Today, actor Sherman Helmsley died of natural causes at age 74 at his home in El Paso, Texas. Helmsley is famous for playing the wise-cracking George Jefferson on the iconic show The Jeffersons, which ran for a decade from 1975-1985.

The Jeffersons, itself a spinoff of All In The Family was not the first show to represent African American life on television – Amos & Andy was aired twenty years before – but it was the first to make it so real and relatable. The Jeffersons was about an African American family living in luxury, which came as a result of George Jefferson’s hard work. It conveyed that the American Dream really is meant for everyone, and it did so through normalizing the African American family. George Jefferson and his family were not entitled or special, they were normal – and successfully so.

“[T]o air a show that featured realistic, contemporary African American life, which in itself belied tired stereotypes, further awakened the country to the reality of population diversity,” David Weigand of the San Francisco Gate wrote today.

The beloved character of George Jefferson – a devoted husband and testy neighbor, among other things – lived well beyond the end of the show. In the years after The Jeffersons went off air, Helmsley carried his character into televisions shows like Family Matters, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Sister Sister.

Helmsley made his mark again and again, and will be survived by his powerful legacy.

– Ben Sherman and Christina Lewis

By Dennis Farr

“We both know this will be DC’s attempt to convince us that a second-string character is more major than he actually is, right?” When DC first announced it would be outing a major character in its universe, my straight roommate expressed his skepticism. It was one I didn’t wish to hold on to, and so I kept hope that we would have a big name. Fortunately (or not), my experience with DC tends toward their Vertigo line, picking up some of their books about Bats and Magic every so often, meaning my own litmus test for whether the character was major would be whether or not I’d even heard of him. Though in an age of HeroClix and Wikis clicked late at night, I’ve gleaned far more surface knowledge than the average non-comics fan.

When DC’s announcement came down, the name Alan Scott didn’t ring any bells, though Green Lantern certainly did. Having a fair amount of LGBT folk in my various social network feeds (most of them not really that interested in comics, but interested in having more representation in all forms of pop culture), they were excited until I informed them that no, this was not Hal Jordon. Which is to say, from the start, in choosing this particular icon, DC’s marketing has seemed a little off. Who were they targeting with this announcement? And how big was it really? Complicating those questions was the fact that the story was picked up and spread quite quickly to many mainstream sites, as well as the more niche queer-centered news blogs. Coupled with Marvel’s same-sex marriage storyline featuring Northstar, it seemed like there was major news in every corner. DC could not have believed it would only reach the fans who are more knowledgeable than I on DC’s main universe.

And upon reading the Earth 2 comics, I was left even more confused.
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I’ve written in the past about the challenges in putting female anti-heroes on television: if they behave decisively and malignantly, they don’t get the credit male anti-heroes do for conforming to gender norms, and if they are weak, or indecisive, or self-obsessed, they’re treated as if they’re distasteful rather than admirable. But another challenge in getting more female anti-heroes on screen is getting networks to try to make them, rather than simply the cable channels that have made their reputations on male anti-heroes.

I think the creators of The Mob Doctor, a drama which stars Jordana Spiro as a surgeon who does medical favors for the Chicago mob to pay the debt she incurred to get her brother out of trouble, are setting up impossible expectations when they suggest that the show will be “ER meets the Sopranos,” as Rob Wright did on Monday. But I think Josh Berman, Wright’s co-creator is on to something, when he talks about the long arc it takes to build a female anti-hero on a network, where viewers will have to build a long investment in Dr. Grace Devlin before they begin following her through the development process that will turn her from a woman stuck doing bad things in difficult circumstances to a genuine anti-hero who embraces stepping over a carefully calibrated moral line.

“We’ve really mapped out her character, and we want it to feel very organic,” Berman said. “And we want to take a woman who never thought this was going to be her life and slowly watch her transform into someone she maybe didn’t think she would become, but is quite confident and happy with who she is. And we’re going to do that slowly. You know, we have milestones over the first season…So hopefully we can deliver on that.”

