Six months ago, it seemed like we were at the verge of a promising new age in female comedy (at least, if you’re a white lady). Bridesmaids was a big, and unexpected, hit. And it was the beginning of a television season in which the hottest trend was sitcoms created by women. As much as I would have wished for a string of hits, the results have been more predictable. The shows have ranged from the toxic Are You There, Chelsea? and 2 Broke Girls, to the increasingly-tolerable New Girl, to the outright winning Up All Night. And despite the boom in shows created by women, the episodes of these programs have been overwhelmingly directed by men. And men have written slightly more than half the episodes in six shows I examined. If a revolution for women in entertainment is under way, this fall may have been the vanguard, but in both employment of women and depictions of them on television, we’re a long way from victory.

Of Whitney‘s 20 episodes, just 7 were written by women, and of those seven, only three were written by women other than show creator Whitney Cummings. The other show Cummings created, 2 Broke Girls, has been influenced much more by showrunner Michael Patrick King than by Cummings (she wrote just one episode of the show), though it’s actually doing better than Whitney at getting episodes written by women on the air: women have written 9 of the show’s 20 episodes, while men have written 11. On New Girl, almost twice as many episodes were written by men (11) as by women (6). Liz Merriweather, the show’s creator, wrote two out of those 17 episodes. It might be hard to imagine, given how much the show seems like a Female Chauvinist Pig archetype, but a majority of Are You There, Chelsea? episodes are written by women—6 out of 10. And it’s the only show on this list where every episode is directed by a woman, Gail Mancuso, who’s also directed an episode of Suburgatory, and is reteaming with Roseanne Barr on her new NBC sitcom Downwardly Mobile. Suburgatory also has a narrow majority of its episodes scripted by women, including series creator Emily Kapnek, 10 out of 19. And Up All Night is the undisputed champion—in a world where having 13 of a show’s 20 episodes written by women counts as an overwhelming victory.

These numbers are a striking reminder that we can’t count on female showrunners and show creators to do all the work of getting more women working on television programs. And we shouldn’t ask them to. Being a woman doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy working with men, or that you can’t learn from men’s perspectives. And we shouldn’t ask women to deny themselves those pleasures and those insights just to make up the gaps created by men who aren’t curious enough to want to work with women, and as a result are missing out on fresh and exciting perspectives, as well as potential friendships and working partnerships. If women creators or showrunners are solely responsible for getting more women writing for television, then the cancellation of a single show or a mass decision by studios that lady-run or lady-created shows are no longer a trend they want to ride could create a massive dropoff in the number of women writers. Until men and women are equally invested in getting more women’s voices in writers’ rooms, those numbers won’t improve in a permanent way.
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James Poniewozik points out that, because of how television production works, the economy characters have to work with in television shows will always lag behind where we actually are:

Does TV have some sort of agenda to talk down the economy? Do programmers realize that average Americans are hurting far more than the statistics and positive spin might make it show? The truth, if you follow the TV business, is neither so nefarious nor profound. Whenever TV chases social trends and zeitgeist plots, there’s a lag time. It takes months or even years to develop scripted shows, and often by the time TV jumps on a trend in the headlines, the headlines have changed. Just as it was quite a while before primetime shows addressed the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, you’d have to expect it to be a while before they reflected any recovery. (Just look at the recent Work It, thankfully no longer with us, in which two guys dressed in drag to get jobs to play off the already-dated “mancession” trend.)

Though I also suspect that any recovery and boom—if and when there is one—will have to be well along before primetime TV is willing to acknowledge it. TV networks want a great economy to sell ads in, but TV writers probably like working with the assumption that it’s tough out there—not for propaganda reasons but dramatic ones. Hard economic times create conflict. They provide stakes, and they supply motivation. TV thrives on characters with challenges in extreme situations, and a recession provides a perfect reason to have characters go to extremes to put food on the table.

