In a long interview with Vulture, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl creator Issa Rae talks about everything from her big-television show I Hate LA Dudes (which sounds like it didn’t get an ABC pickup since they’re shopping it to cable) to her love for Tina Fey. But I was struck by how she talked about White Jay, the love interest for the character she plays on Awkward Black Girl, and who, as it turns out, was the product of a similar process that produces characters of color on majority-white network television show. She explained:

It’s really kind of superficial. The first season, we were growing in popularity, but my producer at the time was saying in order to reach a bigger audience, and to reach white people specifically, you have to put a white person in the show. I was like, “Oh my God, that makes so much sense.” So we chose this character Jay. He was only supposed to be a one-off character. But once we premiered his episode, the audience went crazy in the [YouTube] comments section. I don’t want to bang anyone over the head with the same interracial tropes you’ve seen in the past. It just seemed like a fun story line. His name was initially “Jay,” and the commenters named him White Jay. So we stuck with that.

I’ve been writing a lot recently about the assumption that colorblindness—which in pop culture, frequently functions as casting an actor of color and then refusing to think about how that character’s race might have affected their life experiences, perspectives, or even cultural touchstones and tastes—is progressive, arguing both that erasure of racial experience and perspective is a sin in and of itself, and that it often flattens characters, denying them detail and depth. The flip side of colorblindness, of course, is obnoxious and counterproductive, casting a character of color to provide nothing other than a familiar and reductive dose of blackness, or Asianness, or Latinoness, as if diversity is the equivalent of Tarragon.

What Rae is describing is the intention that can help guide cultural products through a default to colorblindness on one hand, and reductive stereotyping on the other. The assumption that you need to add characters of color to a majority-white show, or a white character to a show that’s mostly about characters of color is an irritating underestimation of audiences, a reflection of the fact that in a lot of directions, pop culture is bad at teaching people to be interested in characters who aren’t like them. But if a showrunner gets handed that directive, it would be awfully nice if their instinct was to create something distinct, rather than to respond to a demand driven by lowest-common-denominator concerns with either a stereotype or a cardboard cutout. That alone isn’t enough to make a character work—you’ve got to actually do your homework for that—but it’s a reaction that really ought to be natural.

It’s not as if Issa Rae doesn’t have a lot on her plate, in between her web-based sitcom, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl and the show she recently sold to ABC with Shonda Rhimes’ help, about a female cohost on an internet talk radio show. But in the midst of all this activity, she’s launched a new series, The Michelle Obama Diaries, which features Michelle Obama translating her own thoughts and throwing the kind of shade Luther offers up for President Obama in Key & Peele‘s Anger Translator skits:

The Anger Translator sketch works because it suggests something sort of naughty and delicious about the president that we’d like to be true rather than that we actually believe to be true. It’s fun for the same reason seeing President Obama punch back in a debate is fun: it makes us feel like he’s as angry and as frustrated as we are, that he’s as disgusted by the volume of crazy and lies lofted in his direction.

The Michelle Obama Diaries, on the other hand, plays into an idea we believe to be true of FLOTUS, that she’s tart and awesome and sexy. And instead of providing a wishful sense of escape from the limitations of the man and the role, the series gives us a sense of access to that side of her. This first episode isn’t as sharp as the Anger Translator schtick yet, in part because the idea that Michelle and Barack have sex, for example, doesn’t actually feel like much of a slap back at a stupid or vicious misperception of the couple, or a confirmation of something we’d wish to be true but don’t really believe to be the case. I would, on the other hand, watch the hell out of a First Ladies of Washington, DC show from Rae along the lines of the brilliant Real Housewives of Civil Rights parody from a while back:

I bet the brunches between Hillary and Michelle would make an epic arc to the first season.

Since my readers introduced me to Issa Rae’s web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, I’ve wished someone would give Rae, whose biting, original, low-budget show has earned her a well-deserved following, a deal and the resources to take her show national. Now, Shonda Rhimes, one of the few women and few African-Americans who can basically get a network to greenlight anything she wants, has found a way to do precisely that. Through her Shondaland production company, Rhimes has helped Rae sell a new series, I Hate La Dudes, about the sole woman on an internet radio talk show, to ABC.

