Perhaps the people who should be really interested Roseanne’s poll results are the executives at NBC, who have hired the comedienne for a new show about the recession, Downwardly Mobile. In that show, Roseanne’s co-star from her titular hit show, John Goodman, will join her on screen again. Even though Roseanne’s overall numbers are bad, there’s one bright spot for NBC, which is desperate for key viewers in the 18-49 demographics: in the Romney-Obama-Barr matchup, she pulled 19 percent of polled voters between the ages of 18-29.

-There is no place that Star Wars can’t penetrate, even Pintrest.

-Why is it so hard to get people to adopt new musical intstruments?

-Go inside John Waters’ house in Baltimore.

-NBC: still not taking my suggestions.

-I would totally watch a show where Justice Sonia Sotomayor solves fairy-tale disputes. Someone call the USA Network!

For the time being, Barr’s presidential run does not pose a problem for NBC as the project, which she co-created and stars in, is in a pilot stage. But things will get dicier if NBC picks it up to series in May and Barr ends up as the Green Party presidential nominee as the campaign doesn’t wrap until the November election, well into the fall season, which starts in September. According to FCC’s equal-time rule, which applies to “all legally qualified candidates” who have “substantial showing” in the campaign, TV and radio stations are obligated to offer equivalent time to competing political candidates if one gets free airtime. While the rule’s application to entertainment shows featuring candidates is more ambiguous than when the candidates do news programs, networks err on the side of caution. For example, when Fred D. Thompson entered the race for the Republican nomination in 2008, he quit NBC’s Law & Order and NBC stopped rerunning episodes of the show that he was featured in. Last year, NBC also indicated that The Apprentice star Trump would be recast if he chose to run for President. Similarly, Alec Baldwin of NBC’s comedy 30 Rock toyed with the idea of leaving the show in order to run for office. (Isn’t it strange that its always talent on NBC shows that have political aspirations?) Barr is known for outrageous moves, including her recent plan to behead bankers who don’t return profits. Still, the timing for her presidential run is strange as it comes just as the actress signed a seven-year deal with 20th Century TV for Downwardly Mobile.

If only NBC would get all creative on us and solve the equal time problem Roseanne presents by casting Barack Obama and Mitt Romney as antagonists on Parks and Recreation. Mitt could team up with Marcia Langman to complain that the Parks Department’s programs are inculcating the very poor with the wrong values, or something, and Barack could represent the Parks Department pro-bono when they get hit with a Mitt-funded lawsuit. Huzzah for aligning the interests of quality television and legal doctrines. In reality, what NBC should and probably will do is not go forward with Downwardly Mobile if Roseanne, unlike Donald Trump, sticks with the campaign. Which, if its star is spending more time stumping than thinking intelligently about how to develop her show, might be the right thing to do creatively anyway.

Of the main characters, musical writer Julia (Debra Messing), scenery-chomping producer Eileen (Anjelica Huston), ingenues Karen (Katherine McPhee) and Ivy (Megan Hilty) are all women, Julia’s writing partner Tom (Christian Borle) is definitively gay, and his ambitious new assistant Ellis (Jamie Cepero) is potentially gay. The only straight men are high-powered-and-he-knows-it director Derek (Jack Davenport) and Frank (Brian d’Arcy James), Julia’s husband.

They both feel varying resentments towards the dominant paradigms that govern their lives. “All that fawning over the actress,” Jack complains. “Gay men piss me off.” “That’s an unfortunate sentiment to express in the American musical theater,” Eileen deadpans at him. His solution to being a straight man in a gay man’s world seems to be to benefit from it, or at least to try. He calls Karen to his house at 10 p.m. the night before her callback, expecting her to show up to seduce him, and even when she’s visibly upset, talks her into proceeding with a sexy-Marilyn impression, if not all the way in to bed.

