Yesterday, Travis reported on Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard’s prediction that in 30 years, the National Football League will die because making necessary changes to improve the safety of the game will produce a sport that no one wants to watch. I think both that scenario and the one that Travis himself lays out are not unrealistic. But it’s also worth remembering that the NFL’s life or death won’t happen in a closed surgical theater. There are people other than the players and owners, and in college, the athletics programs and fundraising departments, with a vested interest in keeping football alive and immensely popular.

Significant among those interests? Broadcast television and ESPN. In the week leading up to the Super Bowl, the League is touting the performance of football on television. 55 percent of the television broadcasts since September 1, 2010, that averaged at least 20 million viewers were of NFL football games, or 135 out of 247 broadcasts. The next-closest program? American Idol, with 39 broadcasts, followed by the London Olympics, with 18. The first scripted program on the list is NCIS, with 11 broadcasts that hit 20 million. There’s no wonder broadcast nets pay big for the games they air: Sunday Night Football is part of what’s helped NBC rebound from fourth place to first in the ratings.

Some of that’s an indication of the increasing weakness of broadcast television, which has had a tremendously difficult time launching scripted programming that finds an audience anywhere near that large, and which has seen the numbers on big reality programs, like Idol and Dancing With The Stars decline. But that weakness means the value of football is two-fold. Football broadcasts prop up television’s advertising revenue model. And they provide a potential launching platform for new programming. That’s one of the reasons the Super Bowl rotates from network to network every year: it’s such a critically important platform for showcasing existing programming to one of the largest audiences that assembles in front of the television anymore.

And that’s just on broadcast: football’s even more important to both cable networks and the cable business model. People who oppose cable bundling frequently complain about the price of sports channels, but access to lots and lots of football is one of the reasons sports make cable seem like a good deal for the more than 100 million American households who subscribe to it. The death of football through formal dismantlement or a rising disinterest and distaste would make bundled cable television seem less valuable.

Television, in other words, badly needs the NFL to stay healthy. What that means the industry can, and will, do remains an open question. But football and television’s futures are deeply intertwined, and at a time when the content television is creating for itself is having trouble finding an audience, those ties are tighter than ever.

The Miami New Times published a bombshell investigative piece this morning that tied multiple Major League Baseball players, including New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez, to a Miami drug company that was supplying them with anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, and other performance enhancing drugs. The story of Biogenesis, the drug firm, and Rodriguez, who admitted to steroid use before, brought back an ugly issue baseball thought it had largely put behind it when it instituted strong drug testing and harsh penalties in 2004.

The response, of course, has been an immediate call for more testing and harsher penalties. But here’s a question few seem to be asking: do drug tests and harsh penalties deter drug use? And if they don’t, how will more drug tests and even harsher penalties do any better?

In baseball, that’s impossible to know definitively, since there are no before-and-after testing numbers. But academic research suggests that random drug testing probably doesn’t prevent drug use. Dr. Linn Goldberg testified during a House Oversight Committee last month that his two-year testing of high school athletes had no deterrent effect. Other academic research has found that “testing alone is not a sufficient deterrent to eliminate drug use among college athletes.” Research into random testing for drugs like marijuana, meanwhile, has found little proof that such testing prevents use.

If Rodriguez, who had already admitted to steroid use once, indeed used performance enhancing drugs again, drug testing and the threat of penalties and public shame obviously failed as a deterrent. Random tests and the threat of rescinded titles, a lifetime ban, and federal punishment didn’t stop Lance Armstrong, and harsh rules and penalties in professional cycling and the Olympics haven’t prevented numerous athletes from using performance enhancers.

It’s easy to suggest that drug testing acts as a deterrent and that more of it would prevent even more use, but it’s hard to find proof of how effective drug tests are at actually preventing use. I’m not sure what the solution to sports’ drug problem is. I’m not even sure there is one, especially if the technology and funding that goes into producing performance enhancing drugs continues to outpace the technology and funding that goes into testing for them. But before we rush to the intuitive “more testing, harsher penalties” solution, shouldn’t we first figure out if the testing that is being conducted now does any good?

Poor Rush Limbaugh, who really has no one else to blame for the fact that his comments about Sandra Fluke lost him advertisers and made Mike Huckabee a viable competitor, seems to be feeling sorry for himself lately. In a recent interview with The New Republic, President Obama said, truthfully, that “If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it.” Now, Limbaugh appears to believe that this means President Obama is pulling some kind of mysterious strings—and to be denying his own influence. As The Hollywood Reporter explains:

Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience Monday that President Obama is promoting a “secondary boycott” against those he disagrees with and that the mainstream media is on board with the strategy.

