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.

This post discusses plot points from the April 20 episode of The Americans.

“None of the agencies are working to share the information,” Phillip in his guise as Clark tells Martha in last night’s episode of The Americans. “Each one wants to be the hero.” His weary description of bureaucratic breakdown and self-interest is a perfect framework for the episode. Interagency communications troubles have created the problem that Elizabeth and Phillip have to solve tonight, stopping a KGB agent who isn’t available to have his orders countermanded. Stan and Nina’s relationship is first enabled by the needs of one bureaucracy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then complicated by the workings of another, the Rezedentia. And Elizabeth and Phillip, after a thawing in their marital Cold War, are forced to reckon with the extent to which their relationship is a bureaucratic arrangement rather than an organic, living thing—and to confront the possibility that they may need to engage the legal bureaucracy to dissolve their union.

“We have to stop an assassin,” Elizabeth says when she explains their assignment. “They need to straighten things out at the Center. Ordering hits, then countermanding them?” Phillip asks her in the understatement of the year. Part of his reaction is to the Center’s apparent incompetence—how do you hire an assassin and not retain the ability to stay in touch with that person? And part of it is that the organization is acting emotionally rather than rationally, making one decision and then changing its mind. It’s hard to devote your life to fulfilling the missions you’re given if they can alter at a moment’s notice, forcing you to be as dedicated to one goal at one moment as you were to its antithesis a moment before.

And the KGB’s display of incompetence is juxtaposed with the FBI’s reaction after three of its agents are murdered by the explosives expert Phillip and Elizabeth could shoot, but not neutralize, given his penchant for time bombs. Stan and his colleagues are personally shattered by the news, and how could they not be? Working for a large bureaucracy doesn’t actually strip the component employees of that organization of their humanity or capacity to react. But they don’t allow their feelings to dramatically shift their mission or operational playbook. You don’t go to war over the loss of three men, however badly you might feel about their deaths in your personal capacity as a functional human. If the Soviet Union and the United States are locked together by the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, a concept that’s more promise than threat, the United States just demonstrated a command and control that could help it avoid self-destruction.
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“Why do the girls on Girls have sex?” Toni Bentley asked in a recent piece in Vogue. “This question arises in my mind while watching this terrific, smart HBO series that wraps up its second season on Sunday. The four quirky protagonists have sex frequently and easily and, hey, why not? They have the pill and we have the right to choose. But, what exactly are they choosing? Not pleasure, that’s for sure.” The rest of the piece is a disaster, including praising Adam’s disregard of Natalia’s sexual comfort for what Bentley calls his “I-am-not-a-prisoner-of-feminism chutzpah.” But it’s an excellent question, and one that gets at an important question that also came up at one of the panels I moderated at SXSW: why it’s so much easier to depict bad sex in pop culture than good sex.

The thing about Girls is that the characters actually have—or are implied to have had—a fair amount of decent sex in it. We may not see Ray and Shoshanna in bed while they’re having sex, but they certainly seem reasonably happy, and sex doesn’t come up in Shoshanna’s litany of complaints when they break up—instead, Shoshanna insists that “I can’t be the only thing you like.” Whatever problems Jessa and Thomas-John had, they weren’t about sexual compatability. When Hannah has sex with Sandy, her short-lived boyfriend from the early episodes of the season, their encounters seem happy and unfraught. During her lost weekend with Joshua, when Hannah asks him to get her off, rather than her having to oblige first, there’s nothing baroque or even particularly inventive about the encounter, but Hannah looks happy, lost in Joshua’s touch. And when Charlie goes down on Marnie in the season finale, she talks about how much she’s enjoying herself, even if she doesn’t seem particularly able to get lost in the moment.

