Yesterday brought the news that HBO had cancelled Enlightened, Mike White’s brilliant series about how to live in accordance with your principals in a corporate world—particularly when you have a lot of debt, or the costs of activism have grown extraordinary. For all that I’m disappointed in the decision and think that it was a mistake for HBO’s brand—despite Enlightened‘s extremely low ratings, it was the kind of show that couldn’t have been produced by any other network—I don’t see it as a tragedy for the story White was telling. After Amy Jellicoe blew the whistle on Abaddon Industries and was fired, Enlightened had her walk off into a sunny California day, anonymous again among the crowd, alone with the knowledge of what she’d accomplished and unsure of what came next for her. But her time at the company was finished, and Amy had decisively acted in accordance with her beliefs. That story was concluded.

But there’s another brilliant, strange, female-centered show that’s still awaiting a decision on whether it will be renewed or cancelled. And I dearly hope that ABC Family decides to make the right decision and save Bunheads, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s dramedy about the proprietors of and students at a California ballet school.

Bunheads has a less determined story arc than Enlightened, and by design, smaller stakes. It follows Michelle (Sutton Foster), a Vegas showgirl who marries a fan, moves to California with him, and ends up owning a great deal of property when he’s suddenly killed in a car accident—and tied to his mother, ballet teacher Fanny (Kelly Bishop), as well. Her students Boo (Kaitlyn Jenkins), Sasha (Julia Goldani Telles), Ginny (Bailey Buntain), and Melanie (Emma Dumont) are intelligent, idiosyncratic young ladies who find themselves galvanized by Michelle’s arrival, which coincides with them reaching the stage of life where they’re deciding how serious they want to be about dance, whether they want to have sex, and what their relationships to their parents are going to look like. The characters don’t have life-or-death problems—at least not after the fatal car ride in the pilot—but they don’t lack for gravity.

Bunheads is a relentlessly female show, more so than any other program on television, and therein lies many of its strengths. Where Girls, after the fight that fractured Marnie and Hannah’s relationship in the first season, has moved its focus away from female friendships, the relationships between women are always primary in Bunheads. Much of the first half of the season followed Michelle and Fanny attempting to navigate an exceedingly difficult situation. Fanny was surprised by the arrival of Michelle as her daughter-in-law and even more disconcerted when her son’s death left Michelle the owner of Fanny’s home, business, and land. Gradually, they’ve navigated a professional and personal partnership, finding a way to run Fanny’s ballet school together and to build an amphitheater on the land left to Michelle. That amphitheater brings them into collaboration with two sisters, the constantly self-deprecating Truly (Stacey Oristano) and bulldozer Millicent (Liza Weil) Stone, who, in one scene, explains to Fanny that she doesn’t actually want to know about the arts, she just wants to be perceived as cultured. Truly and Milly’s rivalry is one of the best examples I’ve seen of exaggeration serving the truth: there’s no way to make a relationship between sisters stranger and more hilariously tortured than they can be in real life.

And the friendships between the students have delightfully specific, and believable, contours. Ginny is hurt when Melanie hides from her that she’s joined the roller derby in addition to ballet. Sasha calls Boo, rather than her parents, when she finds the door to her apartment open and is afraid to go inside. Ginny, Melanie, and Boo feel betrayed when Sasha makes a foray into cheerleading. The four research sex from every conceivable angle together when they’re considering sleeping with their boyfriends, only to be stumped by the condom options at the local drug store. And they’re all invested enough in Michelle to follow her on a road trip when they catch her sneaking off to Los Angeles for a dance audition. Michelle may not be the mentor all of them need in matters of the heart or how to run their lives—judging by her brief, impulsive marriage, she has enough trouble of her own. But they need creative inspiration as much as they need basic life skills advice, someone who can act as a reminder to them that the world is bigger than a little town in California, and that they’ll face bigger decisions than whether or not Boo and her boyfriend Carl should jump up their timetable for the first time they have sex. I could spend an infinite amount of time with these clever young girls and their daily dilemmas.
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In next week’s episode of Sundance Channel miniseries Top of the Lake (which premiered last night), Robin Griffin, the New Zealand police detective investigating the pregnancy and then disappearance of a twelve-year-old girl from her home in a rural community, quietly and almost casually sinks a dart in a man’s shoulder in the middle of a bar. It’s a shocking, violent act, particularly for a female character on television. But it’s also in keeping with the finest work of Elisabeth Moss, who plays Robin, and who stars as Peggy Olson Mad Men: she’s one of the best actresses working today at conveying anger from a female perspective, and exploring the constraints on how women are allowed to express that anger.

