Over at Press Play, Drew Gardner has written one of the best pieces I’ve ever read about reality television. Focusing on a new show called Killer Karaoke, in which contestants are required to sing while being plunged into ice water, shocked with electric collars, or covered in bugs, he argues that reality television, an innovation in programming is cheaper in part because participants don’t have to be paid anything, has begun driving even the rewards offered to the successful contestant who makes it all the way through to the end down—in Killer Karaoke, the most the winner can make is $10,000—but that Killer Karaoke has exposed the unpaid labor in poor conditions that undirgird the industry as part of its very schtick:

Killer Karaoke breaks with this tradition. There is no panel. The contestants are judged only by the audience, according to whatever criteria they please, probably a mix of singing talent, courage, and how entertainingly they flip out. But winning is not exactly the point of the show. Something of an afterhtought, the anti-climactic final challenge involves singing while remaining balanced on a giant rotating turntable with two other remaining contestants. The point of the show is to see how winningly contestants can suffer humiliation and pain under objectionable working conditions. In contrast with American Idol, Killer Karaoke encourages the audience to sympathize with all the contestants from the beginning: though we’re amused by their suffering, we’re also rooting for them. We want everyone to succeed, in a situation where success comes down to freaking out in the most hilarious way…

Steve-O is very much a traditional game show host in this role on Killer Karaoke, an updated Bud Collyer. He stays out of the action and keeps to the role of explaining the stunts and drawing comments out of the contestants. In a recent interview about the show, he said, “Breaking bones and sticking things up my ass was not getting any easier.” It’s clear that he has a strong grasp of the economy of the show, and perhaps about reality TV in general: “It’s about the misfortune of others and exploiting people’s willingness to sacrifice their dignity and well being just to be on TV for a brief moment.” Steve-O’s host character is an expert on ill-advised activities who has happily gotten himself promoted to a upper management position.

The show sounds horrifying, but it’s a fascinating point. And given what seems like the sudden implosion of the television business model, a heavy reliance on reality television, likely with diminished rewards, seems likely to continue. What’s interesting is whether this particular subset of the industry will reach a point where what’s on offer, be it financial or the chance for exposure, is so minimal, and the challenges or humiliations involved are so great, that reality television will stop finding takers. Hotels, big-box stores, and other employers that rely heavily on low-wage workers increasingly seem to have tested, and found, the floor for what they can ask employees to do and still find a steady stream of labor without provoking union organizing drives. But unlike reality television, low-wage American jobs were never going to offer massive prizes to a few workers to defuse more general discontent about compensation and working conditions. In the lottery that is the American economy, if you promise millions of dollars to a single person, you’ll be able to take many millions more from even those who know they’re getting played for suckers—particularly if you’re asking them to participate in one bad subset of the economy because the one they long to escape is worse.

Yahoo’s Chris Wilson has built one of my favorite tools of the election cycle, a survey of network television shows that breaks down which presidential campaigns, party committees, and affiliated groups are advertising are advertising on which programs. A couple of my favorite results:

-Democrats and Republicans are about even in the numbers of ads they’re airing on NCIS, the most popular scripted show on television. No one can resist Mark Harmon, apparently. Now if only one of the candidates would use the show’s Israel politics in a stump speech…

-2 Broke Girls may be crazy, crazy racist, but the first black president’s campaign is targeting viewers of CBS’s recession comedy aggressively: the Obama campaign bought more than 90 percent of the 62 ad buys on the show. Maybe the administration is counting on viewers who identify with Caroline and Max to care more about health care affordability and covered contraception than the idea that racial jokes are hilarious.

-The Voice, NBC’s singing competition, skews Democratic, with 462 of 681 ad buys going to the Obama campaign or Democratic groups and committees. The Olympics, by contrast, had the most Republican-heavy ads, with 250 out of 323 ad buys backing Romney—probably because there was an actual hook there to hang one of the central elements of his campaign on.

