The Writers Guild of America West 2013 TV Staffing Brief, the organization’s analysis of who was hired to write American television shows during the 2011-2012 season, is out, and as usual, the results for women and people of color are not encouraging. Of 1722 writers who wrote for 190 shows, 519 or 30.5 percent of them were women, and 269 of them were people of color. For women, those numbers are up 5 percent from the 1999-2000 television season—as the report put it, “At this rate of increase, it would be another 42 years before women —roughly half of the U.S. population – reach proportionate representation in television staff employment.” And for people of color, the rate of increase is more mixed: the percentage of Asian and Latino writers has risen 2.9 percent since 1999-2000, but the number of African-American television writers has grown much more slowly in the same time period, rising from 5.8 percent to 6.5 percent of overall writers. If the percentage of African-American writers is going to rise just .063 percent, it will take 87 years for black television writers to reach proportional representation in their industry relative to their current presence in the U.S. population.

Part of the reason these numbers are so frustrating to see again and again is that it only takes a few shows to make a difference. As the report points out, “until the recent rise of multicultural dramas like ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal,”—both shows created by Shonda Rhimes— “there had been no successful television dramas that featured a critical mass of minority leading roles or writers.” If all of the 55 shows that hired no writers of color in the 2011-2012 season hired just one person of color to write for them, the representation of writers of color in television would rise three percent. And the examples of a few networks show that it’s not impossible to find women and people of color to hire for all kinds of positions. 50 percent of MTV’s executive producers, 43.5 of the CW’s executive producers, and 38.5 percent of ABC Family’s executive producers are women. 13.3 percent of the executive producers on ABC are people of color, a number likely significantly driven, again, by Shonda Rhimes. 55 percent of BET’s writers are women, and 95 percent of them are people of color. Clearly, there are women and people of color available and eager to work in television, if only someone would think to ask.

Or, as Marlo Thomas put it when I asked her how she found female writers for That Girl, back at a time when television was even more male and white, “Well, you looked for them. You called agents and said ‘What comedy writers do you have that are women? We’re looking for women to write for That Girl’ We’d go to the writers’ agents. Someone would see a name on somebody else’s show and say this stuff’s really good. But when you put out a call like that to agents, agents can’t wait to get jobs for their writers.”

It’s an instruction that the 19 shows that hired no women writers in the 2011-2012 season, and the 55 shows that hired no writers of color during that same time period might take to heart. It’s worth noting that these shows’ lack of diversity doesn’t define all of them. Mike White, who wrote all of the episodes of the first season of Enlightened himself, turned in one of the most complex, sympathetic portrayals of a woman anywhere on television. And Breaking Bad, which employed no writers of color in the 2011-2012 season, produced one of the most nuanced roles for a man of color to appear on screen in the last decade. But just because white men can get it right about women and people of color doesn’t render women and people of color irrelevant—it just means that the standards for white men who are writing female characters or characters of color should be higher. The list of shows that didn’t hire women writers or writers of color in the 2011-2012 season should provide a pretty clear guide to which writers are rising above their own life experiences—and which ones are badly in need of new perspectives in their writers’ rooms:

Television Shows That Hired No Women Writers During The 2011-2012 Season

America’s Funniest Home Videos
Big Time Rush
Californication
Comedy Bang! Bang!
Dancing With The Stars
Eagleheart
Enlightened (Creator Mike White wrote all the episodes)
Futurama
Geniuses
Gurland On Gurland
The Insider
Kickin’ It
Locke & Key
Magic City
Psych
Teen Wolf
Veep
Workaholics I
Workaholics II
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Urging—as I would—readers to watch Top Of The Lake, David Haglund uses the excellent Sundance series to make an important point. American television, he argues, needs to rediscover the miniseries if it wants to retain its creative vitality:

Characters interesting enough to serve as engaging companions week after week for years are wonderful creations, but their stories lack the meaningful shape found in the best novels and movies and plays. We may get glorious moments, and terrific episodes, and occasionally excellent multi-episode arcs. But the need to leave the door open, to keep the story going a little bit longer, and then a little bit longer, is an artistic impediment. Breaking Bad aside, there are few if any shows which have run for more than a couple seasons that one can hold in one’s mind complete and consider as an artistic whole. Contrast that shapelessness with, say, Scenes From a Marriage, or The Best of Youth, or The Decalogue, all limited-run TV programs from Europe that are better than just about anything American TV has ever made.

