Last week kicked off with Two and a Half Men creator Lee Aronsohn‘s declaration that, in terms of raunchy comedies starring women on television, “Enough ladies. I get it. You have periods…we’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.” So it’s wonderfully refreshing to hear Judd Apatow, when asked about his recent projects that star and are about women, and about the female comedy boom, say:

I got bored of penises. I said, ‘enough of that.’ No, I just like immaturity, I like to show people struggle and try to figure out who they are. I’m a guy and so it leaned guy for a while. But one of the projects I’m most proud of is Freaks and Geeks, which is about a woman in high school struggling to figure out which group she wants to belong to, so for me, it goes back and forth…It’s just because it’s a single camera show and we’re on HBO and it’s uncensored. There are limitations when you’re doing a sitcom, in terms of language and how long you have to tell a story. But we’re big fans of all of those shows. My friend Jake Kasdan, who produced Freaks and Geeks, is one of the producers on New Girl and we’re all obsessed.

It’s always funny to me that anyone would remember Freaks and Geeks as anything other than a show with male and female co-main characters. I suppose that has something to do with the fact that Linda Cardellini’s subsequent career been much, much quieter than that of almost any actor with a significant role on the show. John Francis Daley’s on Bones and has launched a successful screenwriting career. Seth Rogen and Jason Segel have morphed from manboys to heartthrobs. James Franco is James Franco.

Given how much time men and women devote to figuring out each other’s behavior and motivations—and how they should tailor their behavior in response—in real life, it’s always struck me as bizarre to assume that men would only want to watch stories about men or that women would only want to watch stories about women. Apatow’s curiosity shouldn’t seem so refreshing and logical. But in the world we live in, he’s practically a beacon of sanity.

Is it:

a) None of the women featured here are the women who created this year’s crop of female-centric television shows, a decision that minimizes the importance of women in creating and shaping depictions on the back end of television production.

b) That Vanity Fair has a strange idea of what women wear to sleepovers.

c) That a feature on a boom in dude shows would never, ever be shot solely with a mind towards providing women with eye candy.

d) All of the above.

Because we needed yet another reminder that even when television is about women, it still has to be for men.

The joyous news is upon us: after years of waiting, we’re finally getting a sequel to the seminal frat pack movie Anchorman. Ron Burgundy and his mustache and jazz flute will ride again! I hope, though, that Anchorman 2 is smart enough to recognize that a lot of what made the original—a story about an outrageously manly San Diego news team learning to deal with their new female coworker in the 1970s—such a comedic masterpiece was its feminism. As a satire of blustering, clueless masculinity and male misconceptions about women, Anchorman is nigh-unequaled in our recent popular culture.

The members of Ron’s news team are posturing, peacocking, competitive, wannabe gentlemanly idiots even before Veronica Corningstone, a sexy, smart female anchor transfers in to join their team as part of the rising tide of women’s lib:

Once she arrives, the team reacts with sheer panic. Has there been a better encapsulation of uninformed, sexist ranting in terror at the loss of privilege than Brick Tamland hollering “I don’t know what we’re talking about!” and “Loud noises!” in the movies since?

These guys know absolutely nothing about women.

And the great joy of the movie is that, by its end, it’s about feminism’s victory. The women at the station where Ron and his team work stand up for themselves and demand better treatment. Veronica proves herself as a smart, competent reporter and anchor. Sports reporter Champ Kind learns that just because Ron’s heart is engaged doesn’t mean he’s lost his best friend. No one loses, unless you count Luke Wilson’s repeated maiming in the news team anchor rumble, still one of the funniest action sequences in quite some time. We need more men in pop culture to have that realization that the rise of women doesn’t automatically make their lives poorer. When it comes to family bands and bear births, feminism can mean that everybody wins.

I’d be curious to hear a comic of David Letterman’s stature weigh in on the question of whether or not women can be funny. But when it comes to who gets to appear on his show, it turns out that it might not matter that much what Letterman himself thinks. The show fired Letterman’s comedy booker, Eddie Brill, after he told the New York Times that “There are a lot less female comics who are authentic. I see a lot of female comics who to please an audience will act like men.” In the process, he reignited the debate most recently fueled by Christopher Hitchens about whether or not women can be funny, or whether they’re funny in the same ways as men, or whether men and women find other things funny.

