Amidst all the business-oriented discussion of whether NBC, which cancelled much of the new programming it tried to introduce last year, can succeed by starting over, going middlebrow, or recreating past hits, there’s one part of the network’s programming decisions that merits mention on the content rather than the financial or audience calculations. The network is remaking Ironside, a show about a detective who uses a wheelchair after he’s shot in the line of duty that ran on NBC for eight seasons between 1967 and 1975. And it’ll be airing The Michael J. Fox show, a sitcom featuring the titular comedian, who did seven years on NBC with Family Ties, which ran from 1982 to 1989, as a news anchor who returns to work despite the way his Parkinson’s Disease, from which Fox suffers in real life. In other words, NBC is putting two shows on air that feature characters with physical limitations, moving a kind of character who’s often relegated to supporting roles—and who’s often there to illustrate the goodness of or provide moral tests to fully able-bodied characters—to the center of the frame. And from the trailers, it looks like both Ironside and The Michael J. Fox show won’t shy away from discussing their characters’ physical limitations, and other people’s reactions to them, directly.

Ironside presents its main character as a man who isn’t limited in his work—or from the trailer—his love life by the fact that he’s had to learn how to use a wheelchair. But the show does look like it’s going to give him something of a chip on his shoulder about it. There’s an interesting moment in the trailer when one of Ironside’s (Blair Underwood) colleagues suggests that he’s demanding for wanting more than the standard, and legally required, accommodations that make it easier for him to maneuver his home and office, and Ironside snaps at him that he was only pursuing what’s due him. It’s nice to see Ironside push back against the idea that people with disabilities need to be saintly exemplars to people who don’t have to use wheelchairs or other adaptive technologies. But it does look like the show might fall into another trope, that of demonstrating just how fully people with disabilities can live their lives, instead of taking that fact for granted. “You really a cripple?” a criminal asks Ironside at one point in the trailer. “You tell me,” Ironside shoots back:

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Happy news! Park and Recreation, the last pillar of NBC’s Thursday night comedy block, appears to have earned a sixth season from the network, at least according to Alan Sepinwall’s reporting. In honor of this victory of quality over mediocrity—or at least in honor of the fact that the collapse of the network television model is keeping alive shows that otherwise might never have drawn breath, I want to consider what it is that makes Parks and Recreation so unique.

The show has always been notable for its optimistic argument that government, portrayed as a wretched hive of ineffectiveness and villainy almost everywhere else in popular culture, employs competent, enthusiastic people, and can be a significant force for good. But as I’ve been thinking over the last year we spent in Pawnee, Indiana, I realized that Parks and Recreation has actually been doing something more striking and sophisticated, which culminated in the season finale, “Are You Better Off?” The show hasn’t just trusted viewers to enjoy the ping-pong match between Leslie Knope’s optimistic liberalism and Ron Swanson’s pessimistic, self-reliant libertarianism and to side with Leslie, but, having accepted that government can be effective, to walk through an extended debate about what government’s capacities should be used for.

As Leslie kicked off her first year on the City Council, she pursued an agenda that was rooted in the idea that the role of government is to remedy failures in the market, even when the failures are a matter of public pleasure and intellectual life, rather than of health, safety, and public welfare. Her initiatives tended to fall into one of two categories: projects that were good for Pawneeans, whether they liked it or not, and projects that enriched their lives, even if they weren’t ponying up enough to support them.

