Note from Alyssa: With a glut of shows set in Washington—and more specifically, in the halls of power—set to hit television screens this year, comparisons to The West Wing are inevitable. But while that show set a high-water mark for political programming, does that mean that its characters were actually good at politics or at running the country? My colleague Ian takes a look at the man who occupied the Oval Office.

For seven seasons, the West Wing was therapy for thousands of Bush-weary progressives who fantasized about being governed by a Nobel Prize winning scholar who didn’t believe that high-income tax cuts were a panacea. Now that America actually is governed by a Nobel Prize winning scholar with a real domestic policy agenda, however, it’s time to be honest about President Bartlet’s legacy. While the ability to rhetorically shame conservatives made him an appealing fantasy, the substance of Bartlet’s policies ranged from uninspired on issues like health care to downright destructive on Social Security and education. Bartlet had a lackluster economic record. He gave away a seat on the Supreme Court to the far right, and he consistently favored symbolic cultural victories over real opportunities to make life better for American families.

If you set aside the budget-busting Bush tax cuts, George W. Bush was actually a better president on domestic policy than President Bartlet. So Bartlet expanded Medicare to cover mammograms and cancer clinical trials? President Bush actually signed a prescription drug plan for seniors. And while George W. Bush at least had the decency to allow his plan to turn Social Security over to Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers die a politically embarrassing death, Bartlet worked with Republicans to pass a massive Social Security reform at a time when Republicans’ were single-mindedly focused on privatization. If the Bartlet Social Security plan had actually been in effect when the market bottomed out in 2008, millions of American seniors would have been left with no safety net to fall back on.

Besides trashing Social Security, the Bartlet Administration had few bold ideas. What was the Bartlet plan to ensure universal access to health care? Or the Bartlet plan to combat global warming? What did President Bartlet do to close the education gap between poor and rich children? Or to ensure that every child who does succeed in high school will be able to pay for college? If anything, his education policy was as much a betrayal as his Social Security debacle. Although the first term Bartlet White House had ambitious plans for education reform, the second term Bartlet wound up supporting school vouchers.

After nearly an entire term in the White House, Bartlet’s economic record was so dismal that it is a miracle he was reelected. Consider his attempt to literally defend this record before God (who he also calls a “feckless thug”): “3.8 million new jobs, that wasn’t good? Bailed out Mexico. Increased foreign trade. 30 million new acres of land for conservation. Put Mendoza on the bench. We’re not fighting a war.”

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It’s not as if characters never leave television shows. Diane and Fraiser both left Cheers, the former for California, the latter for a spinoff. Dr. Addison Montgomery departed Seattle Grace for the bright lights and beaches of Los Angeles. Detective John Munch has transcended franchises, moving from Homicide to Law & Order and popping up everywhere from Arrested Development to the X-Files. But it seems to me we’re entering a period where scripted television feels unusually confident about replacing characters or even entire casts.

The most high-profile case may not have been voluntary or planned: CBS subbed in Ashton Kutcher for Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men, ending the latter character’s run on the show with a fast and not particularly deep workaround. But it came at a time when lots of television shows were deciding that setting and concept were more important than individual characters. The Office saw the departure of Michael Scott, and if the show has seemed creatively moribund since his last episode, its problems really began once Jim and Pam got together. The core cast of the show may change further if Mindy Kaling’s show gets a pickup at Fox, ending her run on NBC as Kelly Kapoor. While it may not be totally clear what’s happening with Glee next year, some of the cast seems likely to depart, whether for a spinoff, or for other projects as graduation approaches for some of the kids at McKinley High. American Horror Story was specifically designed, even if we didn’t know it at the beginning, to replace almost the entire cast every season. And while a new show the CW has ordered may end up following its main character over multiple seasons, its combat-in-the-arena storyline sounds like it could accomodate a whole new cast every season, if need be.

