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.

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.

Willie and Patrick had an idea — and it was not for a web series.

“We should open a gallery…. I have an art history degree. Fuck pilot season. I’m sensing a whole new direction for me….for, ugh, us,” Willie says.

“And I can wipe my father-in-law’s face in the excrement of his own mediocrity,” Patrick replies.

Willie and Patrick are only “slightly lamer versions” of Willie Garson and Patrick Breen, two actors who have been working in the business for a combined 50 years. Garson is best known for his role as Mozzie on White Collar and Stanford on Sex and the City. Breen too has a Sex and the City credit and was mostly recently seen on The Good Wife, though he too has dozens of other credits.

In their new web series, Whole Day Down, which Breen co-created with Tai Fauci (Palisades Pool Party), the two actors play out-of-work actors who decide to make a big career shift and start a gallery. Without start-up funds, they instead get permission to use a space one day a month — hence the title. The gallery is owned by Patrick’s unforgiving father-in-law, Mr. G (Dan Fauci), but the two get permission with the help of his wife Nadine (Elisa Donovan, who many will remember from Clueless and web series aficionados know from In Gayle We Trust).

The dark comedy is right on trend with the revival of quirk and pathos in the TV sitcom — i.e., Louie and 30 Rock, among others. Asked about their inspiration for the show, Breen cited Flight of the Concords and The Twilight Zone, while Fauci was a little more…expansive.

“The Mayan Calendar, the Earth’s reversing polarity, ‘The Holy Virigin Mary’ by Chris Ofili and The Critic starring Jon Lovitz,” she said.

Below you’ll find episode one and a very cheeky interview with Fauci, Breen and Garson about self-parody, satirizing the art world and the future of Mozzie on White Collar!

How did Whole Day Down materialize?

Willie Garson: This came about because we all love each other and have known and worked together basically since birth, mixed with Patrick’s and Tai’s creativity, and a chance to do something fun together.

Tai Fauci: My dad (Dan Fauci) pitched Patrick and I ‘short film satirizing the art world,’ and he wanted us to write it. Since I was currently dabbling in web entertainment, I suggested we make it into a web series. We ran with it from there all the way to the artpocalypse.

From Top: Patrick Breen, Tai Fauci, Willie Garson.

Patrick Breen: And I’m very lazy and have a short attention span, so writing anything over 8 pages is a challenge.

In your mind, what’s the message of the series, if any?

WG: The message, to me, is that pretentious people should never take themselves too seriously, except of course, if you are me, then it is valid.

PB: Any imperative warning is written in a forgotten language which will be translated only after the disaster has struck.

TF: Translation: The end is nigh.

How did you establish the idiosyncratic tone of the show?

TF: We created subtle speech patterns which we used to subliminally implant cockamamie ideas into the heads of our cast & crew.

PB: And my megalomaniacal insistence on getting my way.

What inspired you as actors and creators? (TV series, films, current/personal events, etc.).

PB: South Park, Twilight Zone, Flight of the Concords.

TF: The Mayan Calendar, the Earth’s reversing polarity, ‘The Holy Virigin Mary’ by Chris Ofili and The Critic starring Jon Lovitz.

WG: Basically what makes US laugh, that’s always a good starting point, that hopefully others will find amusing.

WDD parodies a lot of things, including the art world. What are your perspectives on contemporary art?

WG: Contemporary art is always a ripe target, but as art lovers, in real life, we tread the fine line, you never know what will be considered ‘genius’ later, although the situations Patrick and Tai come up with are generally safe from becoming art ‘movements.’

PB: It’s important that artists attempt to give form and substance to the zeitgeist, unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be a hopeful future.

TF: Art constantly pushes the envelope and on occasion takes a dump in the envelope and mails it to your home. Take note that above the return address on that envelope, it reads Whole Day Down.

What projects do you have in the pipeline?

WG: Just shooting White Collar and raising my son (who appears in episodes), and working on my reality show, which I sadly cannot talk about yet.

TF: Mostly Tai for hire and trying to feng shui my fallout shelter on the weekends.

