Welcome to the Veronica Mars television club! As I’ve written here before, I grew up as a devoted reader of Rob Thomas’s young adult novels, particularly the exemplary Rats Saw God and Slave Day, but not as a television watcher. By the time I had television and a cable subscription for the first time, Veronica Mars was off the air, and when I began remedying the gaps in my television education, I prioritized shows that were still running, like Mad Men, or whose creators were currently working on projects that I’d need to review, like The Wire and Deadwood. But now that the Kickstarter to fund a Veronica Mars movie has been so successful, and has opened up such interesting questions about funding models for cult hits and the role of fans as investors, I’m pleased to have a chance to catch up. As I mentioned when I announced this project, we’ll be doing two episodes on Mondays and Fridays. So let’s start with the pilot and the second episode of the first season. Be cool, Soda-Pop…

“This is my school,” Veronica explains at the beginning of the pilot. “If you go here, either your parents are millionaires, or your parents work for millionaires. Neptune, California. A town without a middle class.” It’s a phenomenal thesis statement for a show, even without the murder mystery and private eye schtick that follows, given the class homogeneity of most shows about teenagers, whether it’s the overwhelming wealth of the kids on Gossip Girl, the kooky security of the families on Suburgatory, or even the cookie-cutter comfort of The Neighbors. And there are other intriguing details that Veronica offers up. “The day the company went public, Jake Kane made a billion dollars,” she explains of her ex-boyfriend’s family. “Everyone who worked for him, down to the secretaries, became millionaires.” The sudden transformation of working people into the extremely wealthy is a major change for a community to go through, particularly one with such sharp inequality.

But through the first few episodes, that’s a bit more thesis than a paper that’s ready to turn in. Veronica’s dad may joke that they can eat steak like “the lower-middle class to which we aspire,” but Neptune is a town where even poor teenagers have cars or motorcycles. Veronica tells us that her mother left after her father lost his recall election because “The loss of status, the loss of income, was too much for her,” though the show doesn’t really have time to show us what their lives were like before and after the election, and it’s hard to imagine that the sheriff’s job actually lifted the family up into the upper-class, given that we’re told that a respectable middle class doesn’t exist. Rich kids may use a code* to set up their parties to avoid infiltration by people outsider their clique, but they end up drinking on a beach in Eli’s neighborhood rather than doing something that would be genuinely inaccessible to the teenagers they want to exclude. Rich people in Neptune may have captured the sheriff’s department, but through the first two episodes, given the ease with which Veronica and Wallace subvert the sheriff’s department, the show’s set up a fairly equal contest. It’s not clear what inequality actually means for life in Neptune yet.
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In a USA Today op-ed published Friday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and business executive Tom McMillen argue that the focus on athletics and academics at major American colleges and universities is out of balance, and they proposed multiple ideas to fix it. The majority focus on the salaries of major college basketball coaches, which have skyrocketed in recent years even though graduation rates have not.

While some of the reforms make sense — I like the idea of clawbacks for coaches who get programs in trouble and then bolt to a new school — one of their proposals does not:

Governing boards and college presidents can take steps to right that imbalance. They could adopt a model of “best practices” that includes greater parity in new contracts for coaches between academic and athletic bonuses and provides penalties for poor academic performance.

It’s hard to analyze exactly how such a system would work, but the basic idea of penalizing coaches for poor academic results is a reform that sounds good on its face but is likely to cause more problems than it solves. For one, it punishes the wrong people. Coaches aren’t responsible for developing a culture in which winning is the primary goal. At major athletics programs, no coach who graduates 100 percent of his players but loses a majority of his games is going to keep his job. Why, then, would we punish the coach for prioritizing what they are paid to prioritize? That allows universities and administrators the freedom to ignore their own culpability in the creation of a culture that prioritizes athletic success over academics and their own participation in a business arrangement that generates millions of dollars in revenues but leaves athletes both undereducated and without any voice in the process.

The biggest problem, though, is that such a penalty cuts off the top of the tree but doesn’t do anything about the roots. It’s easy, after all, to graduate more players: put them in easier classes, fudge their grades when they need help, and hand them a diploma. That’s already occurred at places like North Carolina, Florida State, and Georgia. It isn’t much of a secret that it’s happening elsewhere when athletes all show up in the same geology class (“Rocks For Jocks“) or when nearly all of them end up majoring in sociology, communications, or whatever that school’s athletics major-of-choice is. With the help of coaches, tutors, and professors, athletes have been gaming the academic side of the equation for decades. The university almost always party to the process.

There’s no question that the way major colleges and universities educate their athletes is broken and imbalanced. But fixing that requires major reforms that address the root of the actual problem, not easy-to-look-at “reforms” that punish a group of people who are just one piece of the perverse puzzle that is major college athletics, especially when those ideas would just incentivize the same behaviors that are problematic now. Penalizing coaches isn’t going to make it better. If anything, it would almost certainly make it worse, turning athletics programs into degree factories where athletes get diplomas but don’t actually learn anything. And handing out more diplomas for the sake of handing out more diplomas doesn’t mean anything if they don’t come with an actual education.

The bridge is yours.

-George R.R. Martin might make a Game of Thrones prequel TV show, because who really happens with those ice zombies, amirite?

-I think Tina Fey is correct that she probably isn’t quite a movie star yet.

-Jamie Weinman asks the right questions about the latest Jay Leno kerfuffle.

-The Superman litigation continues.