Leslie’s work in the first category prompted the campaign to recall her that ended the first season. She took on the all-male Sanitation Department, who told her at the time that their sole female employee was “the best secretary we got. Except for Dan. Dan’s awesome,” and proved that women were more than capable of picking up Pawnee’s refuse. Later, the men she’d quibbled with would complain about what their lives had been like “Ever since you stripped us of our freedoms by making us hire women.” Inspired by the testimony of citizens like the one who told Leslie “My husband started drinking those giant sodas and he gained 100 pounds in three months. Consequently, we haven’t had sex in ten years,” Leslie pulled a Mayor Bloomberg and cracked down on drink serving sizes in Pawnee, an action that lead the Sweetums corporation to put a target on her back. “You convinced the school board that napkins were a vegetable!” Leslie protested when the company lead the drive to recall her. “They’re made from plants!” a Sweetums executive insisted cheerfully.
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NBC has had a disastrous season when it came to launching new shows, watching glossy entries like Brian Fuller’s serial killer drama Hannibal sink and canceling reality entry Ready For Love. But its fortunes have improved somewhat with the return of reality singing competition The Voice. So it’s no surprise that the network’s going back to the only thing that really seems to be working for it at the moment this fall, and launching a “trivia knowledge and endurance” show called The Million Second Quiz that will air on primetime and be broadcast digitally when it’s not on the network. And it sounds…kind of insane:

The Million Second Quiz will originate from a gigantic hourglass shaped structure built in the heart of Manhattan. Its walls will be made out of glass so the contestants and the game play is visible from the street, somewhat in the vein of David Blaine’s stunts.

The four players who have remained in the game the longest at any time serve as reigning champions and get to live in the hourglass. To avoid being unseated in the primetime show where one of the reigning champions gets challenged, the four must continue to play 24 hours a day, taking strategic breaks to rest and sleep.

Viewers will be able to play along at home in real time and sync to the live primetime broadcast in what NBC calls “the first fully convergent television experience.” Viewers playing from home who win will be flown to New York to appear on the show in primetime.

Most reality shows collect footage 24 hours a day, but then edit it down dramatically. NBC is flipping the script and hoping to generate cross-platform revenue by having actual events going 24 hours a day—or at least hoping that audiences will be interested in watching contestants not go nuts while living in an enormous transparent hourglass. And they’re doing it in a way that might let them eliminate the need for the kinds of expensive celebrity judges that are one of the primary draws to shows like The Voice. The Million Second Quiz may require a talented master of ceremonies, but it seems like an attempt to combine novelty and cheapness in a single swoop.

And that NBC is building a show that’s specifically designed to stress people’s endurance, and to do so while exposing them to the public in a very real way, should be cause for some concern. It’s one thing to test how smart your contestants are, and to give viewers at home a chance to test their wits against those contestants, and even to enter the ring themselves if they prove smart enough. It’s another to set up an incentive structure that encourages people to, say, not sleep in order to rack up points. I hope that those “strategic breaks” will be monitored by doctors who are paid independently from the network, and given some sort of authority to call time on the competition if someone suffers physical or emotional ill effects. If you’re going to ask people to put themselves through significant stress in a way that constantly exposes them both on-set and in broadcast, you owe it to them to protect them.

The news broke this morning that NBC, which has been making efforts to improve the diversity of its casting, is not only rebooting Ironside, the show about a police detective who uses a wheelchair which debuted for the first time on NBC in 1967, making it the only broadcast network to have a show with a lead with a disability, but is casting Blair Underwood in that lead role, making him the only black male lead on broadcast television. That’s great news, and I’ve got my fingers crossed for the show, but Media Matters’ Oliver Willis raises a good point:

can someone tell the tv networks they can cast a black male lead who ISNT blair underwood? hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/nbc-… cc @alyssarosenberg

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) February 5, 2013

As I told Oliver, one of the reasons Underwood was cast is that NBC has a holding deal with him, which means that he’s committed in advance to work on a set number of projects for them. When networks are casting characters for new shows, it makes sense for them to look to the people they have holding deals with first: it’s a pool of actors they’ve already determined that they like, and that they have incentives to work with immediately to get as much value as they can over those existing deals. It’s one thing for an actor to break in to one role, but another one entirely for a network to decide that they want to be in the Blair Underwood business, or the Vanessa Williams business, in a genuine and long-term way.