PB: Unemployment.

Do you have plans for more WDD?

PB: We hope to finish a 13 episode season that takes us to the brink of The Apocalypse, somewhere between the opening of 6th and 7th seal, coinciding with the announcement of The 2013 Turner Prize.

TF: Absolutely, if we can get through these contract negotiations with Mr. Garson. It is the NBA lockout but ten times worse.

Your previous series, Palisades Pool Party, was a very different kind of show. What led you to this project, which is more “grown-up” (at least in the most superficial way)?

TF: Researching the inner workings of the modern teenager resulted in me constantly using words like ‘LIKE,’ ‘OMIGOD’ and ‘BFF.’ I could feel my brain deteriorating. Creating Whole Day Down was number seven in my twelve step recovery process. Offbeat humor saves.

Elisa Donovan

Both of you have had very long, productive careers but are mostly known for smaller roles in big projects. Was WDD a way to give yourselves meatier roles?

WG: Actors don’t really think in those terms, only interviewers do, we both have been fortunate enough to work for a VERY long time, in tons of different roles, we just like the chance to all work with each other.

PB: Yes, Both Willie and I had large roles as gallery owners in the movie Pooty Tang but were cut out in a sort of apocalypse of editing. WDD is mostly a revenge project.

Your characters appear to be slightly more extreme versions of yourselves. Where do the lines between character and actor disappear?

WG: We are both playing just slightly lamer versions of ourselves, the lame truths bubbling right below the reality of our daily lives.

PB: When we began we thought we were playing characters then, since we’re both very lazy it was easier to just play ourselves and use stuff that has actually happened. Willie did get my girlfriend pregnant a few decades ago. so we thought we’d use that.

Your character on White Collar is a fan favorite, but as of the latest finale, his presence on the show is in question. Can you let us in on what’s in store for Mozzie?

WG: Sadly, we just never know, but we trust our writers completely…the next episodes of WC have us wondering where our priorities lie.

Your friend sets you up on a blind date. So you head over to your local, non-profit, organic, trans-friendly laundromat and pick up a black shirt for the occasion. You meet the mystery man at a unpretentiously chic New York bar only to find out: he’s a Republican! What do you say?

“I hope you enjoy rolling around piles of money soaked in the blood of your fellow queers,” naturally.

That funny scene is just one gem in It Gets Betterish, a new dark comedy series from Upright Citizens Brigade performers Brent Sullivan and Eliot Glazer. Sullivan is a stand-up comedian who has performed on Comedy Central’s Live at Gotham and toured his one-man show, “Fag Life: A Conversation with Fred Phelps,” with the UCB Tour Company. Glazer is an editor at New York‘s Vulture (my favorite blog) and has written for Urlesque, BuzzFeed, among other publications.

The rainbow rains on Brent and Eliot.

The series satirizes both the enlightened progressivism of gay men and their straight allies, along with our increasingly mainstream gay politics and culture. It Gets Betterish is one of the smarter gay web series out right now.

The nine-episode series will be released in the coming weeks. “You can look forward to an episode about a twinky club kid, getting an AIDS test, and a heterosexual drag queen,” said the duo, who are both gay.

The title of show is its best pitch. In the first episode, Brent and Eliot try desperately to convince their friends and family that, despite their homosexuality, they do not like Lady Gaga. The megastar has fought hard to take away the gay queen crown from the likes of Cher and Madonna, and we should be grateful, the thinking goes. This is the Lady Gaga who just announced a high-profile anti-bullying initiative, inspired in part by Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, which transformed the darkest moments of homophobia into a broad, positive campaign of self-fulfillment (see the Google ad below). Thirty years ago gays were far on the margins; Savage was a lefty queer. But now we are the minority du jour, on the front lines of the erstwhile culture wars with a broad base of support. Like wealthy Republicans. How do you be gay when seemingly everyone’s on your side?

The series is only the most recent web show to tackle the question of what it means to be gay today. From Louie-esque New York indies Two Jasperjohns, Jack in a Box and duder, to broad comedies like Husbands and Disappointing Gay Best Friend, some web series creators are trying to fill in the blanks left by the hits Modern Family and Glee. (The reality shows, well, that’s another story).

