Okay, which one of you jokers decided it would be a good idea to give Ryan Murphy another television series? Haven’t we learned anything about the results of positive reinforcement? Keep doing it, and he’s going to think this kind of behavior is acceptable.

So, okay, I understand intellectually why he’s been given a new series: it’s because Glee is getting strong ratings and a ton of positive attention, and thus any network worth its salt is going to seriously consider project proposals from him. NBC decided to take the bait to spice things up a bit with The New Normal, which appears to be what happens if Ryan Murphy watches Modern Family right before going to bed.

“See, I could totally do that too” is the unofficial tagline of The New Normal.

I love this knob-slobbering description of the upfront presentation:

Even though those are NBC’s cornerstone comedies for the new year, they’re emotional, progressive and heartwarming. Salke and NBC Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt and could’ve harped on the progressiveness and acceptance of their new shows, but they didn’t — they just focused on the fact that they think they’re well-written and funny.

Right, so NBC gets to ride on progressive laurels without actually saying it’s making a progressive show. So when (not if, this is Ryan Murphy, people) people start criticizing the show on the grounds that it has some seriously massive holes when it comes to treatment of the characters and the subject, NBC can go “well, we were just making a comedy.”

They’re clearly learned a lesson from Glee, which has rightly been savagely attacked for claiming to be a progressive and “inspirational” show, yet having a boggling number of incredibly offensive storylines. This time, Ryan Murphy can say he’s just focusing on the funny. You know, in a show that happens to be positioning itself as progressive and, uh, heartwarming.
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I don’t know whether there was a specific incident or specific set of incidents that led to Dan Harmon’s dismissal as showrunner of Community, and without knowing that, it’s impossible for me to say if that decision was fair or just. It does seem likely that the show without him will change considerably—a fellow critic suggested over dinner this weekend that Community’s heart will have to shift from Abed to someone else, because the other characters can be more easily kept alive and vibrant by writers other than Harmon. But while many questions about Community’s future remain, I feel pretty certain about one thing: it makes no sense, as some folks have suggested to me online, to pirate or delay watching Community beyond the time when you’d count as part of the audience because you want to punish NBC for Harmon’s dismissal.

First, there’s the question of whether it would even be effective. I tend to believe, as I’ve written before, that repeatedly telling Hollywood that piracy doesn’t actually hurt their bottom line gives content companies license to ignore people who do pirate content because they’ve been informed over and over again that pirates were never their potential customers in the first place. If NBC or Sony, which produces Community, and therefore shares responsibility for Harmon’s firing with the network on which his show has aired, does pay attention to a spike in pirated Community episodes, it’s more likely to be interpreted as a sign that even the angry audience is weak and unwilling to give up the show entirely. This is not a tactic that will move the hearts that broke Harmon’s.

Second, as much as Harmon’s singular vision has informed Community, he isn’t the only person who works on his creation. The actors who have turned in great work for the show, and who are at least publicly deeply distressed by Harmon’s departure, don’t deserve to be punished with declining ratings for a decision that’s beyond their control. If, under the new regime, they continue to turn in good, enjoyable work, it seems unfair to try to drive their chances of continuing to do that work into the ground, perhaps before they even know if they’d like to continue doing it.

And there are people other than Harmon who write Community. We should continue to give them credit if they continue to do good work even absent his tutelage. I’d particularly really like female writers like Megan Ganz and Annie Mebane to have creative and ratings success and to get credentialed by their work with a new regime of showrunners. As upsetting as Harmon’s firing is, I’d like to see people who share some of his wild and wonderful approach to television out there and succeeding to keep the flame he lit alive. Dan Harmon isn’t the only person working on Community I want to support, or keep an eye on to see what tremendously exciting things they do best. Dan Harmon isn’t the only person involved in Community who’s worth trying to keep the ratings up for so they’ll get renewed or have credibility pitching other shows in the future, particularly if you care about weird, smart, innovative, self-reflective television. Maybe pirating or driving down the ratings on those other people’s work will make someone out there feel like they’re in solidarity with Dan Harmon. But it isn’t an effective way to support the kind of work he’s given us for three years, or to make sure we see more like in the future.

Like many critics, I tend to want NBC to succeed if only because it gave me 30 Rock, Community, and the utterly sublime Parks and Recreation, and would like the network to be rewarded for sticking with those shows with improving ratings. But the last five or six months have neither given me faith that America will suddenly and against its basic stated desires recognize the fundamental greatness of watching Leslie Knope run for office, nor that NBC has a plan that will work to provide a subsidy for its weird, brilliant shows. And this analysis from Deadline—which, mind you, is analysis, not fact—kind of confirms my sadness:

While it is an office comedy, It’s Messy has a strong female lead. By last November, before the majority of the pilot scripts commissioned by NBC, including Kaling’s, were in, the network had already given early pilot orders to three pilots with female leads, the Sarah Silverman project, Save Me and Isabel. Save Me‘s order was cast-contingent and it looked touch-and-go for awhile but, after a long search, on January 19 Anne Heche signed on to star. Four days later, NBC made the bulk of its pilot orders, including a fourth female-centered comedy, the Roseanne Barr-starring Downwardly Mobile. It may have been Roseanne vs. Mindy for the fourth and last female-lead comedy slot on NBC’s pilot slate as around the time of the Downwardly Mobile pickup, the network passed on Kaling’s script, which had made it to the final round of consideration at the network.

