On the one hand, it was a bummer this week that we were without the services of Team PCHH member Trey Graham, who was off being all, "Oh, professional development this," and "Oh, journalism that."

Fortunately, we were able to secure the services of the fantastic Barrie Hardymon, an editor at Talk Of The Nation. About Barrie, I will just say: she is lovely, she is charming, she is raucously funny, and she has been known to leave her head and her heart on the dance floor. I'm just saying. (Random YouTube commenters can't be wrong: she's the most awesome one.) (Also, I argue that Barrie and I sound like voice twins.)

This week's agenda kicks off with a revisiting of Glen Weldon favorite Gymkata (a topic from two weeks back), and it wraps up with a revisiting of Glen Weldon favorite The Hobbit (a topic from three weeks back). In between, we will touch on brutal television justice, an extremely unconventional lollipop and the reality show that brings it to you, even more ruminations upon the greatness that is the Bachelor franchise and its associated Pad, and Barrie's dual sources of happiness for the week, which demonstrate once and for all that cultural silos in which some people like literary fiction and some people like pop entertainment are utter nonsense.

As if that were not enough, we also return to Stephen's "Stephen Reads A Book" project from last week, in which he reads and shares some of your suggestions (we got lots!) and tentatively picks the book he is now going to read.

All this, plus the usual editing and production (and musical!) stylings of our sterling producer Mike Katzif, and I have to tell you, people ... this episode is epic.

The more talk I hear about the plans to replace Steve Carell on The Office, the more concerned I am that it's going to be the most overblown sendoff in television history — or it would be, except that this is also the final year of Oprah.

Hey, you know how the entire point of Joaquin Phoenix's "now I will be a rapper" thing, the thing that forms the basis of his new movie I'm Still Here, was that he was totally quitting acting? And you know how some people haven't been sure that this was an entirely real development in his life? Please enjoy this report on how, while he may have multitudinous issues, he has apparently not quit acting.

What I want you to know about these Jersey Shore Halloween costumes is that some publicist somewhere sent me one. In the mail. Opened my mail, and there it was. The one on the left. I really needed to tell someone.

You know who's tired of all the hype about Brett Favre? Brett Favre! Why can't a guy retire and unretire several times by way of many press conferences without everyone acting like his retirement or unretirement is some kind of big dramatic thing? Am I right?

 

The Guardian has this thoughtful piece about the weird popularity of the rape joke, and the subtle difference between comedy that's pushing boundaries and comics who "pose as plain-speakers and PC refuseniks in order to smuggle in the kind of misogynist comedy last seen in the 1970s."

Sure, it's early to start speculating about next March's Oscar races. It's also early to start dreaming about who will be best-dressed on the red carpet. That doesn't mean people aren't doing it.

The Wall Street Journal, swimming against trends elsewhere in the area of literary criticism in newspapers, is launching a new separate book-review section.

Speaking of which: Franzen, Franzen, Franzen! Yesterday on Fresh Air, Jonathan Franzen talked about Freedom, depression, novel writing, and the death of David Foster Wallace. And yes, he has this to say about a topic we've discussed in this space: "It seems like there's ... a feminist critique, and it's about the quality of attention that writing by women gets compared to the quality of attention by male writers. I actually have a lot of those feelings myself and have over the years." I, personally, think he's just jealous of himself.

It's time once again for NPR's podcast of the week's best arts and culture stories. Today we're looking at a profile of the new-style old soul singer Leela James, an interview with Martin Landau (fun fact: he was Gene Roddenberry's first choice to play Mr. Spock on Star Trek), and an explainer piece about the music cloud. (That's the idea that you can access a virtual "cloud" of music over the Internet. Reporter Joel Rose examines the plans of Apple and other companies for sending such clouds your way.) We've also got an immersive piece about some amazing new music from Mexico and a preview of fall movies from critic Bob Mondello.

Subscribe here or listen below.

Well, we already have the Emmys and the Schmemmys ... what will we call the new Paley Center Awards? The Fee-Fi-Mo-Memmys? Joe Adalian at Vulture has these thoughts on why this latest effort is probably no threat to the existing awards.

What nifty video went all around the Internet yesterday? Why, this one, showing an Amazing Race contestant in the upcoming season absolutely clocking herself in the face with a watermelon. It is quite shocking. (She seems to be fine, though! Just fine!)

