For those of us who have watched the development of Jane Espenson and Brad Bell’s online sitcom Husbands, the story of a gay actor and a gay baseball player who wake up married in Vegas and decide to make a go of it, over the past several years, we’ve got some exciting news. After one season funded privately by Espenson, a second supported by a Kickstarter campaign, the CW has decided to pick up the existing episodes through distribution through its digital platforms, and to make more of the show:

After rolling out short-form comedy “Stupid Hype” and micro celeb newsmag “CelebTV,” CW is moving forward with a broad development slate that includes “Reno-911”-meets-”X-Files” comedy “P.E.T. Squad,” and migrating popular Web series “Husbands” over to the CW digital platforms. “‘Husbands’ has been a critically-acclaimed, user-friendly YouTube series for two seasons,” said Rick Haskins, exec veep of marketing and digital programs at CW. “By bringing that to the CW, we hope to bring new fans over to the network and to CW broadcast shows as well.”

A borrowed equity strategy like the one employed with “Husbands” is the name of Haskins’ game at the network. The CW understands that when building an online following, it must tap into pre-existing fan bases in order to transition viewers over to the digital platforms. “Stupid Hype,” the CW’s first show to be launched through CWD, cast “Hart of Dixie” star Wilson Bethel for the shorts, hoping to draw fans from his broadcast series over to CWTV.com. The net also offered on-air ad spots promoting “Stupid Hype” and “CelebTV,” encouraging viewers to hit the Web for digital content.

And there’s some discussion that successful online shows might become full-fledged programs for broadcast. It’s always made sense to me that broadcast television would begin using successful online shows as a development pool. It lets the networks spend less money on ideas that don’t go anywhere, and gives them a chance to see what kind of audience a concept can attract when it’s available to everyone, and advertised only by social media and word of mouth. The CW, given both its belief that online viewing is key to its business, and its ratings woes in broadcasts, is a fairly logical place to start. I’m just glad it’s gambling on Husbands, a kind of story that started online because networks weren’t ready for it.

There are a lot of details that have yet to be reported, but this is big: according to The Hollywood Reporter, Nielsen, the company that measures the ratings of television shows, is reportedly planning a significant shift in its ratings measurement system that will capture data about television viewing not simply through broadcast, but through streaming.

By September 2013, when the next TV season begins, Nielsen expects to have in place new hardware and software tools in the nearly 23,000 TV homes it samples. Those measurement systems will capture viewership not just from the 75 percent of homes that rely on cable, satellite and over the air broadcasts but also viewing via devices that deliver video from streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, from so-called over-the-top services and from TV enabled game systems like the X-Box and PlayStation.

While some use of iPads and other tablets that receive broadband in the home will be included in the first phase of measurement improvements, a second phase is envisioned to include such devices in a more comprehensive fashion. The second phase is envisioned to roll out on a slower timetable, according to sources, will the overall goal to attempt to capture video viewing of any kind from any source.

The details here will be important. Will Nielsen measure viewing on Hulu, the streaming service set up by the networks? And if so, will it be capturing that data through user’s devices, or through reporting from Hulu? Will the pool of people who are measured be adjusted to account for people who don’t have televisions but watch substantial amounts of television through subscription services on devices? How will Nielsen measure clips of news shows embedded in network sites like MSNBC’s versus streams of full shows? What time period will streaming ratings cover? Will the ratings be adjusted based on a three-day viewing period, the way viewing from DVR recordings are now? Or will both streaming and DVR watching over the seven days after an initial broadcast count? That’s something that CBS president and CEO Les Moonves has been pushing for, and in a November earnings call said “we think it will happen in a short time.”
Read more

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.

