There’s nothing bold, counterintuitive, or perhaps more importantly, compassionate about saying cruel things about addicts like: “Whitney Houston wanted to kill herself. Nobody takes drugs for that long if they want to stay on the planet.” I’ve been fortunate enough not to be touched directly by addiction, but it’s my understanding that the compulsion to use has little to do with a specific suicidal ideation. And of course, you can have an addiction and still love life and depending on the level of use, contribute to society. Whitney Houston’s fans know she’d struggled for years with a disease—not failed morals. Whitney’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, who O’Reilly mentioned had been hospitalized in the wake of her mother’s sudden death, is probably more aware of anyone else on the planet of what it’s like to live with her mother’s particular failed fight against addiction.

Nobody Bill O’Reilly to remind them that Houston’s addiction robbed her of many productive years of her career and was painful, embarrassing, and detrimental to her. And there’s nothing brave about blaming addicts for the societal consequences of their addictions.

1. Ask a woman on your show: This should be elementary advice, but apparently for too many cable hosts and cable bookers, it isn’t immediately evident that when women’s issues on the table, women’s experiences and expertise might be relevant. It would be nice if men, from cable pundits to researchers, were truly as invested in women’s health issues, from contraception access to breast cancer research, as women are. But that’s just not the way things are. And if you’ve never tried to decide between oral contraceptives, had an IUD put in, or figured out how to pay for either—much less studied the medical or insurance issues around contraception—it ought to be common sense to you that there are things that you—and your audience—can learn from people who have experience that you don’t.

2. Ask women what their experiences have been with health issues that are specific to their gender: Sure, there’s a fine line between asking creepy questions about women’s sex lives and their health. But if you’re interested in why women are so invested in access to contraception, or breast cancer funding (though breast cancer is not simply a women’s disease), or other women’s health issues, find a tactful way to show genuine curiosity. I’d be willing to bet most male pundits don’t have a good sense of the difference between what brand name and generic contraceptive pills cost, or how much costs to have an IUD in, or what it feels like to use either. And while you’re learning more about the emotions that motivate women in these policy debates, you may also fulfill your mission of delivering new information to your viewers or readers. I had no idea that oral contraceptives could be part of a diabetes maintenance regimen until someone wrote about it in a piece I saw linked on Twitter. New perspectives and new data often come forward hand in hand.

3. Treat women like any other interest group: There’s something very odd about the way women get treated when they’re advocating for the issues that affect them: as parochial and unable to see the strategic damage their needs might pose to the Democratic party. No one would ever suggest that that the National Federation of Independent Business is small-minded and undermining Republicans for lobbying to change IRS reporting requirements. So stop treating women, who are a core Democratic voting bloc, as if they’re short-sighted or selfish for expecting that a party they elect will be responsive to their needs.

4. Question the frameworks you’re given: It’s remarkable how many people who profess to believe that consumer choice and a vibrant marketplace are important, particularly in health insurance, are quick to forget about those preferences when someone suggests that a policy infringes upon religious liberty. Religious organizations that don’t want to have to cover contraceptives are also deeply invested in denying their female employees any information about where they could get competing coverage. That sounds a lot less like protecting religious liberty and a lot more like constricting consumer choice. Whether you agree with either of these frameworks for the debate, it’s not impressive journalism to just accept a narrative that’s handed to you by an interest group. Ask questions. Weigh realistic assessments of the impact a policy change. Then frame your own story.

“The good news about NBC today is that we have new owners and they’re investing in our business not only with significant financial resources but with their patience,” Greenblatt said. “They’re providing me with everything we need at NBC entertainment to go after prime time.”

The interesting question is how long that patience lasts. Todd VanDerWerff and I were chatting about this, and he pointed out that the network’s cautiousness with The Voice, which they’re running in a normal schedule instead of oversaturating in the name of a quick ratings bump, is a good sign of a long-term game plan. And only the silliest person would have trouble with the concept that it takes a long time to turn a network around, something that effectively means changing audience expectations and consuming patterns. But NBC’s transformation is part of a tricky double-act: the network’s struggle up the ratings ladder as its head of programming learns how to run a network instead of a cable channel.