I have grave concerns about Joel McHale showing up in Spy Kids 4 with Jessica Alba, which seems like precisely the sort of thing lesser men would do, but whatever he wants to do, I'll back him up. Loyalty is everything.

 

Does Hollywood Need To "Win Back" Its Audience? It's a fair question following this low-impact summer season, but as Cinematical points out, this is the kind of thing that can't really be determined based on a few months of receipts when some of the films that have the biggest expectations for the year haven't even come out yet.

It feels like this was announced back when I was in about second grade, but it's really true for real: Piers Morgan is replacing Larry King at CNN. America's Got ... Suspenders! Or something. (Doesn't have suspenders? It's very confusing.)

Okay, look, Lindsay Lohan. There are times when you're just having fun and acting out, and there are times when things have turned grotesquely serious. You know how you know things have turned grotesquely serious? You are being used as a cautionary tale FOR SNOOKI.

Yesterday's news was that the Amish might be the new vampires. Now it's zombies. But hasn't it been zombies before? Weren't vampires the new zombies, originally? Do zombies and vampires just trade off?

And finally, co-founder of Salon Scott Rosenberg makes a pretty compelling case that the evidence is far from conclusive that links within things you read online cause you to retain less — he at least demonstrates that the evidence that's been produced so far isn't the evidence it would take to demonstrate that point.

Some books are capital-I Important — they were, for example, the first to experiment with narrative in such and such a way, or they documented a time of great change, or some aspect of their authors' race, gender, sexuality or class marked them as a particular cultural milestone.

Because we tend to read Important books when they are assigned to us (how many Important books now languish in the formless limbo of 11th grade reading lists?) we approach them differently than others. Important books, we tell ourselves as we steel our spines to dive into their first chapters, have Much to Teach Us. We experience them primarily on that intellectual/analytical/vaguely medicinal level.

But you're an adult now, and it's important you acknowledge something that old Mrs. Vagnoni, as she stood up there in front of the class droning on about An American Tragedy, never could or would, namely this:

There is Important, and there is Good. And they do not tend to hang out at the same barbecues.

A Good book is one that engages your senses, your heart, and, yes, your mind. But it's an immediate, unconsidered experience, a rush of adrenaline that keeps you turning pages hungrily.

An Important book is one you appreciate. A Good book is one you care about.

Rarely — all too rarely — Important and Good come together in a book that both instructs and involves us. When this happens, attention must be paid.

Hey, that reminds me: Howard Cruse's graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby is back in print. You really should read it.

 

First published in 1995, Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby is, the author insists, not autobiographical, though it does feel intensely personal. It's the tale of Toland Polk, a young white man in the Southern town of Clayfield, Alabama (read: Birmingham) who gets caught up in the Civil Rights movement even as he struggles to come to terms with his sexuality.

It's a clear-eyed account of a turbulent time that weaves the personal so deeply and effortlessly into the political that the intellectual scrim of the book's Importance drops away — even as you admire the skill of Cruse's storytelling, and the tiny, humanizing details he packs into every panel, the simple emotional power of his story itself keeps you reading.

The book snapped up lots of awards back in 1995; it was championed by many in the gay press, who admired its sensitive treatment of coming out, and a few in the comics community, who recognized that Cruse had accomplished something skillful, moving and, yeah, Important.

But critical praise wasn't enough to keep the book in print. My personal copy, which I loaned out to friends over and over again, is now a sorry looking thing — dog-eared and duct-taped within an inch of its life. So when Vertigo announced it was coming out with a handsome new edition this summer — featuring a savvy and crisply written introduction by Alison Bechdel — I was happy.

So was the Washington Post, which reviewed the new edition a few weeks back, and while the review was quite positive, it included one line near the very end that continues to rankle:

"There wasn't a lot of subtlety to the heroism and villainy of the civil rights era in the South, and for that reason comic-strip art may be especially well suited to evoking it."

Gah. And also: Sigh. But no, mostly: Gaaaah.

That single line pretty much dismisses everything Cruse accomplishes in these pages. Because Stuck Rubber Baby is a comic, yes — a black and white one, appropriately enough — but it concerns itself with moral, sexual and emotional gray areas.  In so doing, it reveals how effectively, and seemingly effortlessly, the comics form can be used to tell a nuanced, subtle and emotionally complex story.