In Top Of The Lake, we learn before we meet Robin that she has a difficult reputation. “Robin Griffin,” a local police officer remarks after a young girl, Tui, is found up to her chest in a freezing lake—and after she is pulled out of the water, discovered to be pregnant—and it becomes necessary to pull in a detective with more specific experience, Robin is called in because she is in the area, visiting her mother. “This is going to be painful,” another remarks. When Robin arrives on the scene, she’s impatient. “I want this window covered with sheets of A3, and I want her on my own for as long as it takes,” she says of the room where Tui is waiting at a table, in full view of everyone in the precinct. “Clear? I want a clear yes from everyone.” When Robin objects to the idea of Tui being sent home, a police officer tells her “She can’t get any more pregnant.” “She could be attacked for being pregnant,” Robin snaps back at him.

But if Robin seems like a live-wire of tension, she has good reason to be angry. Her mother is undergoing treatment for cancer. Tui’s case comes at a moment of great tension in the region where she lives. Her father, enraged after a local realtor, Bob Platt, sells a tract of land that he believes was promised to him to a group of women who are setting up a quasi-feminist commune, drowns the man during an attempt to scare him. When he learns of Tui’s pregnancy, his instructions to the detective who called in Robin are harsh. “Here’s what you do. You get on your radio, you phone the detective, and you tell her she’s had a miscarriage, or she’s marrying the kid down the road,” he demands, trying to delay time. “I had my first orgasm when I was seven, my first fuck when I was eleven. So she’s a slut. Her dad’s a slut…But she’s not having a baby. I wouldn’t do that to one of my bitches.” The reaction of men in the—except for the commune—overwhelmingly female town is just as ugly. “Are you a feminist?” one of them asks Robin in an upcoming episode. “Are you a lesbian?” asks another. “You’d be better off being a lesbian,” a third chimes in. “Nobody likes a feminist except a lesbian.”

If the attitudes are frightening, even worse is the likelihood they’ll be made manifest. Tui’s father shoots a dog in front of Robin. The implication after the realtor’s death is that if the women don’t move off the land he believes to be his, he could come after them next. And what’s been done to Tui already, and what could have been done to her after she vanishes from the commune, is horrible enough. It makes sense that Robin is angry, and in a place where she’s been physically intimidated already, it’s not surprising that she’d defend herself, as she does when a gun’s pointed at her. And it’s unnerving that she’d strike first through the creative means of the dart—or, as the show suggests, that she’d be involved in a domestic incident where a wall was punched in. Robin’s enraged by sexism and sexual violence, and she’s responding by claiming a kind of physical power—and more importantly, physical aggression—that’s often reserved for men.
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The TED lecture series has expanded to a TEDxTeen program, and one of the first participants is Rookie Magazine founder and style icon Tavi Gevinson, who raises some important points about the much-maligned archetype of the so-called “strong female character”:

“I think the question of what makes a strong female character often goes misinterpreted and we get these two-dimensional superwomen,” Gevinson suggests. “They’re not strong characters who happen to be female. They’re completely flat.”

I’d actually go further. The evaluation of whether a female character is strong shouldn’t be about whether or not the character herself demonstrates physical or emotional resilience, but about whether the execution of the character, whether she is personally weak or strong, decisive or lost, is precise and unique. The “strong,” if we’re going to keep using the term, should be an indicator of quality, rather than of type. A personality can be strong and distinct without being positive. And there should be a lot more room for women to be compelling without being nice, to exist with a network of support rather than needing to do everything for themselves, and for stories about them to make them worthy of our investment because of those things. Going from one very narrow lane to the next isn’t an improvement. I want female characters to be able to drive all over the highway.

