My former colleague Alex Seitz-Wald, now at Salon, has a great, and unnerving story about a battle over the future of Alabama’s public television network, where a conservative board pushed the network to air videos by a discredited evangelical historian, to roll back its long-standing statement in favor of diversity, including sexual orientation, and to fire the network’s executive director Allan Pizzato. Alex writes that the fight, which is consistent with conservative efforts to demand that bogus history and science be accorded equal respect with rigorously tested conclusions, may be a pretext for something much larger:

APT’s chief operating officer, Charles Grantham, also resigned, as did an interim director appointed by the commission, though the resignation has not gone into effect for the latter. Grantham wrote an open letter to the governor on July 19 expressing dire concerns about the future of the nation’s oldest public broadcasting network. “Now a shadow is being cast over APT by its own directors. … It is my belief that the firings were based solely on ideological differences and personality clashes between Mr. Pizzato and some of the commissioners,” he wrote. The letter goes on to note that “some actions might jeopardize the licenses of APT” and concludes, “If something is not done immediately to stop this destructive spiral, it may be that history will record that under the watch of Governor Robert Bentley, Alabama Educational Television died an untimely death.”

Some critics have speculated that this may be the ultimate goal of the activist faction of the commission. Across the country, public broadcasting budgets are on the chopping block. Republicans in Washington tried to strip funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR has long been a bugaboo of conservative activists, and anti-spending Tea Partyers are opposed on principle to taxpayer funding for public broadcasting. “There could be a much bigger, darker picture here,” our source said. The commissioners, several of whom have political ambitions, could “go back to our constituents and say, ‘yes! We got rid of this godless liberal public television,’” the source noted.

Part of what’s sad about efforts like these to either use public television to advance a particular point of view or to eliminate it entirely on the grounds that public broadcasting and public support for the arts is somehow ridiculous, is that they lose sight of what these programs are actually about: equity of access. As James Poniewozik pointed out in a piece last year, cutting funding for public broadcasting doesn’t mean that all stations everywhere will go away. Instead, stations with narrower supporter bases, often those that serve poorer or rural communities, will disappear as public networks in urban areas with a large pool of donors to draw from will survive. The people who are going after public television in Alabama may only see their ability to air David Barton’s arguments that America’s roots are actually Christianist at stake. It’s too bad they can’t widen their focus and see that in the process, they may jeopardize children’s access to educational programing, and a low-priced way for adults to see sophisticated, family-friendly shows that conservatives and fans of good television alike ought to be on board for.

It says a lot about how poorly the presidential debate was moderated last night that this video left me reflecting that the judges from The Voice appear to have learned a lot more about public presentation and persuasion in three seasons than Jim Lehrer has from overseeing eleven previous presidential debates:

There were a lot of criticism launched at Lehrer last night, but to me, his most significant failing was asking the candidates repeatedly if they thought there were differences between their philosophies and positions when everyone knows they exist and are significant, rather than asking follow-ups that would have helped flesh out those differences. It’s the equivalent of asking actors how it feels to work with a co-star, the sort of query that both demonstrates that the questioner is out of other ideas, and that skates over the surface of the issues actually at stake. Or on The Voice, of defaulting to complimenting the star, rather than laying out a plan for mentoring them, as both Adam Levine and Blake Shelton have gotten very good at doing.

Moderating debates, judging competition shows, and hosting awards shows are all profoundly difficult jobs, in part because there’s no clear set of expectations for how to do them correctly. Lehrer didn’t succeed at any of them, neither defining the issues, nor controlling the flow of the argument between Obama and Romney, which was at times an intriguing free-for-all, nor asking incisive follow-up questions. I don’t envy Lehrer his job, but after eleven outings, he should at least have his own vision of what the job is.

The bridge is yours.

-Lena Dunham is going to make an awful lot of money for her book.

-Carriage cable deals are finally starting to address streaming content.

-Gorgeous science fiction travel posters.

-Netflix will premiere all 13 episodes of its weirdly unnecessary House of Cards remake at once.

-Lincoln 2: Lincoln Harder:

I’ve been feeling like I need a bit of a shakeup in the fantasy that I read, so over the weekend, I finished Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, her rich novel about sorcery and sexual violence in a post-apocalyptic Sudan. It’s not a perfect book—it’s not always clear what’s going on in the interlocking plots, and some of the characters come across a bit flat. But Okorafor’s central innovation is a brilliant one, both for the purposes of the novel, and for conversations around her main subject: she treats misogynistic violence as a strain of magic, something that deeply permeates the world in which her main character, Onyesonwu, conceived in a rape that is part of a campaign of genocide, lives and learns sorcery, emerging in unpredictable ways, and governing deeply-held ideas about what is natural.

When Onyesonwu is conceived, her mother is on a meditation retreat with other women in the desert. The group of men who attack them mostly intend common domination. But Daib, the man who attacks her mother, has more specific intentions: he plans to father a magically influential son on her. When the result is a daughter, one who is marked as an outcast and a product of rape by hear freckled appearance, his plan is thwarted, and Onyesonwu grows up with her own magic, a product of her father’s hatred and her mother’s determination to live, and to raise an independent daughter.

As she grows up, and into the community where she and her mother settle, Onyesonwu’s development of her magic and of her sexual identity both are influenced by the magical norms of the area. She becomes friends with Mwita, another Ewu (a person presumed to be the result of a pregnancy that is caused by sexual assault), but their closeness is initially limited by his magical studies, which Onyesonwu is not allowed to join because she is a girl. “He won’t teach you because you’re a girl, a woman!” Mwita tells Onyesonwu of his teacher. “Because of what you carry here! You can bring life, and when you get old, that ability becomes something else even greater, more dangerous and unstable!” The idea that the capacity to create and sustain life is powerful proves to be true, but the sorcerers’ desire to control it has more to do with their own concerns than with the idea that women can’t handle the way pregnancy inflects magic.

And Onyesonwu also tries to integrate herself more deeply into the town where she is initially understood to be separate by going through a ritual 11-year-old girls perform, even though her mother disapproves. The ritual turns out to involve clitordectomy and giving the girls stones to hold under their tongues to slow their speech. And the surgeries performed on them are enhanced with magic: “The scalpel that they use is treated by Aro,” Mwita explains to Onyesonwu when she experiences agonizing pain when they’re first intimate. “There’s juju on it that makes it so that a woman feels pain whenever she is too aroused . . . until she’s married.” For some of the girls in Onyesonwu, that pain is a terrible curse, as it is for one of her friends who, when she grows older, is turned away by the man she loves because he cannot bear to cause her pain. “Soon we’ll be eighteen, fully fledged adults!” her friend rages. “Why wait until marriage to enjoy what Ani gave me! Whatever the curse, I wanted to break it. I’ve been trying . . . Today it felt like I was going to die. Calculus refused to continue.” But for another, Binta, who was being molested by her father before the ritual, the magical and surgical removal of her capacity for pleasure is something of an escape. “Ani protects me,” she explains to her friends of her father’s reaction. “He-he understands now…He won’t touch me anymore.”
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Stories about daughters and their overprotective fathers sometimes seem to stretch all the way back to, well, the cavemen. But I have to admit I’m kind of excited by Dreamworks twist on that dynamic in The Croods, which features Nicholas Cage as an overly cautious caveman dad who tells his children stories that all end with the moral, “One day, she saw something new and died,” and Emma Stone as his adventuresome daughter, who gets her family out into the sunshine:

I dig that the daughter’s adventurous spirit isn’t just a way of asserting her right to make her own decisions and to be trusted by her father, but as a means for her entire family’s evolutions. And it’s cute that her name is Eep, a name that sounds an awful lot like Eve when spoken aloud, which is appropriate for a girl who’s leading people into a world garden, especially if she doesn’t get blamed for screwing things up this time around. Hopefully her father gets to be something more than the garden-variety animated neurotic or oaf, or both, as cartoon fathers so often tend to be.

Todd VanDerWerff has a fantastic piece in the AV Club about why working-class characters, and even more specifically, working-class problems, have disappeared from sitcoms, touching on everything from the influence of aspirational shows like NBC’s Must-See TV lineup, concerns about writers tackling scenarios they don’t have personal experience with, and the challenges of depicting working-class families without appearing to mock them even when writers and creators themselves come from the backgrounds they’re depicting. Much of the piece addresses the question of why networks aren’t making or airing these kinds of shows, which may or may not be a reflection of audiences’ actual preferences. But it’s also intriguing to see the small evidence we have for what resonates with viewers at home. Todd considers Modern Family, a ratings monster that overshadows shows like my beloved Raising Hope and The Middle:

Take Modern Family, currently one of the most popular comedies on television. The series’ central family—Phil and Claire Dunphy, played by Julie Bowen and Ty Burrell—is headed by a real-estate agent and his stay-at-home wife. Yet even though the show debuted in 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, when a real-estate agent would have been at wit’s end, trying to make sales, the Dunphys never want for money. This isn’t even about how the family can afford a gigantic house—it’s perhaps plausible that Phil got a sweetheart deal. The lack of worry about money is built into the DNA of the show. The characters are constantly getting in car accidents that don’t seem to have any financial effect on them. (Even with good insurance, the number of cars this family goes through should be prohibitively expensive.)…Even if TV comedy’s borderline ignorance of class issues shouldn’t be considered politically irresponsible, consider how much it robs any given series of stakes. When Modern Family started out, it was about a family where the individual members often didn’t get along. As time went on and the conflicts softened—inevitable on a TV comedy—the source of drama too often has to come from outside elements, like all those car accidents. Attempting to avoid this is why so many great TV comedies have given their characters money troubles. (On Roseanne, those money troubles actually got worse as the series went along, until the central family won the lottery in an ill-advised final season.)

I sometimes wonder if television is where the last vestiges of our burst economic bubble linger. We may have come to terms with the fact that we, personally, can’t have the big house with the adjustable rate mortgage, but we haven’t quite gotten over the idea that it would be nice if someone, somewhere could, whether in the Hamptons estates on Revenge, the light-filled loft on New Girl, or even the haunted apartment building on 666 Park Avenue. We may have accepted a stagnant unemployment rate and its impact on our day-to-day lives, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t nice to look at a world where the Clintonian dream of unimpeded growth still procedes apace, where jobs are unstressful, student loan rates aren’t a problem because no one needs student loans, and people who work in the service industry, like Rachel on Friends, do so on their way to careers in fashion or the arts rather than out of economic necessity. If television is an engine of national fantasies, it makes sense that it would be one of the final places where we indulge the dreams we’ve set aside in our day-to-day lives, not because they’re bad dreams, but because they’re unsustainable. And if television has trained viewers not to look for themselves and scenarios they can identify with but for aspirational problems and something they’d like to have, that’s a preference that took time to build, and will take time to reverse.