Cruse' art is all about facial expression and body language. He uses a stippling effect to round his characters' faces and bodies and denote subtle gradations in light and shadow that lend the illustrations a extra richness and dimensionality. His page layouts — particularly those that feature song lyrics, as many do — gently nudge your eye across the page, but when you reach the bottom you find yourself going back to admire how Cruse melds disparate elements so that any given page stands alone as an exquisitely composed narrative object.

That, importantly (and Importantly) is something only comics can do.

More to the point: Toland isn't a hero. He's not noble. His strongest conviction is to protect himself, and to that end he says and does stupid, hurtful things. He's perpetually conflicted and confused and passive. In other words, he's a portrait that doesn't often get painted, in accounts of that time and place. Because, for much of the book, he's one of the good men who do nothing, who allow evil to exist.

Yes, eventually he does step up, but in a halting, achingly human way. Cruse is blisteringly honest, here, about our capacity for dithering self-involvement in the face of a giant societal evil.

Because make no mistake, the Klan is an evil straight out of the pulpiest superhero comic — they even wear masks — but Cruse spends much, much more ink depicting the casual, reflexive racism that pervades the town, that spills out of the mouths of otherwise "good" characters.

Stuck Rubber Baby is a deft, accomplished and deeply felt account of a very volatile time, but it's also the story of a flawed, confused person working hard to make himself less so.

Mrs. Vagnoni probably wouldn't approve of the language, or the sex, in Stuck Rubber Baby — but she'd be hard pressed to deny that it's Important.

And Good.

I'm about halfway through Freedom, the widely praised new novel by Jonathan Franzen. As you probably know, a couple of tweets from women who write fiction (namely Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner) used the New York Times' heavy coverage of Freedom as a jumping-off point to express some long-held frustrations about what the Times covers and what it doesn't. (The story is summarized here.)

As the matter of the advance reviews fades and the book itself becomes the topic, it's important to note that while there's no sign at this point that anything about the way The New York Times covers books has changed or will change, that doesn't mean it wasn't a worthwhile discussion, though perhaps not in the way that was intended. There do seem to be some lessons that can be taken away from the whole thing.

Most importantly, it demonstrated how challenging it is to talk about complicated things when the nature of back-and-forth in online discourse encourages constant diversions into things that are easier.

Consider what David L. Ulin at The Los Angeles Times wrote about Weiner and Picoult's complaints here. First, Ulin looks at the numbers that Slate reported, showing that of all the works of fiction The New York Times reviewed, only 38 percent were by women, and a slimmer 29 out of 101 books to receive two reviews (a Sunday review and a weekday review) were by women.

"That's a valid concern," says Ulin, and he later adds, "It's exactly the kind of thing issue we should be discussing." Nevertheless, he then declines entirely to discuss it, declaring that while the women who brought this disparity up were correct, that probably isn't really why they were upset. He says instead, "The furor over [Freedom's] success smacks of gossip, envy, a mean-spirited approach to literary life. It's personal, people reacting to writer they don't like."

At this point, Ulin switches over to a piece written for Newsweek — which neither Weiner nor Picoult had anything to do with — about not liking Franzen personally. It's curious that what begins with "These women made the following argument, and statistically, they have a point, and that point is important and should be talked about" becomes "but then there's this other thing this other person said, which is not important and should not be talked about, and let's talk about why we don't need to talk about that instead." There seems to be no reason to ignore the "valid" bias question and move on to "Should writers be envious and catty?" — to move from an good question to a dumb question — except that the dumb question, like all dumb questions, is easier.

 

It's very, very hard to get your arms around the idea of whether or not some sort of gender bias exists in the way the NYT reviews books. The statistic that only 38 percent of the reviewed books are by women doesn't mean much without looking at what percentage of all books are by women. But even if you knew that 60 percent of all books were by women, for instance, you'd then have to know what percentage of those are so-called "genre fiction" — romances, thrillers, mysteries — that aren't often reviewed by the NYT whether they're by women or by men.

And then you get into the questions Weiner has raised about why it is that genre or "commercial" fiction should be ignored anyway. The New York Times doesn't limit itself to art-house movies; why should it limit itself to literary fiction? That's not necessarily a question of gender bias; that's a matter of philosophy.

