Two years ago I mourned the death of the “gay show.” In the early-mid 2000s cable networks boasted scripted shows with all-gay leads — Queer as Folk, Noah’s Arc, The L Word, DL Chronicles, Dante’s Cove – following post-Will & Grace buzz and advertiser demands for targeting.

After those shows went off-air, broadcast and cable nets alike realized they could get gay audiences and retain straight women with just one or two gay side characters, without taking the risk of making them leads. Gays became the perfect accessory to an ensemble — from True Blood and Smash, to Modern Family and Happily Divorced.

A number of the producers from those earlier shows have started to take matters into their own hands, using crowdfunding to finance independent and web productions featuring all-gay casts. Call it the inevitable slide down the long tail.

Whether fans can help producers is uncertain, but so far it seems like we might see some movement on that front soon.

Quincy LeNear  and Deondray Gossett, who created the short-lived here! TV show, The DL Chronicles, have been trying to bring it back for awhile now. Last year, they launched an ambitious Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a second season — hoping to garner over $100,000 from fans. They didn’t quite make it, raising a still-impressive total in the mid-tens of thousands.

Undeterred, the two took to Indiegogo — which allows fundraisers to keep whatever they raise, as opposed to Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing policy. From that campaign they raised $15,000. LeNear and Gossett also have investors interested in financing what could be three half-hour episodes.

“After noticing the absence of men of color in LGBT themed films and television and an absence of LGBT people in ethnic themed films and television, we were inspired to address the void,” they said as part of their campaign statement. “Furthermore, while witnessing the misdirected attacks and scapegoating of Same Gender Loving men of color in the media during the height of the country’s Down Low hysteria and HIV witch hunt…we wanted to address the topic from it’s sociological and cultural truths and paint a more accurate picture.”

What helped LeNear and Gossett raised that amount of cash wasn’t just their TV clout — which we’ve seen again and again is a huge help to web creators — but their release of a four-part, 30-minute web series, The Chadwick Journals, to get fans excited about more content. Well done!

DTLA is an original series also harkening back to the aughties boom. Executive producers Larry Kennar (The L Word, Barbershop, Funny or Die Presents), Darryl Stephens (Noah’s Arc), Mark Erickson, Helene Shaw, and Michael Andres Palmieri are looking to raise $25,000 from Kickstarter for post-production on the six-episode, half-hour soap. The team says they have distribution through Canadian gay network OutTV and interest from two US cable networks.

DTLA might strike a chord from fans nostalgic for QAF and its peers, especially as it brings back a number of familiar faces, including Noah’s Ard star Darryl Stephens, The L Word‘s Erin Daniels, Leslie Jordan of Will & Grace and The Real Word‘s Danny Roberts.

Are DL Chronicles and DTLA arriving at the right time? Maybe. There might change in the air. Last summer I wrote about another thirty-minute pilot, Half Share, from former Nanny writer Sean Hanley, looking to bring a gay show back to TV. “Don’t you think a gay network needs a signature show?” Hanley said. Executives at Logo and here! expressed skepticism that scripted gay content could come back to TV, but they nonetheless praised Half Share‘s frank and niche-driven humor.

Outside of television and web series, I’ve been noticing a number of crowdfunded campaigns for longer-form gay content. Dane Joseph (of the recently full-length Drama Queenz) and Dwight Allen O’Neal (Christopher Street TV) last year sought funds for a feature film, Langston’s: a film (4) colored boys, with filmmakers Daniel Armando and James Peoples. While unsuccessful, the campaign raised an impressive $20,000.  ”The film is unapologetically colored, daringly gay, and yet strikingly universal,” Joseph wrote in a Huffington Post op-ed.

For queer fans of color there are more films to come. Of course there is the accomplished (if somewhat familiar) Pariah making its way across America, and arriving this year should be The Skinny from Punks- and Noah’s Arc-creator Patrik Ian Polk.

What the web promises is a last resort for producers looking to finance hard-to-market programs and films. What it doesn’t guarantee is anyone — fans, networks — will pay attention. But given the sizable sums of cash being raised, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a small revival in the gay show soon.

We’ve had a great couple of weeks over at Hacktivision! Of particular interest to our writers have been recent developments with YouTube as a cultural, legal and industrial entity. Here’s a sampling of what we’ve been talking about.