At CNet, executive editor Molly Wood chronicles the bizarre use of stereotypes of women in the Samsung GS4 launch:

The Brazilian woman was hot (duh). A bride-to-be arrives on stage with a chirpy, “check out the ring!” The Air Gestures that let you control the phone without touching it are presented as a boon to giggly women with annoying voices whose nails are wet and who don’t want to put down their drinks. The comically alcoholic one, DeeDee, then proceeds to demo how eye tracking can pause a video when you look away from the screen… as she looks away at a hunky gardener type who proceeds to take off his shirt.
“While the women are cooling down,” says the emcee, “why don’t you tell us about S Health?” By then, it’s almost too easy to have there be a joke about marrying a doctor and then the one about eating too much cheesecake ohyeahthatoneIshouldhaveseenthatcoming. Of course those jokes are in there. Why would those jokes not be in there? We already had a tap-dancing tow-headed kid and a hot Brazilian girl.

What I’m really curious about is whether this latest example of corporate stupidity when it comes to going to the laziest bits of the gender humor well was developed in-house by Samsung or by an outside advertising agency? If the latter, which ad agency? And on what basis did they recommend the use of stereotypes as hooks? I’d be really curious about the market research on which those decisions are based, given how many ads seem to be doing well by defying gender stereotypes. From Super Bowl ads featuring princesses who lead armies and laundry-doing ladies who are passionate and sneaky sports fans to the Kindle ad that treats gay married couple as if they’re a totally normal part of the mix, a lot of companies seem to want to treat women as actual people, or gay couples and the people who are friends with them as actual consumers. My bet is that tech companies in particular want to seem forward-looking in their gender politics as part of projecting a general sense that if you buy their products, you will be part of the future. But that just makes Samsung’s presentation more bizarre.

Austin Cunningham’s “The Girls On Fox News Song” may not be the most important contribution to the country music songbook in recent memory, but it’s a terrific explication of how Fox News built the element of its brand that’s reliant on very attractive women to draw in audiences:

“Honey sure beats vinegar to wash down the news we need,” Cunningham sings, and that’s part of the point. Fox News is selling the attractiveness of its anchors and commentators as much as it’s selling actual information. When the network is literally designing sets to make sure its female anchors’ legs will be visible on-air—not to mention sending Megyn Kelly on a long loop around the studio in high heels on election night—no matter the seriousness of the news at hand, it’s hard to argue that sex isn’t one of their products. And as an entertainment company, that’s certainly their prerogative to pick the products they’re interested in selling.

That said, I always wonder what it must be like to be a woman at the network and to be aware that your looks might easily overshadow the actual information you’re trying to convey. When Cunningham asks us to “Save some love for Greta, she’s the smartest of them all. Bet when she’s off the record, she’s the wildest one of all,” it kind of belies the idea that he’s interested in “beauty with brains.” And if I were Megyn Kelly, I’d be gritting my teeth and hoping that Fox had a plan to move me to Fox proper in primetime, or that Jeff Zucker’s CNN might be interested in hiring me and letting me wear a blazer.

As the New York Times reported today, Chris Hayes, the Nation editor-turned-MSNBC-weekend-host, will be moving from his Saturday and Sunday morning show to take over the 8 PM primetime slot on the network, replacing Ed Schultz, who will shift to the weekends. It’s a great development for people who like their news wonky rather than driven by a culture of gaffes and win-the-cycle mentality. And it’s also good news for another group of people: Hayes’ roster of guests, who will get exposed to a much bigger audience in primetime.

As Rob Savillo reports at Media Matters, Hayes’ show has booked strikingly more diverse guests than any of its competitors on Sunday morning. From January 6 of this year to March 10, the breakdown looks like this:

Up With Chris Hayes is close to booking white men in proportion to their actual presence in the U.S. population, 41 percent to 39 percent. All the other morning weekend shows on other networks are booking mixes of guests that are more than 60 percent white and male.

What’s important about this isn’t just that Hayes’ show could compete with other primetime news coverage by drawing in audiences eager for a different tone in news coverage, and eager to see experts who look like themselves on screen. It’s that the show demonstrates the lie that other shows aren’t diverse just because the pools of people available to pontificate on cable news are largely white and male. Even if they are, Hayes and his bookers have been able to find engaging guests with good insights who are capable of performing well on camera who aren’t primarily white guys. And if they can, the question is why everyone else seems to be having so much trouble? It’s one thing to go along with the accepted status quo in your industry without interrogating it. It’s another one entirely to be caught out as lazier than your competition, which has beaten you at something like representing a wider spectrum of opinions, experiences, and backgrounds, just by trying.

After launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund a long-term project that would examine the roles women play—or are consigned to—in video games, Feminist Frequency video blogger Anita Sarkeesian was subject to a vicious, violence-saturated campaign of harassment. While it was awful to watch Sarkeesian be threatened and slandered for the sin of wanting to do her job well and comprehensively, the utter inability of her harassers to shut her work down has been wonderful to watch.

And I’m cheering Sarkeesian’s perseverance even harder now that the first installment of her project, titled Tropes Vs. Women, is out—and it’s terrific. Examining both the depiction and gameplay of characters like Pauline, Princess Peach and Zelda, Sarkeesian goes back to the origins of the Damsels In Distress trope art and literature, explores how the trope migrated into video games after the rights to Popeye characters couldn’t be secured for a video game, and examines how the trope became valuable to the video game industry:

At the beginning of the video, Sarkeesian, explaining that “This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters,” says something that everyone who loves a piece of culture ought to be required to recite five times every morning while looking in the mirror: “Remember that it’s both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy media while being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.” If that ability to hold two ideas in your head at the same time, to enjoy something while recognizing that it might have problems, is what the people who tried to harass Sarkeesian into silence are so afraid of, it only reinforces how intellectually cowardly and inept they are. The need for something to be immune from criticism isn’t a sign that it’s perfect and everyone else is wrong: it’s a sign you can’t defend the things you love. That’s a position any self-aware person ought to be embarrassed to defend.

Red Widow, which follows Radha Mitchell as Marta Walraven, a woman who grew up in the Russian Mob in Marin County, only to find herself pulled back into the world of crime she tried to leave behind after the murder of her husband, premiered on ABC last Sunday. At the Television Critics Association press tour in January, I spoke with Melissa Rosenberg, who created Red Widow fresh off her stints writing the Twilight franchise, about what mothers are allowed to do on television, what parts of sex can and can’t get past Standards and Practices, and what it’s going to take for women to succeed in Hollywood. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you decide that Red Widow was going to be about the Russian mob?

Well my first decision was where I was going to set it. The original is set just outside Amsterdam, and had this sort of suburban community versus in-town, so I was looking for that. And because I’m from Marin County, in NOrthern California, that was a natural place. You’ve got Marin County and you cross the bridge into San Francisco, which has become emblematic of the bridging of two worlds. And so I began to look at what was the organized crime situation in San Francisco. While the Russian mob isn’t the largest group in San Francisco, it’s one of the top three. So then we were fortunate enough to find the former head of the FBI organized crime branch for the Russian mob in San Francisco and he became our technical consultant…So everything we do is checked with him. We do a lot of research on the internet obviously and everywhere we can. But we’re always conferring with him as well.

In terms of that sort of mob tradition, one of the things I’m curious about in that context is how the mob culture interacts with the way that Marta and Evan are raising their children? I thought that sequence in the pilot where Evan tells their son to kick his brother, he gives his daughter the money for the paints, he’s very sort of emotional and undisciplined and she wants to set boundaries. I was curious how that interacts with the larger mob story and the larger mob culture.

What’s interesting is, you know, having come from Marin County, and we all have these experiences growing up. You think you are raised in, you think that is everyone’s reality. And when you finally leave that nest, you realize, oh, the Marin County way of thinking and being is completely different from the rest of the country. It’s a sort of rude awakening. But there’s part of it that’s always living with you. Things that seem very odd to the rest of the world are just the norm to me. I mean, I htink that’s very much the case with Marta. A lot of people would think that having your husband exporting pot, it would be “Are you frickin’ kidding me?” But for her, it’s in the realm of “I don’t love this, I’d rather you didn’t do this.” But it’s not this huge moral violation in the way it would be for anyone else in the world who had a different background than her. So it’s always exploring the line for her, it’s an unclear line, and it’s different from what a lot of other people’s experiences might have been.

I wonder if we’ve had so many of these anti-heroes who are fathers because of TV tropes about men as bumbling dads, they’re not really involved, so their betrayal of responsibility to their kids doesn’t hit as hard?

There is definitely a much higher standard for characters who are mothers. There are a couple of things you don’t do. You don’t kill a dog. You don’t have a mother betray her children. You’ve lost your audience on either of those two fronts. And it’s just something embedded in our culture that we are less forgiving. And that’s always the line we’re going to be riding with her. She’s never intentionally betraying them. She’s never intentionally putting them in danger. She’s doing the very, very best she can. As we all are!

