When the trailer for Surrender The Secret, a reality show about women who are doing bible studies based on the book of the same name, which presents abortion as a traumatic and sinful experience, came out, most of the mainstream attention given to it pointed out the kinds of misinformation and shaming the show seems likely to promote:

I don’t disagree with any of those sentiments. But this trailer, though it doesn’t follow the conventions of reality television so much as it advertises what sounds like a lecture, actually made me think something different: though Surrender The Secret will be inexplicable to mainstream audiences, I’d guess that it’ll be a relative success.

It actually makes an enormous amount of sense to me that conservative artists would be the ones to figure out how to make new models of distribution work for them. I may not think much of the artistic quality of either the anti-abortion film October Baby or the conspiracy-minded 2016: Obama’s America. But the former made $5,355,847 on a budget of $1 million, and the latter made $33,349,941 in theaters and $5,990,541 in DVD sales. These weren’t movies that came out through major studios, though Lionsgate and Fox handled video distribution for both films. But they found their audiences, through strong word of mouth, through church trips, and through established email lists. Existing affinity groups decided that these projects were something they should support. Neither movie made what would be considered serious box office. But they definitely reached the thresholds of success they’d defined for themselves.

Other projects need to build their own bases of support. The Whedonverse may turn out, in greater and lesser numbers, for projects involving anyone who’s ever worked on a Joss Whedon show or movie, but they’re an exception rather than a rule. Artists like Issa Rae, who have started out with web series and are now moving into network television, have to build their audiences through much, much slower word of mouth that can eventually snowball into media hits, and to an audience that grows somewhat faster. It’s hard to imagine, say, the Human Rights Campaign emailing their entire list and telling anyone who’s ever donated or had contact with the organization to go see the gay adoption period drama Any Day Now.

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.

It’s not as if Issa Rae doesn’t have a lot on her plate, in between her web-based sitcom, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl and the show she recently sold to ABC with Shonda Rhimes’ help, about a female cohost on an internet talk radio show. But in the midst of all this activity, she’s launched a new series, The Michelle Obama Diaries, which features Michelle Obama translating her own thoughts and throwing the kind of shade Luther offers up for President Obama in Key & Peele‘s Anger Translator skits:

The Anger Translator sketch works because it suggests something sort of naughty and delicious about the president that we’d like to be true rather than that we actually believe to be true. It’s fun for the same reason seeing President Obama punch back in a debate is fun: it makes us feel like he’s as angry and as frustrated as we are, that he’s as disgusted by the volume of crazy and lies lofted in his direction.

The Michelle Obama Diaries, on the other hand, plays into an idea we believe to be true of FLOTUS, that she’s tart and awesome and sexy. And instead of providing a wishful sense of escape from the limitations of the man and the role, the series gives us a sense of access to that side of her. This first episode isn’t as sharp as the Anger Translator schtick yet, in part because the idea that Michelle and Barack have sex, for example, doesn’t actually feel like much of a slap back at a stupid or vicious misperception of the couple, or a confirmation of something we’d wish to be true but don’t really believe to be the case. I would, on the other hand, watch the hell out of a First Ladies of Washington, DC show from Rae along the lines of the brilliant Real Housewives of Civil Rights parody from a while back:

I bet the brunches between Hillary and Michelle would make an epic arc to the first season.

There are a lot of terrific online sitcoms and dramas coming online every day, which is a blessing. But it can be hard to hunt down the best of that content across all the platforms where it lives. So every Wednesday, I’ll bring you a roundup of the best of online television that I’m watching in a given week. And if you have recommendations for shows I should be watching, let me know.

1. Husbands: Season 2 of the marriage equality sitcom from Brad Bell and Jane Espenson begins today as our newlyweds, baseball player Brady and unemployed actor Cheeks start navigating what boundaries look like in married life. And if you need a refresher, check out my behind-the-scenes look at the series and the challenges and opportunities of making television for the internet.