 Two Kinds of Piracy - Tarleton Gillespie

I’m not in the business of writing laws, but as a start, my sense of it is that there are two kinds of infringement: first, there are underground sites and networks dedicated to trading copyrighted music, software, games, and movies; they are determined to elude regulations, they often move offshore or spread their resources across national jurisdictions to make prosecution harder, and they are technologically sophisticated enough to work just with numerical IP addresses, set up mirror sites, and move when one site gets shut down. The second kind of infringement is when some fan, who may not know or appreciate the rules of copyright, uploads a clip to YouTube.

YouTube 2012 - Alexandra Juhasz

Most critically, there is now a large and worthy body of YouTube studies, both scholarlyand journalistic (including my own “video-book“), that my students and I must account for. When we began, we were writing the stuff, but now we must play the role of dutiful learners. This quick consolidation of expertise runs against the common understanding of the Internet (and its studies) as a flat playing field where all users and uses are equal.

YouTube as a platform for quality content? Perhaps. - Brett Orzechowski

The days of talking cats (plenty of those), mediocre comedians (too many of those) and self-serving video diatribes will still exist but they will fall further down the pecking order of views. When money is involved, competition increases and so does the level of creativity. The same thinking will continue to exist—be better than the others—but the next four years will welcome a new level of content with an extra level of interactivity that we have yet to see.

Outsiders After Viral Video - Aymar Jean Christian

Therein lies the conundrum. If you are an outsider trying to get “in” – to an industry for a sustainable career as performer or producer – how many options do you have creatively, especially as the market coalesces around a few large networks/companies? And what kinds of representational sacrifices must you make? At this specific moment in history the answers for web video might be “not too many” and “quite a few.”

YOU-ser Generated Movie - Jamie Cohen

Crowd scouting may be a growing trend for the Hollywood industry to locate and discover talent among the vast community of auteurs using the web. Last summer, Ron Howard and Canon crowd-sourced Project Imagin8ion, a photo competition to create a Hollywood short film. The competition was fierce: Ron Howard chose just eight photographs from nearly 100,000 submissions.  And, of course, it was great publicity for Canon and Howard both.

This is What a Broken Internet Feels Like - Kevin Driscoll

YouTube’s Content ID system provides an all-too-real example of internet regulation enacted in running code (with disastrous consequences for free speech.) Flickr’s software-assisted protest of SOPA/PIPA suggests that simulation might provide a powerful tactic for engaging with proposed media regulation in the future. By producing software that simulates the effect of a given piece of legislation, critics can move past vague hyperbole (“SOPA will break the internet”) to demonstrate how it will actually feel to use the internet under the proposed regulatory regime.

Click for journal article at Continuum

As video networks become increasingly successful monetizing audiences — through either advertising or subscription — the question arises: what about everyone else? Most Americans are unaware of the rich ecosystem for video online, from smaller omnibus sites like Blip to minority networks like GLO.

Yet as dynamic as the space is there are still enormous challenges. For years, no company has been able to outpace the size of YouTube or content quality of Hulu. I have a recent article in the academic journal Continuum – “Beyond big video: the instability of independent networks in a new media market” – attempting to understand the innovations and challenges these networks bring to our understanding of our “new media” moment.

The question of how smaller networks will survive in this landscape is more pressing as Netflix and YouTube pump millions in programming. At the top of video market, the major players are already pretty consistent, a combination of YouTube (views) and Hulu (leader in ads), and then Facebook, MSN, Aol, Yahoo and Viacom sites battling it out for the rest.

If you lack that kind of market share, what are your options? Most sites have focused fine-tuning ad sales, through some combination of curating quality programs, refining ad-serving technologies and developing branded entertainment. The latter has proven particularly lucrative for some sites; My Damn Channel and Machinima.com are two great examples. As the video market matures, there’s hope many more networks will be able to survive along with the bigger guys, the kind of long-tail expansion we’ve seen a bit of on television (admittedly aided by conglomeration).

The Continuum article is limited by its time frame — I had to analyze a specific moment, roughly 2007-2010 — and by its case-study methodology. Nevertheless I hope it is useful to media scholars looking for a grounded analysis of how digital media markets are sometimes limited by the old media realities, which rewards companies sophisticated enough to cater to the largescale advertisers and marketers capable of investing in a new medium.