What pops up in trying to plow through all this is mostly anecdotal evidence. For instance, I recently read One Day, a book that is not qualitatively different in style, form, or plot from anything by Weiner or Emily Giffin or any one of a number of writers of commercial fiction marketed to women. This book, however, was written by David Nicholls, and for some reason, it has mostly avoided being classified as the frothy, simplistic, unchallenging pop book that it is. (It also has, I have to say, one of the most shamelessly manipulative and maudlin endings I have ever read in any book at any time, ever — precisely the kind of thing people claim to hate about so-called "chick lit.")

It's very difficult not to wonder whether, had One Day had a different cover photo — say a woman and a man, seen from the back, walking and holding hands — and was written by a woman, The Guardian would have called it "a novel that is not only roaringly funny but also memorable, moving and, in its own unassuming, unpretentious way, rather profound."

Or whether it would have gotten such a positive review from The New York Times, which doesn't seem to have ever reviewed, for instance, any of Giffin's books (aside from a one-sentence mention here or there in a summer-books roundup) but has written about her three times in its Fashion & Style section in pieces like this, which keep you up to date about what she's wearing and informs you that when there are several "chick lit" books released at the same time, that means the summer might just be — yes, they really say this — "catfight central."

I don't care what the statistics are: that is uncomfortable.

Because this conversation is so challenging, as I followed it around the Internet, it kept diverting itself to questions that are easier, like "Do you like Jodi Picoult's writing?" "Do you think Jennifer Weiner makes too much money?" "Shouldn't we all be reading more classics?" "Does Jennifer Weiner understand German?" These things really aren't at all relevant to whether the argument that the Times could stand to review a broader selection of books is valid or invalid — that point could be made by a good writer or a bad writer or someone who isn't a writer at all, and it does nothing to refute that point to say, "Well, she writes trash that doesn't deserve a review." Who cares? That answers the question, "Should the NYT be reviewing Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner?" It doesn't answer the question, "Should the NYT consider reviewing a wider variety of books?"

This is a great question, and it doesn't have to be a particularly combative question. There's no reason to be afraid of it. If you think there's not enough evidence to demonstrate any kind of a problem — as have some people who have pointed out both that Franzen has been witheringly reviewed by the NYT at times and that there certainly isn't a total blackout on literary fiction by women writers, both of which are fair points — then that's the answer. There's no reason to skitter away from that and over to, essentially, "They're just jealous." Okay. Let's say they're just jealous; let's say we buy that. What about everybody else who sort of thought they had a point? Everybody's just jealous? Everybody who has that sense that they're not being well-served as readers?

I noted on Twitter yesterday that according to two pieces that had passed across my desk lately, 64 percent of book purchases in 2009 were made by women, but 61 percent of The Expendables' audience on opening weekend was men. That means buying a book is a more gender-specific act than going to see The Expendables. In part, this just means more women went to see The Expendables than you might think, but it does seem to underline the fact that it's a fair question, when women are buying 64 percent of the books, why they're only writing about 33 percent of the books that The New York Times is choosing to give multiple reviews. Whatever else is going on, the NYT does seem to be slanted toward selling books by men to an audience of women. Why that is, it's hard to say, but whether that is ... well, there's evidence for that.

None of this is to say we have the answer to all this, it just means it seems like an eminently fair question, and one that's been unfortunately lost in a whole lot of distractions.

You have to hand it to The Atlantic for this headline: "When 'Bite Me' Is 'Off The Record.'"

The fact that there's been a boom in Amish-themed romance novels (really!) has been in the news off and on for a while now; Galleycat has an update as it wonders whether, strictly from a trend perspective, Amish romance is the new vampire romance.

Three percent of all Twitter traffic is related to Justin Bieber, who has his own dedicated servers. I just want you to understand what we face.

As BBC4 begins airing the fourth season of Mad Men, The Guardian has this great piece about the writing of the show in particular, observing, "The series's extraordinary freedom is a product of its discipline."

 

Was this summer's Kick-Ass the bomb it has the reputation of being? Perhaps not. Not every opening weekend can be overcome, but it's a very fair point that the opening weekend is not the movie's entire lifespan.

I want to make one more pitch — just one more — for BBC America's wonderful The Choir, which begins its final story tonight: the creation of a community choir in the somewhat hard-up town of South Oxhey. If the first two stories were about teaching kids who had never really experienced music, it's perhaps even more moving to see adults who may have lived fifty years without having the opportunity to fully explore an innate love of singing in an organized way. It's really so, so great — please catch it tonight at 10:00 p.m. on BBC America.