Many viewers are fine with baggy imperfection in exchange for more of their favorite shows, of course. Why ask for less of something as good as The Sopranos? But perhaps if David Chase had been able to tell The Sopranos in 12 or 15 hours of perfect television, he could have then moved on to another epic story—instead of stretching it out for 86 rather up-and-down installments and then leaving TV behind to make a movie. And really, if The Sopranos had to be an uneven, six-season show, then fine. But can’t we have great miniseries, too? Given how much quality TV the U.S. churns out, why does Europe have better miniseries than we do?

I think Haglund is right, and that he’s correct that financial implications are the main reason that we don’t see more miniseries: you can’t race to syndication with something that’s only going to last six or seven hours, and it’s hard to recoup the investments in sets and costumes, which are fixed no matter how many episodes you produce. But granted those factors, I actually want to take a step further: television’s continued creative vitality depends on great flexibility on episode numbers across the board.

I’ve been a long-time advocate for shorter seasons, because I think the 22-episode season is a disaster. It requires shows with overall story arcs to write in a lot of filler. It means that shows are off the air for almost half of the forty-ish week-long television season, which alone makes it almost impossible for fans to regularly shape their weeks around their favorite television shows. It makes much more sense for fans to schedule a single or several evenings of television-watching and to see everything in their DVRs. And most importantly, it’s arbitrary. Part of the reason a show like Enlightened feels like it’s going out on a tremendously high note is that the short seasons fit its arcs well: it was believable that Amy Jellicoe could become a whistleblower and the story she wanted written about her employer, Abaddon Industries, could come to fruition, or something close to it, in eight episodes.

But lately, I’ve been feeling that the problem of arbitrariness applies to shorter seasons, too. I completely understand that Game of Thrones can produce about ten episodes a year, but there are times when I’d prefer to miss a year so the show could handle whole story arcs in a single season, or simply devote more time to certain characters who inevitably are getting short shrift in a ten-episode season. I’d argue that Girls‘ second season was substantially hurt by the fact that it only had ten half-hour episodes—there wasn’t enough time for developments like Hannah’s rise to a book deal or her OCD to percolate. Luther, a wonderful British miniseries, took six episodes to cement the bond between its main character, a detective, and the psychopath who understands him better than anyone else, but then went shorter in its second season to mixed effect. Similarly, Sherlock has felt more like the product of constraints on its in-demand stars’ time than the actual creative needs of the relationship between Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, and Sherlock’s brother Mycroft.

There’s no question that variable scheduling causes headaches for networks, and complications on the overall mix of advertising sales. But it’s not as if they don’t do it already. Shows like Scandal and Don’t Trust The B—- In Apt. 23 were launched with short orders. ABC Family premiered Melissa and Joey with 35 episodes. NBC was able to adapt both 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation to Tina Fey’s pregnancies. It would just be nice if networks could expand or contract the length of seasons for creative reasons, rather than simply for logistical ones.

At the end of the second season of Enlightened, HBO’s strange, precise show about Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a former corporate drone who has an awakening and decides she has to bring her employer, Abaddon Industries to justice, Amy finds herself in shock after she is caught stealing corporate documents and turning them over to Jeff (Dermot Mulroney), a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. “They just fired me,” she tells him on the phone, clearly frightened despite her show of bravado to the company’s president. “They said they were going to sue me.” “Well,” said Jeff, who had been putting up some pretense of dating her to enhance their emotional bond while she continued to feed him documents, “we knew that was going to happen.” “We did?” Amy asked him. “Amy, this story is going to shift the paradigm, man,” Jeff tried to reassure her, appealing to her rather grandiose ego and desire to be an “agent of change” on a massive scale. “They can’t stop it, okay? It’s all worth it.” When Amy told him “We’ll see,” she sounded more sobered, and more realistic, than she has at any other point at the show, even at the moment of her biggest triumph.

Enlightened is a beautiful, wonderful, extraordinarily difficult show on any number of levels—I find it so hard to watch even though I think it’s remarkable that I marathoned the entire second season yesterday so I could enjoy and get it over with at once. And Mike White’s long and quietly been doing critically important work about how hard it is to live out your principals in America, whether he was writing about Dewey Finn (Jack Black) finding another way to make a career out of his love of music in School of Rock or showing Amy crumple in the first season as she learned that the salary for her dream job at a non-profit would leave her bobbing around the poverty line. But even though Enlightened had a semi-triumphant finale, it made one of the most painful points White’s ever gotten across: that you can be right on the merits, you can even win a major political or social battle, and still be treated like a pariah, fired, sued, or jailed. Winning doesn’t save you from consequences—in fact, your continued suffering may be the price of your victory.