Originally posted at Hacktivision

If YouTube’s massive overhaul – many years in the making – revealed anything, it was our deep investments in the transformative potential of web video. Many observers have criticized the company’s move as selling out, a way to streamline the site’s chaos for the benefit of advertisers. (What else is a media company to do?).

We care about web video in part because we care about outsiders and independents making popular and profitable content for mass audiences, on a level rarely seen in media history. Web video, though, has been changing – long before YouTube’s redesign – compelling us to think deeply about who becomes popular, how, why and under what circumstances.

Consider the 2010 hit, “Bed Intruder Song,” whose producers were subject to an extensive New York Times profile in August 2011 and have become symbols of the next wave of video – quirky, popular and sustainable.

The serendipitous product of a local news team, an angry black queer man and a group of young independent producers, “Bed Intruder” capitalized on Antoine Dodson’s apparently humorous rant about the attempted rape of his sister. The video had already attracted following when it was passed on to the Gregory Brothers, of Auto-Tune the News, who did what they do best: “auto-tuned” it. The song was the brothers’ biggest yet, garnering them and Dodson enough cash to catapult their careers.

“Bed Intruder” was a fascinating example of some of YouTube’s most fascinating and sobering dynamics, from the mass appeal of ridiculing weirdos to the incredible marketability of such outsiders. To some, the Gregory Brothers made light of a deeply troubling situation: the violence of the poor, black, rural South, a reality we so rarely confront as a nation. Yet Michael Gregory saw Dodson “not as a caricature but as a charismatic personality,” he told the Times, a prime source for their winning comedy formula.

The Brothers might represent a broad transition in web video, from the spontaneous distribution of scandalous moments to formula-driven comedy curated for audiences – among the most popular video genres and key to YouTube’s transition to television. If this is true, one wonders what is lost in the shift from spontaneity to predictability.

As web video matures, content rarely goes “viral” today. The accepted term among academics is now “spreadable,” focusing on how content is shared in communities not how many views it gets. Now new media companies like the former Next New Networks, under which Auto-Tune the News was distributed, and video syndication have scaled web video into a business and curated those communities. From Maker Studios and The Collective to Machinima.com, the secret to millions of views is having an audience not “going viral.” In fact many of the supposed viral videos of the past five years have originated from performers and producers with smaller built-in audiences, helped by YouTube’s saavy subscription-based network. By 2011, moreover, traditional media companies had realized, again and again, the marketability of the viral form (see work by Max Dawson and Nick Marx). The New York Times’ “Video Virology 101” feature alongside the Gregory Brothers’ profile, populated by peculiar one-off amateur videos, looked more like a memorial than a sign of the times.

The Producers Guild joined the WGA this past weekend and honored original web programming. As Tubefilter notes, the nominees were usual suspects, a mix of web-grown originals (Ask a Ninja, The Guild), derivative programs (Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock) and web-to-TV success (Web Therapy). 30 Rock‘s Jack Donaghy: Executive Superhero won. Another of its series, Frank vs. Lutz, won at last year’s WGA, leading me to wonder if 30 Rock‘s self-reflexivity about television production, which helps endear it to voters for bigger awards like the Emmys, similarly works for the web. The Internet can be mystifying, except when it’s about TV.

The above episode of Jack Donaghy satirizes an intra-network dispute between showrunner Liz Lemon and weatherman Al Roker. Roker is apparently using TGS to promote his own books. It’s up to network exec Jack Donaghy to rescue Liz from this transmedia kerfuffle! Spoofing last-place NBC as a particularly dysfunctional example of television’s increasing complexity, 30 Rock‘s on-air and web-only projects are cartoony but always tinged with truth (e.g.: NBC’s programming chart).

Originally posted at Hacktivision.

Originally posted at Hacktivision!

Why have awards? Award shows help media creators establish norms and values for audiences. They adjudicate quality, innovation, diversity and help raise awareness.

The past two weeks have seen two big awards developments for professional web video: the IAWTV Awards held at CES January 12 and the WGA nominations. What about video can we learn from them? 

When I look at the nominees and winners I see a burgeoning market trying to negotiate independent and corporate production, to recognize the web’s power to include new voices while acknowledge most high quality content often requries more resources.