In other words, if television is to get more diverse, we need more actors of color who are not just breaking in as one-time things, but who are being treated like franchise players. I’m encouraged by the news that Echo Kellum, who was wonderfully winsome and funny on the now-cancelled Ben & Kate has already found work again on NBC’s The Gates. Television isn’t going to start looking like the United States if there’s only a tiny pool of actors of color who have been stamped network-approved.

Next week, thousands of gun dealers, traders, and enthusiasts will gather in Las Vegas for the annual Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show, which touts itself as the largest trade show of its kind in the world. When it does, NBC Sports will be a lead sponsor.

NBC Sports, which has struggled to make its mark in the world of daily televised sports, showcases hunting, fishing, and outdoor shows on its network throughout the day, so its original interest in a trade show aimed at the people who participate in such sports isn’t shocking. But according to some accounts, the SHOT Show is hardly that sort of show. While it bills itself as a huge gathering of hunting and outdoors enthusiasts, the reality is far different, according to a 2011 report from Media Matters, which sent reporters to that year’s event:

The reality of SHOT was thousands of yards downrange from the image projected by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association that owns SHOT and celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. The NSSF portrays SHOT as representing the business interests of family-friendly, outdoors recreation-focused “shooting sports” like elk hunting and clay target shooting. These sports are represented at SHOT, as they are in the firearms industry as a whole, but they’re vastly overshadowed by handguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, home defense shotguns and the like, along with hollow point bullets, concealed carry holsters, tactical clothing and other “personal protection” accoutrements.

This year’s show has an even deeper meaning to its attendees. In the wake of multiple mass killings, with lawmakers at the federal, state, and local levels pursuing sensible restrictions on guns in an effort to curb gun violence, SHOT’s organizers are pitching the event as a show of “industry unity,” as Media Matters’ Matt Gertz noted today:

SHOT Show is billed as the “the largest and most comprehensive trade show for all professionals involved with the shooting sports, hunting and law enforcement industries” and “the world’s premier exposition of combined firearms.” But it is more than just a trade show; according to its organizer, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (the trade association for firearms manufacturers and dealers), “Any SHOT attendee will tell you the show is more than about selling and buying; it’s a powerful display of industry unity and its resolve to meet any challenge affecting the right to make, sell and own firearms.”

It’s one thing for NBC Sports to promote the safe and responsible ownership of guns used in the type of outdoor sports it broadcasts. The SHOT Show, though, seems less a place for hunters and outdoorsmen and women than it does a place where attendees can buy, trade, and otherwise gawk at the high-powered, military- and law-enforcement grade weapons and ammunition that, frankly, have no place in a rational society.

There is a marked difference between those types of weapons and the firearms used by hunters and people who shoot for sport. That distinction is often covered up by organizations like the National Rifle Association, which has instead resorted to promoting the paranoid and absurd belief that liberal politicians in Washington are coming after everyone’s guns. Blurring that distinction is profitable for it and possibly even the National Sports Shooting Foundation (which puts on the SHOT Show), the types of groups that often deny the role of guns in mass killings and America’s high rates of gun violence, because the paranoia that results brings larger crowds to gun shows and pads the bottom line.

But that explanation doesn’t work for NBC Sports, which, as a media organization, shouldn’t just want to promote that distinction but has an obligation to. No one is targeting the guns used in hunting and sport-shooting, because we can curb gun violence in this country without attacking the people who are able to safely and responsibly own and operate firearms for sporting purposes. Those guns, and those gun owners, aren’t the root of America’s gun violence problem, and that’s a fact recognized by everyone involved in the debate over how to prevent gun violence in America (yes, even the NRA). By making that distinction clear, NBC Sports could go a long way in making that debate smarter, sharper, and more accurate. It’s a shame it has chosen not to.

At the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena, Calif. this week, network executives have been fielding a great number of questions about violence in the media in the wake of the Newtown shootings. This is a difficult line for critics to walk, because I don’t know anyone who’s been asking those questions who believes that there’s a causal relationship between media violence and mass killings, or who is asking those questions because they want to shift the focus from gun control efforts to media censorship. But I do think that the Newtown killings crystallized for many of us a sense of burnout we’d been feeling about a sense in American television that the only stakes that are a legitimate subject for prestige television are life-and-death ones.