Below, I talk to Sullivan and Glazer about the state of gay culture, what inspires them and whether or not they really dislike the Lady.

TELEVISUAL: How did this series come together?

We wanted to show the other side of the gay community, the side that is, as we put it, two weirdos drowning in a sea of fabulousness.  There are a ton of gay guys who aren’t the slightest bit fierce.  I think it’s important to remember that you don’t have to be a porn star or wear body glitter to feel accepted within the community.

Eliot angers Gaga fans.

TV: What TV series, films or other cultural products inspired you?

You know, the usual: Modern Marvels, The Dog Whisperer, anything with Bob Vila.  We love Louie on FX, because it presents fatherhood in a completely different light than any other show on television.  That’s how we wanted to present our lives as gay dudes, with irreverence and humor.

TV: How would you describe your humor?

The best?  The tone of IGB could be described as a little dark and honest.

TV: What are your thoughts on the state of the gay community today? Are we better or worse off than we were five, ten or twenty years ago?

There’s no question we’re better off.  Gay rights is probably the fastest moving ‘rights movement’ in history.  Full marriage equality and protections in the workplace are inevitable.  But even if we accomplish full equality, we risk being pigeon-holed unless we start depicting ourselves in a more realistic, less cliched light.

TV: Do you really hate Gaga and love Enya?

Lady Gaga is honestly just fine.  Eliot likes her more than I do.  But “Poker Face” is on my iPod.  So is “Orinoco Flow” by Enya.  And “I Just Can’t Wait to be King” from the Lion King Soundtrack.  And a song from a LensCrafters commercial that I downloaded from Napster in 2002.  So, there, I don’t hate her, but she didn’t change my life.  With that said, her activism is undeniably awesome.

Some of you may remember the web series The Real Girl’s Guide to Everything Else, a satirical show about Rasha, a Lebanese lesbian forced to date men to finance her book project. The series got a lot of coverage last year, from NPR to Jezebel, and a host of lesbian-focused blogs and websites. Super-syndicated across various networks — Strike TV, KoldCast, AfterEllen, RowdyOrbit, among others — it was a successful experiment in indie production.

I was fascinated the producers’ efforts to posit an alternative to Sex and the City and its many copycats by integrating chick-lit/rom-com storytelling with a sensitivity to race, gender and sexuality.

So, in the spirit of honoring the amazing things filmmakers can do, I wrote up a case study of the show now published in the current issue of Transformative Works & Cultures!

The article is for a special issue on race and fandom, an outgrowth of a 2009 symposium on race, ethnicity and (new) media. Because of the journal’s focus on fan studies, I emphasized the series’ use of Sex and the City to market their show in the broader media landscape. Judging from the coverage they received, it seems to have worked.

The thrust of the essay underscores the importance of the market and industry for producers of fan works. Fans have historically tried to influence the industry — typically Hollywood — in a lot of interesting ways, including direct forms of activism. Now, for many years, digital marketplaces have allowed fans to create their own commodities, a way to get the industry’s attention through capitalism. Creating a web series has become in recent years an important part of that process, from Machinima to original dramas and sitcoms.

Most independent web series creators have a mainstream media property to which they are responding. Most media producers do as well. Television shows and movies get sold by resting on the shoulders of success. Ringer = Lost + Alias (right?). You know the drill.

A lot of web shows made from 2007-2009 used Sex and the City as a referent (the other popular referent was The Office). The Real Girl’s Guide is among the most direct, since the creators were both fans of the series and anti-fans of the films (as were most of us!). The producers of the show were saavy marketers and used their particular perspective on woman’s media — an effort to integrate issues of race and sexuality — to get press and attention.

Check out the article if you can — I tried to minimize jargon — and let me know what you think in the comments or shoot me an email at aj (at) ajchristian (dot) org.

PS – For those fans of RGGTEE the producers tell me a plan for season two is in the works. Stay tuned!

