Huffington Post television critic and friend of the blog Maureen Ryan talked to a bunch of comedy showrunners and came up with seven ideas for what’s holding comedy development and the growth of comedy audiences back. You should read it to consider all of them, but I wanted to pull out this particular point:

3. For a show to succeed on a broadcast network right now, does it have to appeal to a wider range of people?

The characters on “Modern Family” — one of the few solid comedy hits in recent years — represent many age ranges and ethnicities, and the comedy appeals to a similarly wide range of viewers. Groff says that the history of “Happy Endings” has served as something of a “reality check” for him — and perhaps for networks buying younger-skewing shows.

“I do go, ‘We did a pretty good version [of a show about people under 30]: a funny, appealing, accessible show with a great cast, and it’s struggling,’” Groff said. The answer might be to make sure that future shows “definitely appeal to enough” 35- to 49-year-old viewers, and find ways to “monetize or count in the ratings the ones who watch other ways,” he said.

I’m a big believer in the idea that shows should be more diverse for practical reasons: you’ll have more hooks on which to hang plot points and character conflicts, and more details with which to build up your characters into actual people, and if you do well in developing characters who reflect markets that are underserved, you might actually pull in viewers you didn’t know were out there for you to find.

But I don’t know that this alone is enough to pull in four-quadrant viewership, and a lot of viewers from all of those quadrants. If representing a diverse range of experiences alone was enough to make a show a monster hit, Community and Go On should be bucking with Modern Family in the rankings, but if I start thinking about that scenario too much, I’ll get depressed. Instead, I think the key to Modern Family isn’t just that it represents so many kinds of people, but what it represents them doing. In Modern Family, young or old, male or female, gay or straight, white or Latino, you can live in gorgeous, expansive California homes, in financial security, with strong family support, and a lot of sunshine. Similarly, NCIS a drama that includes nerds and punks, frat boys and Mossad officers, an irascible Brit and the ur-daddy figure of television, Leroy Jethro Gibbs himself, all kicking ass in the name of American security.

It may be that characters provide useful hooks for viewers, but setting and scenario matter more. The Big Bang Theory, for example, features characters that many viewers can’t identify with or wouldn’t want to identify with because they’re geniuses, esoteric scientists, or have significant social deficiencies. But as nerd culture has taken over mass media and nerds have accrued social capital, it makes sense that a world of geeks would suddenly be a much more desirable setting. Similarly, the world of Two and a Half Men bears no resemblance to my actual life, and probably isn’t a place I’d care to visit if I were mysteriously zapped into my television (I would most likely end up running a spritely news blog in Pawnee, Indiana), but I can see why a playboy’s world is one that plenty of folks would be amused to drop in on.

The problem is that finding appealing scenarios is an awful lot more difficult and less predictable than plugging in demographics and casting accordingly. But viewers deserve both. It’s not enough to be represented on screen if the person you’re supposed to relate to isn’t doing anything you find appealing or admirable.

On Friday, Happy Endings, ABC’s warm, wonderful sitcom that’s a cross between the chosen-family dynamic of Friends and the anarchic pop culture analysis of Community, debuted in a new timeslot to just 3 million viewers, and a 0.9 rating in the valuable 18-49 demographic. Two days later, The Walking Dead, AMC’s violent zombie drama, finished its third season with 12.4 million viewers, 8.4 million of them between the ages of 18 and 49. These two disparate bits of data could be evidence for a lot of different ideas: the general ascendence of cable over broadcast networks, for example, or the American viewing public’s appetite for violent media. But I want to use it to point out something different, and something that I think plays a larger role than is generally acknowledged in the failure of some broadcast shows and the success of turning many cable shows into must-see TV: unpredictable broadcast television scheduling has made it impossible to turn any single television show into a predictable viewing event.

