At the panel I was on last night, one of the audience members closed out the conversation about asking what the role of men was in feminist television. It’s a great question, and it was sort of depressing to walk out of it to find out that Chris Meloni is leaving Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. It’s not really shocking that he’s made that decision—the show is headed for an overhaul, and Mariska Hargitay, who plays Meloni’s partner on the show, is only signed full-time for the first half of the season. I totally get why Meloni would want to move on to other things after more than a decade of an often-grim role as Det. Elliot Stabler. But I’m not looking forward to saying goodbye to a male television character who is constantly engaging with issues of sex and gender.

The show’s also been very careful to establish Elliot Stabler as a kind of idealized man. He’s a Marine, and not just any Marine, but a hand-to-hand combat specialist. He’s supposed to be such an ideal father figure that he’s helped deliver almost all of his children, that the department shrink asks him to step in as a father figure to a traumatized victim. Stabler’s main flaw is that he gets too angry at perps. The show’s ongoing look at police brutality is problematic, mostly because it tries to let the audience enjoy the revenge fantasy of watching Stabler beat up rapists and pedophiles, and then try to make amends for it later, via therapy, confession—the character’s Catholic, but that’s taking it a bit far.

All that masculinity can get exhausting, but it’s probably a necessary pretext for a character on a popular, middlebrow network show who spends both his personal and his professional life dealing with issues of sexuality, sexual violence, and gender expression. If anything, the show’s a pretty effective critique of the efficacy of traditional masculinity. Trying to protect your daughter by forbidding her from doing things won’t keep her from being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Beating up pedophiles doesn’t actually prevent more people from raping children in the future. But engaging with your colleagues and with victims, talking about sex, sexual violence, and sexual expression, and having empathy with victims can make you better at your job and put bad people in jail—and maybe make you a better husband and father. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, whatever its flaws and lack of subtlety, made its male main character’s struggles with issues of sex and gender a major part of the show. I hope that commitment stays even after Meloni’s departure.

While discussing President Obama’s response to the tornadoes that devastated Missouri on his radio show, MSNBC host Ed Schultz shifted into an attack on conservatives for focusing more on the cost of disaster relief than the desperate need for it. Schultz decided that the best way to mark that contrast would be to launch a personal attack on talk radio host and Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham after she criticized President Obama for continuing the Ireland leg of his European trip as disaster relief began. Ingraham critized the “tone-deafness” and the disconnect between “heartbreaking pictures and then President Obama lifting a glass of Guinness.” But, she also emphasized she “didn’t want to make too much of it.” Schultz responded:

President Obama is going to be visiting Joplin, Mo., on Sunday but you know what they’re talking about, like this right-wing slut, what’s her name? Laura Ingraham? Yeah, she’s a talk slut. You see, she was, back in the day, praising President Reagan when he was drinking a beer overseas. But now that Obama’s doing it, they’re working him over.

Schultz can certainly disagree with Ingraham on policy, but her personal life has nothing to do with disaster relief in Missouri. Schultz’s crass remarks about Ingraham were an ineffective way to make an important point. For a leading progressive commentator, they’re unacceptable. Ed Schultz, who has criticized conservatives for their sexism, should apologize to Laura Ingraham during his show tonight. And he should remember that there’s more to building a progressive movement than attacking regressive conservative policies. Respect for women and women’s issues is a core fundamental value, and should never be compromised.

According to an interview he gave as part of a project on legal writing, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas looks to the show as the model for his opinions, and is not so much a fan of Agatha Christie. Certainly, 24 is quite clear when it comes to like Jack Bauer explaining how he’ll wreck your stomach lining, or the fact that you can’t be sort of dead, and I suppose its perspective on the world is easy to discern. But really, what this suggests to me is that Thomas hasn’t read a lot of Agatha Christie. When it comes to economy of prose and story, Christie’s amazingly good at stating a problem, moving through it quickly, and resolving it in a logical way, all useful things for judicial opinions. And Hercule Poirot‘s declaration that “Understand this, I mean to arrive at the truth. The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it,” is as good a motto, whether you’re solving murders in large country houses to which you’ve been invited for the weekend, or writing briefs.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I watched very little television as a kid. Among the things that I missed out on was the Muppets as a mass cultural phenomenon. I watched some Sesame Street, of course, but I didn’t really have a sense that Kermit the Frog was as much a cross-platform star as Michael J. Fox. So when the trailer for Jason Segal’s revival of the Muppets dropped earlier this week, I figured it was time to catch up:

Mostly on a whim, I picked The Muppets Take Manhattan. And oh my goodness should the movie be required viewing for people who are graduating from college:.

The blitheness of the Muppets’ conviction that they’ll make it without much effort on Broadway is proof that post-graduate entitlement isn’t just a Millenial phenomenon. Setting them up in a bunch of bus terminal lockers is a wonderfully clever little riff on the terrible first New York apartment. After Manhattan Melodies, their show, fails to find a producer, there’s something wistful and realistic about the letters the Muppets write each other about their first jobs. It’s true that New York has always been the place dreamers come to dash themselves on the rocks (Todd VanDerWerff’s summing up of Glee makes this point nicely), but the fact that all the characters end up struggling feels particularly relevant to this moment, one where 85 percent of college grads may move back home—it’s not like one character is an investment banker, and one’s a publishing assistant, and there’s just one person in a group of friends who hasn’t quite found what they want to do.

Whether they’re ushering at horror movies, getting fired from makeup counters for worrying too much about their love lives, worrying at a kennel, waitressing in a diner along with a bunch of rats, or giving up and heading home to hibernate, all the characters try to make it sound as if they’re doing just fine, when clearly they aren’t. Miss Piggy gets harassed by construction workers and mugged in Central Park. The only thing that hasn’t aged very well is that Kermit appears to get totally excellent medical treatment when he’s hit by a city cab, despite the fact that as a frog with only part-time employment, he probably doesn’t have much in the way of health insurance. Otherwise, it’s more deflating than I would have expected.

Certainly, Avenue Q is a very direct variation on the theme, sharpened by disappointment, and in some ways, a refutation of the happy ending of The Muppets Take Manhattan. But if Avenue Q is the show that you watch as you look back with nostalgia and a little bitterness on your own post-college naivete, The Muppets Take Manhattan is a sweetened warning about the challenges of entering the labor force, especially at a time when it’s hard to find an entry-level job in what you hope will be your field, complete with visual references to the New York Observer and Ed Koch wishing he could find a frog to balance the budget.

Well, this is one way to use current events to boost ratings: Jace Lacob, hot off the press call about the next season of Damages, alerted me to something I’d missed. The show’s going to have the main characters file a wrongful death suit against a military contracting company, headed by John Goodman. And Dylan Baker is also guest-starring as an Erik Prince-like figure, which after his stint on Kings, marks his second big turn as a militaristic industrialist,. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have made themselves felt on American television shows from ER to Arrested Development, and we’ve had one-off events like Generation Kill. But it’ll be interesting to have a long arc devoted to this facet of the war in an existing show. And after siccing Glenn Close’s legal pitbull Patty Hewes on corporate villains from Enron to Madoff-like Ponzi schemers, it’ll be fun, and maybe even fulfilling, to see her go after a new category of profiteers.