Over at Vulture yesterday, Margaret Lyons did a great public service, sorting out television dramas that have aired on both broadcast networks and cable this season by which ones featured rape or murder as plot lines, and which ones don’t. Unsurprisingly, the shows that include rape and murder—even as a one-off plot rather than a regularly featured occurrence, as in Nashville—dramatically outnumber the ones that find their stakes elsewhere, 109 to 16. As NPR critic Linda Holmes wrote last year, it’s exhausting to have a world of television where the only stakes that are treated as if they’re worthy of long-form exploration are “avoiding being violently killed.” And so I thought it was worth looking through the list of sixteen shows that haven’t gone to the rape or murder well to see what other kinds of stakes seem to be playing well—or at least moderately well—on scripted drama.

1. The realization of creative ambition: Bunheads, Glee, Smash, The Wedding Band, Nashville, Underemployed, to a certain extent The Newsroom are all shows that fall into this category. Creative ambition works well on television for a couple of reasons. Writing a song or story, preparing for a performance or a broadcast, or going after a contract or a part is an essentially procedural process: it has a beginning, middle, and an end point. Having creativity as the stakes also lets television dramas do what the most popular reality shows of the modern era of TV have done: invest audiences in big musical performances. Creativity shows run into trouble, just as reality programs like American Idol do, when they try to sell us on people who aren’t compellingly talented on their own merits, as has been the case with Smash, and is true to a certain extent with the dramatic overemphasis on the goodness of Will McAvoy in The Newsroom. But just as murder and sexual assault turn ordinary people into people who are worthy of dramatic consideration by injecting extraordinarily high stakes into their lives, creativity shows focus on people to whom we assign an extraordinary amount of societal capital in real life.

2. Period pieces: We’ve got a modest, but not extraordinarily large number of period dramas on television right now: Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife, Mr. Selfridge, and The Carrie Diaries. And it’s no mistake that three of those four shows air on PBS, which has built its brand in part in opposition to the prevailing winds of television, and is ahead of the curve on programming to viewers who are burned out on violent storylines elsewhere. It’s also done so with imports: Downton and Call The Midwife are both British shows that PBS has the rights to air. Other period shows, like The Americans, make heavy use of violence. But situating characters in the past tends to lend a sheen of significance to ordinary lives by letting those characters stand in for larger forces. Lady Mary and Cousin Matthew may be just ordinary rich people we’d find sort of irksome if they were will-they-or-won’ting-they through the twentieth century. But from a distance of decades, the reasons that it took them so long to get together, questions about their relative sexual experience, and the importance of Lady Mary’s pregnancy become unfamiliar and newly exciting.

3. Family stories: This is a category that comedy seems to be doing better, or at least with greater frequency, than drama at the moment. But NBC’s Parenthood, and ABC Family’s Switched at Birth have both been useful illustrations of how making whether or not family gets along or holds together or finds its way together can elevate other conflicts. Parenthood and Switched At Birth have been staging grounds for all kinds of other stories, including recognition of creative ambition plotlines, political involvement arcs, and illness and autism stories. If audiences get hooked by what happens when individual characters’ actions influence their group of friends, the consequences are even more significant when their actions can blow up or restore the bonds of family.

4. Procedurals with below-death stakes: In this group fall the quickly-cancelled Emily Owens M.D. and the hardier Necessary Roughness, Suits, and The Client List. The middle two are USA Network shows, which, with its Blue Sky brand, works somewhat like PBS in programming to people who want a different, but relatively predictable, tone from much of what they’re offered on networks and cable. Often the problems characters face on USA’s procedurals are engaging precisely because they’re sort of silly, or because the people who have the problems are silly, or because the means in which they’re resolved are silly. Maybe the cure for television’s rape and murder epidemic isn’t just getting more creative about the stakes involved, but in how main characters solve crimes or medical problems and reach resolutions.

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.

In the wake of last week’s dust-up over Glee, and a long conversation with me and others, Friend of the Blog S.E. Smith has written a post with an important reminder: there are a lot of people who hit their breaking point with that show much earlier than I did, and for whom pop culture is much, much less attentive to their needs:

Arturo and I both discussed the fact that it’s been heavily criticised since the start for the depiction of people with disabilities and people of colour, but this hasn’t gotten much traction. Glee has also done fairly terribly with domestic violence and sexual assault since close to the beginning, and while it may have been lauded for its depiction of queer youth, as Alyssa points out, even those depictions are sinking into a mire…As often happens, when an issue doesn’t directly affect you or a cause you’re close to, you tend to ignore it. Hence, most people ignoring criticisms from the disability community and people of colour when it came to the show’s depictions of our lived identities.

