In between my Breaking Bad binges, I’ve been revisiting a bit of X-Men: The Animated Series, of which I saw a few episodes in my largely TV-less childhood. Aside from the fact that the creators clearly don’t trust public-private collaborations very much (I would love to see a Government Accountability Office audit of the Mutant Control Agency), and the extent to which the show clearly tries to balance out the fact that Magneto is right and Professor X is wrong by surrounding Magneto with morons like Sabertooth and giving Professor X cooler henchmen, the thing that’s striking me most is how the animation seems to impact the storytelling.

By contemporary standards, the animation’s really just passable. Things like wildly distorted body proportions, which have never really been comics’ strong suit especially when it comes to women, don’t bother me that much. But it is clear that to keep things simple, most of the motions that are animated are necessary to drive events forward rather than to establish character, and the show isn’t wasting a lot of time animating, say, chit-chat. As a result, a lot of the dialogue can sound a little bit portentous. Jean Grey and Wolverine don’t spend a lot of time flirting before he’s very seriously declaring his affections for her. People don’t spend a lot of time discussing tactics: they boil down to the core question of whether it’s right or wrong to leave Beast and Morph behind at the Mutant Control Agency. When Storm beats Callista and has her rule over the Morlocks in Storm’s place, they don’t discuss the condition of that new regime: Storm pretty much does a lightsaber drop and walks out. We may be walking into an established universe along with Jubilee, but we have to take a lot of things on faith rather than on evidence.

I understand it’s also a kids’ show, and thus intended to be simpler. We don’t actually need Wire-level of complexity here, or First Class-level debate. The show’s still quite entertaining, and quite good at laying out issues of governance, morality, and politics. But if this was in production today, my guess is that it might be a somewhat chattier show (and folks who have seen the whole thing, maybe it does during the run?). And man, would Jubilee have lost that outfit.

Given that TLC is the same network that gave us Sarah Palin’s Alaska, three iterations of Say Yes to the Dress, Toddlers and Tiaras, and DC Cupcakes (for which, I cannot tell a lie, I once went to a premiere party), I’m choosing to interpret the network’s new show, All-American Muslim, which features six Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan, as an act of penance. My friends at Faith in Public Life are right to note that this is total Alyssa-bait. I don’t know that I’ve heard about what sounds like my perfect show about Muslim-Americans, and as y’all pointed out, there’s no guarantee that Bravo’s Shahs of Sunset will have Muslim characters at all. But even if these shows aren’t great, or not very many people watch, I’m encouraged that so many folks are experimenting in this space, trying to figure out how Muslim and Middle Eastern characters fit into the parts of our pop culture that aren’t about security. We haven’t had enough trials and errors to know what works, as art, and as social argument.

Some cable analysts think that as many as 10 percent of existing American cable subscribers will give up their subscriptions in favor of alternative television platforms by 2011. Now, a more conservative firm’s said they think it’ll be 4 percent by the end of the year and 10 percent by the end of 2015. And while the number of cable subscriptions may keep growing, it won’t be proportional to the overall growth of the potential market

The industry reversed the first-ever declines in the second and third quarters of 2010 to produce a small overall increase for the full year. The modest subscriber gain was neither convincing enough to dispatch the threat of cord cutting nor dismiss the impact of over-the-top substitution. At the end of 2010, we estimate 84.9% of the occupied U.S. households subscribed to a multichannel package after eliminating the overlap of customers with multiple subscriptions. The year-over-year dip from nearly 86% at the end of 2009 illustrates the potential peak in multichannel penetration.

Though we forecast continued absolute growth in subscribers, the pace is not expected to keep up with occupied household formation, leading to a long-term decline in penetrations for multichannel services. OTT substitution is the primary agent in the expected declines in traditional cable, DBS and telco video penetration. SNL Kagan estimates multichannel substitution via OTT delivery will grow from 2.5 million households at the end of 2010 to 12.1 million homes by 2015. The OTT substitution estimates account for nearly 10% of the occupied homes in the U.S. in the five-year forecast.

We’re at a moment of upheaval. The Parents Television Council’s filing briefs in cases challenging cable bundling. Even as alternatives to cable like Netflix get more popular, folks are complaining about the price increases that the company needs to support the contracts for content it’s renegotiating and attempting to expand, and we’re seeing the emergence of an actual competitive market in the alternatives to cable, as Amazon starts signing non-exclusive content contracts. I don’t know what the new landscape’s going to look like, or what company and technologies are going to win out, or where prices for content are going to land, which is part of what’s both exciting and frustrating about the moment that we’re living in. But if I were a cable company, I’d be very, very interested in giving my customers the impression that I was attentive to their concerns about price, customer service, and technological innovation to buy myself as much time as possible before cord-cutting hits hard and accelerates further.

