Last week, the news broke that Downton Abbey, the British drama about the titled residents of a major country estate and the people who work for them, will be adding its first black character: the London-born actor Gary Carr, who has a long British television resume, will play a jazz singer named Jack Ross. This is a notable development for Downton Abbey, which through three seasons has remained resolutely—if appropriate to its time period and setting—monochromatic. But the show’s decision is also part of a larger trend of overwhelmingly white shows that have made the decision to try to broaden their casting and their subject matter. And Downton Abbey can learn from Lena Dunham’s HBO comedy Girls, which responded to a firestorm of criticism over its whiteness by adding a character named Sandy (Donald Glover), a black Republican love interest for the main character, and AMC’s Mad Men, which in its sixth season has added two African-American characters and expanded its treatment of its characters reaction to the Civil Rights movement.

Downton Abbey, Girls, and Mad Men all differ in the extent to which their settings made the absence of black characters conspicuous or uncomfortable. A relatively secluded English country estate, close to a small town rather than London, would be less likely to have black British or immigrant residents than the capital itself, particularly in 1912. Mad Men has somewhat less excuse than Downton Abbey does, and a number of analysts have suggested that the version of Madison Avenue series creator Matthew Weiner and his collaborators have presented on the show actually suggests that women and African-Americans had made less progress in the advertising industry than they really had, particularly at the firm BBDO. And Girls, which was maligned as racist for having four white main characters, did better than its harshest critics suggested and worse than might have been realistic. The show, set in contemporary Brooklyn, did give its main character Hannah Horvath (Dunham) an Asian coworker at the publishing house where she was a long-time intern, but also relied on stereotyped portrayals of non-white secretaries and nannies, and gave its privileged characters a small, monochromatic social circle. Whether or not that was realistic, or whether or not that was a wise choice on Dunham’s part was a matter of how alienating an individual viewer found the decision, and how much one believed that relatively privileged Oberlin graduates might only have close friends of their same race.

Whether or not Weiner or Dunham felt obligated to have their shows respond to their critics on race, they both did so in ways that made black characters on-screen critics of the white main characters. Dawn (Teyonah Parris), Don Draper’s secretary, who became Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s first black employee in the first episode of the fifth season of Mad Men, told a friend she met for dinner this season of her white employers that “Everyone’s scared. Women crying in the ladies’ room. Men crying in the elevator. It’s like New Year’s Eve when they empty the garbage there. There’s so many bottles.” She spoke not just as an outsider to the office but for critics of Mad Men who have found the show alienating and offputting. And Sandy, after failing to finish one of Hannah’s essays on Girls, told her “It wasn’t for me.” When Hannah protested of the essay that “It’s for everyone,” the show was cleverly flipping the script. Sandy, the black character, was saying that a piece of art didn’t have to speak to everyone’s sensibilities, unlike critics of color of the show who were upset that it didn’t address their experiences, while it was Hannah, the white character, who was suggesting that Girls ought to be for everyone, contra many white critics’ defenses that the show’s strength lay in its particularity, and that it couldn’t possibly be reasonable to demand that it serve a universal function.
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Starz seems to have settled on explicit sex and violence as the keys to its brand precisely at the moment when the flagrant use of both of those elements in television drama has ceased to be a novel advantage cable held over the networks and started getting embarrassing, and not a little dull. And even though Spartacus, the franchise that perhaps made the best use of those elements in service of genuine ideas, has just finished its run on Starz, the network appears to be doubling down with Black Sails, a pirate show that’s being advertised as an opportunity for Michael Bay to move on up from showing Megan Fox arching her back to depicting actual lesbian sex and for Toby Stephens to get another crack at the American market after playing Fergus Wolfe in Possession didn’t exactly set his career on fire:

There’s a good show to be done about piracy. But it’s one that requires the showrunners to know as much about Caribbean governance, and economics—some privateering contracts guaranteed fair, consistent monthly wages and advance pay—social dynamics that gave pirates a certain amount of social capital in polite society as well as in island enclaves, slavery, and cooperative organizing as about how to make a lady look fetching in a corset.

