Over at Buzzfeed, Adam B. Vary is absolutely right to suggest that, as the late-night television lineup seems poised for another reshuffle as NBC’s relationship with Jay Leno deteroirates, it would be awfully nice if the networks considered candidates for the positions about to be opened up who aren’t the interchangeable white men who have largely dominated those time slots since time immemorial, or at least since Johnny Carson. And I think it’s worth making a larger point in conjunction with his argument: it’s going to be disappointing if the spaces opened up by Leno’s canning and subsequent reshuffling produce not just the same faces, but the same formats, particularly given the waves of experimentation that have been taking place outside of the major networks for years.

There’s the political model, which started in its current incarnation over at Comedy Central. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert may not hail from exactly the same schools of comedy as David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, and Jay Leno, but they’re marked by the same general demographics. It’s what they’ve done behind the desks on their respective sets that’s different. While Stewart and Colbert take on a wide array of topics, they’re doing so not from a general interest perspective but from carefully honed political ones. Their business model aims for ferocious loyalty among a segment of the population they’ve chosen to pursue specifically, rather than pulling from across the political spectrum as a whole. It’s worldview, rather than schtick that’s the initial selling point, Stewart’s righteousness and Colbert’s gleeful satire rather than signature bits like David Letterman’s top ten lists or Jimmy Fallon’s rapport with his musical guests, though of course Stewart and Colbert sold those, too. FX has subsequently taken a step beyond the innovation that Colbert and Stewart represented with Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell, the intensely political African-American comic who honed his act in the Bay Area stand-up scene before moving to late-night, where he’s ditched the suits and the presumption of white dudeness, and brought along correspondents who don’t look much like the men in ties who largely dominate Stewart and Colbert’s shows, too, like lesbian comic Janine Brito.

And Bell isn’t the only person of color in late night in recent years, nor is Brito the only woman or only non-straight person. Vary called out George Lopez’s TBS show, cancelled when Conan O’Brien moved to the network, as an example of innovation both with hosts and format. T.J. Holmes is attempting to make a go of it on BET. And Arsenio Hall is rolling out a new late-night talk show that will be distributed through CBS syndication sometime later this fall. Wanda Skyes had her shot at late-night hosting in 2010. Chelsea Handler and Kathy Griffin have hosted late-night talk shows, if not the conventional late-night variety standards. And over at Bravo, Andy Cohen has built a successful franchise out of his Watch What Happens Live recap show, which features Bravo talent as well as other guests, and is known for a boozy, playful atmosphere—one of his bits of schtick is to have visitors play games with Cohen as a way of loosening them up. The fact that show has worked is one of the reasons we’ve seen things like The Talking Dead on AMC: as is the case with political shows, other niche late-night programming that lets fans process ideas they’re intensely interested in has become a viable alternative to the general interest show. But these alternative experiments in late night programming seem to be off in their own world, rather than acting as a farm team for the existing business model, which means that diversity of format as well as of hosts is off percolating elsewhere, rather than rising to the networks.

Laura Bennett is right, of course, that the internet and the possibility of content going viral has had an enormous influence on the way late night shows structure their bits—it’s almost a reverse response to Daniel Tosh’s clip shows, where the late night hosts want to manufacture the videos that go huge, rather than discuss and drive traffic to someone else’se work. Jimmy Fallon’s recruitment of The Roots was probably the biggest staffing innovation in recent years, a reason to come for the house band rather than just the host, and in keeping with Fallon’s determination to be a musical tastemaker, rather than simply responding to musical trends. It makes sense that late night hosts would want to be drivers of the culture, active aggregators and curators, rather than simply party hosts riding the hot new trend—you’ve got a better argument that audiences should tune in during the time slot if they might witness the emergence of Odd Future on the national stage, rather than if your’e going to interview Tyler The Creator six months after he emerges onto the national consciousness. But I’m curious to see what different kinds of hosts would choose to elevate if given the chance, and curious for someone who’s going to offer a new way to stage those debuts. Suits, desks, and white guys are all fine on their own. But they aren’t the only way to do things.

It is truly bizarre to me that television networks, in trying to capture viewers’ energy and engagement as they talk about shows after they air, would try to supplant existing tools like Twitter:

A recent study by the public relations firm Edelman found that the majority of users comment on shows and share content after they air.

