Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched all four seasons of Sons of Anarchy. And while shotgunning the show’s episodes may not be for the faint of heart (so much grotesque violence!), it’s given me a lot to think about with the show. So every day this week, I’ll be considering another aspect of life in Charming, California.

Given how much of the fourth season of Sons of Anarchy was about the financial vulnerabilities of, in particular, Clay and Jax, I started thinking a lot about how SAMCRO could function more effectively as an organization. Could the club start a fake pension fund as a way to explain the accumulation of its illict profits as legitimate proceeds of the auto body shop? Could it pay for the education of the club’s mechanics so they could get certification that would make them employable elsewhere? There are upsides and downsides to any potential solutions in terms of how much attention from law enforcement.

But in the end, I realized, the club will never give members the tools that would make it easier to leave. The Sons of Anarchy are a lot like the Republican Party: the MC is increasingly a vehicle for angry, white people to see their grievances legitimated even as it provides them with very little in the way of tangible benefit.

So much of the tension in season four is driven by the fact that, despite the large profits the club sometimes turns on deals, their members live rather financially precarious lives. Clay is drawn to the deal with the cartel even though it involves moving drugs, something that’s absolutely beyond what the club previously defined as the pale, in part because he sees the end of his ability to ride and work with his hands and doesn’t have a nest egg. Jax mires himself in Charming because, as he explains to Tara, he’s an only-decent mechanics with few other prospects for an honest, steady job outside the club, but he can’t accomodate himself to the prospect of living mainly on his wife’s income. As a viewer, it’s hugely frustrating to see Jax insist on an arrangement that places his children and his fiancee in continual danger for the sake of his pride, and that really seems to act as a bridge to a plot arc that renders Tara unable to support him, to provide a financial incentive for them to leave town. But I understand Jax’s desire to be able to support his family even as I’m angry at his insistence in boxing himself in to a dreadful situation.

The thing is, the club provides other things for Jax and Clay, and not all of them are jobs or collections of letters on philosophies of anarchist governance. It’s given both men positions of authority not just within the club, but in Charming itself—being part of SAMCRO gives them standing that without money or formal education, they’d be unlikely to achieve by other means. It gives them a sense of identity that’s written directly into their skin and can be used to negotiate their relationships with other people and other groups. And it gives them justification to pursue their grievances without restraint: if someone offends them, they’re free to pluck that person out. Those cognitive tools for identifying themselves and justifying even their worst behavior are powerful enough that even though the club is actively detrimental to their long-term financial security, their relationships to their families, and even their safety, people like Opie, Clay, and Jax are willing to stick with it. That loyalty is a testament as much to the poverty of opportunities for them elsewhere as it is to the power of the club.
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We’re at a moment when a cohort of actors who cut their teeth in hipster-friendly projects like Party Down and the Frat Pack movies are coming of age. Whether it’s Lizzy Caplan’s emergence as a viable romantic comedy star thanks to her wonderful turn on New Girl; or Adam Scott’s Parks and Recreation-minted heartthrob status; the wave of goodwill Jason Segel is riding right now after his successful reboot of the Muppts franchise; or Aaron Paul’s search for the role that will take him beyond his turn as morally conflicted meth cooker Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad, these actors are all starring in romantic comedies this year. It’s fascinating to see what, if anything, is different about this well-worn trope as taken on by actors less invested in traditional Hollywood glamor than in self-lacerating humor. Mostly it seems that they’re just as invested in marriage and commitment as prior generations, but the obstacles to their happiness are different.

