At the beginning of this year, when I looked at the female comedic archetypes the television season had given us in a highly-touted year of funny women, and that it was teeing up to deliver, there seemed to be four clear categories: the Woodland Creature for those wide-eyed innocents like New Girl‘s Jess and Are You There, Chelsea?‘s DeeDee, the Crude Broad for 2 Broke Girls‘ Max and the titular character in Are You There, Chelsea?, the Rueful Blonde, which includes Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23‘s June, GCB‘s Amanda, and House of Lies‘ Jeanie, and the Somewhat-Wise woman, embodied by Veep‘s Selina Meyer. The truth is that, despite their differences, the members of these clubs have more in common than they are different. They’re all conventionally attractive, set-upon—though not precisely in the manner of the screwball heroine—and in a hurry. They, and babes like Whitney Cummings with legs for miles and the quirk slapped on like eyeshadow, don’t pose much of a challenge to our sense of what women can, and should be.

I was thinking about this in the context of the news, presumably leaked by NBC itself, that Sarah Silverman’s untitled comedy pilot and Roseanne Barr’s Downwardly Mobile, about the recession-wracked residents of a trailer park, aren’t testing particularly well and may be in danger of not getting picked up. And I was thinking of that news in the context of our discussion about Girls, and whether we’re ready for female anti-heroes who are anti-heroic because they’re passive, or whiny, or weird, not because they act like decisive, evil men.

Roseanne Barr and Sarah Silverman in real life, and Lena Dunham’s character on Girls, Hannah Hovarth, don’t act like the women who fall into those four categories. Barr isn’t wafer-thin (she never was), and she isn’t one of those Hollywood women who’s aged into Blythe Danner-like pale, imperious elegance. She’s outspoken about gender and class, attractive traits in an industry bound by iron bands of sexism and wealth. But her Twitter feed can be weirdly combative, her run for the Green Party presidential nomination an odd distraction in a year when she also was supposed to be serious about getting a follow-up to Roseanne off the ground. Some days, Roseanne feels more like Amy Jellicoe, the naive corporate drone who constantly runs up against her own limitations and self-created obstacles in HBO’s Enlightened: it would be nice to root for her, but she’s making it awfully hard.

Silverman’s less hard to reckon with, but she’s just as challenging. Though she’s attractive, she often dresses as if to consternate fashion commentators (a trait I find somewhat endearing). She’s 41, an in-between age when actresses are often no longer treated as if they could sexually appeal to anyone, but before they’re old enough to be grand dames, liberated from their attractiveness and freed to be spymasters or schemers. On-screen, she tends to play either tightly-wound parodies of hard-charging women, whether as producer Alexi Darling in the movie adaptation of Rent, or Patti, Mike White’s horrible, careerist girlfriend in School of Rock, or unsettling naifs like her self-absorbed character in The Sarah Silverman program, who makes Hannah Hovarth look like a model of charity and selfelessness.

And though the debate over Girls has died down somewhat, there are clearly a lot of people who remain very angry with Hannah, who are appalled by her poor choices, insist that Dunham shouldn’t get credit for displaying a body that’s so far from the Hollywood norm, angrily reject the idea that people could have sex that bad or make decisions that emotionally awkward. This discomfort can get ugly, but it’s also very interesting in a world where we’re supposed to sympathize with characters who fret about invisible imperfections, who are allowed, even expected to be humiliated before they can be resurrected for our enjoyment and moral satisfaction. You can make terrible, naive life choices, whether you’re a drunk like Chelsea or blind to your husband’s massive embezzlement scheme like Amanda, but as long as you’re gorgeous and fairly conventional, your wounds will be cooed over, rather than publicly sowed with salt. It’s like how Hollywood likes female geeks as long as the only signifier of their geekdom is a pair of glasses. We’re not conditioned to emotionally attach to women who are genuinely weird.