I’d imagine that some of this is driven by the success of reality television on two fronts. Audiences have clearly become comfortable with swapping out contestants and Housewives as long as their replacements continue to fill the same tropes as their predecessors, and in shows like Glee where the characters are more schtick than actual people, and where the structure demands turnover, it probably wouldn’t been too wrenching for audiences to see actors phased in and out. Making sure actors on scripted shows know they’re replaceable also serves another function: it makes the actors who really need the work less powerful in contract negotiations if they know the show is comfortable replacing them at any point. And phasing characters in and out makes it easier for big stars to commit to television shows without worrying about waking up fourteen years later and having everyone forget that they used to compete for Academy Awards. It might have seemed inexplicable that Connie Britton would sign up for a three-year run of eating brains and having ghost-sex, but as a season-long reset button that lets her remind people she’s something other than Mrs. Coach, it makes more sense.

What does it mean in terms of storytelling? I think that’s yet to be seen. While rotating casts do make most actors less critical in favor of setting, atmosphere, and the internal rules of the world that will govern all characters’ behavior, a few anchor characters will still be important. What bodes poorly for Glee and well for American Horror Story, to take the two rotating-cast-shows from the same creator, is that Glee’s tentpole is the increasingly unlikable and not particularly rational staff, led by Will Schuster, while Jessica Lange still has scenery to chomp as creepy Murder House neighbor Constance in American Horror Story. And the concepts have to be good: both Glee and American Horror Story, while neither show is my cup of tea, have concepts that provide procedural-like structures. Every week, songs will be sung or people will die horribly, and folks will turn in to hear those songs and watch those killings. All of which probably lends itself to a focus on episodic, rather than serialized, shows. It’s difficult for me to believe that anyone is tuning in to Glee because they’re deeply invested in and attentive to the coherence of Rachel Berry’s journey any more.

Does that mean we’re going to enter a period of sloppy storytelling? I hope not. Episodic doesn’t have to mean inconsistent. And moving characters along can give a show an emotional integrity it might not have otherwise. But if characters are going to move in and out of shows, the main motivation shouldn’t be to break the power of actors, but to tell specific kinds of stories.

Given our conversations about SOPA and legacy media’s willingness (or lack thereof) to embrace the ways technology is changing the way we consume media, one of the things I was most interested in at the Television Critics Association press tour was the way executives from the networks talked about technology and how it’s affecting everything from ratings to storytelling. I have a piece on the Atlantic about the five biggest tech ideas at press tour, and FX’s John Landgraf, Fox’s Kevin Reilly, ABC’s Paul Lee, and Hulu’s Andy Forssell all deserve significant credit for creative thinking. I want to pull out one point, though, because I think it’s an important question without an easy answer:

If you want people to put television on their calendars, make television that’s worth the appointment—in every way.
Executive: Paul Lee, President, ABC Entertainment Group
Lee isn’t alone in recognizing this. But he was the executive of the press tour to point out that if you want people to plan their weeks around television shows, you have to give them not just can’t-miss plots but visual spectacles that they want to see on television screens, which have gotten larger and cheaper even as we’ve added multiple smaller screens. “I think part of that is we are taking risks and having fun and a lot of feature [movie] directors are attracted to that…that’s one of the reasons you saw Phillip Noyce” (the movie director who helmed two episodes of ABC’s Revenge and an upcoming episode of HBO’s Luck) “coming in. I think you’re going to see feature actors as well as directors.” The profusion of movie actors, such as Anjelica Huston on Smash, Josh Lucas on The Firm, and Dustin Hoffman on Luck, coming to the small screen in mid-season seems to be proving him right. It may not have worked for The Firm, which is floundering, but we’ll see how Smash and Luck do.

With notable exceptions like Avatar (which was also downloaded illegally with very high frequency), audiences seem at least somewhat resistant to the idea that there are things that simply must be seen on the big screen in theaters or on a decent-sized television, and that lose all their power when shrunk down to tablet, laptop, or phone size. Certainly, the skepticism of 3D, which I think is seen as a means of cash extraction rather than storytelling, is one indicator that it’s going to be tricky to sell folks on gimmicks. I’d absolutely argue that something like the Luck pilot, with its gorgeous color and heart-stopping horse races, is much better on a decent-sized television than on your phone at the gym. But if networks or studios are going to claim that something needs to be seen big, and seen in its time slot, and expect audiences to believe them, they have to have both the storytelling and the visual chops to back it up.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

“Bitcoin for Dummies” was one of those episodes of The Good Wife that revolves around everyone manipulating everyone else. Unfortunately, since Will is facing the very real prospect of jail time and Eli isn’t in the episode at all, the machinations are grim, without the undertone of playfulness this show often gives even cases involving serious issues. To make up for that, though, we get double Kalinda, as she plays a central role in both the case of the week and in Will’s legal woes.