When Happy Endings debuted in 2011, its first episode aired at 9:31 PM even though the show would normally be airing at 10PM. After the third episode, ABC began doubling up the episodes, airing one at 10PM and another at 10:30. In the second season, the show moved to 9:30 PM. In its third, Happy Endings aired first on Tuesdays at 9 PM, then on Sundays with Don’t Trust The B—- In Apt. 23, and now on the Wednesday time slot that’s done so poorly. While in the show’s first season, episodes 1-12 ran on consecutive weeks without a break in between, there was a three-month gap between the 12th episode, which aired on May 25, and the thirteenth, which aired on August 24. In the second season, the episodes ran in consecutive weeks with a break for Thanksgiving until December, when ABC aired one episode, then took the show off the air until January. And in this third season, the show went off the air for two months, between January 29 and March 29. In between the shifts of time slot and the gaps in between episodes, it makes sense that Happy Endings would get whittled down to a core group of viewers who were committed enough to follow it from day to day and from month to month: who else could possibly be expected to chase the show across the calendar for years at a time?

Scheduling changes like this are due to a number of factors, among them high rates of show failure and the excessive length of the traditional broadcast season. Happy Endings moved to Sundays to replace the cancelled 666 Park Avenue, and networks often shuffle shows around to plug holes on their schedules that emerge as new shows fail to attract audiences and are removed form the calendar. And no show on network can both be aired every week and fill out a season that’s eight months long when the standard broadcast network order is for around 22 episodes of a program. This mismatch ought to create opportunities for networks to pair up existing shows with miniseries, shorter-run series with expensive stars like The Following, for which Fox promised Kevin Bacon he’d only have to do 15 episodes a year, or launches of new shows towards the end of the year, as was the strategy for another ABC show, Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, which has grown into a genuine hit in its second—but first full-length—season. But in reality, it frequently makes for lumpy seasons with long breaks. Parks and Recreation may be the show on network television to which I am most emotionally attached but now, if I didn’t feel a professional obligation to watch it in a timely fashion (something I do on Hulu the morning after rather than the night of), I’d let the episodes pile up on my DVR until I could have the pleasure of a long, luxuriant evening with it, rather than risk disappointment by clearing my Thursdays only to find that the show isn’t on.
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It’s the top-ten list time of year, and as I’m catching up on some shows and sifting through my list of favorites, I’ve been struck by how many fantastic performances we’ve seen in television this year. While some are obvious continuations of dominant streaks, like Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul’s turns on Breaking Bad, or Tina Fey’s embrace of happiness on 30 Rock, there are some truly astonishing turns going down on shows that almost no one is watching, or in shows that are so crowded with flashy performances that these are in danger of being overlooked. Here are five of the actors whose work hit me hardest this year:

1. Khandi Alexander, Treme: I ran a little behind Treme this season, but catching up on it this week, I regretted that. Much of that regret comes from how marvelous Alexander is as LaDonna Batiste-Williams. As a bar owner trying to keep her place alive, and determined to see through the prosecution of the men who robbed and sexually assaulted her, Alexander is by turns moody and joyful. Whether she’s feuding with her husband’s wealthy family, cooly cussing out a man demanding protection money from her, finally taking the stand in her much-delayed trial, or developing a tender friendship with Albert Lambreaux, Alexander’s been given the chance to be as complete a female character as I’ve seen on television in a long time. “Burnt me out for nothing,” she said in the season finale when her case ended in a heartbreaking mistrial. But it’s not nothing to those of us who have been watching at home.

2. Andra Fuller, The L.A. Complex: It is a source of considerable sadness to me that so few people found it in themselves to watch The L.A. Complex, an incredibly sharp ensemble show about what it actually takes to become successful in the entertainment industry. The cast is strong up and down the lineup, but if there was justice in the business, this should have been a breakout performance for Andra Fuller as closeted rapper Kaldrick King. King is one of the most sexual and emotional gay characters ever to appear on network television, and as he battered a young lover, made amends with him and reconnected with his father, and began a relationship with a handsome young lawyer who gave him the courage to come out, Fuller acted the hell out of every scene.

