The headline out of Netflix’s first appearance at the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena is that the streaming video service has produced 14 more episodes of the beloved cult hit Arrested Development, and will release them all in a single day on a to-be-announced day in May! But we already knew that the episodes were under production. The real news is that Netflix might have found its purpose as a creator of original programming with the Arrested Development experiment. Not resurrecting dead-but-beloved-or-even-merely-liked series, as seems to be the case every time a Terra Nova or a The Killing bites the dust. Not providing an employment program to Steven Van Zandt in between Springsteen tours. Rather, Netflix might just have found its niche in taking the logical step beyond the subject matter innovations of the Golden Age of television, and providing structural flexibility to television storytellers as well as room to tackle new subject material and in new tones.

To back up for a moment, the two most interesting things that Mitch Hurwitz, Arrested Development’s creator, explained about the Netflix episodes had nothing to do with what story they’d tell. Rather, he said first that the episodes would each focus on a different character, that they could be watched in no particular order, and that events in each episode would become clearer as viewers watched more of them. And second, he explained that some of them were different lengths, though they are all roughly thirty minutes long.

That first development is very significant. Television, for all that it’s developed beyond an episodic structure to tell long-arc narratives, is still a fundamentally linear storytelling mechanism. You may be able to marathon The Sopranos just fine, but you can’t shuffle up the order of episodes and have things make sense. A willingness to treat episodes like a series of interlinked short films that can be watched in multiple orders is something Netflix can do particularly because of its strategy of releasing all of the episodes of its shows at once, and because it doesn’t have to build and retain viewers episode to episode the way a network does to keep a reliable stream of advertising revenue flowing. And it means that Netflix could position itself as much better-suited than networks of any type to adapt not-strictly linear narratives with multiple perspectives. Before yesterday, my dream scenarios for Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From The Goon Squad involved the HBO adaptation, and for World War Z involved a series of stand-alone movies or mini-series episodes. Now, I’m excitedly thinking about what they might look like as Netflix series, a thought that has literally never occurred to me about any material before.
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Over at Wired, entertainment editor Laura Hudson (formerly the editor in chief of Comics Alliance) explores the understandable confusion that women who find themselves the target of violent threats on Facebook feel about Facebook’s refusal to take down some of that content, despite the clear statements in its terms of use that forbid bullying or the use of threats or hate speech against other users. Facebook, which responded to Hudson’s request for comment, didn’t clarify things as much as they seem to hope that they might:

Wired reached out to Facebook for a comment, and a representative clarified the site’s position:

“We take our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities very seriously and react quickly to remove reported content that violates our policies. In general, attempts at humor, even disgusting and distasteful ones, do not violate our policies. When real threats or statements of hate are made, however, we will remove them. We encourage people to report anything they feel violates our policies using the report links located throughout the site.”

What’s a threat and what’s a joke are both subjective things that depend on both the intent of the speaker and what’s heard by the person who is the target of their speech. What Facebook is effectively saying with this decision calculus that it’s willing to give more deference to speakers who say that they’re trying to be funny—a rationale that can be a very convenient shield for people who don’t want to be responsible for how their speech is received—than the fear of people who feel threatened. A joke doesn’t have to be “real” or effective in the same way a threat apparently does, a hugely subjective standard, to be actionable.

After I read Laura’s post, I read Melissa Gira Grant’s review of Katherine Losse’s memoir of working at Facebook, The Boy Kings. Grant urges us to recall Facebook’s origins as a site that scraped photos of women from existing databases and its transition to a site that got women to give up those images of themselves voluntarily. And she explains how Losse’s experience was part of a larger organizational disdain for customer service, even as a comfortable customer service experience was integral to the idea of getting people to be excited to and feel safe about sharing images and accounts of their personal lives online:

Facebook’s most valued employees—software engineers—relied on customer support staff largely in order to avoid direct contact with Facebook’s users. Rather than valuing their work as vital to operations, Facebook’s technical staff looked down on the support team, as if they were not much better than users themselves. “Personal contact with customers,” Losse writes, was viewed by the engineers as something “that couldn’t be automated, a dim reminder of the pre-industrial era…”…Women workers at Facebook, the customer service buffer between programmers and users, were charged with the social upkeep of this “safe space.” Hundreds of times a day, Facebook users would email Losse and the support team to ask, “What does poking mean?” “We always responded innocently,” Losse writes. “Being coy, not admitting the libidinal urges driving much of the site’s usage, was professionally necessary, a way to differentiate Facebook from the cheap and overtly sexual vibes of MySpace.”

It’s not particularly surprising to me that an organization that started with a culture of putting women in subordinate service positions, that regarded customer service as an irritant, and that’s reliant on getting people to put up data on the site might end up with some of the problems that Facebook has now. All of those tendencies militate against taking down content, against taking customer complaints seriously, and against valuing women’s perspectives over the overall needs of the site. But if Facebook continues to want women to feel safe living their digital lives openly on its platform, it may have to start communicating more clearly, and being more responsive, to women who feel threatened on its digital streets.