I’d argue, though, that the current crop of recession shows hasn’t actually confronted the economy particularly head-on for the source of drama. The use of Ponzi schemers rather than investment bankers is a perfect example of this. Television’s littered with Madoff-like Ponzi schemers from 2 Broke Girls, to Revenge, to Don’t Trust The Bitch in Apartment 23 all out of proportion to the actual number of Ponzi schemes operating and the damage they did. Outright fraudsters may be sexy and dramatic, but they’re not actually the reason the economy ended up in a recession.

Explaining what did happen is a much more complicated process, something that many shows don’t seem particularly interested in tackling. But there are other ways to get at the long-term changes in the economy that are going to affect characters and constrain their choices for years. Both 30 Rock and 2 Broke Girls have alluded to student loans their characters carry—Liz, when interviewing with a co-op board explains of her loan that “It is outstanding,” and Max labors in service to her debt rather than their future. But rather than shaping their decisions. In both shows, the loans show up briefly and then disappear—Liz talks to Jack about wiping out her debt and saving for retirement, and Max and Caroline pay off Caroline’s debt with a party. In neither show is debt the long-term problem it is in real life. Similarly, we haven’t had a lot of programing that addresses the lack of retirement security: there’s a generation of workers who are going to have to keep working much longer than they anticipated, and there’s drama in that, even if it’s not of the “what desperate act will I take to put food on the table this week” variety. It’s true America may be going to work. But that doesn’t mean that we’ll suddenly stop bearing the consequences of long-term changes in our economy that were under way before the recession started and will have consequences long after it’s over.

I was looking through the acting nominations for the Comedy Awards, and it really struck me that in a lot of ways, 2011 was a richer year for women in comedy than it was for men.

In movies, Jason Bateman got a nod for Horrible Bosses, Steve Carell was nominated for Crazy, Stupid, Love, Jean Dujardin was tapped for The Artist, Zach Galifianakis for The Hangover Part II, and Owen Wilson for Midnight in Paris. None of these are particularly innovative roles, and all of them (except Dujardin, whose range I don’t really know) fall pretty squarely within these actors’ existing ranges: Bateman is a tense straight man, Carell is sympathetic and slightly clueless, Galifianakis is disconcerting and wild, and Wilson is winsome. There are a few things that I think were left off this list—I’ll defend The Trip until I run out of breath, Patton Oswalt was great and under-recognized for Young Adult, and I’m not really sure why 50/50, which was nominated elsewhere, didn’t score acting nods—but I can’t think of a performance by a man that’s not here that was a revelation. Ditto in TV, which was dominated by utterly predictable nods for Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock, Ty Burrell in Modern Family, Steve Carell in The Office, and Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. I’m glad to see Louis C.K. in there—his performance in Louie was arguably my favorite thing on television in 2011. But it’s not like he has a lot of peers.

For women, on the other hand, the nominations are actually a lot of fun. I didn’t love Horrible Bosses, but seeing Jennifer Aniston get totally raunchy and ridiculous was a fun stretch for her. Ditto for Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher—depending on how she takes her career next, she could leave horrid romantic comedies behind and steer more in the direction of Charlize Theron in Young Adult, who really ought to be here. Melissa McCarthy was a miracle in Bridesmaids, and Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne, who had an utterly breakout performance in that film also could have easily been nominated. Television has its predictable notes—Tina Fey, for a deeply uninspired season of 30 Rock and Sofia Vergara for Modern Family. But you’ve got Zooey Deschanel in there for a debut performance in New Girl, and Maya Rudolph could easily be there for Up All Night, along with Laura Dern in Enlightened, Kat Dennings or Beth Behrs in 2 Broke Girls (that show’s massive flaws are not their fault), any of the women in Community‘s cast or Eliza Coupe or Elisha Cuthbert in Happy Endings.

And if Whitney or Are You There, Chelsea? had been less terrible, and we’d fulfilled all the potential of the lady comedy boom, this could have been an even more crowded field. I may not be equally addicted to every female comedy performance on the market these days. But it seems like there’s a lot of space available for new actresses to enter the field, and for actresses with existing track records to step out of their comfort zones. If those conditions persist, that’s a recipe for an embarrassment of riches.