Jenny Slate started last year on Saturday Night Live with the dual challenges that (1) the dumping of Michaela Watkins seemed unceremonious and ill-advised; and (2) she managed to swear live on her first episode. Now, she's reportedly headed out the door after one season. If the current reports are correct, the show will continue to increase its male-female ratio, getting rid of Slate and adding one woman and three men to the "featured players" list.

[Note: When I first published this story this morning, it accidentally had my byline on it, because that's the default setting when I'm publishing. It is, however, written by NPR movie critic Bob Mondello, who is fortunately very likely to forgive me. — Linda Holmes]

Hear that sputtering sound? It’s the summer movie season gasping to a close –- dollars are up, but barely (and only because of 3D’s premium pricing), while attendance is the lowest it’s been in thirteen years. Hell, without the sequels (Toy Story 3, Iron Man 2, Twilight Eclipse, Shrek Forever After) that grabbed four of the top six spots on hot weather box office charts, the Summer of 2010 would’ve been the kind of bust you have to go back to the 1950s to find.

Now come cooler weather, diminished box office expectations, and a slew of pictures grounded at least theoretically in reality, among them: Nowhere Boy, about Liverpool lad John Lennon, who’s going nowhere fast until he decides to form a boy-band in the early ‘60s; The King’s Speech, about Elizabeth II’s royal dad (Colin Firth) and the speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush) who helped him stop stammering; Fair Game, with Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame, the CIA agent outed by the Bush administration and Sean Penn playing her diplomat hubby; and The Social Network, David (Fight Club) Fincher’s version of  how a nebbishy Harvard student (Jesse Eisenberg) cooked up a little thing called Facebook in his dorm room and became a billionaire.

If fictionalized real-life doesn’t make you want to slip out to the multiplex, you can skip the fiction and just take in a documentary. Among the more promising: Gerrymandering, about the politics of geography; Waste Land, about a sprawling landfill where garbage is transformed into art; I’m Still Here, about actor-turned rapper Joaquin Phoenix (by his buddy Casey Affleck), Inside Job, about the causes of the Wall Street meltdown; and Waiting for "Superman," in which the Inconvenient Truth team look at possible fixes for an education system that even defenders say is broken.

None of this is to suggest that Hollywood’s gone soft on more conventional fare. You’ll still be able to see Denzel Washington taming a runaway train in Unstoppable, Clint Eastwood going all ethereal in Hereafter, and everybody's fave teen wizard staring down the man with no name …. er, nose … in Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. And those whose tastes run to something a tad less demanding can rest assured Hollywood’s got them covered, too. The titles Knucklehead, Douchebag and Jackass will all be on multiplex marquees this fall.

Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical has this thoughtful response to a piece in the Denver Post that suggested that it might be dangerous to provide young girls with misleading images of women in action movies who are too capable of defending themselves physically. Because, you see, men as a rule are apparently perfectly capable of the physical feats performed by men in action movies. [Hold for massive eye-roll.]

The Internet buzzed Sunday night and yesterday about Sunday night's great Mad Men episode, "The Suitcase." Vulture does a nice job of using it as a jumping-off point for a slideshow (I know, I know, slideshows are annoying; I recommend them sparingly) demonstrating how Peggy Olson has changed over the years.

I'm pretty sure we've had a discussion here at the blog at some point (I can't find it at the moment) about whether it's better to read a whole book before you start another one, or to read many books at once. They chatted up this topic, as it happens, yesterday on Talk Of The Nation.

 

Wyclef Jean is not too terribly pleased with comments Sean Penn and former Fugee Pras recently made about his efforts to run for president in Haiti. So he got back at them as only a musician can: in song.

Hey, remember that JetBlue flight attendant who did that thing, and it seemed for a while like he was going to be massively famous, only now it feels like that happened four hundred years ago? He has officially left JetBlue. "He was not fired," says his lawyer. Totally voluntary! He pulled the emergency slide, as they say! Oh, wait.

And finally, in the most anticlimactic announcement American Idol has made since it decided to allow acoustic guitars, Kara DioGuardi has left for real. Young and sensitive female singers will now be left, presumably, to claim that they are huge fans of Jennifer Lopez.