This is a judgement about aesthetic monotony rather than a moral argument, or a bit of policy advocacy. And as we’ve asked those questions over the past few days, it’s been intriguing to see how the executives of different television networks have responded, and particularly whether they’ve focused on the moral implications of their content, or the creative ones.

NBC Entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt made the pitch that after the horrible events of Newtown “the best tonic for not to be glib, but for this kind of thing is go watch an episode of Parenthood as a really great example of a show about a family who love each other and grapple with all of the issues in life,” he argued. In recent years, as the intensity of television has ratcheted up, networks have often pitched their shows as a very different kind of escapism, into dangerous worlds and risky scenarios that we’d never actually confront for ourselves, as a way to put our problems in proportion. Greenblatt here was making a different argument (and an attempt to boost a critically-loved but under-watched drama on his network): that television, by going simpler, can actually help us grapple with the things that we are feeling. This is worth taking with a grain of salt, of course. NBC’s biggest scripted drama right now is the very silly sci-fi show Revolution, about a dubiously-relevant post-apocalypse. But it was still nice to hear Greenblatt muse, even self-interestedly, about what pop culture is for, and to hear a reminder that escapism can be a small journey rather than a great leap.

Both Greenblatt and Fox Entertainment chairman Kevin Reilly cited their responsibilities to the FCC in their answers, but didn’t really discuss what that responsibility consisted of. That have been an interesting turn, given the relative amounts of attention paid to networks’ bottom lines, which keep them in business, and to their community obligations, the long-ago rationale for them to get broadcasting bandwidth. The FCC’s regulation of violence has also been dramatically less rigorous than its regulation of sex, a regulatory disparity that’s obviously affected the market as well.
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In Hollywood, executives are notoriously reluctant to admit that they’re on the lookout for viewers of color. For some reason, it seems to be conventional wisdom that, say, the kind of content that African-American audiences are looking for overlaps in no way with anything any white viewer might be engaged by, ever. And so expressing a wish for a black, Latino, or Asian audience is apparently to express a wish to make a niche product.

So there’s something really refreshing about seeing MSNBC president Phil Griffin tout the fact that his network, which was already number one in cable news for African-American viewers, grew their African-American viewership in 2012 by 60 percent, in a year when CNN’s grew 23.7 percent and Fox’s declined by the same number.

“I think we made a commitment, we decided, that in order for this channel to succeed, that we had to reflect the country. This meant that we had to be part of the country in ways that the other channels weren’t,” he told Mediaite. “People want to know that we reflect their world. And it’s not just a single show – its across the board. You look at the guests every hour and we make sure that we have women, African Americans, everything, and I think to spend a day watching MSNBC is to see America as we have seen it.”

It’s not just a relief to hear Griffin say this—it’s smart strategy. I don’t know why it’s surprising to anyone that as a nerdy lady, I enjoy seeing a reflection of that identity in Rachel Maddow when she’s on the air, rather than needing the news delivered to me by an authoritative white dude my father’s age. And I’m not sure why it’s surprising either that people might like to see an African-American woman like Melissa Harris-Perry lead discussions of, among other issues, race, because we’re interested in the particular perspectives she brings to the table that we don’t happen to possess on our own. Enjoying seeing myself on screen, and enjoying the insights and experiences of people who are not like me, and whose perspectives I can’t magically situate myself into are not actually mutually exclusive impulses.
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Going into the Television Critics Association press tour, one of the shows I was most excited to see shake out was a procedural called Deception, about an African-American police officer, played by Meagan Good, who returns to the white, wealthy family she grew up with because her mother worked for them as a housekeeper to investigate the murder of her childhood best friend. It wasn’t that the show was revolutionary, in fact the reverse: it’s a mashup of ABC soaps like Revenge and Scandal, with a hint of Damages, thanks to the presence of Tate Donovan as the murder victim’s older brother.

