Joshua Alston has a terrific piece at the AV Club about how white critics have treated Tyler Perry movies and television shows. He argues that there’s been a strong tendency to treat Perry with deference because white critics either feel a need to extent points to Perry given that he’s one of the primary filmmakers who is interested in serving African-American audiences in general, or feel that their whiteness disqualifies them from specifically discussing Perry’s treatment of race. And Alston suggests that the dam has broken on Perry in recent weeks in part because his treatment of HIV has given critics another way in to criticize Perry on content grounds:

Temptation has given white critics free rein to trash Perry with impunity, because it allows them to skirt the racial implications of the work, and instead go after his harmful messages about HIV and women’s bodies. Even that is kind of an accident; the reaction to Temptation doesn’t exist in a bubble. The movie was released less than two weeks after the verdict came down in the Steubenville rape case. Any other time, Temptation might have won the types of confused, perplexing mainstream reviews Perry’s movies usually get, but at a time when rape and the politics of women’s bodies were commanding the zeitgeist, Temptation’s implication that women are complicit in their victimization by men couldn’t have been a more unwelcome message. It was so unwelcome, it was enough to encourage white critics, who are generally all too happy to stay out of the knottier conversations about Perry’s work, to attack once the dialogue moved to a topic they felt more comfortable engaging.

I’ve written a great deal about white television and screenwriters’ reluctance either to create characters of color at all, or to design characters of color who have any personality elements or perspectives drawn from their experiences as people of color, out of grave—and not necessarily misguided—fears of giving offense, speaking for others, or getting wrong experiences that are not their own. And I’ve also argued that the best way to give over that fear is to recognize that whiteness is a race rather than a neutral default. In other words, it’s as easy and thoughtful to think about what a Southern African-American family might serve at a typical dinner as it is to consider whether your Jewish characters keep kosher, or about how an Irish-American family might handle their kid getting in trouble in ways that are different from a Chinese-American family.

I think this is an approach that might serve white critics well, too. This is not to say, of course, that white critics should be some sort of final arbiters on the handling of race in America—critic corps need to diversify as much as the writing staffs of the industries that we cover. But I think we’d do well to write more about how shows constitute various kinds of whiteness as well as they do any other race, and to be intersectional in our approach when we write about class, gender, and sexuality. The construction of cops as Irish in The Wire—even to the extent of Lester Freamon singing The Pogues at a wake—is as important and interesting as the many conceptions of blackness on that show. One of the reasons Max on Happy Endings is so striking is not just that he defies physical types and standards of behavior for gay men, but in the way he defies physical types and standards of behavior for Jewish men. Justified has made strong use of Boyd Crowder’s racism, as well as his stints as a miner and a preacher, to depict a man in search of an identity, and who treats his race as a potential source of it. I’m excited to catch up on Shameless at some point precisely to see how the Gallaghers are treated. One of the reasons I think Mad Men would be a better show if it was willing to bring the racial friction of its time period closer to the center of the show, or even to just once treat it as a significant plot point, is because I think it would be interesting to see it explore gains and losses of privilege not just along gender lines, but racial ones as well—what did it really mean for Paul Kinsey and Lane Pryce to be people who could pursue relationships with black women? Is Peggy mentoring her African-American secretary, or merely treating her well, something that was implied in the last episode and that I’d like to see explored in greater detail.

If white critics or film and television writers are afraid of writing about race because we’re afraid of speaking for or about other people, the simplest solution is to stop and realize that writing about race means writing about ourselves as well.

This is a depressing statistic, crunched by writer and comedian Diana Wright: of the top-grossing 20 comedies for each of the last ten years, women have directed just 4.5 percent of them. Of those movies, all but one of them were directed by Anne Fletcher, Nancy Myers and Nora Ephron. And all of them are romantic comedies: there’s not a parody, an action comedy, road trip story, or buddy picture in the mix.