For the younger set, there’s Damsels in Distress, a decidedly odd-looking comedy about a group of college girls (played by actresses way too old for the setting) out to save their classmates from the scourges of depression and cads with donuts and tap-dancing. The movie’s quirky enough that I can’t tell if there’s an abstinence metaphor or there will be an abstinence subplot here. But there’s still something interesting about a college sex comedy framed around a very different framework and with characters who have very different priorities:

Then, there’s Save the Date, which doesn’t have a formal trailer yet, but is one of the movies from Sundance that’s stuck with me most closely. Alison Brie and Lizzy Caplan play sisters Beth and Sarah, the former about to get engaged to Andrew (Martin Starr) a drummer in a rock band, the latter shaken by an unexpected proposal from Kevin (Geoffrey Arend), the frontman for that same band. When Sarah breaks up with Kevin, she embarks on casual relationship that turns into something more serious. To a certain extent, it’s a movie with very conventional themes: love can show up at surprising times! Marriages are more important than weddings! But it’s interesting to see those themes play out in a setting and with semi-bohemian characters who might have rejected marriage in another generation of movies:

Bridesmaids let it be known that sometimes women go a little crazy in the process of planning a wedding, even when they’re happy for the bride. Bachelorette, which also stars Caplan along with Kirsten Dunst and Isla Fisher apparently goes much darker, exposing a group of women who get decidedly vicious when the least conventionally attractive of their number gets engaged before they do. I’ll be curious to see if the movie is honest in its darkness or an occasion to paint all women as catty, status-obsessed, jealous, and willing to tear each other up:

It’s incredibly striking to watch, Ralph Fiennes’ excellent new cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s play about a Roman general turned exile and traitor to his people and himself, Coriolanus, in the midst of a race for the Republican nomination for president, and in the winter of the Occupy movement. To say that it’s a merely 99 percent movement movie would diminish it—and ignore Shakespeare’s intentions to the point of ridiculousness. There’s far too much going on—Roman mothers (and what a Roman mother: Vanessa Redgrave is spectacular as Volumnia), blood feuds (this one, between Martius and Gerard Butler, surprisingly good as Tullus Aufidius), citizens who are easily manipulated and men who think they’re too good to need to earn the public trust.

But Coriolanus is a striking illustration of Shakespeare’s ability to fill whatever space his words are set in. It’s hard to imagine another author who could write a scene of a Roman mother shaming her son into refraining from sacking his home city in an act of poisonous vengeance that would play as well in modern winter coats as it does in togas. And it’s striking to see one of his plays come alive, so vividly transposed to our own time, precisely at the moment that we seem to need it.

In the opening scene of the movie, a group of conspirators come together in a dingy apartment in a bad neighborhood. The First Citizen asks the others, in preparation for a march on grain stores held by the government, “You are all resolved rather to die than to famish?” They could be the General Assembly at an Occupy encampment (the movement could use their graphic design skills, to be sure). The First Citizen’s declaration of Rome’s elite that “They ne’er cared for us yet. Suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us,” is as perfect an articulation of the pains of rising income inequality today as it was when Shakespeare wrote it, and in the time that he imagined those words spoken.

The contempt the citizens meet with when they confront Caius Martius—the Roman general who, like many Republicans today appears to believe that the military are the only people who deserve a social safety net—is awfully familiar as well. “What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues / That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion, / Make yourselves scabs?” Martius spits at them. It’s hard not to imagine that America’s beseiged 1 percenters wish they could summon his eloquence in their disdain, though they might stop short at Martius’s diatrabe against popular government, his complaint that by trying to gain the consent of the citizens “we debase / The nature of our seats, and make the rabble / Call our cares fears; which will in time
Break ope the locks o’ the senate and bring in / The crows to peck the eagles.”

And the movie reminded me of something I think at least modern Shakespeare adaptations have in common that’s quite interesting: they’ve redefined banishment as a retreat to poverty. Banishment’s a hard concept in the modern era—as we’ve filled in the land, it’s harder to imagine what it would be like to be cast out of a city state without easy access to the kind of economic, social, or cultural life you once enjoyed within its walls. And it’s also difficult to imagine getting large numbers of people on board with shunning an individual and casting that curse down the years to disadvantage his children as well.

