Whether you’re coupled or single, Valentine’s Day can be pretty stressful. Restaurants are crowded. Flowers are overpriced. And like New Year’s Eve, another constructed holiday that’s supposed to be the best night ever, it’s actually impossible to do much more than meet basic expectations. But if you’re doing the wise thing and staying in for the evening, but still want to entertain yourself, you can actually have a pretty good time. And thanks to the wonder of streaming video, you can do all of it without any advance planning.

If You Want To Celebrate Friendship, Not Romance: If you’re celebrating your female friends, Ann Friedman makes the case for Parks and Recreation‘s season-two episode “Galentine’s Day,” and for living every day as if friendship is just as important as love. But best friends don’t always have to be same-gender, and if you’re a guy celebrating a female friend or vice versa, I recommend the terminally-underrated TBS sitcom My Boys, which stars Jordana Spiro as a Chicago sportswriter with a group of male poker and bar buddies. And if you’re dealing with a happiness imbalance in your best friendships, The Trip, a road trip involving comedians, amazing food, and Michael Caine impersonations, is incredible.

If You’re Exhausted By Valentine’s Day Commercialism: The good people over at Vulture are debating Sleepless In Seattle v. You’ve Got Mail. But they’re both wrong! The best Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan romantic comedy is the deeply weird Joe Versus The Volcano, in which a disgruntled factory worker gets asked by a wealthy industrialist to jump into a volcano so he can continue mining a valuable metal, and along the way to his fiery death, ends up dating three different Meg Ryans. It’s delightful. Or if the king and queen of romantic comedies aren’t your cup of tea, there’s always The Jonses, in which David Duchovy and Demi Moore play a fake family whose job is to model an aspirational lifestyle and to ramp up spending in whatever neighborhood they’re moved in to. It’s less lighthearted, but much sharper about the recession!

You’re Working On Your Work-Love Balance: It’s been a rough couple of years for romantic comedies, but Morning Glory is the rare bright spot. It’s the slightly surreal story of Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams), a workaholic morning news show producer, who is rewarded for being awesome at her job with Patrick Wilson and the sight of Harrison Ford making her a frittata on national television. From the back catalogue, there’s Soapdish, the weirdest, best workplace romantic comedy of all time, which features Sally Field as a soap opera star, Kevin Klein as her ex-husband doing dinner theater, Robert Downey Jr. as an easily-manipulatable network executive, and Whoopi Goldberg as a deeply put-upon writer.

You’re Feeling Totally, Sentimentally Romantic: I’m all for fighting the romance-industrial complex if you feel like it, but that doesn’t have to mean that love is dead! If you’re in the mood to give in, here are two ways to go. You could dig into Baz Luhrmann’s back catalogue and watch Strictly Ballroom, his lush, but comparatively low-fi movie about competitive ballroom dancing competitions in Australia, Spanish immigrants to the continent, and the power of “Time After Time.” And if you want a little film school to go with your heart-warming, watch The Lady Eve, if only for this scene:

And the fact that every woman should want to be as tough as Barbara Stanwyck in this movie, and every man should be cool enough to want to date her.

Last week, prompted by what appeared to be a product integration plot on The Middle that was aimed at boosting the desirability of the iPad, the New Yorker’s television critic Emily Nussbaum laid out a useful distinction between “props (placement) and integration (paid scripted plots.)” I’ve always said that I’m relatively comfortable with television shows, particularly low-rated but beloved ones that are looking to stay alive by tightening their budgets, by striking some deals with corporate sponsors, either for casual product placement, or for the kind of very transparent, self-aware product integration deals that Subway struck with both Chuck and Community. I think I’m somewhat more tolerant than Emily of the idea that my television programs will try to sell me things, if only because I think it’s a self-limiting form of minor evil. There are only so many times per season you can get away with a plot that involves trying to sell me a product, but an infinite number of times you can try to sell me on many other rotten ideas that have a much greater impact than the purchase of computer electronics.