-The deluge of Julian Assange movies begins:

Around this time last year, I wrote a long piece explaining why you can’t purchase a stand-alone subscription to HBO Go. The service, intended as an enhancement of the HBO experience for existing subscribers, was an attempt to enhance the cable model, not to subvert it. HBO’s entire business model is distribution through cable companies, who are in competition with streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Throwing in with the competition could lead to retaliation. And it’s not clear that there are enough people who would prefer an HBO Go subscription to cable to make it worth blowing up that business model.

But HBO has always been interested in expanding its potential reach. And HBO CEO Richard Plepler is starting to talk about ways HBO could get out of the conundrum of its business model—and one solution he’s proposing could be directly enabled by the consolidation of internet and cable companies into single businesses:

“Right now we have the right model,” Plepler told Reuters on Wednesday evening at the Season 3 premiere of HBO’s hit TV show “Game of Thrones.” “Maybe HBO GO, with our broadband partners, could evolve.”

HBO launched HBO GO in 2010 to let subscribers view its shows over the Internet on devices such as Apple Inc’s iPads. The service has about 6.5 million registered users, compared with about 29 million for HBO’s main service.

However, HBO GO is only accessible for viewers who pay for cable TV service, plus an extra fee for HBO. This means monthly bills of $100 or more typically. HBO GO is available to subscribers of several pay TV companies that provide Internet service such as Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Verizon FiOS

Plepler said late Wednesday that HBO GO could be packaged with a monthly Internet service, in partnership with broadband providers, reducing the cost.

Or, in other words, HBO would still be tied to large cable and broadband providers—it wouldn’t just let you sign up for HBO Go without verifying your subscription to a cable or internet service in the same way you sign up for streaming Netflix. But HBO would be tied to consolidated companies with the diminished expectations that it’s better to get customers to sign up for one service if the choice is between that and not having them sign up for cable and high speed internet with you at all.

I still think that the cable package will continue to have value for a lot of consumers. If a la carte cable pricing tied to internet subscription takes off, per-channel pricing is still going to be quite expensive, and many consumers will end up paying similar amounts to what they spend now for five or ten channels. But for both die-hard cord cutters, and for media companies, this is probably a reasonable detente.

The first number Variety’s reporting out of a new study by Motorola is the one getting all the headlines, that 41 percent of the content on DVRs never gets watched by their American users:

A new study by Motorola Mobility claims that 41% of the content recorded on DVRs in the United States is never watched and deleted. Worldwide, that stat is lower, at around 36%. Still that’s a significant number as networks increasingly want timeshifted viewing through DVRs, VOD and web-streaming platforms to be counted as part of Nielsen’s Live-plus-7 ratings measurement — or viewing captured within seven days of a program’s premiere telecast — when they broker deals with advertisers. At the start of the fall TV season, 46% of U.S. homes had a DVR, up 30% over the previous year…The U.S. has the highest weekly TV consumption at 23 hours of TV and six hours of movies watched, while Sweden and Japan have the lowest at 15 hours and two hours, respectively, the study found. Worldwide, 29% of weekly TV viewing is recorded content, with 76% of those surveyed saying they watch news broadcasts live.

But it’s that second-to-last number that’s really important. And the critical question here is how long the shift is: is all of that 29 percent happening in the three days after episodes air? Seven days? Longer? Whatever the answer, if almost a third of television viewing is happening on DVRs, that’s an enormous figure, and it’s a huge argument for moving out the window of recorded watching that’s being measured in the Nielsen ratings. The fact that 41 percent of recorded content isn’t being watched doesn’t suggest that Nielsen ratings shouldn’t expand to +7—just the reverse. They suggest how much intention there is to watch television in a time-shifted way. That 29 percent seems like a number that’s likely to grow, rather than to shrink, particularly as long as networks are scheduling shows with unpredictable gaps in between episodes.

When I woke up to the news this morning that Chinua Achebe had died earlier today in Boston, I was struck all over again by how strange and frustrating it is that his novel Things Fall Apart remains probably the only novel by an African writer that most people will ever read in their first thirteen years of education. It’s not that Things Fall Apart is a bad novel—it’s a very good one—or that it’s in some way crowding other African writers out of the American education system (which would only be true if there was some sort of quota, and I’m sure no one would admit to that). It’s that Achebe’s most famous novel is a reminder of what we lose out when the literature we read is limited to a narrow set of perspectives.

The thing that fiction does that’s powerful, and that can also make it dangerous, is that it gives us a perspective to sympathize with that, if we’re not careful, and in conjunction with the framing of the history we’re taught, can come to dominate our thinking on events. Scarlett O’Hara is a tremendous character—and I think there’s a compelling argument that Gone With The Wind makes the case that a capitalist free labor system produces both better economic results and more appealing humans than the slaveholding South—but she’d be an absolutely terrible lens through which to view the complexities of the Civil War. Sulking over socials does not principaled opposition to the Confederacy make.

When it comes to Africa, stories like King Solomon’s Mines or Zulu, the classic movie about the battle of Rorke’s Drift, taken on their own, may not seem terribly consequential. But what’s important about Africa in King Solomon’s Mines is that it’s strange, and provides Alan Quartermain a space in which to have an adventure. In Zulu, the point of the story is that more British men received the Victoria Cross for their service in that fight, in which the British were dramatically outnumbered by Zulu warriors. Africa matters in that it’s a staging ground for European men to prove their greatness, or because it’s a place where clashes of civilization occur. But before those white men arrive to test themselves, or before guns are pitted against spears, Africa doesn’t get much attention in literature or in history classes, at least in ordinary middle and high schools. Literature ends up collaborating with accepted versions of history, not challenging it or complicating it.
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