Yet both that study and a Nielsen study found that some viewers do engage with related content while viewing. How to capitalize on that is the challenge. “It’s not like Instagram,” Miso CEO Somrat Niyogi said, referencing the massively successful photo-sharing app. “We’re still trying to crack the code of how do you add value to the TV-watching experience that supersedes what’s happening with Twitter and Google. I don’t think anyone has done it yet.”…IntoNow founder Adam Cahan argues that networks are starting to understand that they should not build their own apps because there is not a great return on investment. But tell that to the networks, who see themselves as having the upper hand because they control the content and have the access to the stars.

I understand that networks like the idea of monetizing branded apps, but given the costs and irritations of development and maintenance, I’m hard-pressed to see why they wouldn’t decide that governing the after-show conversation through existing tools makes more sense. If you’re the social media director at a premium cable network, why wouldn’t you just insist that an actor is available to do a Reddit chat after every single episode? HBO’s hashtags for Game of Thrones episodes are similarly a good idea—it’s an example of a network recognizing where the content lives and giving people a tool they need anyway but that also lets the network effectively tag everyone participating in it and track the conversation.

The larger problem is also just that, whether the conversation is taking place in a medium they control or not, television network social efforts often come across as hopelessly square, controlled to the point of utter dehydration. I can see why FX might be anxious about hosting Kurt Sutter’s blog, in which he goes off on critics who he thinks are insufficiently deferential to his vision for Sons of Anarchy, or his production diaries for GQ—they can be…a little rough. But hosting something like that, and giving creators who want that outlet free reign, would make networks’ sites actual magnets and real sites of engagement. In a way, the best effort I’ve seen by a network to co-opt fan social engagement is Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live, Andy Cohen’s late-night talk show. Half new interviews and drinking games with guests, and half a rehash of recently broadcast Bravo programming, the show uses social media as a bridge connecting Cohen and Bravo fans: they can Tweet in questions for the guests, and use Twitter to discuss the talk show as it’s under way. It’s programming that meets fans where they’re at and has been hugely successful as a result—at this point, Andy Cohen is a more-watched late-night host than Conan O’Brien—rather than treating fans as purely monetizable nuggets.

Watching the presentation for Fashion Star right now, at which we learned that Ben Silverman isn’t concerned about producing shows in the United States and Nicole Richie has awesome turquoise shoes, I was struck by how much the show sounds like an extension of Bravo’s brand. The way it works is this: designers compete to have their designs purchased by companies like Saks and Macys, who will have those clothes in stores the day after each episode airs, and at the end of the season, one designer will win a deal worth, in Silverman’s words “more than $6 million,” which I expect means in the expected income instead of the actual cash value of the prize.

I was working on a piece that didn’t pan out last year about Andy Cohen, Bravo’s former programming director who is now going full-time on his talk show. And at the time, the thing we discussed a great deal is the extent to which, if you have enough money, you can live in the world of Bravo’s shows. You can go to Lisa VanDerPump’s restaurants in Los Angeles. You can hire Kyle Richards’ husband (or any of the guys on Million Dollar Listing) to sell your house or help you buy one. Consultations are available with Patti Stanger if you’re looking for love. You can go to any of the restaurants where the Top Chef contestants and judges work or consult (this is totally why I went to Craftsteak in Vegas).

Fashion Star is essentially a lower-rent, fast-fashion version of this, coupled with instant gratification. I think we’re going to see a lot more of this trend, where television networks both create a compelling world and then give you a little bit of a way to live in it. Glee is particularly up front about this, and the revenue it rakes in from iTunes and concert tours will probably keep it alive even as the ratings dip.

I really liked Tracie Eagan Morrison’s essay last year on Patti Stanger, the titular Millionaire Matchmaker of Bravo’s dating show. She argues, I think persuasively, that more than simply setting up her wealthy clients with the kind of people that they’d like to date and perhaps settle down with, that Stanger’s real strength is brutally assessing the people who come to her and identifying the flaws that have prevented them from having successful relationships. She can go too far, but the show, rather than a testament to love, is a pretty strong argument that if your only priority is to find a long-term relationship quickly rather than organically, you’re going to have to mold your personality and make big compromises in order for that to happen. It’s an aggressive indictment of romantic comedy.

But this stuff? Not so much:

I feel like Stanger is aiming for Dan Savage territory in talking about gay men and monogamy and overshooting, landing…somewhere else. Bravo walks an incredibly fine line with its branding. It’s supposed to be higher-end than its competitors, but its reality shows are no less invasive, and even rich people can have ugly, bad things happen in their lives. And a self- and network-appointed truth teller like Patti Stanger may tip over into a giant vat of crazy, especially in a setting like Bravo programming head Andy Cohen’s live talk show where the guests and the audience drink and everyone’s supposed to be kind of outrageous.