I still hold out hopes that someone will get a superhero television show right—superhero stories are, after all, procedurals with weirder criminals and more vigorous apprehensions, so it shouldn’t be that hard. But as NBC’s The Cape stuck too close to the tone of actual comics without adding enough humor to avoid utter woodenness, it looks like with Arrow, the CW is hewing to its airbrushed hunks formula, and I’m not sure the hunk can act:

It’s also amazing how much the trailer screams “let’s redeem this guy’s privilege by giving him superpowers!” That’s a long-standing superhero tradition, of course. But it plays as kind of a dodge here. The way to make up for having sex with your girlfriend’s sister on a cruise and getting her killed, or tooling around like a rich playboy jerk is not actually to kill all the corrupt people in your city: it’s to not be the kind of person who cheats on your girlfriend because you’re entitled to do so. It’ll actually be interesting to see if The Dark Knight gets into this at all, and explores the extent to which being Batman gives Bruce Wayne an excuse to continue enjoying the fundamental inequalities he benefits from.

Three weeks ago, The L.A. Complex debuted on the CW to the lowest ratings for a broadcast drama, ever. It’s too bad, because this spiky little Canadian show about a group of actors, comics, producers and dancers who live in the same run-down Los Angeles apartment complex is great fun, an improvement both on standard aspiring-starlet stories like Smash, and on theoretically sophisticated takes on modern romance.

Smash‘s biggest problem all season has been that the competition between Ivy and Karen hasn’t felt realistically heated. With Ivy’s experience and her resemblance to Marilyn, it seems obvious that she’d be cast in the lead and Karen was the understudy. The show’s had to spend a lot of time giving Karen chances to sing and showing audiences reacting to her like she’s the Best Thing Ever and giving Ivy the silliest drug problem on television since Saved By The Bell to gin up any sort of drama.

The L.A. Complex, on the other hand, has conflicts that are actually rooted in Hollywood double standards. Abby Vargas, a young aspiring actress who’s been living in her car and making a lot of other bad life decisions, ends up competing with Raquel Westbrook, an older actress on the downswing played with a beautiful bitterness by Jewel Staite. When Abby beats out Raquel for a part, it turns out to be not much of a prize at all: her big break turns out to be playing a dead hooker on a crime show where her lines and her pay cut get cut correspondingly. The fights are so big because the stakes are so small, as when Nick Wagner, an aspiring stand-up comic whose material is flopping finally gets applause by viciously insulting a more successful female comic with whom he had an embarrassing one-night stand.

The relationships have the same kind of heft that Smash, which has recycled through tired affairs, starlets sleeping with directors, and the standard idiot pop-culture move of someone proposing after cheating, lacks. Sure, when Abby sleeps with Connor, the most successful actor of the bunch who’s beginning to shoot his new pilot, we’re not surprised when she catches him sleeping with someone else. But L.A. Complex, rather than making the arc solely about her naivete and vulnerability, has focused on Connor’s self-hatred and destructive tendencies. Other than Rescue Me, there’s not another show that’s dared to depict a male character self-harming, a practice typically reserved in pop culture to signify female teenaged angst (Jess’s cutting joke on the season finale of New Girl was an uncomfortably off moment, I thought).

The show’s subverted our expectations in other ways, too. When Alicia, a talented young dancer, clicks with a former child star who covers for her at her job at a strip club so she can make auditions, we expect to see them date. In a subsequent episode, he sets up for what seems like it might be an entirely-too-soon proposal. Instead, he asks her to make a sex tape with him to jump-start both their careers. And once they’re shooting, he’s shy, and awkward, obsessed with lighting and unable to actually get started. It’s Alicia who takes the lead in a moment that’s neither do-me feminism nor slut shaming: this is the best of the bad options, and she’s making the most of it.

And perhaps the best part of L.A. Complex has been that it’s put a gay couple with actual sexual chemistry on television. Brian Stelter wrote at the New York Times yesterday that pop culture appears to have accepted gay couples completely. But the truth is that’s more narrow that it seems: television loves married, settled gay couples, but it doesn’t actually treat gay people like straight people, giving them heated romances, sex scenes, and love interests with whom they have actual sexual chemistry. On Modern Family, established couple Mitch and Cam have essentially no physical sparks whatsoever—the show even had an episode that attempted to explain that the couple isn’t fond of public displays of affection as a way to explain away their lack of heat. I love Happy Endings, which gave schlumphy Max a hot love interest in the form of James Wolk, but the show still stopped far short of their bedroom door. Even Game of Thrones, which gave its gay king and loyal knight and lover hot makeouts wouldn’t go where it’s gone with almost everyone else on the show, and let them have on-screen sex.