Frank joins Chris on Up All Night as the second major stay-at-home father NBC’s put on television this season. He’s upset when Julia dives into the Marilyn musical, breaking her promise to him that she’ll take the year off so they can focus on their adoption. And when it’s clear that she’s determined to move forward, he decides he has to go back to work: waiting for the adoption to come through and tending their domestic life isn’t enough for them. There’s something very interesting going on here in NBC’s decision to put the emotional struggles of stay-at-home mothers in the mouths of men, and I’d be curious to know how much it’s resonating with straight male viewers — if any of them are tuning in.

I’d argue that even if you are a straight dude, Smash is worth a trying if you’ve been looking for some fascinating female characters on television. Julia’s clearly very creatively driven, sometimes to the point of neglecting her home life. She forgets to dress up for a social worker’s visit that’s a condition of their adoption, but charms the woman when it turns out they share a love of her subject matter. Watching her watch Marilyn movies in bed and light up while she’s doing it is wonderful — Messing may tend towards light fare, but there’s no question that she’s a delight to watch. And as a writer (though, of course, one of the representatives of the chattering classes who nearly give Julia a heart attack), the show has a sense if not for the actual process of writing, which we don’t see in the pilot, the itchy compulsion to do it.

Similarly, Huston is tough as nails: her production company’s in bad trouble, tied up in escrow while she and her husband fight out an extremely nasty divorce. It’s a nice illustration of how divorce can really take something away from a person. “I’m not out of the game and I don’t have to prove it,” she snaps at Derek as they walk through Times Square discussing their fledgling production. Sure, the competition is supposed to be between Karen and Ivy (at the moment, I’m Team Ivy, since the show seems to be trying awfully hard to get me to be Team Karen). But watching these big, grown-up women with big lives making things on television is lovely.

“I reject completely these distinctions and these labels, totally,” he said when asked whether the perception that ABC focusing on soft news, like interviewing kidnapping victim Jaycee Dugard, at the expense of reporting. “We believe our guiding philosophy is relevance…we believe that our mission as you saw is to give people the whole picture so they can change their futures…we have had exclusive interviews with Mubarak and Assad..our anchor Diane Sawyer was the only evening news anchor to go to Japan to cover the Biblical disaster here…We will cede no ground on investigative journalism, on hard-hitting news.” But he also suggested that it was no longer the role of news anchors to act as “priests of news [who] presented at the end of the day one menu of news that they had decided was the most important in the order of importance,” saying it was much more critical to look to the audience’s needs. He cited aggressive coverage of Bank of America’s proposed $5 debit card fee as the kind of story that was responsive to the economic concerns of viewers. And he argued that Christiane Amanpour’s interviews and coverage of the Arab Spring were proof that Nightline was not a lifestyle program.

Speaking of Amanpour, who had her last day on The Week yesterday, Sherwood said that the move was part a product of a desire to focus on American politics in an election year, recasting the charge that Amanpour couldn’t deliver domestic nes as a strength: “We thought her tremendous strengths, her world-beating strengths, are best deployed in her area of strength and also her personal passion.” He insisted that despite the decision to move Amanpour away from The Week, 2011 was “probably one of the greatest years of her career this year. If you look at her domination in terms of big interviews all across the Arab Spring, just an incredible year.” And Sherwood said the move would allow Amanpour to work with CNN in a “unique arrangement.”

And Sherwood set his sites on NBC. In response to one question about whether NBC was trying to imitate George Stephanopoulos by hiring the daughters of former presidents like Chelsea Clinton, saying Stephanopoulos “is a first-rate journalist. And he has, over the last 15 years, developed an incredible set of skills. He’s developed a whole new set of skills in the morning…I think that is an unfair question.” More substantively, Sherwood praised Good Morning America for cutting the Today Show’s lead by “30 to 40 percent.” He acknowledged that “the Today show is very mighty, and they’ve been very mighty for a very long time,” but said of Good Morning America that “It’s dynamic, it’s incredibly watchable, it’s surprising, it’s really fun.” Earlier in the week, NBC’s Bob Greenblatt said that he hoped and expected that Matt Lauer would remain on Today, so it’ll be fascinating to see that rivalry heat up in the year to come.

“The good news about NBC today is that we have new owners and they’re investing in our business not only with significant financial resources but with their patience,” Greenblatt said. “They’re providing me with everything we need at NBC entertainment to go after prime time.”

The interesting question is how long that patience lasts. Todd VanDerWerff and I were chatting about this, and he pointed out that the network’s cautiousness with The Voice, which they’re running in a normal schedule instead of oversaturating in the name of a quick ratings bump, is a good sign of a long-term game plan. And only the silliest person would have trouble with the concept that it takes a long time to turn a network around, something that effectively means changing audience expectations and consuming patterns. But NBC’s transformation is part of a tricky double-act: the network’s struggle up the ratings ladder as its head of programming learns how to run a network instead of a cable channel.

Greenblatt clearly is in the midst of an adjustment between a cable mindset and a network one. “I’m done with cable. It’s a dying business,” he joked, “And ruining the culture of America.” But there’s no question that he misses cable: he talked with surprising frequency about how sorry he was Prime Suspect hadn’t done better, and said that had it been a cable show, it “would have been picked up in the third episode and declared a hit”; and said that “if I was at Showtime, you’d be calling me a genius for launching one or two good shows in a season.”

And in the short term, NBC’s new launches actually feel very much like cable’s strengths: those that are precision-cut and diamond-honed like Smash, and then inexpensive junk like Are You There, Chelsea?, and very little in between. And in between is network television’s sweet spot. Cable is all about the stuff that you just have to pay to get access to because it’s so compelling, and the stuff that you watch because it’s there and it’s all about getting your money’s worth. Network is the stuff that’s pretty solid. The Firm feels like it ought to be that sort of pretty solid show, something mid-level and pleasant without needing to be either revolutionary in its concepts or perspectives or gorgeous in its execution. But the premise for it is so silly—does Mitch ever come back to testify against the firm? Why would he and Abby ever quit their Caribbean early retirement? What is it with this dude and Evil Law Firms?—that I worry it won’t make it over the hump. A show can be cheap and effective or cheap and cheap, and it’s easier to find the latter than the former—see:Fashion Star—but important to at least seem like you’re searching for the former.

Beyond the three-tier question, there’s the problem of the network’s identity and sense of its core demographics, because nerds isn’t going to cut it (Awake’s Kyle Killen joked at his panel that a room full of critics made up most of Community‘s fan base). At Showtime, Greenblatt developed a set of shows that I think could best be described as melancholy anti-heroes, more accessible and diverse than HBO and FX’s somewhat-scary mostly-white dudes. There’s definitely not a pattern that strong in the slate of programming he rolled out here in Pasadena.

And in terms of demographics, I suppose I’d suggest that between Smash, Bent, Are You There, Chelsea? and Fashion Star, they’re aiming for a less-wealthy version of Bravo’s smart lady contingency. When I followed up with Greenblatt about whether the network could rebuild by trying to lure demographics who have largely walked away from the networks back, he said that seeing more diversity in ensemble casts is “going to happen much faster than a black family or an Asian family show…If somebody brings me the great Asian family show or the great black family show, we’re developing some of that. I just think it’s more likely to see large ensembles with diversity.” Which I think is probably correct, though it remains unfortunate that the representative American family on television is still a majority-white one. If we’re going to be a majority minority nation in 2050 (aeons in entertainment-land), we’re going to need more shows like Rob about white folks learning to live with minorities, except not terrible. I’d love to see Future NBC do something like that.

Worst: Big Scary Lesbians. NBC has two pilots where plots appear to be motivated by the presence of outsized, aggressive lesbians. After her lovely work on Glee, Dot Jones deserves far better than to be cast as a butch lesbian who sexually harasses Laura Prepon while they’re both in lockup on Are You There, Chelsea? And the heavy lesbian contractor who gets passed over in favor of a hottie love interest for the main character on Bent manages to simultaneously reinforce stereotypes about lesbians, and about women and home improvement.

