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.

Word came down over the weekend that Iwan Rheon, who played Simon on the wildly inventive dark British superhero series Misfits, has joined the cast of Game of Thrones. And some folks are speculating that he may play Ramsay Bolton, the illegitimate son of Roose Bolton, the lord sworn to Robb Stark who entered the show last season suggesting it might be a good idea to flay some of the enemy host, loosening their skins as a way to loosen their tongues. I hope that’s the case. Rheon is a fantastically chilly actor, and I think he’d bring something special to a role that I think is one of the most important in the Game of Thrones universe. Folks who haven’t read the books and are averse to spoilerdom might not want to read further.

Ramsay plays a pivotal role in the plot of Game of Thrones going forward. It’s he who takes Winterfell from Theon Greyjoy at the end of the second season. But instead of restoring the Northern alliance from the threat of conquest by the faction of the Greyjoys who want to carve out an addition to their kingdom on the fertile mainland, his possession of the castle turns out to be a dagger in the hopes of Northern consolidation. His family betrays the Starks and Ramsay, at the end of A Dance With Dragons, appears to have lured Stannis Baratheon into what may be a fatal trap, a battle in the midst of a blizzard.

But even more importantly, he’s an example of two themes that are critical to George R.R. Martin’s novels: the dangers of unchecked appetite, and the transmission of sin from generation to generation. While Joffrey Baratheon is one of the most hateful and frightening characters in the early novels and seasons of Game of Thrones, Ramsay Bolton easily eclipses him in A Dance With Dragons. Joffrey may order Sansa beaten, but he asks for her face to be preserved: he continues to see her as human, even if he wants to violently control her. Ramsay, on the other hand, is in the business of turning women into non-persons. He hunts them like game, rapes them, flays them and murders them, the order depending on his mood and the quality of chase they give him. And if they are particularly feisty, Ramsay names his female dogs after his victims. Ramsay doesn’t just want to control women, he wants to obliterate what makes them people, turning them into chunks of meat or animal. He represents appetite unchecked by social norms or conventions. When he does marry, Ramsay has no concern for rumor, locking one wife in a tower to starve to death and subjecting the other to particularly brutal marital rapes. Ramsay’s utter lack of shame or need for approval is one of the most monstrous things Martin presents us with, and this is in a world that includes zombies created by nature and man, dragons of legend, and the routine cruelties of feudal tyrants.

And while Ramsay is an unprecedentedly terrible monster, his monstrousness is not sui generis. As I wrote for my essay in Beyond the Wall:

In A Storm of Swords, Roose admits to Catelyn Stark that Ramsay’s “blood is tainted, that cannot be denied.” While he undoubtedly means that his line has been polluted by having to divert it through an illegitimate son who is half-peasant, Robett Glover provides an alternative explanation in A Dance with Dragons: “The evil is in his blood. He is a bastard born of rape. A Snow, no matter what the boy king says.” While it may be decidedly anti-modern to blame children who are the product of rape for his parents’ sins, there’s something to the idea that unpunished rape is a sin that carries implications far beyond individual victims and perpetrators, a crime that comes back to haunt the society that permits and enables it. This is the one moment in the novels when the characters acknowledge an argument that Martin’s been building for us all along: rape produces damage that lingers beyond a single act, a single victim. It can produce monsters that contribute to the destabilization of entire societies.

Ramsay Bolton isn’t the only child who is the unintended consequences of his parents’ sins. Joffrey Baratheon inherits his father’s entitlement and taste for clumsy sexual violence, Robb Stark his father’s emotional sense of duty, the Sand Snakes their father Oberon’s impatience and strategic wrath. Ramsay’s just the worst example of how violent indifference can flower into murderous sadism, at a cost to nations.

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.

Regular-schedule blogging commences tomorrow. But while I was making personal resolutions, I thought of a couple of cultural ones I want to take care of, too.

1. Get over my anxiety about getting stuck on levels and finish playing Portal.

2. Film school: lots of Kurosawa. Lots of Truffaut.

3. Catch up on or finish: Sons of Anarchy, Mad Men, Cheers, The X-Files, Enlightened, Dexter, How I Met Your Mother, Misfits.