That said, we’re seeing the rise of a very different kind of product integration in popular culture that’s bumping up against my sense of comfort. Increasingly, we’re starting to see shows and movies where product integration isn’t incidental—it’s the frame for the entire product. And it’s selling companies, rather than discrete products.

First, there was CBS’s attempt to put together a show based at Groupon, the online coupon dealer. Now, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are starring in a movie, The Internship in which they’re interns at Google:

The CBS show didn’t come through, but both it and The Internship have as their premise the idea that the companies where they’re set are innovative, dynamic places full of interesting, admirable people (30 Rock at least sold NBC and GE as not-even-hot messes). Groupon would have been the star of a television show precisely at the point when its daily deal business model was coming under question, as it and competitors like Living Social ran out of companies willing to participate for the first time, and for companies willing to reup after their first experiences. It’s absolutely true that Google has incredible office space—I’ve visited the ones here in DC, which are deeply enviable—but there’s much more to the company than that. Loyalty to an entire company is much, much more valuable to an organization than loyalty to a single product: Apple, and increasingly Amazon are examples of how profitable it can be to lock in a customer for an entire range of their needs, rather than for one of them. And encouraging us to become attached to corporations (as if they were, say, people) may also be a way of encouraging us to look less closely that those companies have, whether it’s the environmental toll of Apple products or labor issues in Amazon’s fulfillment chain.

In other words, it’s a win-win for companies who can sell themselves as settings to Hollywood. It’s a good deal for movie or television productions that can get substantial subsidies by setting shows and movies in corporations. But for me, it’s a decided bridge too far.

Grantland’s Alex Pappademas recently hit the road with Dan Harmon, his girlfriend Erin McGathy, and various and sundry other people as they put on Harmontown, Harmon’s podcast, as a live national tour. Depending on the level of attention you’ve been paying to Harmon’s life and person outside his role as the creator of Community, reading the resulting chronicle of the trip will be either a profoundly dispiriting experience, or a reaffirmation of things you already knew. But the part of it I found perhaps most disconcerting was a long rant Harmon goes on about television that Pappademas reproduces in order to give readers a sense of “what it’s like to talk to Harmon, who’s one of the most exhaustingly brilliant people I’ve ever had a conversation with.” Harmon apparently said:

When 30 Rock lands on the cover of Rolling Stone, when any television show is lionized for being “smart,” someone’s laughing all the way to the bank — some company, it used to be General Electric, but now it’s Comcast. That there’s a difference between any of this shit is the greatest joke that television ever told. I mean, as the creator of Community, I’m telling you: It’s all garbage. And the idea that my garbage, y’know, needed a better time slot or deserved an Emmy or didn’t deserve an Emmy, the idea that it was better or worse than 30 Rock or Arrested Development or Freaks and Geeks and all that shit — you only have to take a couple steps back before you realize that you’re looking at a bunch of goddamn baby food made out of corn syrup. It’s just a big blob of fucking garbage. The medium is dispensed to people who can’t feed back, can’t change it, who only get it in 20-minute chunks interrupted by commercials, and you’re watching either really well-written jokes or so-so-written jokes or terribly written jokes, but you’re just watching jokes written by a bunch of people who all have one thing in common: They’re not allowed to say whatever they’re thinking! They’re not allowed. You’re definitely not getting truth; you’re getting lies.

Now, so why does this concept of “meta” and smart TV and snobbery — like, why does it offend people? Why can’t you just say, “I don’t like that show; it’s not my cup of tea. I prefer this show”? Because we’re programmed to hate ourselves for being stupid. We are told that the goal is to be smart, and to differentiate between good and bad, and then we are told, from left to right, what is good and bad, and then we are told to go at each other’s throats. And that’s why, if a television show like Community has an element to it where someone says, “This feels a lot like a television show,” you can’t just ignore that — you can’t just take it or leave it. You have to violently — like, it’s a political issue. It’s like, you gotta fight it; you gotta hate it.