It’s notable that this season of Game of Thrones has—with the exception of this weekend’s scene in Littlefinger’s brothel—dramatically scaled down its use of nudity and scaled up its discussion of policy issues, from the ethics and efficacy of purchasing a slave army to the impact on Westeros of the particular people who have helped the country run up a sizable national debt. There was a sense in some of the commentary on the show last year that the prodigious use of nudity in both non-consensual scenes and situations involving prostitution was cheesy, a sop to less sophisticated viewers who might not otherwise be inclined to keep track of the show’s enormous roster of characters or engage with its big ideas about the morality of war. In other words, a clear distinction was emerging between adult drama and “adult” content. And in the show’s third season, characters have talked more about sexual assault and sexual experiences than we’ve actually seen on screen. How characters like Brienne of Tarth and Jaime Lannister respond to a threat of sexual assault, or how Tyrion Lannister interrogates Podrick Payne about his first sexual experience matters much more than watching their bodies in motion.
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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.

Yesterday brought the news that HBO had cancelled Enlightened, Mike White’s brilliant series about how to live in accordance with your principals in a corporate world—particularly when you have a lot of debt, or the costs of activism have grown extraordinary. For all that I’m disappointed in the decision and think that it was a mistake for HBO’s brand—despite Enlightened‘s extremely low ratings, it was the kind of show that couldn’t have been produced by any other network—I don’t see it as a tragedy for the story White was telling. After Amy Jellicoe blew the whistle on Abaddon Industries and was fired, Enlightened had her walk off into a sunny California day, anonymous again among the crowd, alone with the knowledge of what she’d accomplished and unsure of what came next for her. But her time at the company was finished, and Amy had decisively acted in accordance with her beliefs. That story was concluded.

But there’s another brilliant, strange, female-centered show that’s still awaiting a decision on whether it will be renewed or cancelled. And I dearly hope that ABC Family decides to make the right decision and save Bunheads, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s dramedy about the proprietors of and students at a California ballet school.

Bunheads has a less determined story arc than Enlightened, and by design, smaller stakes. It follows Michelle (Sutton Foster), a Vegas showgirl who marries a fan, moves to California with him, and ends up owning a great deal of property when he’s suddenly killed in a car accident—and tied to his mother, ballet teacher Fanny (Kelly Bishop), as well. Her students Boo (Kaitlyn Jenkins), Sasha (Julia Goldani Telles), Ginny (Bailey Buntain), and Melanie (Emma Dumont) are intelligent, idiosyncratic young ladies who find themselves galvanized by Michelle’s arrival, which coincides with them reaching the stage of life where they’re deciding how serious they want to be about dance, whether they want to have sex, and what their relationships to their parents are going to look like. The characters don’t have life-or-death problems—at least not after the fatal car ride in the pilot—but they don’t lack for gravity.

Bunheads is a relentlessly female show, more so than any other program on television, and therein lies many of its strengths. Where Girls, after the fight that fractured Marnie and Hannah’s relationship in the first season, has moved its focus away from female friendships, the relationships between women are always primary in Bunheads. Much of the first half of the season followed Michelle and Fanny attempting to navigate an exceedingly difficult situation. Fanny was surprised by the arrival of Michelle as her daughter-in-law and even more disconcerted when her son’s death left Michelle the owner of Fanny’s home, business, and land. Gradually, they’ve navigated a professional and personal partnership, finding a way to run Fanny’s ballet school together and to build an amphitheater on the land left to Michelle. That amphitheater brings them into collaboration with two sisters, the constantly self-deprecating Truly (Stacey Oristano) and bulldozer Millicent (Liza Weil) Stone, who, in one scene, explains to Fanny that she doesn’t actually want to know about the arts, she just wants to be perceived as cultured. Truly and Milly’s rivalry is one of the best examples I’ve seen of exaggeration serving the truth: there’s no way to make a relationship between sisters stranger and more hilariously tortured than they can be in real life.

And the friendships between the students have delightfully specific, and believable, contours. Ginny is hurt when Melanie hides from her that she’s joined the roller derby in addition to ballet. Sasha calls Boo, rather than her parents, when she finds the door to her apartment open and is afraid to go inside. Ginny, Melanie, and Boo feel betrayed when Sasha makes a foray into cheerleading. The four research sex from every conceivable angle together when they’re considering sleeping with their boyfriends, only to be stumped by the condom options at the local drug store. And they’re all invested enough in Michelle to follow her on a road trip when they catch her sneaking off to Los Angeles for a dance audition. Michelle may not be the mentor all of them need in matters of the heart or how to run their lives—judging by her brief, impulsive marriage, she has enough trouble of her own. But they need creative inspiration as much as they need basic life skills advice, someone who can act as a reminder to them that the world is bigger than a little town in California, and that they’ll face bigger decisions than whether or not Boo and her boyfriend Carl should jump up their timetable for the first time they have sex. I could spend an infinite amount of time with these clever young girls and their daily dilemmas.
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“Why do the girls on Girls have sex?” Toni Bentley asked in a recent piece in Vogue. “This question arises in my mind while watching this terrific, smart HBO series that wraps up its second season on Sunday. The four quirky protagonists have sex frequently and easily and, hey, why not? They have the pill and we have the right to choose. But, what exactly are they choosing? Not pleasure, that’s for sure.” The rest of the piece is a disaster, including praising Adam’s disregard of Natalia’s sexual comfort for what Bentley calls his “I-am-not-a-prisoner-of-feminism chutzpah.” But it’s an excellent question, and one that gets at an important question that also came up at one of the panels I moderated at SXSW: why it’s so much easier to depict bad sex in pop culture than good sex.