But the show operated at the intersection of race and class at a way I thought was fascinating and promising. Good’s Detective Joanna Locasto, only the second woman of color to be the main character on a currently-airing television show, was returning to a setting where she’d grown up on the wrong side of the class divide, not with more money, but with the power of the state on her side. And she and her boss, Will Moreno (Laz Alonso) were in a position that strikes me as almost unprecedented in popular culture: as people of color with substantive power, and particularly police power, who were tasked with investigating and—and personally judging—a decadent and corrupted white family, and with whom the audience is intended to sympathize with absolutely.

That’s an extraordinarily rich scenario, particularly for a network television show. And it’s one that came about in part, as NBC Entertainment President Jennifer Salke explained in NBC’s executive session yesterday morning, “That was a family that was conceived and cast began to be cast as a white family. And we insisted that there be a diverse woman in that role.” I was excited to discuss that scenario and all of its potential with Deception‘s co-creators Gail Berman and Liz Heldens. And so it was disconcerting to see them retreat from the idea that they’d discuss race at all, and to do it as quickly as possible.

“It is a way to sort of deal with race without actually having to talk about it,” Heldens said when I asked her about their plans for dealing with the intersection of race and class issues. “But it’s not really something we talk about too much in the writers’ room.” When Hitfix critic Daniel Fienberg pushed her on it further, citing her experience working on Friday Night Lights, a show that was both diverse and explicitly conscious of racial issues, she retreated even further. “Why it’s not a discussion? I don’t know,” she told him. “I just think it’s sort of there, and, you know, whenever you’re writing a script, you’re always trying to get your page count down so they can shoot it.”
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NBCUniversal has a relationship with Donald Trump, the long-time performance artist and host of its NBC reality competition show The Apprentice, that’s strikingly similar to the one between the Donald and the Romney campaign McKay Coppins described in one of what will be one of many post-mortems of the campaign:

Among the savvy sophisticates who populated the campaign headquarters in Boston, Trump was viewed as a joke and a blowhard — an outrageous figure whose fixation on Obama’s birth certificate was, at once, bizarre and off-putting, according to campaign sources. But he was also popular among the very voters Romney was most concerned about winning over. And the candidate’s aides believed — perhaps naively — that if they could win his endorsement, they might be able to win the hearts of his many conservative fans. “He played very well with blue-collar-type Republicans, and the campaign saw that,” said one source in Trump’s camp. “If you have no education, and you work with your hands, you like him. It’s like, ‘Wow, if I was rich, that’s how I would live!’ The girls, the cars, the fancy suits. His ostentatiousness is appealing to them.”

For NBC, The Apprentice is a product similar to a Trump political endorsement. It’s relatively cheap to buy, in part because it’s heavily supported by product placement. It channels the things that make Trump irritating, his presumptions of expertise, his abrasiveness, and his showman’s flair, towards reasonably amusing targets. And in its Celebrity Apprentice iteration, the show pulls in stars with their own followings. For this, Trump got a $130 million contract from NBC last year. But NBC handed down that deal to Trump at the end of an awful year for the network. And now that the ratings landscape–and the political one–are very different, NBC should seriously consider if they want to stay in business with Trump, or if both he and The Apprentice have reached the end of their usefulness.

The Apprentice is probably near the end of its natural lifespan as a show anyway. Its celebrity editions are drawing fewer than 9 million viewers per episode, a figure that isn’t bad, but also isn’t strong enough to use to launch other new shows. And it pales in comparison to The Voice, which both has given NBC a platform to boost freshman success stories like Revolution and Go On, and provides an alternate revenue stream to the network in the form of music sales. As NBC solidifies its revitalized brand, and as non-musical competition shows increasingly show their age, the network should consider Trump and The Apprentice both in the context of the larger primetime environment and with an eye towards the special headaches Trump brings in his wake.
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