Given how obsessed a segment of the American viewing public has become with the process of making television, and the people behind the camera who make it, it’s been interesting to watch the reception to a recent slew of behind-the-scenes stories about show business. The CW’s aired the strong Canadian drama The L.A. Complex, about a group of aspiring actors, dancers, comedians and producers who live in a run-down apartment building, to ratings so low they’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad to see a good show with intelligent things to say about the entertainment industry get overlooked. By contrast, Jennifer Weiner’s The Next Best Thing, about a woman who sells her dream television show only to face down the compromises that it takes to make a version of it the network will air, debuted at 2 on the New York Times Bestseller list.

That’s an encouraging thing, in part because the novel is a sly and accurate education in the workings of the television industry, based on Weiner’s own experience making the ABC Family show State of Georgia. And those workings, and the conversations people have about them in The Next Best Thing are inevitably inflected by gender, race, and the mechanisms the industry has in place to deal with both.

In the novel, Ruth Saunders was badly injured in a childhood accident that’s left her with facial scars and that killed her parents. Her grandmother, who raised her, moves with Ruth to Los Angeles after Ruth graduates from college and hopes to pursue a career as a television writer. While Ruth begins work as an assistant and moves up the writing ladder, her grandmother scores work as an extra.

Ruth faces her first initial setback when she falls for her boss on a show where she’s working, and he rejects her. When her agent suggests that Ruth look for a job on a show run by a woman “I laughed, knowing as Shelly surely did, that women-run shows, especially comedies, were still a distinct minority. After all these years of feminism and presumed equality, there still wasn’t a woman hosting a late-night network show, and only a handful of ladies were writing for those male hosts. Sticoms weren’t much better. Male writers and showrunners were the rule, women writers and showrunners were still the exception, and while every writers’ room had a few females and at least one person of color, comedy was still very much a white man’s world.” That may be the kind of thing people who read me, or Maureen Ryan know. But I don’t know that the average Jennifer Weiner reader—or really, the average television watcher—does, and it’s incredibly valuable for the book not just to present that information to them, but to present it as if it’s settled knowledge.
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I’ve been following Bunheads, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s kind of delightfully weird ABC Family show about a showgirl who impulsively marries a guy, moves to California with him, discovers his eccentric mother runs a ballet studio, decides to stay in California after her new husband is killed in a car accident, and starts spending time with her mother-in-law’s students. It’s a weird, fun, female-centric little show. And it got me thinking about an interesting question. We have a lot of shows and movies about people who defy the odds and make rigid, exclusionary institutions realize their potential. But are there situations where it’s unproductive or unrealistic to encourage a character to dash themselves against a norm or organization that’s unlikely to yield?

The character who occasioned those thoughts is Boo, a student who’s heavier than some of the other girls. She’s not fat by any means, but she doesn’t have a naturally willowy figure, and we see her improving as a dancer through the episodes that have aired so far, as she prepares to audition for a prestigious summer program run by the Joffrey Ballet Company (which is real, not merely an invention of the show). Boo’s nervous about her chances, but hopeful. “I’m a better dancer, I’m in better shape,” she tells her mother as they shop at a farmer’s market, only to be crushed when she finds her mother’s already ordered a cake with “Better Luck Next Year” iced across it. When she’s cut in the first round, rather than consoling her, Fanny whips out a wig and outfitting Boo as another girl, declaring “You were not cut. No one cuts one of my girls that fast. Now, you’re Trina from Simi Valley if anyone asks.” Boo gets cut that time, and another time after, telling Fanny that the judges have offered praise for her other identities, but not for her original self. She’s buoyed, even though she doesn’t get in.

I hadn’t really considered this until I talked to a friend who danced for a long time about the show, and she mentioned that she thought there was something cruel about suggesting that Boo could get in to Joffrey’s program. All the talent in the world, she suggested, would never overcome Boo’s body type. So is it misleading to tell a story in which she’s encouraged to keep trying, that suggests Joffrey might divert from the deeply established priorities of the ballet world? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with stories that encourage people to pursue their dreams and changes to established structures that would keep them out. But there’s good drama, and perhaps fair warning, in stories that illustrate how difficult it is to make those boundaries fall, and that sometimes they stay standing.

