One of the reasons I’m excited for Veep, HBO’s upcoming show about a female vice president, is that I think it’ll be an interesting intervention in our ongoing debate about awkward ladies in comedy:

A lot of that conversation has centered around Liz Lemon, and the question of whether the embrace of her awkwardness is also an embrace of mediocrity. The addition to 30 Rock of a page who sees Liz as living a dream life after seasons of emphasizing that she’s given up on her professional dreams and dating beneath her has complicated this perspective. But I think Veep adds a new layer to what Sady Doyle has dubbed Lady Loser Comedy.

Selina, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character, is objectively successful: she is the Vice President of the United States. It’s hard to argue that is in any way, shape, or form a compromise or a failure except by the most utterly insane standards. But as y’all will see in the pilot, she keeps screwing up: uttering politically unfortunate malapropisms, making staff mistakes, being generally socially stiff. But Veep walks a very thin line between treating Selina as if she’s dumb and treating her job as if it’s impossible to do well. And therein, I think, lies the revolutionary potential of awkward female characters. It’s one thing to spend time reveling in just being a mess, which I think is the appeal of Liz Lemon for some people, and also why I’m over the character—I’m just not having fun down there any more. But explorations of female awkwardness that reveal how artificial and ridiculous the conventions that govern so-called dignified female behavior are? That I’m pretty excited for.

It’s coincidental that they came out so close together, but two recently-published interviews, one with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, and the other with William Shatner, present an interesting portrait of the odd institutional bias against genre fiction. Chabon, in an interview with Wired, talked about the way he’d been discouraged from writing genre fiction, even though it was one of his first loves, in his MFA program:

I had been taught early on in college and graduate school that I wouldn’t be taken seriously if I wrote genre fiction, and not only would I not be taken seriously, but people just really didn’t want to read it, like, my workshop mates and my workshop leaders. I had workshop leaders who just out-and-out said, “Please do not turn science fiction in to this workshop.” That was discouraging, obviously, and if I had had more courage and more integrity, I might have stood up to it more than I did, but I wanted to be read, and I wanted to receive whatever benefits there were to be received from the people I was in workshop with, and the teachers I was studying from.

And, you know, I wasn’t looking for a fight, and it wasn’t like I don’t love F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov, and Eudora Welty, and all those people. I love their work just as much — if not more in some cases — as Arthur C. Clarke, or Frank Herbert, or whoever it might have been. So I had just sort of allowed myself to fall into this channel as a writer that at some point I realized I didn’t want to be limited to anymore.

And William Shatner, talking with Terry Gross, explains how, though he took his work on Star Trek extremely seriously while he was acting on the show—” I applied every talent I had to making it valid and working on story and fighting management and doing the best I could”—he came to feel ashamed of it afterwards, and was bucked up by Patrick Stewart’s commitment to the work:

When I left “Star Trek,” I left it with pride and went on to other things. And then “Star Trek” started to become popular about six years afterwards, as it went into syndication. And then people started talking about, hey, there’s – beam me up, Scotty. And there’s Captain Kirk. And, you know, and then somebody would say: Do you really go where no man has gone before – in that sort of semi-mocking tone that I thought, well, all right. Maybe it wasn’t as good as I thought it was. And maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. And I held myself up defensively.

It was only watching Patrick Stewart – and I have great respect for Patrick, both as an actor and as man. I love him. And the gravitas that this great Shakespearean actor gave to his role, that I suddenly realized that this guy is taking Captain Picard every bit as seriously as Macbeth. And I used to. And I stopped. And what the hell’s the matter with me? It was a great piece of work. Everybody contributed to three years that has lasted 50. It’s a phenomenon. Why aren’t I proud of it? And that’s when I had that moment.

I’ve never really understood the bias against genre fiction. It’s not as if there’s something inherently more praiseworthy about contemplating the present in an entirely realistic way than about considering the possibilities future or the norms of the past. It’s not actually less self-indulgent to revisit and fetishize, say, the sixties or the eighties than to imagine what it would be like to live under an interplanetary government, to settle Mars, or to fight the War of the Roses with powerful metaphors for uncertainty and danger thrown in the mix. That MFA programs and critics have managed to convince people otherwise is evidence that they’re good at preserving the privilege awarded certain kinds of work, not that they’re correct.

This post contains spoilers through the March 8 episode of Parks and Recreation.

Remember in January when I talked to Nick Offerman and gave y’all the word that he had written his first episode of the show, and that it dealt with the question of whether Ron Swanson is a feminist? Well, this was that episode. And I think it may have been one of my favorites of the season, particularly in the way it kept the stories adjacent to but not involving Leslie moving along.

The A story itself, though, was pretty good. I’m glad the show is finally dealing with the fact that the campaign isn’t just a machine that reinforces for Leslie and Ben how right they are for each other. Because he’s doing his job right, and because he’s deeply invested in it, Ben can’t just be the adorably tense, dorky dude Leslie loves so much: he’s a tense, dorky dude with the power to tell her what to do. And sometimes that stuff isn’t much fun. But when she blows him off, it’s a disaster, resulting in an impromptu, drunk campaign interview that could halt her rise in the polls, of not knock her out of them completely. What made the story so great, though, was not the stretch-limo chase to Indianapolis to get the tape (a development that made me devoutly wish Parks and Recreation could find an actual way for Tom to grow). Instead it was that even in the midst of an epic cock-up, Leslie managed to notice people Pawnee wasn’t serving well-Pawnee’s airport workers-come up with a plan to help them, and win their loyalty such that they’re willing to do her a solid. The story was a perfect mix of acknowledging Leslie’s fallibility while reaffirming her fundamental dedication and talent.

I also just loved watching Ron click with Andy’s women’s studies professor at their celebratory dinner after he passed his first college class. “My father once told my mother that God made Eve from Adam’s rib,” he says, explaining that while he’s not technically a feminist, he stands in solidarity with strong women. “She broke his jaw.” It’s an interesting contrast with Chris, who is almost too deferential, telling the professor, “I didn’t want you to think I was objectifying you with my male gaze.” She goes home with Ron, who isn’t making any effort to be any less masculine-”No need. Porterhouse. Rare. Quickly,” he tells the waitress-but is also fully on board with what she teaches. Masculinity and feminism, in this case, are two great tastes that go great together.

And I found the C story, in which Donna blows off a date to hang out with Jerry, who proved to be unexpectedly dedicated to stuffing envelopes, surprisingly sweet. We see Jerry lose so often that I’ve enjoyed seeing him find himself in his element on Leslie’s campaign, whether he’s running phone banks or stuffing mailers. Even if he screws up, as he did last night, it’s nice to see him as the person in Leslie’s life other than Ben who has best stepped up to help her, and in doing so, has found a bit of hi,s