But I actually think the more important point here is less in positing an answer to those ultimately unempirical questions and more in pointing out the critical importance of gatekeepers in diversifying entertainment. Letterman is, of course, the CEO of his show, so his opinions matter. But just as important as his feelings about about female comics is whether he cares enough to make sure everyone on his team is on the same page about booking. It’s the same across the entertainment world. It’s a good thing for Bob Greenblatt at NBC to want to find stories with more diverse casts and a great show about a black or Asian family, but he’s also got to make sure that the folks who are reading pilot scripts know that he’s got his eye out for something like that. We need good executives at entertainment companies, but we also need good gatekeepers, because those roles aren’t always the same. It may take time to get there, but hopefully Letterman will replace Brill with someone who knows how to find the best female comedians. And it’s good to see the Daily Show finally hiring a black woman to deliver reports:

This New York Times Magazine profile of Stephen Colbert has the problem many of these profiles of him or Jon Stewart do, which is that it’s impossible to find someone to criticize them, which is unfortunate. But what it does do well, I think, is to put some of Colbert’s key stunts into perspective, in a way that makes it very clear why I like him so much:

In August, during the run-up to the Ames straw poll, some Iowans were baffled to turn on their TVs and see a commercial that featured shots of ruddy-cheeked farm families, an astronaut on the moon and an ear of hot buttered corn. It urged viewers to cast write-in votes for Rick Perry by spelling his name with an “a” — “for America.” A voice-over at the end announced that the commercial had been paid for by an organization called Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, which is the name of Colbert’s super PAC, an entity that, like any other super PAC, is entitled to raise and spend unlimited amounts of soft money in support of candidates as long as it doesn’t “coordinate” with them, whatever that means. Of such super-PAC efforts, Colbert said, “This is 100 percent legal and at least 10 percent ethical.”…“Aren’t lawyers allowed to have fun?” Potter asked me a few weeks ago, adding that he knew what he was signing up for by appearing on the show. He also said he thought that Colbert was serving a useful function. “I’m very careful not to ascribe motive to him — he can speak for himself,” he said. “I don’t know what he’s thinking. He can find the laws ironic or funny or absurd. But he’s illustrating how the system works by using it. By starting a super PAC, creating a (c)4, filing with the F.E.C., he can bring the audience inside the system. He can show them how it works and then leave them to conclude whether this is how it ought to work.”

Easily the most awkward moment in Colbert’s career, and also in many ways a defining one, was his appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006…Never cracking a smile or breaking out of character, he went on to praise Bush for believing “the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday” and to point out that the administration wasn’t sinking but soaring. “If anything,” he said, “they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.” Nor did he leave out the correspondents themselves. “Over the last five years you people were so good,” he said. “Over tax cuts, W.M.D. intelligence, the effect of global warming: we Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try and find out.”…Many in the audience, the president in particular, seemed not to know what to make of this guy. Whose side was he on, and was he joking or not? Yet a video of the performance went viral within hours, and Stephen Colbert became something like a household name. Writing in The Times, Frank Rich said Colbert’s routine that night was the “moment when the American news business went on suicide watch.”

Longtime readers will know that I’m less fond of Jon Stewart. And I wonder if the reason I like Colbert more is a matter of emphasis. Stewart, I think, is a reformer, he’s optimistic about the capacity of the system, and that translates into his tactics. That’s the reason his march on Washington didn’t really resonate with me: it was too close to the things he was mocking to actually feel like a condemnation of the cults of personality he was lampooning. Colbert, by contrast, intervenes in ways that can be uncomfortably aggressive, and that are starting to force the system to step in and shut him down as they did when he tried to buy the naming rights to the South Carolina Republican primary. I’m interested in that kind of pranksterism, or, as the piece puts it about Colbert’s improv teacher Del Close, “more nearly a philosophy or a way of life than just a way of getting laughs.”