On this week's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we start off with a quick discussion of a few Emmy highlights, and then we move into a discussion of some things we like — or, in Stephen's case, things we are against. Which is, in Stephen's case, "everything."

Beloved icons? Against. Famous D.C. tourist attractions? Against. The act of reading? Well, that answer is more complicated. And he'll explain why he wants you to sit right down and write him an email — right now.

Meanwhile, we discuss the surprisingly good season of Project Runway that's currently underway, how we felt about last weekend's Emmy Awards, a new movie Trey is very fond of, and Glen's current favorite podcast (other than, of course, this one).

Thanks to Stephen Thompson, Trey Graham, Glen Weldon, and our invaluable producer Mike Katzif — who, I should mention, did amazing work this week editing our bitterness and fighting down to the point where we will not actually be e-mailbombed by angry bespectacled time-traveling carnies. (Don't ask.)

Listen right here, or subscribe to NPR's nifty arts podcast Culturetopia, which will bring you not only PCHH, but also other cool NPR arts coverage.

The Chicago Tribune asks whether a popular book ensures a popular movie — a question on many minds as the Stieg Larsson books fly off the shelves and head to Hollywood.

Anthony Bourdain is always good for a few candid remarks about people other than himself, and he does not disappoint in this interview leading up to the 100th episode of his show, No Reservations.

Speaking of which, Noel Murray has a great essay at the A.V. Club about the general matter of reality shows tending to flame out unattractively, no matter how good they originally are.

 

First it seemed like Jennifer Lopez was coming to American Idol, then it seemed like maybe she wasn't, but now it looks like things are on again.

Many people own Dan Brown books, but many people get rid of them, too, says this look at the titles most commonly donated to book shops in the UK.

Using one of my favorite turns of phrase in quite some time, the Telegraph pays tribute to "the almost freakishly benign gift to the civilised world that is Jon Hamm’s handsomeness."

A smart essay at Slashfilm chronicles the rise of self-awareness in cinema, looking at both camera-aimed winks and meta-films that ultimately serve as sendups of already existing genres. It's an interesting piece in light of the rise of what it deems "deliberate unoriginality," which isn't necessarily a bad thing in all cases.

If you've ever taken small children to a 3D movie, you know that for some of them, it kind of freaks them out. And what that means to some people is that a 3D movie might get a different rating than the 2D version of the same movie. At least in Sweden.

How many pounds did this year's crop of major September fall fashion magazines weigh? (You heard me.) The Wrap has the story.

Are you in favor of or against the ironic collecting of bad art? Either way, you might be interested in this story in The New York Times.

This week's digest of NPR's best arts and culture stories —the one that can be downloaded straight into your mobile thingie — includes a terrific profile of former Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, part of our 50 Great Voices series, and a look at how movies have over the years tried to predict the future.

Our future may hold precious little in the way of traditional soap operas; this piece mourns the passing of As The World Turns after five decades on the air and muses upon why audiences have turned away from soaps. Reporter Lynn Neary looks at the feminist backlash to glowing reviews of Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, and a review of a sexy new thriller that's something like a French Bonnie And Clyde.

À la semaine prochaine! Subscribe here or listen below.

Expect good things: Breaking Bad star (and Emmy threepeater) Bryan Cranston has a date with Saturday Night Live.

Robert "Joe" Halderman, who pleaded guilty to trying to extort money from David Letterman, has been released from prison after four months.

The latest unsung outrage: WHY DOESN'T DANCING WITH THE STARS INCLUDE WRITERS?

The ongoing battle between people who like to read books on paper and people who like to read books digitally is reaching critical mass as couples to go war in their own homes! My favorite part is the lady who couldn't enjoy her book because her husband was using an iPad to read instead of reading a book beside her. Oy.

You can think of acknowledgments as one of the sweetest and warmest parts of any book. Or you can think of them as icky, like this guy.

The Hollywood Reporter has more details on why content companies other than ABC/Disney and Fox are thus far declining to participate in Apple's 99-cent rental program we discussed earlier today, and what that might mean for the experiment's future.

The new Apple TV that Steve Jobs announced yesterday will do a bunch of different things. It will let you put Netflix streaming content right on your TV, which you can already do with various TVs, gaming consoles, DVRs, standalone boxes, and Blu-ray players, meaning this is not an innovation so much as something that would sink the Apple TV as a competitor instantly if it weren't offered. It will let you rent HD movies without acquiring a physical DVD — which is something you've long been able to do in a variety of places, from iTunes to Amazon to the "On Demand" button of your cable remote.