But I think both Coriolanus and Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of Romeo + Juliet did something fascinating in their depictions of exile: they made Martius and Romeo poor. When Romeo leaves Verona and ends up living in an isolated trailer: it’s ultimately a poverty of information that kills him when he rushes back to kill himself at what he believes is Julie’ts grave. After the people turn on him and he’s banished from Rome, Martius goes homeless, sleeping rough, hitching rides, growing out his hair and beard, and ultimately stalking his great enemy, Aufidius, to his war council. When Aufidius accepts Martius’s allegiance, and shaving his head, welcomes him back into citizenship, it’s a moment so charged, it’s almost erotic. The nature of our punishments may change. But Shakespeare’s words still have the heft and magnitude to express what exile, what inequality, what hunger mean to us across the years.

President Obama’s been making headlines for singing in recent weeks, whether it’s Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” or pulling out some soul to serenade his hometown with a rendition of “Sweet Home Chicago.” But just as Bill Clinton had his saxaphone, the current First Family, POTUS in particular, has made a regular habit of rocking out in public over the years, and I don’t just mean singing along to “This Land Is Your Land” at his pre-Inauguration festivities. So here’s a guide to the notable song choices and dance moves the Obamas have employed since the family hit the national stage for real. They may not be ready for The Voice or So You Think You Can Dance (having seen them do an Inaugural Ball shuffle, I can attest to this in person), but for a couple of middle-aged folks, the Obamas seem like a decent couple to bring along for a night of karaoke:

1. “If I Only Had a Brain,” Gridiron Dinner, 2006: Sadly, I couldn’t track down video of this, but the members of the Gridiron Club had Obama, then in his freshman term in the Senate, sing a parody version of the Scarecrow’s song from the Wizard of Oz, including these lyrics: “I’m aspiring to greatness, but somehow I feel weightless, a freshman’s sad refrain. I could be a great uniter, making ethics rules much tighter, if I only had McCain.”

2. “Chain of Fools,” Detroit, 2008: On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama busted out some Aretha in honor of the hometown diva. And man does he sound good:

3. “See You Again,” Inauguration Weekend, 2009: So it might not be what she would choose to listen to, but props to First Lady Michelle Obama for knowing the words to Miley Cyrus’s best song and rocking out along with her daughters at the new administration’s Kids’ Inaugural Concert. With any luck, Obama Karaoke can be a multi-generational affair.

4. “Happy Birthday,” Kennedy Center, 2009: He’s no sexy Marilyn singing happy birthday to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who was undergoing treatment for cancer as he celebrated his 77th birthday. But it’s pretty funny to note that absent a podium, Obama has a tendency to conduct a pretend orchestra. Later that year, Obama apparently serenaded Armando Gomez, a Chicago businessman, with the same song at a Cinco De Mayo party at the White House.

5. Fiesta Latina, the White House, 2009: POTUS brought out some slightly more sophisticated dance moves when he was partnered up with Thalia later that fall at a celebration of Latin American music at the White House:

But seriously, someone’s gotta put that goofy head wiggle on lockdown before Obama’s ready for the bigtime:

6. “Move Your Body,” Alice Dean Middle School, Washington, DC, 2011: At least when FLOTUS pulls a out the dorky mom dance moves, she does it for a good cause. And there’s a limit to how dorky you can appear when you’re rocking out to a song that’s part of your partnership with Beyonce Knowles to get kids exercising.

7. “Let’s Stay Together,” The Apollo Theater in New York, 2012: Obama brought the Al Green a month before Valentine’s Day. Turns out speechifying has a tendency to turn you a little husky. Maybe Obama can take vocal cord care tips from Adele:

8. “Sweet Home Chicago,” Chicago, 2012: When he turns on his pipes, the President tends to choose soul or blues. It’s nice of his adopted hometown to provide him with a theme song that’s right in his wheelhouse.

The bridge is yours.

-Todd VanDerWerff on Glee. Even more than usual.

-Nuclear submarines are the new big pop culture trend.

-Ashley Tisdale and Louis C.K., because why not?

-Your visual cheat sheet to Hugo, which if you’re going to see one Oscar-nominated movie before this weekend, I recommend.