A lawyer named Dylan Stack, who has Treasury agents literally following him around, comes to Lockhart/Gardner because of Alicia’s past dealings with Treasury. (This show is one of the best around at remembering to let previous cases affect new ones.) The Treasury department is after Stack’s client for supposedly creating a new online currency called bitcoin, and they’re after Stack because he won’t tell them his client’s identity. At first, Will is understandably reluctant to take on a possibly quixotic and high-profile case against the government in the middle of his own tussle with the State’s Attorney, but the representative of the brave new world of virtual money has arrived with piles of cash, and we know that Lockhart/Gardner needs cash. Judge Sobel quickly rules that Stack doesn’t have to give up his client’s identity, but since we’re still in the first half of the episode, that can’t possibly end things, and it doesn’t: Gordon Higgs, the same Treasury lawyer Alicia dealt with a few episodes ago, promptly arrests Stack for being the creator of bitcoin himself.

Perhaps characteristically, Will wants to go on the offense where Alicia and Diane are inclined to defense. They try to argue that bitcoin isn’t a currency at all, so it doesn’t matter whether Stack created it. But after some back and forth, including a fun cameo by CNBC’s Jim Cramer as an expert witness, Sobel rules that bitcoin is a currency, basically because it’s transferable and you can buy things with it on Amazon. I wasn’t entirely convinced – Cramer made some good points about bitcoin not having many of the characteristics of currency, including a central regulating bank, and another witness’s comparison of bitcoin to frequent flier miles seemed apt – but at least this outcome meant we got to spend the rest of the episode watching Kalinda run around a cryptography conference in pursuit of the real inventor of bitcoin.

Kalinda eventually figures out that bitcoin is three people, not one: Stack and his two partners all accuse each other in hopes of leading both Kalinda and the Treasury agents in circles. The most interesting element of this is that one of the partners is a beautiful young blond woman, and Kalinda astutely points out that the woman could use her gender and looks to deflect suspicion: Everyone assumes that the inventor of a revolutionary tech product must be male, and it’s satisfying to see a woman turn this discrimination on its head and use it to her advantage. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter that Kalinda is being manipulated, because she doesn’t need to have the true answer as long as she can play Higgs the way she wants, and no one on this show – with the possible exception of Eli – can manipulate like Kalinda. She sets up (and “accidentally” records) a meeting with Higgs at which she promises to unmask the real inventor of bitcoin, and this proof that Higgs doesn’t really believe that Stack is the inventor leads the judge to dismiss the case. At their last meeting, Alicia tells Stack that she bought one bitcoin, but that it didn’t feel real. Stack responds with unexpected words of wisdom that could be the tagline for the whole show: “Real’s gonna change. Just watch.”
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This post contains spoilers through the first episode of the second season of Downton Abbey.

So, caveat! I am almost but not entirely caught up on the first season of Downton Abbey, so I am relying a little bit on Wikipedia for backstory here. I will be caught up by next week, but for now, please be merciful.

I really am struck by the atmosphere of creative destruction in this episode, the way the war clarifies and distills the characters priorities. I agree with critics who say that Downton Abbey is predictable, more a product of its genre than a subversion of it. But it’s the rare thing that both can be qualified that way and that is executed so strongly that it’s a bracing reminder of why these cliches exist and are powerful. Even when I can see something coming from a mile away, whether it’s a hand injured in the war, a maid’s disappointment or a nobleman’s wrongfooting, it still lands like a blow to the chest. And there are enough surprises that are true to character that there’s fresh air in it.