3. Eliza Coupe, Happy Endings: I spoke to Eliza Coupe earlier this season about her approach to physical comedy, playing uptight, and being half of one of only a few interracial couples on television. Since then, her performance as Jane Kerkovich-Williams has only gotten deeper and funnier. Whether she’s going overboard in enjoying being the breadwinner in her family, sneaking a perfectly-prepared turkey into her sister’s house to ensure that Thanksgiving isn’t a disaster, or revisiting the origin of her relationship with her husband Brad, Jane’s exploded the idea that being controlling means you have to be a humorless bitch, and I love her for it.

4. Charles Dance and Maisie Williams, Game of Thrones: Peter Dinklage probably has Game of Thrones‘ acting awards slot locked up as long as Tyrion Lannister lives. But that’s too bad, because Dance and Williams spent this year putting on the best cross-generational acting clinic on television as Tywin Lannister and Arya Stark. They’re people who should be mortal enemies, but, isolated from their families and in service to larger causes, find themselves understanding each other. I could watch the two of them dance around each other in Harrenhal’s great hall for ten hours a year.

5. Walton Goggins, Justified: Goggins, who’s been everywhere from Sons of Anarchy to Lincoln this year, probably has the best shot of anyone on this list of scoring an actual Emmy nomination. As Boyd Crowder, Goggins has taken an archetype, a racist redneck, and infused the role with an injection of coal-country rage, tenderness towards his surrogate father Arlo Givens, and a spiky relationship with Arlo’s son Raylan, who is his sometime-enemy, sometime-ally. I can’t wait to see where their rivalry heads next. Goggins was good on The Shield, but I think he’s even better on Justified.

One of my favorite sitcoms is Happy Endings, ABC’s show about a group of friends who live in Chicago. Much like Modern Family found a way to revitalize the family sitcom (though it’s fallen off notably in quality), Happy Endings found new juice in the group-of-close-friends comedy. In part, it did so by changing what that group of friends looked like, adding Max (Adam Pally), who became one of the most innovative gay characters on television simply by being a person rather than a stereotype, and Jane Kerkovich-Williams (Eliza Coupe) and Brad Williams (Damon Wayans, Jr.), a loony-for-each-other new married couple who also happen to be one of the rare interracial couples on television. But it’s also a mile-a-minute joke factory deeply rooted in the characters’ quirks and the specifics of their relationships with each other, whether Max is dosing Penny (Casey Wilson), who he’s been taking care of after she has an accident, with sleepy tea so he can get at her physical therapist, or food truck operator Dave (Zachary Knighton) and Jane’s younger sister Alex (Elisha Cuthbert), whose broken engagement kicked off the series, are trying to date again while denying that they’re in a serious relationship.

Coupe and I spoke in advance of the third season of Happy Endings, which returns to ABC tonight at 9 PM, about Jane, whose combination of obsessive-compulsion and gleefully whacked-out sexual chemistry with Brad have made her one of my favorite characters in television. She told me where her style of physical comedy comes from, how she draws on her own marriage for inspiration, and why New England WASPs are so hilarious. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’ve noticed that you have a very specific approach to physical comedy: Jane gets a lot of mileage out of being very stiff or very boneless. Is that something you developed for her character, or does it come out of personal experience?

