“One of the lucky things one of the nice, sort of, unintended consequences of working for HBO is that the entire season is written, shot, and locked in the can before the first episode airs,” Aaron Sorkin said at the panel for his show The Newsroom at the Television Critics Association press tour on Wednesday. “So even if you are tempted to try to write a little bit differently to please the people or change someone’s mind, you can’t do it. The season is done.” In other words, he’s happy with his show even if critics dislike it, saying that he “a hundred percent disagree[s]” with viewers who have been perturbed by his portrayals of women. If there was one theme to the exchange, it was that there’s a gap between what Sorkin sees in his own show, and what critics are seeing on screen.

And that division was even more striking because of a presentation earlier in the day of a show that is exactly what Sorkin seems to want The Newsroom to be, only it’s not airing on HBO and Sorkin didn’t create it: The Hour, a period piece about British news broadcasting in the fifties, that aired its first season on BBC America last summer.

Where The Newsroom began with vague arguments about will (and Will) and has moved into the nebulous motivations of his cranky corporate overlords, The Hour has clearly-delineated obstacles to the excellent reporting of the news. In the first season of The Hour (as was also the case with the miniseries State of Play), the show’s public broadcasters struggled to get a story out despite significant reporting hurdles thrown up by the government and pressure applied by the agents of state. In the second season, star Romola Garai, who plays producer Bel Rowley, explains that “There’s a new character that comes in at ITV, which is the big rival to the BBC. It’s launched at the beginning of the series. And they have their own show, which is very much a competitor to ‘The Hour.’ And their Head of News is a very dashing and attractive man who Bel hates and then grows to find curiously attractive.” That’s a specific and important story to tell, and one that requires more specific contrasts between styles and ethics of reporting (as well as more new characters), one that Will hints at in his monologue about providing advertising-free space for news broadcasting, that The Hour will spend part of six full episodes on.

And where The Newsroom has Neal as its blogger caricature, Don as the producer who wants to do right but is failing at it, and Maggie as, apparently, the person designated for Sorkin to establish and then “have them slip on as many banana peels as you want,” as he put it on Wednesday, The Hour’s characters are more clearly connected to larger positions and larger pressure points. This season on The Hour, Hector (Dominic West), the aristocratic anchor who found his nerve in the previous season, will find himself disgruntled when he’s forced to share the position with Freddie (Ben Whishaw), the young, radical reporter who backed him up previously. And The Hour’s creator Abi Morgan explained that they’re part of a larger alignment within the galaxy of the show.

“You have that internal triangle going on as well with Bel as the kind of mediator of those two,” she explained. “And then the bigger one is the birth of other channels, in particular ITV, and it’s about the commercial success of a commercial channel like ITV versus a public service broadcaster like the BBC. So we have that, and then, on a wider level, it’s about Britain aligning itself with America, trying to compete with America, but also the friend of America. So it has a bigger issue about the nuclear arms race and their relationship with America and really the kind of duck and cover terror of the late ’50s where life felt very short and very prescient.”

Morgan promised other issues as well: race, in the form of booming immigration to Britain and the far-right response to it, as well as a love triangle between a black secretary, a black doctor, and a second-generation British Jew; the rise of glamor and celebrity culture imported from the U.S., which Morgan said would go to Hector’s head; and the launch of Sputnik. The Newsroom‘s response to these issues has been to treat anti-immigrant bigots like fools rather than powerful forces and to provide an opportunity for Will’s saintliness even as he makes a range of equal-opportunity offensive comments, and to egregiously insult women who work in and consume celebrity culture.

On a character level, there’s a dramatic gap between Bel’s hypercompetence when it’s juxtaposed against Maggie’s perpetual mistakes and the vast gaps in supposedly-genius MacKenzie’s knowledge about basic world facts. Sorkin seems to believe that he’s firmly established MacKenzie as brilliant even though we rarely see her doing substantive work on the show. He insisted that “she’s got the whole meeting with the staff in which she’s extremely deft and a great leader, and then once you nail that down, it’s, for me, permissible to have her hit ‘send all’ instead of just ‘send’,” even as he ignored the wildly hysterical reaction and technical ignorance he wrote for her in the aftermath of that error. Morgan, by contrast, shows Bel doing much more of her job in the first season of The Hour, giving her working life and her affair with Hector balance, and having her excellence in the former be a part of the attraction that leads to the latter. And she outlined plans to expand the relationship between Bel and foreign correspondent Lix, and to contrast them with the women they meet in London’s burgeoning club scene.