I recently texted a friend to complain about how overwhelmed I was by my lengthy to-do list — which included, incidentally, writing this blog post.

Me: “My to-do list is never ending bleh.”

Friend: “It always has been Marps. I’ve never met you when you told me ‘oh I’m so chill I got nothing on my todo list.’” (I’ve known her 10 years).

Me: “Haha. I guess I should just realize this about myself…And accept it.”

It was then I understood why, in my foolhardy quest for personal and professional perfection, I so loved HBO’s Enlightened.

Of course, Laura Dern’s Amy Jellicoe, the protagonist — or antagonist — of Mike White’s peculiar HBO series, has more on her mind than a to-do list. She has issues, many more than she can handle. After having an affair with her boss, Amy is transferred to another department and has a nervous breakdown. She promptly flies away to an expensive tropical retreat, replete with self-help gatherings and lessons in pseudo-spirituality, before returning to work at Abaddon, the chic but nefarious corporation who fired her. Demoted, single, middle-aged, hated by everyone including her own mother, Amy is all alone and works hard every episode to maintain the peace she fleetingly achieved.

The small question in Enlightened is: can Amy achieve true peace? The bigger question is: can we all, in this ruthless, chaotic and fragmented world, become complete and satisfied citizens?

Enlightened is about the constraints we all feel on our lives and our silly belief we can surpass them. I have been trying to conquer my to-do list for ten years! Tranquility is always just around the corner, never fully realized but always a possibility.

Yet the story is grander than that. At a time when corporations are more powerful than they’ve been in decades, of increasing competition in the white and blue collar labor markets, this question is more pressing than ever. Social constraints have caused, and risen with, the market for self-help and the American rhetoric of personal responsibility over the past 20 or so years. For years academics have charted how, inadequate social welfare/protections and persistent deregulation has led Americans to run toward God, spirituality and self-help in search of answers. People ask Oprah, Suze Orman or The X Factor to help them fix their lives and achieve success, and they often come up short.

Amy is grappling with her mortality, economic circumstances and failing personal relationships.

Amy truly believes she can overcome the massive challenges before her, despite her age, gender and employer’s less-than-legal employment practices (not to mention general lawlessness on human and environmental rights). Her mother, representing the older generation, has no dreams of personal satisfaction: life is about the drudgery of living. Amy’s ex-husband Levi (Luke Wilson) has also resigned himself to the fallacy of the American dream, of financial and personal well-being. He medicates this condition with robust collection of drugs: pills, coke, weed.

Amy’s drug is self-help. Each episode concludes with a monologue, by turns cloying and inspiring, in which Amy temporarily finds peace. In a recent episode, Levi and Amy take a nostalgic but disastrous camping trip to reconnect with each other and the outdoors. After it all more or less falls apart, Levi tells Amy to give up on him: he’s miserable and always will be. He doesn’t have Amy’s blind faith in personal and professional Nirvana. Amy then delivers the following monologue:

“You can try to escape the story of your life, but you can’t. It happened. The baby died. The dog died. The heart broke. I knew you when you were young. I know your heart broke too. I will know you when we are both old, and maybe wise. I hope wise. I know you now. Your story. Mine isn’t the one I would have chosen in the beginning, but I’ll take it. It is my story. It’s only mine. And it’s not over. There’s time. There is time. There’s so much time.”

Enlightened's Levi has stopped pursuing joy and the American dream, preferring fleeting highs instead.

In this monologue Amy, for a moment, realizes that she has limited control over her life. She has to deal with what she has and with her inevitable death. What Amy does have is very little: her job is a dead end; it has no social meaning and isn’t intellectually challenging. The people she thinks are her friends make fun of her behind her back. Her mother won’t even lend her a car when hers breaks down. Her husband is suffering from serious trauma and has checked out. The comic part of the show is how quickly Amy forgets all this and jumps right back into blind hope.

Enlightened sets up a interesting tension: the poetry of the American dream, the promise of personal peace it engenders, and the tough economic, personal and social realities most Americans deal with everyday. Because Amy is educated and middle class, she has a better chance at happiness than most, but then her personality steps in.

Like in The Comeback, Amy is, of course, her own worst enemy. The Comeback‘s Valerie Cherish believed she could achieve personal success and fulfillment through reality television, in many ways the public face of self-help in our society (see Laurie Ouellette and James Hay’s brilliant Better Living Through Reality TV). But both Valerie and Amy suffer from extreme social awkwardness and an aggressive strain of narcissism that renders them unable to to read other people’s reactions to their hijinks.

Co-creator Mike White is known for developing these sad characters. Says Gawker‘s Richard Lawson: “Mike White traffics in that kind of punishing, Todd Solondz-with-a-smile American meanness and despair that can be pretty bleak and exhausting. Not necessarily that his characters are mean…but that he can come across as being incredibly mean to his own creations.”

Amy returns to Abaddon, scourge of corporate America, full of hope.

I would argue White has reason to be mean. After all, there’s a lot of evidence Americans should be angry right now — indeed, we’re starting to get more and more angry. By all accounts, Amy should be very mad at Abaddon (in Hebrew: the place of destruction), which stuck her in a basement after 15 years of employment. Even those who have jobs are doing more work for the same or less pay — even academics! Because of the economy, Amy can’t get a better paying position, and so far she hasn’t sued. Amy wants to work for an institution promoting social justice, but those jobs don’t pay enough. Finding true meaning through her job is not possible at the moment. And the people around her, suffering in various ways from the same fate, have already resigned.

Why is this revolutionary? I and others have argued that television has failed to critique this distinctly American problem. Almost every show, scripted or reality, traffics in the idea that individuals, through perseverance, can achieve some level of satisfaction by whatever standard they set. Think of how many television shows end in marriage, professional promotion, friendship, a new house, etc. Most of them. The few that don’t — The Wire chief among them — are noteworthy for precisely that reason.

In this landscape, shows like The Comeback and The Wire, and to a lesser extent United States of Tara, Weeds, The Sopranos, and the like, are necessary and refreshing. Current critical darlings like the AMC trio Breaking Bad, Mad Men and The Walking Dead are asking some of the same questions and may yet conclude with the harsh reality of The Wire.

But so far Enlightened has been admirably focused on the question of whether individuals truly can affect change in their lives, even as their worlds, and the world, fall apart. Whether Enlightened can maintain the punishing brutality required to answer that question is reason enough to keep watching every Monday. Stay tuned!

Thanks to Racialicious for linking!

If you pay attention to web shows by and about people of color, you probably have come across 12 Steps to Recovery, a romantic comedy series about Parrish Diaz, a jingle composer and actor dealing with a hard break-up. In the show, Parrish’s friends decide the only way he’ll get over his ex is to do a romantic “12 step” program: go on dates with 12 different women.

From Hitch and Knocked Up to The Best Man and (500) Days of Summer, romantic comedies about men have always been popular, if less so than female-driven ones. Producers see them as a good way to get a more balanced male-to-female ratio in your audience.

What makes 12 Steps to Recovery a little different is its use of Parrish’s story to showcase different kinds of women. Viewers end up learning more about the girls than the leading man. Each episode features a new date with a different kind of stock female trope, from transwomen to Southern belles. “Not all of us women are carrying baggage,” Parrish’s friend Dani says in one episode.

The series, which has a bunch of episodes released but is still in post-production for the remaining few, re-launched on KoldCast last month.

“I wanted the launch on Koldcast to be something different, something special,” series creator Tony Clomax said, noting how he re-cut a few episodes for the release.

Clomax said his goal as a producer, director and editor is to raise the bar for black independent content, getting away from the mediocrity he sees on the web. “I’m not going to put something out there that hasn’t been through a sound mix,” he said. ”We’re getting away from our traditions…Don’t just do something to get by.”

Still he believes the web is overall positive for content creators, especially in the black market. It reveals how the likes of Tyler Perry do not represent the full extent of the culture.

“It helps filmmakers build their brand and build an audience,” he said. “That’s been the cry: we want to see ourselves, we want to see our stories.”