It’s really funny, because I used to play ice hockey as a kid. I grew up in New Hampshire. I’m from Plymouth, New Hampshire. It was a thing. My dad was a semi-pro hockey player, both of my brothers played, I mean, I was raised by a boy. I was taught to box, I was taught to play hockey, I played baseball and softball for a while. And it was always an ongoing joke, like when I played hockey, I was so stiff on the ice. My dad would be like, “You gotta crouch down, Liz.” And I’m like, “I know,” and he’s like “No, you gotta get down towards the ice.” And I’d be like this, and I thought it was really funny. I was like, I’m such a stiff person. But then I started realizing that can be really funny. It’s either zero or a hundred with me. I’m either that, or I’m like [in a funny voice] “What’s up?” completely loose, because I think I got so much criticism for being that way, so it was like, let’s do both. The physical comedy of it all, saying all of that, I mean, there was one episode in the first season where I’m drunk and I’m all over the place. But it’s fun to go to extremes. I was obsessed with Jim Carrey, like obsessed, and I was obsessed with, I think Sandra Bullock also does some great physical comedy, and I think subconsciously, I may locked that and my head and said “Oh, that’s how you do it.”

I also think with women, either women are supposed to be totally relaxed and loose or they’re thought to be uptight. You seem to mine a lot of comedy from perfectionism, from people holding themselves together when they really want to just let go.

I think that’s what I love about my character. Coming form New England, which you know, the WASPY “Everything’s fine!” but on the inside they’re just completely crumbling. That’s how I feel like my aunts and my mothers are: “Everything’s great! Everything’s fine! We’re fine! Good, good, good, everything’s fine!” But turn a corner and they’re alone and they’re like “Oh my God! Everything’s falling apart!” And I think watching someone who’s unhinged try to hold it together is one of the funniest things. And I think that it’s far more interesting, unless, of course, we let them be completely unhinged. Whenever I see, on a movie or in a play, watching someone completely full-on cry is not as interesting as watching them trying not to cry. In real life, I’ll cry by myself, alone, in a private place, at home or with my husband. But around a lot of people, if I’m emotional, I’m going to try to hold it together, which is actually, if you’re going to put a camera on that and give it a time slot of 9 o’clock on Tuesday nights, is funny.

One thing you also seem to do is play a lot of characters between how they see themselves and how they come across to other people. Do you find that juxtaposition interesting?

Yeah, I think probably because I am that a lot in my own life. My friend once told me that “You are the most confident insecure person I’ve ever met in my entire life.” And I was like, “You’re right, you’re right, you’re right.” It is really interesting to see someone who thinks “I am totally cool and going with the flow” when it’s “Oh my God, if you honestly believe that about yourself, it’s hilarious.” I guess I’ve noticed that in my characters, especially in Jane, especially the second season, we saw a lot more of that, what she thinks she is and what she really is. It’s an inner struggle she’s having, so conflicted, but if you put it on a TV show it’s really funny, but I think a lot of people can relate to that.
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I wrote earlier this week about American Horror Story: Asylum, and how for me, the show is most effective when it brings out the monstrous in human behavior rather than when it trots out the whole, bloody bag of horror tricks. But as always, I enjoyed talking to my podcast partner Asawin Suebsaeng of Mother Jones, who’s much, much fonder of scary violence than I am, and hearing what he has to say about the show’s execution:

Also in this week’s edition: more on Alex Cross and discussions of Happy Endings and Don’t Trust The B—- In Apartment 23, which blessed event I am so ridiculously excited for.

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.

ABC has been very, very good at building diverse casts and rosters of characters for television shows, and minority media groups recognized them for it earlier this week. When the nominations for the NAACP Image Awards came out, ABC was in the mix in prime time with Modern Family in Outstanding Comedy Series, Vanessa Williams in Desperate Housewives, Damon Wayans, Jr. in Happy Endings, Sofia Vergara for Modern Family, Grey’s Anatomy for Outstanding Drama Series, Taye Diggs in Private Practice, Chandra Wilson, Sandra Oh, Loretta Devine, and James Pickens, Jr. for acting on Grey’s Anatomy. And the network snagged an additional eight nominations in the GLAAD Media Awards, including Grey’s Anatomy and Pretty Little Liars in Outstanding Drama Series, Happy Endings and Modern Family, and the episode “Acceptance” on Man Up!.