Greenblatt clearly is in the midst of an adjustment between a cable mindset and a network one. “I’m done with cable. It’s a dying business,” he joked, “And ruining the culture of America.” But there’s no question that he misses cable: he talked with surprising frequency about how sorry he was Prime Suspect hadn’t done better, and said that had it been a cable show, it “would have been picked up in the third episode and declared a hit”; and said that “if I was at Showtime, you’d be calling me a genius for launching one or two good shows in a season.”

And in the short term, NBC’s new launches actually feel very much like cable’s strengths: those that are precision-cut and diamond-honed like Smash, and then inexpensive junk like Are You There, Chelsea?, and very little in between. And in between is network television’s sweet spot. Cable is all about the stuff that you just have to pay to get access to because it’s so compelling, and the stuff that you watch because it’s there and it’s all about getting your money’s worth. Network is the stuff that’s pretty solid. The Firm feels like it ought to be that sort of pretty solid show, something mid-level and pleasant without needing to be either revolutionary in its concepts or perspectives or gorgeous in its execution. But the premise for it is so silly—does Mitch ever come back to testify against the firm? Why would he and Abby ever quit their Caribbean early retirement? What is it with this dude and Evil Law Firms?—that I worry it won’t make it over the hump. A show can be cheap and effective or cheap and cheap, and it’s easier to find the latter than the former—see:Fashion Star—but important to at least seem like you’re searching for the former.

Beyond the three-tier question, there’s the problem of the network’s identity and sense of its core demographics, because nerds isn’t going to cut it (Awake’s Kyle Killen joked at his panel that a room full of critics made up most of Community‘s fan base). At Showtime, Greenblatt developed a set of shows that I think could best be described as melancholy anti-heroes, more accessible and diverse than HBO and FX’s somewhat-scary mostly-white dudes. There’s definitely not a pattern that strong in the slate of programming he rolled out here in Pasadena.

And in terms of demographics, I suppose I’d suggest that between Smash, Bent, Are You There, Chelsea? and Fashion Star, they’re aiming for a less-wealthy version of Bravo’s smart lady contingency. When I followed up with Greenblatt about whether the network could rebuild by trying to lure demographics who have largely walked away from the networks back, he said that seeing more diversity in ensemble casts is “going to happen much faster than a black family or an Asian family show…If somebody brings me the great Asian family show or the great black family show, we’re developing some of that. I just think it’s more likely to see large ensembles with diversity.” Which I think is probably correct, though it remains unfortunate that the representative American family on television is still a majority-white one. If we’re going to be a majority minority nation in 2050 (aeons in entertainment-land), we’re going to need more shows like Rob about white folks learning to live with minorities, except not terrible. I’d love to see Future NBC do something like that.

I remain pretty convinced that even if it takes a very long time to unbundle cable, and even if a bunch of networks die in the process, a move towards a more flexible (if not entirely a la carte) multi-platform system is inevitable. The idea that choice is paying for precisely what you want, rather than getting an enormous number of things — some of which you want and some of which you’d gladly see die in a fire — for your money seems pretty well-entrenched in the music industry now, and has always been the case for books. If I were HBO, I’d be pondering a subscription option for HBO GO only: I’m pretty sure I’d pay the $9-odd dollars I pay for my HBO package now for HBO GO only if I didn’t have cable.

For networks that don’t have the same premium branding as HBO or Showtime baked into their business model, and thus would have more difficulty attracting a core of subscribers used to paying for them separately, it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I can see something like Bravo making the jump to premium-lite status not because the content is astonishingly good but because the brand is so clearly defined. And I wonder if other networks will retrench their content offerings to try to keep the subscribers they have, or innovate to try to bring resistent cord-nevers into the fold. It’d be easier to do the former, but for the survival of the industry, much more important to innovate with everything to do the latter.

Before I get into the specifics of this episode, let me just say what a pleasure it is to watch a show with characters and politics this good to be at the top of its game. Parks and Recreation is so good, and so warm-hearted that it’s not remotely work to watch it. And I desperately hope Amy Poehler wins an Emmy for this season so we can see her give an acceptance speech as Leslie a la Emma Thompson when she won her Golden Globe for Sense and Sensibility.

