AdWeek reports that Comcast, which is purchasing the rest of NBC Universal, will begin using that company’s rules for advertising across its whole enterprise. And that includes a ban on firearms advertisements:

In a statement, Comcast said it decided this month it would adopt the advertising guidelines used by NBCUniversal, which will not accept ads for weapons or fireworks. (Last week, the cable giant announced it would acquire the 49 percent of NBCU it didn’t own for $16.7 billion.) NBC’s ad policy, last updated in June 2012, reads: “NBC does not accept advertisements for weapons or fireworks. Commercials that include weapons or fireworks as props will be approved on a case-by-case basis.” News of the policy change was reported by the local ABC affiliate in Flint, Mich. Williams Gun Sight Co. was outraged that its 30-second spot could no longer run on cable. A Comcast spokesperson didn’t know how long the NBC policy banning ads for firearms and weapons had been in place at NBC. “It’s a long-standing policy,” the spokesman said.

Voluntary restrictions on gun ads are relatively common in the wake of gun violence. In 1999, President Clinton asked representatives of the entertainment industry to eliminate advertising that included images of guns and gun violence. In 2003, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune decided it would only accept for ads that were antiques or collectibles after a man murdered his wife with a weapon that he purchased from the Guns & Rifles section of the classifieds. And this January, ESPN refused to renew an advertising contract with East Coast Guns on the grounds that its advertising criteria had changed to exclude ads that featured hand guns and ammunition for those weapons.

Comcast’s decision seems more likely to be the product of standardizing corporate practices as part of the acquisition than a direct response to the Newtown massacre. It would be a public relations problem for the company for a sales representative operating under one set of standards to accept an advertisement that local affiliates are unable to run. But it’s also probably a good call for the company given the current environment. I’ve said this before, but I think one of the most reasonable steps the entertainment industry could take in response to concerns about the impact of violent media would be to align the ratings of products that are being advertised with the ratings of the products they’re being advertised during. It would be labor-intensive to place ads that way. But making sure that viewers who have turned into general-interest or all-ages programming aren’t surprised by images of graphic violence would at least help consumers make viewing choices, even if it wouldn’t address the concerns of people who are worried about the desensitizing impacts of media violence.

Grantland’s Alex Pappademas recently hit the road with Dan Harmon, his girlfriend Erin McGathy, and various and sundry other people as they put on Harmontown, Harmon’s podcast, as a live national tour. Depending on the level of attention you’ve been paying to Harmon’s life and person outside his role as the creator of Community, reading the resulting chronicle of the trip will be either a profoundly dispiriting experience, or a reaffirmation of things you already knew. But the part of it I found perhaps most disconcerting was a long rant Harmon goes on about television that Pappademas reproduces in order to give readers a sense of “what it’s like to talk to Harmon, who’s one of the most exhaustingly brilliant people I’ve ever had a conversation with.” Harmon apparently said:

When 30 Rock lands on the cover of Rolling Stone, when any television show is lionized for being “smart,” someone’s laughing all the way to the bank — some company, it used to be General Electric, but now it’s Comcast. That there’s a difference between any of this shit is the greatest joke that television ever told. I mean, as the creator of Community, I’m telling you: It’s all garbage. And the idea that my garbage, y’know, needed a better time slot or deserved an Emmy or didn’t deserve an Emmy, the idea that it was better or worse than 30 Rock or Arrested Development or Freaks and Geeks and all that shit — you only have to take a couple steps back before you realize that you’re looking at a bunch of goddamn baby food made out of corn syrup. It’s just a big blob of fucking garbage. The medium is dispensed to people who can’t feed back, can’t change it, who only get it in 20-minute chunks interrupted by commercials, and you’re watching either really well-written jokes or so-so-written jokes or terribly written jokes, but you’re just watching jokes written by a bunch of people who all have one thing in common: They’re not allowed to say whatever they’re thinking! They’re not allowed. You’re definitely not getting truth; you’re getting lies.