If this really was a choice between Kaling and Barr, Barr was, to me, the wrong bet. There’s no question that Roseanne is brilliant. But it’s been a long time since it went off the air, and Barr’s most recent project, a cracked reality show about her macadamia nut farm did more to suggest that she was not the person to bring in to be the voice of a recession comedy than to confirm her old bona fides as a working class prophetess. Instead, she’s been running that venture, campaigning for the Green Party nomination and futzing around on Twitter, all worthy pursuits to be sure, but ones that read more as her coasting on her past success than gearing up for new ones.

Kaling, on the other hand, has been doing yeoman work holding up The Office, a comedy NBC should have cancelled years ago but that is worth tuning into occasionally almost solely for her presence on it. How nice would it have been for NBC to recognize that work, as well as her charming social media presence, her successful other enterprises like her blog and book, and to affirm the value there. Kaling may not have been able to speak for working-class women, as Barr did so effectively for so many years, but she could have been part of the explosion of South Asian women on television, one of what are still very few female show creators. It may have been that in between sending off 30 Rock and renewing Whitney, NBC felt like it had made its contribution to the female-comedy boom, and it was set. But picking up Kaling’s show would have moved that boom forward into its next iteration, beyond white women, and beyond a particular kind of hot-but-clumsy-or-awkward white woman. NBC bet on its past, instead, and ended up with neither Barr’s show on its schedule, nor Kaling’s. And Kaling’s, though it needs a name transplant, looks fantastic:

There’s something deeply craven about the energy politics of at least the ads for Revolution, the splashy J.J. Abrams apocalypse show that NBC is adding to its schedule this fall. I’ve always been skeptical of the idea of a world where “all forms of energy mysteriously cease to exist,” even as I tend to think hitting the reset button on civilization is interesting. But there’s something particularly cowardly about the approach the show appears to be taking to that amorphous premise: this is a show about energy politics that doesn’t seem to have the courage to even mention that electricity is generated by other things, among them coal, natural gas, and oil.

Seriously, this is a show that says things like “We used electricity for everything. Even to grown food and pump water. But after the blackout, nothing worked. Not even car engines or jet turbines. Hell, even batteries. All of it. Gone forever.” Except that absent some mysterious magical thing or scientific nonsense Abrams and Eric Kripke, his co-creator dream up for introduction at some point, electricity doesn’t have an on-off switch: it’s generated by many different methods. Messing with the grid that distributes electricity is not the same thing as removing our capacity to ever generate and distribute more of is. We don’t use electricity to make airplanes stay up, we use jet fuel—20.2 billion gallons of it annually as of 2009. And while hybrid electric cars are on the market, those too rely on internal combustion engines, which in turn are powered by fossil fuels.

I’m fully aware, of course, that most television is based on junk science. But the reason this is particularly disappointing is that Kripke and Abrams are setting up a scenario here that undermines precisely what science fiction has the potential to do: reckon with what we’ve done to ourselves and posit solutions, be they scientific or societal. A magic shutdown scenario, rather than a situation where we’ve run out of fossil fuels, doesn’t require us to grapple with what we’ve done to ourselves—there are no contractions of services, no resource hoarding, no slow adaptation and competition between classes or nations. The blame can and probably will be placed on some sort of mysterious cabal rather than our collective inability to radically change our energy use. And the solution will be in the form of hidden knowledge possessed by an equally small and brilliant cabal, rather than major, painful, realignments in the way we live our lives and innovation that changes it. Setting up its central conceit this way, Revolution is a fantasy of an energy crisis where no one is to blame, in the same way that Tony Stark’s building-powering arc reactor (a great discussion of the relevant zoning issues is available here) is a fantasy that an alternative to fossil fuels is just around the corner.

But at least The Avengers argues that green energy innovation is sexy (as will, apparently, Marion Cotillard in The Dark Knight). That’s much more attractive than a fantasy in which an energy crisis happens to us as innocent victims, rather than an acknowledgement that we happened to the world’s energy reserves.

The bridge is yours.

-Here are Fox and NBC‘s schedules for the fall.

-Some real talk on the reality of friendship segregation and Girls.

-An interview with the creator of The Avengers‘ secret big bad—and a reminder that Marvel could be doing better by the creators of its characters.

-Glad to hear Greg Garcia has a new overall deal.

