The continuing move of the entire Palin family into reality television careers is an amusing downfall story, but it took a serious turn today with the news that the state of Alaska had provided $354,348 in subsidies to Bristol Palin’s most recent venture into the genre, her Lifetime show Bristol Palin: Life’s A Tripp, which had such dreadful ratings it was yanked from its slot after two episodes. It’s one thing for the entertainment industry to effectively subsidize the Palins’ careers, given the relatively limited appeal they have in the aftermath of Sarah Palin’s political career. But it’s another for Alaska to spend money to attract a show to the state that probably would have filmed there anyway.

If the purpose of film and television production credits is to keep jobs in-state or to convince companies that otherwise might not have produced shows in a state to consider filming there, it’s not remotely clear why Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp would have been a good candidate for those credits. Alaska is Palin’s childhood home. It’s where her parents continue to live, though Todd Palin’s stint in reality television this fall might mean that the family is gravitating more towards Los Angeles. And it’s where Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol’s child, continues to live. If she was retreating from an attempt at a career in California and reestablishing her life near her support system, Alaska was the most logical place for her to do it, even absent a subsidy program. That the show got tax credits from the state suggests more an eagerness to distribute them to whatever project came along than a real effort to attract new and unexpected business to the state.

It’s true that the show generated some revenue for the state, though it’s hard to tell if it was enough to justify spending those subsidies on this particular program, rather than attempting to attract another show to Alaska, or holding off on spending it at all. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, which broke the story of the tax subsidy, notes that the production reported spending $995,275 in Alaska, though not all of that money went to people who live in Alaska, and about $500,000 of that spending went to on-camera talent for the show. The benefits of the program were not exactly broad, or oriented towards creating a lot of new, long-term Alaska jobs.

I understand why states try to lure away productions from California, and to get some of those jobs for their own citizens. But with almost every state offering some form of incentives, it’s easy for productions to shop for the best deal and to pit those subsidy programs against each other in a way that could minimize the economic benefits the states receive from hosting those productions. And if one of the marks of a viable industry is that it can survive without being subsidized, some states are finding it difficult to get their film programs truly off the ground—after Michigan cut its incentives, a new and expensive studio in Pontiac is finding itself without clients. If states are going to pony up to attract film and television productions, they should be clear about what kind of benefits make the programs worth it for them, or they should consider orienting those credits programs to ends beyond economic ones, like improving the numbers of contracts going to women and minority-owned businesses or projects in the industry. The welfare of Bristol Palin and the future of Alaska’s film and television industry are not one and the same.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is displeased that, in the wake of the end of Jersey Shore, in part because some of that show’s stars started doing things like having babies and acquiring responsibilities other than partying, MTV is coming to his state with a show that will start airing next year called Buckwild. The program will follow the antics of a group of twenty-somethings who live in a 4,000-person town. The Washington Post reports on his letter to MTV:

“As a U.S. Senator, I am repulsed at this business venture, where some Americans are making money off of the poor decisions of our youth,” Manchin wrote. “I cannot imagine that anyone who loves this country would feel proud profiting off of ‘Buckwild.’”

“Instead of showcasing the beauty of our people and our state, you preyed on young people, coaxed them into displaying shameful behavior — and now you are profiting from it. That is just wrong.”
In an interview Thursday before sending the letter, Manchin repeatedly called MTV’s decision “just awful.”

“I have no problem with people in this country trying to earn a profit, but I would ask them: Would they do this to their own children, in their own neighborhood, in their own home state?” Manchin said.

It would be nice of Manchin, in the course of defending the innocent young people of his state, would recognize that his own constituents are among the people who “are making money off of the poor decisions of our youth.” There are definitely reality television programs that can be exploitative. Scenes can be cut to be misleading. Producers can be less than honest with participants about their intentions for a project. And no matter how much anyone does to prepare the subjects of a reality show for the limelight, there’s no way to predict what the reaction to a program will be until it airs, or how people who haven’t previously broadcast their lives will react to being characters, as opposed to actual humans.

But we’re also at a point in the development of reality television where many, many people who agree to participate in it are aware of the genre’s conventions, and go into the process with open eyes and a clear sense of how they can leverage the process to their own advantage. The subjects of Breaking Amish appear to have given the producers what they wanted, no matter the facts of their actual lives. I have qualms about making very young children the main characters of reality shows, but the adults who are participating in a program like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo seem self-aware and happy, and rather than becoming objects of pure ridicule, there are a lot of people who have found them rather likable. Jersey Shore‘s stars showed a determined willingness to make fools of themselves, but in a way that was mostly calculated, rather than desperate.