Now, so why does this concept of “meta” and smart TV and snobbery — like, why does it offend people? Why can’t you just say, “I don’t like that show; it’s not my cup of tea. I prefer this show”? Because we’re programmed to hate ourselves for being stupid. We are told that the goal is to be smart, and to differentiate between good and bad, and then we are told, from left to right, what is good and bad, and then we are told to go at each other’s throats. And that’s why, if a television show like Community has an element to it where someone says, “This feels a lot like a television show,” you can’t just ignore that — you can’t just take it or leave it. You have to violently — like, it’s a political issue. It’s like, you gotta fight it; you gotta hate it.

If you’re a critic, you have to write your 90-page review of it that takes longer to read than it does to watch the episode, prattling endlessly in this pseudo-intellectual way, filling the next tier down’s head with this language that they can use to talk about the show over coffee. The conversation we’re not having is: “Hey, there’s 250 million of us watching an average of six hours a day of a one-way transmission that only ever tells us that we are all animals and that we should buy Cottonell.” That’s the one conversation no one is having, not a single one of us. Well, I mean, there are a couple people having it; they’re on street corners covered in tattoos with their dicks pierced, and they’re holding signs saying, “Honk if you want to burn down the White House.” Those people are not marketable; we put them in the same drawer as homeless people; they’re weird characters, putting flyers on your windshield and walking around barefoot and freaking out about the fact that this Orwellian nightmare is happening, and we’re all inside having these debates about whether or not liking 30 Rock makes us smart or stupid.

Now, I say everything that follows as someone who believes even more than the average, 90-page-review-writing, critic that television matters, that movies matter, hell, that Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series of romance novels is a delightful and important critique of the genre while also still being a successful example of it. So Dan Harmon can feel free to ignore as much of this as he chooses. But in my defense, I’m also someone who wrote a long meditation on NCIS and Americans’ relationship to government, so I’m not sure I’m guilty of trying to sort out whether I’m smart based on my love of both Anthony DiNozzo and Chris Traeger.

But beyond the questions of my investment in a system Harmon thinks is nonsense, and of Harmon’s own self-regard and how it pairs with his self-hatred—which was a striking element of this piece even for someone who suffers from substantial self-image dysmorphia—this…was not quite the visionary statement I expected? For all that it’s absolutely true that all television that is broadcast on cable or networks is produced in a corporate environment, to say that “It’s just a big blob of fucking garbage” is the equivalent of arguing that there’s no substantive difference beween the Democratic and Republican parties. It may be true that there isn’t as much variation as we’d like in the offerings available to us. But the corporate money that’s gone into our politics has actually homogenized the party system much more than the corporate money invested in television development has ever homogenized content—and the differences between the parties remain easily discernable. To stick with the comparison, there genuinely is a difference between the smarmy cynicism of House of Cards‘ garage-murdering, sex-having, amoral power brokers, and the optimism of Parks and Recreation‘s argument that local government can genuinely make life better.

And for all that television’s a one-way medium, it’s not alone—and it has more capacity to adapt over time than either novels or movies. Girls is to television as Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be is to novels, an almost pathologically open dispatch from a young woman’s perspective. While Heti’s novel will only ever be what it is, Girls has actually gotten substantially stranger in its second season, and more willing to test the limitations of our affections for its characters, whether Hannah’s upping the self-regard factor, or Jessa’s being called out as the golddigger that she is, even as the show expects us to continue to sympathize with her. Parks and Recreation actually got more optimistic about government, and more committed to showing its main character as competent and engagingly strange, after its first season, the opposite direction from the one you’d expect a corporately-controlled product to travel. The Wire may be the Great American Novel, but it also switched settings and main characters, growing and changing in a way a movie or novel never could have done.
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Over at Time, James Poniewozik has a smart piece about the rebranding of G4, the video gaming channel owned by NBC Universal, into the Esquire Network:

Spike’s sensibility was more along the lines of Maxim–gadgets-and-girls-oriented magazines whose philosophy was not that men needed a magazine to make them better but that they were already good enough. Spike has dropped the “TV for men” branding over the years, though it still has MMA fighting and a logo that could serve well as a label for men’s body spray. (It also airs the brilliant reality-TV parody The Joe Schmo Show, which among other things is as good a spoof of reality-TV dudeliness as anything.)…

But NBCU must think the Esquire brand has some value to the channel—that a certain breed of upscale male viewer will see it as promising the kind of avuncular man’s-guide-to-life service that the magazine serves up alongside its long news features and the Funny Joke from a Beautiful Woman column. Will there be shows about buying the perfect tux? On mixing Hemingway’s favorite cocktail?

So far, the few announced series include Knife Fight, a competition among young chefs, and a travel show called The Getaway. Cooking, travel—those sound like things that could appeal to a certain breed of demographically attractive, metrosexual men, and things that the rest of the cable universe kind of provides already, no?

Part of the interesting question in trying to do programming for men is how you’re defining them. When people talk about trying to lock down male viewers, some of the implication is that they’re looking for heterosexual men, rather than reaching out to gay men, because the assumption is that wealthy (read: desirable) gay men already have all of their needs met by Andy Cohen’s fabulous meanness over on Bravo. Picking Esquire as a branding partner also assumes that NBC Universal is going after a certain subset of heterosexual men, the kind who watch Top Chef, rather than the ones who are tuning in to Duck Dynasty and NFL games.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it also seems like an inherently limited strategy. FX, one of the networks that’s oriented towards men, at least to the extent that it’s the rare channel where more men than women tune into its dramas, has built its brand in part by putting lots of different kinds of men in primetime, from ne’er-do-wells running a bar in Philly, to biker dudes in California, to middle-class football fans and their families, to super-spies with a twist. It’s a strategy that means that you can pull in audiences who are both eager to see exaggerated riffs on themselves on screen, and people who are eager to disappear into fantasies that have nothing to do with their lives. In general, trying to reach different kinds of men also means trying to catch men who watch television many different ways. Trying to lure young, tech-savvy viewers who are watching DVRed television or streaming shows online back to your network simply by giving them more content you think might like, and programming very narrowly to what you think their tastes are, seems like something of a fool’s errand.

And really, I think that attempt to narrowcast presents problems beyond the technological ones. What of Esquire‘s brand is translatable into narrative? If it’s pseudo-intellectual justifications for drooling over hot women, that wouldn’t necessarily make it much different from Spike’s or Maxim‘s. Some of its reported features could make good movie or mini-series adaptations, but those are expensive, hard to syndicate, and magazine stories are adapted into movies less often that the development deals places like New York and The Atlantic have in place would suggest. In other words, Esquire‘s brand is transitional enough even as a magazine. Trying to import it wholesale, rather than developing an identity through programming, seems like a way to try to grab a new audience on the quick and cheap, rather than trying to figure out what works, and to learn who your audience is, rather than to dream of who it might be.

I’m not usually exceptionally fond of either contrarianism or remakes, but I’m going to buck a trend here and say I’m kind of excited about a darkish reboot of The Munsters. We’re certainly seeing a bit of a trend towards the horrifying on television this fall: if American Horror Story can sell people on Connie Britton eating brains, I guess anything is possible. And Grimm is doing something I appreciate, increasingly partnering up straight-man-to-the-point-of-invisibility Nick with a Big Bad Wolf. But both Ryan Murphy’s wannabe-transgressive drama and NBC’s semi-bland procedural essentially use monsters in the same way, to test the extent to which there’s a bit of a wild thing inside all of us normals before reasserting our essential humanity. Instead, I’d like to see a show about what it’s like to be a monster in America, something as proudly but a little less triumphalist than The Addams Family. What does it mean to grow up really, profoundly different, without the promise of a big-city gay community or the rise of hipster glasses as a fashion trend to power you through? What does it mean to find your community — and your family — and what would you do to protect it from outsiders? America’s pretty quick to kill or assimilate the things it sees as monsters. We’re less good at making art that at the things we can’t eliminate easily or decisively.

-My friend Alejandra O’Leary has a couple of songs from her new album available for listening. What are you waiting for?

-The saddest movie scene of all time, as determined by psychological testing.

-Online distribution concerns might hold up the NBCUniversal-Comcast merger.

-Chewie and Han Solo have some unresolved issues.

-We would solve a lot of problems if we could prevent giant alien robots from hiding lots of equipment in the ocean in the first place:

If that video isn’t working, this one should be.