-Speaking of which, Oscar Etiquette:

On Monday, Ryan McGee laid down a marker in the AV Club, arguing that HBO’s success with shows like The Sopranos deemphasized the need to make individual episodes of television compelling as long as they served a larger narrative, and urged episodic shows to adopt at least the facade of long-arc stories even if they weren’t well-suited to do so. James Poniewozick at Time suggested that Ryan’s overstating the extent to which this has actually happened, and make a point that I think gets at a gateway that precedes Ryan’s piece. “It’s true that a TV series is not a novel,” James writes. “But it’s also not a movie. Every medium works best when it takes advantage of what’s distinctive about it. TV is linear and cumulative, allowing a story to unfold over weeks, months or years.” So what is it that makes it a distinctive medium? And how can we best nurture that?

To answer the second question first, there’s an extent to which television is the least flexible of the major media. While it’s absolutely true that the networks are becoming somewhat more flexible about season lengths—something like ABC’s found footage horror show The River is a good example of this—and cable channels and network do make miniseries, it’s true that the standard network season is 22ish episodes and the standard cable season is 13ish episodes. The episodes are of a relatively standard length: 22ish minutes for a sitcom and 42ish for a drama on the networks and non-premium cable channels, and closer to 30 and an hour on the premium cable channels.

Those are astonishing formal constraints for an artist, even a commercial one, to work under, and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that. Standard-release movie features features can run from 80 minutes to well over two hours, and you can make something substantially shorter or longer than that and still find mass-market distribution for it. Novels are bound by some constraints on what a publisher can physically bind, but there’s a great deal of range within those technical specifications, and within them, no one’s setting limitations on how long or short chapters have to be, or even what they’re expected to look like: David Foster Wallace and Jennifer Eagan have helped shake that up. And one can only imagine, especially given the rise of e-books that can incorporate video, graphics, or animation, that experimentation will continue. Most pop songs hover in the three-minute range, but once again, that’s not a formal constraint, and iTunes may have hurt the album but it also freed artists like Robyn from its limitations. Web television may yet shake the formal constraints of television, but we’re far from a paradigm shift. Television is the most restrictive popular art form in existence, and I’m constantly awed that people manage to fit stories neatly into the space allotted to them without too much filler or franticness. But those restrictions are more than some sort of technical exercise: this is a multi-billion dollar industry, not a writing workshop handing out a structurally tricky assignment to talented students.
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In the wake of the Comcast-NBCUniversal merger, much of the attention’s been on low-rated NBC’s efforts to right itself. But yesterday, the company made two big announcements about very different parts of its future. First, fulfilling some of the terms of the deal, Comcast said it’ll launch four new channels, two aimed at African-Americans (including one backed by Magic Johnson) and two at Latinos. And, investing in the technological future of viewership, the company said it’s starting a video-on-demand service that will include legacy television shows and movies.

Given the massive success of Univision, and the fact that the best networks seem to be able to offer Latino audiences is either Rob Schneider’s bumbling through the family his character married into on Rob or Sofia Vergara as a transplanted bombshell, it makes sense that someone would try to go more aggressively after that rapidly growing market sector. It’s hard to tell what El Rey, the first of those two channels, will offer: “a mix of reality, scripted and animated series, movies, documentaries, news, music, comedy, and sports programming” isn’t exactly descriptive. But I do think it’s promising that the network’s saying out of the gate that they’ll hire Latino producers. You would think that would be a given for programming aimed at a Latino audience, but I don’t exactly take it for granted. And I think that “BabyFirst Americas,” which is a truly terrible network name, could actually find an audience in households where the first language is English. Bilingual education is going to be a lot more important in the future, and quality programming for children in Spanish could be a great educational tool for parents who want their kids growing up with multiple languages no matter which one they themselves speak.

I tend to think the African-American focused networks are a bit less significant, if only because the networks made a strategic decision to abandon black audiences a long time ago, and BET, TVOne, and VH1 have been trying to pick up that lost audience ever since. That said, I’m at least mildly interested to see what the folks behind REVOLT mean by this: “REVOLT will be live, like all great moments in television history. REVOLT will also be immediate, like today’s social networks,” because it’s so goofily futuristic. I’d be more compelled if the marketing material said something about building out mobile-friendly products, given the role that mobile plays in bridging the digital divide. But we’re a couple years out from seeing what they develop.