NPR’s Linda Holmes, who clearly is my main source of inspiration today, wrote in her very smart assessment of 30 Rock as that show wrapped up, that:

30 Rock may not have undone years and years of gender imbalance in running shows, and it may not have changed hiring practices, but it’s hard to remember now that before it came along, the entire idea of a woman having a comedy brand that translated to comedic opportunities for people other than herself was depressingly shaky as a public proposition. Again, that doesn’t mean women couldn’t do it or weren’t writing comedy — there were women writers from the very beginning at Saturday Night Live and elsewhere. But comedy’s creative centers of gravity in the public imagination were not generally women.

And one of the great things about 30 Rock was that romantic comedy was just one of the few things it did, whether the person with romantic troubles was Liz, Jack, Jenna, or even Tracy and Pete within the confines of their marriages. It did race comedy, class comedy, rural v. urban comedy, workplace humor, and political and cultural satire. We may be making progress in the kinds of comedy women can do on television. But clearly we’re a long way from women who can successfully build comedy empires in the movies based on multiple styles, much in the way that Adam McKay’s parodies are also both social commentary and effective romantic comedy.

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.

Over the past year or so, the discussion about the portrayal of female characters in video games, and the employment of women in the industry that produces those images has been particularly heated. But for all the challenges this industry faces, a new survey of video game producers suggests that gaming companies may actually be outflanking television when it comes to improving the representation of women in certain positions, and in making pay equitable for male and female producers.

According to the latest edition of Game Developer Magazine’s annual salary survey, in 2012, 23 percent of video game producers are women, a year-on-year increase of 7 percent over 2011, when women represented 16 percent of producers. That’s a significant shift in a single year, and it’s a kind of progress that would be striking in the television industry, where progress in shifting the composition of the writing workforce has been notably slow. Between the 1999-2000 television season and the 2011-2012 television season, the percentage of female television writers rose from 25.5 percent to 30.5 percent—as the Writers Guild Of America, West pointed out “At this rate of increase, it would be another 42 years before women —roughly half of the U.S. population – reach proportionate representation in television staff employment.”

And the gap between the 2012 average salaries for male and female producers in video games was $6,602—$78,989 for women versus $85,591 for men. That’s a smaller gap than the one between male and female television writers, which in 2009 was almost $10,000, with an average salary of $98,600 for female writers, compared to an average of $108,000 for men. And women actually make more than their male counterparts in one area of the industry, programming and engineering, even though they hold only 4 percent of those positions.

Now, there are differences between these industries: video games are produced on a project basis, while television shows can either run in an open-ended way, or end after a discrete amount of time, though both of those possibilities are open-ended. But the ends of television seasons often provide opportunities for shows to bring in new writers—Aaron Sorkin, for example, famously has a tendency to clean out his entire writers’ room at the end of each season—and would provide opportunities to shift the demographics of writers’ rooms. In either industry, changing the ratios are largely a matter of will. And it’s great to see an industry like video games, which has a shorter history than television, demonstrate that even in a culture that’s known for male fans and male characters, if you want more women working on projects, you can find it. Maybe if the video game industry continues to make progress, everyone else will feel pressure to catch up.

After an Academy Awards ceremony that seemed to be programmed out of the conviction that the best way to improve the relevance of the movies is to emphasize its most profitable work rather than its most, well, relevant, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seems to have surprised a number of its members by sending out invitations to meetings in three cities to discuss what the Academy does and ought to do. That this is happening seems entirely reasonable and sensible, and so the really newsworthy element surrounding all of this is that Academy members the New York Times talked to seem to be surprised and disconcerted that it’s happening:

In the last few years the Academy, which presents the Oscars, has been the subject of almost constant hand-wringing concerning the quality and ratings of its annual awards show, the age and ethnic diversity of its membership, and efforts to shore up the cultural relevance of film. Still, the group has rarely, if ever, opened the door for a global discussion of its aims or operation. Mr. Koch did not respond to a query about the meeting on Friday, and a spokeswoman for the Academy declined to comment. Several Academy members who have been active in the awards process said on Friday that they were puzzled by the announcement. One highly placed studio executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with the Academy, said he believed it was an attempt by Ms. Hudson, who has held her post for about two years, to get input from members as she and others plot their agenda.

