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.

We are one episode into 2 Broke Girls and already people are calling for Kat Dennings to lose 10 pounds. I wish I could be more articulate about this, but it’s hard for me to express how enraged and sad this makes me, even if the only people expressing this sentiment are Internet trolls. Even though I have some reservations about the 2 Broke Girls pilot, Dennings’ performance is one of the most precise and fully realized in any of the new fall TV shows, and she has sexual charisma to burn. It just destroys me that we cannot have one single woman who represents a marginally different kind of beauty in mainstream popular culture without people coming out of the woodwork to demand she fall in line with their particular preferences.

Nobody would be harmed by a world where not every single woman in entertainment and public life is sculpted to meet a narrow standard of beauty that has nothing to do with what most people find desirable in real life. Enormous numbers of people are harmed by narrow-minded, vicious little standards of sexual appeal that say if you don’t fit into a sample size, you can’t be gorgeous, and that if you desire people who aren’t a sample size, your desires are illegitimate. Kat Dennings is a goddess. If you don’t like her, you have many, many other options. Scuttle off and enjoy them and let the rest of us appreciate the awesomeness that is her, and Amber Tamblyn, and to mourn the fact that this is about as good as it gets in terms of body size diversity. I never understand what drives people to say hateful things like this on the Internet. Even less so in cases like this where the ugly opinions people are propagating have basically won.

I’m on record as being pretty excited for Tower Heist, and for a movie that considers the non-extremely wealthy of Bernie Madoff’s fraud. And it seems like Bernie Madoff revenge fantasies or victim stories are everywhere this fall. Ponzi schemes play a role in 2 Broke Girls and Apartment 23. A Bernie Madoff grotesque is one of the assassination targets in Colombiana

But the obsession with Madoff isn’t just a bad thing because it’s a derivative trope. If pop culture makes him the sole scapegoat for the financial crisis, our television shows and movies will be dodging a complicated but important issue. I understand why Madoff’s convenient. If he’s to blame for people losing their trust funds and job opportunities, shows can give us a slightly shrunken New York, a recessionista version, as it will, without blaming all those cute investment bankers who are potential love interests for our heroines. But that’s a dodge. Not every story should be a complete chronicle of the entire financial crisis, but shows set in New York or with interests in our reshaped economy should be clear that you didn’t have to be criminal to cause an incredible amount of damage even if they’re not incredibly specific about the mechanisms of the damage.

I want badly for Kat Dennings to have a great career, and have ever since she stole The 40 Year Old Virgin away from the movie’s adults every time she was on screen. It was frustrating watching her play second banana to the leaden Natalie Portman in Thor, and I really hope she breaks the streak in 2 Broke Girls, a show that, among other things, seems to be about the Bernie Madoff scandal and small business ownership, as well as about the gentrification of Brooklyn.

That gentrification thing, first. Part of Michael Patrick King’s schtick in Sex and the City was giving the sense that he was ahead of the curve on New York Trends: the show helped create the country-wide sense of the Meatpacking District as cool and cupcakes as a thing. But 2 Broke Girls feels like it’s desperately trying to catch up and prove its cred. Max’s (Dennings) monologue that’s been all over the trailer — “I wear knit hats when it’s cold out, you wear knit hats because of Coldplay. You have tattoos to piss off your dad. My dad doesn’t know he’s my dad.” — is both unfunny and a couple of years ago. Only the final, dry line about how unaroused her customers’ rude behavior makes her has any sting. Similarly, Max’s lament that “The cliental used to be all Eastern Bloc criminals and crack whores, but then he took it over and ruined it,” would be funny if Brooklyn wasn’t already so ridiculously gentrified and if there wasn’t something a little bit weird about treating folks from the former Soviet Union as they’re all sleazy, slutty crooks.

Then, there’s the Madoff thing. Caroline, Max’s blonde foil, is the daughter of a Madoff-like con artist named Martin Channing, and apparently, we are supposed to feel sorry for her, even though my reactions trended much more towards Max’s. I feel some pity for Mark Madoff, who finally figured out his father’s fraud, reported it, and eventually committed suicide as the investigation into Madoff’s frauds mounted. But I find it a lot harder to feel pity for someone who just totally missed that her lavish lifestyle was financed by extensive white-collar crime, and who very belatedly is having her first experience with the idea that people have to work to support themselves. And the show overcompensates by making Max’s other boss, a Manhattan socialite, so pathologically stupid it’s impossible to imagine how anyone stands to be in the same room as her. She’s a walking hathos alert.

All of that said, I think this show has potential. Dennings is very good about keeping her character from becoming sour; in 22 minutes, she’s stressed, seduced, warm and wry. Beth Behrs, who plays Caroline, may be stuck with some unfortunately high-concept characterization, but she’s got a nice way around a line reading, whether she’s telling Max’s loser boyfriend to get up out of her Chanel when he tries to hit on her, or coming up with a new business plan on the spot. That last bit is the smartest thing in the show: the frame device for at least the first season looks like it’s going to be Caroline and Max working together to save the start-up capital to earn a bakery. It both feels timely—the recession prompts people towards alternative jobs and start-ups—and a good character synthesis. Max is hustling, but so exhausted she doesn’t have the energy to put together a bigger plan, and Caroline is irrepressible enough to give her the kick she needs, even as she needs Max to keep her honest and from doing things like stealing the extra money she’s charging for cupcakes. That’s a great, sturdy setup, if the writing calms down a bit. And if the show stops making bad jokes about people getting raped at Duke.