I’ve long lamented the fact that we’re probably not ever going to get a movie series or television show based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy because it’s too big, and too deeply rooted in discussions of science, to translate for a mass audience. But it sounds like Neill Blomkamp’s post-District Nine project, Elysium, in addition to boasting a cast that includes Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Alice Braga, Diego Luna, and Sharlto Copley, may be exploring some of the same things I’d hoped we’d get out of a Mars project. A viral teaser for the movie comes in the form of an advertisement for a fictional company called Armadyne advertising for folks who work in everything from “zero g welders, mega-structure engineers, quantum networkers” to “zero g coupling and multi-generational planning”.

This seems promising. Mars is a major character in the Mars trilogy, but all of the characters’ engagement with the particular planet they settled are shaped by the equipment they have to work with, the structures they build, and the dramatically longer perspective they have on the impact of their work and the events of their relationships. Those concepts can be usefully applied to places other than Mars and to situations other than colonization. I thought that overall, Alastair Reynolds’ Chasm City was not a particularly successful novel, though I did think that the best parts of the book were the ones about the fleet of ships sent from Earth to start new colonies that showed how extreme longevity could do the opposite of what Robinson suggests in the Mars trilogy, making people increasingly detached from morality, the value of relationships, and the consequences of their actions.

I’m not particularly surprised that Blomkamp, of all directors, would make a movie that’s engaged with structural issues. District 9 is about how humanity fails to understand the structure of an alien society because it doesn’t really see that the structure is there at all. And human governments manage their sense that they’ve got an anarchic — and to them, disgusting — society in their midst try to quarantine it with techniques that haven’t really worked perfectly before. Blomkamp did something astonishing and original when he demonstrated what happens when a society’s sense of what is true and what is possible is profoundly disrupted. I’ll be excited to see him build a new one from scratch.

This post contains spoilers through the July 21 episode of Louie.

I really love the episodes of Louie that focus on Louis C.K. as a father, in part because I view them as part of a vast, charming, and ultimately blinkered experiment. In theory, Louis should be the perfect father. He tries to be fair, to explain things rationally to his daughters in a way that shows respect for them, and he gets dorkily excited about the kind of things that in ten years or so, his daughters are going to think are pretty awesome, like the Who. In practice, like with his attempts to explain to his younger daughter means that justice doesn’t always mean you get the exact same candy as your sister, sometimes that doesn’t work out.

This episode is one of those moments, beginning as it does with the world’s most epic repetition of “I’m bored!” “Why don’t you answer me?” Louis’ youngest daughter finally asks him. And he delivers the kind of answer that parents in television scripts are supposed to use to illuminate their children’s lives. “Because ‘I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say,” he tells her. “You live in a great big vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. And even the inside of your own mind is endless. It goes on forever, inwardly. The fact that you’re alive is amazing. So you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.’” The thing is, that “great big vast world” sometimes ends up being your dad rocking out to “Who Are You” in the car, a goose by the side of the road, and your racist great aunt.

But the whole scenario gets at why it’s so hard to be a great parent, to be a great literary critic. Being a good person necessarily means holding certain values, but being capable of critical thought, which most of us agree is part of being a good person, means holding a couple of ideas in your head at the time, like the idea that you should respect your 97-year-old great aunt, who says of the place you live that “there’s nothing but niggers, and even worse today, I hear,” while recognizing that calling people niggers is wrong (and calling nuts nigger toes is wrong, too). “How do you try to feel like a good country when you’ve done shitty things as an entire nation?” Louis asks.

The answer, apparently, is gradual progress from generation to generation. Make sure your daughter doesn’t show her penis to a girl with Down syndrome by the dumpster behind Kentucky Fried Chicken, and you’re probably moving things along. And accept that they’re going to spend time with Huckelberry Finn, who is “a dirty little homeless white trash creep.” If your father is this awesome at textual analysis, and this thoughtful about what you read growing up, you’re probably going to turn out okay.

-The number of local arts journalism jobs is down by 50 percent in the last eight years.

-The cognitive dissonance of the Uncanny Valley.

-Person of Interest is Early Edition with electronic surveillance instead of a magic newspaper.

-You’re still going to be able to go to a physical place and rent movies.

-This new St. Vincent song is exactly how the heat makes my brain feel right now.

Our conversation about the FCC’s attempts to regulate children’s television earlier this week and Peter Suderman’s post expressing skepticism of the whole enterprise (with which I largely agree) have made me realize I don’t have a very good sense of how the market for children’s television works. Obviously, FCC limitations means there’s less potential for advertising in any given hour of television, but it seems like that advertising’s more likely to be effective because the content of the show narrows the audience down to advertisers’ preferred market. You don’t have to worry that you’re going to get a good overall audience but that the ratings won’t be high enough in the demo. I have no idea if the Children’s Programming Emmy Awards actually drive viewership at all. Mainstream publications like the New York Times don’t really appear to review children’s programming, and a quick jaunt through Parenting and Family Circle magazines suggests that they do a lot of list-like guides, but don’t provide a regular stream of comprehensive reviews of new shows.