I guess it doesn’t necessarily surprise me that the 94 percent of Academy voters who are white and the 77 percent of them who are men might not really want to talk about the fact that they’re an overwhelming majority. But it’s a nice test of how committed actual folks are to their values to see if they’re willing to discuss their privilege and to consider measures that would dilute them. And after the Academy Awards’ schizophrenic pendulum swings between hosts from different generations and senses of what are the most effective ways to emphasize the importance of the movies, it makes sense to stage an actual conversation rather than leaving things in the hands of producers who don’t seem to be coming up with good solutions on their own. Good on Academy president Hawk Koch and chief executive Dawn Hudson for saving the dates. Now it’ll be up to their members to actually contribute, rather than act like it’s bizarre that an organization would attempt to reassess itself.

During his tenure on his weekend show at MSNBC, Up With Chris Hayes, Hayes and his staff managed to book a roster of guests that was striking more diverse than the comparable shows on any other network. Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Ann Friedman asked Hayes how he’d achieved those numbers when so many other shows complain that it’s so difficult to break beyond the dominance of white men in political commentary. The answer? A strict quota system, and a reassessment of what kinds of perspectives were important to include in each debate:

But sometimes national politics is the hottest topic, and some argue that media can’t be held to a diversity standard when women and people of color are so drastically underrepresented in relevant spokesperson and leadership positions. Hayes acknowledges that, for shows like Meet the Press, there’s probably something to that excuse. But most news outlets aren’t only talking to senators and CEOs. There’s a wide range of perspectives that can be brought to bear on any number of political issues. And, without a quota, it’s easy to default to the same handful of big names.

“You have to say, ‘We give ourselves this rule,’ and that’s going to force us to just be more resourceful,” Hayes says. “Because I genuinely don’t think there’s another way to do it. If you don’t do that then the inertia and the tide are so strong, unless you are committed as a priority to actively fight against it, you’re going to end up reproducing what everyone else does.”

As he makes the transition to primetime, he plans to keep a quota system. “It’s going to be even harder to do at a daily level than it was at two shows a week,” he says. “But we’re a thousand percent committed to it.” After all, it’s part of what made his weekend show so successful. Hayes has heard from the audience that they appreciate the fresh faces and perspectives that this rule has forced him to cultivate.

I think this is a critical point. Newspaper and magazine columnists, people employed at various times by lobbying and consulting firms or political campaigns, and professional activists aren’t the only people who participate in—or are affected by—politics. A lawmaker may believe that, say, food stamps incentivize certain behavior, an academic who’s studied the question may have research to offer on the question, but someone who has actually had to live on food stamps for a period longer than the challenges lawmakers frequently take on has perspective to offer, too.

The idea of limiting the discussion to just one of those dimensions seems silly if it’s stated in those terms, or if you actually care about a real discussion. But there are people who have real interests in keeping political conversations circumscribed. Making those interests transparent rather than presenting them as an unfortunate result of the market is one of the reasons Hayes’ commitment to diversity is valuable. The whiteness of cable television is a choice, not a natural order.

The Writers Guild of America West 2013 TV Staffing Brief, the organization’s analysis of who was hired to write American television shows during the 2011-2012 season, is out, and as usual, the results for women and people of color are not encouraging. Of 1722 writers who wrote for 190 shows, 519 or 30.5 percent of them were women, and 269 of them were people of color. For women, those numbers are up 5 percent from the 1999-2000 television season—as the report put it, “At this rate of increase, it would be another 42 years before women —roughly half of the U.S. population – reach proportionate representation in television staff employment.” And for people of color, the rate of increase is more mixed: the percentage of Asian and Latino writers has risen 2.9 percent since 1999-2000, but the number of African-American television writers has grown much more slowly in the same time period, rising from 5.8 percent to 6.5 percent of overall writers. If the percentage of African-American writers is going to rise just .063 percent, it will take 87 years for black television writers to reach proportional representation in their industry relative to their current presence in the U.S. population.