The walls between the upstairs and the downstairs were already crumbling in the first season, whether in Lord Grantham’s tie to Bates or Carson’s confession to Lady Mary that “even a butler has his favorites” after he reassures her that her life isn’t over yet. But the war’s brought them down in force, with Isobel as something of an intermediary. First, there’s Sybil, who, after realizing bitterly that “Sometimes it feels as if all the men I ever danced with are dead,” decides she wants to try nursing, and by extension, learn how to be a functional woman rather than an ornament of the aristocracy. “Have you ever made your own bed, for example? Or scrubbed a floor?” Isobel asks her gently. The scenes of Mrs. Patmore and Daisy trying to teach her how to do the simplest tasks, including filling a kettle without drenching herself, are kind, revealing Sybil’s foibles but helping her work beyond them. It’s fascinating to see Violet and Lady Grantham’s response to her desire. Violet, surprisingly, sides with Isobel, insisting that “You can’t pretend it’s not respectable when every day we’re treated to pictures of queens and princesses in a Red Cross uniform.” And Lady Grantham’s concern for Sybil ultimately undoes her objections: her daughter’s emotional well-being trumps her concerns with propriety. “I was worried about Lady Sibyl. But I’m not worried anymore,” she tells the butler. “Carson, the cake will be a surprise whether you approve of it or not, so please don’t give it away.”
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I kind of feel like Netflix is giving us everything and the kitchen sink with Lillyhammer: it’s The Sopranos! And a little bit of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Scandanavia! With a good dose of fish out of water stuff a la You Kill Me! And a sheep! And a girl band! And a bit of Uncanny Valley in that opening sequence that makes the characters look more like Grand Theft Auto avatars than actual humans!

That said, I do quite like semi-goofy gangster stories and Steve Van Zandt, so I’ll definitely check this out.

But I think the show, and the other originals Netflix has signed up for, including an Arrested Development continuation and a House of Cards remake point to a larger challenge for the service as it tries to develop a brand identity. What’s been great about Netflix as a streaming and DVD delivery service has been its breadth. Whether your thing is violent motorcycle gang soap operas, workout videos, or great sitcoms of the ’80s, it had you covered. It would likely be easier for Netflix to dig in and develop a couple of great sitcoms, or one or two great dramas, or to decide it’s going to do a couple of anti-hero shows across formats, effectively deciding that it’s going to court a niche audience for its originals business, or at least one niche at a time. But it’s a harder thing to develop consistently excellent programming across a wide variety of genres, tones, and subject-matter tranches. I can understand why the company would prefer to try for that, though: after causing a lot of confusion and doing itself a lot of damage, I’d want a master-stroke to bring in new or disaffected former customers, and to make a lot of my audience very excited. I’m just not entirely sure how it’ll pan out.

We’re done with Boardwalk Empire and Homeland for the season, and while I’ll pick up The Walking Dead and Community when they return, we’ve got some pretty substantial space in the schedule. What do you want me to recap? I’m happy to pick up an ongoing show, or to give a shot to a new one — I’ll definitely be doing House of Lies. Nominations go until noon on Friday: we won’t do a formal vote, so second things you want even if someone’s already tossed them in the pool. I’ll make a final schedule and publish it on Monday.

Experian’s come out with its annual list of the shows whose viewers are most consistently conservative and liberal, and they’re interesting less for what they say about conservative and liberal tastes than what they indicate about the parties.

If you extrapolated back to form a party profile from the shows with the most purely conservative audiences, it would be a pretty easy guess from the top three shows — Barrett Jackson Auction (which I’d never heard of), This Old House, and the 700 Club — that the party is old, and somewhat religious. There’s a Ron Swanson-like streak in the fondness for Top Shot, New Yankee Workshop, and American Pickers. And it’s interesting to see a semi-anthropological streak in the Republican devotion to reality shows about working-class white folks like Swamp Loggers and Swamp People. Conservatives may insist that progressives treat working people with a combination of curiosity and condescension, but there are no reality shows in the list of programs with the most concentrated liberal audiences. And The Bachelor, which has a pretty grotesque perspective on marriage and family values, is in the top 10 for conservative shows.

Looking at the shows with the most concentrated liberal audiences, it’s easy to guess from mock news shows like The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and the Soup that the audiences skew young, and snarky. In fact, six of the 15 shows with the most solidly liberal audiences are talk shows, which one could say suggests a penchant for (not always productive) introspection. Shows about real and alternate families are big among liberal viewers, ranging from Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock to Glee and Modern Family to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The Middle is the only real family show to be in the conservative top 15.

