Over at Vulture yesterday, Margaret Lyons did a great public service, sorting out television dramas that have aired on both broadcast networks and cable this season by which ones featured rape or murder as plot lines, and which ones don’t. Unsurprisingly, the shows that include rape and murder—even as a one-off plot rather than a regularly featured occurrence, as in Nashville—dramatically outnumber the ones that find their stakes elsewhere, 109 to 16. As NPR critic Linda Holmes wrote last year, it’s exhausting to have a world of television where the only stakes that are treated as if they’re worthy of long-form exploration are “avoiding being violently killed.” And so I thought it was worth looking through the list of sixteen shows that haven’t gone to the rape or murder well to see what other kinds of stakes seem to be playing well—or at least moderately well—on scripted drama.

1. The realization of creative ambition: Bunheads, Glee, Smash, The Wedding Band, Nashville, Underemployed, to a certain extent The Newsroom are all shows that fall into this category. Creative ambition works well on television for a couple of reasons. Writing a song or story, preparing for a performance or a broadcast, or going after a contract or a part is an essentially procedural process: it has a beginning, middle, and an end point. Having creativity as the stakes also lets television dramas do what the most popular reality shows of the modern era of TV have done: invest audiences in big musical performances. Creativity shows run into trouble, just as reality programs like American Idol do, when they try to sell us on people who aren’t compellingly talented on their own merits, as has been the case with Smash, and is true to a certain extent with the dramatic overemphasis on the goodness of Will McAvoy in The Newsroom. But just as murder and sexual assault turn ordinary people into people who are worthy of dramatic consideration by injecting extraordinarily high stakes into their lives, creativity shows focus on people to whom we assign an extraordinary amount of societal capital in real life.

2. Period pieces: We’ve got a modest, but not extraordinarily large number of period dramas on television right now: Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife, Mr. Selfridge, and The Carrie Diaries. And it’s no mistake that three of those four shows air on PBS, which has built its brand in part in opposition to the prevailing winds of television, and is ahead of the curve on programming to viewers who are burned out on violent storylines elsewhere. It’s also done so with imports: Downton and Call The Midwife are both British shows that PBS has the rights to air. Other period shows, like The Americans, make heavy use of violence. But situating characters in the past tends to lend a sheen of significance to ordinary lives by letting those characters stand in for larger forces. Lady Mary and Cousin Matthew may be just ordinary rich people we’d find sort of irksome if they were will-they-or-won’ting-they through the twentieth century. But from a distance of decades, the reasons that it took them so long to get together, questions about their relative sexual experience, and the importance of Lady Mary’s pregnancy become unfamiliar and newly exciting.

3. Family stories: This is a category that comedy seems to be doing better, or at least with greater frequency, than drama at the moment. But NBC’s Parenthood, and ABC Family’s Switched at Birth have both been useful illustrations of how making whether or not family gets along or holds together or finds its way together can elevate other conflicts. Parenthood and Switched At Birth have been staging grounds for all kinds of other stories, including recognition of creative ambition plotlines, political involvement arcs, and illness and autism stories. If audiences get hooked by what happens when individual characters’ actions influence their group of friends, the consequences are even more significant when their actions can blow up or restore the bonds of family.

4. Procedurals with below-death stakes: In this group fall the quickly-cancelled Emily Owens M.D. and the hardier Necessary Roughness, Suits, and The Client List. The middle two are USA Network shows, which, with its Blue Sky brand, works somewhat like PBS in programming to people who want a different, but relatively predictable, tone from much of what they’re offered on networks and cable. Often the problems characters face on USA’s procedurals are engaging precisely because they’re sort of silly, or because the people who have the problems are silly, or because the means in which they’re resolved are silly. Maybe the cure for television’s rape and murder epidemic isn’t just getting more creative about the stakes involved, but in how main characters solve crimes or medical problems and reach resolutions.