12 Steps is sleek, beautifully lit and appropriately paced for a rom-com, though some of its story lines, particularly the plots for the first two dates, might shock and rankle some viewers — it’s on the scandalous side of things. This seems like a strategy to get viewers talking, which might have been a smart move. On the web, the producer never gets the final word, and it’s better if your audience feels compelled to blog or tweet about the latest episode.

Meanwhile, Clomax is staying busy with a number of projects, including directing a series called Disciplinary Actions, a Law & Order-type series on labor and unions (that seems timely!). He has a number of features in the works, including a possible campaign to turn 12 Steps into one, and two others, a documentary called You Only Live Twice about a former gang member who decided to change his life, and a narrative film called Harlem Boils.

The most interesting aspect of 12 Steps for me has been its financing model. Instead of seeking sponsorship from large, corporate brands like many independent web series, Clomax and co-producer Stuart Films, run by Emelyn Stuart, approached smaller national brands and crafted commercials and placements for them. The series initially ran on BBN, the Black Broadcasting Network, giving those companies TV exposure they otherwise couldn’t afford.

12 Steps is also on numerous websites. Many users might find them on YouTube, where they’ve been viewed over 70,000 times. On Blip TV, however, it’s been viewed 800,000 times. Clomax is particularly proud of its deal with a new distributor, Zora TV, which targets black women.

In the end Clomax thinks creators spend too much time angling to get on TV and not enough time exploiting the plethora of opportunities the web has offered.

“There are so many ways of monetizing…instead of waiting for television to say ‘we’re going to give you an opportunity,’” he said.

I’ll end with posting the episode with one of my favorite performances from 12 Steps‘ many actresses, Malikha Mallette, who hilariously caricatures the Southern woman Bernadette in her impromptu blind date with Parrish.

Confession: I prefer my TV comedies packed with more jokes than plot points. 30 Rock is really the only network sitcom I watch religiously, and my favorite comedies of the past ten years include Will & Grace and Sex and the City, which are really more collections of jokes and puns with characters thrown in to say them.

One of the things I like about web humor is its relentless need to entertain viewers with as many gags and antics as possible. Three comedy pilots at NYTVF were crazy enough to keep me engaged — and that’s saying a lot.

OB/GY Anne, which won an award for best writing at the fest, follows Anne Savage, an OB/GYN working in a family practice. A workplace comedy with a cast of inept and insensitive characters, OB/GY Anne is a lighter, more focused Scrubs, centered on the pitiful dating life of its newly-30 protagonist. The series is based in part on a one-woman show, The Three Year Plan: How To Marry a Man in 1,095 Days, written by Debbie Singer, who co-wrote and co-created the series with director Joseph Saroufim. ”I have a lot of vagina jokes,” said Singer, who also plays Anne, in a post-screening Q&A. Shot in two days and developed in under six months, the OB/GY Anne pilot had charm and wit.

MID: Murder Investigation Unit is a CSI spoof that reminded me of the cult darling NTSF:SD:SUV (National Terrorism Strike Force: San Diego: Sport Utility Vehicle). For an independent pilot working in a difficult genre to spoof on a low-budget, MID delivered a number of laughs and smart gags, my favorite being the show’s dysfunctional strip club.

I’ve already interviewed Vinny Lopez, creator of Two Jasperjohns, the web series that satisfied my desire for a wacky and peculiar show about gay bears in Brooklyn. After the screening, Lopez let us in on his production philosophy: make everything easy. His crew shot most of the episodes in his apartment starting this past February, working on Sundays, because his neighbors blast reggaeton on Saturdays. Asked if he was worried about casting nine, redheaded brothers for the series, Lopez said he wasn’t worried: “I know a lot of redheads…I’ve had no problems with that. If anyone needs any, I’m going to start a casting agency!”

At the BAFTA Rocliffe New Writing Forum at this year’s NYTVF, Phil Rosenthal (Everybody Loves Raymond) told new writers one of the most common notes he got from executives was to make his characters “likable.”