The thing about Girls is that the characters actually have—or are implied to have had—a fair amount of decent sex in it. We may not see Ray and Shoshanna in bed while they’re having sex, but they certainly seem reasonably happy, and sex doesn’t come up in Shoshanna’s litany of complaints when they break up—instead, Shoshanna insists that “I can’t be the only thing you like.” Whatever problems Jessa and Thomas-John had, they weren’t about sexual compatability. When Hannah has sex with Sandy, her short-lived boyfriend from the early episodes of the season, their encounters seem happy and unfraught. During her lost weekend with Joshua, when Hannah asks him to get her off, rather than her having to oblige first, there’s nothing baroque or even particularly inventive about the encounter, but Hannah looks happy, lost in Joshua’s touch. And when Charlie goes down on Marnie in the season finale, she talks about how much she’s enjoying herself, even if she doesn’t seem particularly able to get lost in the moment.

So why do the bad moments stand out more than these? Girls has become almost notorious for its scenes where characters express their fantasies, or where characters have bad sex due to a lack of assertion, compatibility, or poor sexual communication. In the finale, Natalia, who tells Adam during sex “I can like your cock and not be a whore, okay?” before asking him to “Slow down. Can you slow down for me, babe?” appears to get at least some of what she wants out of sex, but, as their disturbing encounter in the previous episode revealed, she and Adam want fundamentally different things. Hannah’s poor sexual decision-making, like her decision to sleep with Laird while high on cocaine he helped her procure despite his efforts to maintain his own sobriety, or her compliance with Adam’s fantasies and sexual desires in the name of having experiences, have been one of the most-discussed elements of the show. When Marnie tells Charlie “This is what I keep trying to tell Hannah when she talks about all her wandering. There’s an endpoint. We have all these experiences so we can settle down,” she’s missing the point, too. The idea isn’t to stop having new experiences. It’s for those experiences to inform the characters’ sense of their own desires, and to make it easier for them to ask what they want.

Maybe part of the problem is that it’s easier to make clear that sex is going wrong than when—and to what degree—it’s going right. Watching Hannah struggle to take off her panties while lying on her stomach because that’s what Adam told her to do, or the high pitch of Natalia’s voice as she’s getting anxious, and the dip in register as she makes her displeasure clear, are easy ways to manifest discomfort. But choreographing sex scenes so that they look attractive to viewers at home isn’t the same thing as conveying what’s going on in the characters’ heads. One of the funniest, sharpest illustrations of this conundrum is the sex scene beween Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks in Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno. When the two characters, who have been close friends and roommates for a long time, finally have sex, the camera first lingers on their faces, focusing on their emotional involvement, and their reactions to what their bodies are doing, which remains off-screen. When the camera pulls out, they don’t appear to be doing anything special, and their co-producers on their pornographic movie look puzzled about what’s going on.

It’s an idea that offers some solutions for Girls if the show wants to shift its tone in the third season, and to be as notable for the good sex its characters have as well as for all the times things go awkward, and miserable, and wrong. The show’s made a name for itself by the amount of its actresses bodies it’s willing to put on screen, and the things it’s willing to show people doing with their bodies and to other people’s bodies. But maybe it’s time for Girls’ writers and directors to remember that their eyes—and a lot of their feelings about the things that are happening to their bodies—are up here.

The most recent episode of Girls aired while I was at South By Southwest, and in a way I’m glad I’ve had some time to watch the episode slowly, and to think about it before writing about it, given the flood of reaction and debate to the half-hour of television.