So it seems we have a couple of problems. It’s not really clear that networks want to produce children’s programs, even as pay channels do, but the government feels there’s got to be some children’s programming available to people who don’t have pay cable. And Peter’s right to say that parents should make informed decisions about what their children watch, but it doesn’t really seem like there’s great information available without a major search that goes beyond ratings and plot summaries.

I can rattle off the names of dozens of television critics in a heartbeat, but I can’t think of one influential critic who regularly writes about programming for children in a way that’s aimed at helping parents decide what shows their children might enjoy from those they benefit from, rather than addressing children’s television as a matter of nostalgia. I’ll admit that I am not the target demographic for such criticism, but there does seem to be an odd gap between the amount of attention that we give children’s and young adult fiction in book form and the amount of critical attention to children’s and young adult television. Part of the problem may be that there isn’t really much in the way of young adult television at all — one of the complaints from parents in the GAO report I wrote about in that original post was that there aren’t many programs that are targeted at children over the age of 8. And so perhaps rather than seeing children’s television as part of a continuum with the programming we’ll watch as adults, we see them as entirely different animals: television for kids is instruction, while television for the rest of us is culture (and some commenters suggested this is actually what parents want, but it still seems like better information about what achieves that would be useful).

I don’t know what the fix is here, but it does seem like we have a scenario where a lot of people are unhappy, or feel like the market isn’t shaking out right. If we want a mix of network programming that includes Dora the Explorer, and The Adventures of Pete and Pete, Arthur and Ghostwriter, uses of the medium that help children learn both educational basics and how to be consumers of more sophisticated culture, something has to change. I don’t think regulation’s going to magically produce this regime, but I don’t know that the market, as it currently exists, is helping parents become informed consumers either.

We’ve got a trailer for Frank Miller’s al Qaeda-killing superhero story Holy Terror, which looks entirely predictable:

As I wrote back in June, I just don’t see the world the way Miller does. I don’t believe America’s streets are “filled with fear.” If Americans’ hopes are shattered, I think it’s by an ongoing recession rather than by a terrorist threat so pervasive that it’s got us cowering in the basements of foreclosed homes. And we have big national problems, but the idea that America has descended into the pit both isn’t accurate and is a really convenient way to dodge actually trying to find systematic solutions to the things that make Americans miserable day-to-day, like say, skyrocketing health care costs.

This episode contains spoilers through the July 21 episode of Burn Notice.

The core action on last night’s episode of Burn Notice was an interesting look at what Michael might have been like when he was starting out at the CIA. But I have to admit, I was more intrigued by the things happening around the edges of the core case. Burn Notice is such a slick, hilarious presentation of certain kinds of masculinity that it doesn’t often present a lot of fodder for serious gender analysis (though the episode this season where Michael and his mother acted out an old abusive family situation was right in that wheelhouse). But last night, we got two very different looks at tough women.

In the wake of Max’s death, the woman investigating his death (and thus, inclined to believe Michael killed Max) is also Michael’s new CIA contact. Agent Pearce is sort of exhausting in her efforts to warn Michael that if he’s guilty, she will bring him down in the most painful way possible. “I’d offer my condolences, but I’m much better at catching bad guys than shedding tears,” she tells him when they first meet. And when Michael tells her, in all honesty, that he wants to catch Max’s killer as much as she does, she warns him “I have a pitbull at home and I learned how to run an investigation from her….she is a very, very determined bitch when she wants something.” It’s a mannered performance (by the character, not the actress), one that’s meant to demonstrate her conformance to stereotypes of very tough women, that she’s unfeeling, that she doesn’t feel wounded by sexual slurs, etc. I’m intrigued to see Michael spar with a woman at the agency, but I hope there’s more to Pearce than simply asserting that she’s a badass.

By contrast, there’s a lot of more traditional femininity everywhere in the episode tonight. Michael’s client hires him because a con man had his sister beaten into a coma. “She was so beautiful,” he sighs at her bedside, before getting all inconveniently noble on Michael and company. Jesse’s tweaking Michael about the extent to which Fiona’s taken over Michael’s apartment. “I knew Fee was going to shake things up in here…but you got a bread basket,” he editorializes. “Is that potpourri I’m smelling? You’re killing me, man.” It’s funny, especially since that frippery aside, Fiona is firmly on Jesse’s side in telling Michael that he’s got to be much more hard-nosed about the CIA’s investigation into Max’s death. And Michael’s mother is vexed about her soap operas.

These days, I find myself a lot more interested in Fiona than in Michael. As Michael told his client at the end of the night, “I don’t know how to be anything else.” And now that he’s had a setback in building his relationship with the CIA, I wonder if he might continue to be the same rigidly professional operative. Fiona, on the other hand, keeps choosing Michael, even as he tries to rebuild a life that doesn’t line up with hers. Her redefinition of her apartment may be silly and feminine. But unlike Michael, she knows enough about who she is to have a sense of how she wants to live.