This television season has been kind of a letdown, and I assume I’m not alone in desperately hoping for a reset next fall (though having Game of Thrones back is helping quite a bit). So eager am I that I took a deep dive into the full list of pilots that the networks are casting for next season for The Atlantic and came away with one key observation. Hollywood’s moving on from Ponzi schemers and fraudsters to a new iteration of the recession, a widespread sense of insecurity and retrenching in the bosom of family:

This year, the networks are gearing up to try again: There are three “moving home” pilots in production, including ABC’s How to Live With Your Parents for the Rest of Your Life, in which a divorced mother moves home; an as-yet untitled CBS sitcom about a man who loses his house to foreclosure; and Fox’s El Jefe, about a man in his 30s who moves in with his former nanny, a scenario that takes the idea of raising other people’s children to a real extreme…

Housing isn’t the only thing television characters will be needing from their families in the next television season. Perhaps driven by the sense that the economy is tough and impersonal, networks are developing an unusual number of family business comedies. After her turns on medical drama A Gifted Man and as bootlegger Mags Bennett on Justified, Margo Martindale will play a woman running a diner with her sisters in ABC’s Counter Culture. Sisters are big for the network, which also has The Smart One, with Portia de Rossi as a bright, ambitious woman resentfully going to work for her beauty-queen-turned-mayor younger sister, played by Malin Ackerman. In Fox’s Must Hire, a younger man gets his father a job only to find out his dad is a problem employee. In Partners, on the same network, gay and straight business partners form a substitute family. By the networks’ calculation, we relish the idea that work could be as safe as family—it’s much harder for your father or your sister to lay you off than it is a faceless corporation.

That’s not the only thing we’re going to see, of course: there are going to be a lot of conspiracies and a large helping of paranoia, aliens and robots in the suburbs, and period dramas that leave the fifties and sixties behind. It’s not exactly morning in America, and it looks to be a fall filled with diminished expectations.

Lost Girl, the Canadian fantasy series about Bo, a succubus, and the rest of the faerie world she operates in, which is headed into production on its third season and finished airing its first season on SyFy last night, has attracted comparisons to Buffy the Vampire Slayer for its progressive attitude towards sexuality and sexual orientation and its detailed magical world. It’s not quite Buffy—a story about a hot bisexual succubus who seduces people for good will never be as subversive, or as funny as a high school built over a portal to Hell and a cheerleader who battles the forces of evil. But the differences between the two shows aren’t entirely a bad thing: Buffy laid a foundation on which Lost Girl‘s building a somewhat more sexually progressive and more diverse universe.

Lost Girl represents, in television terms, a generation of forward progress from Buffy when it comes to sex. Sex is literally life-giving to Bo, rather than conflicted in the many ways it is in Buffy. While initially she operates a lot like X-Men‘s Rogue, sucking her victims dry of chi to the point of their deaths, as she becomes more confident in and knowledgeable about her status as a succubus, Bo stops draining her partners while still drawing sustenance—and joy—from sex.

Unlike Buffy, whose on-screen partners have, alternately, lost their souls, ignored her afterwards (college boys can be jerks, too), turned to vampire hookers out of a sense of inadequacy, and tried to rape her, Bo doesn’t get punished for sleeping around. When she sleeps with Dyson (Kristen Holden-Ried), the wolf-shifting fae and cop who’s her entree into the faerie world, the scenes are choreographed to be enticing, rather than a form of self-punishment, like Buffy’s first house-destroying night with Spike, her second vampire lover. Dyson may be convenient to Bo, the same thing Buffy accuses Spike of being to her, but their encounters don’t make anyone involved hate each other.

And unlike how Buffy handled Willow’s coming-out as bisexual, having her transition from attractions only to men to (on-screen, at least) attractions only to women, Lost Girl is confident enough to have Bo’s sex life reflect her stated sexual orientation. She’s capable of loving and desiring both Dyson and Lauren, the human doctor in service to the fae who Bo falls for—and of being hurt by both of them. The heterosexual and same-gender sex scenes are filmed differently, to be sure—when Bo sleeps with Dyson, it’s all dramatic lighting and multiple sexual positions, while the night she spends with Lauren is silk sheets and sweet nothings. But even if the show doesn’t quite have the courage to treat the scenes as if they’re similar, it’s progress to have a bisexual character dating people of multiple genders calmly and without comment, instead of functionally confining them to heterosexuality or homosexuality.