This is a point that—with the exception of martyr stories like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X—is often significantly absent from our popular understanding of history and our mass culture. We remember Harriet Tubman’s heroic work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and never bother to learn that she had her arm broken by a train conductor while white passengers called for her to be thrown off the train, that she didn’t receive a pension for her Civil War service until 1899, and that she was the victim of a kind of prototypical 419 confidence fraud. After Frank Kameny was fired from the U.S. Army Map Service after his arrest in Lafayette Park for cruising, he was never employed again, friends and family supported him as he pursued activism, and it wasn’t until 2009 that Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry apologized to Kameny on behalf of the government and gave him the Theodore Roosevelt Award.

Seeing the gap between the public impact of activism and the private consequences for activists unfold in Enlightened hit me in a particularly painful way because I watched the show’s second season on the same day that the New Yorker put Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Aaron Swartz, the activist and programmer who committed suicide in January, online, and the day after The Atlantic published Swartz’s former partner Quinn Norton’s account of her involvement in the federal case against him for downloading documents from JSTOR. I would never compare Swartz to Amy Jellicoe as activists on the whole, because Amy’s talents and understanding of political systems are so nascent, and because she fundamentally lacks the talent for making friends that Swartz, in my and many others’ experiences, possessed. But in that lack of full cognizance of the consequences of their actions, they seemed to have something in common. MacFarquhar writes:
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I loved the first season of HBO’s little-watched but truly remarkable comedy, Enlightened, about Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a corporate drone who has a breakdown and returns to work determined to good in the world but resigned to the basement as punishment for her meltdown. It’s is one of the best depictions I’ve ever seen of how hard it is to try to live up to your values in corporate America, particularly when you have debt to pay off, because fulfilling work is so often dramatically underpaid, if it’s paid at all. So I’m particularly excited to see that in the second season, Amy’s leveling up—she fantasized about burning down the company she worked for last season, and this year, she’s found a way to do it, by becoming a corporate whistleblower:

“People are living under the illusion that the American dream is working for them,” Amy says in the trailer, in one of the baldest statements about inequality I can think of on scripted American television. And I hope Enlightened makes an important connection that’s implied in this clip. “I just don’t want to jeapordize everything because you’re pissed about your life,” Tyler (Mike White, also the show’s creator) tells Amy when she tries to enlist him in her whistleblowing scheme. But sometimes, you’re pissed about your life because of structural things that make it worse, that make things unjust, that prevent you from grabbing the resources and opportunities to fix your life by more gradual and reasonable means. Sometimes, you have to blow things up, and jeopardize everything, for a shot at something better. That’s one of the fundamental and scary truths of organizing, of the Walmart workers who walked out on Black Friday, of every whistleblower who ever lived. Last season, Amy wanted to change the world and be liked. Now, it seems, she’s truly reconciled herself to the fact that the first half of that equation may be more important.

I’ve been writing on and off for months about where women fit into the current Golden Age of television (or are we in the Silver Age at some point? Someone who knows more than I do about mythology, help!), particularly into the ranks of masculinized anti-heroes. So I just loved Todd VanDerWeff’s brilliant piece on how the current standards for television excellence are defined by masculinity, and how shows like Girls and Enlightened are powerful—and uncomfortably received—challenges to those norms:

We have a very particular idea about what makes “good” TV in this age of episodic online reviews. “Good” TV is either a single-camera sitcom filled with pop-culture references or moments of pathos (ideally both), or a serialized drama—often on cable—that probes the darkest limits of the human experience and has a bad-boy protagonist. In essence, we’ve created a world where the only two shows that can be copied to make good TV are Arrested Development and The Sopranos.

There’s nothing wrong with this, actually. Copying those two shows has resulted in a lot of great series, including some terrific, distinctly feminist TV, be it the female heroes of Parks & Recreation or Mad Men’s multi-faceted portrayal of what it meant to be a woman in the ’60s. But copying those two shows has also resulted in a narrow TV palette, a limited series of colors to draw from when constructing the next “great” TV show. These series tend to have sensibilities that are very white and masculine, largely because they’re all created by white males, and, hey, write what you know. (It’s not like my reviews aren’t informed by this same perspective.) Even the shows created in this mold that have female characters at their centers—Damages, say—tend to define that female character by how well she fits into a traditionally masculine world.