This strikes me as an astute insight. Viewers of cable shows have become conditioned to come to new programming ready to identify with or root for someone who behaves badly or aberrantly. Within the first episode, we expect to see the contradictions of Tony Soprano as a mobster and family man, Al Swearengen as a tyrant and a man of sympathy to sex workers, Walter White as chemistry teacher and meth genius, Lena Dunham as vain, lazy striver and as cuttingly observant friend. On networks, viewers expect to be introduced to characters who are, with slight variations, straightforwardly worthy of a rooting interest without serious moral complication. Even when a character like Dr. House arrives as a cantankerous jerk, it took a while for House to make him uncomfortably transgressive—his wounds were always obvious enough to provide a psychological backgrounder on his orneriness.

I’m not sure The Mob Doctor is going to be the show that executes this premise successfully, based on the pilot. I like star Jordana Spiro, especially from her tenure on My Boys, where she played a Chicago sports reporter, but there’s a fair bit of melodrama and silliness going on around her. But I think Berman is laying out an important formula, one that if we want richer, more complex women on television, it would be wise to keep in mind that we have to strap in for the long haul.

Back in June when the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, I wrote a post that explained how the implementation of the law would eventually change medical procedurals. In particular, as more and more patients come onto the insurance roles, shows aren’t going to be able to demonstrate that doctors are compassionate by having them take on uninsured patients in defiance of hospital bureaucrats or the policies of their private practices. That’s something that The Mindy Project, Mindy Kaling’s promising new sitcom for Fox, does in its pilot episode: Mindy, an OB/GYN, takes on a conservative Muslim woman as a patient, telling her son that he has to promise her the family will be insured by the time his mother gives birth, even if it’s a lie, so Mindy can take her on as a patient.

On Tuesday, the people behind the show suggested they would take on another aspect of medical practice: medical bill collection. The show is adding Amanda Setton, who will play Shauna, the receptionist and person responsible for collecting bills at Mindy’s private practice. And the show says she’ll be tough about it. “I think Shauna would literally handcuff a pregnant lady to get her to pay her,” executive producer Matt Warburton. And Kaling added “she thinks of herself like a sexy bounty hunter.” I’ll be fascinated to see how that plays out, how much sympathy the show has for patients who are facing fees that seem disproportionate to the attention or benefit they’ve received, and if Shauna goes after insurance companies for reimbursements as well.

But however it plays out, I’m heartened that as House, one of the biggest medical dramas on television, departs the airwaves, some of the new medical programs that are coming after it, even if they aren’t direct replacements, are thinking beyond the operating room or the diagnostic process. Call the Midwife, which I wrote about yesterday, is as much about what the advent of the National Health Service allows doctors to do as how they do it. And if The Mindy Project ends up being about how people pay for their care as much as how the titular character delivers it, that would be a real landmark.

Despite the remarkable feats of the female athletes that are participating in the 2012 Olympics, when it comes to women and athletics there is still a lot of sexism involved.

Take, for example, two clear cases of unequal treatment based on gender. The Japanese women’s soccer team and the Australian women’s soccer and basketball teams were relegated to economy while their male counterparts flew business class. This is despite the fact that the women’s teams are ranked higher and have played better in the past. The Japanese women’s soccer team won the World Cup last summer, and is favored to win a gold medal this year. Similarly, the Australian women’s basketball and soccer teams have much higher international rankings than the men’s teams. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the women’s basketball team “won silver medals at the last three Olympics, and won bronze in 1996. The Boomers [the men's team] have never won an Olympics medal.”

The former captain of the women’s basketball team weighed in, saying she knows it’s about gender: “It’s been a bit of a sore spot, especially since the women are much more successful. I’m yet to find a nice answer for it other than they’re male and we’re female. You’d hate that that’s the reason, but I’m sure it is.”

Some instances of sexism in the Olympics are more subtle but equally egregious. For example, the media coverage of female athletes frequently focuses on their bodies as sex objects rather than as athletic tools, an angle rarely used to describe the men.
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“I’ve never really had that issue put before me before,” Kevin Reilly, entertainment president of Fox said on Monday morning. I’d just asked him about the latest report from San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, which revealed that in the 2010-2011 television season, Fox had fewer women working behind the camera than any other broadcast network—a measly 18 percent, and the second lowest-number of female characters, 39 percent of characters narrowly beating out NBC’s 36, and whether Fox’s female-lead comedy boom was a response to those figures. I honestly didn’t think it was a hard question. But apparently, in the entertainment industry, it remains a surprising and unexpected one.

