Forget the tape delay. Forget the weird cutting of certain events. Forget the obsessive focus on American athletes at the expense of covering the whole games. Forget the substanceless pool- and track-side interviews. From a sheer editorial judgement perspective, the biggest question about NBC’s coverage of the 2012 London Olympics has got to be how this video, “Bodies in Motion,” (NBC has, perhaps wisely, declined to make it embeddable), which features slow-motion shots of female athletes’ bodies set to music so cheesily porn-like it’s hard to believe that this isn’t a video someone made to parody the focus on female Olympians’ bodies.

The cluelessness of it even extends to the written description for the video: “Check out these bodies in motion during the Olympic Games,” as if the women it’s portraying, none of whom are identified by name, or country, which might have been a petty distraction from ogling, are inanimate objects rather than people. This utterly contentless video, which communicates nothing about the events these women are participating in or what it takes to perform them, might meet the editorial standards at Maxim, though the video quality isn’t even particularly impressive. There is no way it should pass the editorial standards for a news organization.

And yes, it’s a dumb viral video. But it’s a reminder of how much this Olympics, which has been a terrific one for women in so many ways, has brought out the uglier, stupider impulses in a lot of people, whether it’s the athletic official who suggested that British heptathalete and eventual gold medalist Jessica Ennis weighed too much, or Jere Longman’s bizarrely nasty attack on American hurdler Lolo Jones. And the video illustrates the root of many of the complaints about NBC’s coverage of the games: they’re presenting news events as if they’re entertainment. A lot of the time, that’s meant errors of ethics, like having local anchors refer to events that already passes as if they’re upcoming to hype NBC’s primetime coverage. This time, it’s an error of editorial judgement, packaging women doing their jobs, which happen to be entertaining, as if they’re eye candy. As NBC reassesses its coverage in preparation for the next games, “Bodies in Motion” should be a prime example of where the network’s judgement failed.

FX has officially picked up The Americans, the spy show it announced it was developing last fall that stars Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as KGB agents whose cover involves living as a married couple with two children in the suburbs of Washington, DC in the early 1980s. I wrote last winter that I was excited for the prospect of a show that was about tradecraft, given that the main characters, Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings, would be practicing it both at home and in the real world. And the more I think about this, the better idea I think the show is.

Most Washington movies are very into the Halls of Power, which makes for soaring visuals that convey the immediate sense that the characters are Very Important People. But they ignore the potential of the relatively mundane suburbs, the prospect of scary people playing with power in the non-descript ranch houses and ring suburb parks far away from the National Mall. Breach, the tremendously underrated Billy Ray movie about Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who turned out to be spying for the Soviet Union and Russia, did a fantastic job of turning Hanssen’s house (he was played by Chris Cooper), his church, his indescribably bland office, and the park where he made drops horror movie locations. One of the tensest scenes in recent movies involves Ryan Phillipe, playing Eric O’Neill, the agent who was assigned to work with Hanssen and report on him, trying to sneak a Blackberry back into Hanssen’s briefcase without getting caught. The utter ordinariness of Hanssen’s settings became repugnant over the course of the movie because of the profound lie it represented.

Homeland‘s done something similar with returned prisoner of war Nicholas Brody’s family home. It’s a modest, light-flooded dwelling, a symbol of tranquil suburban domesticity that turns out to be full of secrets, privy only to Carrie Mathison, the CIA agent who’s conducting an unauthorized operation to spy on him, and to us. Brody and his wife struggle to resurrect their sex life on his return, he prays clandestinely in the garage, and he’s hidden a suicide vest in the closet. Instead of a familiar family dynamic, Brody’s return means his family home is suddenly full of secrets, something that show continues to explore in its second season.

It sounds like The Americans may have some levity to ease the tension—Phillip and Elizabeth are fake married, but one of the show’s conceits is that they’re falling in love for real. But FX would be smart to look to both Breach and to Homeland for their sense of how to play out quiet, hugely high-stakes dramas in suburban Washington.

Over at IFC, Terri Schwartz reports that Ben Affleck’s been approached about directing DC’s Justice League movie, and has a smart assessment of his strengths and weaknesses in the position that also suggests a way DC, as it tries to build a viable movie franchise to match The Avengers, could distinguish itself from Marvel’s approach:

For now, we’re just intrigued by the possibility of Affleck. He has some experience with superhero films, but we’ll be the first to admit that “Daredevil” wasn’t great. Fortunately Affleck has greatly matured as an actor and a director since then, which is good for this project. However, Affleck doesn’t have any experience directing with CGI, which could be a boon or a curse. He filmed some great realistic action scenes in “The Town,” which could make a “Justice League” film more in line stylistically with Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” trilogy. To us, the more realistic this film is, the better, though we know there’s no way to make characters like the Green Lantern and the Flash work without some semblance of computer assistance. Hopefully Affleck is up to the task.