I’ve long thought that Sex and the City, which I love, has been weirdly excluded from the narrative of the rise of great television even though it premiered before The Sopranos did and had as much to do with the rebranding of HBO as an adult, smart, frank network as The Sopranos did. I wonder if that is in part a response to fact that the default perspective in popular culture is male, so shows aimed at women are based in the assumption that men will never come along, or that women will find some sort of refuge from male-dominated culture hugely refreshing. And to a certain extent that’s true—shows that speak to my experience in any way that’s close to emotionally precise are so rare they feel miraculous. But I wonder if their particularity becomes a hindrance when it comes to acting as a model. It shouldn’t be that hard to extract from Sex and the City that frank, aspirational shows about female friendships and female sexuality are a draw. But somehow, that show becomes particular time, place, and set of actresses, exceptional in its depictions of anti-heroines, its excellence, AND its privileging of women’s experience, while The Sopranos is conventional in its focus on men and unconventional only in its focus on an anti-hero and the quality of its execution.

I hate that we still haven’t found the show with a female lead, about specifically female issues, and from a specifically feminine-coded perspective that’s such a smash and so well-executed that everyone wants to try to be as smart and as ground-breaking and as buzzed-about as it. I hate that quality shows about women remain exceptions rather than anything close to a norm. As much as I love Girls and Enlightened, they’re too low-rated to qualify. But they’re sparking hugely difficult and important conversations, and perhaps they’re turning over fertile soil for someone who will follow them, and strike gold in the same fields..

I had one of those weekends where you sit down on the couch and get up three days later having watched four seasons of How I Met Your Mother. And while at first there wouldn’t appear to be much that a Friends-like CBS sitcom and a quirky HBO show from Mike White, the show that How I Met Your Mother most reminds me of is Enlightened. They’re both shows about compromise, but while Enlightened‘s Amy Jellicoe rages against a system that makes her dreams futile, How I Met Your Mother is all about anaesthetizing the pain of selling out.

One of my favorite scenes in Enlightened is when Amy, desperate to escape a corporate job that she hates (and is admittedly terrible at and makes no effort to succeed in), interviews for her dream gig at a homeless shelter. It’s something that would use her skills and that she’d find fulfilling. And it pays less on an annual basis than she owes in debt from her stint in the treatment center. Laura Dern does an incredible job of selling how dreadful that revelation is to Amy, and how insanity-inducing it is that the non-profit system is set up so that only a very small number of the people who would like to work there can actually do so under existing conditions.

Beyond that scene, Enlightened makes clear why Amy hates her job, even if we ultimately can’t entirely sympathize with her approach to it. Dougie, her boss, is crude and unprofessional. Amy’s ideas for making her company stronger and more socially responsible are blown off, and when they finally get attention, she’s set up as the entertainment by a vicious group of executives. It’s humiliating, and it’s boring, and we can sympathize with her desire to get away from it.

How I Met Your Mother, on the other hand, kind of blunts Marshall’s ultimate decision to walk away from trying to work in environmental law when he first does it (I know he leaves Goliath National Bank in future episodes, I just haven’t gotten to them yet). The montage of him standing in front of the mirror, psyching himself up with increasingly diminishing returns, as he goes on job interviews is funny, but it doesn’t actually communicate the loss of a life-long dream (never mind that the show doesn’t really communicate that Marshall is a committed environmentalist other than telling us repeatedly that he is). The fact that Lily’s enormous credit card debt basically forces him to take a corporate job after he’s fired from his first firm should be a deep betrayal with long-term consequences and the show basically deals with it in two episodes.

And even though we’re told that Marshall’s given up on the whole reason he went to law school, the show suggests that ultimately it’s no big deal. When he goes to work at his first law firm, the voiceover tells us that he ends up representing a hazardous amusement park. But we never see him handle one of its manifold issues, which both could have been great plot fodder and could have presented actual moral dilemmas that show what it meant for Marshall to sell out. And when Marshall ends up working for Barney at Goliath National Bank, rather than something that makes him miserable, the job actually looks fine. He and Barney hang out on the roof drinking beer, Marshall appears to get along with his coworkers and to feel no particular qualms about the work that he’s doing. The biggest problem he faces is finding a place where he can go to the bathroom in peace.

I think it’s probably true that most folks aren’t working jobs that are perfect reflections of their passions: it’s not like Amy and Marshall are alone in ending up in a place other than the one they hoped to be. But I appreciate Amy’s raging hope. And there’s something rather quietly sad about seeing Marshall surrender. How I Met Your Mother doesn’t have to—and shouldn’t—be Enlightened. But I wish it respected its characters enough to spend some more time with their pain and disappointment.