Yesterday brought the news that HBO had cancelled Enlightened, Mike White’s brilliant series about how to live in accordance with your principals in a corporate world—particularly when you have a lot of debt, or the costs of activism have grown extraordinary. For all that I’m disappointed in the decision and think that it was a mistake for HBO’s brand—despite Enlightened‘s extremely low ratings, it was the kind of show that couldn’t have been produced by any other network—I don’t see it as a tragedy for the story White was telling. After Amy Jellicoe blew the whistle on Abaddon Industries and was fired, Enlightened had her walk off into a sunny California day, anonymous again among the crowd, alone with the knowledge of what she’d accomplished and unsure of what came next for her. But her time at the company was finished, and Amy had decisively acted in accordance with her beliefs. That story was concluded.

But there’s another brilliant, strange, female-centered show that’s still awaiting a decision on whether it will be renewed or cancelled. And I dearly hope that ABC Family decides to make the right decision and save Bunheads, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s dramedy about the proprietors of and students at a California ballet school.

Bunheads has a less determined story arc than Enlightened, and by design, smaller stakes. It follows Michelle (Sutton Foster), a Vegas showgirl who marries a fan, moves to California with him, and ends up owning a great deal of property when he’s suddenly killed in a car accident—and tied to his mother, ballet teacher Fanny (Kelly Bishop), as well. Her students Boo (Kaitlyn Jenkins), Sasha (Julia Goldani Telles), Ginny (Bailey Buntain), and Melanie (Emma Dumont) are intelligent, idiosyncratic young ladies who find themselves galvanized by Michelle’s arrival, which coincides with them reaching the stage of life where they’re deciding how serious they want to be about dance, whether they want to have sex, and what their relationships to their parents are going to look like. The characters don’t have life-or-death problems—at least not after the fatal car ride in the pilot—but they don’t lack for gravity.

Bunheads is a relentlessly female show, more so than any other program on television, and therein lies many of its strengths. Where Girls, after the fight that fractured Marnie and Hannah’s relationship in the first season, has moved its focus away from female friendships, the relationships between women are always primary in Bunheads. Much of the first half of the season followed Michelle and Fanny attempting to navigate an exceedingly difficult situation. Fanny was surprised by the arrival of Michelle as her daughter-in-law and even more disconcerted when her son’s death left Michelle the owner of Fanny’s home, business, and land. Gradually, they’ve navigated a professional and personal partnership, finding a way to run Fanny’s ballet school together and to build an amphitheater on the land left to Michelle. That amphitheater brings them into collaboration with two sisters, the constantly self-deprecating Truly (Stacey Oristano) and bulldozer Millicent (Liza Weil) Stone, who, in one scene, explains to Fanny that she doesn’t actually want to know about the arts, she just wants to be perceived as cultured. Truly and Milly’s rivalry is one of the best examples I’ve seen of exaggeration serving the truth: there’s no way to make a relationship between sisters stranger and more hilariously tortured than they can be in real life.

And the friendships between the students have delightfully specific, and believable, contours. Ginny is hurt when Melanie hides from her that she’s joined the roller derby in addition to ballet. Sasha calls Boo, rather than her parents, when she finds the door to her apartment open and is afraid to go inside. Ginny, Melanie, and Boo feel betrayed when Sasha makes a foray into cheerleading. The four research sex from every conceivable angle together when they’re considering sleeping with their boyfriends, only to be stumped by the condom options at the local drug store. And they’re all invested enough in Michelle to follow her on a road trip when they catch her sneaking off to Los Angeles for a dance audition. Michelle may not be the mentor all of them need in matters of the heart or how to run their lives—judging by her brief, impulsive marriage, she has enough trouble of her own. But they need creative inspiration as much as they need basic life skills advice, someone who can act as a reminder to them that the world is bigger than a little town in California, and that they’ll face bigger decisions than whether or not Boo and her boyfriend Carl should jump up their timetable for the first time they have sex. I could spend an infinite amount of time with these clever young girls and their daily dilemmas.
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