We all know broadcast TV loves likable leads, but the cable revolution showed us how some unlikability makes things more interesting — this might be HBO’s greatest contribution to TV history, with Larry Sanders, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Sopranos making strong cases for complicated characters.

That tradition is alive and well online, and four comedy pilots screened at the fest proved it.

Readers of this blog might remember Matthew Kirsch’s duder, one of my favorite series with a gay lead, which explores the misadventures of Glen (Kirsch), Ricky (Alden Ford) and their friends in New York City. Kirsch’s protagonists are well-intentioned but occasionally, and humorously, inappropriate. In the episode screened at NYTVF, Ricky calls his college friend a “jackass” on his Facebook wall on the day his mother died — hijinks, including an accidental outing, ensue. The New York audience really liked the episode and duder won best comedy pilot at the fest.

In the tradition of Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Weatherman is an Australian series about a hapless, aging meteorologist with radically different-sized feet and a predilection for unintentionally racist comments. The weatherman’s inability to keep his foot out of his mouth made my laugh and squirm at the time. I tend to not watch awkward sitcoms — shows like Curb give me too much anxiety — but The Weatherman was tightly written enough to please fans of relentless comedic discomfort.

Tai Fauci and Patrick Breen‘s Whole Day Down, which has been making the festival rounds, is a sitcom starring Breen and Willie Garson (as themselves) as they attempt to transition from acting to the art world by producing exhibits one day a month at a gallery space. As the series progresses, the pair’s experiment descends farther and farther into chaos. The intentionally strange show has a touch of gloom and inanity that seems quite in step with where most ambitious comedies are headed these days (Workaholics, Always Sunny, Louie, etc.). Director and veteran acing coach Dan Fauci said in a post-screening Q&A the producers are pitching the show’s episodes to TV networks as possible interstitials.

Unfortunately I cannot say much about the fourth pilot in this comedy block, Fishy Business, as I came in late to the screening. From what I saw, however, the show is efficient and inventive, with a sleek look and intriguing concept about selling out in the ailing music industry.

If you’re a sci-fi fan, you probably know Jane Espenson, who has written and produced some of the most ambitious television of the last ten years including Battlestar Galactica, Dollhouse, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the sadly cancelled Caprica. With over 40,000 followers, Espenson is among Hollywood’s few prominent female TV producers.

This week Espenson returns to sitcoms – on the web. The writer-producer, whose comedy credits include Andy Barker, PI, Ellen and Gilmore Girls, is jumping into the indie web series world after having written a number of Battlestar’s popular, award-winning web stories.

Husbands, premiering Tuesday, follows two gay men, an athlete and actor, who drunkenly get married in Vegas. One of its stars and writers is a rising YouTuber, Cheeks, and the show also showcases Caprica’s Alessandra Torresani and newcomer Sean Hemeon. Episodes will be available at Blip and on Cheek’s YouTube channel, the beginning of 11-episode distribution plan set on proving to networks there’s an audience for the show: the episodes will combine into a pilot.

Teased at this year’s Comic-Con, Husbands aims to be a new kind of gay show in a market with a only few popular gay leads on TV.

“Husbands is set in a world in which marriage equality is a given, so there’s not really a debate about the yes-or-no of it as policy,” Espenson said. “There is a lot of new territory in this area as the world changes, and a lot of it is ripe for humor.”

Below, I talk to Espenson and Jeff Greenstein about her move back to comedy, gay marriage and what’s different about producing for the web. For episodes and extra content, visit Husbands‘ website.

Jane: You’re well-known for your work in sci-fi fantasy, much of it quite serious. How did it feel to get back to comedy?

JE: GREAT!  I never really meant to leave comedy.  Well, I wanted to leave the culture of half-hour comedy television because for the most part, I didn’t feel I was contributing enough, but I didn’t want to stop writing jokes.  I’ve managed pretty well to get dark humor into episodes of shows like Battlestar, but I haven’t actually written pure comedy since I worked on Andy Barker, PI, the comedy starring Andy Richter.  It was really really fun to write jokes again.

Jeff: You have a broad and deep well of experience in television. Was working on a web series a welcome change, a new challenge or not much different?