I’ll have much more detailed write-ups of each of these shows as they air, but as I wrote in The Atlantic today, looking at the Bridesmaids-inspired female-centric comedies, the big trends for fall seem to be women competing against each other, particularly along Betty-and-Vernonica-like blonde and brunette lines and the Bernie Madoff’s influence on New York:

There’s something odd and unfortunate about the tendency of sitcoms to pitch women against each other—even when there aren’t the affections of a boy like Archie Andrews at stake. In CBS’s 2 Broke Girls, which premieres tonight at 9:30, brunette Max (a tart and wonderful Kat Dennings) is immediately suspicious of Caroline (Beth Behrs), a former socialite who lost her fortune when her father’s Ponzi scheme collapsed and takes a job at the same Brooklyn diner where Max works. A gentler version of that dynamic is at work in NBC’s family comedy Up All Night, where new mother Reagan (Christina Applegate) tries to defend her right to family time against the demands of her boss and friend, talk show host Ava (Maya Rudolph, the only woman of color in a leading role in any of these shows). And in Apartment 23, which will debut on ABC later this fall, June (Dreama Walker), who moves to New York only to have her job vanish in yet another Madoff-like collapse, ends up rooming with the cartoonishly manipulative Chloe (the always wonderful Krysten Ritter).

In each case, some of the tension between each pair dissipates by the end of the first episode. But it remains frustrating that the most common way to generate dynamic friction between women in pop culture is to start with a win-lose scenario, where only one woman can end up in control of her time, a choice New York apartment, or a deeply scuzzy diner in an up-and-coming neighborhood. If the stakes were higher, the competitions might seem justified, but there’s something depressingly recession-sized about these conflicts, and the faster these shows move on to interesting and fraught collaborations rather than battles over scraps, the better.

I’m really curious to see how these shows evolve beyond their early episodes — there’s a lot of potential in the set-ups for all of these shows to say something interesting about the desirability of marriage, about friendships between men and women, and about a reduced, recession-era New York. Whether they capitalize remains an open question.

There’s been a lot of discussion of a series of illustrations, some of which are reproduced here, that show what male superheroes would look like if they were posed like Wonder Woman is on the cover of the latest Justice League. I was particularly interested to see those images in conjunction with a new study that looks at 1,000 Rolling Stone covers and determines that the images of both men and women have become more sexual more frequently over the 43 years the magazine’s been published, but that over time, the number of sexualized and hypersexualized images of women has increased faster than the number of comparable images of men. I mention this because while I think reducing women to their sexuality is a problem, we’ve also got something of an equal opportunity problem here.

The reason those images of superheroes posed like Wonder Woman are resonating is in part because they’re funny, they’re superheroes in drag. They help make clear why it’s ridiculous to have Wonder Woman running around fighting evil in a swimsuit — it can be hard to see things as ridiculous when they’re all you’ve ever seen, but when you see a reversal, like a pantsless Batman, it’s usefully jarring. But these images don’t accomplish their full purpose because they aren’t actually meant to be sexy. They don’t communicate to men what it’s like to see another man held up as an object of pure sexual desire for women’s consumption.

That’s one of the reasons I cracked up in the 2 Broke Girls extended trailer when Kat Dennings explains that she can’t resist her cheating newly-ex boyfriend because of “he had these muscle thingies [adjacent to his abs]…I don’t know what they’re called but they make smart girls stupid.” Or why Crazy Stupid Love is selling the joke where Emma Stone tells Ryan Gosling, “It’s like you’re Photoshopped!” when he takes off his shirt. There’s this idea that female desire doesn’t exist, or if it does, that it’s sort of laughable, which both of those examples thankfully reject, but as a result, we have fewer images of men that are just purely about being beautiful and covetable. Patrick Swayze’s incredibly desirable in Dirty Dancing, but the fact that there are so few images of men that are just available for the female gaze like that hugely magnifies the significance of his performance and his self-presentation in the movie.

I don’t want to live in a world where we remove all images of women that are desirable. I just want more of other kinds of images, and equal opportunity for women who like to sigh over dudes to have images to sigh over.

Lizz Winstead mentioned this when I talked to her on Tuesday, and it’s something I think about fairly frequently as well: what do you do when you come up against a movie or television show you’re not sure you’re going to like, but that you think you should watch to prove there’s an audience for that kind of movie or television show? My sense is that you take a deep breath and go as often as you can, or set your DVR to record things you don’t really intend to watch just so you can juice the numbers a bit. Sometimes, what feels like it might be a duty watch, turns out to be a delight, as was the case with Bridesmaids. Sometimes, it turns out to be 2 Broke Girls, which looks like it’ll be generally frustrating but with the occasional thing that is so funny and true that I get sucked back in all over again:

But it’s a risky strategy. Proving there’s a market for one thing won’t necessarily convince studios that there’s a market for things like it, but rather that there’s a rigidly defined market for that single thing, as has proved to be the case with the announcement that Lionsgate is giving Tyler Perry his own network. Perry is not exactly known for giving projects that might be better suited to other artists, like For Colored Girls, to other directors and writers, so it remains to be seen if he tries to write and program the entire network himself. We can only hope that it’s too much even for the famously productive studio head, and that he has to let other creators handle some shows, and put some new ideas out there.