I think the show could have easily messed up tonight’s A plot, in which Leslie, who has claimed that she’s born and raised in Pawnee in her new book, finds out, to her horror, that her mother actually gave birth to her in Eagleton because “Pawnee hospital was overrun with raccoons at the time…did you expect me to give birth to you in an infested, disease-filled room?” Because the stakes here aren’t nearly as high as they’d be for President Obama, and because the investigation is motivated by Joan’s perpetual and personal enmity for Leslie rather than institutionalized racial animus, the plot doesn’t work without making us feel the stakes for Leslie, and Poehler pulls it out brilliantly. When she moans, “I wonder who else was born in Eagleton. Voldemort, probably,” her anguish is palpable. I didn’t particularly love last year’s “Eagleton” episode, but seeing the payoff here makes it all worth it.

And the show does a nice job of satirizing all the people who have set Leslie up to be exposed without falling too far into a partisan divide. The reason the question of Leslie’s birth is important is not because of conspiracy theories, but because she made it important, using it as a peg to hang her book on and the crux of her campaign. So the people who question her are trying to answer a legitimate question they have about her honesty, rather than pursuing a nonsensical theory in hopes of subverting the democratic progress. It’s also in keeping with what we know of Joan, a vindictive schemer whose heart is presumably permanently cold and dead now that Lil’ Sebastian has passed beyond this vale of tears, so when she declares perkily, “We will pull out the world map and speculate wildly,” then rocks out to the Gotcha Dancers, it’s consistent rather than unrealistic. When one attendee at Leslie’s reading yells at her, “That sentence was confusing! You might as well be from China!” he might be stupid, but the situation is legitimately kind of confusing! All of this works beautifully within the world of the show while also showing why the actual birther conspiracy is so completely ridiculous and damaging.

Parks and Rec was also on fire tonight with its dead-on cultural parodies. It starts in an NPR office where programming is sponsored by “Sweetums Cares, a non-profit that puts umbrellas on homeless people when it rains,” and where the host admits of “lesbian Afro-Norwegian funk duo Nefertiti’s Fjord,” “Yes, they’re quite awful. But they are lesbians.” Then, there’s Joan’s book club, which includes a novel Leslie describes as “A heartwarming story about a caveman eye doctor who travels to present-day Cincinnati and can see everything except love,” which I would read the hell out of. I have a weakness for juxtapositional humor, which is why I like 30 Rock‘s lists so much, and these mash-ups are just pitch-perfect and plausible enough to be uproarious. And when, in the B plot, Ben and Tom ended up at lunch with an increasingly drunken Joan, I particularly liked that the sloshed anchor decides she wants to take Ben home as well as Tom when he talks Star Trek to her (after Ben tells Tom “Nerd culture is mainstream now. So, you know, when you use the term ‘nerd’ derogatorially, you’re the one who’s out of the zeitgeist.”). “I like Tribbles!” she mumbles loopily as they put her to bed.

The one part of the episode I didn’t particularly like was Ann’s attempt to schmooze April and Ron. Ann and April have had their issues, but they’ve essentially worked through them, and there’s no particular incident that would have April shutting her down. And she and Ron don’t have much of a relationship at all. If the balance of this had been a little different, it might have been a good little part of the ongoing mentoring relationship between Ron and April, but from Ann’s point of view, this was essentially dull. I think the show needs to figure out what it’s doing with Ann in an affirmative way this season. If Ann’s only working in City Hall to give Ben and Leslie a place to sneak off to together, or to deal with awkward situations, that’s not enough. She got this job in one of the funniest episodes the show’s done. It shouldn’t be all downhill from there.

None of this is really surprising. We’re still negotiating our way towards a new equilibrium, and we’re going to see a lot of bumps, like Starz not renewing their contract with Netflix, along the way. Cable subscriptions will probably have to fall a lot further before the cable companies and the networks feel pressure to more aggressively seek out alternatives. And at the end of the day, I think prices will settle somewhere in between what cable companies charge now, and what Netflix and Amazon charge. There’s no way $79 per year makes sense as an all-inclusive fee for delivery of physical objects, streaming licenses, and now, a couple of books a month. And $29.98 for unlimited streaming and a lot of disks seems pretty fair, though still not enough to cover current shows that you can watch on multiple devices. This system’s going to get more complicated before it gets clearer.