2. My Gimpy Life: There are a lot of funny, unsentimental comedies about people with disabilities in the pipeline, including The Sessions, the Oscar-bait movie starring John Hawks as a polio-stricken man who sets out to lose his virginity in his thirties and FX’s upcoming sitcom Legit, which follows the misadventures of three men, one of whom uses a wheelchair. Actress Teal Sherer beat them both to the punch with this funny, spiky series that’s as much about how Hollywood works as it is about navigating life while using a wheelchair:

3. H+: Bryan Singer returns to some of the themes he explored in his X-Men movies in H+, a series about a world where humans have adopted computer implants in their brains—but the man who invented the technology has vanished and whistleblowers are warning of ominous consequences. The show looks terrific, and I think has a chance to be one of the first great online dramas:

4. Lauren: Lots of online television shows are distinguishing themselves from network fare by bluntly confronting social issues. Lauren, one of a number of series from the WIGS channel, which focuses on female characters, is taking on rape and the chain of command in the military:

When Husbands, the online sitcom about a professional baseball player and a TV star who get married in a drunken weekend in Vegas and decide to stay together in support of marriage equality and because they think they might actually be in love, premiered last year, I wrote that “setting yourself up as a model minority may be an important way to argue for legal rights, real equality means the right to make mistakes and bad decisions—and to work your way out of them.” While that’s true of the show’s main characters Brady (Sean Hemeon) and Cheeks (Brad Bell, also the Husbands co-creator, writer, and executive producer with TV veteran Jane Espenson), when it comes to experimenting to discover the future, it’s also true of Husbands itself, one of the pioneering high-quality ongoing shows to live online rather than on a broadcast network.

What’s exciting about about Husbands, though, is how quickly the show has grown in scope and emotional ambition from its first season to its second, which premieres on August 15. A year’s acquaintance has richened the on-screen chemistry and affection between Hemeon and Bell, and Husbands has grown in confidence both in terms of the ideas it’s exploring and the team behind the show’s sense of the skills they’re developing by working on it. And the show is becoming an important example of how television distributed online fits into a larger pop-culture ecosystem, not simply as an alternative means of distribution for content networks are too timid to make, but as a rich idea lab that could breed a new generation of pop culture tropes and show-runners.

For a sense of that, I have an exclusive first look at the behind-the-scenes material the Husbands crew shot to accompany the second season, which goes inside the table reads and Bell and Espenson’s writing sessions, and also provides some perspective on how large the team involved in the show is:

And it is large: the $60,001 the Husbands team raised through their Kickstarter campaign helped pay the more than 40 people who worked on the second season of the show, let the production move from its cramped initial setting to a rented house that gives the scenes and actors room to breathe, and helped upgrade the cameras from commercial hand-held DSLRs to Steadicam rigs with Scarlet cameras that improved the quality of the images. “It looks like big TV,” Espenson joked when I visited the set in May. “It’s the new big TV,” Bell said, and it’s true. Husbands is an illustration of the narrowing gap between online sitcoms and their broadcast siblings.

The set and the crew aren’t the only way Husbands is bigger in its second season. The show has a large roster of major guest stars, most notably Joss Whedon as Brady’s clueless agent Wes. He’s the kind of man who declares “You know I’d gay-march on hepatatis-infected glass to change things,” even as he tries to get Brady to tone down Cheeks, explaining that “acceptable gays are overweight, over forty, overly professional with their lovers in public,” the show’s painfully accurate swipe at chemistry-free couples like Cam and Mitch on Modern Family. And in a sequence that will make fanboy hearts everywhere go pitter-patter even as it makes a point, Dichen Lachman and Tricia Helfer appear in a brutal parody of straight-guy fantasy about pillow-fighting college girls experimenting with lesbianism.
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I really love the idea of Electric City, the web series Tom Hanks is doing through his Playtone production company with Yahoo. The show is set in its titular dystopia, a place where criminals are sentenced to time on generating bikes, mail’s delivered by footbound couriers, reliable electricity access is a class issue, and a secret society of older women called The Knitting Circle really runs everything:

The thing is, though, it’s hard to set up a dystopia in five-minute chunks, and hard-boiled dialogue often goes down better if its silliest-sounding pronouncements are surrounded by some more normal conversation. The first episode of Electric City begins with a voiceover about how utopia is “The place of security. The illusion of freedom. Humankind gets in the way of perfection…It’s best to ask no questions and be told no lies, here in the Electric City.” That last sentence might have been better as a piece of advice from one character to another, earned after we’ve actually had a chance to see how the city works. But instead, it comes across as a thunderous cliche that distracts from what’s specific and interesting about the show.

