This post discusses basic premise details of The Americans.

In the post-Tony Soprano world, television’s so obsessed with creating successful anti-heroes that it’s corrupted the word beyond its original meaning, applying it to all manner of dark characters. If a hero is someone we want to and should, within the structure of the story, root for, a villain is someone we want to and should root against, and an anti-hero is someone a show succeeds in making you want to root for, even though, by all the conventions of morality, we know we shouldn’t. Characteristically, the way we’ve known we shouldn’t cheer for an anti-hero is because they employ violence, either for reasons we know to be wrong, or to be ridiculous, be it Tony living out the terminal decline of the fantasy that is The Godfather in suburban New Jersey, Omar Little robbing drug dealers in Baltimore (both he and Maurice Levy are absolutely correct about each other), or Walter White cooking meth to live out a fantasy of his own genius and dominance that he failed to achieve in legal life.

Elizabeth Jennings (Kerri Russell), the KGB spy living under cover in the United States of 1980 in the Cold War drama The Americans, which premieres on FX tonight, represents a major break from this anti-hero tradition for two reasons. First, she’s a woman. As much as television has tried to create female anti-heroes, it’s often succeeded in doing something rather different. On Damages, for example, super-lawyer Patty Hewes was more of an anti-villain, a character we might have wanted to root for, given her work going after amoral corporations, but who the show succeeded in making chilly and repulsive, just as Homeland‘s Carrie Mathison is a conventional hero complicated by mental illness and fanaticism. In The Mob Doctor, Grace Devil, who the show’s creators billed as an anti-hero, was really a conflicted, dark hero. Elizabeth may be the first female character who truly fits that definition.

And the reasons she’s an anti-hero represent a significant break with the intellectual tradition of that trope on television. Elizabeth isn’t greedy, or myopic, or casually violent. She’s a deep and true believer in an ideology that will be alien to almost everyone who tunes in to The Americans, a devoted KGB agent who is working as hard as she can for the downfall of the United States. In one of the show’s nicest twists, Elizabeth is actually much more ideologically dedicated than her husband Phillip (Matthew Rhys), who feels the lure of American prosperity, and with whom Elizabeth runs that most bourgeois of business as their cover, a Dupont Circle travel agency. When we see them arrive in the United States in a flashback, both Elizabeth and Phillip marvel over the availability of air conditioning, but while Phillip says that America exceeds his expectations, Elizabeth tightens her lips and declares “There’s a weakness in the people.” As Phillip begins to consider defecting, Elizabeth snaps at him that she would never follow him, “Because I am a KGB officer. Don’t you understand that? After all these years, I would go to jail, I would die, I would lose everything before I would betray my country.” And to hammer home her commitment, she tells Phillip in a subsequent episode that if their options are to be “Tortured, locked away, forced to betray everything we believe in if we ever want to see our kids again? I’m not going to make that choice.”

It’s a great source of pain to Elizabeth that keeping her cover means allowing her children with Phillip, Paige and Henry, to grow up to be Americans, with all the appreciation for capitalist consumer culture that entails. “I’m not finished with them yet. They don’t have to be regular Americans, they can be socialists, they can be trade unionists,” Elizabeth protests, in an argument that suggests she still believes that there’s some flexibility in the society she’s trying to take down. Phillip, more in love with the country they’re hiding out in, is less optimistic. “This place doesn’t turn out socialists,” he tells her.
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College athletes are one step closer to some form of compensation. A federal judge in California refused a request by the NCAA to dismiss a lawsuit that challenges the organization’s rights to the images of former college athletes and the money it makes off them.

Former University of California-Los Angeles basketball star Ed O’Bannon sued the NCAA and video game manufacturers in 2009, claiming that they do not have the right to use his likeness in commercials, video games, and television rebroadcasts without compensation. Last year, lawyers in that suit, which is now a class-action joined by former stars like Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell, amended it to seek a share of all TV and video game revenue for men’s basketball and football players. The suit could be worth billions of dollars for the NCAA, which has a television contract worth more than $10 billion and sells licenses for its brand to video game manufacturers.

The NCAA sought the suit’s dismissal on procedural grounds, but a federal judge denied that motion yesterday:

In dismissing a motion by the NCAA to prevent football and men’s basketball players from legally pursuing a cut of live broadcast revenues, a federal court judge Tuesday raised the stakes for the governing body of college sports as it defends its economic model.

Judge Claudia Wilken issued her ruling Tuesday, rejecting the NCAA’s motion that players in the antitrust suit led by former UCLA star Ed O’Bannon should be precluded from advancing their lawsuit on procedural grounds.

The suit, if O’Bannon prevails, would not allow for compensation while athletes are in college. Instead, it would set up a trust in which players’ share of revenues — 50 percent of TV revenues and 33 percent of those from video game sales — would sit until the completion of their collegiate careers. As lawyer Michael McCann explained in Sports Illustrated, an O’Bannon victory still wouldn’t allow compensation for labor, but it would allow them to be compensated for their images and their use.