I was looking through the acting nominations for the Comedy Awards, and it really struck me that in a lot of ways, 2011 was a richer year for women in comedy than it was for men.

In movies, Jason Bateman got a nod for Horrible Bosses, Steve Carell was nominated for Crazy, Stupid, Love, Jean Dujardin was tapped for The Artist, Zach Galifianakis for The Hangover Part II, and Owen Wilson for Midnight in Paris. None of these are particularly innovative roles, and all of them (except Dujardin, whose range I don’t really know) fall pretty squarely within these actors’ existing ranges: Bateman is a tense straight man, Carell is sympathetic and slightly clueless, Galifianakis is disconcerting and wild, and Wilson is winsome. There are a few things that I think were left off this list—I’ll defend The Trip until I run out of breath, Patton Oswalt was great and under-recognized for Young Adult, and I’m not really sure why 50/50, which was nominated elsewhere, didn’t score acting nods—but I can’t think of a performance by a man that’s not here that was a revelation. Ditto in TV, which was dominated by utterly predictable nods for Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock, Ty Burrell in Modern Family, Steve Carell in The Office, and Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. I’m glad to see Louis C.K. in there—his performance in Louie was arguably my favorite thing on television in 2011. But it’s not like he has a lot of peers.

For women, on the other hand, the nominations are actually a lot of fun. I didn’t love Horrible Bosses, but seeing Jennifer Aniston get totally raunchy and ridiculous was a fun stretch for her. Ditto for Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher—depending on how she takes her career next, she could leave horrid romantic comedies behind and steer more in the direction of Charlize Theron in Young Adult, who really ought to be here. Melissa McCarthy was a miracle in Bridesmaids, and Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne, who had an utterly breakout performance in that film also could have easily been nominated. Television has its predictable notes—Tina Fey, for a deeply uninspired season of 30 Rock and Sofia Vergara for Modern Family. But you’ve got Zooey Deschanel in there for a debut performance in New Girl, and Maya Rudolph could easily be there for Up All Night, along with Laura Dern in Enlightened, Kat Dennings or Beth Behrs in 2 Broke Girls (that show’s massive flaws are not their fault), any of the women in Community‘s cast or Eliza Coupe or Elisha Cuthbert in Happy Endings.

And if Whitney or Are You There, Chelsea? had been less terrible, and we’d fulfilled all the potential of the lady comedy boom, this could have been an even more crowded field. I may not be equally addicted to every female comedy performance on the market these days. But it seems like there’s a lot of space available for new actresses to enter the field, and for actresses with existing track records to step out of their comfort zones. If those conditions persist, that’s a recipe for an embarrassment of riches.

The bridge is yours.

-The only celebrity memoir I’d even contemplate purchasing.

-Another reason you should catch up on Enlightened so you can watch it next season.

-Michael Chabon on his life-long relationship with Edgar Rice Burroughs.

-Amazon v. the Independent Publishers Group.

-This is basically the perfect role for Ben Stiller:

Spurred on by Laura Dern’s Golden Globes win for her roles as Amy Jellicoe, I’ve been catching up on Enlightened. It’s a fascinating show, one of the more uncomfortable things I’ve ever watched in its combination of Amy’s intense selfishness and immaturity and New Age preachiness. But I’m also struck by how much it’s a story about what it means to work for a company you think is actively harming the world, and how difficult it is to do socially responsible work.

The company that Amy worked for before her breakdown, and that she finds herself attempting to reform, is literally called Abaddon, after the place of destruction in Jewish religious texts and the king of the Pit in Revelation. Amy hopes to implement a corporate responsibility program when she comes back to work after her stint in rehab, but instead finds herself in the basement, consigned to a program for people the company considers kooks, but who they can’t fire. When she tries to convince HR to give her a task force or let her act as a community liaison by giving the department head a printout of stories about Abaddon’s environmental and labor problems, the woman is actively frightened that talking about those issues will get them both fired. Amy’s former assistant shuts her down when Amy suggests that they could be getting into bed with a company responsible for industrial accidents in India. The inertia and terror are deep.

And when Amy tries to get a job with a non-profit, she’s devastated to learn that the salary on offer at a place where she thinks she’d fit in is $26,000, just $2,000 more than her bill from the rehab center. “I can’t live on $26,000 a year. I’m in debt, I’m living with my mother,” Amy cries to the man interviewing her for a job at a homeless shelter. “There are all these things I want to do. And I can’t. And it’s so frustrating.” Of course it is. And it’s a huge problem that we can’t make socially responsible and socially fulfilling work financially rewarding, much less viable, for people with debt and bills.