I love the sex scene in the pilot, and I am consistently cranky about sex on television. This looked like people who were having intercourse like real people. Can you talk a little bit about the process of writing that scene—and was there anything Standards and Practices wanted you to cut or change?

There’s always a few grinds and pumping, I can’t remember the word—

Thrusts?

You can’t thrust! When we shot that scene, it was one of the most intense shooting days of our pilot, because those two have amazing chemistry. You really felt that you were stepping into a very intimate relationship. We had a very closed set. These two actors, both of them, have a lack of vanity, and will just fling themselves into something. There’s a lot of footage that will never be scene, 95 percent of it, because it’s just so outrageous in an incredibly fantastic way. What it got pared down to, you still get, it’s a very sexy scene, it’s not pretend, it’s not “And now we’re doing this for the cameras because it looks really hot.” It’s two actors as directed by Mark Pellington, who’s a very real director, who basically let the room disappear for them and immersed themselves in this moment.
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For the last three years Vida, a non-profit dedicated to women in literature and associated literary arts like poetry, has published a census that tracks the number of women writing for significant literary publications like the Boston Review, Harper’s, and the New Republic, the number of women writing reviews, and the number of women whose work is reviewed by those publications. The purpose of those numbers is simple: to expose how significant the byline gap between male and female reviewers is, and to make clear the differing levels of attention that literary work by men and women receive by the publications where a good review can make a significant difference in an author’s reputation or sales. But the hope is more ambitious: that by forcing editors to see the results of their commissions and subject selections in the aggregate, they’ll change their practices.

But when the third set of results was published yesterday, the news was discouraging. In 2012, the Boston Review, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Times Literary Supplement all published reviews by fewer women than they had in 2009. Of the publications that published more women in 2012 than in 2009, Granta, The New York Review Of Books, and The New York Times Book Review, published fewer women in 2012 than they had in 2011. Gains were followed by reversals, proof that gains were ephemeral rather than systemic, more likely the result of a random fluctuation than a renewed commitment to bring a diversity of ideas in the door by diversifying the authors who would offer them up.

The numbers invite some discouraging potential conclusions. Is listing numbers of women authors published and reviewed—or the number of women writing and directing and producing episodes of television and movies—a pointless enterprise because the people who run literary magazines and studios and television networks are unshameable? “Three years is enough time to create change, even if it’s a little change. I’m tired of conversations. What else is there to say? Editors don’t give enough of a damn to change the status quo,” wrote the fiction writer Roxanne Gay. “There’s nothing to really say at this point. The gender (and racial) inequity exists. It is stark. Counting is useful for reminding us.” When editors like the New Yorker’s David Remnick, who wrote the Forward’s Elissa Strauss “You are right. It’s certainly been a concern for a long time among the editors here, but we’ve got to do better — it’s as simple and as stark as that,” do they not actually mean it? Or do they not know where to look for women to commission? Because if the latter, I’m sure the Collected Wisdom Of The Internet could drum up some suggestions.

My guess would be that the problem is less malign, but more insidious. I’d be willing to bet that every editor of every publication on this list is, in theory at least, committed to the principals of gender equity. But I’d also be comfortable laying money on the idea that they’re equally convinced that their subconscious biases, reliance on familiar authors, and processes to sort submissions and identify new contributors are sound and don’t in any way work to produce byline inequality. They’re probably uncomfortable with the idea of quotas and target numbers, in part because they want to have faith in their own processes. In other words, they can acknowledge a problem without thinking that it’s their problem. And making that connection is what’s important.

I don’t think Vida should stop its count any more than I think Martha Lautzen should stop measuring how many women are making film and television. And I certainly plan to keep writing about those numbers, if only so any time someone is upset about one person or another getting or not getting an opportunity they can say they didn’t know there was a larger context at work here. But for those numbers to break through to the people who have the power to change them, we apparently need something more than those figures. It may not take a Ladies Home Journal-style sit-in, but maybe we could at least start with some specific asks for editors. Do we want parity by a set date? A goal of a certain percentage change per year? I’m open to all suggestions. Because three years of stagnation is a sign that we need different tactics.