In a jaw-dropping panel at the Television Critics Association winter press tour, Sex and the City and 2 Broke Girls creator and producer Michael Patrick King doubled down his defense of the rampant racial and ethnic stereotypes in 2 Broke Girls, suggesting that they would not change even in response to notes from the network that suggested “dimensionalizing” the non-white characters in the supporting cast.

“Nina likes to say we’re an equal opportunity offender…I personally am thrilled with everything we’re doing. I’m happy with the growth. I feel we’re growing. I think there’s room to grow. I’m thrilled with the arena, with CBS, who knows what a big, bold joke means,” he told an audience of critics, many of whom have argued that the show’s signal weakness is its heavy reliance on obvious racial humor. “I don’t find it offensive, any of this. I find it comic to take everybody down…Being a comedy writer gives you permission to be an outsider and poke fun at what people think of other people.”

King defended the jokes about Matthew Moy’s diner manager Han Lee, saying “I like the fact that he’s an immigrant. I like the fact that he’s trying to fit into America. I like the fact that in the last 3 episodes we haven’t made an Asian character, we’ve only made short jokes.”

He also said that he thought the show was an authentic representation of the relationships between people of different races and backgrounds in gentrifying New York neighborhoods.

“I feel that it is broad and brash and very current. It takes place in Williamsburg, NY,” he said. “It is a complete mashup of young, irreverent hipsters, old-school people, different nationalities, different ethnic backgrounds. And what our show represents is that mashup of smart girls and a wide range of characters. Nina [Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment] likes to say we’re an equal opportunity offender. I like to say that the big story about race on our show is so many are represented. The cast is incredibly multi-ethnic, including the regulars and the guest stars. We sort of represent what New York used to be, and still is, a melting pot.”

King did acknowledge that the show would continue to develop supporting characters of color like Garrett Morris’s Earl, who he said got a more substantial storyline in an upcoming episode. And he suggested that while his obligation was to expand the two main characters (who he said had their origins in stereotypes as well) first, he “didn’t think the [supporting] characters were one note. I thought they were the first note.”

But it was an undeniably tense session, with King at one point calling out The Wrap critic Tim Molloy and, in a lame attempt at proving the humor he was defending can work, suggesting that Molloy’s Irish heritage is the source of sexual problems. I’m told that critics asked these kinds of questions at summer press tour, so it’s difficult to believe that CBS in general, which has another broad ethnic show debuting in Rob, or King in particular would have been surprised by them. Perhaps he genuinely believes that these sort of jokes are cutting edge in the same way he suggested that the show’s sex jokes reflect the fact that the show is “8:30, on Monday on CBS in 2012. It’s a very different world than 8:30 on Monday on CBS in 1994.” If this is as far as we’ve come, we’ve got a long haul ahead of us.

Despite its silly name, Don’t Trust the B- In Apartment 23 was one of my favorite pilots that I saw this fall. I like Krysten Ritter a whole bunch, and her odd-couple roommate schtick with Dreema Walker felt plausible and funny. Ritter plays Chloe, a manipulative New Yorker who takes roommates only to drive them nuts and keep their deposits, who ends up with more than she bargained for in June, a wholesome Midwesterner who came to New York only to find the job she planned to take wiped out by Bernie Madoff’s fraud. Chloe also maintains a nicely platonic friendship with James Van Der Beek, playing a slightly-altered version of himself a la Larry David, something that, as Ritter said today, is all too rare on television in particular and pop culture in general. I was intrigued by the Madoff references, and other riffs on things like June and Chloe walking out without paying a bar tab and blaming it on times being tough, so I asked creator Nahnatchka Khan what role the recession plays in the show.

“I think we’re trying to make it feel like it exists in the world. I know a lot of my friends are feeling the recession and it’s a real thing that exists,” she said. “Dreema’s going to continue to try to get a job. She’s trying to get hired by a Wall Street firm and people aren’t hiring, so she’s working at the coffee shop with Mark. But not giving up, and that’s the hopeful message. Times are tough but people aren’t giving up.”