It’s not the only way Lost Girl is more representative than Buffy. Bo and her roommate Kenzi (a human con artist played with delightful spunk by Ksenia Solo) hang out a bar owned by “Trick” McCorrigan, a powerful fae who also happens to be played by Rick Howland, an actor with dwarfism, in what may be the only performance featuring a person of short stature on television where their dwarfism isn’t a regular and explicit plot point. The most powerful official in the fae universe, the Ash, is played by Clé Bennett, a Canadian actor of Jamaican descent. And Dyson’s partner in his day job as a cop, Hale, is also black, a nice improvement on the all-white Scooby Gang.

It’s too bad Lost Girl doesn’t quite have a mythology or psychology is rich as Buffy, but then, almost nothing on television these days does. But it’s laying down a marker for fantasy, reminding us in a world where we have diversity in our monsters and myths, it’s not so strange to have a true diversity of people.

Lee Aronsohn, the co-creator of the hit comedy sitcom ‘Two and a Half Men,’ issued a host of sexist remarks at a television conference recently, complaining about the over-saturation of female-oriented comedies. “We’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation,” Aronsohn said, adding, “‘Enough, ladies, I get it. You have periods.”

Calling Aronsohn a “sexist creep,” Alyssa Rosenberg noted the comment “tells you everything about how cosseted Hollywood’s disgusting sexists are.” Aronsohn issued a flippant apology on Twitter: “Yes, yes – it was a stupid joke. I’m sorry.”

While Aronsohn elicited widespread anger as a result of his snide insults, he did find one defender: Rush Limbaugh. The hate radio host, who constantly bemoans the “chickification” of various aspects of American life, used that term his defense of Aronsohn, urging women to leave them alone today:

All he’s talking about here is the chickification of his business. He writes sitcoms – he’s a comedy writer. He says the women have taken over. It’s all vagina all the time. We get it! Ok women, let us alone.

Watch it:

Limbaugh is trying to repair his corporate brand with advertisers, hordes of whom have left his show due to his willingness to engage in sexist attacks. Limbaugh is of course a suitable defender of Aronsohn, given his distinguished track record and his willingness to call female advocates “sluts.”

Is it:

a) None of the women featured here are the women who created this year’s crop of female-centric television shows, a decision that minimizes the importance of women in creating and shaping depictions on the back end of television production.

b) That Vanity Fair has a strange idea of what women wear to sleepovers.

c) That a feature on a boom in dude shows would never, ever be shot solely with a mind towards providing women with eye candy.

d) All of the above.

Because we needed yet another reminder that even when television is about women, it still has to be for men.

Liliana Segura ran the numbers and found out that the finalists for the National Magazine Awards, which were announced today, include no women in the Reporting, Features, Profiles, Essays or Columns categories. Women did, however, dominate the nominations in the Public Interest category. Four out of five of those nominations went to women: Natasha Gardner for “Direct Fail,” about sentencing children as adults in 5280; Kathy Dobie for “Tiny Little Laws” about sexual assaults in Indian country in Harper’s; Lea Goldman for “The Big Business of Breast Cancer” about pink branding and profiteering in Marie Claire; and Sarah Stillman for “The Invisible Army,” a look at the fate of foreign workers on U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the New Yorker—the piece also just won a Hillman Award.

It’s fantastic to see women clean up in this space, but I wonder if the paucity of female nominees in other spaces is due to the fact that there is a National Magazine Award General Excellence category for Women’s Magazines, which “Honors women’s magazines, including health and fitness magazines and family-centric publications,” while men’s magazines like Esquire and GQ are counted as General Interest publications. Now, Esquire and GQ aren’t truly general-interest publications: their style, health, and lifestyle sections aren’t designed to be accessible to someone like me, and that’s fine. But the division in General Excellence creates an incentive for women’s magazines to genuinely specialize their coverage across the board, while men’s magazines have incentives to commission features and criticism that compete with publications like the New Yorker and The Atlantic.