The best of those things are the ominous members of the Knitting Circle, whose members actually bust out their crochet hooks and knitting needles while they plot in a building called the Camera Obscura that gives them a view of the entire city. “A source of our trouble has yet to become a responsible resident of our city. he is again a free man,” Mrs. Orwell declares, after a man named Vernon is released from his sentence generating electricity and has returned home where he’s commenced beating his wife again. “We only get so many chances,” one of Orwell’s compatriots tells her. “Get rid of him.” I imagine that the show will flesh this out, but not knowing what the Knitting Circle’s official role is in Electric City makes it hard to know how to feel about their actions and their tone even as a baseline. I like the idea of this show a lot. But folks who want to make web shows have to figure out how how to get context and setup in much shorter episodes, and to tell shorter story arcs. It’s not just a matter of making cuts at the five-minute mark. The episodes have to work on their own.

I’ve longed to see the actual statistics on viewership for Hulu and Netflix’s original content efforts, so I was exceedingly interested to see Deadline’s first roundup of how many people are watching the YouTube channels the company stood up with programming seed money. The numbers are revealing.

Geek and Sundry, the Felicia Day-branded channel meant to build off the success of her web show The Guild, has attracted a proportionally huge amount of media coverage and buzz. But it was only the 16th-most watched channel on the site last week, netting 728,453 views (it was 13th previously). The most-watched channel, Sourcefed, which quickly wraps up viral news stories, was number one for the second week running with 5,607,921 views, a number that would have any actual network other than NBC feeling chest pains. The numbers drop off quickly after that: the channel with the number two slot has 3.8 million views, and only the top 11 channels netted over a million clicks on the play button. These are sobering numbers for folks who’d like to see network and cable television get outcompeted by the web. And they’re a cautionary tale for those who’d like to see their favorite shows, like Community, slip the yoke of a conventional production company and be supported by viewers: it’s a reminder that the core audience for any given show who would follow it off their televisions, much less support it with their dollars is not actually equivalent to its Nielsen rating.

Perhaps these numbers will improve. I continue to think that bundling web series together makes a lot of sense so people can find a number of things they might like at once, and so shows like The Guild, Husbands, or The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl with comparatively large followings can be used to launch new efforts. This is a medium is barely in its infancy, it’s really still in gestation, and the vast majority of consumers haven’t even thought about seeking out new original programming online much less figured out where to find what they like.

But I still think this illustrates a point I made in On The Media this weekend. I really think the networks would be smart to start using web television as a farm system. A season of web television usually adds up to about the length of a pilot. If a motivated web audience finds a show and proves willing to keep coming back for the bits and the pieces of a pilot over a period of time, that might be a good indicator that a core audience exists for a show that a network can build on, rewarding legacy viewers with higher production values, and putting a promising concept in front of an audience that didn’t even know it was out there to hunt for. If the networks were smart, they’d be excited about the idea of all these people shooting test pilots for them for free and developing audiences for them before they have to spend a penny of their advertising budgets, even if they don’t care about good ideas. And as much as I like the idea of the networks having more competition, it’s not time to give up on conquering from within either.

The move by Electronic Arts to allow non-EA developers to sell games they funded through crowdsourcing and built on their own on the Origin platform for three months without charging them fees to do so strikes me as a really smart, collaborative decision.

One of the things I’ve been doing out in Los Angeles is visiting sets and talking to people about web television. As I think is clear to anyone who’s watched The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl or Husbands, or played an indie game, the challenge isn’t necessarily getting quality products into production—though extra resources and access to equipment never, ever hurt—it’s finding a way for those products to reach the full audience that would enjoy them if only those consumers knew the products existed, and to make those products sustainable. You can develop the best game in the world, but if no one other than the people who crowdfunded it know where to find it, your chances of using that method to leverage yourself into the next level of business so you don’t have to go back to Kickstarter next time are not great.

