This post discusses plot points from the fourth season of Justified. Read at your own caution if you aren’t caught up.

As I’ve watched Justified over the past several weeks, I’ve been struck by a sense of how crowded the show has become. It sometimes seems as if everyone is descending on Harlan County, which is simultaneously sprouting new layers of law enforcement, a Native American community, and teenage miscreants. But last night it struck me why I haven’t loved this season of the show, even as I’ve loved the evolution of Boyd and Ava’s relationship this year. Much of what makes Justified special is its attention to its setting, and everything the show’s been adding lately has made Harlan more obscure and less specific.

The story of Drew Thompson was supposed to be a story about the arrival of the serious hard drug trade in Harlan. But instead, it’s ended up being about people in Harlan responding to, and in Boyd’s case, manipulating, Theo Tonin, the Detroit crime boss who was pulled into the show last season by the presence of Robert Quarles. The problem with the Tonin storyline though is that it doesn’t actually tell us all that much about Harlan or the people who live there. Theo, at least so far, comes across as a fairly generic mercurial gangster who indulges his son and has a henchman who wanted his fatherly approval. He doesn’t represent Detroit in nearly the same way Boyd or Yorkie-owning, Dixie Mafia-running Wynn Duffy tell us about Harlan by letting us see a very particular vision of crime in Harlan.

And the time spent on Thompson this season has ended up taking away from any number of other, more local, and more interesting subplots. I was terribly disappointed to see the initial plot by Harlan’s elite to hire Boyd to blow a hole in a slurry pond so they could claim EPA clean-up funds to address the resulting disaster turn into a cheap assassination plot. That’s a fascinatingly diabolical idea rooted in real dangers—coal slurry threatened the Tuscaloosa water supply in 2011—and it would have provided both fascinating commentary on a long-running American industry and a throughline to Boyd’s experiences as a coal miner, first as a teenager with Raylan, and in season two.

The slurry plot could have made physically manifest the ways in which coal mining has had a morally poisonous influence on Harlan. Coal has helped economically stratify the county, something that became very clear when Boyd and Ava went house-hunting in Clover Hill, the neighborhood where Ava’s mother worked as a cleaning lady when Ava was a child—”They locked up their jewelry whenever she came over,” Ava says, a little sadly. “Are you sure I can’t show you something a little further down the hill? There are some lovely starter homes down there. Beautiful views. Quaint,” their realtor told them, trying to shoo the couple out of the neighborhood that might by polluted by the implications of their all-cash purchase and unpolished diction. “You and your fiancee might want to think about the commute..I ask because the banks are getting very stringent with applications.” It’s not that no show or movie has ever focused on poor or unwanted people moving into a rich—or white—neighborhood before. But Harlan’s class dynamics are specific, and, just as Boyd and Ava have discussed, the role of Crowders in Harlan is specific, persisting as they suspect from one generation into the next, requiring radical action, or at least a Dairy Queen franchise, to change.
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This post discusses plot points from the February 20 episode of The Americans.

When The Americans debuted in late January, one of the things that excited me about the show was the way anti-heroism functioned within it. Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, the deep-cover KGB agents at the heart of the show, weren’t being made sympathetic to us because they were incredibly badass despite using their powers for evil, as is the case with a Walter White, or many of the characters in Game of Thrones. Instead, we were being persuaded to sympathize, even more so than is the case in Showtime’s Homeland, with characters who want to bring down the United States government, and to see the United States through the lens of their ideology and their geopolitics.

Last night’s episode of The Americans was a through-the-looking-glass perspective on the Cold War that revealed the disadvantage the Soviet Union perceived itself to be at relative to the United States, and how the paranoia that governed the Soviet system poisoned its own agents’ decision-making. The catalyst for that exploration? The shooting of President Reagan outside the Washington Hilton by John Hinckley, Jr., a mentally ill man who hoped to impress Jodie Foster. As its lens on those events, The Americans generally stayed out of the inner circle, and focused on people who had a small role in the events. For Stan, the Jennings’ FBI agent neighbor, that meant confirming that Hinckley was a lone gunman rather than a Soviet agent. And for Elizabeth and Phillip, that means trying to make sure that the federal government doesn’t blame the Soviet Union for the assassination attempt.