I sort of like that perspective. 2 Broke Girls tends to tell specific stories about why the characters don’t have any money. Max grew up poor and has financed her attempts at self-improvement with debt, which haven’t yet paid off for her. Caroline lost her family’s money when it turns out her fortune was built on a foundation of lies. But the people around them seem relatively unaffected by the recession. Han’s trying to make the diner take off, but it’s not like there are very specific problems he has because of the recession. Hipsters continue to spend ridiculous amounts of money. Peach’s friends are only affected by Ponzi schemes, not by their tanking investments.

Other shows are doing one-offs. I think we’ll see a lot of things like Raising Hope‘s planned Occupy Natesville episode, that weave in the symbols of the recession in the same way most people will have glancing contact with the bleeding edge of the conversation without being permanently on the vanguard. But getting that persistent environment right is a tricky thing that involves thinking out your characters’ motivations in a really complete way. People are affected by recessions in ways that they don’t necessarily name, and figuring out how to articulate that and keep their motivations consistent is important.

Fortunately for my sanity and good cheer I consumed far more culture that I liked in 2011 than culture that raised my blood pressure. But there were some things that got me really irritated, whether because they’re noxious on their own or because they’re wasted opportunities. Here are ten of them:

1. Red Riding Hood is miserably conventional: The previews implied that Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight follow-up twist on a fairy tale would have Red Riding hood be the wolf, a parable of the violence of female desire and a throwing off of restriction. Instead, it featured a totally traditional love triangle, some impressively terrible dialogue, and a torture elephant. Good lord.

2. Lady Gaga’s incredibly terrible immigration reform song “Americano”: I love me some Gaga, one of the few major stars with any sense of how to use her platform to advance political goals. But this song was a hot, condescending mess. If she wants to dip back into these waters, she might want to take notes from Emma’s Revolution’s “If I Give Your Name.”

3. True Blood goes racist, incoherent:: Alan Ball should know that just because you say your show isn’t a political metaphor doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for the ideas your show expresses. And he should be pretty embarrassed by the way his show handled rape, gender identity, and the South’s racial history this season.

4. Colombiana is totally incoherent: Man, I want to adore Zoe Saldana as a badass tiny action heroine, but this movie featured laughable dialogue, fueled the idea that Ponzi schemers are solely responsible for the recession, and had what is possibly the least plausible romance on screens this year.
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I feel this weird compulsion to apologize for continuing to write about 2 Broke Girls. The show is the kind of thing that drives me absolutely insane: something that’s a massive hit despite the fact that it relies on heavily and genuinely offensive content and that doesn’t necessarily seem to be learning the lessons of its best episodes or best laugh lines. And yet, like Todd VanDerWerff, the good things about it strike me strongly enough at times that I just can’t walk away from it, in part because I believe that if it did get better, it would be a stark rebuke to the show’s early bad impulses, to the idea that terrible racial and ethnic humor and stupid scatology is what sells in 2011.

Which is why I’m glad to hear that Jennifer Coolidge is joining the show as Max and Caroline’s neighbor. Coolidge is spectacularly good at playing roles that are very, very funny precisely because in the hands of another actress, they’d be stupid stereotypes, but that she manages to turn into something far stranger and more specific. In Legally Blonde, her undereducated manicurist could easily be a dumb confidante for Elle, but she imbues the role with a specific rage, and her empowerment feels genuinely triumphant:

In Best in Show, she delivers a vicious parody of gold-digger self-justification—and then, of course, a very funny and unexpected riff on lesbian culture that’s totally unmalicious while still being very much on point:

And it’s not like she’s given a lot to do in the American Pie movies, but even then, the joke is more on people who took up MILFs and cougars as if they were a thing.

That combination of specificity and newness seems to me to be exactly what 2 Broke Girls needs. The problem the show has, across both its endemic racism and its dated hipster references, is a sense that the only way to use stereotypes for comedic effect is to reference. It’s a low order of humorous thinking, and not one that anyone mistakes for sophisticated. But you can riff on stereotypes, and you can puncture the people who rely on them rather than the people who are supposed to exemplify them. 2 Broke Girls could do something clever by having Han end up dating a hipster, for example, simultaneously humanizing them both and dramatically reducing the social capital Max and Caroline get out of demeaning their boss and their neighbors. Having Coolidge as a hard-working neighbor could inject some genuine weirdness into the show’s vision of Brooklyn, while also illustrating the long-term financial struggles Max and Caroline are both facing. I hope it works.