Best: Support for Working Mothers. Amanda Peet mentioned at the Bent panel that NBC had been wonderful about accommodating and supporting her being a working mother during production of the show. Debra Messing says of her character on Smash, “The hero’s a woman who is very passionate about her creative life and needs that part of her life fulfilled, but also is a proud mother who has that home life and wants that part of her life fulfilled. The way Theresa writes, there’s such richness.” Not that we need aggressive emphasis of characters HAVING IT ALL constantly, but it’s nice to hear that the network practices off-set some of the better things it preaches on-screen.

Worst: Uncertainty. Bob Greenblatt doesn’t know when Community‘s coming back. No one knows when Awake will air. Scheduling’s not easy, we know, but stop torturing us here.

Meh: Alcohol: It sounds like the drinking on Are You There, Chelsea? will get tired quickly, but J.B. Smoove as an addict in recovery? That could be intriguing territory. Television’s got a lot of serious drinkers, but fewer people showing us what it’s like to live in a world where most people treat drinking as if it ranges from no big deal to the linchpin of their social lives.

Best: A lack of sniping. NBC may have to fight its way back to the top, but the network seems aware that it’s not close enough to its rivals to tear them down. The folks behind Smash acknowledge that Glee opened the door without slagging anything they don’t like about it. Bob Greenblatt was blunt about the network’s need to find its own way without complaining that his rivals are being wrongly rewarded for less risky programming. When The Voice criticized its rivals, it was on substance and format, which is fair game. NBC’s biggest asset is the fact that people want to like it. It’s clear they have no intention of relinquishing it.

But more to the point, there’s the idea that if someone is a virgin at an advanced age, they need to be fixed, as if virginity is inherently a flaw or the result of someone being damaged. Sometimes, as The 40 Year Old Virgin put it, sex jus doesn’t happen for people. That movie was probably the most positive way to spin that particular kind of plot arc—Andy wants to have sex, but after some bad experiences, has essentially stopped trying. That it hasn’t happened isn’t really his fault, and he’s not an inherently damaged person. The advice he’s given turns out to be mostly BS, too: there is no secret code for getting with women or having satisfying sex. He just has to find someone he feels comfortable with.

That hasn’t exactly been the case with television recently, though. Glee‘s played out Emma as an incredibly damaged person who does bad things to other people by virtue of refusing to fix herself. I don’t know what will happen in the upcoming arc where Will proposes to her. But the show has not exactly handled her with delicacy and empathy. Now, Are You There, Chelsea? is going to have its bitter, alcoholic party girl rooming with another late-twenties virgin, Dee Dee, who I am informed by the network no longer has her eyes pop all the time. Lauren Lapkus, who plays Dee Dee explains: “She has really strong morals, religious morals. But she’s able to go with the flow. And then kind of help her open herself up in different ways. And over the course of the season she has experiences she wouldn’t necessarily have with different guys.” Which, you know, okay. I like the idea of a sympathetic religious character on network television. But I really hope they treat her as if she has something to bring to the table, rather than having her deliver moralistic sermons on subjects that Chelsea’s already made her mind up on. And as for her getting opened up to new experiences? I’m not sure Chelsea Handler, fictional or otherwise, is someone who should guide someone in a sensitive way towards their deflowering.

*Chelsea Handler’s explanation for why she’s playing a character based on her own sister? “I have a sister. Period. Her name isn’t Sloane. And we had to change her name for legal reasons, so my own family can’t sue me…Everything I’ve been accusing her of my whole life I can now reenact before her eyes.”

It’s always tricky to think about the niche and trying to build on the niche. Because unfortunately that’s been the good news and the bad news of a show like Community. It has such a strong core audience, and yet it’s been hard to expand that audience. What we’re trying to do is seize on the audience that’s going to come to it at the beginning…we’re developing all kinds of those things. I’m not sure yet what it’ll yield out of development. But we have to some degree do the thing that no one else is doing but we have to be broad. You can just program for 18-year-old twins and get a hit show on a cable network. We just have to figure out how to seize on that but also not end up in the narrow place.