Both parties are caught off guard in the task, though Stan gets a head start. Agent Amador is quizzing him on his Russian, and bribing him with jelly beans, in a nice nod to Reagan’s tastes, for right answers, when the news comes in. Phillip and Elizabeth, by contrast, are late to the country’s upset—they were secluded in a hotel for an afternoon tryst. “Thank you…For making us take the afternoon off,” Phillip tells Elizabeth. “That’s what you want to thank me for?” she asks him playfully. But once they see the news on a television in the hotel lobby, they’re all business, and the show parallels Stan and the Jennings activating their sources.

Elizabeth, motivated by her memories of Stalin’s death as a child in the Soviet Union, is convinced that a coup is underway, especially when Al Haig, then serving as Secretary of State, announces on television that he’s taking charge until Vice President Bush, who was on an airplane at the time, can land, be briefed, and assume command until Reagan is ready to return. Stan’s source believes the same thing, and tells him so, seeing Haig’s military rank rather than his diplomatic position. “Are you serious?” Stan asks her. “He’s one of your top generals and he’s announced he’s taking control,” Nina explains. “What do you call that?” And The Americans gives some support to the idea that the Soviets aren’t purely viewing the events through the lens of their own experience. In a downtown bar, a low-level Bush staffer complains about the constitutional questions posed by “Al, ‘I’m In Control Here’ Haig”‘s actions, while a similarly low-level Haig staffer insists that “It reflects the political reality.”

But Phillip’s one of the few characters who is able to parse that the American anxiety about Haig’s action stems from a different place than the Russian fears—it’s more about process, and less about the prospect of a long fall away from the American tradition. “All these years, walking these streets, living with these people, you don’t really understand these people. Haig could have ten nuclear footballs, and they wouldn’t have a coup,” Phillip tells Elizabeth. “Can you please just try to get yourself in a different way of looking at things?” She’s not having it. “I remember where I came from. Not having all these things. Having it be about something different than myself,” she spits at him. “You don’t think they’re all about lies and conspiracy like everything else? Why do you think it’s so different?” Phillip doesn’t have a really good argument for her yet, though he manages to win this round of the debate by switching the subject to the weakness of Soviet command and control, and convincing Elizabeth that they need to stop a war from happening. But his ability to answer Elizabeth’s query convincingly in the long run will be critical to resolving the tension between them, and the question of whether they defect and stay together, or whether Elizabeth stays loyal, while Phillip is pulled inexorably away from her, America as a whole his green light at the end of the dock.

And they aren’t the only couple who are having trouble with their cover, and with making assessments from underneath it. When Stan returns home, his wife is concerned less about Reagan’s shooting than with how they’re doing. “I thought we were going to get a chance to know each other again, living in the same house,” she explains. “You never talk to me. Why is it so hard?” Stan’s forced to confess that his stint underground, referred to memorably in the pilot of The Americans is still affecting him—he hasn’t been totally able to resurface. “I was living with psycho militants for too long. I don’t know, okay?” he tells her. “It just doesn’t feel like it did before.” Elizabeth may be unable to gage American politics because of the experiences of her childhood, while Stan’s increasingly unable to fit smoothly back into the American life from whence he came because of what he saw of his own country. What makes America different may be scarier than Elizabeth believes, or that Phillip has been able to see.

There are a lot of details that have yet to be reported, but this is big: according to The Hollywood Reporter, Nielsen, the company that measures the ratings of television shows, is reportedly planning a significant shift in its ratings measurement system that will capture data about television viewing not simply through broadcast, but through streaming.

By September 2013, when the next TV season begins, Nielsen expects to have in place new hardware and software tools in the nearly 23,000 TV homes it samples. Those measurement systems will capture viewership not just from the 75 percent of homes that rely on cable, satellite and over the air broadcasts but also viewing via devices that deliver video from streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, from so-called over-the-top services and from TV enabled game systems like the X-Box and PlayStation.

While some use of iPads and other tablets that receive broadband in the home will be included in the first phase of measurement improvements, a second phase is envisioned to include such devices in a more comprehensive fashion. The second phase is envisioned to roll out on a slower timetable, according to sources, will the overall goal to attempt to capture video viewing of any kind from any source.