But on The L.A. Complex, gay men get treated like everyone else. When Tariq Muhammad, an up-and-coming hip-hop producer gets assigned to work with superstar rapper Kaldrick King, the older man spends a day testing Tariq as they meander through Los Angeles. And at the end of that day, Kaldrick makes a veiled invitation to Tariq. The staredown between them before they kiss and fall into bed is one of the more sexually charged moments to appear on television this season. As commercial as it is, that moment does something that almost no pop culture does: treats gay people as if watching them fall in love and have sex is as interesting and as natural as seeing them as sexless, domesticated marrieds.

As the title suggests, these are my first impressions of these shows, and therefore not definitive judgements. Obviously, all the posts in this series contain spoilers.

The sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a controversial one: the creators didn’t know they were going to be able to make it; Buffy’s decidedly dark and depressed; and Willow’s addiction is admittedly uneven. But I love it because I think it’s a fantastic acknowledgment of how hard that first year out of college is for everyone, and in particular, how difficult it can be to make it in the adult world without the academic credentials you’re expected to have if you’re someone of a certain class background. I also just think that Sarah Michelle Gellar is very, very good at playing fragile and scared, and showing what it’s like to summon your strength when you’re at the absolute bleeding edge of desperation.

All of which means she’s working a lot of her strengths in Ringer, the first episode of which aired last night, which looks like it’s going to be an extended meditation on the difference between the appearance of goodness and its actuality. Gellar plays twins, first Bridget, a former stripper and recovering addict who caused the death of a young boy, then later Siobhan, Bridget’s twin. When Siobhan disappears off a boat, Bridget impulsively jumps at a chance to reset her life (and avoid testifying against a dangerous crime figure, one of the few Native American characters I’ve seen on television in a long time) and pretends to be Siobhan, knowing that Siobhan’s husband and friends don’t know that Bridget exists.

The plausibility of this ruse is pretty dubious. Bridget has next to no time to do research on Siobhan’s life, and her impersonation is, well, imperfect. “You look absolutely anorexic,” chirps Siobhan’s best friend Gemma. “You must share your secret.” And when Siobhan’s husband Andrew comes home, he immediately notices huge differences in the way his wife is reacting to circumstances, explaining that “I love it. I just don’t believe it.” And now Bridget’s going to have to fake a pregnancy, which I’d suspect will work about as well for her as it did for Terri on Glee.

But if she can pull it off, it will be because Siobhan turns out to be such an awful, manipulative person that the people around her chalk up her inconsistent behavior to her terminal duplicitousness. It turns out the so-called good sister is sleeping with Gemma’s husband Henry; driving Henry nuts by refusing to see him — and then refusing to acknowledge that she’s carrying his baby; engaged in what’s essentially a fake marriage with her own husband; shipping her stepdaughter off to boarding school. Maybe she lied about Bridget’s existence not because Siobhan was ashamed of her or hurt by things she’s done but because it’s part of a pattern of bad behavior and lies. And maybe whatever happened to her on that boat was by Siobhan’s design, not a suicide but an escape, a vindictive attempt to stick Bridget with her life. We have a lot of television about bad behavior by rich people, but less about the fact that we tend to equate wealth with virtue, often as a way to make ourselves feel better about wanting it. Having a main character repeatedly come up against the fact that what she thought about her sister’s life based on its polished surface was wrong is an interestingly direct way to engage with that myth.

I don’t really think Ringer is good—for it to be that, it would have to build its mythology a bit more slowly. The pregnancy reveal should have been a couple of episodes in, and we should get more time to see Bridget make the decision to replace her sister and figure out how she’s going to pull it off. And if it’s going to be this dark, we need to see the darkness, not just be told that it’s out there, somewhere, in this brightly-lit, fancy world. Bridget’s terror should feel real. And the show should have at least some sense of fun about Bridget’s new life. If she’s stolen Siobhan’s place in the world after years of living lean in Wyoming, there should be some guilty humor in the gorgeous clothes, house, and husband.