If you’re a critic, you have to write your 90-page review of it that takes longer to read than it does to watch the episode, prattling endlessly in this pseudo-intellectual way, filling the next tier down’s head with this language that they can use to talk about the show over coffee. The conversation we’re not having is: “Hey, there’s 250 million of us watching an average of six hours a day of a one-way transmission that only ever tells us that we are all animals and that we should buy Cottonell.” That’s the one conversation no one is having, not a single one of us. Well, I mean, there are a couple people having it; they’re on street corners covered in tattoos with their dicks pierced, and they’re holding signs saying, “Honk if you want to burn down the White House.” Those people are not marketable; we put them in the same drawer as homeless people; they’re weird characters, putting flyers on your windshield and walking around barefoot and freaking out about the fact that this Orwellian nightmare is happening, and we’re all inside having these debates about whether or not liking 30 Rock makes us smart or stupid.

Now, I say everything that follows as someone who believes even more than the average, 90-page-review-writing, critic that television matters, that movies matter, hell, that Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series of romance novels is a delightful and important critique of the genre while also still being a successful example of it. So Dan Harmon can feel free to ignore as much of this as he chooses. But in my defense, I’m also someone who wrote a long meditation on NCIS and Americans’ relationship to government, so I’m not sure I’m guilty of trying to sort out whether I’m smart based on my love of both Anthony DiNozzo and Chris Traeger.

But beyond the questions of my investment in a system Harmon thinks is nonsense, and of Harmon’s own self-regard and how it pairs with his self-hatred—which was a striking element of this piece even for someone who suffers from substantial self-image dysmorphia—this…was not quite the visionary statement I expected? For all that it’s absolutely true that all television that is broadcast on cable or networks is produced in a corporate environment, to say that “It’s just a big blob of fucking garbage” is the equivalent of arguing that there’s no substantive difference beween the Democratic and Republican parties. It may be true that there isn’t as much variation as we’d like in the offerings available to us. But the corporate money that’s gone into our politics has actually homogenized the party system much more than the corporate money invested in television development has ever homogenized content—and the differences between the parties remain easily discernable. To stick with the comparison, there genuinely is a difference between the smarmy cynicism of House of Cards‘ garage-murdering, sex-having, amoral power brokers, and the optimism of Parks and Recreation‘s argument that local government can genuinely make life better.

And for all that television’s a one-way medium, it’s not alone—and it has more capacity to adapt over time than either novels or movies. Girls is to television as Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be is to novels, an almost pathologically open dispatch from a young woman’s perspective. While Heti’s novel will only ever be what it is, Girls has actually gotten substantially stranger in its second season, and more willing to test the limitations of our affections for its characters, whether Hannah’s upping the self-regard factor, or Jessa’s being called out as the golddigger that she is, even as the show expects us to continue to sympathize with her. Parks and Recreation actually got more optimistic about government, and more committed to showing its main character as competent and engagingly strange, after its first season, the opposite direction from the one you’d expect a corporately-controlled product to travel. The Wire may be the Great American Novel, but it also switched settings and main characters, growing and changing in a way a movie or novel never could have done.
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The bridge is yours.

-Last-minute Valentine’s Day shoppers, don’t fear. My friend Alejandra O’Leary and her awesome band have you covered.

-Reamde is coming to television and I am excited.

-Billy Wilder asked himself “How would Lubitsch do it,” and more Hollywood storytellers should do the same.

-Peter Dinklage is going to be in the next X-Men movie.

-An ode to Joni Mitchell’s Blue.

This post discusses plot points from the February 13 episode of The Americans.