The details here will be important. Will Nielsen measure viewing on Hulu, the streaming service set up by the networks? And if so, will it be capturing that data through user’s devices, or through reporting from Hulu? Will the pool of people who are measured be adjusted to account for people who don’t have televisions but watch substantial amounts of television through subscription services on devices? How will Nielsen measure clips of news shows embedded in network sites like MSNBC’s versus streams of full shows? What time period will streaming ratings cover? Will the ratings be adjusted based on a three-day viewing period, the way viewing from DVR recordings are now? Or will both streaming and DVR watching over the seven days after an initial broadcast count? That’s something that CBS president and CEO Les Moonves has been pushing for, and in a November earnings call said “we think it will happen in a short time.”
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This post discusses plot details from the January 30 episode of The Americans.

As I wrote in my review of the show yesterday, I’m excited about the potential of The Americans for a great many reasons: its use of geopolitics to ask questions rather than assign solutions, its sick sense of humor, its portrait of domestic life, its louche use of eighties music. But what bowled me over in the pilot the first time I watched it, and what I didn’t expect from The Americans, was a deeply nuanced portrait of what it means to be a sexual assault survivor. The revelation midway through the pilot that Elizabeth had been raped by the man who was then her trainer, and now is a high-profile defector explains a great number of things we’ve seen her do so far. And the fact that she hasn’t been able to tell her husband about it is a shocking illustration of the fundamental cruelty of their arrangement: the KGB’s paired Elizabeth and Phillip for life, but forbidden them from exchanging the kind of information that could give them a shot at building a happy and functional marriage.

From the first sequence in the show, The Americans‘ approach to sexuality is part of what makes it clear that the show is engaging with spy conventions rather than simply replicating them. It’s a lot of fun to watch Kerri Russell in a blonde wig and a leather dress seduce a mouthy federal official, who brags to her “At this level, there aren’t many people he can trust,” or to hear, later, on a recording, her get more information out of him by explaining “If I was going to see you again, I’d want you to be a little—I don’t want to hurt your feelings—but stronger, maybe?” He may not be able to dominate her sexually, but he can demonstrate his importance verbally. But what most movies or shows wouldn’t give you is the moment after the seduction, Russell taking off the wig in the car to reveal strands of her own hair stuck to her forehead, her mouth twisting with at least momentary disgust. This isn’t a story about people who got into the spy game so they could sleep with beautiful women and gratify their own sense of attractiveness. Using her sexuality is part of Elizabeth’s job, but that doesn’t mean she has to like it.

And the idea that her sexuality is not her own to control as a condition of her employment becomes even more horrifying the show explains that Elizabeth’s sexual availability was taken to its logical conclusion during her training as a KGB agent. Timosheev first tells Elizabeth, who is still learning to speak English naturally and without an accent, to say “I’m sorry. Use the contraction.” And then, when he defeats her in their fistfight, he rapes her—presumably he isn’t stopping in part because she tells him no in Russian, rather than in English. Later, desperate, Timosheev tells Elizabeth “I never meant to hurt you. They let us have our way with the cadets. It was part of the job. A perk.” It’s both a pathetic excuse, an attempt to avoid responsibility or agency, and it lets Phillip know, for the first time, what happened to his wife before the KGB paired them up in a much warmer and fuzzier exercise of control.
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Over at The New Republic earlier this week, I wrote about how FX’s new comedy Legit, which premieres tonight at 10:30, encapsulates an underlying theme that animates all of the network’s programming: what does it mean to be a legitimate and successful American man? While not ever FX watcher is loyal to the network’s entire lineup, if you drop in on its comedies and dramas, you’ll find men dealing with everything from how to be better fathers to their children than their own were, coping with the consequences of sexual double-standards, and grappling with downward mobility or weaker economic positions than their partners. Legit, an enormously agreeable show that’s simultaneously sweeter and tarter than many of FX’s offerings, fits in that formula and expands it in some exciting new directions.