Part of the reason these numbers are so frustrating to see again and again is that it only takes a few shows to make a difference. As the report points out, “until the recent rise of multicultural dramas like ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal,”—both shows created by Shonda Rhimes— “there had been no successful television dramas that featured a critical mass of minority leading roles or writers.” If all of the 55 shows that hired no writers of color in the 2011-2012 season hired just one person of color to write for them, the representation of writers of color in television would rise three percent. And the examples of a few networks show that it’s not impossible to find women and people of color to hire for all kinds of positions. 50 percent of MTV’s executive producers, 43.5 of the CW’s executive producers, and 38.5 percent of ABC Family’s executive producers are women. 13.3 percent of the executive producers on ABC are people of color, a number likely significantly driven, again, by Shonda Rhimes. 55 percent of BET’s writers are women, and 95 percent of them are people of color. Clearly, there are women and people of color available and eager to work in television, if only someone would think to ask.

Or, as Marlo Thomas put it when I asked her how she found female writers for That Girl, back at a time when television was even more male and white, “Well, you looked for them. You called agents and said ‘What comedy writers do you have that are women? We’re looking for women to write for That Girl’ We’d go to the writers’ agents. Someone would see a name on somebody else’s show and say this stuff’s really good. But when you put out a call like that to agents, agents can’t wait to get jobs for their writers.”

It’s an instruction that the 19 shows that hired no women writers in the 2011-2012 season, and the 55 shows that hired no writers of color during that same time period might take to heart. It’s worth noting that these shows’ lack of diversity doesn’t define all of them. Mike White, who wrote all of the episodes of the first season of Enlightened himself, turned in one of the most complex, sympathetic portrayals of a woman anywhere on television. And Breaking Bad, which employed no writers of color in the 2011-2012 season, produced one of the most nuanced roles for a man of color to appear on screen in the last decade. But just because white men can get it right about women and people of color doesn’t render women and people of color irrelevant—it just means that the standards for white men who are writing female characters or characters of color should be higher. The list of shows that didn’t hire women writers or writers of color in the 2011-2012 season should provide a pretty clear guide to which writers are rising above their own life experiences—and which ones are badly in need of new perspectives in their writers’ rooms:

Television Shows That Hired No Women Writers During The 2011-2012 Season

America’s Funniest Home Videos
Big Time Rush
Californication
Comedy Bang! Bang!
Dancing With The Stars
Eagleheart
Enlightened (Creator Mike White wrote all the episodes)
Futurama
Geniuses
Gurland On Gurland
The Insider
Kickin’ It
Locke & Key
Magic City
Psych
Teen Wolf
Veep
Workaholics I
Workaholics II
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The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas has made a splash in advertising circles with a racy new print spread that portrays bellhops as a symbol of a very different kind of quality and service:

I’m all for the general recognition that heterosexual women like to look as much as heterosexual men, and that as consumers, we’re not necessarily going to be satisfied by the idea that, say, gorgeous women should settle for funny, schlubby guys who don’t have their lives together. But what struck me most about this ad wasn’t that the bellhop was naked below the waist—it was that we don’t see his face at all. It’s one of the most literal transfigurations of a man—and in particular, a service employee—into an object of consumption that I’ve seen. Men, when they become sex objects, are not generally considered to have handed in their brains in the same way that gorgeous women are often expected to behave as mute objects. Channing Tatum may take his clothes off in Magic Mike, but the whole point of the movie is that there’s a brain and a heart somewhere to the north of that gyrating pelvis. Giving heterosexual women eye candy may seem like a form of third-wave equality. But if the form of that eye candy becomes a race to the bottom where it’s not clear whether women or men are treated worse or presented as more powerless or unrealistic, that doesn’t seem like much of a win.