But the most genuinely novel thing Apple is doing in conjunction with the release of the new Apple TV is changing the basic iTunes approach to selling TV shows from two or three dollars per episode (HD costs more) to 99 cents — in return for the fact that it's not a purchase; it's a 48-hour rental.*

 

Apple has only ABC/Disney and Fox on board right now, along with BBC America — the vast majority of television isn't included in the rental project anyway. But Jobs is confident, he says, that they'll come around.

Why This Isn't Like Music

By invoking the 99-cent price, Apple undoubtedly would love to suggest similarities to the massive quake it caused in the music industry with its 99-cent price for downloads of individual songs. But for several reasons, that's not a particularly apt comparison.

First and most obvious is the fact that with that model, you paid 99 cents and got to keep the song. Here, you pay 99 cents and once you start watching the episode, it's gone in 48 hours. Certainly, songs and shows are different in that people may listen to a song hundreds of times, but only the most hardcore fan would ever watch television episodes that often.

But there's also absolutely no history of people paying to rent television episodes on a per-episode basis. The new online models that have done the best job of changing the way people watch TV have either involved purchasing episodes or full seasons, much as they'd purchase a DVD, or have involved giving an all-you-can-eat selection either with a paid subscription (Netflix) or with ads (Hulu). People bought music before iTunes, but people have never regularly rented television episode by episode with no ability to record it or save it for later. This will require a substantially larger shift in consumer habits than buying 99-cent songs did.

Why Episode Renting Isn't Ready To Replace Cable

So let's assume Steve Jobs is right. Everybody gets on board, you can get all the shows you like via episode rentals, and everybody has an Apple TV in their home. Could this arrangement take the place of the much-maligned current cable structure?

If it does, it probably won't be soon, and it may not come without tweaks to the model.

One issue is convenience. How often does one member of the family watch a show at one time, and another one pick it up off the DVR at another time? Will all those families want to coordinate, with one eye on the clock, to make sure everybody catches up with the show within 48 hours of when the first person started watching it?

And then there are the kids. Yes, adults will tell you, "I only watch every episode of an average TV show once anyway; what are the odds I'm going to want to watch The Big Bang Theory again? Renting seems fine." Kids, on the other hand, can be relentless with beloved episodes, recording something and then watching it over and over without ever getting bored. You want to break it to your kid that that episode of Phineas and Ferb that you owned two days ago is gone now? Do you want to dish out 99 cents every other day until she gets tired of it? Even for yourself, do you want it to cost extra money every time you want to zone out in front of something relatively mindless? (Spiritually, perhaps you do, but will the TV-watching population make that choice?)

Finally, the 99-cent price point may strike consumers as a little high just for the right to watch an episode of television for a 48-hour period, if you compare it to what it costs to buy shows on DVD — where you can own them forever, loan them to others, get all the extras, not rely on your Internet connection, and so forth. It's even harder to justify if you compare it to what it costs to buy seasons on some other streaming sites — Amazon, for instance.

To give one example, you can purchase the first season of Modern Family in HD on Amazon for $31.99. For that price, you can keep it in your library and watch it, commercial-free, as often as you like. It would cost you $23.76, on the other hand, to rent it from Apple for 99 cents an episode and then lose it forever. You save money, sure. But do you save enough? Might you decide instead to do without HD, in which case you can actually acquire it from Amazon for $23.99, 23 cents more than it would cost you to rent it for 48 hours from Apple?

BUT WAIT. It gets better. ABC and Fox, the two partners who have signed on to rent episodes through Apple for 99 cents, are now currently selling episodes at Amazon for ... 99 cents. Apple has the advantage of hooking you up with its hardware — there are currently fewer ways to watch Amazon's Video On Demand than Apple downloads, certainly — but right now, that's the trade-off: with these shows, you can own the episode from Amazon or rent it from Apple, for the same price. It's the Wild West out there, people.

Why Episode Rentals Will Probably Catch On Anyway

The fact that we're nowhere close to a rental model replacing cable doesn't mean there's not a place for it. If you consider this as a nice extra option, and you don't try to envision it shaking up the entire industry and becoming the standard way people watch TV any time soon, it's easy to see the appeal.