The industry reversed the first-ever declines in the second and third quarters of 2010 to produce a small overall increase for the full year. The modest subscriber gain was neither convincing enough to dispatch the threat of cord cutting nor dismiss the impact of over-the-top substitution. At the end of 2010, we estimate 84.9% of the occupied U.S. households subscribed to a multichannel package after eliminating the overlap of customers with multiple subscriptions. The year-over-year dip from nearly 86% at the end of 2009 illustrates the potential peak in multichannel penetration.

Though we forecast continued absolute growth in subscribers, the pace is not expected to keep up with occupied household formation, leading to a long-term decline in penetrations for multichannel services. OTT substitution is the primary agent in the expected declines in traditional cable, DBS and telco video penetration. SNL Kagan estimates multichannel substitution via OTT delivery will grow from 2.5 million households at the end of 2010 to 12.1 million homes by 2015. The OTT substitution estimates account for nearly 10% of the occupied homes in the U.S. in the five-year forecast.

We’re at a moment of upheaval. The Parents Television Council’s filing briefs in cases challenging cable bundling. Even as alternatives to cable like Netflix get more popular, folks are complaining about the price increases that the company needs to support the contracts for content it’s renegotiating and attempting to expand, and we’re seeing the emergence of an actual competitive market in the alternatives to cable, as Amazon starts signing non-exclusive content contracts. I don’t know what the new landscape’s going to look like, or what company and technologies are going to win out, or where prices for content are going to land, which is part of what’s both exciting and frustrating about the moment that we’re living in. But if I were a cable company, I’d be very, very interested in giving my customers the impression that I was attentive to their concerns about price, customer service, and technological innovation to buy myself as much time as possible before cord-cutting hits hard and accelerates further.

Beck has a fairly obvious advantage, in that part of his shtick is getting people to buy things, from Christmas books, to gold, to Groupon-style deals, to a new fashion line (which looks to be Founding Fathers meets fratboy chic), so a fairly inexpensive television subscription service is just another thing to toss into the shopping cart. That model is probably one that will work better for individual auteurs, like Joss Whedon, who can convince their dedicated audiences to pay for products they create than for whole networks. But finding ways to accustom consumers to pay for some things, whether it’s special access to interview sessions with actors and writers, seriously quality tie-in merch, other media that advance the story, early access to episodes, or whatever, is a way to get them ready—if the television economy shifts radically, which it might not—to pay for core content. Shilling isn’t dignified, and marketing can go overboard, but as Sondheim reminds us, whether it’s high or low, art isn’t easy.

Church deacon Mr. Brown, from Tyler Perry's "Meet The Browns."

But it’s not just the delivery mechanism for the product that’s a problem: respondents in the survey that article cites say they think cable is a bad value, and with good reason. The bundle of channels that come in a cable package are a truly random spread of things, and while that may seem like it provides a lot of choice, it’s not actually letting me pay directly for the things I’d like to purchase. No one would stand for a model where to buy George R.R. Martin books, I had to guy the whole Left Behind series. The music industry’s evolved to a point where I am no longer required to pay for the skits on hip-hop albums. Cable’s obviously much more dependent than either of those kinds of art on delivery mechanism, but if I were the strong, profitable, critically acclaimed network, I would totally gang up on the dead weight I was packaged with and insist on letting consumers do something like pick ten channels for a set price and then pay a la carte for extra channels. Channels could opt to be available in that initial tranche, or to stay independent like HBO, or participate in both.

I’d pay what I’m paying for cable now if I could just get BBC America, SyFy, USA, TNT, FX, Bravo, AMC, Showtime, HBO, and ESPN. I imagine those networks would be happy to take their greater share of my subscription dollars and use them towards nifty programming. But I don’t have that option. Instead, I’m stuck subsidizing endless spinoffs of Tyler Perry’s House of Payne.