The storyline that’s provoked the most commentary has been a sequence towards the end of the episode in which Adam, after running into Hannah while on a date with his current girlfriend Natalia, falls off the wagon, takes Natalia back to his apartment, and when she expresses some dismay at the state of it, orders her on all fours and has her crawl to her bedroom. What commences there clearly makes Natalia uncomfortable from the outset. When Adam pulls off her panties and begins trying to get her aroused, she notes she hasn’t showered that day, which Adam interprets only as an expression of concern for him, rather than as a tactful attempt to ask him to stop. They have short-lived penetrative sex, at which point Adam pulls out and prepares to ejaculate on Natalia. Though she only tells him not to come on her dress, an injunction he complies with, she is obviously deeply distressed after the event, telling Adam “I, like, really didn’t like that.”

Much of the analysis of the episode has centered on the question of whether Adam committed a sexual assault against Natalia. “‘No means no,’” wrote my friend Amanda Hess at Slate, “is not the only measure of consent.” “This episode asks us why we’re so, so careful not to call things rape, or why we think there’s an acceptable level of reluctance, coercion, or intimidation that can be part of a sexual encounter,” Margaret Lyons writes at Vulture. Adam is clearly a man with boundary issues, someone I’ve found creepy enough to justify the cops showing up and creating some distance between him and Hannah. And while I think that the fact that this episode has been so upsetting, confusing, and sparked such a powerful debate about the space between an outright no and a clear yes that’s so often interpreted as consent to sex or sexual acts, I actually found myself focusing on something else: the fact that Adam was also portrayed as miserable and upset at the end of the encounter, too.

This is not to say that Adam’s feelings about his encounter with Natalia are more important than her feelings. But in his question to Natalia after she made clear how upset she was, “Is this it? Are you done with me?” there are some interesting issues, and potential answers to the question of how to train men, not just women, to prevent sexual assault.

Part of the reason I was so struck by this episode of Girls is because I’ve been rewatching How I Met Your Mother for a piece on what that show says about contemporary relationships. And I’ve been struck by the extent to which that show both fetishizes Barney Stinson’s (Neil Patrick Harris) conquests, and how much his technique has to do with impairment and manipulation of consent. On New Year’s in the first season he picks up Natalya, whose most important trait seems to be that she hails from “The former Soviet republic of Drunk-Off-Her-Ass-Istan,” as Barney puts it. Lily asks Barney at one point “they’re blonde and drunk, isn’t that your type?” But I can’t think of a moment when the show ever discusses the impact of sobriety on consent—it’s just a running joke that Barney likes to, and is very good, at taking advantage of women who are heavily intoxicated. He’s also a liar, changing his presentation of himself so women will be more likely to consent to sex with him. ” I’ve told some outrageous lies. I have told women that I was famous, a war hero, that sex with me would cure their nearsightedness,” he explains in season seven. And at one point, these deceptions do seem to cross over into a clear, and what ought to be ugly, taking of sexual advantage, when Barney explains that he likes to meet women new to New York “with no idea what a casting director could legally ask her to do, hold, or lick during an audition.”
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I don’t quote him often enough here, but Maclean’s critic Jamie Weinman is one of the people whose work I’m always most interested to read. And this meditation on how, narratively, popular cuture tends to overvalue looks because movies and television don’t do enough to establish other aspects of characters’ personalities, is a great illustration of why I feel that way about his work. Weinman argues persuasively that it’s actually quite hard to translate why couples come together for a mass audience without going to looks as a primary motivator:

The main reason for this is that in real life there are many different reasons why people would get together, beyond looks – which, after all, are subjective. But the actors are often playing characters who don’t have any of the redeeming qualities they have in real life. Woody Allen in real life is smart, talented and successful. But the people he plays in films are usually not very smart, talented or successful. (He was most plausible as a romantic lead in Annie Hall, one of the few movies where he really played someone on more or less his own level.) You can believe that the real Larry David could attract someone for reasons other than his money, while it’s hard to believe that of the fictional Larry David, since his bad qualities are so exaggerated.

It’s also very hard to establish any other reason beyond looks why characters are attracted to each other. It can be done, it’s just very hard, and maybe impossible to judge until you see the actors on film together. Writers try to do this all the time; any time there’s a couple, they try to establish some reasons why they’re in love, so it’s not just a superficial physical attraction. And a lot of the time, the reasons are unconvincing: they’re compatible because they engage in “witty” banter that isn’t witty at all, or they both like some poet the scriptwriter vaguely remembers hearing of.

