Over at Vulture yesterday, Margaret Lyons did a great public service, sorting out television dramas that have aired on both broadcast networks and cable this season by which ones featured rape or murder as plot lines, and which ones don’t. Unsurprisingly, the shows that include rape and murder—even as a one-off plot rather than a regularly featured occurrence, as in Nashville—dramatically outnumber the ones that find their stakes elsewhere, 109 to 16. As NPR critic Linda Holmes wrote last year, it’s exhausting to have a world of television where the only stakes that are treated as if they’re worthy of long-form exploration are “avoiding being violently killed.” And so I thought it was worth looking through the list of sixteen shows that haven’t gone to the rape or murder well to see what other kinds of stakes seem to be playing well—or at least moderately well—on scripted drama.

1. The realization of creative ambition: Bunheads, Glee, Smash, The Wedding Band, Nashville, Underemployed, to a certain extent The Newsroom are all shows that fall into this category. Creative ambition works well on television for a couple of reasons. Writing a song or story, preparing for a performance or a broadcast, or going after a contract or a part is an essentially procedural process: it has a beginning, middle, and an end point. Having creativity as the stakes also lets television dramas do what the most popular reality shows of the modern era of TV have done: invest audiences in big musical performances. Creativity shows run into trouble, just as reality programs like American Idol do, when they try to sell us on people who aren’t compellingly talented on their own merits, as has been the case with Smash, and is true to a certain extent with the dramatic overemphasis on the goodness of Will McAvoy in The Newsroom. But just as murder and sexual assault turn ordinary people into people who are worthy of dramatic consideration by injecting extraordinarily high stakes into their lives, creativity shows focus on people to whom we assign an extraordinary amount of societal capital in real life.

2. Period pieces: We’ve got a modest, but not extraordinarily large number of period dramas on television right now: Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife, Mr. Selfridge, and The Carrie Diaries. And it’s no mistake that three of those four shows air on PBS, which has built its brand in part in opposition to the prevailing winds of television, and is ahead of the curve on programming to viewers who are burned out on violent storylines elsewhere. It’s also done so with imports: Downton and Call The Midwife are both British shows that PBS has the rights to air. Other period shows, like The Americans, make heavy use of violence. But situating characters in the past tends to lend a sheen of significance to ordinary lives by letting those characters stand in for larger forces. Lady Mary and Cousin Matthew may be just ordinary rich people we’d find sort of irksome if they were will-they-or-won’ting-they through the twentieth century. But from a distance of decades, the reasons that it took them so long to get together, questions about their relative sexual experience, and the importance of Lady Mary’s pregnancy become unfamiliar and newly exciting.

3. Family stories: This is a category that comedy seems to be doing better, or at least with greater frequency, than drama at the moment. But NBC’s Parenthood, and ABC Family’s Switched at Birth have both been useful illustrations of how making whether or not family gets along or holds together or finds its way together can elevate other conflicts. Parenthood and Switched At Birth have been staging grounds for all kinds of other stories, including recognition of creative ambition plotlines, political involvement arcs, and illness and autism stories. If audiences get hooked by what happens when individual characters’ actions influence their group of friends, the consequences are even more significant when their actions can blow up or restore the bonds of family.

4. Procedurals with below-death stakes: In this group fall the quickly-cancelled Emily Owens M.D. and the hardier Necessary Roughness, Suits, and The Client List. The middle two are USA Network shows, which, with its Blue Sky brand, works somewhat like PBS in programming to people who want a different, but relatively predictable, tone from much of what they’re offered on networks and cable. Often the problems characters face on USA’s procedurals are engaging precisely because they’re sort of silly, or because the people who have the problems are silly, or because the means in which they’re resolved are silly. Maybe the cure for television’s rape and murder epidemic isn’t just getting more creative about the stakes involved, but in how main characters solve crimes or medical problems and reach resolutions.

I’ve turned into a total and utter Nashville junkie—fights about economic development and race and politics interspersed with singing is my version of network television Nirvana—so I was excited to read Willa Paskin’s interview with the show’s creator, Callie Khouri. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in their conversation, but I wanted to pull out this excerpt, which I found striking:

People who make TV also seem much more comfortable making shows for women than people making movies do.

Because you’re allowed. You’re allowed to make things for women on television and there’s not like … you don’t have to go through the humiliation of having made something directed at women. There it’s just accepted, whereas if it’s a feature, it’s like “So, talk to me about chick flicks.” It’s like … I don’t think you want to hear my opinion about this.

I want to hear your opinion! Even though it’s probably not very nice.

No, it’s not. I just think it’s insulting that if there is something with women in it, it’s relegated to this kind of trash heap. It doesn’t matter what it is, how good it is, if there is emotion in it, it’s immediately going to be talked down to. And I’m obviously irritated by that. Probably all women are. Certainly a lot of women filmmakers are.

I think there’s an extent to which this is true. But there’s also a certain overlap between programming aimed at women and shows that are considered “soapy” and melodramatic, two tones and methods of storytelling that I think tend to be considered less serious. That’s not to be said that soapiness can’t be done badly: putting children in danger, having plots gyrate wildly, and throwing new elements into the mix to generate emotion that a show isn’t earning are bad things that can be done by masculine-coded shows like Sons of Anarchy, too. But I don’t think, for example, that realism is inherently a better tone than well-executed archness or camp, and I’m not entirely sure that’s something that’s reflected in our consensus of what makes for great television.

But I do think in our past decade of television, violence gets more credence than romance (which is part of what makes Homeland‘s mix of the two so fascinating), business and war get taken more seriously than personal revelation. Nashville, I think, works in part because Khouri and her colleagues are using business and politics as tools to put pressure on deeply felt romantic relationships: they’ve added forces that lend a sense of scale to love. I do agree that it’s progress that you don’t have to humiliate a woman on television in order to let her win, and that women, like the awesome leads of Happy Endings, can be delightfully weird without being defeated or in need of reform. But I don’t think that means we’ve entirely won. When we’re at a point where sentiment is as prized as hardness and purely domestic stories are taken as seriously as explorations of public lives (not to mention better roles for women of color and women with bodies that deviate beyond the mean), then I think women’s television will be in a place both with its audience and in terms of critical acclaim that would make me happy.

I always enjoy reading Troy Patterson over at Slate, but his review of Nashville, ABC’s soapy drama about the rise of a great American city as told through the conflict between a rising country star, Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere) and a falling one, Rayna James (Connie Britton), reminded me of a pet peeve: the tendency to frame conflicts between women as cat fights, rather than as expressions of legitimate divisions and substantive rivalries.

There’s no question that Juliette and Rayna don’t like each other much, and that they’re downright vicious to each other in a meeting arranged by their label. Rayna makes an effort to be nice to Juliette. But Juliette gives her what can only be described as the best modern cut direct I’ve ever seen, ignoring the attempt at a complement and an outstretched hand and turning instead to a legendary songwriter and radio host, telling him “It is such an honor to get a chance to sing for you tonight.” Even then, Rayna still tries, telling Juliette “You’re burning it up out there, girl.” But Juliette goes in for the kill, telling her: “My mama was one of your biggest fans. She said she’d listen to you while I was still in her belly.” Even if Rayna’s record sales are lagging behind Juliette’s, her fidelity to an old business model hasn’t dulled her ability to bring the burn. “Well, bless your little heart,” she tells Juliette. “That is a charming story. You probably got to go on soon. I’m sure you’re going to want to make sure you got those girls tucked in there real good.”

Taken in isolation, this would be an epic attack of cat-scratch fever. But the differences between Rayna and Juliette are real. Juliette needs pitch correction to make her recordings sound good, and her songs are poppier tunes, engineered to become earworms to listeners the same ages as Rayna’s pre-teen daughters. Those of us who mourn the homogenization of popular musical genres may sympathize with Rayna when she complains “Why do people listen to that adolescent crap? It sounds like feral cats to me. Why does everyone think she’s good?”

But on the other hand, she’s hustling in a way that Rayna’s not. Rayna may not like the new model for the music industry, but her nostalgia’s bread inflexibility. She doesn’t want to tour with Juliette, and she rejects the prospect of doing a tour in smaller venues that would both create artificial demand for tickets and help her reconnect with her most enthusiastic fans. She’s lazy about recording extra tracks for her album, and then irritated when other singers snap them up. It may be obnoxious of Juliette to go after Rayna’s bandleader and other collaborators, but she’s attuned to the careful balance between commercial success and Nashville credibility, and is making more efforts to shore up her weaknesses than Rayna is.

And if Juliette has mommy issues—hers is an addict who Juliette tries to avoid so she won’t let herself be talked into giving her mother money that would feed her drug use—that she works out by seducing any man who crosses her path, even making a play for a guy who bumps into her in a hallway, Rayna has whopping daddy issues. Hers is more present in her life than Juliette’s mother is in hers, and he’s played by Powers Boothe as a wheeling, dealing real estate tycoon. In denial about how much her father has helped her recording career and prickly about the possibility of coming under his influence, Rayna reflexively reacts against anything her father proposes or asks. I can understand why Rayna rejects her father’s machinations just as I can see why Juliette, who lacks the family and support that buoys Rayna, seeks out affirmation elsewhere.

Juliette and Rayna may go personal in their attacks on each other, but that doesn’t mean their differences aren’t substantive, whether they’re throwing down over aesthetics and authenticity, competing for talent, or charming crowds on stage at the Grand Ol’ Opry, where Rayna rules the stage with a queenly distance and Juliette reaches out to let her fans touch her. These are interesting, meaningful questions and jealousies rooted in actual economic pressures, rather than the result of irrational animosities. Juliette and Rayna may have perfectly-manicured claws and blown-out manes, but just because these lionesses are clashing doesn’t mean it’ a catfight.

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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A great deal of discussion about television’s breakout period has focused on the extent to which television has equaled, or even replaced the novel in the best shows’ sprawling explorations of huge groups of characters, social issues, and the idiosyncrasies of American life. But last season, and I think in this upcoming season of television, we have a number of shows with different ambition that are struggling within their forms: they want to be movies or miniseries, and are trying to figure out how how to stretch their plots over 22 episodes, much less multiple seasons. The prime existing example of that kind of show is Revenge, the story of a woman coming back to have her way with the people who framed her father for complicity with terrorism, a decision that lead to his death. The show initially started with its protagonist, Emily Thorne (Emily Van Camp) doing in an enemy per week, but given how short her enemies’ list really was, the show lost momentum after she got rid of the easy marks and had to stretch out her stalking of the Big Bads. It’s a setup that might have worked brilliantly and nastily as a six-episode miniseries, but got ponderous towards the end, and is hard to imagine working all the way through a second season unless her battle escalates to full-on trench warfare in the Hamptons:

This fall television season features a number of new shows, all of which I like, but none of which seem sustainable over the long term. On ABC’s Last Resort, the crew of a nuclear submarine refuse their orders and take over a small tropical island which they declare independent. The idea of taking Gotham hostage with a nuclear weapon barely seemed plausible over a period of nine months in The Dark Knight Rises, and it’s hard for me to see how a viable stalemate would persist for years or the conspiracy around the orders the crew got to nuke Pakistan can stay undetected and unbusted for that long either. Nashville, also on that network, features a rivalry between two country singers played by Connie Britton and Hayden Panettiere, but it’s hard to believe they can remain in a perpetual state of animosity—tours last only so long—or what the show plans to do after playing out its B story, about the Nashville mayoral election. Fox’s midseason show The Following, about a serial killer who develops a following during his imprisonment, has an even more limited premise: there can only be so many people willing to sign up to commit mass murder or to stab themselves in the eye to mess with the FBI. The case can’t go on forever unless the show wants to abandon its core dynamic, a rivalry between Kevin Bacon and James Purefoy. That show, at least, is beginning with a 15-episode season because that’s the number per year Bacon was willing to commit to.

To an extent, it seems like Revenge was written with the expectation that it couldn’t possibly get a full-season order, and the same may be the case with Last Resort, which is excellent, but high-concept and will air in an extremely difficult 8 PM Thursday timeslot. But it’s really too bad that networks don’t have some quarterly or mini-series sized time slots that they could use for concepts that are fascinating, but don’t fit neatly into the 22 episode season. The season length is essentially arbitrary, and in so much as it has a rationale, it’s a commercial rather than an artistic one, a way to get to the syndication threshhold of 100 episodes as quickly as possible without burning out actors or writers. But miniseries or shorter runs could be a way to make truly must-see TV again, as appeared to be the case with Kevin Costner’s run on Hatfields & McCoys earlier this summer. I understand the difficulties of sinking resources into one-time productions for a business model that’s based on monetizing the same content multiple times.

But when I think about it, I still think one of the shows I enjoyed last season was ABC’s The River, a horror story about a group of Amazonian explorers who go looking for their long-lost leader. The show had its flaws, including some casting problems. But when it was cancelled after the short run of its first season, it went out with a genuinely terrifying image, of the river shifting to trap the crew forever. That, more than a clear resolution or explanation, or wringing everything out of the characters that could possibly be obtained with them, was some thrilling television. There wasn’t a repetitive episode, a moment that made me feel like the show was in a rut, just a scary economy to the show’s forward progress. I’d rather have less of a good concept executed well than one wrung painfully dry, as CBS is doing to How I Met Your Mother right now. And I’d love for networks to find their way to building some flexibility into the schedule to give stories the amount of space they actually need. It’s not only in my interests. If the broadcast networks are going to complain that cable’s beating them in awards nominations because those networks only need to produce eight to fifteen episodes of a show, the broadcast networks might consider whether it would behoove them to play the game, at least sometimes, by the new rules.