And speaking of digital, the bigger news for Comcast is probably the announcement that it’s building a Video on Demand service to challenge Netflix. They’re not just pulling in content from the NBCUniversal family, which makes it a somewhat more aggressive move than HBO and Showtime’s construction of separate, Netflix-like portals for their shows and movies. Those investments by individual channels could be interpreted as negotiating moves to show Netflix they’re willing to hold out, or attempts to preserve the sense that their content is ultra-premium. But Comcast seems like they’re trying to provide a genuine alternative, even if the content library they’re starting out with is relatively small. But given that Netflix is in the process of renegotiating contracts, and has had to pay higher fees to reup, there could be room for a company with a serious cash library to stock up fast. And a streaming or VOD service could provide an alternative way to keep alive low-rated but passionately-loved shows like Community that might not be earning their spot in a network lineup, but could draw subscribers to a streaming service.

This post contains spoilers for the February 21 episode of Justified.

If shows like the Law & Order franchise hammer home how easy it is to get lost in the big city, or to hide yourself in it if you’ve got wickedness in your heart, Justified last night felt like it was making a reverse and perverse case for the ability of rot to flourish in the country. Limehouse’s holler is still the most fascinating place the show’s taken us this season, a little fiefdom anchored by history, tradition, and an absolute refusal to be uprooted by racism. But Delroy’s entrance onto the scene is a reminder that you don’t have to have good intentions to build an enclave. And Arlo’s reappearance in his son’s life at the time when Raylan needs him least is a reminder that neglect to relationships is not determined by geography.

Let’s take Delroy first. There’s no question that he’s a smooth talker, telling Ellen May “My parents raised me in a commune of sorts. I wouldn’t call it hippie, exactly. Mostly dope farmers. But strangely, we were a family. Looked after each other. Just like we do here…It ain’t easy looking after you girls. There’s doctors, and clothing and food, what-not. Porn don’t nearly pay the bills. It’s those pills that keep the roof over our heads…Like everyone else, you must be willing to make a sacrifice,” before sending her back into a situation that nearly got her killed. He may be a pimp, but telling Ellen May “It pains me to do this to you, truly. But you have to learn accountability, just like I had to,” before beating her viciously makes him sound more like a cult leader than a hustler. Ugly things can flourish in isolation, particularly when someone’s willing to pray on people who are exceptionally isolated, like J.J., who corrects Ava’s memory of her, reminding the other woman that Ava remembers her from “Middle school. I never made it to high school.” Justified can be a bit talky this season, but in moments like this when it hammers home the importance of education and the isolation of rural poverty, it delivers tremendous sermons with very few words.

Limehouse may rule his holler with a similarly iron fist, but at least he goes to the trouble of articulating and grounding a code. “Gold chains and champagne and hoes and shit,” he lectures a deputy who’s getting all Emiliano Zapata on him. “Oh, son. We have survived in these hills for 15 decades by staying among ourselves.” I can imagine that Limehouse will wield terrible violence before this season is over, but so far, his game of only giving when he’s got first, his insistence that “The people who bank with me are the ones who have access to the things I know” is a form of insurance. The question becomes what happens when people like Dickie Bennett stop trusting the bank. And while Noble’s Holler has held on to its independence by not challenging white folks directly, amassing power can invite investigation, and as we’ve seen in earlier episodes, interdiction.

Then, there’s Arlo. Alan Sepinwall pointed out that if Arlo’s not faking, “the idea of Raylan having to care for the father he despises — wondering all the time how serious his condition really is — could yield some terrific material,” and I tend to agree. It would be fascinating to see FX become the first network to seriously examine the relationship between middle-aged people and their aging parents, particularly when those adults are under severe pressure. But even if that doesn’t turn out to be the case, Raylan’s relationship with Arlo isn’t something he can bury in the backwoods. Whether it was Arlo’s continued criminality or Quarles’ determination to ferret it out, some things can’t stay dead and buried, even in the backcountry.