4. See John Lithgow in The Columnist and Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Death of a Salesman,” “Chinese Art in the Age of Revolution” and “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition” at the Metropolitan Museum, “Strange Interlude” at the Shakespeare Theater Company, “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980″ and “Zarina” at the Hammer Museum.

5. Read: a lot of Judge Dredd. Barchester Towers. Play It As It Lays. Joseph Lelyveld on Gandhi. Manning Marable on Malcolm X. Swamplandia.

What’s everyone else working on?

Like a lot of other culture writers, I’m a nerdy Anglophile, so I’m sick over the riot reports coming out of London. And from a cultural perspective, it’s particularly devastating to hear about the burning of Sony’s distribution warehouse and the impact it’ll have on independent artists and independent record stores. So if you want to support British artists, and in particular, to consume some art that’s about the socioeconomic and racial divisions that have played a role in British unrest over the past year, not just the past few days, here are a couple of suggestions:

1. Prime Suspect, Series Two: The second season of the show that made Helen Mirren a star is all about underinvestigations of crimes in London’s Afro-Caribbean neighborhoods — and about the role that race and gender expectations play in the way police officers present themselves in the larger context of the force:

2. Logic’s “For My People.” I’m not comfortable with everything the conscious rapper Logic is saying on Twitter about the riots—I don’t think celebrating burning police stations is productive — but “For My People” is a great explication of how difficult it can be for poor people and people of color to get a place at the policymaking table, or to get media attention by peaceful means:

3. Spooks, Series One. American spy shows tend to focus on foreign threats rather than domestic ones. This show, about a fictional MI-5 unit, is all about the threats to British stability from within, whether it’s anti-abortion extremists, racists who want to forment ethnic conflict in England as a means of cleansing it, and even a post-Buffy Anthony Head as racial environmentalist.

4. Misfits. I’ve written about Misfits before, but if you’re looking for pop culture that will force you to empathize with people who are not inherently likable, or a show about the unfashionable parts of London that are in the process of getting torn up, it’s worth checking out.

After watching Alphas on SyFy last night, I feel like it’s a show that makes a lot of sense to watch alongside Misfits. They’re both shows about people with powers that are as inconvenient as they are helpful. And as Rowan Kaiser pointed out yesterday, Misfits is a show that reverses the polarity on traditional heroes and villains, because in the absence of people who will believe in the main characters’ powers, they seem dangerous and crazy. Alphas is the reverse of that, a show about people with superpowers that would be disastrous if they weren’t managed and protected by someone who can advocate for them within conventional heirarchies. Without someone to mediate between the human and the superpowered world, both shows suggest that things could get ugly, Misfits by showing that reality, Alphas by suggesting it.

Whereas the kids from Misfits face off with probation workers with good intentions and frightening levels of committment, the characters on Alphas are watched over by David Strathairn as Dr. Lee Rosen, a kindly psychiatrist and neurologist who mediates between his charges, swims a lot, eats “Asian pennywort. It increases the blood flow of oxygen to the brain,” and speculates about the skiffle origins of his favorite musicians. Both shows get that superpowers may interfere with characters’ abilities to function in the real world: Alisha on Misfits might not be able to have a regular sex life, Rachel on Alphas has parents who assume she’s unmarriageable because of her sensitivities (though they don’t know she knows they think that), and Alphas‘ Gary clearly is somewhere on the autism spectrum. And both shows get that superpowers make for an awfully tetchy group environment. On Alphas, Rosen is an escape valve for that pressure. In the five episodes of Misfits I’ve seen so far, it’s not so clear that the group will be able to stand together.

I tend to think that these kinds of shows in conjunction with efforts like FX’s adaptation of Powers, and things like the rise of the human characters in S.H.I.E.L.D. in the Marvel movies, we’re reaching the second phase of superhero stories beyond the pages of comic books. The first was about how superheroes learn to live with themselves once they’ve attained great power or, in the case of Batman and Thor, taken on great quests. The second is how the rest of us learn to live with them in a society profoundly altered by their presence.