So why do the bad moments stand out more than these? Girls has become almost notorious for its scenes where characters express their fantasies, or where characters have bad sex due to a lack of assertion, compatibility, or poor sexual communication. In the finale, Natalia, who tells Adam during sex “I can like your cock and not be a whore, okay?” before asking him to “Slow down. Can you slow down for me, babe?” appears to get at least some of what she wants out of sex, but, as their disturbing encounter in the previous episode revealed, she and Adam want fundamentally different things. Hannah’s poor sexual decision-making, like her decision to sleep with Laird while high on cocaine he helped her procure despite his efforts to maintain his own sobriety, or her compliance with Adam’s fantasies and sexual desires in the name of having experiences, have been one of the most-discussed elements of the show. When Marnie tells Charlie “This is what I keep trying to tell Hannah when she talks about all her wandering. There’s an endpoint. We have all these experiences so we can settle down,” she’s missing the point, too. The idea isn’t to stop having new experiences. It’s for those experiences to inform the characters’ sense of their own desires, and to make it easier for them to ask what they want.

Maybe part of the problem is that it’s easier to make clear that sex is going wrong than when—and to what degree—it’s going right. Watching Hannah struggle to take off her panties while lying on her stomach because that’s what Adam told her to do, or the high pitch of Natalia’s voice as she’s getting anxious, and the dip in register as she makes her displeasure clear, are easy ways to manifest discomfort. But choreographing sex scenes so that they look attractive to viewers at home isn’t the same thing as conveying what’s going on in the characters’ heads. One of the funniest, sharpest illustrations of this conundrum is the sex scene beween Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks in Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno. When the two characters, who have been close friends and roommates for a long time, finally have sex, the camera first lingers on their faces, focusing on their emotional involvement, and their reactions to what their bodies are doing, which remains off-screen. When the camera pulls out, they don’t appear to be doing anything special, and their co-producers on their pornographic movie look puzzled about what’s going on.

It’s an idea that offers some solutions for Girls if the show wants to shift its tone in the third season, and to be as notable for the good sex its characters have as well as for all the times things go awkward, and miserable, and wrong. The show’s made a name for itself by the amount of its actresses bodies it’s willing to put on screen, and the things it’s willing to show people doing with their bodies and to other people’s bodies. But maybe it’s time for Girls’ writers and directors to remember that their eyes—and a lot of their feelings about the things that are happening to their bodies—are up here.

“There’s a beast in every man,” begins the new trailer for Game of Thrones, which returns to HBO on March 31. It’s a good warning for audiences, particularly those who haven’t read George R.R. Martin’s books, and who therefore aren’t necessarily prepared for how much darker the show is going to get, starting with this third season and the third novel:

I’ll probably always be willing to extend Game of Thrones some more credit than I grant to, say, The Following, because it’s about war, and, to a certain extent, the ways in which the differing standards for what is acceptable in time of war act as a demarcating line between nations and cultures. Given that brutality in war is both the show’s subject and an ongoing issue for us—if only it was true and defining of us that “America does not torture“—I’m willing to brace myself to watch acts that I might find stupidly revolting if they were airing as part of another show. But I am curious as to where audiences’ tolerances for some of the acts that I suspect will be part of this third season will land, and whether the conversation about the show will shift from its handling of female nudity and sexual violence to violence in war and violence as a sign of personal vice. Game of Thrones has its psychopaths, but the franchise is genuinely different from a show like Dexter in that it recognizes and demarcates them as such.

At the end of the second season of Enlightened, HBO’s strange, precise show about Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a former corporate drone who has an awakening and decides she has to bring her employer, Abaddon Industries to justice, Amy finds herself in shock after she is caught stealing corporate documents and turning them over to Jeff (Dermot Mulroney), a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. “They just fired me,” she tells him on the phone, clearly frightened despite her show of bravado to the company’s president. “They said they were going to sue me.” “Well,” said Jeff, who had been putting up some pretense of dating her to enhance their emotional bond while she continued to feed him documents, “we knew that was going to happen.” “We did?” Amy asked him. “Amy, this story is going to shift the paradigm, man,” Jeff tried to reassure her, appealing to her rather grandiose ego and desire to be an “agent of change” on a massive scale. “They can’t stop it, okay? It’s all worth it.” When Amy told him “We’ll see,” she sounded more sobered, and more realistic, than she has at any other point at the show, even at the moment of her biggest triumph.