Finally, The Newsroom seems plagued by a problem that I don’t think I would have identified before Sorkin and Jeff Daniels’ presentation on Wednesday. Given Sorkin’s history, I think it was reasonable to assume that Will was meant to be a straightforward hero, which is why is deeply unpleasant behavior, particularly towards women comes across as obsessive-repulsive. Now, I think Sorkin believes he’s writing and Daniels believes he’s portraying a nuanced anti-hero, when in reality, Sorkin is struggling to write an anti-hero in a realm where he’s previously written straightforward champions. “We present this Will’s mission to civilize as something, first of all, that people roll their eyes at, and second, that always blows up in his face,” Sorkin said in response to a question from me. “Hubris on this show is always punished.” Except it’s not. When Will’s mission to civilize meets with derision, the women who are offended by him are portrayed as bitches, and in one case, as actually unhinged. When Will reflects with his therapist on his bullying of a Santorum supporter on his show, he feels bad later, but in the broadcast, he ends with the last, tough word, and faces no drop in ratings or professional consequences. Sorkin hasn’t found a transgressive thing for Will to do that makes the audience excited that’s the equivalent of Walt’s cooking meth or Omar robbing drug dealers. Instead, he’s made us feel bad and cranky about his case for values that many of the viewers who dislike the show actually share.

The Hour, on the other hand, has absolutely straightforward flawed heroes, and I think it benefits from that clarity, and its willingness to visit down real consequences. Hector may start the season riding a wave of celebrity at the dramatic expense of his job performance, but from the promo we saw at press tour, he swiftly ends up in the clink for an as-yet-unidentified transgression. That, not a drink in the face, is a true consequences to face for hubris.

In January at the Television Critics Association press tour, Hulu, the service set up by the broadcast networks to provide streaming content supported by advertising and subscriptions, announced its first original slate of scripted and reality content. Yesterday, they were back with announcements that Hulu will air the new seasons of the popular British shows Misfits, about a group of unlikely superpowered teenagers on probation, and Armando Iannucci’s scabrous political comedy The Thick of It on the same day and date that they air in the UK, and a panel promoting its airing of the Israeli drama, Prisoners of War, that is the basis for Showtime’s critical and commercial hit Homeland. The news that American audiences won’t have to wait to see these shows through a legitimate channel—and that Hulu won’t be bleeping the profuse and wildly creative profanity that is a hallmark of The Thick of It—is the useful, practical news out of Hulu’s session. But these shows herald something even more important: Hulu’s found some of the tools that are starting to define its competitive advantage as something other than a subsidiary of the networks that created it.

The time lags between when shows air in their home countries and when they arrive everywhere else has is one of the major frustrations of engaged television viewers who hear about programming they’re desperate to at least sample, but have no legitimate way of acquiring for months, years, or even at all. Even when Netflix makes it possible for viewers to catch up on past seasons of a show, viewers may come up against even greater gaps between the episodes they can finish and the time when new ones are available. Hulu, which doesn’t have to worry about slotting something into a narrow number of programming slots, is ideally suited to do what networks can’t and Netflix has yet to pursue: get viewers caught up on programming they love and transition them smoothly into the experience of watching along with an international audience they may already be in conversation with.

Similarly, in signing up Prisoners of War, Hulu’s committed to an arena of programming that broadcast networks have essentially removed from consideration: subtitled programming. And it’s done so with the source material for one of the most buzzed-about shows on television. It’s a move to claim a new space, and in particular, one important to dedicated, smart viewers who, because they have to read the subtitles, will be keeping their eyes closely focused on the screen, something that has to make Hulu’s advertisers very happy. In a conversation after the panel, Hulu’s senior vice president for content, Andy Forssell said that the company has been trying to close deals on more international shows, including some deals to bring Danish programming to the U.S. that didn’t quite work out. But if those shows fail to find other homes on proper U.S. networks even as the Scandanavian noir trend continues with the news that FX is planning a remake of Danish/Swedish co-production The Bridge, Prisoners of War could give Hulu the track record to be best positioned to close those deals in the future.

Hulu isn’t giving up on original content, Forssell emphasized. He plans to make more episodes of Battleground, Hulu’s political show, which Forssell told me and The AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff was one of the 25 most-viewed shows on Hulu when it was rolling out new episodes. He said he has ambitions to do smarter programs aimed at teenage girls and is looking to target under-served audiences, including African-American viewers. And Hulu will try to keep its productions lean, operating much like Israeli productions or the 10-90 deals networks like TBS and FX have set with Tyler Perry and Charlie Sheen, where actors shoot large blocks of scenes together and out of narrative order to minimize time and money on locations and to make sure they work more consecutive days.

It may take time for the network to find a mix of content and creators that make Hulu truly competitive. Forssell declined to release specific ratings figures, arguing that they were a distraction from the strategy Hulu wants to pursue of giving shows multiple seasons to mature and time to find their audiences beyond a specific ratings period. But he said that Hulu’s best-performing proprietary shows were attracting audiences roughly the size of basic cable broadcasts for each episode, and maintaining roughly two thirds of that audience for the full length of each stream. But its content acquisitions and partnerships should give Hulu time to flesh out its original content strategy, test strategies and business models to increase legitimate audiences for piracy-vulnerable shows, compete with BBC America and PBS for sophisticated audiences with a taste for international programming.