In the mixed-up world of television hierarchies, gay people are a lot better off than many other minorities. The fights against bullying and homophobia are no longer entirely lonely or isolated battles: participating in them can be a way of gaining social capital in a way that, for instance, the fight for accessibility or standing with poor single mothers of color tend not to be. Gay people are a long way from full equality here in the U.S. and elsewhere, but gay characters appear more frequently and with greater nuance than disabled ones, and Hollywood has more powerful gay men than, say, women of color. There’s nothing wrong with wanting, and pushing for, more and more representative storytelling about LGBT people, a fight I’m fully in support of.

But when, relative to other folks who may be your allies, or who may be members of your community (it’s not like being gay means you can’t be disabled, or that you’re necessarily white), you’re in a position of power, it’s important to be gracious and thoughtful about the needs of other people who feel underrepresented and misrepresented. There are a lot of people who say that Glee has been powerful and life-affirming for a lot of young gay people, and I’m absolutely sure that it’s true. Whatever my objections to the many other facets of the show, its treatment of young gay couples is rich, nuanced, and equalizing. But Kurt Hummel’s story comes packaged with other storylines that marginalize and make small the lives of other people who have less hope of changing their station and less family support than he does.

As progressives, we should want better. Not every cultural artifact has to be about every oppression. That’s impossible, and a lot of subjects would benefit from a tight, stand-alone focus that elevate them as issues rather than using them as a spice in an Overcoming Difficulties Potpourri. The Surrogate, an exceedingly warm, funny romantic comedy about sex and disability that will be huge Oscar bait later this year does precisely that. Girls may not capture all of New York, but it does well on reproductive rights and sexual health issues without—and your mileage may vary—regularly taking a hammer to people who face challenges that its main characters do not.

Things aren’t perfect, by any means. But we shouldn’t feel so desperate for any representation of people who aren’t straight, white, gender-conforming and able-bodied that we champion those that do gravely wrong by other people in the frame. If Hollywood products want credit for being progressive, and they want the awards and accolades and social approbation that comes along with being groundbreaking*, we should have the confidence to demand of them that at minimum they try to avoid doing harm.

*Which is, of course, different from critical acclaim, as it should be. If folks want to be treated as if they have a special category of impact, I see nothing wrong with holding them to a higher standard.

Since Glee‘s debut in 2009, one of the major criticisms of the show has been that it’s immoral. Glee has been criticized for the racy photoshoot its stars, who play high schoolers though they’re of legal age, did for GQ, for its relatively realistic portrayal of teen sex and drinking, for its well-developed gay characters and most recently, for its sympathetic treatment of a new transgender character. Most of these criticisms say more about the people mounting them than Glee itself. But over the past two seasons, it’s become impossible to escape the conclusion that Glee is an immoral show, but not for the reason cultural conservatives believe. It’s become a show that’s not just sloppy but exploitative and manipulative of serious societal issues and human experiences. And it’s time to walk away, even for hate-watching purposes.

One of the biggest structural problems with Glee has always been its attention deficit disorder. Major life events and hugely consequential actions pop up without warning to provide drama in episodes and then vanish whether they’re resolved or not, never to be mentioned again. Most of the time, that gets dismissed as laziness, the result of a fragmented writing room, an inevitable consequence of Ryan Murphy’s style. Murphy gets a lot of credit for sensitively portraying the lives of sexual minorities in particular. But it’s time to start calling him what he is: a cynical exploiter of oppressed people who has very little actual interest in actually exploring their experiences in rich, complex, compassionate ways.

Last night’s episode of Glee was a disgustingly egregious example of this trend. In this hour, we learn that McKinley High’s football coach Shannon Beiste has been hit by her husband, a football scout whose initial appearance served mostly to escalate the rivalry between Coach Beiste and Jane Lynch’s cheerleading Coach Sylvester and has rarely been mentioned again. We know that Coach Beiste fell so hard for her husband in part because she’s often felt unlovable, but their relationship plays essentially no role in the show, and Coach Beiste is not a character whose inner life the show consistently explores. So when we found out that he was hitting her because “He had been bugging me all weekend to do the dishes, but I forgot,” and that, “As soon as it happened, right away he was so sorry, and started crying and begging me to forgive him,” after a bad, and horrendously inappropriate rendition of “Cell Block Tango,” the development came out of nowhere. Glee wouldn’t do something this bad to a character the show actually has something invested in—God forbid we explore teen partner violence, a subject that after Yeardley Love’s killing at the hands of her ex-boyfriend George Hughley at the University of Virginia might be worth discussing with these kids. No, instead Glee inflicts something dreadful on a character who’s there solely to elicit reactions from the main cast, the show beats up on the masculine woman who fears she’s unloveable.