-Saturday Night Live, somewhat surprisingly given the show’s history of lampooning Republican candidates, breaks close to even, with 250 Republican ad buys and 258 Democratic ones. Maybe the idea is that the Republicans will catch hate-watchers?

There’s a lot more data there, and the numbers will change as we head into the ad-heavy final weeks of the campaign. But it’s fun to sort through these results, if only to get a sense of who the candidates believe are the target audience for particular shows.

It says a lot about how poorly the presidential debate was moderated last night that this video left me reflecting that the judges from The Voice appear to have learned a lot more about public presentation and persuasion in three seasons than Jim Lehrer has from overseeing eleven previous presidential debates:

There were a lot of criticism launched at Lehrer last night, but to me, his most significant failing was asking the candidates repeatedly if they thought there were differences between their philosophies and positions when everyone knows they exist and are significant, rather than asking follow-ups that would have helped flesh out those differences. It’s the equivalent of asking actors how it feels to work with a co-star, the sort of query that both demonstrates that the questioner is out of other ideas, and that skates over the surface of the issues actually at stake. Or on The Voice, of defaulting to complimenting the star, rather than laying out a plan for mentoring them, as both Adam Levine and Blake Shelton have gotten very good at doing.

Moderating debates, judging competition shows, and hosting awards shows are all profoundly difficult jobs, in part because there’s no clear set of expectations for how to do them correctly. Lehrer didn’t succeed at any of them, neither defining the issues, nor controlling the flow of the argument between Obama and Romney, which was at times an intriguing free-for-all, nor asking incisive follow-up questions. I don’t envy Lehrer his job, but after eleven outings, he should at least have his own vision of what the job is.

We talk a lot about the tendency of the entertainment industry to homogenize people, particularly women. If you don’t have the right height-to-weight proportions, your skin doesn’t fall in the approved shade range, or your features aren’t a particular kind of symmetrical, good luck finding work. But what we don’t talk about as often—because it doesn’t happen nearly as often—is what happens when Hollywood has to deal with characters, or with actual people, who are just not conventionally attractive.

In recent days, production stills for HBO’s fantasy series Game of Thrones have been circulating that include our first look at Brienne of Tarth. For folks not familiar with the franchise at all, or who haven’t read the books but have seen the first season, Brienne is a female knight. And not just any female knight: she’s an exceptionally clever and strong warrior. But she’s also the rare female character in popular culture who is unambiguously plain. I’m not talking about the standard Hollywood construction of the pretty-ugly girl who just needs to lose her glasses a la Rachel Leigh Cook in She’s All That or her unfortunate presentation like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. She’s not a character who is “unconventionally pretty” but who retains a certain core attractiveness that just needs to be recognized by the right, unsnobby people. Brienne isn’t someone who doesn’t know she’s pretty and requires a makeover to see herself clearly. She’s just not attractive. George R.R. Martin leaves essentially no wiggle room in the text for Hollywood to magically transform Brienne into a supermodel, and I appreciate that HBO didn’t try. As Brienne, Gwendoline Christie may not be quite as unattractive as Martin makes her out to be, but she looks powerful and dignified in a way that’s authentic to the book. It’ll be very interesting to see how much HBO’s adaptation includes the constant degradation, including persistent threats of rape, that Brienne faces both because she’s a female knight who is better than men at what she does, and because she’s an unattractive woman who has sexual desires.

It was fascinating to contrast that presentation with how The Voice treated Sarah Golden, a contestant who joined Cee Lo Green’s team in Monday night’s blind auditions. The show made a huge deal of Sarah’s anxieties about her appearance, and the chances she thinks she hasn’t gotten because of how she looks. In fact, the cutting stayed away from her face for so long, something they haven’t done with any other contestant, I was convinced the producers were going to reveal that she had some sort of disfiguring birthmark or major scarring. Instead, Golden turns out not to have any malformation or hideousness: she’s just a plain, non-supermodel, woman, one who might even come across as a cute butch lesbian (the show hasn’t told us anything about her sexual orientation) if that’s the way she’s coding herself. It was a bizarre attempt to gin up some drama that ended up acting as a reminder of an unfortunate truth: that if you’re not pretty, Hollywood and society are not always particularly kind.