I’m particularly glad to see the love for Happy Endings, which has its flaws, but I think is the best group-of-friends comedy on television right now. At the Television Critics Association press tour, I asked creator David Caspe how he came up with the character of Max, who I think is one of the most balanced portrayals of a gay man anywhere in popular culture right now. Caspe said that while he knows Max has gotten praise for avoiding being either totally nelly or totally butch, he just based the character on a friend of his. It’s evidence of the fact that pop culture will get more diverse not only as the country does, and generational turnover (hopefully) makes the entertainment industry less white and dudely, but as white dudes have more diverse groups of friends and more contact with other kinds of people.

Similarly, Revenge, about which I really should be writing more, has done a nice job of getting different kinds of people into what’s typically seen as a hegemonic enclave. They’ve got both race and class in Ashley, who is trying to make her way in a world that looks down on her more for her economic station than (at least explicitly) her skin color. And Nolan is gay and techie and something entirely behind the standard menu of gay stereotypes. Tyler’s bisexuality was handled as if it was no big deal — neither he nor Nolan have ever had a conversation about their sex lives that’s about orientation, just individuals. Sometimes, I think TV shows get themselves hung up on the idea of diversity because they think they’d have to tell stories that are explicitly about the experience of being diverse. But it turns out that black people and gay people want things that don’t have to do with being black and gay.

I, along with what seems like every other television critic in America, have been greatly enjoying seeing Happy Endings hit its stride this fall (especially paired with Revenge, it makes for a nice comedy-drama macaron). But I’m finding myself wishing that the show would take a bit more advantage of making Brad (Damon Wayans, Jr.) and Jane (Eliza Coupe) an interracial couple to actually talk a bit about race. I’d be really curious to hear them talk about how they want to raise their kids and what it will mean for them to be biracial instead of having their visit to suburbia be about breakfast-themed Halloween costumes and the perils of that particular holiday. And the show seems inclined to give them wacky marriage strains and fixes like weirdly peppy sorority sisters and improv obsessions, rather than finding a defining approach to more naturally occurring material. The show tends to bring up race more in the interacts between Brad and his friends — in the last episode, Dave kept posing at blackness and kept getting shot down by Brad. But while the episode did a nice job of shooting down Dave’s dorkiness, the show didn’t really have Brad say anything about what Dave’s attempts at bonding meant to him, or why they didn’t work, or why they were inauthentic. It felt like an incomplete moment, particularly since these guys are supposed to be close.

I think it’s in part because my new throwback obsession is Living Single, which I’m devouring off my DVR. And one of the things I like best about it is the way it draws its jokes and dramas from real differences of opinion and conflicts about race. The scenarios aren’t patently absurd, so the presentation has to be sharp. (It also, like many other shows of another era, assumes a much broader base of general knowledge than shows today appear to.) I loved, for example, the episode where Max’s mother, the always extremely welcome CCH Pounder comes to visit. When Max’s friends say they look alike, Max’s mother, who straightens her hair, replies that it will be true once Max, who wears her hair braided, grows up–and starts paying better attention to her hair. It’s not some invented, bizarre mother-daughter cruelty. It’s instantly recognizable, and lands particularly hard because of the force of Pounder’s delivery.

It’s no mistake that one of Happy Endings‘ best episodes is the one where Max (in this case, white and gay) discovers that Brad is blowing him off to spend time with an alternate group of friends composed entirely of black men. Both Brad’s need for a racially specific environment and Max’s anxiety about not fitting in with Brad’s black friends are realistic and draw their humor and pathos from things real people are likely to feel. Unlike, say, using couples improv to boost a fraudulent tour business. It’s similar to the way the show scored a hit with a fractured take on another common experience — Penny buying her dream condo, only to believe it’s haunted by the ghost of spinsterhood yet to come. I think Happy Endings is often very good, but I’d like to see the show trust itself a bit more to riff on what’s real rather than coming up with goofy substitute conflicts.