Mike Fleming at Deadline is more skeptical of the prospect that Affleck is going to happen:

This is a story I checked out days ago, and didn’t run when Affleck’s reps stated that it was not going to happen with him. Now, it makes sense that Warner Bros would offer Affleck the project. Chris Nolan is top man over there, but after three Batfilms and after producing the Superman reboot Man of Steel, he’s gotten spandex-clad protagonists out of his system. After Nolan, the studio then offers everything else to Harry Potter director David Yates (who is now keen on Tarzan) and Affleck, who has become a major director with Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and the upcoming Argo. Just because the studio wants Affleck doesn’t mean he will do the movie, and several sources tell me he might take a meeting, but that’s it.

After putting his acting career in the dumper with questionable choices like Gigli, Affleck admirably scripted a second act for himself with his writing and directing skills, and did it by taking on unexpected, thoughtful films. His reps clearly denied he would take this, and why would he want to direct a Justice League movie, unless he himself had figured out a way to make one that would compare favorably with Joss Whedon’s billion dollar Marvel smash The Avengers? I don’t see it.

Whether or not Affleck ends up being the man to do it, I think that DC would be strategically and creatively smart to create a franchise that’s less cosmic and more realistic than Marvel’s, and that maintains at least the gloss of ideas from Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. Given that Whedon’s locked in for Avengers 2, it probably doesn’t make sense to get into an witty arms race with him. Similarly, Marvel is, I think, potentially going to test audiences’ tolerance for cosmic characters and conflicts with Guardians of the Galaxy, and DC could distinguish itself by grounding its conflicts in the real world, and potentially even in real issues. Even if I think the politics of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies were ultimately flimsy and inconsistent , they got people talking without getting in the way of the movies’ blockbuster status, and that’s not a terrible brand if you can find directors and writers who can walk that line intelligently. It may not be possible to do emotional connection and dialogue better than Whedon, but given the way The Avengers has been set up so far, I think it’s possible for DC to come off build a more grounded world that gets audiences to connect to the characters and conflicts in a more serious way. We’ll see whether that’s Zack Snyder’s actual approach in Man of Steel, but DC’s certainly selling the initial hero’s journey as deeply rooted in the American experience and landscape rather than foregrounding the cosmic elements of it.

I also think that a more grounded, naturalistic (in so much as these things can be naturalistic) approach to the DC Comics universe might be a smart hedge against the day that mass audiences get a little tired of superhero movies. If you don’t need to to use Skrull spaceships and giant space lizard fish in the climax of your action sequences, you can make excellent action movies on smaller budgets. In boom times, that can mean bigger profits. If trends slow, it can mean preserving a margin. I don’t really expect DC to think that strategically, given the general death of the mid-budget action picture. But the company needs some smart insight to distinguish itself if it wants to do more than tag after Marvel’s coattails.

If we hadn’t already heard that Joss Whedon will be writing and directing The Avengers and returning to television with a Marvel series, this would be by far the most exciting pop culture news of the week: BBC America is apparently considering a spin-off show that would feature Alice Morgan:

There’s a school of thought that says crazy-quirky supporting characters aren’t as appealing when they’re thrust into the center of the action, but I’m willing to bet against conventional wisdom if BBC America greenlights a Luther spinoff centered around brilliant sociopath Alice Morgan (played to delectable perfection by Ruth Wilson). “The BBC is very interested in the project,” Luther creator and exec producer Neil Cross told Variety. “The only real question would be how many and how often we would do it — whether it would be a one-off miniseries or a returning miniseries, a co-production or not.” “Even if I didn’t sell this thing, I would still end up writing the miniseries,” Cross went on to say. “It’s something peculiar, but she’s far more clever than me, far more witty than me, far more everything than me.”

That’s a fantastic idea, and not only for those of us who are anticipating the withdrawal when Cross finishes his last miniseries installment about troubled detective John Luther (Idris Elba). Morgan, as portrayed by Ruth Wilson (who resembles an evil Emma Stone), is a powerful, original television character, a genius who killed her parents and when Luther figured her out, made him her moral lodestar, the only person she felt any emotional attachment to, and the only person who she recognized as having valid desires and needs other than her own.

As I’ve written before, in the great anti-hero shows of our era women, often wives, serve the audience-alienating role of reminding both us and the anti-heroes themselves that their anti-social behavior is less awe-inspiring and badass than it is a gross violation of community norms and often, other people’s rights. Even a female anti-hero like Patty Hewes does grotesquely awful things to other people does so in the name of a clearly-articulated greater good, and sometimes feels bad about it, as in that repeated scene of her shaking violent in the chair at her beach house in the first season. And while Aspergerian nerd Sheldon Cooper is one of the biggest characters on television, on Bones, Temperance Brennan’s confusion about social cues has been muted over the years. We like, or television thinks we like, to like our female characters uncomplicatedly, rather than transgressively.