Legacy media companies, whether it’s video game distributors or the television networks, have an enormous asset in their distribution networks. Even without a big marketing campaign, if your game is populated in a categories list or popping up in a recommendations list based on your other purchases, or if your show automatically starts playing after another program is finished streaming, that’s a huge advantage over simply hosting that game or show on a website and hoping the audience will find its way there. Right now, these games and these shows are small enough that they aren’t necessarily going to compete with big studio productions—either they’re cheaper so it’s not a financial tradeoff, or the games serve different needs—so the studios lose absolutely nothing by opening up their distribution networks to give the indies a boost.

And these early experiments give them a chance to figure out what a business model for collaboration might look like. EA could end up deciding to let indie games stay on for 90 days for free and longer for a fee. They could shorten the free window to a month, and then let games stay for 5 percent of each sale or whatever fee would make this a viable proposition for indie developers who would be getting sales they never would have had access to otherwise, and for the company whose only costs are expanded maintenance of an existing customer service infrastructure. And legacy media companies could track sales and views and advertising revenue to spot new talent. Legacy media and indie media don’t have to be inextricably opposed, and EA’s opening up its sales platform is a perfect illustration of what an experiment in collaboration might look like.

When the Hollywood Reporter noted yesterday that My Damn Channel, an online television network, had unveiled a slate full of original content, it clarified a major problem with web television for me. While YouTube’s channels, like Felicia Day’s Geek & Sundry, will aggregate some similar tranches of web programming, so many of the best shows live off in their own isolated spaces, word of them traveling by word of mouth. I’d watch vastly more web television shows if there was a single place I could find a lot of them, sorted by topic, or theme, or programmed into something approaching harmony. And I wonder why, in their pushes into original programming, Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon haven’t focused more on true web television and less on an arms race with networks that have an enormous advantage over them in production and advertising budgets (Google is, to be fair, spending $200 million advertising its YouTube channels) and savvy.

Much of what these online content providers seem to be doing so far is feeding off scraps or trying to capture old magic. When Terra Nova was cancelled, there were rumors Netflix might pick it up even though it was immediately and obviously a terrible proposition. Its remake of House of Cards, helmed by David Fincher, lacks a creative rationale and is a hugely expensive attempt to purchase the kind of credibility that so many British shows arrive in the states armored in. The Arrested Development reboot is about satisfying an old core audience rather than building a new one. This is a defensive strategy rather than an offensive one. Hulu’s been trying to play offense, but its new shows have no built-in audience unless you count Morgan Spurlock diehards.

Acquiring or distributing existing web TV franchises would be a more modest first step, but it makes sense for a lot of reasons. First, it would be a lower-cost way to bring existing fans of a program to Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon’s streaming site, and in a way that has the potential to be sticky if people jump from a show they already like to one they aren’t familiar with. Second, and this is important, web series offer the potential to catch audience growth on the upswing, rather than the downswing. While this isn’t true for all web series, shows like Jane Espenson’s Husbands can work as individual episodes or, watched all together, as a test pilot. Web shows could be a way for Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon to grow an initial audience and figure out which shows are their best investment bets to level up to full series, and then allocate their production and advertising budgets to shows and showrunners with proven track records in this format.

This is a more modest, less fast way to compete with the networks. But ultimately, it’s hard to believe that the streaming services will truly be able to match network content. They’re viable precisely because people want to pay less for content, and so the streaming services’ best bet is not to try to stretch those dollars threadbare, but to use them to build something entirely different. Google seems to get this. Everyone else? Not so much yet.

The bridge is yours.

-An awesome list of ten web series starring women of color.

-A superhero who’s teaching kids to overcome Tourette Syndrome.

-Not going to lie. Pretty excited for the new Fast and Furious movie.

-Jon Lovitz is not wild about President Obama.

-Ted Nugent may not be a threat to President Obama, but he is a danger to bears.

-So, the new G.I. Joe movie is basically In Like Flint, with the fake president?