It’s been four years since John McCain tried to tarnish President Obama by suggesting that the candidate was a celebrity–as if all famous politicians aren’t–rather than a man of substance. The tactic didn’t work. If anything, the first Obama term in office was evidence that we were ready for a president who was a celebrity, whose wife’s fashion choices were scrutinized and imitated, whose pop culture tastes made headlines and drove viewership, and whose administration became the subject of pop culture itself, from Leslie Knope’s Joe Biden obsession on Parks and Recreation, to Comedy Central’s sketch show Key & Peele, which built its audience in part on the strength of Jordan Peele’s Obama impersonation and its Anger Translator sketch. And now that the 2012 election is over, it’s clear that the dynamic worked in the opposite direction. Campaigners on both sides used these three entertainment industry tactics during the election. And I’d predict that we see more of them in the future:

1. Campaign movies: In 2008, the Obama campaign aired a thirty-minute primetime special in support of his candidacy. This election featured movies even more prominently. There was the so-called “King of Bain” documentary, When Mitt Romney Came To Town, which was produced and distributed by a Super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich’s candidacy:

In the general election, 2016: Obama’s America, a so-called documentary by conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza about Obama’s supposed radicalism, made $33 million at the domestic box office. Dreams From My Real Father, a hilariously paranoid attempt to prove that President Obama’s real father was a Communist and deeply terrible beat poet named Frank Marshall Davis who purportedly seduced Stanley Ann Dunham, was mailed to voters in swing states.

Mainstream movies that tried to capture the spirit of the campaign had more mixed success. Butter, an attempt to satirize both Midwestern butter-carving, and Michele Bachmann, ended up doing only $73,000 in domestic box office in a very limited run: condescension and Bachmann’s fading political star proved not to be a winning combination. Jay Roach’s The Campaign, the Will Ferrell-Zach Galifianakis vehicle about a suddenly-competitive House race, did better, taking in $86 million. The combination of Ferrell’s star power and a more generalized indictment of political dishonesty was probably always going to be a more potent bipartisan draw. In the future, I wouldn’t be surprised to see mainstream movie studios starting to produce or acquire documentaries about the candidates themselves. 2016 is the kind of thing that might be an embarrassment, but it demonstrated that there’s real money out there in catering to politically-engaged audiences for the studio that wants to reach out and grab it.
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The AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff joked yesterday that he and I are the only people interested in the independent television movement and the problems surrounding finding a successful business model for it that doesn’t include distribution over established networks. But the report he filed from the New York Television Festival is indispensable for anyone who cares about connecting up genuinely fresh voices, ideas, and faces with the audience we believe is hungry for them but isn’t finding them, or isn’t paying for them. Todd explains why it’s been so much harder to find that business model in independent television than in independent film:

No one has quite figured out the independent TV business model just yet—a problem even Grey will admit exists. Attending NYTVF feels a bit like how I imagine attending Sundance in the mid-’80s must have felt: There’s a whole bunch of valuable product that could attract an audience if given a chance, but no one’s yet sure how to make money from that product. It was Sex, Lies, And Videotape that helped Sundance break through into the mainstream consciousness, and I’m not sure that independent TV has found its Steven Soderbergh yet. And even considering that factor, there’s the fact that running a TV show is a vastly different undertaking from directing a film. An independent film can be released to theaters, where it will hopefully recoup its budget. An independent TV pilot will ideally lead to a larger series, and that would mean a substantial investment of network funds to keep the show going, while an independent film is, ultimately, a much smaller investment of cash. Until a show as self-evidently good as Sex, Lies, And Videotape breaks through, independent TV may remain a curiosity too costly for networks to indulge in.

I’d note that in certain ways, independent film in recent years has also been gaining access to alternative distribution methods that audiences are already using. You have to find your way to an independent movie theater, but it isn’t a totally different experience from going to the multiplex. Same with ordering independent movies on demand: indies like Margin Call and Bachelorette have gone to VOD sometimes without even going to theaters and done fine there because audiences are so familiar with the experience of ordering movies. But indie television hasn’t broken in there, because that would mean striking details with cable carriers, which is no small task of its own for producers who, and would probably be something the networks would frown on, however little competition the indies would provide. Right now, indie television isn’t getting access either networks like PBS or even bigger distribution networks like Netflix and Hulu, which would be obvious outlets for them. However easy it is to distribute on the web or through YouTube, it still requires determined consumers who are already used to looking for content outside normal channels to find those shows.

That, of course, comes second to the issue of just producing enough material independently to actually constitute a television season, much less a television episode. Todd explains, for both reasons of creativity and resources, that most shows at the festival just aren’t coming up with even a full episode’s worth of material, though the best shows, like Husbands, are coming close. He’s right it’s going to take a big breakthrough show that becomes a massive hit despite the distributional challenges—and then it’s going to take people working out the rather more complicated business infrastructure to provide the huge, long-term support indie television makers are going to need to keep turning out product.