This is probably also one of the reasons that so many shows in particular get themselves stuck on implausible will-they-or-won’t-they relationships. People have a lot of intangible reasons for staying apart from people who would actually be a good match for them—a newly-single Jess and Nick on New Girl are a good example of this apparent irrationality—but it’s very hard to communicate that kind of internal hedging. But because will-they-or-won’t-they relationships are one of the biggest form of stakes that comedies in particular can play with, sitcoms will keep going to that well, even if it’s something that’s hard to do well.

The young adult novelist Malinda Lo has, in a post about her efforts with colleague Cindy Pon to spend a year focused on diversity in young adult fiction, in two very concise paragraphs summed up the challenge felt by white creators who have the desire to include characters of color in their work, but are deeply concerned about committing cultural appropriation, falling into stereotype, or performing ugly mimicry that’s actually worse than keeping their stories lily-white:

I really appreciate writers who write outside their racial experience or sexual orientation. For one thing, there are many more white writers being published these days than writers of color, and if white writers can contribute to increasing the representation of people of color in the book market, I’m all for it. Second, I believe part of a writer’s job is to write about people who are different from her. I think it’s important that we do that. That we seek to tell stories that challenge us as writers on many levels — whether in characters or in plot or in style. Otherwise, we don’t grow as writers; we become mired in stories we’ve retold so many times they wear a groove in the stairs of our imaginations. I think that in order to truly fly, writers must do things that can cause us to crash and burn.

But I understand why writers are hesitant to write about characters who don’t share their race or sexual orientation. Cultural appropriation is real, and many of the guest posts about white/straight writers doing their research and attempting to get to the heart of their characters are, I think, sincere efforts to avoid cultural appropriation. I applaud that awareness, because I’ve read books that have been insanely popular, but have turned me off completely because they felt so much like cultural appropriation.

This is an issue that’s come up in debates about the monochromatic nature of the main cast in Girls. And it’s a good explanation for why so many people default to the idea that colorblindness in character writing—essentially, creating characters who are entirely unshaped and whose actions are undetermined by their racial or ethnic background—is progressive. As Marla Daniels put it on The Wire, you cannot lose if you do not play, and when it comes to race, a lot of white creators seem to agree with her: having a non-white character lets a show or movie look like its covering its bases, but refusing to actually create character details that are drawn from or rooted in that character’s race or ethnicity means that a writer or director doesn’t risk getting those details wrong. Race-blindness is more risk management strategy than a means of actually making television, movies, and books more diverse.

The thing about diversity is that it’s really not about numerical quotas—it’s about getting different kinds of experience, and different kinds of details on screen and on the page. And getting those details and experiences right is largely a matter of doing research about matters large and small, something that goes for white characters as well. If you’d make a character read Jewish by having him or her use the occasional Yiddishism and talk about the high holidays—the negotiation over Josh Girard’s TGS contract in 30 Rock, in which Jack offers him Sukkot off, is a great example of doing this—you can write detail that ties a Latino character to a country of their family’s origin in conversations about food, geography, religious practice, or any number of other characteristics. If you want to give an African-American character slang, or preferences, or style that aren’t generically and stereotypically black, think about region, which influences music, food, fashion, and experiences of racism—Boston has expressions of bigotry that are different from, say, those in Georgia.

In other words, treat characters of color like you’d treat white ones: as people who pop off the screen or the page in direct relation to the amount of work and detail that’s gone into building them as believable and complete human beings. If a creator is worried that adding details and nuances that are drawn from a character’s race and ethnicity will swamp that character, making them only legible as black, Latino or Asian, that means you’re not doing enough to develop that character, to think about how they in particular might react to experiences that might be common to someone of their heritage, and what specifically they’d take away from being the subject of a racially motivated traffic stop, an assumption that they’re undocumented, or an incident where someone treats them as if they’re either a genius or sexually inadequate. Running generic scenarios with a specific character in mind, even if those thought experiments don’t make it into a final product, can be a way of testing your own thinking about that character’s identity and uniqueness, and developing a set of consistent behaviors that will guide their reactions to all kinds of events, racially-motivated or no.

This is work I think writers don’t always realize they’re doing with white characters, because the details are familiar and easily available to them. But just because you don’t have to reach for the details of a bar mitzvah, a Lutheran wedding, or tailgating at Ole Miss doesn’t mean those nuances aren’t signifying racial identities, experiences, and allegiances. And just because you don’t know much about Mexican Catholicism, regional Chinese cooking, or the origins and contemporary reception of Kwanza, for example, doesn’t mean those details aren’t out there to be found. You may not be able to lose if you don’t touch race with a ten-foot pole. But your work, and the consumers of it, definitely can.