Legit has a relatively simple premise: a stand-up comic, Jim (stand-up comedian Jim Jeffries), who lives with his divorced friend Steve (Second City alumn Dan Bakkedahl), who he met when Jim came to live with Steve’s family as an exchange student (Steve tells his mother, who hates Jim, at one point that “I wanted a Swedish female!”), decides to become more “legitimate,” with a vague sense of what that might mean. But he finds some purpose when Steve encourages Jim to reconnect with Steve’s younger brother Billy (DJ Qualls), who has muscular dystrophy, and who is confined to an assisted-living facility. Deciding that Billy, who is 31, has been overly coddled and needs to experience more of life, Jim first takes it upon himself to break Billy out of the facility for occasional adventure, and then decides to move Billy in with him and Steve and begin caring for him. The show, run by Peter O’Fallon, starts off a bit rough around the edges. But it grows quickly in its first couple of episodes, and Legit‘s portrayal of both life with disability and the friendships among maturing men has the potential to be something special.

To start with, it’s very funny. Many of the stories are drawn directly from Jeffries’ experiences with his friend with muscular dystrophy or O’Fallon’s helping to care for his father, who died of ALS. Much of the punch of Jim’s stories comes from his character’s utter lack of social awareness. Sometimes, he’s hilariously entitled, spinning out a fantasy about having a child with a terminally ill woman who will die once their child is old enough to get him beers from the fridge, saving him from having to be a good husband, and guaranteeing that his child will always be grateful. And in other moments, that lack of respect for social norms mean Jim’s capable of caring for Billy without inhibition, whether he’s helping the other man urinate because he’s decided the bottle Billy uses is a genius invention, or helping him through the awkwardnesses of Skpye dates and cybersex. Jim may believe that Billy’s going to be the perfect wing man, and that taking him out and helping him develop a social life may mean that he’s “going to get so much pussy.” But despite his frattish inclinations, Jim spends a lot more time hanging out with Billy at home than taking him out and making use of him. If selfishness set Jim on his quest to become legitimate, it seems that once he’s started visiting Billy again, Jim finds himself in it for the pure enjoyment of Billy’s company—and the joy of tweaking Billy’s mother, Janice.

Steve is an appealing straight man to Jim’s wildness, and an ongoing illustration of the limitations of Jim’s approach to life, and the practical realities of caring for someone with muscular dystrophy. When the two men take Billy on an exuberant road trip to a Nevada brothel so he can lose his virginity, they deposit him in a room with a cheerful prostitute (and Jeffries real-life girlfriend), only for Steve to realize that he’s forgotten to undress his brother. After Jim hands out dating tips to Steve and Billy, Steve initially finds success with an attractive woman from his office by complimenting her eyes, only to end up stuck with variations on that theme after he finds he doesn’t have anything else to talk to her about. Good intentions and low inhibitions aren’t enough, as it turns out, to navigate every situation or to negotiate a truly fulfilling life.
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At the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena, Calif. this week, network executives have been fielding a great number of questions about violence in the media in the wake of the Newtown shootings. This is a difficult line for critics to walk, because I don’t know anyone who’s been asking those questions who believes that there’s a causal relationship between media violence and mass killings, or who is asking those questions because they want to shift the focus from gun control efforts to media censorship. But I do think that the Newtown killings crystallized for many of us a sense of burnout we’d been feeling about a sense in American television that the only stakes that are a legitimate subject for prestige television are life-and-death ones.

This is a judgement about aesthetic monotony rather than a moral argument, or a bit of policy advocacy. And as we’ve asked those questions over the past few days, it’s been intriguing to see how the executives of different television networks have responded, and particularly whether they’ve focused on the moral implications of their content, or the creative ones.

NBC Entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt made the pitch that after the horrible events of Newtown “the best tonic for not to be glib, but for this kind of thing is go watch an episode of Parenthood as a really great example of a show about a family who love each other and grapple with all of the issues in life,” he argued. In recent years, as the intensity of television has ratcheted up, networks have often pitched their shows as a very different kind of escapism, into dangerous worlds and risky scenarios that we’d never actually confront for ourselves, as a way to put our problems in proportion. Greenblatt here was making a different argument (and an attempt to boost a critically-loved but under-watched drama on his network): that television, by going simpler, can actually help us grapple with the things that we are feeling. This is worth taking with a grain of salt, of course. NBC’s biggest scripted drama right now is the very silly sci-fi show Revolution, about a dubiously-relevant post-apocalypse. But it was still nice to hear Greenblatt muse, even self-interestedly, about what pop culture is for, and to hear a reminder that escapism can be a small journey rather than a great leap.