I think women’s magazines could stand to be a lot more ambitious in their criticism, and in the way they structure their profiles in particular, in ways that would challenge the idea that they’re not aimed at a general audience. Just because an actress is a woman, and a profile of her is appearing in a women’s magazine, doesn’t mean it has to be family and weight first and craft and artistic impact second. But the existence of the Women’s Magazine category, and the grouping of women’s magazine in with subjects that tend to be considered second-tier in comparison to the subjects that tend to win National Magazine Awards—heath and family versus national security, national tragedies, national media phenomena and the people who handle all three—isn’t helpful. It’s worthwhile to consider whether judges have biases. But it’s also worth interrogating whether the categories the National Magazine Awards uses aren’t set up to elevate the best in journalism, whatever its subject matter is. It’s not clear why Glamour’s “The Secret That Kills Four Women a Day” on relationship violence is in personal service rather than straight features unless the editors who submitted it felt they had a better chance of it being recognized as Helpful Tips for Women rather than an issue that should be part of the national conversation across gender lines.

The bridge is yours.

-A literary war on Twilight.

-Possible jobs for Keith Olbermann.

-Parks and Recreation makes parks better in the real world, too.

-Roland Emmerich will invade the White House.

-Mad Men‘s slam on George Romney was totally historically accurate.

The writer Meg Wolitzer has a blockbuster essay in the New York Times Sunday Book Review about the differences between the ways fiction by men and women is marketed, reviewed, and received. There are a lot of elements there, and I’m sure it will be much-discussed, but what struck me most about it was Wolitzer’s explication of the way incentives systems work to reward consumers for reading novels by men and about “male” issues, and to reward female novelists for taking on male characters and “male” themes:

Stories, long and short, and often about women’s lives, suddenly mattered to the cultural conversation. This period, the 1970s and to an extent the early ’80s, initially appeared to create an entirely different and permanent reality for female fiction writers. Men were actively interested in reading about the inner lives of women (or maybe some just pretended they were) and received moral kudos for doing so…

Recently, when the novelist Mary Gordon spoke at a boys’ school, she learned that the students weren’t reading the Brontës, Austen or Woolf. Their teachers defended this by saying they were looking for works that boys could relate to. But at the girls’ school across the street, Gordon said, “no one would have dreamed of removing ‘Huckleberry Finn’ or ‘Moby-Dick’ from the syllabus. As a woman writer, you get points if you include the ‘male’ world in your work, and you lose points if you omit it.”

Lorrie Moore added, “A female scholar once said to me: ‘I already know what women think, pretty much. I’m more interested in reading books by men.” The problem with this statement becomes clear if you flip it. Were a man to say, “I already know what men think; I’m more interested in reading books by women,” he would be greeted with incomprehension. While there may be no such thing as “male” or “female” writing, to say that the emphases of male and female writers might sometimes be different doesn’t mean that the deepest concerns or preoccupations of women are inferior or any less essential. Literary women novelists can of course do very well without male readers. And some literary male writers have admitted envying women the “femaleness” of the novel-reading (and -buying) community — a community that, from my own experience with book groups and individual readers, I know to be attentive and passionate.

This is exactly what’s happened in television and the critical definitions of the so-called Golden Age. We’ve created the sense that the audience is morally sophisticated for emotionally engaging with the aberrant, sometimes abhorrent behavior with middle aged men (who, for the most part, happen to be white). To contemplate Tony Soprano makes you an ethically sophisticated thinker. To commune with Carrie Bradshaw makes you a consumerist flake.

But what’s so critically important about Wolitzer’s point here is that this is not a natural or permanent state of affairs. If the rise of feminism created a space where the incentives were shifted, and where men got credit in conversation and in their personal relationships for reading fiction that explored the rich inner lives of women, we could create that kind of environment again. Some of that requires some of the right, big books and movies and shows to come along—I wish Karen Russell’s phenomenal novel Swamplandia! had made it further in the Tournament of Books in a way that might have given it some slingshot momentum, and I thought Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones was an unfortunate missed opportunity to give that director credit for his long-standing interest in the inner lives of women and girls. And some of it will require critics, male and female alike, to work together to forge a new consensus. The strong reception Lena Dunham’s Girls has been receiving from the kind of male critics who are at least semi-reflected in many Golden Age shows gives me hope that we might be at a sort of tipping point in television.

I’ve written in qualified defense of product placement in the past, arguing that when it’s used to subsidize repetitive competition shows or to prop up low-rated but quality programming where the audience is aware that product placement is ongoing, there’s no real damage to the creative integrity of a program. But switching up Bond’s martini for a Heineken in Skyfall, the next installment of the storied franchise, is going too far.