In addition to the relative genericness of their presentation and general demeanor, the ladies of network television comedy may have gotten a lot of screen time, but they didn’t do much original with it. The closest Jess came to transgressive on New Girl was dating her students’ father. Chelsea’s Female Chauvinist Pig on the show that bears her name is enough of a trope to have a book dissecting the phenomenon she represents. Max’s sour diner waitress on 2 Broke Girls could be the granddaughter of cranky counter gals who have been slinging hash since time immemorial. Talking about her lady bits and their needs doesn’t actually mean she’s treading new territory. GCB‘s Amanda may fight her battles with barbecues and church solos, but they’re the same old wars between mean girls who can’t let go. On Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23, June is one of an infinite number of eager strivers in New York. Her roommate Chloe may be the closest thing to a truly original, transgressive character in the crop, a fiancee-seducing, lesbian-faking psycho who sets her father and her roommate up to help them rebound, a Bizarro-world version of the cult of self-help. But while Chloe is a manic, evil delight as played by Krysten Ritter, she’s not precisely convincingly real. Whitney, which seems doomed given Whitney Cummings’ commitment to a new talk show, posed the most believable challenges to the standard sitcom arc for women: two couples on the show entered and broke off engagements, and rather than being shattered by those decisions, seemed fine. The weddings, it turned out, were eclipsing the work of building their actual relationships. It’s sad that this counts as a major departure from the script, but in this field, I have to give it high marks.

My hope is that as we assess this year of television ladies, the relative success of some of these shows serves as a thin edge of the wedge to get some women on television who are genuinely weird or unusual, rather than just performing slight deviations from the norm. Silverman and Barr may not make it on to NBC this year. But Girls will be back on HBO, keeping the hope for women on television who are awkward, and angry, and not conventionally attractive, and entitled—and in other words more like some of television’s most profitable men—alive. If the only kind of women who can be funny on television can all wear the same size dress and hit the same comedic beats, this year of sitcom women hasn’t won us very much at all.

Margaret Lyons has a nice appreciation of what she’s calling TV’s new crop of “sweatshirt boyfriends,” the laid-back guys who are populating a wide range of shows:

Despite their relaxed attitude toward personal grooming, sweatshirt boyfriends aren’t necessarily Apatowian man-children — Jack (Nick Wechsler) on Revenge owns his own bar and takes care of his annoying teenage brother, Pete (David Walton) on Bent is a successful enough contractor, Chris (Chris D’Elia) on Whitney is an entrepreneur, and Joe (Luka Jones) on Best Friends Forever is a video game designer. Pete (Mark Duplass) on The League just seems sort of low energy, more depressed than inept, while Nick (Jake M. Johnson) on New Girl and Max (Adam Palley) on Happy Endings fall more in the goofy-slacker camp, though both have started confronting their fears of adulthood, Nick by finally seeing a doctor and Max by learning to enjoy frittatas. Did you know those are like egg pizzas? The newest edition to the SBC (that’s the sweatshirt boyfriend club) is Best Friends Forever’s Joe.

What she doesn’t mention, and what I think is somewhat important about this development, is that this subset of characters contain a fair number of guys who work blue-collar jobs. Sure, there are the video game designers and Whitney‘s tech millionaire. But Jack and Nick are bartenders, Pete is a contractor, and Max drives a limo. Women are getting their shot at jobs outside the normal gamut of party-and-wedding planners and PR professionals, too. The 2 Broke Girls are waitresses and nannying. On GCB, Amanda’s working at a Texas-varietal Hooters, and appears to be rather enjoying it—she gave up an opportunity to move up the rungs working as a consultant to a denim line to stay hustling pitchers and standing up for her fellow waitresses.

There are disconnects between these characters jobs and their lifestyles, of course, from the palatial apartment on New Girl to the Chicago loft on Happy Endings—television has a hard time with the visuals of limited incomes, even when they’re acknowledging that people have job titles other than banker or party planner. Amanda lives with her mother in a gorgeous Dallas mansion, a situation that might be humiliating if it wasn’t so comfortable, and if the house wasn’t giant enough for Amanda to have some genuine autonomy within it. The apartments on Girls, which debuts this weekend on HBO, may be the only socio-economically appropriate dwelling in pop culture in shows that aren’t Raising Hope. But even if these characters and their lives aren’t precisely accurate, it is, frankly, nice to see characters of different incomes be friends, date, occasionally deal with the fact that they’re at different places in their careers and at different levels of financial security, given that’s the way that actual people conduct their actual lives.

Of course, Newt Gingrich is overstating the case for pandering effect when he says that The Show Formerly Known as Good Christian Bitches is “anti-Christian bigotry.” But he’s not entirely wrong that the show isn’t exactly fulfilling the potential Robert Harling laid out for it at the Television Critics Association press tour in January, to turn the institution of the church into as compelling a setting as a police station or a hospital emergency room.