WGA New Media Award

This is the second year the WGA has recognized new media creation. For years the Writers Guild has been committed to the transformative potential of digital distribution (stemming from the Writers Strike), particularly those produced outside traditional institutions. So the union each year recognizes two types of content: “original” and “derivative.” “Derivative” tends toward corporate fare — web shows that support TV and film — while “original” mixes it up. Last year the strong and scrappy teen lesbian series Anyone But Me won alongside 30 Rock. When I asked ABM‘s Susan Miller about what the award meant, she celebrated the web’s ability to support artist-driven production.

“It was the recognition on the part of other writers, of my peers, that it doesn’t matter what you write, write for, or what size screen. It’s really a matter of putting out something that matters to you,” Miller said.

This year, the WGA pits indie darlings Downsized (from Daryn Strauss) and Jack in a Box (from Michael Cryil Creighton) against Aim High, from McG, Warner Premiere and Dolphin Entertainment. Web programs for 30 Rock, Mortal Kombat (forthcoming as a movie), Sons of Anarchy and The Walking Dead are nominated in the derivate category.

IAWTV Awards (International Academy of Web Television)

The story of the IAWTV Awards is a bit more complicated.

Borne out of an internal squabble with the original “web series” award show, the Streamys (now moving forward), the IAWTV Awards had the task of proving it could be as good if not better than its former self. Unlike the WGA, most of whose awards go to traditional media participants, the IAWTV has the weight of a new and mostly invisible media format on its shoulders. A lot of hopes and fears were pinned on the show.

“I think it’s going to definitely blow up next year,” Felicia Day said of the market. Her series, The Guild, was the night’s big winner. “A lot of companies are looking at distribution on the web, specifically for the web, as being a neccessary part of their distribution model.”

This new environment — where companies like YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Crackle Yahoo and Aol are pumping hundreds of millions in original over-the-top content — has greatly raised the stakes. As the market matures, what will happen to its scrappiest producers?

In its nominations the IAWTV did a pretty good job getting a mix of indie and corporate video. As NewTeeVee writer (and Hacktivision contributor!) Liz Miller wrote: “No awards show ever gets it exactly right…But looking at the nominees, one thing stands out — if the goal is to celebrate web originals, then the IAWTV Awards are a step in the right direction.”

Now that we know the winners, it appears voters wanted to honor nominees who have been supporting short-form video consistently for years, those who present a strong public face. Felicia Day’s The Guild won the top comedy award (unlike at the Emmys and Golden Globes, comedy gets top billing on the web) and a bunch of others. Some have griped about the Day/Guild supremacy, but the fact remains her show is still the sine qua non of web series success: from its low-budget roots in 2007 to its sponsorship by Microsoft and Day’s enormous popularity (check her Twitter), The Guild is the inspirational story. To this day when I interview creators from all different genres and backgrounds they cite The Guild as the reason they started making shows.

A screenshot from "RCVR"

Other winners have been steady advocates and quality producers for awhile, particularly Shira Lazar (What’s Trending) who regularly writes and advises about the web series form, and Machinima.com, which distributes long-running programs like Red v. Blue and solid new ones like Dragon Age: Redemption and RCVR, all of which took home trophies.

“Purer” indies like Pretty, Anyone But Me and The Jeff Lewis 5-Minute Comedy Hour (Lewis is a Guild actor) were also acknowledged, and the latter two took home trophies.

Most of the other winners are known and respected names in the community but not much known beyond it, indicating the need for such a show.

The eventual impact of both the WGA and IAWTV Awards might be minimal — coverage of both has been somewhat light — but both are necessary. Despite some reports of light attendance and technical glitches at the IAWTV and other complaints I’ve heard personally about diversity, there’s no reason to think such “new media” awards can’t thrive and have a meaningful impact as (and if) TV and the web converge.

Originally posted at Tubefilter

In last week’s 30 Rock sixth season premiere, Liz “Cranky Sue” Lemon was, all of a sudden, happy! Fans saw her skipping with animated birds and smooching on a mystery man (James Marsden).

It was about time. Sitcoms about cranks have two options: cling relentlessly to the joke or allow characters to grow. Michael Cyril Creighton, creator and star of the critically acclaimed web series Jack in a Box – who also had a hilarious turn on 30 Rock! — opted for the latter.