And then, having made her a victim, the show can’t even handle it in a genuinely serious way. The plot became the B story to Kurt and Rachel’s NYADA auditions. There’s no question that those scenes are an important moment and one the show has been moving to for more than a year. And it definitely reflects teenaged myopia to privilege that event over a subject as serious as domestic violence. But there should be a distinction between the show’s priorities and its characters, a test the show failed miserably last night.
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The bridge is yours.

-How Fenway Park reached its 100th birthday.

-Matt Zoller Seitz on Veep and June Thomas talks to Armando Iannucci.

-The worst heroes in pop culture.

-Earth’s most adorable Avengers.

-Glee may be a huge mess, but the voices of some of its stars are just undeniable:

Maybe I am just an Old, but do kids these days listen to Perez Hilton? Who knew!

I have to say, though, if Rock the Vote had access to the stars from Glee (Darren Criss shows up in this video), it would have been fun to see them knock out some renditions of Schoolhouse Rock’s best songs about voting rights and civic involvement. I want to see Naya Rivera sing “Suffering ‘Til Suffrage”:

Movies are rarely precisely what you expect going into them, but it’s rare that I’ve attended a movie with so few hopes as I had for 21 Jump Street, Jonah Hill’s seemingly-unnecessary remake of the classic television series about cops gone undercover in a high school starring Johnny Depp, and emerged so thoroughly happy. Gone are the after-school special themes of the original, and in their place is an anarchic, often quite sweet action comedy about an odd couple on the trail of a synthetic drug that still manages to take on issues ranging from rising tides in popular opinion as represented by high school students to angry black cop cliches, represented here by Ice Cube. As he explains to Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Hill) after they’re reassigned to his squad following an unsuccessful stint on bike patrol, he’s black, he’s a cop, and sometimes he gets angry.

The movie’s smartest, most subtle move may be its imagination of how, in the five years between Jenko and Schmidt’s graduation and their return as undercovers, high school has changed dramatically. Out with the muscle cars, and in with the vehicles powered by leftover cooking oil from the Chinese place. Acing your admission to UC Berkley is the new cool. Gay kids of color are fully integrated into the popular crew. Jenko, who finds himself displaced in the new hierarchy, the meathead slouch and eagerness with a punch that served him so well five years ago now liabilities, blames all the changes on pop culture, declaring “Fuck Glee!” But he’s liberated by the chance to set off bottle rockets and exchange lightsaber secret handshakes with the nerds, just as Schmidt gets another chance at creating decent high school memories. And while it’s not as if movies from Clueless to Ten Things I Hate About You to Mean Girls haven’t been delineating new cliques for years, there’s something refreshing about 21 Jump Street‘s suggestion that there’s been a fundamental shift in values.

It takes nothing away from that articulation that it’s embedded in a very violent, very funny, very silly action movie. It’s a delight to see Channing Tatum, who never quite seems to be taken seriously even as he’s done everything from staying light on his feet in Step Up; to playing wounded and violent in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (the movie that Hill says made him want to work with Tatum on 21 Jump Street); to putting in a turn in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies; be loose and profoundly goofy. If he wants to, Tatum could develop some of the antic physicality of Vince Vaughn. And while I’ve often found Jonah Hill a somewhat distant presence, the opening sequence in the movie, when he’s a trembling, bleach-blonde Slim Shady clone who harbors no more baroque dreams than attendance at prom is tremendously endearing (even if it harkens back to my senior year a decade ago rather than to 2007). Watching them bumble through action sequences that simultaneously honor and point out the ridiculousness of the conventions of the genre is a delight, particularly in one sequence where they blow up a truck full of chickens.