JG: It was fun! Although I initially moved to Los Angeles to become a director, I’ve spent the past two decades in an entertaining digression into television writing. I’ve only returned to directing in the last year or so with Desperate Housewives. So getting the chance to direct what is effectively a half-hour comedy pilot — albeit one whose initial “airing” will be in two-minute segments on the Internet — was an exciting challenge.

It was also fun to work with a group of fresh-faced, energetic, inventive young actors, a crew who in many cases are only a few years out of college, and to shoot a show on digital SLRs. The whole experience was like film school all over again, yet the result is remarkably polished. I’d put our show up against any network pilot out there.

What makes Husbands different and/or the same from classic sitcoms about married couples — whether I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners or Mad About You and King of Queens?

JE: Well, the idea that it’s about a newlywed couple where both the spouses are men is obviously the biggest difference, but in a way that just highlights how much the rest is the same — a lot of the stories that would be told on Husbands are ones that you could have told on Mad About You.  But I also think there’s a very young freshness to the humor and language of Husbands that comes from working with such a young co-writer; Cheeks writes jokes that are informed by knowing his TV history, but also by living in the real world at a very specific time.  To talk like we’re on Top Chef, between the two of us, I think we found a very new and specific humor profile.

What are your thoughts on gay representation on television today? What do we need more or less of?

JG: We need less of the gay friend who gives the lead girl advice on her wardrobe, or the gay friend who tells the main guy what shoes to wear on a date, and more of gays and lesbians as lead characters in their own right.  And, of course, that’s what we’re doing with Husbands.

What are your thoughts about gay marriage? Husbands appears to address debates from within the gay community about whether and how we should get married.

JE: Well, I’m obviously pro marriage equality.  Husbands is set in a world in which marriage equality is a given, so there’s not really a debate about the yes-or-no of it as policy.  But it does address the fact that the Brady character, a professional athlete, sees a stable marriage as something he can sell to his more conservative fans, while Cheeks, who plays more of an iconoclast, fears that it’s a little too staid for his fans.  That’s certainly a debate I’ve never seen before.  There is a lot of new territory in this area as the world changes, and a lot of it is ripe for humor.

In your experience, what are the challenges of writing and producing a web series? 

JE: So much can go wrong, and without the mechanism and money of a studio behind you, there are fewer ways to fix problems.  That’s what would give me anxiety on the set– what if we just lose the audio or don’t get the shot?  There’s no way to go back and do a reshoot.  And of course there’s the question of its future — does it move to TV, stay online, how do we pay for it?  It’s daunting.  I was very glad we had a great director in Jeff Greenstein, making sure it looked perfect, and a great line producer in M. Elizabeth Hughes, keeping tract of everything.

JG: Everything was “indie,” which I actually enjoyed. We shot primarily at two locations — a hotel in West L.A. which our production designer tricked out to look like Vegas, and a North Hollywood bungalow belonging to two friends of Jane’s. That meant our crew had to be small and nimble and work extremely fast. And there was no better example of this than our first set-up: a run-and-gun guerrilla-filmmaking shoot at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles, doubling for the Vegas Strip. Our two leads were clad only in bikini underwear and (in Cheeks’s case) a bridal veil, we had friends playing aggressive paparazzi, and we had to grab our shot quickly, before the L.A. Live security people threw us out of the place. It was perhaps the best time I’ve ever had as a director.

Much of your cast and crew have worked in television and film. Was working on Husbands a welcome change, a new challenge or not much different?

JE: This was a pretty young cast (Alessandra Torresani, Cheeks, and Sean Hemeon) and a pretty young crew, who are used to the sort of on-the-run filmmaking we were doing.  For me, this was a huge new challenge — I wasn’t used to seeing the working parts of a production quite so close up.

What projects — web, TV or film — are you working on that you can share with us?

JE: I’m working on a show called Once Upon A Time for ABC, which I’m loving.  Fairy tale characters in the real world — so imaginative.  I’m a consulting producer there, currently writing my second script for them, and it’s a blast!  And of course, I would love to make more Husbands!