“I tried to make him a little happier this past season, which some people weren’t jazzed about. But I needed to do it as a challenge to myself, because it’s really hard to write that character happy…I thought it was time,” Creighton said in an interview.

“We’ll see how long that happiness lasts,” he added.

Unlike his character Jack, Creighton has had a lot of reasons to be happy. After Jack premiered in 2009 it quickly developed an enthusiastic fan base and won a top award at the New York Television Festival. A year later, when the New York Times decided to start covering web programming, readers alerted writer Mike Hale to Jack. Jack eventually got Creighton membership to the Writers Guild of America East, and this month the WGA honored him with a nomination for outstanding achievement in original new media, alongside Aim High (Aol/Cambio) and indie darling Downsized (from creator Daryn Strauss).

“It’s amazing…It feels good because there’s a lot of stuff on the web, and it’s hard to make an impression,” he said. “I’m constantly humbled and surprised when I come out with something new and people still watch it.”

Creighton is halfway through writing the fourth and final season of Jack. As the series approaches its finale, he is starting to reflect on its success, why many viewers stuck with the show through its two dozen episodes.

“I feel like the voice is pretty clear, and I’ve known what I was trying to go for from the beginning,” he said, adding that the show has improved over the years. “I think I’ve gotten better as a writer, as an actor, as a collaborator. The longer I do it, it’s starting to get stronger, just because of practice.”

Creighton and Testa, who plays Jack's mom.

One of his greatest challenges was making Jack relatable, since the character can tend toward sad and supercilious. As a writer, Creighton tried to make Jack’s most unlikable traits — petulance, mild disgust — understandable given the character’s ludicrous work and family life.

Like with every indie web production, making Jack in a Box is a lot of work, particularly in post-production, but Creighton keeps it as simple as possible. Most episodes take place in one location, which his collaborator Jim Turner, who also does the editing, shoots in a few hours.

The show has featured a terrific roster of guest stars and regulars, most of them Creighton knows from acting in New York. Two-time Tony Award nominee Mary Testa and fan favorite Katine Corrao (Good Neighbor Minute) regularly play Jack’s foils and instigators. Cycling through the show have been a robust cast of actors known for solid TV and web series work: Marylouise Burke, Jackie Hoffman, Randy Harrison (Queer as Folk), Becca Blackwell (Gay’s Anatomy), Patrick Heusinger (Gossip Girl, Royal Pains), Thom Woodley (The Burg, Greg and Donny), among others.

“I’ve had some good muses,” Creighton said. “It’s probably my favorite part of the whole series.”

Perhaps the biggest development of the past season was Jack’s new beau, Drew (Paul Thureen). For the first two seasons, the character stayed avowedly single, though Creighton believes most viewers knew he was gay. Jack’s singlehood made sense in the beginning, and Creighton didn’t want to push a romantic storyline before the character was ready.

“It wasn’t right for the story to have any love because he wasn’t able to,” he said. Writing a relationship was one way Creighton let the lead grow. “It just happened to happen when I needed to write it, and the audience wanted it, and Paul was available to play the part.”

Next up for Creighton are a series of guest roles on a number of web shows, including Timeless Seasons; Guards of Dagmar, the highly anticipated series from Anyone But Me scribe and 2011 WGA award-winner Tina Cesa Ward; and a possible role in Two Jasperjohns by Vinny Lopez.

While he’s sad to see Jack go, Creighton is eager to work on new ideas, including writing a television pilot. “I want to do a lot of other things…I need to let this baby grow up and walk away.”

WGA award nominees will be honored on February 19. The fourth season of Jack in a Box premieres later this year.

Originally posted at Splice Today

Indie film tends toward realism. It’s not hard to understand why: on a low-budget, the special effects necessary for fantasy and science fiction are hard to achieve.

Creative filmmakers aren’t afraid of a challenge, though. In recent years, and especially 2011, a handful of art house movies ventured into the cosmic, breathing epic life into intimate stories.