I think this is probably true, even if it’s deeply unfortunate that shows aimed at a black audience, or that star black or Latino characters, count as such a niche that programming in that direction means networks assume they’re giving up white viewers. But a recession seems like a good time to try to win some minority viewers back to the networks by showing them that cable isn’t the only place that will tell stories about their lives or meet their needs. NBC’s very good at fan service for nerds. It would be cool to see them try to do something similar for other categories of underserved viewers. And it would be nice for someone to demonstrate an understanding that Tyler Perry products aren’t just popular because they’re Tyler Perry products, but because they’re an entrant in a comparatively bare market.

*I maaaay have used Living Single as an example of a black sitcom that’s the kind of thing NBC could do. The Hollywood Reporter may have made fun of me for it, but NBC would flip if it had a freshman comedy that pulled 9 million viewers per episode in its first season.

-Hollywood may be releasing Oscar contenders late in the year, but they’re not box-office hits.

-Goodies from The Avengers.

-NBC starts filling out its robot rights drama.

-The U.K. Defense Ministry turns to video game technology to soup up its simulations.

-Scissor Sisters. Krystal Pepsy. Azalea Banks. Get happy:

More broadly, this kind of genre show strikes me as a smart move for NBC. Grimm, a genre show about a world that is slightly but not entirely different from our own, is both moving steadily in what I think are some intelligent directions, and more to the point for the struggling network, actually winning the demo in its hour on a regular basis. After Chuck finishes its final season, it would be wise to try to continue the nerd-momentum but roll it into a more popular show. And after Fox ran into trouble with Terra Nova, which was the unholy trinity of awful, expensive, and not wildly successful in the ratings, there’s genre credibility up for grabs in network-land, especially as HBO goes hard on fantasy with Game of Thrones and American Gods. If NBC is going to take Gavin Polone’s advice and try to regain market share by rebranding itself as a dude network, it could do worse than to go a sci-fi/fantasy route rather than trying to turn this fall’s bro-show failures into pyrite and pass it off as gold. Genre may be stereotypically guy territory from the industry’s perspective, but it’s also not inherently alienating to female viewers.

One of NBC’s true assets is the ability to promote its new shows on NFL Sunday, the only programming they have that gets a big male audience. But if they want to get men to watch and stay with their shows, they have to commit to giving men what they want thematically and not water it down in an attempt not to alienate potential female viewers. The Playboy Club might have reached a male audience (as the original club did), but instead of making the show a titillating male fantasy set at a time when Hugh Hefner’s lifestyle was heroic rather than clownish, the network steered the show toward mystery and female empowerment stories. The result felt neither here nor there and didn’t attract either audience. Women are more tolerant in terms of what they’ll watch than men are. If a character is boorish, sexist, and violent but is written with integrity and is in a vehicle for interesting plots, women will watch: The Sopranos was a great example of this. But no matter how well done Drop Dead Diva may be, no straight guy will watch it. When I was first producing Gilmore Girls, I remember testing it and hearing the males in the test audience say that they thought the show was quite good but that they’d never tune in.

I really wish this wasn’t true. It’s incredibly irritating to be told by, say, Marvel Comics, that if women would just pony up some more cash than we already do, they’ll do better by us. We already bend so much. Are we really supposed to believe that if we completely acquiesce to culture made by and for men that they’ll they’ll reward us with products that are oriented towards us and our experiences? It doesn’t seem to have worked out that well for us to just buy in to culture about men, or culture where really terrible things happen to women in the name of grittiness. Watching The Sopranos and The Wire didn’t get us a New Golden Age mob or cop show with women in the center of the frame and men at the periphery.

And I just want to holler at men who insist they’d never tune in to a show aimed at women to consider what they’re missing, to consider what women add to their favorite shows. Does anyone who watches Sons of Anarchy seriously think it would be a better show without the female characters? Even without the men of SAMCRO, or with them on the edge of the frame, Gemma and company would make a killer stand-alone television show, and I hate to think that the men who tune in to Sons of Anarchy wouldn’t tune in to that. Similarly, I think the total dude aversion to Sex and the City is a mistake, though I can see how the show would be discomfiting for men who aren’t used to hear themselves spoken about in the same ways men regularly speak about women in culture. And Buffy the Vampire Slayer may have romantic and emotional subplots, but it’s an unambiguously wonderful cheesy action show with great villains. It’d be pretty depressing to see men not tune in to AKA Jessica Jones when it comes out, or to have it labeled the chick superhero show, the bone that gets thrown to women as a reward for our patience.