The funniest bit is probably the list of shows favored by moderate voters. I’m sure politicians would love to find some leading indicators in those results. But unless we’re supposed to take a fondness for HGTV as an indicator that housing is the biggest concern most American swing voters face, there isn’t much there to build a platform on. Instead, we like semi-reformed rock stars and heavier public servants, stories about how men found their wives and women going bonkers of their dream dresses. Swing voters will remain mysterious and variable.

Jamie Weinman makes what I think is a good point—the essentially centrist perspectives of mass-market television don’t mean that characters can’t have opinions or that shows can’t portray political debates:

There are certain issues mainstream TV will always have trouble addressing, and there’s no use complaining about it; TV is basically a centrist medium, held back from taking a definitive stand on almost anything divisive. But that doesn’t mean every character has to be completely without defined political views. It’s often hard to tell what political affiliation a character has—even when that character is a politician. In an era when almost everything is politicized in one way or another, and even a schoolgirl’s tweet can lead to an incident with the governor of Kansas, it can be limiting for characters to be without opinions on these things. We don’t need to know who every character votes for, but there are story possibilities when some of them are Republican or Democrat or Tory or NDP. After all, when families get together, one of the things they argue about is politics; if you take that away, you’ve mostly got arguments about technology and sex. And as TV is currently proving, there are only so many stories you can get from technology and sex.

While I’d prefer a world where television programs weren’t afraid to have clear worldviews that settled somewhere other than the absolute center of the political spectrum, I’d rather shows have characters who represent a range of definitive political opinions than that they have no politics whatsoever. The idea that political neutrality or uncertainty is a default position, and that viewers will identify more with characters who have no politics whatsoever, strikes me as rather strange. Sure, when it comes to opinion polling, people may pick at random to avoid admitting that they’re underinformed or haven’t reached clear opinions on issues or candidates. But that indicates at least a sense that having an opinion is more desirable than not. If people are having even cursory conversations in their own lives about politics, there’s no reason to believe that they’d shy away from watching such conversations on screen—people both watch television and talk about current events for pleasure, so there’s no reason to believe they’re mutually exclusive.

And at the end of the day, viewers are going to like some characters more than others for all sorts of reasons. It doesn’t seem to be a vastly greater risk to float a character who has definitive political views than to put one out there who is so gratingly annoying (a la many of the supporting characters in Whitney, for example) as to be unbearable. The more television from the eighties and nineties I watch, the more convinced I become that the “technology and sex” problem Jamie’s describing is real: the aperture of what non-cable networks seem to think they can portray is narrower now than it was when Tip O’Neill swung by Cheers or Max ran for borough council on Living Single:

That’s a shame, and I think it’s one of the reasons the networks have lost so much critical ground to cable. It’s not just a sex and violence differential.

Lost in the ongoing kerfuffle over whether Chelsea Clinton is qualified to report human interest segments for NBC News, and whether her hiring represents a conflict of interest for the network, seems to be a quality question: is the very private daughter of the man who was president more than a decade ago actually a draw for anyone? I kind of get the Meghan McCain thing as entertainment, if not as news — she’s got a well-cultivated personality, she’s built a following on social media; at the USA Network-The Moth storytelling event I went to earlier this fall, she comported herself with a winning degree of sophistication and self-deprecation. But I don’t know that anyone tunes in to MSNBC for her.

And it’s even more bewildering to think that people would tune in for Chelsea Clinton. One of the more admirable things the Clintons ever did as parents was to fight hard to protect Chelsea’s privacy, especially at a time when Bill’s behavior was inviting withering media scrutiny. As an adult, she kept to that pattern, working a series of bland private sector jobs and venturing out only to campaign for her mother in 2008. I looked at some of her wedding pictures (Hillary rocked a really awesome caftan in the days beforehand) in a cursory way. But the same preservation of her privacy and stringent avoidance of public life or public service that don’t make her a particularly qualified journalist don’t make her a particularly interesting person either. I have no idea what Chelsea Clinton’s unique lens on the world is, and nothing about the deal with NBC has made it seem like I should really care. I say this not to be callous, but to suggest it’s puzzling that the network would pursue a hire that invites disapproval without a clear upside.