In a truly amazing expression of honesty, Alex Bilmes, who edits Esquire UK, used the opportunity he was given as a speaker at a conference to explain how low his estimation of his readers are:

“The women we feature in the magazine are ornamental,” he said, speaking on a panel at the Advertising Week Europe conference in London on Tuesday. “I could lie to you if you want and say we are interested in their brains as well. We are not. They are objectified.” Bilmes, speaking on a panel hosted by Cosmopolitan editor Louise Court about feminism in the media and advertising, added that men “see women in 3D” in many different roles in life “but at certain times we like to see them sexy”. “[Esquire] provide pictures of girls in the same way we provide pictures of cool cars,” he said. “It is ornamental. Women’s magazines do the same thing.”

That’s a pretty sad set of ambitions for a magazine that published Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.” And it’s a reminder for all that magazines like Esquire and GQ purport to serve sophisticated men, they’ve been pulled down by the lad-mag market rather than rising above it.

Whenever a contemporary men’s magazine, or someone employed by one, does something particularly stupid, I’m always reminded of this terrific piece Jon Zobenica wrote for The Atlantic in 2007 called “Are We Not Men?” which is all about the decline of the form. In it, he particularly cites the Playboy Advisor as an example of the kind of real talk that made that magazine refreshing—in fact, Zobenica argues, “I developed a respect toward women in part by reading Playboy as a young male.” He wrote:

In the October 1973 Advisor, a man on the verge of marrying a small-breasted woman wonders if he can honestly go ahead with the nuptials, given his fears of desiring more-ample women. To which he gets, in part, this response:

It’s not a question of honesty; it’s a matter of maturity—yours, not hers. A marriage is more than the sum of its anatomical parts; success depends on qualities of love, respect and compatibility.

In the February 1976 Advisor, a woman writes in that her boyfriend, who’s miffed that he can’t bring her to orgasm (though he claims he’s successfully done so with every other lover), has tried to pressure her into a threesome with another woman as a remedy. The response reads in total:

Your partner has come up with a rather novel excuse for experimenting with a third party (necessity is the pimp of invention or the mother of deviation), but we doubt that a ménage à trois would be the answer to your problem. While a triangle might show him by direct comparison that all women are different, it might also double his failure rather than his fun. Since you are more familiar with your response than he is, do what you can to increase your pleasure. Patience is not something that can be measured or corrected with a stop watch: By making orgasm the goal of your lovemaking, you may have changed the event into an endurance contest with no winners. Love for the moment, not the finish. Sex is a mystery, but when it works, it reminds us of what Raymond Chandler said: The ideal mystery is one you would read if the end was missing.

Thirty years on, in March 2006, Playboy was still at it, offering this response to a writer who defended (on grounds of “intimacy or commitment issues”) another man’s reluctance to label his partner a girlfriend:

You may be correct about his issues, but he should work them out on his own time rather than wasting hers. Labels may be confining, but after three months “girlfriend” threatens no man.

Now, he’s writing about the content rather than the pictures. But the fantasy, Zobenica argued, was in part about what you got to do with that pretty girl, and it didn’t involve driving her like a car. “When, at nineteen, and living in my very first apartment, I cleared out half my medicine cabinet and half my closet, and gave them over to the California blonde who’d just moved in with me, it felt as true to the life I’d seen and imagined as my red Camaro and my Brutini Le Sport shoes. This was no capitulation; this was part and parcel of the dream,” he wrote. “This was, it seemed to me, exactly what Playboy had espoused: finding a nifty chick and sharing the good life with her.”

We can debate the relative merits of cheesecake, and whether it actually counts as some sort of feminist appreciation for female forms. But I’m not going to assign Blimes credit for featuring women in their forties, or women of different races in his pictorials—and yes, that’s something he actually asked for. Claiming you’re able to make a broad range of women into fetish objects is decidedly less ambitious than aiming to make your readers see the full potential of a woman, and of themselves in a relationship with her.

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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