“I would love to take credit for this,” Limbaugh said Monday. “I’d love to say that I find myself here because of a brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed strategy, but one of the reasons that Fox News and I stand out like sore thumbs here is because the rest of the media is gone. The rest of the media is in the tank. The rest of the media has long ago ceased doing their job. They’re not reporting, they’re not curious, they’re not holding Obama accountable. They are on board. They are part of the agenda-advancement team.”

I’m awfully curious about this kind of thinking. Does Limbaugh believe himself to be influential, or not? If he doesn’t believe himself to have any particular influence over lawmakers, does that mean advertisers can’t decide if they do or don’t want to be associated with him, which is, after all, how pure media organizations have always set up that part of their revenue equation? How does President Obama saying that legislators care what Limbaugh thinks translate into him organizing a boycott against Limbaugh? What kind of free time does Limbaugh think President Obama has? It’s always entertaining seeing what it’s like down the rabbit hole, but I have less amused tolerance than usual when the subject is Limbaugh’s hurt feelings.

The bridge is yours.

-The most badass cartoon heroines of the 1980s, as determined by io9.

-Paul Giamatti might play the Rhino in Spider-Man 2.

-The Caldecott and Newbury Medal award winners are announced.

-Don’t get too excited for the CW’s Wonder Woman show, at least not yet.

-Siskel and Ebert v. the Star Wars haters:

As the end of 30 Rock approaches on Thursday, I’ve been going through the Kübler-Ross stages of grief as I prepare to lose the network television show that’s dominated my time as a critic: denial, anger, handshakefulness, depression, and marathon watching. I’ve thought a great deal about what I want to say about the end of Tina Fey’s brilliant, persistent creation, the show that beat Aaron Sorkin, that helped define NBC’s comedy brand as the smart kid at the party, and that helped lever Fey from Saturday Night Life to massive stardom. But watching the first several seasons of 30 Rock again, I was struck less by the show’s gender politics, which have always been a key focus of the show and the criticism of it, or by its wicked satire of the broadcast television business, which I’ve gotten to see in action at the Television Critics Association press tour, than the very fine line it walked on race.

30 Rock‘s become more of a cartoon over time, but its initial premise was as much a racial one as it was about gender, and one with resonance both for our political environment and the arguments we’ve had about race on television in the years since 30 Rock debuted. Liz Lemon, a middle-class white woman (from Whitehaven, PA), who’d created a sketch show with her white best friend, had her world turned upside down when she was forced to add Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan), who was not just a man, but an African-American man of exceedingly modest and unfamiliarly urban origins, to her program as a co-star. As Liz and Tracy got to know each other, 30 Rock pulled off an extraordinarily difficult feat. In its early years, it was often a show about the ways in which the broad preconceptions of white liberals fail them when they begin some of their first personal and professional relationships with people of color. And in Tracy and Angie Jordan, 30 Rock did something even harder: it gave characters of color the opportunity to take alternately cheerful and exasperated advantage of Liz’s awkwardness, without ever portraying them as race hustlers, and staged constant debates among African-American characters about what constituted racial progress. Liz’s issues might loom large and cause discomfort, but she was mistaking the sideshow of her feelings for the main event.

Almost from the moment we met her, one of Liz Lemon’s signature preoccupations was demonstrating that she was not, in fact, a racist. “Race is a huge issue, according to Newsweek magazine,” Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski), Liz’s best friend told her in an early episode of the show they created together. “Well, it is 2007 and some of us don’t have these hangups,” Liz declared, proud of herself. But of course, Liz is rife with racial hangups, many of which she mistook for sensitivity. In the season one episode “Jack-tor,” for example, Liz became convinced that Tracy was illiterate after he flubbed a series of cue cards. When she offered to give him time off to attend reading classes, Tracy amused himself by taking advantage of her condescension. “I can’t read!” he declared histrionically as he high-tailed it out of the office. “I sign my name with an X! I once tried to make mashed potatoes with laundry detergent! I think I voted for Nader!” When she discovered that he was tweaking her, rather than examining her own preconceptions, Liz got huffy about Tracy’s reaction to her assumptions. “He took advantage of my white guilt, which is only to be used for good, like overtipping, and supporting Barack Obama,” she explained, casting herself a a victim, and long before Obama even formally began his campaign for president, setting up support for him as a proxy for racial self-congratulation by white voters.