I don’t know what’s worse: the idea that women have to constantly submit to guy-defined culture, or that guys, by staying in their own enclaves, miss out.

Seriously, though, I love this sort of transmedia worldbuilding. I’ve always thought that the secret to Bravo’s success was the fact that they recognize that folks want to live in the world of their favorite pop culture, and so they built shows where, if you had enough money, you could hire the stars to flip your house, cook your food, cut your hair, style you for an event, find you a spouse, or sell you art. You can’t really do that with Pawnee or Greendale, but you can create a temporary illusion to that effect. That’s a real strength of NBC shows. And I hope whatever direction Bob Greenblatt takes the network in, he appreciates that level of attachment.

And it’s even more bewildering to think that people would tune in for Chelsea Clinton. One of the more admirable things the Clintons ever did as parents was to fight hard to protect Chelsea’s privacy, especially at a time when Bill’s behavior was inviting withering media scrutiny. As an adult, she kept to that pattern, working a series of bland private sector jobs and venturing out only to campaign for her mother in 2008. I looked at some of her wedding pictures (Hillary rocked a really awesome caftan in the days beforehand) in a cursory way. But the same preservation of her privacy and stringent avoidance of public life or public service that don’t make her a particularly qualified journalist don’t make her a particularly interesting person either. I have no idea what Chelsea Clinton’s unique lens on the world is, and nothing about the deal with NBC has made it seem like I should really care. I say this not to be callous, but to suggest it’s puzzling that the network would pursue a hire that invites disapproval without a clear upside.

Texas State Climatologist:  “This is really the first time when climate change has manifested itself in a tangible way within the state of Texas.”

Koch-funded Richard Muller:  “The existence of global warming is pretty much beyond dispute now.”

NBC’s Anne Thompson:  Koch brothers are “oil billionaires and climate change deniers.”

Wow!  The NBC Evening news ran one of the best segments on global warming and extreme weather ever to appear on a major network.  Here it is:

The  weather is becoming so extreme in a manner that  climate scientist had been predicting for decade that it’s getting harder to ignore.   At the same time, climate scientists are starting to do a good job of documenting the link to global warming and  coming up with good analogies with which to explain it to the public, like Meehl’s steroids analogy.

Indeed, the AP also reported on a leaked version of a new IPCC report on this subject with the headline, “More weather disasters ahead, climate experts report; Some locations will become ‘increasingly marginal as places to live’.”  Here are some key excerpts:

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Freakish weather disasters — from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press.

The final draft of the report from a panel of the world’s top climate scientists paints a wild future for a world already weary of weather catastrophes costing billions of dollars.

The report says costs will rise and perhaps some locations will become “increasingly marginal as places to live.”

The report from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be issued in a few weeks, after a meeting in Uganda.

It says there is at least a 2-in-3 probability that climate extremes have already worsened because of man-made greenhouse gases.

Other studies makes stronger statements (see “Bombshell: Study Finds 80% Chance Russia’s 2010 July Heat Record Would Not Have Occurred Without Climate Warming” and “Bombshell: Study Finds 80% Chance Russia’s 2010 July Heat Record Would Not Have Occurred Without Climate Warming“).

The final draft of the report from a panel of the world’s top climate scientists paints a wild future for a world already weary of weather catastrophes costing billions of dollars.

The report says costs will rise and perhaps some locations will become “increasingly marginal as places to live.”

The report from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be issued in a few weeks, after a meeting in Uganda.

It says there is at least a 2-in-3 probability that climate extremes have already worsened because of man-made greenhouse gases….

“The extremes are a really noticeable aspect of climate change,” said Jerry Meehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “I think people realize that the extremes are where we are going to see a lot of the impacts of climate change.”