I don’t remotely agree with my sometimes-Slate colleagues David Haglund and Daniel Engber that this week’s episode of Girls, in which Hannah hooks up with a handsome doctor whose trash cans she’s been misusing, was “the worst episode of Girls ever.” But something that the two of them said that struck me as particularly truthful in a revealing way:

Engber: I felt trapped by my unwillingness to buy into the central premise. Narcissistic, childish men sleep with beautiful women all the time in movies and on TV, so why should this coupling be so difficult to fathom? I think it’s because Hannah is especially and assertively ugly in this episode. She’s rude (“what did you do?” she asks Joshua, referring to his broken marriage), self-centered (“I’m too smart and too sensitive”), sexually ungenerous (“no, make me come”), and defiantly ungraceful (naked ping-pong). In sum, the episode felt like a finger poked in my guys-on-Girls eyeball, or a double-dog dare for me to ask, How can a girl like that get a guy like this? Am I small-minded if I’m stuck on how this fantasy is too much of a fantasy and remembering what Patrick Wilson’s real-life partner looks like?…

Haglund: resumably there are things that Hannah would not, in any world that resembled our own, get. Such as Patrick Wilson, for instance. I want to suspend my disbelief—just as viewers have, for generations, imagined that Al could get Peggy and Homer could get Marge and Jim Belushi could snag Courtney Thorne-Smith. But the show needs to work harder to make that seem feasible. And not pile implausibility upon implausibility.

Why is it that we believe that Jim Belushi could plausibly be married to Courtney Thorne-Smith? Or that Katherine Heigl’s character in Knocked Up, a beautiful, upwardly mobile entertainment reporter would end up with pre-weight-loss, unemployed Seth Rogen, simply because his character stepped up by performing the basic adult human task of obtaining a job? And why is it that we don’t believe a sexually available weirdo like Hannah Horvath could have a several-day fling with a depressive, divorcing, lonely doctor because he happens to be played by Patrick Wilson? Is it that in men, being funny is considered the equivalent of being beautiful for women? Are male characters are required to have one positive characteristic, whether it’s a sense of charm, or the expressed desire to not be a a deadbeat, where women need to be both a certain level of hot, as well as be desirable in other ways? Are movies and TV that feature pairing between schlubby guys and attractive women really doing the equivalent amount of work it would take to make long-term relationships between those characters credible that it would apparently require folks to believe that someone might want to keep Hannah around for a couple of days?

I can see how Hannah’s hookup with Joshua might not have been plausible for everyone in the audience. After all, who invites random strangers into their living room for lemonade, as Joshua did when Hannah showed up at his door after spotting him at Grumpy’s? How many of us kiss random strangers simply because we’re on a quest to have dramatic experiences that will be fodder for later fiction writing? But I think there’s a strong case that we’re simply more used to seeing men date and marry above themselves, at least when it comes to looks, in popular culture. That doesn’t mean that those pairings are, themselves, more credible, or that more work’s gone into making them credible, just that we’ve had more training in suspending disbelief when it comes to them.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar took to his Huffington Post blog last week to review Girls. While I think he has some points worth considering about his show, I was actually more struck by his follow-up, in which he writes about the reaction to a professional basketball player writing cultural criticism—much of which ignored the fact that Abdul-Jabbar has both acted and written history. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

Some questioned why a man my age would watch a show about girls in their twenties, as if they’d just discovered me hanging around a school playground with a shopping bag full of candy in one hand a fluffy puppy in the other. Of course, these critics are right. When I read Moby Dick I first had to convince the bookseller that I was a former whaler named Queequeg. When I read the poetry of Sylvia Plath, I had to pretend I was a depressed white woman with daddy issues. Don’t worry, I used a fake ID.

One of the strangest, and most persistently irritating assumptions in popular culture is, as I’ve written before, the idea that white men are general interest, while women and people of color are niche subjects. It’s bizarre to me that we would think that women are interested in stories about men, and how they view sex, work, and power, all subjects that affect us, whether we have male lovers and partners, male bosses and coworkers, or simply male relatives and friends, but that men wouldn’t be interested in what insights fiction can give them into their families, friends, lovers, coworkers, or objects of distant desire. It’s a framework that assumes that men are hopelessly myopic, which is awfully condescending, but it’s also one that gives men who pay attention to culture created by and about women extra points for reaching out beyond the range of their own experience. It’s nice to see Abdul-Jabbar give that thumb on the scale precisely the bemused side-eye it deserves.