Both Greenblatt and Fox Entertainment chairman Kevin Reilly cited their responsibilities to the FCC in their answers, but didn’t really discuss what that responsibility consisted of. That have been an interesting turn, given the relative amounts of attention paid to networks’ bottom lines, which keep them in business, and to their community obligations, the long-ago rationale for them to get broadcasting bandwidth. The FCC’s regulation of violence has also been dramatically less rigorous than its regulation of sex, a regulatory disparity that’s obviously affected the market as well.
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GLAAD’s Network Responsibility Index is one of the most fascinating and comprehensive looks at the on-screen diversity of American television, examining not just gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters, but racial and gender diversity as well. And the version of its report released today says a lot not just about which networks are doing well at integrating LGBT characters into their programming, but about generation gaps between viewers and which kind of gay people are most integrated into the American imagination.

On broadcast television, there’s a striking gap between the network aimed at the youngest viewers and the one that targets the oldest. The CW consistently leads its rivals in programming that includes gay characters—in the 2011-2012 television season, 29 percent of its program hours included gay characters or gay people, bolstered substantially by its reality programming. 62 percent of those impressions were of LGBT people of color. During the same period, CBS only had gay people or characters in 8 percent of its original programming. The CW, of course, is so dangerously at the bottom of the ratings that it’s at risk of actual extinction, while CBS leads the ratings by a significant margin. The attitudes of young viewers should drive LGBT-inclusive programming, but their actual consumption behaviors mean they’re creating a less strong market than their rising consumption power would indicate.

It’s also important to note that, while more LGBT characters and people are appearing on television, their numbers are still small enough that a single character or program can significantly shift a network’s performance. Reality programming is the major driver of LGBT representation on NBC and ABC. CBS has so few LGBT characters that Kalinda Sharma, the bisexual investigator on The Good Wife, ends up accounting for almost one third of the hours of representation of non-straight people on the network, and that show provided 48 percent of those hours overall. Diana Berrigan, the FBI agent on White Collar, made the USA Network the leader in representations of black LGBT people and lesbians all on her own. White gay men remain the most popular kind of LGBT people on television.

These small numbers mean both that the cancellation of a single program can significantly decrease a network’s representation of LGBT characters. But it also means that a few chances can make a network get better quickly. FX, a network that’s been defined by its explorations of heterosexual masculinity, for example, went from 19 percent of its programming hours including LGBT characters to 34 percent on the strength of Archer and American Horror Story. That’s a blessing and a curse. Progress is fragile. But it’s also relatively easy to accomplish.

And this year’s NRI has an interesting finding about the impact of popular culture on public opinion from its Pulse of Equality survey, which is conducted by Harris Internactive. “Among the 19% who reported that their feelings toward gay and lesbian people have become more favorable over the past 5 years, 34% cited ‘seeing gay or lesbian characters on television’ as a contributing factor,” the report says. That doesn’t mean television works for everyone, of course: Ann Romney’s love for Modern Family hasn’t exactly made her any more amenable to marriage equality. But if popular culture makes 6.5 percent of Americans think more favorably about LGBT people over a five-year period, that’s a significant contribution, and one that’s worth fighting for.

It seemed inevitable that FX would renew Charlie Sheen’s Anger Management for another 90 episodes after its initial run this summer, which no matter how much I hated it, found an audience (though not as big an audience as the initial announcement of it seemed to suggest was necessary for a renewal). Now that it’s happened, I’m resigned and more than a little sad. But if FX is going to continue to make money off of Sheen, here are five interesting—and even a few redemptive—things it could invest that cash in.

1. A female anti-hero drama, preferably starring C.C.H. Pounder: Glenn Close’s legal drama Damages didn’t quite work out on FX, which has since retrenched its brand as a dude-heavy network, though its Cold War drama The Americans, starring Kerri Russell, should help a little on that score. If FX is going to go lowest-common denominator on content with Anger Management and give Sheen a continuing platform and advertising dollars to rehabilitate his public image, they should reinvest the profits in helping the anti-hero genre grow and giving a woman a similar platform and career boost. C.C.H. Pounder did amazing work for the network on The Shield. FX should consider bringing her back.