Enlightened is a beautiful, wonderful, extraordinarily difficult show on any number of levels—I find it so hard to watch even though I think it’s remarkable that I marathoned the entire second season yesterday so I could enjoy and get it over with at once. And Mike White’s long and quietly been doing critically important work about how hard it is to live out your principals in America, whether he was writing about Dewey Finn (Jack Black) finding another way to make a career out of his love of music in School of Rock or showing Amy crumple in the first season as she learned that the salary for her dream job at a non-profit would leave her bobbing around the poverty line. But even though Enlightened had a semi-triumphant finale, it made one of the most painful points White’s ever gotten across: that you can be right on the merits, you can even win a major political or social battle, and still be treated like a pariah, fired, sued, or jailed. Winning doesn’t save you from consequences—in fact, your continued suffering may be the price of your victory.

This is a point that—with the exception of martyr stories like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X—is often significantly absent from our popular understanding of history and our mass culture. We remember Harriet Tubman’s heroic work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and never bother to learn that she had her arm broken by a train conductor while white passengers called for her to be thrown off the train, that she didn’t receive a pension for her Civil War service until 1899, and that she was the victim of a kind of prototypical 419 confidence fraud. After Frank Kameny was fired from the U.S. Army Map Service after his arrest in Lafayette Park for cruising, he was never employed again, friends and family supported him as he pursued activism, and it wasn’t until 2009 that Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry apologized to Kameny on behalf of the government and gave him the Theodore Roosevelt Award.

Seeing the gap between the public impact of activism and the private consequences for activists unfold in Enlightened hit me in a particularly painful way because I watched the show’s second season on the same day that the New Yorker put Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Aaron Swartz, the activist and programmer who committed suicide in January, online, and the day after The Atlantic published Swartz’s former partner Quinn Norton’s account of her involvement in the federal case against him for downloading documents from JSTOR. I would never compare Swartz to Amy Jellicoe as activists on the whole, because Amy’s talents and understanding of political systems are so nascent, and because she fundamentally lacks the talent for making friends that Swartz, in my and many others’ experiences, possessed. But in that lack of full cognizance of the consequences of their actions, they seemed to have something in common. MacFarquhar writes:
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As has been widely reported, Vice is in North Korea with Dennis Rodman now on what has been billed as some sort of pseudo-diplomatic mission, but which has instead turned into a parade of gross declarations of friendship for the horrifically oppressive regime on Rodman’s part, and disgusting tweets about getting hammered with Kim Jong Un from Vice staffer Jason Mojica. It’s worth noting that this isn’t just one of Vice’s usual video stunts. It’s an episode that the company is shooting for its HBO news magazine series. And that they’re doing something like this isn’t particularly surprising.

This summer at the Television Critics Association press tour, I asked Vice’s Shane Smith about the way they were branding the show, which included things like introducing segments by offering up as analysis of the Kashmir conflict “India and Pakistan fucking hate each other,” and about what level of information they expected their audience to have. His answer didn’t reveal a keen awareness of the difference between starting broad and getting more detailed, and the problems with presenting news about the world beyond the United States in a reductive tone that smacks more of cultural tourism than insight.

“They do fucking hate each other, and they’ve hated each other for quite some time,” he told me. “So, you know, we get into why, which is because of partition and Kashmir. But also it goes to a very complex point of its water now. Water is a huge issue in Pakistan. They’re saying that ‘India’s taking our water.’ Water is maybe the main issue in India right now. Now, that’s a very complex point to get to, but you have to start sort of broad and say, ‘They hate each other. This is why they hate each other.’”