This is good, and illuminating, news for two reasons. First, it’s a sign that production companies and networks are finally starting to look to web-based content the way they should, as a source of genuinely new voices and of fresh storylines. In an ideal world, the internet and the distribution platforms native to it, Hulu in particular, should function as a kind of minor leagues for television, allowing artists to test ideas, improve their tool kits as low budgets require many of them to write, direct, edit and score as well as act, and build followings. Not all projects will succeed, but web shows, which are free from the pressures of network scheduling, can take time to develop audiences by word of mouth. If a show becomes a hit online without the benefit of a major publicity campaign, as Awkward Black Girl did, it’s fantastic proof of concept. That Rhimes and ABC recognized Rae’s talent and her audience is a testament to them, as well as to Rae’s work and vision.

The question will be how much leeway Rae has at ABC. Because it’s a network, it’s hard to imagine she’ll have as much freedom when it comes to content or to ratings as Louis C.K. has at FX or Lena Dunham has had at HBO. ABC picked up the show because the network thinks it can make money from Rae, not merely to pick up awards nominations or critical praise, and no matter how original Rae is, she’ll be getting network notes. But in a sense, there’s something invigorating about that proposition: ABC must think it’s possible to do well with a show from the perspective of a nerdy African-American woman whose prior selling point has been the social awkwardness of the character she portrayed, not precisely a demographic that gets heavy representation on network television.

And it’s also exciting to see Rhimes use her capital in Hollywood this way. Tyler Perry, the other person of color who can get almost any television or film project he wants into development, has never seemed particularly interested in using his shingle to help other writers and directors get projects moving (though he produced Lee Daniels’ Precious). And today he signed an exclusive development deal with the Oprah Winfrey Network, locking in profits but limiting his influence. There’s nothing wrong with Perry making that money. But it’s more exciting to see Rhimes single-handedly use her influence to make television a place that’s not just more diverse but more interesting, even in a way that goes beyond her own shows. I’ll be crossing my fingers for Rae to succeed not just because I can’t wait to watch whatever she creates, but because if she does well, that can only rebound to Shondaland’s credit, and if this is any indication, to our benefit as well.

YouTube’s plunged into interesting and uncharted waters by announcing that it will shell out $100 million to a variety of creators ranging from Slate to Ashton Kutcher to develop 100 web television channels. Creators will get up to $5 million to program the channels as they wish, and if they earn back that start-up capital and make more, they’ll make money on the project.

There are, of course, a lot of silly contenders in there. I’m not sure we actually need an American Hipster channel (the fact of its existence probably renders it hopelessly passe, right?), or if Pharrell Williams or Shaq can support their own brands, though if the latter succeeds, maybe we can persuade Peyton Manning to give up football for buddy comedies. One would imagine the Onion doing just dandy — their Onion News Network videos are often, if not always, some of the funniest things on the Internet and it’s possible to see this becoming just another way to aggregate their content.

But what’s exciting about this is that it’s a low-cost way to experiment with niches that aren’t necessarily big enough to justify the investment and start-up costs on television. I’ve often lamented the fact that there isn’t a female equivalent of Louis C.K. getting money from a cable network to produce a tough, low-budget show, but Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls at the Party network might just be it. I absolutely cannot wait to see what the women involved along with Poehler (and if they haven’t though about it, they might bring on Issa Rae’s Awkward Black Girl as an addition to their roster) come up with. There are, of course, spaces where women get to experiment with art and comedy, but they’re fragmented, and there are women who get to do their own thing in a network context if they’re Tina Fey or Whitney Cummings, but the idea of a reasonably well-financed place where women can make weird, engaging comedy, where the operative word is Smart is so wonderful it makes my heart explode. Similarly, I’m excited to see what folks do on channels like The Nerdist, SB Nation, and TED, if only because it doesn’t really exist in my frame of reference that places like that could get as much support and bandwidth, and that is marvelous.

Not all of these networks will survive, but when they do and don’t, we’ll actually have some sense of what does and doesn’t work, what theoretically untapped audiences do and don’t exist. This is a chance to organize ourselves and show support for the kinds of networks we actually want, with a ratings system that will likely be vastly clearer and simpler than the Nielsen ratings system. And that’s exciting.

And this is also a chance to figure out what a web TV network looks like. Is there 24 hours of content a day? Do networks find existing web series like Husbands and syndicate them? Will the workforces be unionized (the Writers Guild East is working on a campaign for web writers and from what I understand, doing pretty well)? Will the networks become a breeding ground for network pilots, a kind of minor leagues? Or will they develop their own storytelling vernacular, their own sense of timing? I have absolutely no sense of the answers to these questions. But the fact that we’re going to have a well-financed lab to try to figure some of them out is pretty awesome.