So far, we’ve seen three church traditions come into play: a call to prayer, the choir’s song selection, and social hour afterwards. And all three of those institutions have been used for evil: Carlene’s used “Jesus Take the Wheel” to remind Amanda that her husband died in a fellatio-induced car crash; she’s called Amanda out for special prayers for the congregation and had Amanda do the same in retaliation; and the social hour after services is an occasion for sniping so thinly veiled it hardly counts. Nobody’s talked to the pastor. We haven’t seen any members of the church’s board of directors, or what must be manifold committees. We haven’t even met a gay choir director! All of those elements could be generators of broader social drama about Amanda’s efforts to reintegrate herself into Dallas society, something that the book did rather well. And it could broaden the show beyond the war between Amanda and her high school tormentees.

This is not hard to do well: Keeping the Faith set the model for both Catholic churches (which, admittedly have the all-time great religious comedy device of the confessional) and synagogues. That movie is rich with spiritual directors, pre-teens in need of counseling, retiring lead rabbis and upcoming assistant rabbis, seniors in need of interfaith community centers with awesome karaoke machines, cranky board members, and the world’s best Ein Keloheinu. In other words, it trusts its viewers to know something about theology, and to appreciate the humor in the details of religious practice. And it showed that doctrine can be alternately nourishing and unnecessarily restrictive. GCB could take a lesson.

One of the more interesting lines of questioning about GCB (formerly Good Christian Bitches) at the Television Critics Association press tour has been whether “Christian” is a bigger hurdle for the show than “Bitch.” There’s one way in which that makes sense: this would hardly be the first time that practicing Christians felt like Hollywood hadn’t portrayed them accurately or fairly. (It would make less sense to suggest that Christians are not a market.) In response, series creator Robert Harling* suggested something that shows an appealing degree of structural awareness. Apparently, we should think of the church in GCB the same way we think of a precinct office in a cop show or an emergency room in a hospital, and expect that the show will be bounded by the internal rules and expectations of the church.

“There are rules. And you have to be respectful of those rules,” he said. “Even if it’s a temple or a mosque or whatever, you have to be aware and respectful of faith systems. And, you know, the joy of it is watching these people try to function within these rules. And the rules remain the same. The respect for the faith remains the same…the goal is to watch people try to be good.”

Long-time readers will know that I’m a freak for stories that are driven by bureaucracies, whether it’s a police department, a branch of the federal government, or a school. We have a lot of cop and hospital shows because we’re very familiar with the Hollywood version of how those bureaucracies work and what the dramatic beats exist in those spaces. But expanding the kinds of organizations we’re familiar with and that characters can work in is a worthy goal. Kristin Chenoweth joked of gay men, for example, that “There’s one in every church,” an idea I’m certainly familiar with but which I’m not sure is obvious to non-churchgoers. Establishing that kind of thing and getting folks familiar with it (though not to the point of boredom) and doing similar things for synagogues and mosques could make for some pretty fun storytelling in a new environment.

*Who wrote Soapdish, which I adore. If you have not watched it, you should check it out.

Once upon a time, ABC was planning to air two shows in midseason with the word “bitch” in the title: Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 and Good Christian Bitches. Then, the shows became Apartment 23 and Good Christian Belles. And now they’ll come on air in midseason as Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23 and GCB. When he was asked about it in Pasadena today, Paul Lee, the president of ABC’s entertainment group, said, “on broadcast it turns out it’s a not a word you want to use in the title. But at the same time, [Apartment 23] is a show with so much attitude, and we felt, and the showrunners, that it reflected the irreverence or the outrage of that show…Look, GCB, which officially stands for Good Christian Belles, a good title, a good show.”

This doesn’t really make any sense. Abbreviating an obscenity to its first letter reads reverent, rather than edgy. This is church-ladies-being-naughty language. There’s nothing brave or outrageous about it. And there’s something strange about the idea that “bitch” is the best expression of toughness, or unwillingness to compromise, or to be edgy or interesting. Meredith Brooks has been there and done that more than a decade ago:

And we all know how that turned out. I’m not necessarily the right audience for a reclamation of “bitch,” but I’m not particularly persuaded that the term is evocative by Leslie Bibb’s argument today that “Every human being has a moment of being bitchy. I think on the show is we all sort of test each other. I think when a woman’s a bitch, it’s based on being scared.” We can find non-gendered language that captures that emotion more specifically and precisely. “Bitch” isn’t a word that can sell a TV show because of decency issues. It’s because it’s uncompelling.