It’s Valentine’s Day today, but we’ve been living in a moment of television romanticism for some time now. Homeland started out as a nervy thriller and turned into an epic love story, which as Lorrie Moore persuasively argued in the New York Review of Books, works only if you’re able to believe that an obsessive Central Intelligence Agency analyst and a dedicated al Qaeda terrorist would be able to shut out everything else and fall uncritically for each other (whether or not they have an intense and believable sexual attraction to each other is a separate question). Downton Abbey has won over significant followings in the United Kingdom and the United States on the strength of Michelle Dockery and Dan Stevens’ performance as Lady Mary and Matthew, members of the British nobility slowly finding their way to each other. And The Americans, FX’s Cold War drama, is effective precisely because it’s a portrait of a marriage, albeit one arranged by the KGB.

But there’s something that makes Homeland and Downton Abbey very different from The Americans, and it’s not just how the relationships in each show began. In Homeland, Carrie sets aside her loyalty to the United States, and Brody’s loyalty to al Qaeda wavers because in each other they find kindred, intense, obsessive spirits. Ideology is less important than love. And in Downton Abbey, ideological concerns for Matthew and Mary after they’re married, as they debate how to modernize management of the estate and how to manage questions ranging from Edith’s offer to write a newspaper column and Branson’s integration into the family. Politics, for Downton Abbey is a means of creating obstacles for a couple in what is primarily a love story.

In The Americans, though, politics and ideology serve a very different function. They’re among the things that draw people to each other, providing the basis for conversation, mutual conviction, and real love. As Elizabeth explains to Phillip after he discovers her affair with Gregory (Derek Luke), a civil rights activist who Elizabeth has turned into an operative, and who is pulled back into their lives when they need to conduct an operation to deal with their colleague’s secret wife, “I was 17 when I joined the KGB. I never had a boyfriend. They put me with you. When we got here, I was 22 years old. I was living in a strange house, in a strange country, with a strange man. And I met Gregory and he was passionate about the cause. He was passionate about everything. He was passionate about me. I recruited him. And he didn’t even want everything. He just believed, like I did. He was the first person I felt I could really talk to. And I needed that. It just happened. It never really happened that way for us, did it?”

Politics aren’t a side issue here. They’re not a gimmick The Americans is pulling in to the show in order to create problems for a couple in order to artificially spin out the amount of time it takes to get them together, or to create drama for a couple we want to believe is essentially happy. In this show, politics is one of the things, other than good looks or ephemeral chemistry, that draw people together, that give them the basis of work they want to do together, that gives them something to talk about and a sense that they’re profoundly in step.

As we’ve seen in previous episodes, differences in their ideology is one of the reasons that Phillip and Elizabeth have found themselves in tension, and unable to have a genuine relationship. The decision to defect or not to defect isn’t just a matter of their political views shifting: it means dramatically changing the terms on which their relationship is conducted. And it’s been an understandably traumatic conversation to have come out into the open. But the fact that they’re discussing defecting, and the impossibility of the things they’ve been asked to do by their KGB handlers, and what being in the KGB has done to them is the very thing that’s made a real relationship between them possible for the first time. The breakdown of Elizabeth’s loyalty to the agency is what let her violate the rules she and Phillip were given, and to talk to him honestly about her sexual assault, removing one of the obstacles to them having a genuine sexual life where they don’t harm each. “Things are changing at home with me and Phillip,” Elizabeth tells Gregory. “You mean you’re finally leaving him?” he asks her. “The opposite, actually,” she tells him.

Not all couples have the same challenges that Phillip and Elizabeth have to deal with. Most of us don’t have to manage country estates, our relationships determining the economic fates of hundreds of people in the region where we live. And for all Romeo and Juliet-style romances between couples dramatically divided by differences imagined, a la the Capulets and Montagues, or real, as between the United States and al Qaeda, most of us aren’t working a James Carville-Mary Matalin schtick. But politics and passionate convictions matter to our relationships, too. Whether it’s the division of housework, or the ability to genuinely support each other’s work and share our interests, our ideas and our romances aren’t separate, or obstacles to each other. The Americans is the rare show to recognize that.