First, it would be hard to make the case that adding a Heineken sponsorship is actually necessary to help the production cut costs or make some sort of margin. The Bond franchise may be the most reliable product in moviegoing history, resistant to downturns, odd plots, and dreadful names—Quantum of Solace made just $5 million less than the far superior Casino Royale. Unless Sam Mendes, who is directing Skyfall, is doing something truly bizarre with the movie, there’s probably no particular need to lock in a little margin to ensure that everything will be okay.

Second, this is a case where Bond’s original product choice actually matters—the scene where he comes up with the particular formula for it in Casino Royale is all about the delight a self-made man takes in tweaking the conventions and the formulas of the class he’s joined. That Bond drinks his martini shaken not stirred, and therefore slightly weaker, is a nice little chink in his masculine armor because it means he’s drinking a weaker cocktail (shaking makes the ice melt faster and dilutes the drink). Characters’ tastes can be and often are arbitrary in popular culture, but Bond’s are carefully curated and a very important projection of his personality that helps provide continuity from one actor to the next. Turning him into a Heineken drinker is a betrayal.

More to the point, why does it have to be Bond quaffing the brewski? If Felix Leiter is back—and one has to hope he will be given how wonderful Jeffrey Wright’s been in the role of Bond’s American counterpart—why not have him knock back a beer while Bond drinks his martini? You’d still get the positive association, and you could get it in a way that tweaks Bond’s martini-drinking a bit, plays up the difference between American and British styles. That actually seems like it would be smarter, and more self-aware. And one of the things that’s made Subway’s product placement in recent years so successful is that it acknowledges that the audience is fully aware of what they’re doing and what they’re trying to achieve. It’s less about building desire for the product and more about generally positive associations for the brand, something that’s more sophisticated, but much more fun for viewers. Bond can be deadly serious, but as Casino Royale showed, he’s more fun when he’s aware of his own affectations, pretentions, and self-defense mechanisms. Heineken and Mendes might want to take a lesson.

After yesterday’s brouhaha in comments, there was something really wonderful about having Bones to come home to after its hiatus, especially since this was the long-awaited episode when Brennan finally has her baby. I really appreciate that Bone has just become the only television show I can think of with two smart, nerdy working mothers with very young children, so I was particularly curious to see how the show handled childbirth.

The answer is with the show’s trademark silly sense of humor: after arguing about baptism, Brennan ends up giving birth, in a manger, to a daughter she and Booth name Christine Angela. But I appreciated a couple of things about the way they handled it, chief among them that Brennan didn’t get pressured into having caesarean section, which is far too often the way that shows and movies choose to amp up the drama of birth. And while I would never in a million years voluntarily give birth in a barn rather than a hospital, I do kind of appreciate that the men in the show, after trying to trick her into things, ended up deferring to her judgement about how soon she’d deliver. Brennan’s decisive retort to Sweets and Booth that “Are you the one who has to undergo wave after wave of mind-searing pain that only ends after a writhing, screaming object the size of a, a jack-o-lantern pushes its way through your vagina? When you give birth to a baby, you can make the decisions,” was delightful.

But I found myself really profoundly upset by the scene where Brennan, in pursuit of a suspect, chases him through a prison dining room on the logic that because she’s heavily knocked up, no one will hurt her. This both seems deeply illogical—the cynical old Brennan might have assumed she’s more likely to be taken hostage because she’s doubly vulnerable. I’m not sure a desperate prisoner who’d already killed one man would suddenly be reverent about a pregnant woman, and the setup revealed some weird attitudes about the sanctity of mothers that are not strictly grounded in the anthropological evidence. And reckless in a way that I thought was hugely disrespectful and hurtful to Booth. If she’d going to coparent with him, she has to respect at least some of his feelings about her and Christine’s safety. The choreography may have been funny, but the disregard for Booth’s feelings in a situation where they didn’t absolutely have to be disregarded (offer incentives to the prisoners who bring the guy in safely, why dotcha?) felt emotionally off. And I wouldn’t have minded if the episode spent a little more time exploring that recklessness, and everything else that was going on, as it prepared for this milestone.

As Buffy reminded us, there doesn’t always have to be a case, even in procedural shows. Sometimes life is a big enough mystery.