I’m always up for modernizing Nielsen ratings, but this new measurement the organization is rolling out isn’t exactly what I was looking for:

Nielsen Twitter TV Rating will measure the total audience for social TV activity, including participants and users who are exposed to the activity. According to Nielsen, this will provide the “precise size of the audience and effect of social TV to TV programming.”

“The Nielsen Twitter TV Rating is a significant step forward for the industry, particularly as programmers develop increasingly captivating live TV and new second-screen experiences, and advertisers create integrated ad campaigns that combine paid and earned media,” Steve Hasker, president of global media products and advertiser solutions at Nielsen, said in a statement. “As a media measurement leader we recognize that Twitter is the preeminent source of real-time television engagement data.”

According to Nielsen, the Twitter TV Rating will serve to complement Nielsen’s existing TV ratings. The tool is described as “giving TV networks and advertisers the real-time metrics required to understand TV audience social activity.”

I get that networks want to see what kind of buzz their shows are generating. But it’s a measure of real-time engagement, which is the same measurement that’s been rendered so much less useful by the rise of DVRs and high-quality, legal streaming sites. And as anyone who has been dismayed by the gap between, say, the volume of Twitter conversation about a cult sitcom like Community and the actual ratings for that show, I think it would ultimately be much more useful to the survival of beloved but low-rated programs to measure the real viewership of those programs more comprehensively. To incorporate more data, Nielsen would have to trust self-reporting from legal streaming services like Hulu, and would have to work out windows for those reports to be delivered and combined with DVR data. But it would be much more useful for networks, and for those of us who love shows where we fear enthusiasm for them isn’t being captured by the current ratings system, especially those like the CW with younger audiences who are watching more television streaming and on mobile devices, to be able to sell package ad deals across platforms, than to know what people talk about Twitter on any given night.

I was out of the town for the critics’ screenings of The Hobbit, which I’ll try to catch over the Christmas break. But I really appreciated this essay about Ali Arikan that’s half review of the movie, and half a meditation on a contradiction inherent in the film, and in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy as well. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote work that was incredibly nostalgic for the past, but it’s taken modern technology to put them on the big screen:

The reverence for a supposed golden age ruined by progress is a recurring theme in human history. The Romans had it, no doubt the guys before the Romans had it too. J.R.R. Tolkien, whose children’s story The Hobbit has now been adapted to the screen as a trilogy by Peter Jackson, also subscribed to this philosophy, along with his contemporaries, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Dorothy L. Sayers, and C.S. Lewis. As the twentieth century progressed, Tolkien would be embraced by the alternative society as a sort of prophet of doom, accurately predicting the harrowing bleakness wrought by modernity.

To this day our hemp-wearing chums will knowingly roll their eyes and talk—at length—about Tolkien’s prophetic abilities (in theme, at least). Machines ravaged the earth only a handful of years after he wrote The Hobbit, in the carnage of the Second World War, they pronounce. But machines are operated by people. Human cruelty can be catalogued as far back in history as you want to go. The twentieth century has no exclusive rights on the charnel house.

And, most tellingly, neither of Tolkien’s books that have now been adapted into live-action features, The Hobbit or its cinematic precursor The Lord of the Rings, would have been possible without advancements in film production. Both were turned into feature animations of varying success in the 1970s, and John Boorman had long planned bringing the latter to the screen in the same decade, but it was technological progress that allowed Peter Jackson, et al to successfully tackle such densely—and idiosyncratically—crafted works of fantasy. Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a rousing success, hugely popular with both audiences and critics, garnering billions of dollars at the box office, with the final film, 2003’s The Return of the King, sweeping the Oscars. Jackson and his films put the fantasy genre on film culture’s map.

This is one of the reasons I’ve always appreciated A Song of Ice and Fire—it’s fantasy that acknowledges that, while feudal society offered opportunities for glory and luxury to an extremely tiny minority, the standard of living was dramatically lower for almost everyone else, and even those privileged few were vulnerable to disease, death in childbirth, martial rape, death in battle, among other maladies. Tolkien wasn’t wrong that the process of moving into modernity can be wrenching, and the movie’s depictions of, say, Saruman’s deforestation of the area around Isengard, capture those sacrifices. But it’s a world where the only thing that comes out of industrialization is orcs, not, say, penicillin.