Weather Underground meteorology director Jeff Masters, who wasn’t involved in the study, said in the United States from June to August this year, blistering heat set 2,703 daily high temperature records, compared with only 300 cold records during that period, making it the hottest summer in the U.S. since the Dust Bowl of 1936.

By the end of the century, the intense, single-day, heavy rainstorms that now typically happen only once every 20 years are likely to happen about twice a decade, the report says.

The report said hurricanes and other tropical cyclones — like 2005′s Katrina — are likely to get stronger in wind speed, but won’t increase in number and may actually decrease. Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel, who studies climate’s effects on hurricanes, disagrees and believes more of these intense storms will occur.

I’ll have more on this report in the coming weeks.

Kudos to NBC and the AP for getting the story right.

Related Posts:

• Munich Re: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change”
• Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding that harm humans and the environment
• Terrific ABC News story: “Raging Waters In Australia and Brazil Product of Global Warming”
• Another terrific ABC News story — on the role global warming is playing in extreme winter weather

It’s good to have that part of the job depicted accurately on television both because it’s a good thing that they exist in the real world, and because they make for more compelling storytelling. We don’t live in a Minority Report kind of world — if Nick just keeps storming into suspected child kidnappers’ houses, at some point he’s going to violate the rights of someone innocent and supernatural who will be totally within their rights to be thermonuclearly angry with him. And more importantly, it would be interesting to see Nick try to get warrants based on information he’s getting from supernatural sources a la Beka Cooper, trying to reconcile magic and the rationality of police work. If the show isn’t going to play with that tension at all, why not just make him a private investigator? Creating concepts like cops who can see magic are interesting when they let us play with tropes and our ideas about the real world, not when they let us abandon our sense of the rules entirely.

-We might get a sequel to The Incredibles. Which I sort of hope would focus on Frozone.

-Has NBC’s self-mythologizing created some of its problems?

-Has the economic downturn helped push producers out the door?

-AFTRA and SAG are asking IMDb to pull birthdates.

-Happy Friday! Have a documentary about The Phantom Tollbooth!

But even though all of those things would send me screaming for the hills or a cleansing dose of Deadwood, they’re not actually the thing that freaks me out most about this justly-canceled show. I’m, perhaps sort of cornily, invested in the idea that American culture can be great; that it can play a critically important role in showcasing the best of the America and exploring what it means when, as all too often happens, we abjectly fail to live up to it; and that there’s an audience for the good stuff (which can range from the conventional, well-executed, to the wildly experimental), even in an age of niche entertainment.

Outsourced is everything I’m pushing back against. It’s not just that the show is set in a call center where the employees sell the lowest of the low-brow artifacts of American culture, and the Americans they encounter on the phone tend to be frat boys and people who are excited by bird-feeders with deliberately stupid misspellings, although that doesn’t help. The bits of culture Todd ends up explaining to his workers are things like Cheesehead-dom. It’s not that rooting for the Packers is not a noble past-time, but there’s something really depressing about the prospect that the collected ephemera of a novelty catalogue is what passes for cultural diplomacy.

Then, there’s the function that Todd and Charlie play outside the office. Charlie’s socially offensive, awkward, and racist in an unintegrated way that suggests the writers just threw together a group of traits rather than trying to produce a coherent worldview. He harasses Indian women, offends his coworkers, and the only effort he makes to interact with Indians is when he plays laser tag with Manmeet and Gupta. When he recites America’s accomplishments, he throws in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue. Todd is marginally better at trying to learn about Indian culture, but he’s exporting things like knowledge of Hugh Hefner’s regular wardrobe, and falls for a new hire who drops Slinky references and makes “Smooth Operator” jokes. Jerry, Todd’s boss, gets Todd and Rajiv arrested for cow tipping, a joke that’s impressive in its cheapness and obviousness.

In other words, Outsourced is invested in the idea that we come together over the flimsiest, dopiest things in American popular culture, not the best. Maybe that’s true. Maybe the most popular things America produces are the most ridiculous. Maybe our export of David Hasselhoff to Germany is our legacy. But I kind of believe we do better than that. Even if we do produce a lot of junk along the way.