It was depressing, for a number of reasons, to hear about a comedy that ABC is putting into production called The Smart One. I love Portia di Rossi, whose wonderful comedic talent has languished since Arrested Development and Better Off Ted went off the air. But this is not an enlightening premise: “The show follows two sisters: de Rossi’s smart one and [Malin] Akerman’s dumb one. De Rossi’s character goes to work for her dimmer, but more popular sister who is a former beauty queen currently serving as the mayor of a city.” It’s especially irritating to see ABC doubling down on dumb-but-pretty stereotypes because television is actually doing a nice job with female politicians—nicer, perhaps, than our politics at large, where women remain underrepresented.

I feel like I don’t even have to spend time discussing the foremost example of this trend, Leslie Knope, the civil servant who’s running for Pawnee, Indiana City Council on Parks and Recreation. But I will say this, anyway: whatever long-time fans of the show think of Parks and Recreation’s tonal and plot problems this season, the fact that they’ve got a woman on television running for office, and are taking her anxieties about that process seriously and generally respectfully, is kind of remarkable. Leslie may make hilarious miscalculations, and things may go wrong in her campaign, but the show’s never questioned the idea that Leslie’s desire to serve is deep and genuine, and that she’d make an absolutely fantastic member of City Council. Parks and Recreation‘s contempt for the laziness, entitlement and incompetence of Bobby Newport, the vastly wealthy heir to a destructive company who is trying to buy the seat Leslie’s running for, is particularly bracing given the role that billionaires are playing in supporting the various Republican candidates in this year’s primary campaign.

By contrast, Mel Burke, the city councilwoman Melissa Joan Heart plays on ABC Family’s Melissa & Joey, is essentially Leslie Knope for the non-hipster comedy set. Like Leslie, she’s blonde, fiercely devoted to her small city, somewhat awkward with the press, and prone to lingering sexual tension, though in this case with Joey, the manny she’s hired to take care of her niece and nephew, who are living with her after her brother went to jail for a massive Ponzi scheme. A multi-camera sitcom, Melissa & Joey spends much more time in Mel’s house than in her office, and the wacky antics have more to do with the fact that she has a hunky former banker living in her basement rather than her overwhelming devotion to public service. But that doesn’t mean the show doesn’t have at least some of Parks and Recreation‘s zany sense of politics: in the first-season episode “Seoul Man,” an illegal-domestic-help scandal hit Toledo’s public servants, and it turned out Joey was born in Korea and was having trouble locating the papers establishing his citizenship. It’s nothing revolutionary, but Parks and Recreation and Melissa & Joey share a nice commitment to celebrating women in public life, and to portraying them as more competent and dedicated than the people around them even though they have more burdens and obligations to balance.

There’s no question that the new crop of political shows will have a more varied take on women in politics, and that’s a good thing. Female politicians do misspeak and get themselves int turf wars, as Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ character on Veep does. Inconvenient romances happen in Washington in real life as they do—though perhaps not to the same extent—as they will on ABC’s other political show debuting this spring, Scandal. But it’s one thing to give women in politics complexity and texture. And quite another to have it be hilarious that they’re only there because they’re hot, and voters are too dumb to care that they have no other qualifications.

At the ABC Family session at the Television Critics Association press tour this morning, I asked the network’s president Michael Riley about the fact that Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation had named ABC Family the leader in portrayals of gay characters, particularly in creating gay characters who weren’t just white men in urban areas. His answer suggested some forward-thinking about diversity — he was the first executive on press tour to talk about the changing demographics of the country, even glancingly:

For us everything we do at ABC family is grounded in storytelling and iconic characters. We never set out to portray anyone anyway. We build up those characters from a multi-dimensional standpoint. We couldn’t be more proud to receive that honor. For us, it’s very much about how we ground everything we do in great story-lines and characters. Millennials are a diverse ground of people. We want to make sure out storytelling really reflects that diversity, and that’s something we keep doing not only in that space but in other multi-dimensional spaces.

