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.

Alysia Abbot has a fascinating critique of the rise of gay fathers on television in The Atlantic today, pointing out that the most interesting gay father in media this fall isn’t a sitcom character, but an activist in a documentary:

The most vibrant gay man you’ll see on a screen this fall won’t be found on TV but in David France’s filmed history of the ACT UP movement, How to Survive a Plague. Bob Rafsky quit his job as a PR executive at Howard Rubenstein (he’d represented Donald Trump before going on disability for AIDS) in order to become an activist. In a New York Times op-ed he wrote, “There’s not much to do except to keep fighting the epidemic, and those whose actions or inactions prolong it, until I get too sick to fight.”…Rafsky was also a dad. Among the most affecting scenes in an already affecting movie are those between him and his young daughter, Sara. We see them celebrating birthdays and dancing together in his sunny New York apartment. Rafsky’s face beaming, he tells us in voiceover: “It’s the only really successful love affair of my life.” This love is made more poignant as we see him deteriorate over the course of the film.

Rafsky’s best known for a moment in the spring of 1992, when he heckled candidate Bill Clinton at a campaign rally in New York City,”What are you going to do about AIDS?” Clinton responded, “I feel your pain.” The televised exchange led to AIDS becoming an issue in the ’92 election. During the Clinton administration, protease inhibitors were developed, transforming AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable disease. These advances couldn’t save Rafsky, who died of AIDS in 1993, but his story illustrates the legacy of political activism, a legacy to be proud of. At the time of his death at age 47, he was writing an autobiography about his work as an AIDS activist tentatively titled A Letter to Sara.

The gay fathers on TV today can make us laugh, but can they inspire? If they can’t inspire can they at least not embody embarrassing stereotypes? Thinking about the latest crop of gay dads on television I can’t help but recall a popular chant from the Act Up demonstrations whenever someone was arrested or harassed: “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” The irony is that, too often, the world wasn’t watching then. But now, thanks to these primetime characters, people are definitely watching. They just aren’t seeing much of the truth.

Or maybe to put it another way, we aren’t seeing much of gay parents other than their gayness. It makes sense that stories about gay couples who are starting families would involve characters who are confronting their expectations for what their sexual orientation meant for what they could and couldn’t do in their lives. That’s an important conversation, but it is a limitation on storytelling, and on building out other facets of these characters. It’s one of the reasons I like Julie White’s character on Go On so much. In addition to the fact that she’s one of the only lesbian moms on network television, her character already had children with her wife, so that conversation is over and done with. Instead, we get to see her anxieties about dating and sex as a widow, her crankiness, or even be surprised by the fact that she turns out to be a lovely, accomplished dancer. We need stories about gay people reckoning with their own gayness. But equality means that not all stories about gay people should have to be about their gayness, just as straight people get to blow things up, and have wacky roommates, and go to terrible bachelor parties, and wear latex without implications for their sexual orientations.

Yesterday, word came out that NBC, which already renewed Up All Night in the face of low ratings and overhauled the family sitcom’s core premise, will put the the single-camera comedy on hiatus again and bring it back as a multi-camera show taped in front of a live studio audience. I wish I thought that would help. When it debuted last fall, Up All Night, which was created by a woman, had a high proportion of female writers, and was a smart take on fathers staying home to raise children, was one of the shows I wanted most to turn out to be wonderful. But every step of the way, Up All Night‘s doubled down on its worst elements rather than recognizing what its strengths are. The number of cameras doesn’t seem to be at the heart of where Up All Night‘s gone wrong.

There’s no question that family sitcoms can be popular even when the families they put on screen are richer, and cooler, and better-looking than our own. But the charm of a show like Modern Family, when it works, is that it emphasizes that no matter how gorgeous Jay and Gloria’s house is, no matter how little Phil’s real estate business seems to have been impacted by the recession, their emotional and familial problems (if not their financial ones) seemed rather similar to our own. Up All Night, by contrast, took a family that already wasn’t much like our own, from Reagan’s job in the entertainment business, to their sprawling, gorgeous California home, and made them seem even less relateable.

Increasingly, Reagan and Chris seem more like irritating hipster archetypes than actual people. One of the running jokes on the show has been their irritation with a squarer neighbor couple, Gene and Terry, who had a child around the same time that they did. I can see how Gene and Terry’s enthusiasm could seem grating, complicating Reagan and Chris’s attempts to retain their pre-baby identity as a cool couple. But that cool-couple posturing actually comes across as a great deal more irritating than anything Gene and Terry get up to, and disproportionately mean, as a result. It’s one thing to show your main characters having the kind of night out on the town Regan and Chris regularly enjoyed before they had Amy. It’s quite another, as in one recent example, to watch Reagan make an utter fool of herself trying to seem cool at a coffee shop full of younger consumers. New Girl recently pulled off a joke like this beautifully in an episode where Schmidt fell all over himself trying to impress his new hipster neighbors, but the show balanced it by making the kids themselves as ludicrous as Schmidt’s posturing. But in Up All Night, Reagan just came across as ridiculous and desperate. More and more, I’m finding myself not sympathetic to Reagan and Chris but repulsed by their pettiness.

That’s part in parcel with an odd tonal decision the show’s made in the wake of the decision to cancel Ava’s talk show at the beginning of the first season. I initially praised that move because it seemed like an attempt to deescalate the show’s slightly more hyperreal elements and to focus clearly on what Up All Night does best: getting at the pleasure and anxiety that comes with accepting that being a parent is the most important part of your identity. Instead, the show subbed in Chris’ brother as comic relief rather than Ava’s shows, and in having Chris go back to work, albeit as a contractor, jettisoned the most interesting perspective Up All Night had to offer: what it means for a man to experience the same loss of identity and expectation that he’ll live his whole life through his child that women are excepted to accept without complaint every day. That was genuinely novel and often movingly executed (unlike the crude approach of network-mate Guys With Kids), letting Will Arnett be something other than the crazy-eyed nut he’s so often pigeonholed as.

I miss that show, and Jason Lee, marvelously down-to-earth as Ava’s boyfriend. Up All Night seems to assume that his work as a contractor was the interesting bit of his character, rather than his essential decency, his flashes of temper and frustration with Ava’s ridiculousness. That’s the kind of character you could build a show around, using a regular guy perspective to humanize characters who live their lives at a greater distance from the average American experience. And when Reagan was working on Ava’s show, she filled that role herself. Up All Night has opted to do the reverse, having rarified people treat everyday life as if it’s hard or distastefully uncool. And it’ll have trouble when it goes in front of a live audience if the viewers are laughing at Chris and Reagan instead of with them.

Todd VanDerWerff has a fantastic piece in the AV Club about why working-class characters, and even more specifically, working-class problems, have disappeared from sitcoms, touching on everything from the influence of aspirational shows like NBC’s Must-See TV lineup, concerns about writers tackling scenarios they don’t have personal experience with, and the challenges of depicting working-class families without appearing to mock them even when writers and creators themselves come from the backgrounds they’re depicting. Much of the piece addresses the question of why networks aren’t making or airing these kinds of shows, which may or may not be a reflection of audiences’ actual preferences. But it’s also intriguing to see the small evidence we have for what resonates with viewers at home. Todd considers Modern Family, a ratings monster that overshadows shows like my beloved Raising Hope and The Middle:

Take Modern Family, currently one of the most popular comedies on television. The series’ central family—Phil and Claire Dunphy, played by Julie Bowen and Ty Burrell—is headed by a real-estate agent and his stay-at-home wife. Yet even though the show debuted in 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, when a real-estate agent would have been at wit’s end, trying to make sales, the Dunphys never want for money. This isn’t even about how the family can afford a gigantic house—it’s perhaps plausible that Phil got a sweetheart deal. The lack of worry about money is built into the DNA of the show. The characters are constantly getting in car accidents that don’t seem to have any financial effect on them. (Even with good insurance, the number of cars this family goes through should be prohibitively expensive.)…Even if TV comedy’s borderline ignorance of class issues shouldn’t be considered politically irresponsible, consider how much it robs any given series of stakes. When Modern Family started out, it was about a family where the individual members often didn’t get along. As time went on and the conflicts softened—inevitable on a TV comedy—the source of drama too often has to come from outside elements, like all those car accidents. Attempting to avoid this is why so many great TV comedies have given their characters money troubles. (On Roseanne, those money troubles actually got worse as the series went along, until the central family won the lottery in an ill-advised final season.)

I sometimes wonder if television is where the last vestiges of our burst economic bubble linger. We may have come to terms with the fact that we, personally, can’t have the big house with the adjustable rate mortgage, but we haven’t quite gotten over the idea that it would be nice if someone, somewhere could, whether in the Hamptons estates on Revenge, the light-filled loft on New Girl, or even the haunted apartment building on 666 Park Avenue. We may have accepted a stagnant unemployment rate and its impact on our day-to-day lives, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t nice to look at a world where the Clintonian dream of unimpeded growth still procedes apace, where jobs are unstressful, student loan rates aren’t a problem because no one needs student loans, and people who work in the service industry, like Rachel on Friends, do so on their way to careers in fashion or the arts rather than out of economic necessity. If television is an engine of national fantasies, it makes sense that it would be one of the final places where we indulge the dreams we’ve set aside in our day-to-day lives, not because they’re bad dreams, but because they’re unsustainable. And if television has trained viewers not to look for themselves and scenarios they can identify with but for aspirational problems and something they’d like to have, that’s a preference that took time to build, and will take time to reverse.

Watching this year’s crop of fall pilots, I was struck by something: it’s an awfully good time to be a kid on television. If you’re a child or a teenager, you get to be the voice of reason on a show full of insane adults! Confidant to a terrorist who you know as your dad! The clandestine prize in a battle between your father and your uncle about what counts as heroism and successful masculinity! Or a whole new archetype of teenage nerd. Even the adorable moppets cast for sitcoms these days have some edge, from Joey King in the tragically-cancelled Bent, to Shania on The New Normal. One note: these roles remain overwhelmingly white—when you slot characters of color in peripherally, we don’t get much chance to meet their families. Interestingly, a lot of these great, smart, intriguing characters are girls. In honor of the the rise of great kids on television, and with hope for more, here are six of my favorites:

1. Dana Brody, Homeland: Dana started out Homeland‘s run as one of the sulkiest teenagers anywhere on television, but her father-daughter bond with her former prisoner of war father has turned into one of the most touching depictions of parent-child closeness on television. Dana is her father’s confidant on issues like his conversion to Islam and his troubles returning home, and he, in turn, is her champion when Dana and her mother Jessica, turned rigid and controlling by Brody’s years in exile, come into conflict. And at the end of the last year, that love helped prevent a devastating terrorist attack. This year, Dana gets to flirt with boys, stand-up for her father yet again, and continue to be one of the most crankily real teenagers on TV. I dread to think what would happen if she ever learns the truth about her dad.

2. Shania, The New Normal: I remain unenamored of Ryan Murphy’s portrait of a gay couple having a baby with a surrogate. But I cannot resist Shania (Bebe Wood), the first daughter of surrogate Goldie. As Shania, Wood is a rare thing on television, a child with opinions and interests that are decidedly her own. She calls her grandmother a bigot. She gets obsessed with Grey Gardens as a way of communicating how alone she feels in California. She kisses boys in the cloakroom. And unlike her mother, she pulls the lever for Obama in her school mock election. More than almost another other child on television, Shania feels like an actual person rather than a moppet. I would watch a spinoff in which she and Joey King’s character from Bent are bitter enemies, or who solve crime together, for ten seasons.

3. Walter Junior, Breaking Bad: I was initially annoyed by Walter Junior, AKA Flynn, but over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the sensitive son Albuquerque’s resident super-villain has never really appreciated. Walter Junior began the series loving a father who is somewhat disgusted by him, whether Walt’s resentful of Walter Junior’s efforts to built a website to raise money for his care, or Walt encouraging Walter Junior to drink until it makes his son ill. Since then, Walt’s courted his son with cars, but something interesting has happened: Walter Junior’s seized on the idea that his Uncle Hank is a hero instead of his father. Walt may have convinced himself that he’s a meth-cooking ubermensch, but the New Walt can’t even convince his own son to admire him. He has to buy him instead. Poor Flynn. If Hank busts Walt and Carrie busts Nicholas Brody, he and Dana should sneak some beers out of the house and try to figure out what went wrong.

4. Alex Dunphy, Modern Family: Alex Dunphy’s a new kind of girl on television: a nerd who’s relatively confidently superior to the popular kids, embodied by her gorgeous but academically-struggling older sister, Haley. As a result, she’s put social studies low on her list of academic challenges, but like a popular kid learning to enjoy hitting the books, Alex is starting to realize that her older sister’s approach to life has some assets, too. Rumor is, she’ll have her first boyfriend this season on Modern Family. Hopefully the show finds our favorite girl geek a fellow as iconic as Haley’s on-again-off-again sweetie, musician Dylan.

5. Simon, The L.A. Complex: Simon, more so than some of the other precocious creations on this list, feels like an actual child, a kid who gets super-excited about bubble machines, runs away from home when he’s angry at his big sister, and isn’t sure if he wants to be a child actor, or to grow up to be a scientist. But he’s sweet, winning, and tough, willing to act through a scary scene on a crime show that frightens Beth, his caretaker, warm enough to make friends with the grown-ups at the long-term occupancy hotel where they’re staying. I’m sorry Simon’s leaving the show, but it’s nice to see a kid have actual relationships with adults who recognize that he has something to offer on his own terms.

6. Arya and Sansa Stark, Game of Thrones: Given that their older brothers are off being King In the North and fighting with the Night’s Watch, I’m not counting the Stark boys as children. But even if I factored them, I’d have to give the edge to Arya and Sansa Stark, two sides of the tomboy-girly-girl coin played to perfection by the actresses who embody them. Both Sansa and Arya have found different kinds of power in their gender. As a hostage in King’s Landing, Sansa’s burgeoning sexuality makes her vulnerable to the sadism of King Joffrey, but sympathetic to men and women alike whose sympathy may be her greatest asset. And on the road, Arya has disguised herself as a boy to survive among warlords and brigands, her skills with a pointy sword and willingness to make unusual allies keeping her alive. Taken together, Arya and Sansa are a reminder that neither masculinity nor femininity is superior: it’s all what the situation calls for.

Awards are always a terribly flawed way of determining what makes for good popular culture. Limits on the number of nominees lock deserving contenders out of their categories. Differences between the people who watch television shows or movies and the people in the pool assigned to judge them can produce some truly baffling biases and decisions. And winning doesn’t automatically transform a show’s prospects of staying on the air or an actor’s chance of getting good work in the future. But all of those caveats aside, it can be hugely satisfying to see a small show get the recognition you assume it’ll be denied, or an actor break barriers. And if you want better television, here are the shows and performances you should root for get whatever boost it’s possible to wring out of the Emmys on Sunday.

COMEDY SERIES
Who’s Nominated:
The Big Bang Theory
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Girls
Modern Family
30 Rock
Veep

Who Should Win: Girls

Why: There are a lot of legacy shows on this list, and some very notable omissions, particularly Parks and Recreation, which had a much stronger season than its network counterpart 30 Rock. Given that, I have to root for Girls, one of the few comedies to arrive on television knowing exactly what it was and what its strengths were, even if during its run, creator Lena Dunham had to confront some of its more notable weaknesses and absences, particularly when it came to race. Flawed though it may be, those of us rooting for more personal, low-budget shows—and who would like to see folks of color get the opportunities Dunham and Louis C.K. have—should hope for Girls to take home the statuette over more commercial favorites like The Big Bang Theory.

COMEDY ACTOR
Who’s Nominated:
Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory
Larry David as Himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm
Don Cheadle as Marty Kaan in House of Lies
Louis C.K. as Louie in Louie
Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock
Jon Cryer as Alan Harper in Two and a Half Men

Who Should Win: Louis C.K. or Don Cheadle

Why: It’s impossible to compare C.K.’s exploration of wounded and uncertain middle-aged masculinity and Cheadle’s turn as a hyped-up management consultant struggling to raise his potentially transgender son with tenderness and consideration. House of Lies is an inconsistent mess in comparison to the jewel-like Louie. But C.K. isn’t exactly lacking in recognition. And Cheadle’s playing a character who’s more distant from his real self than C.K. Plus, a black actor hasn’t won the Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Emmy since Robert Guillaume for Benson in 1985.

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While watching the new fall television pilots and revisiting some old shows that are back this fall, I was struck by a worrisome conclusion. There are a lot of shows that have picked the wrong person to place at the center of their storytelling at the expense of much better characters, or that are treating people other than their true main characters as if they’re the main attraction for purpose of advertising. A bad offender on the latter score this fall is Last Resort, which is running print ads that make it appear as if Scott Speedman is the show’s star, rather than Andre Braugher, who dominates the pilot, for reasons you can probably do the math about. But while it’s one thing to start a show with the assumption that one character is the hook and to have others emerge, it’s a shame to watch a show spend seasons focused on the wrong people.

1. Boardwalk Empire: Now in its third season, Boardwalk Empire remains convinced that the best thing it has going for it is Nucky Thompson, who isn’t much more than a chance for Steve Buschemi to show off and wear great suits. But its strongest assets lie elsewhere. How fantastic would a version of Boardwalk Empire that focused on Chalky White and the rise of an East Coast black middle class and aristocracy be? What about Kelly Macdonald’s fantastic Margaret Schroeder, a woman who transformed her lot in life and now is determined to pay it forward through philanthropy, even if it means challenging a powerful head doctor at a hospital over the cause of maternal health? And then there’s Richard Harrow, mutilated in war, grieving the loss of Angela Darmody, one of the few people who ever understood him, and now raising her child with Gillian Darmody as a monstrous replacement mommy. But any chance the show had to be about soldiers returning from World War I appears to have died with Jimmy Darmody last season, replaced by the increasing presence of showy mobsters, and Boardwalk Empire is poorer for all its lost possibility.

2. How I Met Your Mother: I get it. This show is the story of how Ted met the mother of his children. But it’s also an illustration of the weaknesses of selling sitcoms, which are designed to go on forever, on premises that really only feel viable for a short time. Marshall and Lily’s split, reunion, and road to parenthood, experiment with suburbanization, and return to the city is the true big arc story of How I Met Your Mother. And I’m as sick of waiting for Ted to grow up as Ted is as waiting for the love of his life to show up.

3. Revolution: NBC’s new post-apocalyptic drama wants to capture the cachet of The Hunger Games so badly that it turned its main character, Charlie, into a person I refuse to call anything but Fake Katniss. She’s got a leather jacket, a bow, a penchant for woodsiness, but entirely lacks a personality. And Revolution has the same problem that The Hunger Games does: the world it’s set in and the events it explores means that what the knowing adults are up to is vastly more interesting as story material than watching kids run around. At least The Hunger Games‘ kids were relatively well-developed. Revolution doesn’t even have that going for it, and it’s particularly painful to see it focus on its CW-quality leads when Zack Orth’s former Google executive character’s been relegated to the wings, and assigned the task of providing Hurley-style quips.

4. New Girl: Watching the premiere episode of the second season of New Girl, I was struck by two things. First, Jess isn’t even close to the new girl in the apartment she shares with her male roommates anymore. And second, the show found its legs last year when it turned into an exploration of masculinity, rather than a celebration of Jess’s Manic Pixie grade school teacher. Jess isn’t a terrible character, and the show’s pokes fun at some of the whimsy-cures-everything attitude that was so gratingly front and center early in the show’s first season. But still, if it weren’t for all the branding that went into making New Girl a Zooey Deschanel vehicle that’s probably impossible to undo at this point, it would be nice to see the show recenter on the ensemble that makes it so strong.

5. Modern Family: ABC’s smash hit made waves in the offseason when production was delayed on new episodes because of a nasty contract dispute between the producers and the show’s adult stars. It’s too bad, because increasingly, they’re the least interesting part of the show. Mitch and Cam are a TV-sterilized sexless gay couple. Gloria’s a bombshell stereotype. Claire gets stuck with periods-make-ladies-crazy storylines. But the kids remain the most winning part of Modern Family. If the families involved had some more children, you could build an entire show about the dynamics of the siblings and cousins. And in a television environment where kids get to be props more than actual people, a program from the perspective of young people would be fascinating.