I’d take this news of study with a large grain of salt—or maybe some well-buttered crumpets, because it’s English, and I do adore me some crumpets—because the authors only interviewed 77 people involved in television and film production. But it’s interesting to see the extent to which a new report reveals that people who work in those industries in the UK feel that class still plays a major role in determining who’s able to gain entry to jobs and to influence:

A survey of professionals in the industry has found that working-class people are discriminated against because they do not have the “right accents, hairstyles, clothes or backgrounds.”

Presenting the study yesterday at the British Sociological Association’s annual conference, researchers said people from working-class backgrounds, women and those from ethnic minorities did form networks within the industry, but they were not as powerful and were “discriminated against because they were not trusted insiders.”

“Most jobs were gained through friends and friends of friends,” the researchers from Durham University and the University of St Andrews said. “Openings were rarely advertised and producers tended to rely on the grapevine.”

It’s not that this is totally different from the American entertainment industry. But I was struck by the sense that class is so legible in the UK. Perhaps this is only my experience, but I’ve always read accents as regional markers and grammar as a class marker: what shows Boyd Crowder is a Kentuckian as his accent, and his syntax and use of words like “ain’t” show that he’s less educated than other characters. It’s got to be incredibly frustrated to be judged by something that’s hardwired into you before you have a chance to know that it might be important. And it’s a worthwhile reminder that there’s no perfect, bias-free entertainment industry out there in another country for us to emulate. We’re all stuck replicating our prejudices and class systems.

The ratings are in for the last episode of Downton Abbey, and PBS has got to be thrilled—5.4 million people tuned in to see Matthew Crawley and Lady Mary finally get engaged. Those are numbers that in some slots, NBC would die to have. And as the Daily Beast reported last week, the show hasn’t just drawn good numbers: it’s helped PBS pull in new donations. But Downton Abbey‘s only one show, and the last time the network pulled numbers like this was for Ken Burns’ series on the America’s national parks. That doesn’t exactly provide a clear guide to what PBS might build its brand into.

I suggested in January, and I still believe, that PBS could rebuild by airing a lot of British content that isn’t widely available over here. Hulu’s been able to make some inroads by airing Misfits, Party Animals, and The Only Way Is Essex, the kind of show that one would think would land on BBC America but didn’t. PBS could go the same route, but the shorter runs of British shows means they’d have to come up with a ton of material to fill the schedule. And not all of the options for promising British shows, be it Luther or Misfits, share what I think is a crucial attribute of Downton Abbey: it’s very family friendly. Certainly we know that Lady Mary had sex, and people suffer grievous war wounds, but there’s a world of difference between Mr. Pamuk’s death and the sex scenes in Misfits, or seeing bandaged fake Patrick and seeing the victims in Luther. Your mileage may vary, but I think you could watch Downton Abbey with a sophisticated 10-year-old, give or take a few years, and I think it’s a good thing to have shows available that a family can watch across the generations.

And finding that sort of programming is hard. I think what Ken Burns does is noble, but he can’t turn out these documentaries very quickly, and I don’t know that there’s an audience for more of them. ABC Family’s shows may be accessible to a wide age range of viewers, but I’m not sure they’re really intended to draw in adults. Finding something that’s genuinely appealing in a cross-generational way, rather than simply broadly age-appropriate, is tremendously difficult, and it’s not a code I’m sure anyone’s consistently cracked. I’d really like to see some creative experimentation with age-appropriateness as a starting constraint rather than an end goal. There are stories where sex, drugs salty language, and all the other things parents might want to wait to expose their kids to are essential. But that’s not true for every human story.

Downton Abbey scored 4.2 million viewers in its return on Sunday, 1.28 million viewers more than Mad Men averaged in its most recent season and just 280,000 viewers below what Community averaged in its second season (in other words, numbers NBC would like to see again as a minimum). The numbers are cheering if only because it’s nice to see that public television can score a program that’s as compelling as network offerings, that if public broadcasting is to be the bastion of eggheads and intellectuals, that there are 4.2 million of them willing to turn out to support quality programming.

But what does it mean for what kind of slate PBS might put together? I’ve been having some trouble finding ratings for the U.S. airing of Sherlock on PBS, but it certainly seems at least like an anecdotal success. Luther got poor ratings on BBC America, which may be a product of the network’s availability as a standard part of cable packages, despite the fact that it seems like a logical crossover for those of us nostalgic for The Wire. I wonder if it might have been more successful on PBS, and helped PBS build a bit of edgy cred, as Luther is nothing if not often and significantly uncomfortable. I do think it’s a challenge for PBS, both in terms of its public support and building a broader audience long-term, to be seen as too British. But how awesome would a drama block that starts with Downton, continues to Sherlock, and ends with Luther be?