Liz made similar mistakes early in her relationship with Tracy’s wife, Angie (Sherri Shepherd), falling back on racial tropes in the absence of knowing how to make conversation with Angie like an actual person. “Bling-bling! Ghetto fabulous!” Liz complimented her on a diamond ring Tracy brought her as part of a reconciliation. “This belonged to Brooke Astor,” Angie told her, irritated. And their relationship got worse when Angie demanded approval over Tracy’s characters on the show, rejecting a pimp character named Slickback Lamar, and refusing to be mollified by an Obama sketch. “No,” she told Liz. “We support Kucinich.” And while Angie initially wanted to sanitize TGS of racial stereotypes, she would ultimately turn a profit, and create a hit for NBC in Queen of Jordan, a broad reality show in the tradition of the Real Housewives that featured Angie and her entourage, while making a joke out of executive Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), whose anxiety about preserving his dignity set him up for constant humiliation. Liz may have told old-school comedy writer Rosemary Howard (Carrie Fisher) that “You can’t do race stuff on TV. It’s too sensitive,” and been taken aback when Rosemary told her of a blackface sketch pitch that “We would have done that on the Mandrell Sisters.” And as it turns out, it’s not Liz who figures out how to do racial comedy on television, but Angie, who finds a business model in exploiting racial and sexual stereotypes and preconceptions—many of them likely held by people who think of themselves as liberals.
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The news that J.J. Abrams will be directing Star Wars Episode VII may have me down at the mouth for what it says about the larger, risk-averse state of franchise science fiction and fantasy. But when it comes to Star Wars, because I am an irrepressible optimist, there’s always a new hope. And this time, it’s in the form of rumors that Disney may be considering a female lead for the project, though some of that sourcing includes the speculation that Matthew Vaughn pitched Chloe Grace Moretz as a lead, a prospect that would have killed me and sent me to feminist nerd heaven.

Because I’d love to see this come to pass; because I still think it would be smart for Disney to not entirely blow up the Expanded Universe continuity so it can juice the value of a ton of extant intellectual property; and because early rumors are that Michael Arndt, who is writing the script, is setting the movie in the Jedi Praxaeum, the school established on Yavin 4 after the end of the Galactic Civil War, it’s worth a reminder of how many fascinating female characters pass through that setting in the Expanded Universe. Any of these women would make for terrific subject material for Episode VII, and pay us back for the deeply terrible writing for Padmé Amidala in the prequels.

1. Jaina Solo: The most obvious way, and one of the coolest, to pass the torch from the generation of actors who defined Star Wars to their characters’ children. Jaina Solo is Han Solo and Leia Organa’s daughter, and in the Expanded Universe, she grows up to be an incredibly talented fighter pilot, Jedi Knight, and half of a hot will-they-or-won’t-they romance with the descendant of an Imperial officer. There’s a ton to be done there, and a natural bridge for small roles for Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, as well as Mark Hamill as Jaina’s famous uncle.

2. Tenel Ka Djo: Princess Leia is one of the most badass subversions of the princess genre of all time, from her toughness under torture, her prickly romance with Han Solo, and her role as a stateswoman in her own right. But she’s hardly the only descendant of a royal family to find a larger purpose in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Tenel Ka Djo is the heir to a hugely powerful matrilineal kingdom, Hapes, who walks away from her destiny to train as a Jedi Knight. Disney’s made some steps in the right direction with Brave, but this would be downright revolutionary.

3. Mara Jade: Maybe the contender with the strongest fanboy constituency, there are challenges with making Mara the main character of a new trilogy, namely that she ends up as Luke Skywalker’s wife, and telling her origin story now would require finding a way to substantially age down Mark Hamill if they’re going to have a canonical epic romance. But Star Wars is, to a certain extent, really the story of Darth Vader. With him out of the picture, Mara’s trajectory from the Dark Side—she worked for the Emperor, before Luke found her and turned her to the light—would provide a complementary journey that would hit familiar emotional beats and make similar use of the Force.

4. Daeshara’cor: In the original Star Wars trilogy, members of the alien species Twi’lek mostly got to be sexy—and sacrificed—dancing girls or villainous advisers. Daeshara’cor is a former slave who hooks up with the Republic and with Luke Skywalker out of her hatred of the institution. She could be an interesting way to tease out the impact of the Empire and the stakes of the Rebellion that doesn’t involve goofy trade federations or adorable podracing moppets.

5. Tionne Solusar: Need to give a new generation of Star Wars fans a thorough grounding in the mythology of the Force and Jedi history? Who better to feature than the Jedi historian. Send Tionne around the galaxy on a testing and recruiting mission, and you could recreate some of the getting-the-band-together magic of X-Men: First Class.