2. A show about a man trying to grapple with his abuse of women: One of the grosser things about Anger Management is the way it’s reduced—and so much of the show is a meta-reappropriation of Sheen’s real-life personality—Sheen’s mistreatment of women to cheating and callousness, smoothing over his record of physical violence towards them. In the run-up to Anger Management, FX suggested the show could be about a man grappling with his treatment of women. If the network made that show, made it about a man with a history of abusing, and genuinely confronted repentance, violence, and control, it would be a landmark show.

3. A Louie-style low budget show from a woman or a person of color: In the wake of Girls’ debut on HBO this spring, there was an enormous discussion about the absence of women and people of color as television creators. That conversation, as is often the case with these things, has died down somewhat, but it shouldn’t go away. “John Landgraf wanted to let you know that the door is open for you to come to FX anytime and do the same show Louie does in your own version,” FX’s press guru John Solberg told Chris Rock at the Television Critics Association Press tour this summer. “So you are welcome to come.” The network should get serious about that invitation, but not just to Rock.

4. A genre show: With Game of Thrones, HBO’s found an awesome story engine to put dragons and zombies on-screen—and also to stage big, long discussions about gender and violence. FX has looked at adapting the comic Powers, about two cops who investigate crimes involving superheros, for television, and if that doesn’t work, it should look forward with an eye towards the fact that genre shows aren’t just about the special effects—they’re about issues, too.

5. A story about a male-dominated culture from the perspectives of women: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with FX’s core brand being shows about masculinity, a theme that’s produced a lot of interesting television. But the secret of Sons of Anarchy is that the show is at its best when it’s exploring biker life through the perspective of its old ladies, Gemma Teller, Tara Knowles, and Lyla Winston. That’s a formula FX could use to keep its identity while moving female characters to the center of the frame more frequently. And done right, it could mean the network gets shows about how different masculinities affect women.

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.

Over at TV By the Numbers, Robert Seidman argues that even if Nielsen collected more comprehensive ratings data on viewers, even those who aren’t in the sample pool, or who don’t have set-top televisions at all, viewers will still be unhappy when their favorite shows are cancelled. And he says a more comprehensive system would be prohibitively expensive and painfully slow:

Would a complete census be more accurate than Nielsen? If you could get it, it would, without a doubt, be more accurate. But TV ratings measurement exists for the purpose of buying/selling TV advertising. The networks and advertisers aren’t going to be willing to pay for it and as expensive as Nielsen is (and it’s very expensive) the census style system would be multiple orders of magnitude more expensive to maintain and manage. The networks and advertisers aren’t going to pay for something like that for a system that might only be a little more accurate.

On top of that you’d still probably need Nielsen or something like it because the census system would have so much data to crunch it wouldn’t likely be able to produce fast national ratings the next morning and final ratings the next afternoon. The networks need the information fast so they can react and make scheduling decisions.

I think the larger problem is less developing a new system, and more reporting of data in ways that would help viewers understand the true audiences for their favorite shows. Some of this is a problem of overlapping systems, all of which report data differently or fail to report at all. Community fans, for example, see the low Nielsen ratings for the show, but have a sense that their numbers are larger due to time-shifting beyond the seven-day period, or to viewers without televisions who are watching the show on Hulu, which doesn’t report streaming data publicly, especially because social-media chatter around the show makes it seem like the Nielsen numbers couldn’t possibly be representative. If all those numbers were available, we’d have a better idea of the total fanbase for individual shows, even if the data had to be pieced together from multiple sources.

The other thing that might help in the current system is changing the way ratings data is presented. As things work presently, data’s released sporadically, sometimes through press releases from Nielsen or the networks. There aren’t tools available to the public, or even to journalists, that make it easy to pull data, graph trend lines, or compare shows. To a certain extent, that’s understandable: gathering ratings data is an expensive, time-consuming process, and Nielsen’s business model seems to work fairly well for it. But in January, FX President John Landgraf suggested his network might build a portal to provide more fine-grained data than normally gets reported to journalists, in part as a tool to help the network get public credit for its full viewership, rather than the viewers the current system credits it for. His isn’t the only network—or the only fan base—who could benefit from that kind of information.