If I were Manchin, I might have a little more respect for my constituents. The only real argument I can see making is that rather than setting the show in Sissonville, which is in Kanawha County in West Virginia, which has 6.1 percent unemployment, down from 6.7 percent last year, MTV might have considered going to Clay County, where the unemployment rate is 13.5 percent, up from 10.6 percent last year.

I wrote earlier this year that The Hour, the BBC’s period drama about the producers, reporters, and anchor on a show of the same title trying to break through the BBC’s strictures and the stifling social environment of the late 1950s, was the show that Aaron Sorkin wanted his HBO drama The Newsroom to be. It was attuned to the actual rhythms and difficulties of reporting, the stories are legitimately revealing rather than pontificating, and the characters face genuine obstacles to getting those stories on the air. And in the second season of the show, which began its run on BBC America last night, I think that’s become even more true, particularly in the way that The Hour is handling the rise of a phenomenon that The Newsroom tried to critique decades later: the rise of commercial television programming aimed at women.

I talked to Abi Morgan, The Hour‘s creator, about the show’s approach to gender in general, and about the kind of programming aimed at women like Marnie (Oona Chaplin), the upper-class wife of The Hour anchor Hector (Dominic West), who begins exploring a career as the host of a cooking show. She explained:

I think if you look at the women, the on-screen talent at that time, on the whole they were either singing along to a puppet, or they were presenting the kind of soft magazine programs that were just starting to come up through the ’50s. I liked the idea of Marnie almost becoming quite literally this professional housewife. She’s this Fanny Cradock-esque character. It also felt like a kind of brilliant, brittle metaphor for this kind of life Marnie finds herself encased in. You’ll see that marriage really is tested through the course of the series….

The mainstay of commercials of that time was the great British housewife. Marnie is very much the consumer of her time. On the wider level, the show is about the birth of capitalism in the ’50s and into the ’60s. The warmongers were finding a way of making money out of nuclear paranoia, [and there was a] global desire to be part of the arms and space race. This parallels what’s going on with Marnie. She’s someone who aspires to a bigger life. When you write a drama set in this era, you have a whole period where if your characters have any gumption or charisma, they have to break away from this suppressive ’50s world.

Where The Newsroom could be viciously dismissive of mass culture aimed at women—Will McAvoy ran himself into trouble in part by insulting a gossip columnist for covering the Real Housewives, and declaring that he’d fix another woman whose primary flaw included consuming that kind of show—The Hour doesn’t try to make judgements about whether it’s bad or not that programming aimed by women exists. Instead, it tries to reckon with what it means that this kind of programming speaks powerfully to the ennui of post-war women like Marnie, who aren’t working, and how their power as consumers affects the entire media landscape. When Bel debates whether or not to run a segment about Christian Dior, she’s also trying to figure out where fashion fits in the hierarchy of news and human interest.

And the show never presents Marnie as stupid for being entranced by a commercial, or seeking out a career using the skills that she has, even if they’re feminine ones. Of course she’s bored! She was bred for a specific role, to be a good wife to a man like Hector, who was expected to play a corresponding part, but instead cheats on her, pursues entertainment in nightclubs where she is not invited, and treats her as if she couldn’t possibly be interested in his career. Marnie is an intelligent, capable woman, but no one asks anything of her, not even that she be available for sex and housekeeping. Even if she’s only valuable to television as a consumer, at least it’s a form of being valued.

The thing that Will McAvoy, and that by extension The Newsroom, never seemed to get, is that consuming frivolous things doesn’t make you a frivolous person. Everyone I know who watches Real Housewives does so because they recognize the show as a social critique folded into a trainwreck like a pill into applesauce. It’s possible to even consume things that you know are bad for you, or that have no redeeming social value whatsoever, to recognize them as such, and to enjoy them anyway. The question is not whether or not someone is a good person for watching certain things. It’s what need they speak to, what itch they scratch.

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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James Woods’ review of Thomas Wolfe’s latest novel Back to Blood is a fairly comprehensive dismantling, taking on everything from the way Wolfe overcooks every sentiment until they blend together in a grey mush to some of the creepy racial attitudes in Wolfe’s depictions of the overmuscled physiques of his characters of color. But beyond the novel itself, Woods makes an argument about how research can serve fiction, or undermine it:

Over the years, Tom Wolfe has campaigned strenuously on behalf of the journalistic role in fiction. In “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” and elsewhere, he has argued that American fiction since the nineteen-sixties has fallen into sterility and irrelevance, because American novelists aren’t looking at the world. According to him, they’ve retreated from the traditional calling of writers like Balzac, Zola, and Sinclair Lewis, because they’ve exchanged the labor of reporting for easy fictional games (postmodern self-referentiality) or for a few dull inches of ivory (minimalism, dirty realism). The American novel will be reborn, Wolfe claims, when the novelist gets out onto the street and starts copying. Not only will such reporting produce the little details, “the petits faits vrais that create verisimilitude”; it is essential for literature’s greatest effects. American fiction, grounded in “a highly detailed realism,” will properly emulate the Zola who went down into the mines in Anzin, in 1884, to do research. While underground, Wolfe says, Zola discovered that the pit horses lived and died in situ; when he transfers this found detail to the pages of his novel “Germinal,” the reader is moved and aghast….