The women are negligible. Ellie Kemper is funny in a tiny turn as a teacher who can’t quite stay within the bounds of propriety when Jenko shows up in her AP Chemistry class, for which he is manifestly unprepared. Brie Larson has slightly more to do as Molly, the vivacious high school senior who become Schmidt’s ticket both to school’s main dealer and to membership in the popular crowd. But Jenko and Schmidt’s relationships with women isn’t really the point—as Tatum said after the screening when asked about his transition from romances to comedies, “well, it’s a bromance.” And it’s to Jenko that Schmidt turns after a moment and trauma and realization, telling him “Okay, let’s make a baby.”

I very much wanted to like Smash, NBC’s show about the making of a Broadway musical, and not just because I’m eager for the generally well-intentioned network to be repaid for Parks and Recreation and Community with some huge commercial successes. I’m interested in people’s artistic processes, and I adore Anjelica Huston and Debra Messing, who star as the show’s book writer and producer, respectively. But the show isn’t drawing the kind of numbers NBC would have hoped for, particularly for a show they would have loved to monetize the way Fox has turned Glee into a cash cow, with iTunes sales and a spin-off live show. And it’s not really working creatively, either.

Perhaps the central problem of Smash is that it’s predicated on a rivalry that the show is contorting itself to make plausible. There’s no question that Ivy (Megan Hilty) deserves the lead in the Marilyn musical under development over Karen (Katherine McPhee): she’s a more polished Broadway singer, a more accomplished dancer, she has much more experience on the stage, she’s a physical match for Marilyn, and she’s a more dedicated professional. So how does Smash make it seem like an emotionally engaged contest? By making Ivy a shallow bitch. While we get Karen’s home life with her devoted boyfriend and trips home to her friends and supportive family in Iowa, Ivy gets a single phone call home, where it’s clear that things aren’t all right, but we never get any details. Even though she’s clearly more qualified, we’re told Ivy only really gets the part because she slept with Derek, the director, a convenient drama-driving plot device that also happens to reduce a talented performer. Now that we’re in rehearsals, we see Ivy pushing Karen (now a member of the chorus) to the side, even though she’s not exactly doing her job. It’s contrived and irritating.

Then, there’s the show-within-a-show itself. The characters talk endlessly about Marilyn Monroe without revealing anything particularly interesting about her character. The numbers themselves are charming, but ultimately light—maybe it’s just me, but I’m not particularly moved by a faux Marilyn cooing about manipulating men with her sex appeal. The show tells us, rather than shows us, that these artists are having profound experiences with the material—though it does a nice job of showing us how sexy artists can be to non-artists when they’re in their zones.

And I wonder if that combination of material and setting is what’s preventing Smash from becoming the grown-up version of Glee—and would prevent it from being that show even if everything else was clicking. Glee is a hot mess these days, but it can be genuinely daring and moving when it takes on the subject of gay teenagers. But it does so in a setting where everything else is familiar: this is a small town populated with relatively familiar archetypes, the students attend an essentially typical high school, and they’re singing songs almost everyone in the viewing audience has heard before. The gay characters are a minority in a largely straight world. It’s a show that is sometimes about tolerance, and asking to do that from a very safe space for straight, middle-American viewers.

Smash, on the other hand, is asking viewers to come into a world where women and straight men are dominant, framed by music that’s original rather than familiar. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, per se—shows shouldn’t have to star straight dudes to be successful. But I do think that it might be a sign of NBC’s unwillingness or inability to accept that it’s going to have to make some genuinely popular entertainment to score a smash hit. What makes Glee easy to consume isn’t just the renditions of popular hits—it’s the setting. It’s not actually a natural sege from the cover extravaganza that is The Voice and its quartet of judges who represent the full spectrum of the music business to a show about the making of a Broadway musical.

NBC needs to recognize the difference between the two and decide what kind of entertainment it wants to make. If it’s going to make quirky shows or shows that imply that rivals like Glee aren’t grown-up enough, NBC may be consigning itself to a smaller but wealthier group of viewers who are desirable to advertisers. But if it’s going to make big, mass entertainment that it endeavors to make somewhat smarter than its competitors offerings, it needs to do so without giving the impression that it resents having to do it.

The bridge is yours.

-Todd VanDerWerff on Glee. Even more than usual.

-Nuclear submarines are the new big pop culture trend.

-Ashley Tisdale and Louis C.K., because why not?

-Your visual cheat sheet to Hugo, which if you’re going to see one Oscar-nominated movie before this weekend, I recommend.

-Speaking of which, Oscar Etiquette: