In Salon today, my dear friend Willa Paskin has a terrific diagnosis of Fox’s freshman comedy, Ben & Kate, which she says is the sitcom version of a dramedy: emotionally engaging, but too nice to actually be funny in the way we expect comedies to deliver. It was a piece that clarified my growing problems with the network’s other female-centric freshman entrant in Fox’s Tuesday night comedy block, The Mindy Project. What was one of my most hotly-anticipated new shows of fall has turned out to be too unpleasant to have fun with, and a show that sacrifices interesting new territory in the service of its own myopia.

Some of the problem with the show lies in the dynamic between its two main characters, Mindy (Mindy Kaling) and her coworker Danny Castellano (Chris Messina, who I normally like very much). While the two are supposed to be friends as well as coworkers, they’re also the show’s obvious Will-They-Or-Won’t-They couple. But the thought of them together makes that prospect seem more horrifying than charming. In the pilot, for example, Danny told Mindy, in a line laced with some real ugliness, that if she really wanted to look nice for a date that she should lose 15 pounds. One of The Mindy Project‘s most important interests is exploring how romantic comedy tropes play out in the wild, or at least the wild as constituted by Mindy Kaling’s version of her life in which she’s a love-challenged gynecologist. In a conventional romantic comedy, that crack would have been evidence that Danny is the kind of obnoxious person that Mindy will learn to jettison when she meets someone who truly values her for who she is, or that he’s a candidate for a Gerard Butler-style reformation, someone who causes pain to women because he’s in so much of it himself. But The Mindy Project’s riff on it, and on Danny himself, seems to be an affirmation of another cliche: that pick-up artist style put-downs are precisely what proves a guy is desirable.

Some of Danny’s meanness, as when he told Mindy last night that he’s as attached to her as she is her office lamp because “The lamp provides light to that part of the room. You do what you do,” smacks of rivals escalating their war of words. But some of their interactions seem tinged with a genuine cruelty. In last night’s episode, when Mindy decides to have Danny be her gynecologist (an idea that seems terrible and to lack emotional astuteness in any case), their interaction takes a bad turn during Danny’s questions about Mindy’s sex life and family plans. “Do you plan on having children. I’m going to check no,” Danny tells her. “You aren’t married or even in a committed relationship.” Mindy slaps back at him by mentioning his failed marriage, a move that seems like it ought to be off-limits between people who actually have some affection for her. And Danny responds by harshly laying out Mindy’s real prospects for having the four children she tells him she wants to have:

Let’s say you spend the next year or so dating this guy. You’re 33 them. You spend a year getting to know him, 34. Two years living with him, 35, 36. Finally he proposes, you get married, congratulations, you’re 37. You start talking about having kids, but the maternity leave alone is enough to take you out of the game. You spent so long building your career. 38. Now your husband starts resenting how busy you are, he want someone with more free time, but you don’t want to stop working, so he moves out. 39. The divorce is finalized, 40…So you manage to have one kid under the buzzer? Hey, anything can happen.

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It’s been a long summer, hasn’t it? In between the resurgence of the War on Women, the torments of The Newsroom, and the slog of the political conventions, I’m ready for it to be fall–and for the return of the fall television season.

This autumn is the beginning of a big turnover for NBC on Thursday nights, as The Office and 30 Rock head into their confirmed swan songs, and Coommunity and Parks and Recreation enter what could also be their final seasons. Fox is more stable, but investing in female-centric comedy as it adds Ben & Kate and The Mindy Project to run alongside New Girl. ABC, coming off a fourth-place finish in the ratings, is throwing everything at the wall, but with more joie de vie and less desperation than NBC. And while I never thought I’d say this, one of the more intriguing dramas of the fall is taking its bow on CBS. To help you sort through the new offerings, here’s the complete ThinkProgress guide to fall television.

SEPTEMBER 11

Show: Go On (NBC)
Time: 9:00
The Concept: A radio host (Friends vet Matthew Perry), in deep denial after losing his wife unexpectedly, gets ordered to a support group by his boss (John Cho). There, he meets a possibly-underlicensed group leader (Laura Benanti), a widowed lesbian with anger issues (a fantastic Julie White), a taciturn young man whose brother is in a coma (Tyler James Williams), and a middle-aged Latina woman who’s lost her entire family (Tonita Castro).
Watch If: You appreciated Community‘s ability to pull off a relatively low-concept episode. In a lot of ways, Go On feels like the show NBC initially hoped Community would be, about misfits who choose and build an adult family for themselves. You’re interested in seeing more diverse casts on television. Your mileage may vary on Perry’s white-dude cheerleader effort, but Go On may have the most diverse cast of any network pilot ever, and makes that a strength of the show rather than an excuse for lazy racial and ethnic humor. You like Matthew Perry, who could have the opportunity to do some really interesting work here.

Show: The New Normal (NBC)
Time: 9:30
Concept: A gay couple, Bryan and David (Andrew Rannells and Justin Bartha), decide to try to have a baby by surrogate, and end up working with Goldie (Georgia King), a single mother, who decides to act as a surrogate to fund her dream of going back to law school to give her daughter (a sharp Bebe Wood) a better life–and to escape from her narrow-minded mother (a sharp-tongued Ellen Barkin).
Watch If: You miss the days when Glee had actual focus. The New Normal doesn’t improve on some of Glee‘s core problems, including a weird distance from lesbians and Ryan Murphy’s fondness for stereotypical gay men, mean older women, and Nene Leakes. But at this point, it’s got at least a core story that in some places comes across as deeply felt. You want to see more gay families on television. I’m more curious how Go On will pull off Julie White’s character’s family, but hopefully, Murphy can pull off a gay-headed family with a couple that has more sexual chemistry than Modern Family‘s Mitch and Cam.
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Back in June when the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, I wrote a post that explained how the implementation of the law would eventually change medical procedurals. In particular, as more and more patients come onto the insurance roles, shows aren’t going to be able to demonstrate that doctors are compassionate by having them take on uninsured patients in defiance of hospital bureaucrats or the policies of their private practices. That’s something that The Mindy Project, Mindy Kaling’s promising new sitcom for Fox, does in its pilot episode: Mindy, an OB/GYN, takes on a conservative Muslim woman as a patient, telling her son that he has to promise her the family will be insured by the time his mother gives birth, even if it’s a lie, so Mindy can take her on as a patient.

On Tuesday, the people behind the show suggested they would take on another aspect of medical practice: medical bill collection. The show is adding Amanda Setton, who will play Shauna, the receptionist and person responsible for collecting bills at Mindy’s private practice. And the show says she’ll be tough about it. “I think Shauna would literally handcuff a pregnant lady to get her to pay her,” executive producer Matt Warburton. And Kaling added “she thinks of herself like a sexy bounty hunter.” I’ll be fascinated to see how that plays out, how much sympathy the show has for patients who are facing fees that seem disproportionate to the attention or benefit they’ve received, and if Shauna goes after insurance companies for reimbursements as well.

But however it plays out, I’m heartened that as House, one of the biggest medical dramas on television, departs the airwaves, some of the new medical programs that are coming after it, even if they aren’t direct replacements, are thinking beyond the operating room or the diagnostic process. Call the Midwife, which I wrote about yesterday, is as much about what the advent of the National Health Service allows doctors to do as how they do it. And if The Mindy Project ends up being about how people pay for their care as much as how the titular character delivers it, that would be a real landmark.

Like many critics, I tend to want NBC to succeed if only because it gave me 30 Rock, Community, and the utterly sublime Parks and Recreation, and would like the network to be rewarded for sticking with those shows with improving ratings. But the last five or six months have neither given me faith that America will suddenly and against its basic stated desires recognize the fundamental greatness of watching Leslie Knope run for office, nor that NBC has a plan that will work to provide a subsidy for its weird, brilliant shows. And this analysis from Deadline—which, mind you, is analysis, not fact—kind of confirms my sadness:

While it is an office comedy, It’s Messy has a strong female lead. By last November, before the majority of the pilot scripts commissioned by NBC, including Kaling’s, were in, the network had already given early pilot orders to three pilots with female leads, the Sarah Silverman project, Save Me and Isabel. Save Me‘s order was cast-contingent and it looked touch-and-go for awhile but, after a long search, on January 19 Anne Heche signed on to star. Four days later, NBC made the bulk of its pilot orders, including a fourth female-centered comedy, the Roseanne Barr-starring Downwardly Mobile. It may have been Roseanne vs. Mindy for the fourth and last female-lead comedy slot on NBC’s pilot slate as around the time of the Downwardly Mobile pickup, the network passed on Kaling’s script, which had made it to the final round of consideration at the network.

If this really was a choice between Kaling and Barr, Barr was, to me, the wrong bet. There’s no question that Roseanne is brilliant. But it’s been a long time since it went off the air, and Barr’s most recent project, a cracked reality show about her macadamia nut farm did more to suggest that she was not the person to bring in to be the voice of a recession comedy than to confirm her old bona fides as a working class prophetess. Instead, she’s been running that venture, campaigning for the Green Party nomination and futzing around on Twitter, all worthy pursuits to be sure, but ones that read more as her coasting on her past success than gearing up for new ones.

Kaling, on the other hand, has been doing yeoman work holding up The Office, a comedy NBC should have cancelled years ago but that is worth tuning into occasionally almost solely for her presence on it. How nice would it have been for NBC to recognize that work, as well as her charming social media presence, her successful other enterprises like her blog and book, and to affirm the value there. Kaling may not have been able to speak for working-class women, as Barr did so effectively for so many years, but she could have been part of the explosion of South Asian women on television, one of what are still very few female show creators. It may have been that in between sending off 30 Rock and renewing Whitney, NBC felt like it had made its contribution to the female-comedy boom, and it was set. But picking up Kaling’s show would have moved that boom forward into its next iteration, beyond white women, and beyond a particular kind of hot-but-clumsy-or-awkward white woman. NBC bet on its past, instead, and ended up with neither Barr’s show on its schedule, nor Kaling’s. And Kaling’s, though it needs a name transplant, looks fantastic:

The bridge is yours.

-It’d be nice if people were willing to donate more than $1 million to serious political causes, as well as satire.

-How Angry Birds learned from the music industry’s response to piracy.

-The proposition that video games make the kiddies crazy is not worth fabricating quotes to prove.

-Could K-Pop finally conquer America?

-Mindy Kaling’s OB/GYN show got picked up by Fox, in the second-best pop culture news of the week.

Normally, profiles of women in Hollywood have at least one anecdote about what they eat (remarks about clothes and jewelry are the substitute for women in Washington) to suggest that said actresses are normal people and to obscure the fact that it takes an enormous amount of self-denial and expensive training to actually meet the industry’s standards for body size. But Vanity Fair is breaking all the rules! Instead of using Mindy Kaling’s order at a restaurant to show she’s a normal person taking advantage of someone else’s expense account by ordering goodies, they’re using it to raise their eyebrows at her lack of fealty to an absurd dieting regimen:

“I’m ready, actually,” she replied enthusiastically, ordering fruit salad, followed by day-boat sea scallops in creamy corn grits with bacon-braised greens, a poached egg on top, and toasted rye on the side. She devoured the second course happily and requested jam to go with the toast.

“Not too careful with the calories, Mindy?” I ventured.

“Are you kidding? I love reading about diets. But I can’t implement them. That’s my problem.”…

“I just want to let you know about the dessert,” our waiter said tactfully.

She chose the profiteroles with chocolate sauce and melted ice cream.

The jam! The humanity! It would be really delightful if someone would actually find a different way to do a celebrity profile. But even if you’re doing a puff piece, this is an even more direct and pathetic reinforcement of stupid norms than usual, skipping the bit where they pretend it would be great if people didn’t have to starve themselves.

I really would like television to integrate abortion into its conversations about sex and reproduction. And I think Dr. George Tiller is a hero and a martyr. But given the way True Blood’s handled hot-button social issues this season, particularly the disgraceful way it’s handled race and the show’s general unsubtlety on gender, I have grave concerns about the prospect of Alan Ball doing an HBO show based on Tiller’s life, which is apparently his next project for HBO.

Ball and his problems aside, I’m trying to decide how I feel about approaching abortion through drama as opposed to comedy, and the idea of a show where it’s the focus as opposed to part of the scenery. It’s relatively easy to think what the plots for a drama might be like: the doctor is stalked, the doctor is attacked, the doctor tries to keep his staff’s morale up as they are harassed going about their business, doctor has all sorts of interactions with patients, patients’ relatives, etc. But I worry about how much a show like that would give credence to anti-abortion arguments in the name of appearing even-handed, or make the doctor a morally ambiguous character like Walter White or Tony Soprano, rather than wholeheartedly embracing the idea the preserving access to abortion under tremendously trying circumstances is a heroic act.

And I think part of the problem is that a show like this keeps abortion separate from the rest of our discourse about sex, from American life. Which of course it’s not. A show like Mindy Kaling’s OB/GYN comedy, if it manages to integrate abortion into a larger ongoing conversation about reproductive health and American sexual life, would push back against that. Abortions are not weird, freakish things that happen only to Fallen Women or in Back Alleys. They are rational, regularly-performed medical procedures. And while I do think it’s important to be honest about the fact that they are a medical procedure women aren’t always happy to have performed, shifting the debate towards normalization is critical. That’s a tremendously complex needle to thread. And I think I trust Mindy Kaling to do it more than I trust Alan Ball.

The bridge is yours.

-How do you tell if a show is so bad it’s good?

-A basic tutorial on Lifetime movies.

-”Television is for lazy and tired people, while the active and young choose the Internet as it gives them more interactive opportunities.”

-Mindy Kaling is back and blogging. Though mostly about shopping.

-The combination of a tough action director portraying the violence of a repressive regime should be interesting. Not sure about the dialogue, though:

I don’t know that I’ve ever sat through an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear from readers that in the second episode of this season of the show, Sandra Oh’s character, Cristina Yang, had an abortion — and not because she got pregnant and it was inconvenient, or because she was raped, or because she’s broke and desperate — but because she doesn’t want to have children. Which is one of those things that people feel, but still gets treated as if it’s a risky thing to say unless you’re Helen Mirren.

So I watched the episode, and I actually thought they did a pretty nice job with it — particularly with this scene, which I thought was a good illustration of how stressful it must be to terminate a pregnancy without the support of your partner:

Grey‘s is a soap opera, but it’s a soap opera that reached an average of 11.41 million people per episode last season. So this is big, even if it’s a one-off.

Then, there’s also the news that Mindy Kaling is developing a show for NBC where she plays an ob/gyn, a character she’s basing on her mother who, as her brother puts it in the profile of Kaling that recently ran in the New York Times, is “a professional gossip who does Pap smears.” I really, really hope that there’s a way for the show to handle abortion at some point. It would get ridiculous fairly quickly for an ob/gyn to only ever has patients who are overjoyed about their pregnancies and to never have a patient who doesn’t want to be pregnant, or can’t — for whatever reason — stay pregnant. At minimum, there have to be conversations about birth control and sexual and reproductive health, and the mere possibility of something like that being on network television every week makes me so joyous my heart runs the risk of exploding.

The fact that we live in a world where women making vagina jokes on networks is enough to send some dude-critics to the fainting couch illustrates how necessary something like Kaling’s show is, how necessary Grey‘s decision was. These shows don’t have to end the conversation, but they’re a vital acknowledgment that lady business isn’t just that.