Shockingly, a tactic used by movie studios and movie theaters to juice profits without much, if any, thought to how it impacts the viewer experience or the content of films, is not proving to be a long-term success:

Despite the optimistic title, the writing is on the wall for studios, which have become increasingly reliant on those ruby tinted spectacles for profits.”3D attendance has been declining on a per-film basis since the release of ‘Avatar,’ and we expect the growth in 3D film releases to flatten out,” the study’s authors write. Part of the culprit is that studios are not increasing the number of films they release in 3D like they once were, and theater chains in the United States are not doing as much to expand their network of 3D compatible theaters after a building frenzy. “Recent 3D releases have underperformed, screen build-out has slowed and ticket premiums are unlikely to increase,” the study’s authors write.

As someone who is a 3D skeptic, in part because I have to wear the glasses over my glasses, which is both physically uncomfortable and means the effects don’t work as well for me as for other people, there are only three uses of 3D I’ve found that justify the use of the technology, which even for non-glasses wearers has some detriments like turning down the brightness of color:

1. To explore the built or natural physical environment of a fictional world: There’s a reason Avatar is the highest-grossing movie, 3D or otherwise, to ever be made. James Cameron designed a fiendishly creative world, made it gorgeous, and used 3D to make his fictions real. If he was shooting on a real planet with familiar flora and fauna, Cameron could have counted on our minds to pop out the plants and animals we’d seen before and make them feel visceral and alive. Instead, he let us play. I’d argue that one of the reasons Thor wasn’t as entertaining as I wish it had been is that we got glimpses of Asgard, but instead of tooling around and through the city, courtesy some bodacious 3D, we instead got a lot of throne room scenes and a lot of distant cityspaces. Hopefully when we return, we’ll get some more Asgardian architecture to feast our eyes on.

2. To provide a sense of actual scale: Martin Scorcese’s Hugo may be the best 3D movie I’ve ever seen, in part because it used the tactic for both the first reason on this list and the second. We meet the train station where the movie’s young protagonist lives out his days as secret keeper of the clocks through a big, meandering 3D introduction that whips us through the cogs and pistons of the timepieces. And 3D, by situating us in the frame, helps us see how small and vulnerable Hugo is, and the magnitude of the work he’s doing in order to stay free and fed. The shots of him hanging over the station floor in the giant clock there have a marvelous sense of scale, and as a result, of stakes.

3. To make your audience physically uncomfortable: I tend to believe that if the story and basic images you’re putting on screen don’t transport viewers, you’ve got problems already. But there are times in which I can see a movie wanting to give viewers an overwhelming sense of speed, or a fall, or a reversal of perspective or direction, in which case 3D could be a way to make the situation feel overwhelming.

I’m sure there are more good filmmaking scenarios that would justify 3D. But much of the time it feels like we’re paying a couple of extra bucks mainly for the privilege of wearing plastic glasses for two hours, rather than having a different movie-going experience. If you want to convince audiences that your movie is literally worth more because it’s in 3D, then you need to show that to them on the screen, rather than expect them to believe it.

Cable companies scored a victory yesterday at the FCC:

Federal regulators are letting cable companies scramble all their TV signals, closing a loophole that lets many households watch basic cable channels for free. The Federal Communications Commission voted Friday to lift a ban on encryption of basic cable signals, saying it will reduce the number of visits by cable technicians to disconnect service and reduce cable theft. Neither the FCC nor the National Cable & Telecommunications Association knows how many households are taking advantage of the unencrypted signals. NCTA spokesman Brian Dietz says most of the theft is by cable modem customers who also connect their line to a TV set.

Whatever the merits (or lack thereof) of the decision, I think there’s an extent to which this is an interesting test. People who would like to see the cable and media companies, which to an extent are distinct entities, innovate in the service offerings they make available to consumers tend to fall in one of two camps. First, there are those who say that piracy, whether of content or of the cable services that let them access content, are a sign that current offerings aren’t sufficient to meet the specific needs of potential consumers, and that content and cable companies could innovate their way to more business. Second, there are those who say that piracy is committed by people who would never purchase these goods and service in the first place, and who thus shouldn’t be subject to excessive regulation, which is of course a different argument than saying regulations would damage the underlying structure of the internet, etc. This second argument is a decent one against spending money and energy on regulation, but it’s ultimately an argument against innovation. If pirates are people for whom the only acceptable price point is zero dollars, no matter how much content and cable companies innovate, they’ll never be able to capture those consumers, and so it makes no sense to adjust or endanger business models to try to accommodate their needs.

What happens after cable companies start scrambling their signals will be an interesting test of these propositions. If cable subscriptions stay level, they maybe it’s true that the folks who are stealing cable service were never potential consumers. If one company cracks down and another company’s subscription base rises, maybe it’s a sign that consumers are willing to pay, but will be unwilling to sign up with companies that seem sour about enforcement. Or if all companies crack down and all subscriptions go up, then perhaps there’s some indication that there are customers out there available to be culled if the environment gives them few options other than to buy service legally. These will all be shaky correlations, of course. But it’s important to actually start testing the question of whether people who aren’t paying for media they consume now are potential customers or not if we want to push cable and content companies towards new business models.