This, from a New York Times piece on the comedy boom, seems somewhat off to me:

And then there’s the economy. Mr. Lee said it was a mistake to tie trends too simply to social developments, but in this case, it was inevitable to think of “things like the 1930s and screwball comedies.”

Indeed, socio-economic conditions are being widely credited. Mr. Lorre, who had hits before and after the economy tanked, said, “Comedy thrives during economic downturns. You know, if you’ve had a bad day, laughter is a better remedy than watching a coroner pick shrapnel out of some poor guy’s private parts.”

Ms. Salke said, “It’s all part of stress level.” She said people might look to comedy because they “don’t want to think too hard.” She added, “You’re probably sitting around the table talking about how you’re going to afford the tuition, or you’re not going to have a vacation, or you can’t afford a divorce. You need an escape from that.”

Lorre’s core comedy, the goofy, escapist Two and a Half Men, has seen its ratings fall from 28 million in this year’s premiere to 15 million for the last episode. And a lot of the comedies that are resonating — or, in an anemic ratings season, at least have gotten pickups — tap directly into contemporary issues if not into anxieties, whether it’s the class politics of 2 Broke Girls, the biggest new comedy of the fall, the post-college roommate scenario of New Girl, or the domestic trials of Up All Night and Whitney. Even Modern Family, cited for its excellence as one of the causes of the comedy resurgence, is nodding to the zeitgeist by having Claire Dunphy run for town council.

I do think it’s true that television has generally become more about providing aspirational models to audiences rather than reflections of their lived experiences. But even though that’s the case, the characters in popular comedies today still have problems that bear some small relation to those faced by their audiences, even if the consequences are cushioned by wealth or the scale is different — Jay’s business having trouble on Modern Family, for example, probably wouldn’t mean that his family gets foreclosed on. These are not the problems of, say, a con woman and a beer heir who meet cute on a cruise ship in The Lady Eve, or a professor and a gang moll in Ball of Fire, challenges that might be fun to watch but none of us could ever possibly have. We are not ignoring our mortgages to chase a leopard through the suburbs. Comedy characters today may be somewhat more secure than comedy watchers, but they’re helping us mediate the challenges of contemporary life, not escape them entirely.

I still think 2 Broke Girls is pretty terribly racist. Matthew Moy retains his dreadful accent and lack of anything for which we could plausibly respect the character. Oleg is still nothing but a walking sexual harassment lawsuit. In last night’s episode, when Max asked Caroline, “Which one is your ex? The Asian one? The black one? Just kidding!” the line and the line-reading weren’t nearly precise enough to suggest that Max might be mocking Caroline for only dating rich white dudes, rather than affirming the idea that of course a woman like Caroline would only date white men, because aren’t interracial relationships hilarious! And I don’t know what’s with Sonny Lee and Patrick Walsh, who wrote this episode, but memo to them: bisexual people actually exist, and lines like, “Everyone keeps telling me they can’t decide. It’s like a support group for bisexuals,” don’t make you, or Caroline, who delivered it, seem clever. They just make you seem dumb.

And yet, as much as I want to quit this show, it’s making it hard for me. To back up for a second, almost 15 million people are tuning in to 2 Broke Girls every week, giving the show a pretty incredible platform. And while a lot of that platform’s been spent making jokes about horse excrement (also, last night, mouse poop) and general racism, the show’s spending more time on debt, financial literacy, and considerations of our values around money. And that’s kind of remarkable. A show that’s been remarkably square as it tries to show off its coolness has stumbled into being the closest thing we have to Occupy Wall Street popular culture.

Don’t believe me? Consider last night’s focus on debt and financial literacy. When Caroline makes the mistake of answering the dreaded green phone in the apartment she shares with Max, she learns two things. First, that her roomie has substantial debt. And second, that among those debts is the hole she dug herself into trying to get a degree that would give her a shot at illustrating children’s books. Max, it turns out, is almost the epitome of a We Are the 99 Percent.