I’m absolutely a believer in trying to bring new audiences in to international news, and into news at all. But to have any sort of integrity, your priority in that mission has to be the story itself. Speaking the same language as your target audience may be an important skill set to bring to the mission. But the point is less that you want to meet them where they’re at than to convince them to come along to where you are. And if using that language and those values—including the idea that it’s transgressive and cool to get drunk with and fed by a dictator who is starving his own people to death—take over what you’re trying to communicate about water rights in Pakistan or the horrendous repressiveness of the North Korean regime, you probably need to slow your role and reconsider what you’re doing. If this was some sort of Increasingly Poor Decisions Of Todd Margaret-style fiction, I could see it as a Girls-level satire of the grotesque privilege and oblivious of First World tourists in the Third World. But Vice and Rodman are actually doing these things. And I’m curious how HBO is going to try to convince audiences that this is really a fresh, edgy take on news reporting, if only for the despair factor.

Over at Vulture, Amanda Dobbins has an interesting post responding to the criticism of Life Is But A Dream, the documentary Beyoncé Knowles produced about herself and largely drawn from footage she either shot of herself via webcam and had shot for her as part of her efforts to archive her life, that it’s boring and stage-managed, a testament to Beyoncé’s perfectionism rather than genuinely revealing. Dobbins suggests that it’s a rebuke to the culture of celebrity meltdown:

Life Is But a Dream is nothing but an exercise in public togetherness; even the webcam confessionals and a tender speech about her miscarriage can’t hide the obvious calculation behind the self-directed film. This is Beyoncé propaganda, a 90-minute self-paean to a pop star whose name is synonymous with control. What’s interesting — interesting enough that Beyoncé feels the need to address it in her own hagiography — is that “control” has become a bad word.

“I don’t have to kill myself and be so hard on myself,” Beyoncé says of her perfectionism at one point. You can take that as a stab at self-improvement, or you can interpret it as a savvy attempt to answer her critics in the middle of a film designed to reinforce her Perfect image. It’s probably a little bit of both — if anything, Life Is But a Dream teaches us that Beyoncé is not much more than a construct of recorded footage. (She is filming herself all the time, after all. Even in the elevator.) But it highlights a troubling celebrity truth: Somehow, being perfect — onstage, on-camera, even at home — is not enough. We expect to see our pop stars fade, even as we shame them for it. We want Britney to fall apart again on national television. We want to lecture Rihanna about her romantic choices. We want unfiltered and “real” celebrity access until we get it, and then we want to punish the celebrities for it, because humanity is a pop-star sin, too.

Tyler Lewis, a dear friend of the blog, and a non-Beyoncé fan had a rather different reaction, that Life Is But A Dream gave him his first real sense of who she is, and how it affects her music:

I didn’t get the sense that she wasn’t interested in being truly vulnerable so much as unpracticed at it. I have this profound sense that this is a 31-year old woman who has never allowed herself, or been allowed, to feel deeply. So this film is an exercise I think in watching her learn to be vulnerable. There’s that moment where she says, almost surprising herself, that she can’t do it alone. Or the way she conveyed more deeply the hurt she feels that people would think she would fake a pregnancy than she does relating what it must have been like to have had a miscarriage.

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It’s felt a bit like we’ve been living through one of Westeros’s infamous winters, at least when it comes to the dwindling supply of good television, so I’m looking forward to the return of Game of Thrones like a Brother of the Night’s Watch awaiting a raven of the appropriate coloring from the Citadel:

There’s not much here to see yet—Tyrion’s scar is probably the biggest change this lets us see. I understand why it would have been prohibitive to really get rid of Peter Dinklage’s nose to match up the damage Tyrion suffers during the Battle of the Blackwater in the books, but I do regret the preservation of his general handsomeness. Readers of the books may share my feelings about how that will affect our perception of events coming down the pike. For both readers and people who are only watching the show, what are you looking forward to and hoping for in season three? As a member of the former category, I have to admit I’m looking forward to seeing how the show starts to diverge from the novels, if only because I think that some of the story lines that are being changed and trimmed will give us clues about what’s going to happen in George R.R. Martin’s yet-to-be-completed novels, and which plotlines are just red herrings, and thus, for the purposes of television, dispensable.

The sexual abuse of parishioners—particularly children—by members of the clergy has become a defining scandal for the Catholic Church, changing the dynamics between priests and their flocks as lay Catholics demand accountability from Rome. But before crises in Boston and other American cities, a group of brave, deaf men in Milwaukee began speaking out in the 1970s about a priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, who abused as many as 200 of them. Mea Maxima Culpa, a new documentary about their experiences and their courage, premieres on HBO at 9PM tonight.