Reilly pivoted to the number of women who watch the network, saying “Fox is traditionally thought of as a male core network. Whether it’s our history of genre or animation, we still have that access point, and we have shows that deliver equally with men and women. When you’ve seen with shows like American Idol, we have not only the highest concentration of women, but young women. We’re not in the one-quadarant business.” Which is nice for Fox, and meeting the needs of female viewers is a worthy goal, but Reilly’s response kind of misses the point. (To his credit, I spoke to Reilly after the session, and he’s promised a follow-up after he’s looked at the SDSU report, which I look forward to.) If you don’t want to be a one-quadrant network, it might help not to have one-quadrant writers.

That’s particularly true on a show like The Mindy Project, which isn’t just a show about a young woman navigating work and life, but about women’s health issues. But, while there are female writers other than Mindy Kaling working on the show, the writers’ room is majority male, and the male writers who have joined the show have received the lion’s share of the media attention as the show has staffed up. “I think our greatest asset is we have at the top of the show the greatest female half-hour writer in television,” executive producer Matt Warburton said when I asked him what the male writers were bringing to women’s health and work-life balance topics. And Kaling gave the answer that almost every executive in Hollywood gives when asked about diversity: “We’re looking for people who can write women super-well,” she said. “That said, we are alwasy looking for really funny female writers. That’s something we’re looking forward in the future,” implying that the current state of affairs was a matter of money rather than hiring decisions.

To her credit, Dana Fox, creator of Ben and Kate, one of the best new sitcoms of the season, about an irresponsible man who moves home to help his sister care for her young child, talked candidly after her panel about some of the challenges of hiring female writers. There are four women on the writing staff of her show, and Fox said she had hoped to hire other female writers who were snapped up by other programs. Fox’s best friend is New Girl creator Liz Merriwether, and she spoke movingly about her desire to promote and support the work of her friends who are female television writers. Even if she’s just getting started on those projects, Fox is a step ahead of the man who runs her network in thinking about diversity in the writers’ room.

Cassandra Clare, the fan fiction writer turned real-life young adult novelist, has a terrific post up in response to readers (apparently very attentive ones) who were confused why the casting call for the movie adaptation of The Mortal Instruments indicated that the producers were looking for an Asian character to play one of the main characters:

They want an Asian actor to play Magnus because Magnus is Asian. (Technically, Magnus is biracial. I would be perfectly happy with a biracial actor playing him — but otherwise the option is an Asian actor, not a white actor. It doesn’t matter if any of Magnus’ background is white. Casting him white would erase that part of his background that is Asian. And important. There are plenty of roles out there for white actors. Most roles are for white actors. This is not one of them. There is very little I have control over as regards casting. I cannot pick an actor for Magnus. I don’t have that ability. But I can say, and say strongly, that I want them to cast an Asian or half-Asian actor, and I did. It is pretty much the one ironclad demand as regards casting that I have made, i.e. : if you don’t cast an Asian actor, I’ll never talk about this movie again, nor will I see it.)…

I have gotten many letters over the years from readers who are happy that Magnus is not white, that Jem is not white, that Maia is not white, that Aline is not white. The fact is that most parts in books are for straight white folks and even more so in films. There are not that many parts for actors who are not white — even less substantive ones. Taking those things away by casting Magnus as white and talking about him as white does cause actual pain to actual people — and to what end? Why? Why send the message you only want to read about white people and only want to see white people on your screens?

There’s something fascinating about the point when investment in or identification with a character causes some readers to willfully fail to see or absorb the race of characters who are clearly non-white. And it says something worrisome that such identification, in those cases, seems to require that characters be white. That Clare’s willing to raise these kinds of questions with her fans, and to stake her political capital with the people adapting her work on keeping her franchise multicultural because she believes that’s the key to making her characters distinct and interesting, is admirable and important.