Forget the tape delay. Forget the weird cutting of certain events. Forget the obsessive focus on American athletes at the expense of covering the whole games. Forget the substanceless pool- and track-side interviews. From a sheer editorial judgement perspective, the biggest question about NBC’s coverage of the 2012 London Olympics has got to be how this video, “Bodies in Motion,” (NBC has, perhaps wisely, declined to make it embeddable), which features slow-motion shots of female athletes’ bodies set to music so cheesily porn-like it’s hard to believe that this isn’t a video someone made to parody the focus on female Olympians’ bodies.

The cluelessness of it even extends to the written description for the video: “Check out these bodies in motion during the Olympic Games,” as if the women it’s portraying, none of whom are identified by name, or country, which might have been a petty distraction from ogling, are inanimate objects rather than people. This utterly contentless video, which communicates nothing about the events these women are participating in or what it takes to perform them, might meet the editorial standards at Maxim, though the video quality isn’t even particularly impressive. There is no way it should pass the editorial standards for a news organization.

And yes, it’s a dumb viral video. But it’s a reminder of how much this Olympics, which has been a terrific one for women in so many ways, has brought out the uglier, stupider impulses in a lot of people, whether it’s the athletic official who suggested that British heptathalete and eventual gold medalist Jessica Ennis weighed too much, or Jere Longman’s bizarrely nasty attack on American hurdler Lolo Jones. And the video illustrates the root of many of the complaints about NBC’s coverage of the games: they’re presenting news events as if they’re entertainment. A lot of the time, that’s meant errors of ethics, like having local anchors refer to events that already passes as if they’re upcoming to hype NBC’s primetime coverage. This time, it’s an error of editorial judgement, packaging women doing their jobs, which happen to be entertaining, as if they’re eye candy. As NBC reassesses its coverage in preparation for the next games, “Bodies in Motion” should be a prime example of where the network’s judgement failed.

FX has officially picked up The Americans, the spy show it announced it was developing last fall that stars Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as KGB agents whose cover involves living as a married couple with two children in the suburbs of Washington, DC in the early 1980s. I wrote last winter that I was excited for the prospect of a show that was about tradecraft, given that the main characters, Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings, would be practicing it both at home and in the real world. And the more I think about this, the better idea I think the show is.

Most Washington movies are very into the Halls of Power, which makes for soaring visuals that convey the immediate sense that the characters are Very Important People. But they ignore the potential of the relatively mundane suburbs, the prospect of scary people playing with power in the non-descript ranch houses and ring suburb parks far away from the National Mall. Breach, the tremendously underrated Billy Ray movie about Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who turned out to be spying for the Soviet Union and Russia, did a fantastic job of turning Hanssen’s house (he was played by Chris Cooper), his church, his indescribably bland office, and the park where he made drops horror movie locations. One of the tensest scenes in recent movies involves Ryan Phillipe, playing Eric O’Neill, the agent who was assigned to work with Hanssen and report on him, trying to sneak a Blackberry back into Hanssen’s briefcase without getting caught. The utter ordinariness of Hanssen’s settings became repugnant over the course of the movie because of the profound lie it represented.

Homeland‘s done something similar with returned prisoner of war Nicholas Brody’s family home. It’s a modest, light-flooded dwelling, a symbol of tranquil suburban domesticity that turns out to be full of secrets, privy only to Carrie Mathison, the CIA agent who’s conducting an unauthorized operation to spy on him, and to us. Brody and his wife struggle to resurrect their sex life on his return, he prays clandestinely in the garage, and he’s hidden a suicide vest in the closet. Instead of a familiar family dynamic, Brody’s return means his family home is suddenly full of secrets, something that show continues to explore in its second season.

It sounds like The Americans may have some levity to ease the tension—Phillip and Elizabeth are fake married, but one of the show’s conceits is that they’re falling in love for real. But FX would be smart to look to both Breach and to Homeland for their sense of how to play out quiet, hugely high-stakes dramas in suburban Washington.