Over at NPR, Linda Holmes has a lovely post about the fallacies of pretending that “the masses” or “Middle America” are some sort of homogenous block of cultural consumers, or that “the lowest common denominator” is something we should have contempt for, rather than embrace:

I’ve always found the lowest common denominator kind of a cozy concept, particularly because you kind of do it by feel — it’s a translator that lets you take two things that seem to be vibrating on different frequencies and unlock them so they can fit together instead of bumping into each other.

But somehow in culture, “lowest common denominator” has become a way to describe not what’s unifying but what’s worst, as if we all come together where we are awful and stupid. In fact, when we do all come together in large numbers, it’s usually not where we are awful and stupid, particularly not because we are awful and stupid. We come together where there’s enough commonality to let people talk to each other about the same thing. How did that become a slam, unless we assume that the purpose of culture, and of our own tastes, is to efficiently separate those who favor wheat from those who are more into chaff?

The lowest common denominator on a huge scale, in fact, is probably something like The Avengers or the Oscars or the Super Bowl, none of which is embraced for its scandalous or scatological qualities, but all of which are popular simply because lots of people think it’s fun to watch them. And as silly as those things are, their commonality is actually their most redeeming quality — that it’s the lowest common denominator across surprisingly diverse populations is the best thing about the Super Bowl, not the worst. It’s certainly the best thing about the Oscars.

To paraphrase some of the rest of the piece, we watch Community in red states and worship at the altar of Mark Harmon in NCIS in blue states.

I have to say, I wonder if some of this divide comes from shifts in business models that have divided both television and movies into things with massive audiences and tiny audiences, without much space in between. In movies, we’ve increasingly got tentpoles, many of which are genre movies—which face an inherent critical bias and are siloed into “low” culture no matter how self-serious they get—and smaller independent or foreign films, with smart, adult, not very expensive movies vanishing from the scene. 2012 felt like a rare movie-going year in part because there were a number of mass hits, like Lincoln, Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, and Django Unchained that have both done good or pretty good box office and have received good reviews and been the subject of spirited intellectual debates. The things among our common denominators weren’t inherently the lowest. But I do understand how, if you’re a devotee of those $30 million movies that are vanishing, or if it’s becoming harder for you to find independent and foreign films in theaters and they’re slow to make it to video on demand or to streaming, you might feel a certain amount of resentment. It’s not just that other people want and support other things—it’s that it feels harder to get what you want.

The same is true in television, where there remain some massive hits like Dancing With The Stars, NCIS or The Big Bang Theory, but where the ratings for new comedies in particular have quickly shrunk to the point of invisibility. Watching the struggle of something like Community to stay alive, I don’t blame people for being frustrated that more people aren’t tuning in. But the truth is that something like Community, or Happy Endings, or even 30 Rock, all the self-aware, self-referential, pop-culture examining comedies out there—they have an inherent audience ceiling. And that’s totally okay! One of the blessings of a diversified media environment is that networks will create and keep running weird shows with wacky premises and strange-but-endearing characters long after they would have been nuked in a previous era of television. What fans of those shows want is less for everyone to suddenly ditch Leroy Jethro Gibbs and discover the joys of Dean Pelton, and more for NBC to find a way to make money on its wonderful little curiosities, whether it’s an adjustment to the Nielsen ratings that gets advertisers excited about more delayed watching, or richer syndication deals with Hulu and Netflix.

In other words, if folks are still turning up their noses at what “Middle America” watches when Dan Harmon gets his eleventy-billion new shows on the air in coming seasons, the heck with ‘em. But if folks are upset about what’s getting mass audiences because they’re afraid it threatens what they like, I have more sympathy for people’s desire to get their hands on and provide support to content than they love.

Chevy Chase’s hatred for his job on Community as Pierce Hawthorne, an aged millionaire taking classes at Greendale Community College to make up for his empty personal life, has become the stuff of entertainment industry legend, as well as continued proof of Chase’s unpleasantness. But his latest meltdown raises larger questions than ones about his ego or his poor relationship with Dan Harmon. As Deadline reported over the weekend, “People close to the situation say that Chase had been increasingly frustrated and uncomfortable with the direction of his character, Pierce, who is a bigot. After getting fed more lines he found offensive during a scene yesterday, I hear he snapped and launched the tirade, airing his frustration and suggesting that the way things with Pierce are going, he may next be asked to call Troy (Glover) or Shirley (Brown) the N-word.” The meltdown raises an interesting challenge not just to Community, but to shows like Ryan Murphy’s Glee and The New Normal, which rely heavily on Pierce-like characters: how do you write an interesting bigot.

Community and Glee use their heavily-prejudiced characters to complimentary ends. On Community, Pierce’s racism and sexism are the clearest manifestations of how generally annoying he is. He’s the kind of person who, when Shirley accuses him of sexual harassment, declares “Sexually harassing? That makes no sense to me. Why would I harass someone who turns me on?” He’s the kind of guy who’s clueless enough to pull himself out of an existential crisis by telling himself “Well, I do have a young, African-American friend now.” Pierce is oblivious to how he comes across, but that’s in part because his bigotry doesn’t really appear to have an impact on anyone around him, and as a result, he doesn’t suffer much in the way of consequences. Periodically, Pierce gets isolated from the group, as he did at the end of Community‘s second season, but that’s generally due to broader incompatibility with the group’s younger, kinder members, rather than because he deeply wounds anyone or says something that the other characters on the show deem completely beyond the pale. His racism and sexism are the way the show demonstrates his disconnect from people in general, rather than a way to illustrate the power of ideas like the ones he espouses. At its best, Community captures the way that bigotry can isolate people from the connections they genuinely crave. But often, Pierce is merely a crank, without that level of interiority.

On Glee, Sue Sylvester is similarly harmless. She exists mostly to coin catchphrases for the show, and to create a baseline in which her occasional moments of behaving like an actual human being seem surprising and emotional. Sue’s occasionally a proxy for interesting ideas, like the war on public arts funding. But mostly, she’s not even specifically prejudiced. She’s just mean.

Murphy’s done a more interesting job on The New Normal. As I wrote before the television season started when a Utah NBC affiliate decided not to air the show:

What I think is narrowly effective about The New Normal, and that might make the affiliate’s audience most uncomfortable, is that it shows bigotry as directly hurtful to the people in range of it. For most of the pilot, Jane (Ellen Barkin), an older divorced woman, is an outrageous caricature of a biased person, who speaks aloud what for most people is subtext or subconscious fear, rather than having her anti-gay views and her racism subtly inflect her thinking, bubbling up in surprising ways that leave everyone around her on edge. But the people around her do a nice job of acting out the pain her outrageous statements cause them. She acts as a roadblock in her daughter Goldie’s (Georgia King) efforts to better herself the one way she believes she can—Goldie is a young single mother—by carrying another couple’s child for a large, one-time fee that would allow her to attend law school. Jane is mean to the gay couple (Justin Bartha and Andrew Rannells) who choose Goldie to be their surrogate. Even when she doesn’t mean to, Jane inadvertently ends up coming across as racist to one of the men’s assistant (Nene Leakes). Jane’s views are more disruptive and hurtful than the act of two men building a family together.

There’s a fine line to walk between marginalizing characters who espouse bigoted ideas, and acknowledging that power that racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of hatred still have in the world. The New Normal falls down when it has Jane say outrageous things that are meant to be points at which we see her as hilarious and marginal, but end up just sounding offensive and flat. And Community can sacrifice moments of interesting development by failing to pursue the consequences of some of the most terrible things Pierce says, coasting on joke construction. I can see why Chase would get uncomfortable playing a character whose racism, sexism, and homophobia go less questioned than he wishes they would, mining ideas he finds abhorrent for simple laughs—whatever you think of him personally, he’s a long-term, outspoken liberal—and who doesn’t have much of a shot at growth or reckoning. These are difficult balances to get right. But as we grow towards a time where people like Pierce and Jane are more genuinely marginal in the real world, these are kinds of characters it’s even more important to try to get right.

It’s the beginning of the end of an era at NBC. We’ve known for months now that this season of 30 Rock will be that venerable sitcom’s last. Yesterday, showrunner Greg Daniels announced that The Office will wrap up this season as well. Community‘s changed showrunner hands as well, after the firing of Dan Harmon, and it’s hard to know if that shift will produce a show that will earn a fifth season. Parks and Recreation may be the last show on the network’s Thursday night comedy with a serious chance of continuing beyond the spring of 2013.

But while it will be difficult to say goodbye to all of these sitcoms, which have significantly defined my adult television watching, with departure comes opportunity. There’s an enormous amount of talent tied up in these comparatively low-rated shows, and I’m excited to see what everyone involved with them is going to do next. Some of them, like The Office’s Steve Carrell and Mindy Kaling have already departed for movie careers or new projects. Here are seven ideas for what other people who have given us so much fun on Thursday nights could do once their shows end.

1. Mike Schur should make a show about a television news station: The Parks and Recreation creator, who just signed a new deal with Universal Television, ran the Weekend Update segment during his stint on Saturday Night Live. On Parks and Rec, local talk show host Joan Callamezzo and anchor Perd Hapley are among the funniest supporting characters anywhere on television. TV needs a fantastic, cutting satire of news that isn’t created by Aaron Sorkin. Schur’s the guy to give it to us.

2. Amy Poehler and Tina Fey should play best friends who are mothers to young children: Poehler already gave cinematic birth to Fay’s daughter in Baby Mama. They’re hilarious whenever they’re in the same frame together. And given that television is obsessed with the novel idea of men raising their own young right now, in shows from ABC Family’s Baby Daddy to NBC’s upcoming shows The New Normal and Guys With Kids. Maybe now that we’ve gotten used to the idea that men have to give up things to raise children and that those adjustments take time, American audiences are ready to be sympathetic to mothers, who have always been in that position.

3. Put Aisha Muharrar, Megan Ganz, Katie Dippold, Kay Cannon, and Annie Mebane in a room and produce whatever they come up with: I’m not sure NBC gets enough credit for this, but its Thursday night comedies employ a mind-blowing number of smart young female writers. I would watch anything any of these women, or any combination of these women, put together in a heartbeat.

4. Keith Powell and Alison Brie should have an arc on a show where they date: If I have one complaint about 30 Rock over the years, it’s been the waste of the show’s incredibly strong supporting cast. As Toofer, Powell’s been very funny as the fussy, high class Harvard graduate who’s sometimes driven nuts by his fellow writers. I’d love to see him play off Brie, who’s been perfect as the precise Annie Edison over three years on Community, and deserves a chance to play the kind of sexy adult she plays on AMC and in movies on a broadcast show. Maybe in a program where Alec Baldwin plays Brie’s boss. If I can’t get that, I’ll take a spinoff web series about Grizz and Dot Comm in compensation.

5. Develop a show around Retta as a stand-up comedian: Her performance as Donna has been incredible on Parks and Rec, and while cable networks are falling all over themselves to give show deals to white male comedians, Retta seems like she could crush it on network. Showbiz shows haven’t worked particularly well on NBC of late—Up All Night is cutting its talk show to focus more on the characters at home. But whether Retta did something about doing stand-up, or based in her routines, I’d love to see her sidle in from the corner of the frame to claim center stage.

6. Craig Robinson. Judah Friedlander. Road trip: Two big guys, one good at projecting surprising empathy and precision, the other with a particular talent for reveling in mess, perversion, relationships with Susan Sarandon, and dressing up in women’s clothes and teaching self-defense lessons. I may not have been lured by The Hangover or other buddies-behaving-badly movies, but these guys would get me in the seats.

7. Adam Scott, Danny Pudi, Ellie Kemper as neighbors, and possibly roommates: Ben deserves a break from April and Andy. Have Scott, Kemper, and Pudi occupy the three apartments around the end of the hall. Put Kemper in the middle one and you’ve got the physical and actorly set up for a very nerdy, adorably enthusiastic love triangle.

Over the past several days, I’ve been reading my colleagues reactions to NBC’s executive session at the Television Critics Association press tour, particularly to president Bob Greenblatt’s remarks that, while he loved comedies like Community and Parks and Recreation (a claim that in Community‘s case, I doubt the veracity of), he doesn’t plan to make more of them. “What Greenblatt seems to mean in his formulation is that ‘broadening’ is actually a process of programming shows that are less personal visions of the world by their creators, and more big, easily grasped concepts packaged as big-laff heart-warmers,” wrote Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker. Time’s James Poniewozik wrote “NBC is under no obligation to make challenging, narrow sitcoms that only critics like me love. TV is a business, and that, as history proves, frequently means being a monkey business. Also: you can make big, broad, even dumb comedies that are great!” And Tim Goodman at the Hollywood Reporter weighed in with a close read of Greenblatt’s carefully couched remarks to suggest that “the words used definitely implied what people seemed to fear – that NBC was going to dumb things down in a real hurry. But the unsexy qualifiers that were left out also suggested that Greenblatt was thinking of something more complex – and that is a middle ground where comedy can be broadly appealing while also smart as opposed to a sophisticated lock-box of cleverness that appeals to a niche audience and thus keeps NBC in the basement.”

I agree with all of those assessments, to a certain extent. But I think that the challenges NBC has faced with finding audiences for its current crop of comedies is fairly easy to diagnose, and with an answer that doesn’t come down to merely that they were too smart for a dumb audience. And that diagnosis suggests the beginnings of a formula that NBC can use to fix itself.

NBC’s critically acclaimed comedies are complex both in their concept and in their human details. 30 Rock is not just about the backstage antics at a television show, it’s about the backstage antics of a sketch comedy show, and how those antics are influenced by corporate pressure. Its characters are engaging precisely because they’re not archetypes: instead, the show stars a neurotic, middle-aged single woman, an insecure black star who intellectualizes his stardom, and a depressive corporate executive. Parks and Recreation is about a small town, but a high-concept one with apocalypse cults and Indian massacre sites and wacky Peruvian sister city delegations. Again, the characters themselves are wonderful and rich, whether it’s libertarian Ron Swanson or apathetic April, and they’re highly unusual tropes in an already wacky town. Community, when you think about it, started off as the lowest-concept of these shows, about students at a community college, and initially, only two of its main characters, movie-obsessed Abed and millionaire Pierce were major deviations from existing tropes. And as much as Community‘s been praised for its experimental episodes, which are genius, it’s also been exceptionally good at its entirely conventional storylines, like Troy’s first legal drink.

I think some of NBC’s response to its current woes, and the response that’s been getting much of the attention, has been to think that both its concepts and its specific storylines and haracter need to be as generic as possible. It’s why they’re producing a show like Guys With Kids, which has an increasingly familiar premise—men staying home to raise children—and relies for humor on the exceedingly low-level, generic idea that males of the species caring for their young is inherently hilarious. To its credit, I don’t think NBC’s reaching all the way for the lowest common denominator. Nothing on its schedule has jokes as racist and pandering as 2 Broke Girls, for example, and the network’s new shows are actually strikingly diverse.

But it’s also instructive to watch 1600 Penn, which the network will begin airing in the midseason, and like Guys With Kids, is one of the worst shows of a new pilot crop. That show, like 30 Rock and Community, has a very specific premise: it’s a look inside the dynamics of the first family, something only a handful of living people can actually relate to without reaching for metaphor. The characters within that family are also specific, some in a way that are relatable and universal—a perfectionist daughter, a hypercompetitive dad—and some of whom are less so—a trophy wife second First Lady, a heavy, fratty First Son who is both cause and solution of international crises. The father and daughter work, but the wife and son are weighed down in nasty cliches and implausibility that isn’t actually funny or insightful. Specificity can be as lowest-common denominator as broadness, and NBC has examples of both ways to fail on its fall schedule.
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Over at TV By the Numbers, Robert Seidman argues that even if Nielsen collected more comprehensive ratings data on viewers, even those who aren’t in the sample pool, or who don’t have set-top televisions at all, viewers will still be unhappy when their favorite shows are cancelled. And he says a more comprehensive system would be prohibitively expensive and painfully slow:

Would a complete census be more accurate than Nielsen? If you could get it, it would, without a doubt, be more accurate. But TV ratings measurement exists for the purpose of buying/selling TV advertising. The networks and advertisers aren’t going to be willing to pay for it and as expensive as Nielsen is (and it’s very expensive) the census style system would be multiple orders of magnitude more expensive to maintain and manage. The networks and advertisers aren’t going to pay for something like that for a system that might only be a little more accurate.

On top of that you’d still probably need Nielsen or something like it because the census system would have so much data to crunch it wouldn’t likely be able to produce fast national ratings the next morning and final ratings the next afternoon. The networks need the information fast so they can react and make scheduling decisions.

I think the larger problem is less developing a new system, and more reporting of data in ways that would help viewers understand the true audiences for their favorite shows. Some of this is a problem of overlapping systems, all of which report data differently or fail to report at all. Community fans, for example, see the low Nielsen ratings for the show, but have a sense that their numbers are larger due to time-shifting beyond the seven-day period, or to viewers without televisions who are watching the show on Hulu, which doesn’t report streaming data publicly, especially because social-media chatter around the show makes it seem like the Nielsen numbers couldn’t possibly be representative. If all those numbers were available, we’d have a better idea of the total fanbase for individual shows, even if the data had to be pieced together from multiple sources.

The other thing that might help in the current system is changing the way ratings data is presented. As things work presently, data’s released sporadically, sometimes through press releases from Nielsen or the networks. There aren’t tools available to the public, or even to journalists, that make it easy to pull data, graph trend lines, or compare shows. To a certain extent, that’s understandable: gathering ratings data is an expensive, time-consuming process, and Nielsen’s business model seems to work fairly well for it. But in January, FX President John Landgraf suggested his network might build a portal to provide more fine-grained data than normally gets reported to journalists, in part as a tool to help the network get public credit for its full viewership, rather than the viewers the current system credits it for. His isn’t the only network—or the only fan base—who could benefit from that kind of information.

The bridge is yours.

-Jaguar gets that product placement doesn’t always have to be sycophantically positive.

-SEK has a typically brilliant analysis of the camera work in “Blackwater.”

-Watching Curt Schilling blame the state of Rhode Island for the failure of his video game company is a study in conservative hilarity.

-I actually think this trolling of Community fans, myself included, is pretty funny.

-Of course Danny Boyle is basing the London Olympics Opening Ceremony on The Tempest and Frankenstein.

-Jay-Z and Kanye West take to the barricades:

In case any of you haven’t seen it yet, I wanted to call your attention to Emily Nussbaum’s New Yorker column on Community and Doctor Who, which is really a stealth argument that it’s time for those who look down their nose at genre fiction to reconsider, in part, perhaps, because genre fiction itself has changed:

The original “Who” dwelt on pure sci-fi obsessions, abstract questions of how society is organized and the line between humans and machines. But, as deeply as fans loved the show, its themes were rarely emotional. Instead, it jumped from Aztec civilization to Mars, as much an educational show for children as an adult narrative, with a British-colonialist view of the universe. (So many savages, so little time.) The series’ most striking feature was the Doctor himself: in contrast to “Star Trek” ’s Kirk—the Kennedyesque leader of a diverse society—the early Doctor Who was an alien iconoclast with two hearts and a universe-wide Eurail Pass. For a certain breed of viewer, this was an intoxicating ideal: the know-it-all whose streak of melancholy—or prickly rage, depending on who was Who—had to be honored, because he actually did know everything. Though that show had its charms, I was surprised, and delighted, to find that the modern “Doctor Who” has a very different emphasis: it’s a show about relationships, in an epic and mythological vein.

“It’s so much larger when you’re on the inside,” she writes of science fictional shows, though it’s worth remembering that emotional complexity and attentiveness to relationships aren’t the only thing that validate science fiction. There’s plenty of value in well-executed silly gadgets and drivebys to distant civilizations. The Daleks may be low-effects “Nazi-ish pepper pots,” but shabby exteriors and crude mechanically can be a vehicle for totalitarianism as well as glitz and glamor. Dropping in on a planet or a time per week can read like a survey of the Empire, but early Star Trek made those encounters melancholy, and strange, and sad (and occasionally silly) from the outset—those visits were less an affirmation of control but a reminder of how much there is out there. It’s not less worthwhile to dream about how we’ll interact with the strangenesses of the future than to ruminate on how we might have interacted with people we already know in the past. The world is changing rapidly, and even outwardly silly thought experiments may yield useful lessons and parallels. How we’d behave under siege may be a question that fluctuates only slightly if the invaders are orcs, or medieval humans, or Nazis, or cybermen. How we define humanity is a question that can be extended and expanded by science fiction in a way that realism or historical fiction may not allow us to access. Execution is one thing, but ambition itself is not inherently laughable or dismissable.

Genre fiction may become respectable when it’s seen to be answering the same sorts of questions as literature, and if it meets certain standards for prose or artistry. But judging fiction on the former rather than simply the latter says more about the gatekeepers of respectability—the New Yorker a week earlier banged the guilty pleasure drum to no particular effect or insight, saying “part of the pleasure we derive from them is the knowledge that we could be reading something better”—than about the fiction that’s up for judgement.

I don’t know whether there was a specific incident or specific set of incidents that led to Dan Harmon’s dismissal as showrunner of Community, and without knowing that, it’s impossible for me to say if that decision was fair or just. It does seem likely that the show without him will change considerably—a fellow critic suggested over dinner this weekend that Community’s heart will have to shift from Abed to someone else, because the other characters can be more easily kept alive and vibrant by writers other than Harmon. But while many questions about Community’s future remain, I feel pretty certain about one thing: it makes no sense, as some folks have suggested to me online, to pirate or delay watching Community beyond the time when you’d count as part of the audience because you want to punish NBC for Harmon’s dismissal.

First, there’s the question of whether it would even be effective. I tend to believe, as I’ve written before, that repeatedly telling Hollywood that piracy doesn’t actually hurt their bottom line gives content companies license to ignore people who do pirate content because they’ve been informed over and over again that pirates were never their potential customers in the first place. If NBC or Sony, which produces Community, and therefore shares responsibility for Harmon’s firing with the network on which his show has aired, does pay attention to a spike in pirated Community episodes, it’s more likely to be interpreted as a sign that even the angry audience is weak and unwilling to give up the show entirely. This is not a tactic that will move the hearts that broke Harmon’s.

Second, as much as Harmon’s singular vision has informed Community, he isn’t the only person who works on his creation. The actors who have turned in great work for the show, and who are at least publicly deeply distressed by Harmon’s departure, don’t deserve to be punished with declining ratings for a decision that’s beyond their control. If, under the new regime, they continue to turn in good, enjoyable work, it seems unfair to try to drive their chances of continuing to do that work into the ground, perhaps before they even know if they’d like to continue doing it.

And there are people other than Harmon who write Community. We should continue to give them credit if they continue to do good work even absent his tutelage. I’d particularly really like female writers like Megan Ganz and Annie Mebane to have creative and ratings success and to get credentialed by their work with a new regime of showrunners. As upsetting as Harmon’s firing is, I’d like to see people who share some of his wild and wonderful approach to television out there and succeeding to keep the flame he lit alive. Dan Harmon isn’t the only person working on Community I want to support, or keep an eye on to see what tremendously exciting things they do best. Dan Harmon isn’t the only person involved in Community who’s worth trying to keep the ratings up for so they’ll get renewed or have credibility pitching other shows in the future, particularly if you care about weird, smart, innovative, self-reflective television. Maybe pirating or driving down the ratings on those other people’s work will make someone out there feel like they’re in solidarity with Dan Harmon. But it isn’t an effective way to support the kind of work he’s given us for three years, or to make sure we see more like in the future.