There’s an obvious gender differential at work here: there are a lot more conventionally unattractive men who work regularly in Hollywood than conventionally plain women. And while Game of Thrones also has a male character, Tyrion Lannister, whose life is dramatically shaped by the fact that he doesn’t look like everyone thinks he’s supposed to, it’s the rare franchise that deals as much with looks-based discrimination against men and male body anxiety as much as it does women’s experiences of those issues. Perhaps Hollywood would be less fascinated in an anthropological way with the issues faced by women who don’t fit a very narrow mold if they didn’t do so much to form and strengthen that mold in the first place.

What would I do without Super Bowl ads to explain my own gender to me? Truly, I would be lost. Super Bowl 2012 actually seemed less egregiously sexist than previous years, even given the inevitable GoDaddy ad, so predictably gross that I don’t even include it here. But taken together, the ads form a pretty striking portrait of how American industry views American ladies. Let’s take a look, shall we?

1. Women don’t invent things (people of color don’t either), but they will sell you electronics:

2. When we’re superheroes, we get the cute little guns that can fit in a purse:

3. Seriously. Combat never stops us from looking hot:

4. That said, go up against a dude, and we’re super-defenseless:

5. You can make everything better by turning it into an unclothed woman who acts, quite literally, as an object for your use:

6. We live to seduce you so you will purchase motor vehicles:

7. Buy us flowers, and we will give you unreciprocated oral:

Read more

The numbers for The Voice have been big over the past couple of days, even without the boost from the Super Bowl: 17.7 million viewers tuned in last night, and a 6.6 rating among the coveted adults between the ages of 18 to 49. It makes sense that the show is doing well. Two episodes into its second season, The Voice is improving on its strengths, providing a real debate about American popular music.

Because the judges actually have to compete against each other, the candidates are doing something smart: in cases where more than one judge turns their chair around, they’re actually asking questions. They want to know why the judges were compelled by their singing. They’re curious as to whether the judges think they should stick within a genre and build a strong identity there or try to transcend it. Blake Shelton’s been winning candidates over by appealing to the ones who truly want to be country stars, while Adam Levine and Cee Lo Green have been pitching themselves as coaches who don’t want to see their artists get limited. The judges’ answers aren’t as good as the candidates’ questions yet, but I hope that’s something that they’ll improve on over time. And the fact that those conversations are happening at all are an encouraging thing for people like yours truly who have everything from OutKast to Toby Keith in their playlists and who want to see these genres in conversation. Because they already are, whether American Idol acknowledges it or not.

Do we still need more of that stylistic diversity represented on the stage? Of course. But I like that there’s a singer with opera training on Christina’s team, and I’m holding out hope, as Cee Lo promised me at TCA press tour, that we’re going to get an MC, too. If The Voice can walk the line between increasing the stylistic diversity of its singers without tipping over into novelty act territory, it’ll just become a more interesting show. And now that we’re over the initial novelty of seeing superstars woo contestants, the show will only get better as those competitions get more fierce and specific.

Based on this evidence, we should totally decide the 2012 general election in a The Voice-style singoff:

One of the things I’ve always found fascinating about singing competition shows like American Idol and now the X Factor is the assumption embedded in them that pop music is still a relatively pure genre that isn’t increasingly integrated with hip-hop. Because whether it’s pop songs that include MCed bridges or hip-hop songs where the rappers are singing their own hooks or are bringing in pop stars to sing original hooks, hip-hop is increasingly embedded in the pop charts, even if it’s not yet the dominant genre in American popular music. But the big competition programs tend to focus on the clarity of sung vocal performance. We haven’t had a show yet that defines what makes a great MC, or defines an MC as the most important voice in American music.