Very occasionally in this novel, Wolfe gives evidence that he knows the difference between those French prunes and “Hotchkiss, Yale . . . six-three.” At one point, Nestor, fleeing the opprobrium of his community, ends up at a favorite Cuban bakery, where he enjoys “a whiff of Ricky’s pastelitos, ‘little pies’ of filo dough wrapped around ground beef, spiced ham, guava, or you name it. . . . He had loved pastelitos since he was a little boy.” It’s a rare passage without exclamation marks, and superficially it resembles Ivan and the prunes. But the detail about the pastelitos has the whiff not of pastry but of research. Like everything else in this book, it is imparted information, and is thus the expected detail, the properly stamped sociological receipt. Ivan’s French prunes come out of nowhere, and surprise us with their singular surplus: Why prunes? Why French prunes?

This is something I consider a great deal, and I tend to think that research should serve three main purposes in fiction, whether it’s fiction that means to comment on the real world, or to dream beyond it, both equally valid aims:

1. It should identify conditions and conflicts that provide rich drama: So much of what’s important about research, whether it comes through formal reporting or new life experiences, is identifying new stories and conflicts in the first place. David Simon’s reporting is the reason he could identify bureaucratic tensions and criminal rivalries that would be the basis for The Wire. Thomas Mann might not have seized on sanatoriums as a subject, one of the examples Woods offers up, had his wife not ended up in one. Whether you think they should have happened at all, t’ll be interesting to see how Kathryn Bigelow’s conversations with the Obama administration end up affecting Zero Dark Thirty.

2. It can be a source of unexpected details that make characters more fully-rounded people: Woods’ complaint about Wolfe’s use of pastelitos is not that the description of them isn’t accurate, but that it’s unsurprising. Knowing that a Cuban character enjoys traditional Cuban food doesn’t necessarily add much to our sense of that character as a distinct person. But learning, as was the case with the opening of this season of Mad Men, that Madison Avenue advertising executives were stupid enough to throw water balloons at Civil Rights protestors, both creates a powerful little anecdote and exposes the gap between the sophisticated facade of self-appointed masters of the universe and the reality of their behavior.

3. It should avoid errors that take knowledgable viewers out of the story: It may be a little thing to complain about, but one of the most irritating things that television, in particular, does, is name a location where something is happening in the name of credibility, and then show a place that is patently not that location. Homeland committed a particularly egregious violation of this sort last season when it said an attack was going to take place in Farragut Square in Washington, DC, and then used a location that had precisely nothing in common with the block-sized park. Slips like that may not matter for the majority of viewers of any given cultural artifact. But it’s silly to gesture at realistic detail and immediately undermine the attempt. I’m not saying that everything in fiction has to function exactly the way it does in the real world—fact-checking is an awfully boring way to watch television. But if you’re commenting on the world as it is, or putting characters in a familiar world, considering whether the choices you’re making and the details you’re including pull consumers out of the universe you’ve created or create internal contradictions will serve you as well as them.

GLAAD’s Network Responsibility Index is one of the most fascinating and comprehensive looks at the on-screen diversity of American television, examining not just gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters, but racial and gender diversity as well. And the version of its report released today says a lot not just about which networks are doing well at integrating LGBT characters into their programming, but about generation gaps between viewers and which kind of gay people are most integrated into the American imagination.

On broadcast television, there’s a striking gap between the network aimed at the youngest viewers and the one that targets the oldest. The CW consistently leads its rivals in programming that includes gay characters—in the 2011-2012 television season, 29 percent of its program hours included gay characters or gay people, bolstered substantially by its reality programming. 62 percent of those impressions were of LGBT people of color. During the same period, CBS only had gay people or characters in 8 percent of its original programming. The CW, of course, is so dangerously at the bottom of the ratings that it’s at risk of actual extinction, while CBS leads the ratings by a significant margin. The attitudes of young viewers should drive LGBT-inclusive programming, but their actual consumption behaviors mean they’re creating a less strong market than their rising consumption power would indicate.

It’s also important to note that, while more LGBT characters and people are appearing on television, their numbers are still small enough that a single character or program can significantly shift a network’s performance. Reality programming is the major driver of LGBT representation on NBC and ABC. CBS has so few LGBT characters that Kalinda Sharma, the bisexual investigator on The Good Wife, ends up accounting for almost one third of the hours of representation of non-straight people on the network, and that show provided 48 percent of those hours overall. Diana Berrigan, the FBI agent on White Collar, made the USA Network the leader in representations of black LGBT people and lesbians all on her own. White gay men remain the most popular kind of LGBT people on television.

These small numbers mean both that the cancellation of a single program can significantly decrease a network’s representation of LGBT characters. But it also means that a few chances can make a network get better quickly. FX, a network that’s been defined by its explorations of heterosexual masculinity, for example, went from 19 percent of its programming hours including LGBT characters to 34 percent on the strength of Archer and American Horror Story. That’s a blessing and a curse. Progress is fragile. But it’s also relatively easy to accomplish.

And this year’s NRI has an interesting finding about the impact of popular culture on public opinion from its Pulse of Equality survey, which is conducted by Harris Internactive. “Among the 19% who reported that their feelings toward gay and lesbian people have become more favorable over the past 5 years, 34% cited ‘seeing gay or lesbian characters on television’ as a contributing factor,” the report says. That doesn’t mean television works for everyone, of course: Ann Romney’s love for Modern Family hasn’t exactly made her any more amenable to marriage equality. But if popular culture makes 6.5 percent of Americans think more favorably about LGBT people over a five-year period, that’s a significant contribution, and one that’s worth fighting for.

VH1 has yanked Ev and Ocho, a spinoff from its Basketball Wives franchise, that would have followed Dolphins wide receiver Chad Johnson and Evelyn Lozada in the early stages of their marriage, after Johnson was arrested over the weekend on battery charges. It’s one thing to pretend that people who don’t actually like each other are friends, or that people who are friends are fighting, or that celebrities are in danger of fake explosions. It’s to give a guy whose wife ended up at the hospital with a cut forehead while he got dragged off to jail a chance to sell himself to audiences as an appealing newlywed.

Entertainment companies have choices about what kind of people they want to be in business and what kinds of fantasies they want to sell. Johnson is hardly a money machine like Charlie Sheen, so the decision to drop him isn’t as painful to the network as it would be for the networks of the world to collectively and permanently turn their backs on that particular member of the Estevez clan. But still, it costs money to shoot a show and then shelve it. I’m glad that for now, VH1 isn’t interested in peddling that fantasy, and is willing to take the hit on the show.

“You guys are going to be talking about us either way,” Bristol Palin said at a panel for Dancing With the Stars: All Stars at the Television Critics Association press tour on Friday, explaining why she and her family have embraced reality television even though it brings additional scrutiny to her family. It was the second Palin-studded panel of the tour. Bristol’s father Todd is a participant in NBC’s military-themed reality show Stars Earn Stripes, and while he barely uttered a word during the panel introducing the show on Tuesday, his wife, gone strikingly Hollywood, was the most sought-after star at NBC’s poolside party. But it was Bristol’s appearance that illustrated the contradictions of the Palin’s hunger for the spotlight and their disinterest in dealing with, or embracing with relish, the consequences of continuing to put themselves in the public eye.

“Our family’s mantra is to live life vibrantly,” Sarah Palin told Vulture’s Joe Adalian in a brief interview he was able to snag before hotel security started blocking reporters from approaching the family. “And participating in a show like this, especially for Todd, is exactly that. It is living life vibrantly.” Her daughter was less able to put a politician’s gloss on an essentially mindless pursuit. “I just think that God provides opportunities like this and you can go out and do ‘em,” she said, suggesting that if she was going to be the subject of media reports, she might as well embrace the opportunities that come with living in the public eye.

But Bristol got less and less comfortable as she was asked whether her family, which has frequently been vocally upset about their press coverage, has contributed to its own problems by embracing a profession that often puts its subjects in revealing and embarrassing situations. Recently, Bristol’s Lifetime Show, Life’s a Tripp, featured a sequence in which many viewers believed Bristol’s young son Tripp used the epithet “faggot” to deride his aunt—Palin has said that he used profanity, but not an anti-gay slur. When she and fellow contestant Pamela Anderson were asked about their attitudes towards gay people, Palin got visibly upset. “I like gays. I’m not homphobic and I’m so sick of people saying that just becuase I’m for traditional marriage,” she said. That stand “doesn’t mean I’m afraid of anyone else…whatever. I’m going to dance, I’m going to go have fun.”
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