Alice Morgan fits none of those models. It’s not that she doesn’t understand other people’s values and feelings—she just doesn’t particularly care about them. She’s ingeniously violent in service of her own interest, unlike Brennan’s use of her abilities to solve crimes and ease the pain of the bereaved, or Patty’s manipulativeness in service of her clients. And her sexual heat with Luther is unapologetically freighted, manipulative even as it stems from perhaps the only sincere affection Alice’s ever felt in her life.

TVLine suggested that a show build around Alice might follow a Dexter-like format, where Alice struggles to maintain a code that helps her pass as a decent person, while channeling the impulses she’s unable to repress. That makes sense, although I think there’s an important inverse. In that show, Dexter learned that some of the impulses and behaviors he’d been faking actually had meaning to him. A show built around Alice that intersected with a thoughtful consideration of gender could let her have some of those experiences, and also expose some of the uglier motivations behind the expectations that women be nice, and primarily oriented towards the needs of others. Anti-heroes have primarily been used to expose the flexibility of our own morality, our ability to attach to a corrupt cop or a family mobster. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be used to reveal the rot in what we cling to, as well as what we’re eager to let go.

I spent an hour yesterday considering how to tackle Stephen Marche’s calamitously awful piece for Esquire, “The Contempt of Women,” an attempt at cultural analysis in which he strawmans Girls, Sex and the City and Fifty Shades of Grey all in one paragraph, praises President Bush’s myopia, and literally cites declining sexual assaults rate as evidence of women’s contempt for men. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say so much as I didn’t know where to start, at least until Marche tweeted “The women who show their contempt for my piece on the contempt of women prove my point by virtue of their contempt. Does that make sense?” It’s the perfect encapsulation of an idea that’s shows up in culture everywhere from the backlash against Anita Sarkeesian to the defense of comics who say that women aren’t funny: that women don’t have the right to determine what’s fit for judgement, particularly if their target is something admired by men or conferring of male privilege, and when they do, their judgement is inevitably tainted by self-interest or motivated by irrational contempt rather than the merits of the case.

It is, apparently, not okay for women to want clarity about the status of their relationships and sex that is fulfilling for them as well as their partners, as Hannah does on Girls, to attempt to negotiate the terms of their relationship as Anastasia Steele does in Fifty Shades of Grey, tease the president of the United States, who is also your husband and probably comes equipped with his own set of domestic idiosyncrasies and slight annoyances, or appreciate Louis C.K.’s self-examination. The thing is, there’s a lot of stupid in our culture, and contempt for women is embedded in that very stupid. I’m not sure why women are supposed to accord a heightened level of respect for narratives that tell us we should fall for inconsiderate schlubs whose inattentiveness is a theoretical down payment in future awesome, or the idea that sexual harassment is part of video game culture, or assertions that female incompetence is adorable and endearing. If people and concepts are going to treat women with utter, logic-boggling disrespect, I have no idea why I should bring deference to a contempt-fight.

But we are in luck! Because it turns out that even if I’m not supposed to feel contempt for things and behaviors, and men are supposed to ignore me, Marche is allowed to visit judgement down on his fellow men, and they’d do well to fall in line. “I suppose I should feel compassion, or some kind of weird gender loyalty, for the guys who can’t figure this out,” he writes. “In all honesty, I don’t. There is no masculinity crisis. There’s a crisis for idiots. The Tucker Maxes of the world are doomed. That’s not the end of men. It’s the beginning.” What a relief that someone is allowed to name nonsense for what it is! I hope Marche is ready and able to serve. Because I have a list of things I’d like him to hold in contempt for me.

By Andrea Peterson

As an associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf, Chip Kidd designs books. More specifically he designs iconic book covers for writers including Bret Easton Ellis, Haruki Murakumi, David Sedaris, John Updike, and Michael Crichton. Even if you’re not a bibliophile or design freak, if you survived the nineties you’ve undoubtedly seen at least one of his designs: the dinosaur skeleton from the Jurassic Park logo.Kidd has become “the closest thing to a rock star” because he excels at taking the core elements of a narrative and distilling them into a single graphic representation of what the core elements of the story. It’s a process he explained in a TED Talk:

As Kidd touches on during his TED Talk, the rise of electronic ooks and the digital marketplace is bringing rapid change to his industry. When he spoke with NPR’s Weekend Edition last Sunday, he noted “people don’t buy a book on the web because of its cover.” Monday Amazon announced Kindle ebook sales had overtaken print sales in the United Kingdom for the first time. Those two facts hit me hard as someone who frequently purchases a wide variety of items based solely on outward appearance (I first listened to Supertramp because the cover of Crisis? What Crisis? caught my eye) and as someone who had been captivated during one of my youthful booksale scouting missions by a small paperback adorned with the strange juxtaposition of three monkeys considering a piece of cheese.
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