And the show didn’t just take Max’s debt and leave it at that. Caroline, who is better the smarter she’s made out to be, points out that Max needs to figure out the interest rates on her credit cards and start seriously paying down her student loan debt because she can’t discharge it in bankruptcy. For a show with that kind of clout to actually explain those useful (and true) facts, and to make a story out of them, is just so profoundly smart and useful even though it seems small. In a television environment where the closest shows come to engaging with the recession is to (very entertainingly) take down rich creeps in the Hamptons via insider trading or to use the fact of a costly mortgage to explain why a family can’t leave a manifestly haunted house, for a popular show to engage with the actual problems that have sent thousands of demonstrators into the streets is bracing.

Even more importantly, the show is launching a stealthy assault on the idea that possessing extreme wealth, no matter how you came to obtain it, is desirable. 2 Broke Girls‘ hipster-bashing can seem behind the curve and resentful of a generation of New Yorkers who came up behind Michael Patrick King and stole his cred. But last night’s episode was also a reasonably incisive parody of the ridiculous things rich people spend money on, including cupcakes (an industry Sex and the City single-handedly jumpstarted) and horse rides. And when Caroline was faced with the ex-boyfriend who dumped her when her father went to prison, Max read her a useful riot act, asking her if she really thought she was a more admirable person when she was luxuriating in unearned wealth.”But now that you support yourself by earning your own money, that’s somehow shameful?” Max challenges Caroline. And of course she’s right.

2 Broke Girls isn’t going to single-handedly upend television’s obsession with wealth, and the networks’ attachment to aspirational programming. But if it manages to make financial responsibility, earning your own money, and paying off your debt seem more admirable than being the 1 percent, it’s making a contribution that shouldn’t be totally dismissed. We should demand that the show’s race and gender politics catch up to its positions on class. Occupy CBS.

I hate to think this about a show that Kat Dennings is involved with. But after last night’s nigh-inexcusable episode of 2 Broke Girls, it’s hard to escape that the show is relying heavily, and unattractively, on clumsy and unfunny racial humor.

It’s not just the diner manager, though he’s pretty bad. His name appears to be changing from episode to episode, though whose mangling of the English language seems likely to persist until Michael Patrick King doesn’t think they’re funny any more. Nobody thinks that producing a nametag for an employee means “you’re killing it.” And making jokes about said Asian boss like, “You can’t tell an Asian he made a mistake. He’ll go in back and throw himself on a sword,” isn’t funny, it’s just gross and stereotypical and treats Asia as if it’s a single country without distinct national lines and cultures. Then there’s the cashier, Earl, an older African-American gentleman, who sits around saying things like, “That’s the exact same sentence that got me hooked on cocaine,” or making horrible jokes about rape at Duke. There are some relationships where I suppose it might be okay for a younger white woman to say to an older black man that she’s making cupcakes that are made with “Delicious dark chocolate the ladies can’t help but love. I’m calling it the Earl.” But in the context of a show that hasn’t even reached the 30-minute mark between its two episodes, that just reads as kind of gross.

Then, there’s the show’s propensity to treat Brooklyn as if it’s full of alternately charming and distasteful ethnics (and the borough as if it smells bad). Caroline complains that the diner is “Three blocks and fifteen ‘Hola, chica!’s away” from the apartment she’s sharing with Max. When she complains that it’s noisy outside, Max explains that “that’s Puerto Rican noise. You’ll get used to it.” Caroline dramatically overpronounces “Juan” and “Javier,” as if it’s supposed to be hilarious, and she and Max make fun of a countergirl named Nabulungi.

I mean, seriously? A major television network saw this cut and decided, yes, what we desperately need in an already super-white television season is two milk-white chicks making fun of non-white people? It’s not as if ethnic and racial humor is impossible to do well, even if you’re not operating at Louis C.K.’s level, but this is just disgraceful. The show can contrast Caroline and Max’s backgrounds all it wants, but it’s increasingly obvious that King and the other folks working on the show are the ones who need etiquette and basic humanity classes.