Missed an episode of something you don't care about that much, and can't find it online at the network or at Hulu? (And who knows how long those options will be available anyway?) Can't stand to watch the ads that free options require you to endure? Well, sure, then, 99 cents to rent it is much better than two or three dollars to own it when you don't need to. When you envision episode rentals as a convenient supplement to the models that are already out there, they make all kinds of sense.

Moreover, the more respect television gets, the more there's a certain amount of television that appeals to people who, in general, don't like television. These are the people who genuinely only watch, say, Mad Men and 30 Rock. (This is, as a side note, a much smaller population than the number of people who will tell you that they only watch Mad Men and 30 Rock. Their TVs see them when they're sleeping, they know when they're awake, and they know they watch The Dog Whisperer.)

These are the people who have, in many cases, already dropped cable or perhaps never had it, and who get the TV they do watch from Netflix and existing online outlets anyway. For them (if all the providers get on board someday), this could be a very good deal indeed; cheaper than buying, faster than waiting for DVDs, wildly less expensive than springing for cable.

Does the concept of the 99-cent rental change everything? Not yet. Does it demonstrate that the shifts in the way television is sold and distributed continue, and that Apple is absolutely committed to having its beautifully contoured plastic fingers all over every possible emerging model? Absolutely. And the history of Apple suggests that whether what it's offering is especially novel or helpful or not, the company is pretty good at getting its customers on board.

*Yes, download "purchases" carry limitations and are not real purchases, just licenses, but they feel like purchases to buyers, so let's leave this distinction for another day.

I am occasionally reminded, with a certain pang, that I used to know how to play bridge. Not very well — I left off at the "learn the secret language of asking for aces" phase — but well enough to play socially with pals in a college dorm. I played, but only moderately. (Bridge is surprisingly well-suited to goofball college students, since it is literally possible to be "vulnerable with nothing on," which is a completely clean scoring reference but generally caused us to make jokes about being alone in the shower, which was in turn related to Mystery Science Theater 3000. For real, I have never been cool a day in my life.)

Anyway.

So bridge, I played a little. Spades and hearts, on the other hand, my friends and I played a lot. Somewhere, there exist multiple spiral notebooks tracking spades games in particular, all down the page, following our progress until we got tired or had to go to dinner or someone actually had to do some work. (It is my theory that in college, cards are the beer of nerds.) There was a nice big lounge in our dorm with a couple of big tables, and we happily passed many a shuffling-and-dealing hour there, until one of the RAs told us that four-person card games are exclusionary because people who wander by cannot join in. She suggested something everyone could play, like Go Fish.

(As you know, no peer-delivered insult stings a 20-year-old quite like being excluded from a wild, boundary-pushing, independence-testing, social-more-challenging game of hearts.)

 

We moved. Sometimes to the floor of the hallway outside someone's room. As you can imagine, this greatly improved our relationships with our peers.

Then in law school, I played nickel-dime-quarter poker, not very well, with a group of guys who typically cleaned my clock.

But as we continue thinking about screen-less, unplugged entertainment (as we started to do yesterday and I think your response suggests we should continue to do), I realized I rarely play cards anymore. And it's too bad, because even silly card games are more fun than they often get credit for.

The other day, I had occasion to play one called Too Many Cooks, which is sort of like hearts, but not really, and it's about soup, but not exactly, and chilis are kind of like hearts, but again, only after a fashion, and there's such a thing as "the four of mushroom."It's also a surprisingly aggressive game for one that features cards that have happy little peas on them. This is a game about soup, but it can, at times, accommodate the idea of vengeance.

It's kind of great, to be honest. And halfway through it, one of my friends (the one who taught me to play bridge, in fact, so long ago) had occasion to somewhat grandly ask the friend who provided the game, "Is it permissible to lead a chili before chilis have been played?"

Someone in yesterday's car-games thread mentioned Mille Bornes, and I was a big fan of that one, too, as are my nephews. That game is why I can't say "Sunday, Monday, Tuesday" in French, but I can say "flat tire" and "end of speed limit."

So here's my question to you (and please understand that I am not returning to bridge, as a concession to the shortness of life): What are your favorite card games? They can be standard-deck games, or ones like Too Many Cooks that require their own decks to allow you to "follow soup." (Hey, I didn't make it up.) I'd like to learn some new ones, because there's only so much Wii boxing a girl can credibly enjoy.