As I wrote in a long piece for AlterNet this week, athletes, professors, lawyers, legislators and activist organizations are pursuing compensation and labor rights for athletes in different manners — through litigation, legislation, reform, or outright organization. There is a compelling case that athletes function as employees (much like some graduate students), and that as such, they have a right to a voice in the system in which they function. An O’Bannon victory wouldn’t define athletes as employees. But it would be a clear demonstration of how much value athletes generate for universities and the NCAA, an outcome that would make it harder to for the organization to pretend publicly that the athletes are simply playing for fun.

The bridge is yours.

-A pretty good explanation of how New Girl converted even a diehard skeptic like me.

-Linda Holmes on why “The Head And The Hair” is such a critical episode of 30 Rock.

-Tracking the movements of Petyr Baelish.

-Justice League may not happen if Man of Steel does poorly.

-Have a gorgeous short film:

This post discusses plot points through the January 29 episode of Justified.

Last night’s episode of Justified juxtaposed one of the series’ goofier scenes of violence, Marshal Raylan Givens’ duel with aspiring cockfight manager Randall, conducted with fists and a beanbag gun, with one of its most somber, veteran Colton Rhodes’ preparation to kill prostitute Ellen May, who Boyd Crowder had decided was no longer sufficiently loyal to be trusted with the secret of a murder. It was a particularly striking contrast if, like me, you watched the first four episodes of Justified‘s fourth season in a single sitting. The show has always had a complicated attitude towards violence, one embodied in its title, a reference to Raylan’s insistence in the pilot that a shooting in Miami was “justified”: it’s awfully fun to watch Raylan wreak controlled mayhem, but the line between his deployment of it and the violence of Boyd, his opposite number, is fine and constantly shifting. And this season of Justified, whether it’s intentional or no, has been an extended meditation on both the use and abuse of guns—and of all the other ways we can do awful harm to each other.

When we met Patton Oswalt’s Constable Bob in the first episode of this season, Justified presents an interesting contrast between him and Raylan. The two men have known each other since high school, when Constable Bob put one of their classmates, who bullied him, in a coma—which he’s still in. “They underestimate me at their peril,” Bob tells Raylan. “Just ask Ollie Kemp,” Raylan plays along. “If he could respond,” Bob adds, a little too lightly. On the road, Bob tells Raylan that he’s got an unnerving cache of weapons packed in a “go bag.” “This shit goes road warrior, I’m ready,” Bob declares.

But when it comes to a standoff, Bob isn’t quite the badass he makes himself out to be. And Raylan’s most valuable weapon, in between everything else he uses to get the two of them out of a hostage situation, turns out to be his mouth. Where Raylan’s use of violence comes across as clever and precise—particularly when he shoots out the air bags in a fugitive’s car to break up a standoff without either man getting shot—Bob comes across like a bit of a poser, and one whose pretentions to heroism can actually be dangerous. Some of that is because we’ve been conditioned to think of Raylan as a cool drink of water, and we meet Constable Bob as a kind of dark comic relief. But it’s also true that, unlike Bob, Raylan actually knows what he’s doing with a gun, rather than thinking that possessing a gun confers upon him some sort of magical competence.

Bob isn’t the only person with that misconception, or whose access to guns is more dangerous than protective. Ellen May, who turns out to be keeping a gun for protection not just from clients, but from Ava Crowder, who is now pimping her, shoots and kills a client. “Arlo’s a furry. He usually dresses up in a bunny suit. But this was scary. Plus I was on drugs,” she explains to Ava of why the situation turned deadly (though she later confesses to not being high). When the Marshals go hunting for Waldo Truth, the mysterious man involved in the cocaine parachuting into Harlan County, they find his family smoking pot, telling stories—and pulling handguns. “You gave him a gun?” Mrs. Truth asks after her thirteen-year-old turns out to be packing. “We agreed it was time,” a male member of her family explains. The idea that a young teenager dumb enough to point a pistol at a federal marshal is ready for firearms ownership is a terrifying prospect. And Wynn Duffy’s pulling a pistol and casually shooting a member of the Dixie Mafia dumb enough to poach on Boyd’s territory is a cold illustration of what it means to normalize gun ownership, regular, threatening, gun use, and the escalation of disputes that have no reason to be fatal.
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As part of its attempts to make the U.K.’s citizenship exam more challenging, the Home Office has released a new version that, among other things, includes a wide range of questions on British culture:

The achievements of Monty Python, Rudyard Kipling and Andrew Lloyd Webber are all included in a new 180-page Home Office syllabus which asks potential citizens to learn about Britain’s history, culture and values, from the stone age to the 2010 general election, before they take a new and more tough “Life in the UK” test as part of the government’s intention to dramatically reduce net migration….

Don Flynn, director of the Migrants’ Rights Network, said: “The test takes us a long way from the goal of supporting the integration of migrants. It is in danger of looking more like an entry examination for a public school which requires complete identification with elite views of British history and culture…Migrants will have to learn about Purcell, Benjamin Britten and the Beatles, and “artistic achievements, from medieval stained glass to David Hockney, our national love of gardening, and the work of influential architects”.

I’m obviously sympathetic to complaints about the slants of historical interpretation in the exam. But I’m torn on the question of culture. I appreciate the recognition that part of being a citizen is having a sense of your national and collective culture. Even if you think the Super Bowl is obnoxious, or can’t hit the highest notes in the national anthem, I think most Americans have a general sense of those things, and some feelings about what it means that we like watching large men barrel into each other at high speeds, or the persistence of “Sweet Home Alabama.”

What’s a lot harder, however, turning the task of establishing an unofficial national canon over to the state. While The Guardian, in the piece I’m quoting above, spends more time on objections to the history sections of the exam, I can’t imagine everyone’s pleased with the menu of British culture that’s included in the test, whether the objections are based on the mix of high and low culture, or how multicultural the contributions are. Personally, I’d want to protect new citizens from knowledge of Andrew Lloyd Webber, but that’s just me. And this is for a relatively small country, albeit one with a long literary, architectural, and musical history—I can’t imagine what the fights over establishing a pool of knowledge for an American citizenship test would go. While canon implies something fixed and permanent, I’m a lot happier with a constant state of argument and revision, one not facilitated by the Home Office, or any other government body.

Over at Variety, Andrew Wallenstein has a very smart piece about how a central piece of Netflix’s business strategy may actually work against the company. One of the things Netflix facilitates is binge viewing, which in my case means watching an entire season of 30 Rock in a single day, but for most people means watching a couple of episodes of television at a time, instead of once a week the way they’d be released in their timeslots on television networks.

But when it comes to the shows it’s creating, rather than the ones it’s licensing multiple seasons of at once, that’s a problem. Netflix is releasing every episode of its seasons of Arrested Development and House of Cards at once. And at 14 episodes for Arrested Development and 13 episodes for House of Cards, that’s few enough episodes for people who are interested in just those shows, but untempted by the rest of Netflix’s offerings, to sign up for a free trial of the service, watch everything they want, and then quit before they have to start paying. Wallenstein explains:

A relationship with a program that might otherwise drag out over months on a linear channel is telescoped into hours. And therein lies the paradox inherent in Netflix’s business model: Allowing consumers to consume at their own speed contradicts the company’s financial imperative to keep them on the service paying the seductively cheap flat monthly fee of $8 for as many months as possible. Sure, it’s possible Netflix has assembled a library so vast — over 40,000 episodes of TV and counting — that a subscriber can fill countless months hopping from one binge experience to the next.

But let’s not forget that the whole point of Netflix embarking on an original programming strategy is to bring in new subs by offering a different value proposition. These are consumers who didn’t feel compelled to sign on to binge on library programming, but they’re interested in seeing a buzzed-about new show like “Cards,” and other originals still to come….It’s not like another original series will be waiting for them as soon as they’re done with “Cards.” The next series on Netflix’s slate of originals, Eli Roth’s “Hemlock Grove,” isn’t due until April and the revival of Fox’s “Arrested Development” doesn’t begin until May. Thus, getting new subs to pay for a second consecutive month of services becomes at least a little less likely.

This strategy gets even scarier given Deadline’s reporting that Netflix isn’t financing its original content development from original revenue streams, but at least partially from debt:

About $225M of the proceeds from the $500M offering it announced today — senior notes due in 2021 paying interest at 5.375% a year — will be used to retire the company’s $200M in 8.50% senior notes that are due in 2017. But with Netflix’s first original series, House Of Cards, making its debut on February 1, some investors wonder whether the company needs the remainder to help it handle its steep content payment commitments. Some $2.3B of Netflix’s $5.6B in streaming content obligations will come due in the current fiscal year, Wedbush Securities’ Michael Pachter says. The new debt, he believes, “is necessary to solve near-term cash flow problems, and indicates the low likelihood of positive cash flow for the year.” Netflix’s debt, along with its investments to expand overseas, make it “a risky investment.” Moody’s Investors Service also considers Netflix’s new debt to be risky, giving it a Ba3 rating. The debt assessment firm believes that some of the cash will be used to pay for “investments in original programming, which require more up-front cash payments” than library titles.

It may make sense for Netflix to bring in different tranches of customers with original and licensed programming. But to do it, I’d bet that long-term, the company’s going to have to raise its prices. And to keep up with escalating costs of licensing—particularly as Amazon continues to expand its efforts in this space, Netflix will have to pay just to keep a basic content library, rather than for exclusives—and of content production, those prices will have to keep rising. Netflix, like Hulu Plus, has largely been able to keep its prices stable, rather than subjecting customers to annual price hikes or hikes at the end of contracts a la most cable providers. Negotiating that shift may cost the company customers, too. But Netflix isn’t Amazon: it can’t subsidize its purchases and creation of content with a ton of other merchandise, or with a board that accepts essentially no profits. It’s going to have to come up with the money somehow.