Wednesday, October 15 was a momentous day for digital media. With streaming services like Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime giving networks a place for past episodes (and in some cases, new episodes day after air) of their series to live on and gain new viewers, there was a seismic shift that was felt throughout the lands of Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner and other cable providers when HBO announced it would launch its own stand-alone streaming service in 2015.

HBO currently provides HBO GO for cable subscribers which includes a library of movies, and complete series both new and old, including Game of Thrones, Veep, The Sopranos, Girls, The Wire and more. Amazon Instant members also have access to HBO programs, but only past seasons (current seasons will take up to three years to land on Amazon). The new streaming service will not require a cable subscription and will include basically the same content as cable subscribers get with HBO GO (sister channel Cinemax content may also be included). It’s rumored Showtime will follow suit at some point in the near future.

And that future may not be too far away with today’s announcement that CBS (Showtime is a corporate sibling) is also going to offer its own exclusive subscriber streaming service. As far as streaming content goes, CBS has been notoriously stingy in offering new episodes of its current season shows on any platform save for its own mobile app and website (and even there, finding complete episodes of your favorite shows is a dicey proposition although the network does offer current episodes of Under the Dome and Extant on Amazon).

CBS All Access is a new pay service that gives subscribers access to most of the network’s current programming and classics from its vaults. For $5.99 a month, users have access to full current seasons of 15 CBS primetime shows, including The Big Bang Theory, Blue Bloods, Criminal Minds, CSI, Elementary, The Good Wife, Hawaii Five-0, The Mentalist, NCIS, Person of Interest and Survivor, with new episodes available day after air. (CBS is the one major network that does not offer new episodes of its shows on Hulu Plus.)

You also get the ability to live-stream your local CBS station (initially in 14 markets with more to be added, and some sporting events will not be available), full past seasons of 8 CBS shows including The Good Wife, Blue Bloods, and Survivor (with more to come), 5,000 episodes of “CBS Classics” including Cheers, Twin Peaks, Star Trek, and CSI: Miami, and Big Brother 24/7 live feeds. Extra content for special events like the Country Music Awards and The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show will also be available.

With more options becoming available to stream just the shows and networks you want, are the cable companies in danger of becoming obsolete, or will this force them to drop prices to keep subscribers plugged in? The new streaming options, of course, won’t kill cable — just yet — but they will certainly force the companies to re-examine their current models. With subscribers cutting the cord and relying on OTA local network channels, streaming services, Roku, Apple TV and Google Chrome, the cable companies are going to have to start offering something other than their tiered packages.

One popular solution, something demanded by cable subscribers in general, is an ‘a la carte’ option, allowing customers to choose what channels they want to pay for and not be forced to pay for channels they never watch. So far, though, cable companies and content providers have been less than enthusiastic about that option simply because it would cost them millions. But with many cable channels offering their programming online (hardly any of the big ones like HGTV, Lifetime or Discovery offer current programs on Hulu Plus like the major networks do), cord-cutters could force them to re-evaluate their own streaming strategies, especially those that do require a cable subscription log-in (like MTV and TNT) to access their shows. If subscribers start to flee cable en masse, those networks will have to adapt to survive.

With CBS All Access priced at $5.99 a month, Hulu Plus at $7.99, Netflix at $8.99 (and that recent $1.00 price increase really hurt their bottom line), Amazon at about $8.25 a month and the HBO service projected to cost perhaps as much as $15 (totaling less than $50 a month), would you be willing to ditch cable and watch everything streaming and over the air in the case of local channels?

The first season of Aaron Sorkin’s latest show The Newsroom saw quite a bit of criticism. Critics called it smug and self-serving, pointing to the characterization of females, cherry-picking real news from the recent past and Sorkin’s tendency to preach to the audience as some of the many problems they had with the show. Despite the criticism, HBO picked up the series for a second season that premiered this week.

Audiences expecting massive changes in the second season of The Newsroom are going to be more than a little disappointed. If you shared the same concerns that other learned critics had with the show last year, then you’ll find this year just as grating as last. But for those – like myself – who were fans of the first go-round, then you are going to enjoy the second season.

The show largely – though not completely – dispatches with last season’s main arc and embraces one that is even larger in scope — and political implications. We learn in the first episode that News Night reported a story implicating elements of the United States military with the use of chemical weapons against civilians during a black-op codenamed Genoa. The whole season is framed, with the bulk of the story told as a flashback while including AWM’s attorney, played by Marcia Gay Harden, deposing members of the News Night staff about the story, which apparently will be revealed to have been false.