So at the panel for The Voice yesterday, I asked Cee Lo Green and the rest of the panel whether that might be something that the show tries to do in the coming season. Carson Daly cut Cee Lo off when he started to say “Christina Augilera was lucky enough to find our first—,” and Aguilera said “There’s versatility in the talent this year,” which I’m taking to mean that there is an MC in the mix. And I’ll be curious to see how that plays out on the show. Rather than straight covers, will the MC be doing riffs on preexisting songs, like Lupe Fiasco riffing on Kanye West’s “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” remix? Will they be singing and rapping bridges, like Chris Rene did less successfully than his vote count on X Factor would suggest? I might bet on the latter, especially since Daly ended up talking about rappers like Drake and Lil Wayne who sing their own hooks as proof “the line between MCing and singing is breaking down.”

And I’ll be curious if at some point there starts to be a consensus on what makes a good MC. I happen to like mine fast and clear (though I draw a line at speed for speed’s sake, a la Twista), but obviously someone slower like Drake, or like a lot of classic MCs (the game’s gotten faster, if not more fierce) still has a lot of love. And that’s hardly the only factor. In any case, it’ll be very interesting to see The Voice move the conversation on competition reality shows a bit towards where the market actually is. And we’ll see what it’s like to have Christina Aguilera, known for her belting, mentor an MC.

First day of press tour is done, and tomorrow I dive into the waters of MSNBC, Bravo, and SyFy. More to come, but here were the best and worst trends from NBC’s presentations today:

Worst: Big Scary Lesbians. NBC has two pilots where plots appear to be motivated by the presence of outsized, aggressive lesbians. After her lovely work on Glee, Dot Jones deserves far better than to be cast as a butch lesbian who sexually harasses Laura Prepon while they’re both in lockup on Are You There, Chelsea? And the heavy lesbian contractor who gets passed over in favor of a hottie love interest for the main character on Bent manages to simultaneously reinforce stereotypes about lesbians, and about women and home improvement.

Best: Support for Working Mothers. Amanda Peet mentioned at the Bent panel that NBC had been wonderful about accommodating and supporting her being a working mother during production of the show. Debra Messing says of her character on Smash, “The hero’s a woman who is very passionate about her creative life and needs that part of her life fulfilled, but also is a proud mother who has that home life and wants that part of her life fulfilled. The way Theresa writes, there’s such richness.” Not that we need aggressive emphasis of characters HAVING IT ALL constantly, but it’s nice to hear that the network practices off-set some of the better things it preaches on-screen.

Worst: Uncertainty. Bob Greenblatt doesn’t know when Community‘s coming back. No one knows when Awake will air. Scheduling’s not easy, we know, but stop torturing us here.

Meh: Alcohol: It sounds like the drinking on Are You There, Chelsea? will get tired quickly, but J.B. Smoove as an addict in recovery? That could be intriguing territory. Television’s got a lot of serious drinkers, but fewer people showing us what it’s like to live in a world where most people treat drinking as if it ranges from no big deal to the linchpin of their social lives.

Best: A lack of sniping. NBC may have to fight its way back to the top, but the network seems aware that it’s not close enough to its rivals to tear them down. The folks behind Smash acknowledge that Glee opened the door without slagging anything they don’t like about it. Bob Greenblatt was blunt about the network’s need to find its own way without complaining that his rivals are being wrongly rewarded for less risky programming. When The Voice criticized its rivals, it was on substance and format, which is fair game. NBC’s biggest asset is the fact that people want to like it. It’s clear they have no intention of relinquishing it.

Spoilers from last night’s finale.

I’d hoped we were going to see an out gay contestant win the first season of The Voice, a victory that for me would have clinched the show’s total superiority over American Idol as a more positive, more truly meritocratic show. I remain unconvinced by Javier Colon, so I’m doubly disappointed. But the fact that half of the final four were comfortably out lesbians, and that the show gave big platforms to three gay singers, all of whom will probably end up with record contracts, is without question a victory. If the threat of The Voice as a competitor for ratings and music sales makes Idol and Idol contestants reconsider the idea that being publicly out is a barrier to really competing or to iTunes sales, that’ll be a good thing too.

And I expect big things of Dia Frampton, too, especially if she keeps writing songs like this: