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.

Former Gov. Sarah Palin and her camp may be raking in media hits by complaining about the portrayal of Palin in HBO’s upcoming movie about the 2008 presidential election, an adaptation of Game Change. But Hollywood seems to be giving more than it’s taking away from the Palin family lately: Bristol Palin’s just inked a deal with Lifetime to do a new reality series, following in her mother’s footsteps. The show promises “never-before-granted access to Bristol’s real-life experiences growing into womanhood, Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp will reveal how she adjusts to her life in Alaska, where daily she faces the many pressures of raising her toddler son Tripp alone and maintains the close relationship she holds with her parents.”

For all the Palins complain about their treatment by Hollywood, this deal is actually a sign of the industry’s generosity to the family. Sarah Palin’s Alaska started out with strong ratings for TLC, but they declined, particularly in episodes where Palin was hunting or fishing, and TLC declined to order a second season of the program. Her special on Fox News, one of the things the network hoped would make her a star on the network, didn’t exactly sparkle in the ratings either.

And Palin, more than any other member of her family, ought to have been the draw: she was the one who was rocketed to national prominence and national controversy. If she didn’t exactly turn into a television star, even when she was given a couple of chances in a couple of different formats, it’s hard to see why there’d be a strong market for a show about a second-tier member of the family whose main prior accomplishment in the entertainment industry is a stint on Dancing With the Stars and a novelty appearance on The Secret Life of the American Teenager. For all the Palins complain about the way Hollywood treats them, the industry certainly seems generous about continuing to cut them paychecks.

Dr. Keith Ablow has a long and nasty record of saying unpleasant and inaccurate things about sexual orientation, gender identity, and the media. He’s insulted Chaz Bono, calling him a “very disordered person”; speculated darkly that a J. Crew ad will sow widespread gender confusion among children; and declared that prison normalizes homosexuality. As my colleagues at ThinkProgress have repeatedly pointed out, it’s an embarrassment that a serious news network would give this much space and airtime to someone whose idea have as much science behind them as patent medicine.

But Ablow’s association with the network does mean we got to see his colleague Megyn Kelly, who periodically pops up to say something awesome about, say, the medieval state of maternity leave in the United States, absolutely dismantle Ablow’s claims that Bono’s participation in Dancing With the Stars will convince legions of American children that they’re not comfortable with the gender they were born into (and also that transitioning is like giving liposuction to an anorexic):

While I don’t think that anyone’s going to switch their gender identity because Chaz Bono is a public figure appearing on a dance show, I’d stop short of saying it’s a totally neutral act. If the somewhat older audience for Dancing With the Stars watches the show and realizes that Chaz Bono is just another guy going through the same process of making himself vulnerable and awkward as all the other candidates, and as a result, feels like transgender people are a little less foreign, that strikes me as a pretty good thing.

It would be wonderful if Fox didn’t credential Ablow by counting him as part of their medical team. But I do think there’s real value in giving folks who believe the same noxious, fictional things that he does some airtime so they can be exposed as the hateful frauds they are. Good for Megyn Kelly for pointing out just how specious his theories about media influence are, and even more importantly, asking, “Isn’t there enough hate?” And good for Bono for refusing to give Fox interviews and refusing to play Fox’s two-faced game, bashing people one day and expecting them to play nice the next.