-This makes me very, very happy:

In tonight’s finale of Parks & Recreation, we’ll find out if Leslie Knope won or lost the City Council seat she’s been campaigning for all season, but it’s still not clear if we’ll return to Pawnee next season to see Leslie take her place alongside Councilman Hauser in victory or revitalize the Parks Department in defeat. The same is true for Greendale Community College and the TGS writers’ room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The speculation is that 30 Rock will be back for a short season, and that if Parks & Rec and Community get pickups, they’ll be shorter orders as well. That might mean fewer episodes of shows we love. But creatively, it strikes me as a good thing.

I’m a long-time advocate of shorter seasons, and I think we’ve seen a lot of illustrations of the foibles of trying to fit 22-episode orders into a 40-week period this year. Revenge‘s long hiatus slowed the momentum of the ABC Hamptons-set thriller down to a crawl, and the show’s gotten baroque and full of moody shots in its attempt to fill up episode space since its return. Community‘s disappearance from NBC’s airwaves for an agonizing and indefinite period left fans waiting, and while NBC tossed out and then yanked sitcoms like Best Friends Forever and Bent in quick succession. Now I understand that shows fail, networks need to replace things that aren’t working at all, and fans don’t want to wait a long time for their favorite shows to come back. But I’d much rather see short, excellent seasons of shows that are suited to it, and to see them run continuously rather than spaced out in seemingly random ways.

NBC’s Thursday night comedies seem uniquely suited to shorter, smarter seasons. 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation‘s shortened seasons were their best for entirely different reasons. 30 Rock‘s second season was shortened by the writers’ strike, but it was a hilarious, joke-dense season. “SeinfeldVision” and “MILF Island” were fantastic riffs on the industry that preceded the “Queen of Jordan” running gag the show is using now. “Greenzo” featured two of the show’s best-ever cameos in David Schwimmer and Al Gore. And “Sandwich Day” turned Liz’s love of food into a sign of something other than middle-aged singleton schlubbiness. No one has ever made scarfing a sub look so poignant before or since.

Parks and Recreation‘s shortened third season had tons of great comedic beats as well, but it also illustrated how sitcoms can pull off strong serialization without dropping plotlines for a long stretch of episodes or producing episodes that don’t work as standalones. The stated major arc of the season was the question of whether Ben and Leslie would get together, a will-they-or-won’t-they that fit neatly into a wide variety of settings. And it turned out that Leslie’s victories in restoring the Harvest Festival, over her rivals in Eagleton, and in organizing Lil’ Sebastian’s funeral were actually setting up Leslie being asked to run for office. The show didn’t always hit the same beats, and in fact in episodes like “April and Andy’s Fancy Party” and “The Fight,” we got to see a number of the vulnerabilities that would plague Leslie in her campaign this season, namely her desire for control.

The 22-odd episode season may be an industry convention, but that doesn’t mean it’s a creative imperative. If the 2012-2013 season is going to be the last year we have 30 Rock, Parks & Recreation and Community, I’d rather have one of those shows on every night for 36 to 45 straight weeks (with exceptions for holidays), and to have those episodes be uniformly excellent, no filler. And if television’s really just about selling soap, I’ve got to believe it might sell better with new programming rather than reruns and schedule gaps.

Kevin Fallon interviewed Warren Littlefield, who ran NBC’s Entertainment division during the fertile years of 1993 to 1998 to talk about his new book, an oral history of Must See TV. He doesn’t have anything illuminating to say about the present, dismal state of NBC—does anybody?—but Littlefield does have some interesting context to offer on the fight to get NBC to go forward with Will & Grace:

Management said, “What the hell are you doing? Why are you developing Will and Grace?” It’s network television, and we have advertisers to answer to. Advertisers are not ready to embrace, at the core of a show, a relationship between a gay man and straight woman. What are you doing?…As I looked at the world, we lived in a world where I saw that relationship all the time. It was this gap. Television had ignored it. I knew that Max and David had a great feel for that world and those characters. They just needed to be convinced that we would actually go forward with it if they wrote it. I said to them, “If you do a great job, we’ll have to.” And that’s what they did. So then in order to kind of hip-check my management, I made sure that I went to Jimmy Burrows. When Jimmy fell in love with the project, I knew that no one could stand in the way…Lo and behold, advertisers said, “Oh, this is a really funny show.” That’s all they saw. So there was no protest. There was no advertiser boycott. It just went on and continued to carry the torch of what Must See TV stood for.

It’s one of the clearest cases I’ve ever seen of executives being afraid to greenlight something they didn’t have personal experience with, and overestimating the negative reaction as a result. I’m sure there are others. It’s rather sad to me that if someone doesn’t see a potential audience or kinds of relationships with their own eyes, they’d be unable to imagine that it exists. I don’t assume that my experience is the sum total of the world, and I do believe it’s incumbent on me to broaden that pool of experiences I have to draw on. Gay men and their straight female friends aren’t unicorns. Neither are middle-class black families. It’s infinitely irksome that gatekeepers wouldn’t have learned this basic lesson, and that it keeps the world of entertainment smaller and more limited by poverty of imagination than it has to be.