As much as I liked the first season, it wasn’t without flaws. The Newsroom definitely excels when the romantic entanglements of the cast take a backseat to everything else. Unfortunately, the story is still mired down with the Jim and Maggie relationship. As much as I like both Alison Pill and John Gallagher Jr., the two characters don’t have a great deal of chemistry (Unlike Sloan and Don; but more on that later). And while Jeff Daniels and Emily Mortimer do have great chemistry, it works better in the context of their professional relationship rather than their personal one.

I really enjoyed Olivia Munn’s Sloan Sabbith in the first season. More than anyone in the cast, Munn found her voice in Sorkin’s fast-paced writing style. Sloan continues to come into her own in the second season; she’s given more responsibility, including co-anchoring the 10^th Anniversary of 9/11 coverage. And her potential relationship with Don, hinted at towards the end of last a season, still bubbles in the background. It’s the only relationship I’d actually like to see explored on the show.

But, again, the problems that many had with the show last season are still there. Will McAvoy is still an insufferable jerk — though nobody ever seems to complain when Don Draper acts similarly. The news is still — for the most part, Genoa being the exception — cherry-picked from the recent past. Sorkin is still too preachy (the much-publicized addition of conservative political advisors to the writer’s room had no real impact to the show’s tone). I’m nowhere near qualified to weigh in on the perception of the poorly written women, but I’ve always held that all of the characters on The Newsroom are extremely flawed: I remember Will rolling on the floor trying to pull on his pants last season, and Don has a moment in the first four episodes involving an office chair where he comes across just as silly.

The Newsroom is far from a perfect show. It is not Sports Night and it is certainly no West Wing. But it is much better than it is has been given credit for. In a world where audiences aren’t smart enough to find the brilliance in ABC Family’s Bunheads, at least HBO was willing to take a chance on another season of a show for fans of the fast-talking, quick-witted, smarter-than-they-should-be heroes.

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I would be willing to bet a significant amount of money that at least 92.7% of all middle-class to upper-class white women in America have at one time or another watched an episode of Sex and the City, or seen one of the two movies based on the original series, or at the very least could pick Carrie Bradshaw out of a lineup of curly-haired fashion icons. In the fourteen years since the show began its six-season run on HBO, it’s epitomized the bitchcom (that’s a word I just made up from a combination of bitch and sitcom to mean any TV show predominantly preferred by women over men — not that all women are bitches, obviously, it just seemed catchy) and has been a comparison point for all similar television programs to follow. Perhaps its most current and notable comparison is HBO’s currently running estrogen-fest, Girls.

First, there are the most basic characteristics of the show: location (Manhattan), main characters (four gal pals), occupation of the leading protagonist (writer), and theme (love/sex/friendship/self-actualization/sex/romance/sex/alcoholic beverages). So, in comparison, Girls takes place in the borough of Brooklyn (which is the new Manhattan … right?), follows four twenty-something friends, but particularly a singular protagonist working to establish herself as a writer as they deal with love, sex, friendship, self-actualization, sex, romance, sex, and consuming alcoholic beverages. And one brief encounter with crack cocaine. Pretty similar, eh?

Even the specific characters are re-embodiments of Sex and the City predecessors. There’s Hannah, the young writer, chasing desperately after the affections of a man who may or may not end up satisfying her emotional desires at the end of the day. She’s a slightly less well-dressed, but equally as independent and neurotic version of Carrie Bradshaw. The Miranda to Hannah’s Carrie is Marney, suffering from significant control issues in her friendships and relationships, has a problem with over complicating simple conflicts, and takes life maybe just a little bit too seriously. The friendship foursome is finished off by Shoshanna and Jessa, who fulfill the same less prevalent roles of Charlotte’s classy naiveté and Samantha’s free-spirited, less than grounded nature, respectively.

But what Girls does that Sex and the City never will, is speak to a generation with very specific ideologies, wantings, and expectations of society. It explores what happens to well-educated young women, who have been told their entire lives that if they go to college then they’ll get a job and that finding a husband is necessary to finding happiness, don’t get the lives they expect. To anyone outside of that worldview, they’re just over privileged white bitches complaining about problems that aren’t really problems. But to anyone within that same reality, it’s an embodiment of just how fucking scary the real world can be to a class of people raised and educated within a proverbial bubble.

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