My interest in indie cosmic emerged after watching the little-seen Rachel Weisz vehicle Agora, about the philosopher Hypatia, known for her pioneering work on astronomy and mathematics. The narrative centers on the fall of the Roman Empire and onset of the Dark Ages, as intellectualism and cosmopolitanism met a precipitous decline (so the movie argues). Hypatia thinks through big ideas – what is the Earth’s shape and movement? – while civilization falls apart. The film puts this microdrama into grand perspective with numerous, operatic shots of the Earth from space. Not exactly science fiction, but gesturing heavily toward the cosmic.

A still from "The Future"

Then, suddenly this year, indie cosmic was everywhere: in the portentous delusions of Michael Shannon’s character in Take Shelter, the arrival of an alternate universe in Another Earth, the prehistoric fantasies of Tree of Life, the threat of interplanetary destruction in Melancholia; the surreal disruption of space-time in The Future and the green-eyed aliens of Attack the Block. Each film used silent and miniscule dramas to draw us in but expanded our perspective with simple images of other worlds, extraterrestrial creatures and events.

Sci-fi is at its best when it forces cultural introspection, encouraging us to question who we are and why we do the things we do. Take Shelter might have achieved this best, using surrealism to have us question our reality and our sanity, a broader metaphor for our chaotic political and environmental moment. Michael Shannon’s Curtis believes the apocalypse is near and in preparation breaks numerous social and economic norms – going into debt, violating work rules, taking unnecessary survivalist precaution. We don’t know the metaphorical flavor of Curtis’ resistance (paranoia or justifiable fear) but the film’s final, fantastical moment likely gives us an answer.

Less effective were, according to many critics, Tree of Life, Another Earth and Melancholia. I appreciated Lars von Trier’s story of the end of the world as a meditation on coming to terms with death, but he stymied his critique of the 1% by adopting an earnest perspective on thoroughly unlikable people (better to go Bunuel, with a camp perspective of the unlikable bourgeoisie). BothAnother Earth and Tree of Life have been criticized for lacking cohesion, and Tree of Life in particular excelled only in its hyper-realistic and intimate portrait of a family in 1950s Texas. When he reached for the stars, Malick’s trademark diversions left me cold.

The must-see indie cosmic film this year has to be the witty, dark and provocative Attack the Block, a “midnight movie” about aliens attacking the ‘hood. It poses a simple question: why, in cinema, do monsters only attack rich areas like Manhattan or London? The answer – because those are the places people care about – propels Attack the Block forward. Set in government housing in London, the movie shows how young, “delinquent” teens have to fend for themselves when the state doesn’t care. As the chaos unfolds, the police focus more about arresting young black kids for petty crimes then stopping an army of monsters from destroying half the city. In trying to prevent the end of the world in face of government indifference, the kids too learn something about the “other,” and a savior by the name of Moses, steps up to the plate. I won’t spoil it, but the last scene is a powerful yet ambivalent statement that in many ways foreshadowed the London riots a few months later. Think ofMisfits with a stronger political edge.

As digital post-production becomes cheaper – shorts like Alive in Joburg and Plot Device attest to the democratization of special effects – more indie films will experiment sci-fi and fantasy. Hopefully this will help stanch the monotonous stream of pseudo-realist movies about aimless thirty-somethings who don’t know how to dress and propel independent storytelling to tell larger stories with broader import and artistry.

I couldn’t think of a more perfect time to announce a new blog about the future of video and television! Within the last month, YouTube’s re-launch has changed the video landscape, Hulu and Netflix announced more original content, and the web series community has been experimenting with award shows.

Hacktivision is the brainchild of Josh Braun, a Quinnipiac University professor — and recent doctoral graduate at Cornell — who’s been researching new media and television. The site is being supported by Quinnipiac. Braun is the managing editor, and I’m an editor.

There’s been big revival in television criticism and scholarship over the past ten years in response to the medium’s rapid transformation by cable and digital distribution. A number of sites like Antenna, Flow and In Media Res publish essays in this area.

Meanwhile writers focused on digital media have been turning to TV scholarship as video consumption rises and web-grown companies grow in scale and financial clout. I can’t think of a better way for journalists, academics and practitioners to talk about the incredible changes underway in our media system, and TV studies seems uniquely positioned to examine contemporary visual culture holistically. (See Noel Kirkpatrick’s review of Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz’s new book on television studies for an example of what I mean).

We hope the the site will be a hub for writing not only on video and TV, but also its relationship to social media, transmedia storytelling, user-generated content, policy, tech and film. No medium is an island these days!