He hammered home the generational message over and over again. “Millenials are absolutely voracious around technology,” he noted, talking about the Twitter buzz around Pretty Little Liars. “We always capitalize on anything we can do..for us it’s about being part of that conversation.” And he said, in an assertion I’m intrigued by and would love to see more support for, “Millenials aren’t genre-specific. We aren’t genre-specific.” Now, of course, all of this makes sense for a network that’s specifically aimed at young people. But at some point, all the networks are going to have to make the shifts. ABC Family’s thinking about diversity is a valuable model.

A number of you have been telling me to watch Switched At Birth, and after today’s panel at the Television Critics Association press tour, I can see why you’re all so enthusiastic (I also have the first season DVDs now, so I’ll get on that, likely on the plane home). The show’s creator Lizzy Weiss said it was so important to her that the character of Daphne Vasquez be played by an actress who was deaf or hard of hearing so they would both be fluent in ASL and have a sense of the cultural implications and perspectives of deafness that she limited casting to candidates who didn’t have all their hearing and searched beyond established actresses to find someone who would be right for the part before eventually casting Katie Leclerc, who has Meniere’s disease, for the part.

“It was important to me that the character feel and sound more deaf than Katie is,” Weiss said. “Having a deaf accent is part of being distanced from someone deaf, and I wanted her biological family to feel uncomfortable around her at first…Katie will tell you she worked with people to get that accent right.”

It was genuinely touching to see the rest of the cast talk about what learning ASL — or working on an ASL-friendly set, in the case of Sean Berdy, who had an ASL translator working with him — had meant to them. Vanessa Marano, whose father is a language professor, said she grew up being taught that it was important to be bilingual, and since the show has started, she’s been touched by the fact that the show is used to teach students about ASL and to consider learning it as a second language. Constance Marie, who plays Regina Vasquez, teared up talking about the conversations she’s had with deaf people who have been moved by her portrayal of a hearing woman learning ASL to communicate better with her deaf daughter. All in all, it sounds like a show where the cast ended up having a particularly good experience by learning about a world that wasn’t their own. I’ll check back in once I’m caught up with some thoughts whether that’s made for good TV, too.

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation just named ABC Family the network that does the best job at portraying gay characters — and as portraying them as something other than simply white urbanized men. Apparently, 55 percent of the network’s original programming hours have images of LGBT people, which seems like an impressively high ratio considering the actual number of gay people in the population, though it would be interesting to see also what percentage of their characters are gay, and how many of those programming hours feature gay characters instead of having them in the mix or in the background.

But that’s sort of splitting hairs — ABC Family’s managed to work gay characters into shows as racy as Pretty Little Liars and as conservative as The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and that commitment is an important kind of accomplishment. I write a lot here about the things that adding character diversity to pop culture can bring to stories, but it’s an important second-level realization to understand that there are a lot of kinds of people within a minority grouping like “black” or “gay” or “women.” Pop culture may think to look for gay men, for example, in hair salons, but they also do things like run the Republican National Committee, just as lesbians may attend WNBA games but they also have their own entertainment empires. The presence of gay people, for example, in places culture and stereotype have suggested we shouldn’t expect them says something about the flexibilities and limitations of those organizations and settings as well as about the characters who inhabit them.

The reason someone like Glenn Beck gets verklempt about the possibility of a mixed-race, or as he put it “half-gay,” Spider-Man is not just that folks get weirdly grabby about continuity and crabby about characters who they don’t feel represent their struggles (because, of course, it’s the color of Spider-Man’s skin that makes him unlike white readers, not the ability to eject webs from his body). It’s because fitting black or gay or female heroes smoothly into superhero storylines suggests that the superhero community as a whole are comfortable with people Glenn Beck isn’t comfortable with, that it might not be the place he imagines it to be.