I spoke to Alex Gibney, the Academy Award-winning director of Mea Maxima Culpa about how to record interviews with deaf subjects, the need for transparency in Catholicism, and how the Catholic Church functions like Enron. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I grew up in the Boston area, so I’m familiar with the breadth of the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse issues. But I was curious, how did you come to this particular story about clergy sexual abuse when there are so many?

Well, I mean, I grew up in Boston too, for that matter. But actually I came to this story because I read it in the New York Times. What impressed me about it were two things. One was the connection between the Milwaukee story and the policies of the Vatican. That was a revelation that hadn’t been properly known at this point. And two was the heroes at the heart of the story, who I didn’t think had been properly celebrated. We hear a lot about victims. We don’t hear a lot about heroes…

They were protesting forcefully despite their handicap, and despite rather major prejudices towards the deaf. There’s a deposition, as you saw in the film, in which Archbishop William Cousins is asked “Why didn’t you reach out to ascertain whether these allegations of abuse were true for the victims?” And he was like, “The victims were deaf. What would they have to say?”

Do you think that Father Murphy decided to work in the deaf community because he would have access to children who were doubly vulnerable?

There’s a dstinction to be drawn in this film between the pedophiles and the coverup. I regard him as the classic predator. A compulsive sexual deviant who was a predator in the way he went after children. Predators tend to look at places where they can go after their prey as easily as possible. Predators tend to hide in plain sight, in a place where they can have access to a lot of victims. He was the interlocutor between their parents and the kids. That was really terrifying. On the part of Murphy, anyway, I think it was a lot of predatory behavior. But he used the church, and he used his skills. You can’t look at this situation and say Murphy became powerful in the deaf community in order to be able to prey on children. I think he also very much cared about the deaf community and a lot of people in the deaf community supported him because he had raised so much money. I think we have to see this as part and parcel of how predators hide in plain sight.

What do you think that Catholic reformers can learn from this protest about how to change the church and hold it accountable?

The only way to extricate is to expose. Any institution that claims that the only way to protect itself is to cover up crimes isn’t protecting itself, it’s just digging deeper into a culture of criminality. If you’re a company and you discover a culture of criminality in your company, say, Enron, do you cover it up, or do you bring it forward and say our reputation is important, but rooting out crime is even more important, and therefore convincing everyone that your reputation as an upstanding company should be upheld?
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I loved the first season of HBO’s little-watched but truly remarkable comedy, Enlightened, about Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a corporate drone who has a breakdown and returns to work determined to good in the world but resigned to the basement as punishment for her meltdown. It’s is one of the best depictions I’ve ever seen of how hard it is to try to live up to your values in corporate America, particularly when you have debt to pay off, because fulfilling work is so often dramatically underpaid, if it’s paid at all. So I’m particularly excited to see that in the second season, Amy’s leveling up—she fantasized about burning down the company she worked for last season, and this year, she’s found a way to do it, by becoming a corporate whistleblower:

“People are living under the illusion that the American dream is working for them,” Amy says in the trailer, in one of the baldest statements about inequality I can think of on scripted American television. And I hope Enlightened makes an important connection that’s implied in this clip. “I just don’t want to jeapordize everything because you’re pissed about your life,” Tyler (Mike White, also the show’s creator) tells Amy when she tries to enlist him in her whistleblowing scheme. But sometimes, you’re pissed about your life because of structural things that make it worse, that make things unjust, that prevent you from grabbing the resources and opportunities to fix your life by more gradual and reasonable means. Sometimes, you have to blow things up, and jeopardize everything, for a shot at something better. That’s one of the fundamental and scary truths of organizing, of the Walmart workers who walked out on Black Friday, of every whistleblower who ever lived. Last season, Amy wanted to change the world and be liked. Now, it seems, she’s truly reconciled herself to the fact that the first half of that equation may be more important.