Visit the site, follow it on Twitter and like it on Facebook (heck, even circle it on Google+).

Finally, please take a look at our stellar list of contributors, who I’m sure will produce provocative and fun posts and essays over the coming months!

Previewing the new (hit) Showtime series House of Lies, New York‘s Kera Bolonik offered a brief but pithy aside:

Is anyone on TV bad at their jobs these days? Not if it’s a high-status gig. But feel free to be a bad waitress, or a crappy paper salesman or receptionist, or an ennui-ridden local-government intern, or, a lazy, crazy comic on a low-rated sketch-comedy show.

I assume the “lazy, crazy comic” Bolonik is referring to is 30 Rock‘s Tracy Jordan. And she’s right. Tracy is bad at his job. But what about Liz Lemon, she of the fairly “high-status gig” of network showrunner?

There has been a bunch of writing about Liz Lemon and feminism, some of which seems somewhat perplexed by Tina Fey’s positioning of Liz as both a “working woman” and “dysfunctional woman.” We see this divide in the show’s obvious — and increasingly tiresome, by the way — work vs. life theme: Liz is good at her job but bad at life.

Maybe, but maybe not. Perhaps the problem writers are having with Liz is precisely that: maybe Liz is bad at her job and at life. If we associate TV feminism with a desire women’s professional equality, positive representations show women who are able to function properly in the workplace. Those representations presumably provide examples for young women to aspire to.

What if 30 Rock is saying something different? As a sitcom, 30 Rock mines workplace dysfunction for laughs. We love watching the chaos. But the chaos probably reveals Liz’s ineptitude, since it’s her job to manage it.

First, let’s examine the evidence, far more seriously than anybody should. What aspects of her management suggest Liz is a feminist non-icon?

Personnel – Obviously Tracy and Jenna run the show — or, rather, constantly threaten the show’s continued survival. Before she can get them under control, they’ve typically cost numerous delays and additional labor. In other episodes, Liz has numerous run-ins with the show’s crew: forgetting their names, accidentally making advances on them, confusing them by race, and occasionally letting them supersede her authority.

Writing – For all intents and purposes, TGS is a horribly written show. Liz Lemon on Variety: “They called us a comedy show!” Fart jokes are a staple.

Budget – Liz hates making budget decisions, preferring to delay or defer to either her superiors (Jack) or employees (Pete, Jenna).

Safety – TGS is not a safe place to work. Props, people and equipment are constantly falling from the ceiling. In one episode Liz almost incinerates her cast and writers.

Creativity – TGS has succumbed — as have many network shows as ratings decline — to systematic and inelegant product placement and advertainment. It also frequently broadcasts meaningless and poorly marketed “specials,” often based on the whims of management (Jack’s Christmas special; Jenna’s fake memorial).

Work/life balance – Terrible, in almost every way imaginable.

All of this, of course, is what makes 30 Rock a fantastically funny show. If TGS was a well-oiled operation, and Liz great at managing it, there wouldn’t be much to watch, let alone laugh at. The horrible workplace also serves as a nice metanarrative about the decline of broadcast TV, the inherent flaws in the live sketch show (i.e. why SNL is often so bad), etc.

But is there a feminist message too? I’d argue 30 Rock has much less in common with sister programs Parks and Recreation and Up All Night (and even less with TV’s female-led procedurals) and more with Enlightened. Both shows dramatize how professional perfection is a meaningless goal, particularly for women, since office culture itself is so male-friendly: both sitcoms have assertive male bosses whose professional skill and fortitude is beyond the reach of the awkward, self-doubting protagonists. Both Fey and Dern ask us why we’re so invested in seeing women who get it right all the time, when so much of life and work is beyond any individual’s control. 30 Rock gives us enough fantasy (TGS‘s seeming inability to get canceled) and demonstrations of skill (the occasional episodes where Liz masterfully exerts her will) to keep viewers interested and provide glimpses of the wonderful representations we love to see. Most of the time, though, we see them fail, over and over. (I think also of The Comeback and AbFab).

Ultimately, as cartoony – Muppet-y, Cathy-y – as 30 Rock is, its most realistic storyline portrays how working women often have bad offices and can’t always change that. It isn’t the first show to say it, but it might be among the most inventive.