So, okay, I understand intellectually why he’s been given a new series: it’s because Glee is getting strong ratings and a ton of positive attention, and thus any network worth its salt is going to seriously consider project proposals from him. NBC decided to take the bait to spice things up a bit with The New Normal, which appears to be what happens if Ryan Murphy watches Modern Family right before going to bed.

“See, I could totally do that too” is the unofficial tagline of The New Normal.

I love this knob-slobbering description of the upfront presentation:

Even though those are NBC’s cornerstone comedies for the new year, they’re emotional, progressive and heartwarming. Salke and NBC Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt and could’ve harped on the progressiveness and acceptance of their new shows, but they didn’t — they just focused on the fact that they think they’re well-written and funny.

Right, so NBC gets to ride on progressive laurels without actually saying it’s making a progressive show. So when (not if, this is Ryan Murphy, people) people start criticizing the show on the grounds that it has some seriously massive holes when it comes to treatment of the characters and the subject, NBC can go “well, we were just making a comedy.”

They’re clearly learned a lesson from Glee, which has rightly been savagely attacked for claiming to be a progressive and “inspirational” show, yet having a boggling number of incredibly offensive storylines. This time, Ryan Murphy can say he’s just focusing on the funny. You know, in a show that happens to be positioning itself as progressive and, uh, heartwarming.

Yes, there's a sassy Black friend

Having been bitten thoroughly by Ryan Murphy, I am not only twice shy, but forever shy. Especially given his disdain for critics from the communities he so thoughtlessly and casually exploits. As Alyssa’s recently noted, Glee has really taken a turn for the worse when it comes to all those oh-so-progressive storylines; she argued for dropping the show altogether from your viewing habits because it’s gotten so vile. It’s an argument I’ve been making for years.

Glee has historically been viewed by a lot of fans as strong on queer storylines, something I’m not totally sold on myself, and that makes me raise an eyebrow over the promises that The New Normal will be amazing because it’s queer-focused. On Glee, I have some problems with the handling of Kurt, I’m uncomfortable about the rape scene between Kurt and Blaine and how it was handled, and Murphy’s record on bisexuality is pretty appalling. Like, the fact that he set up an entire episode to question whether bisexuality is real. Just, you know, for starters.

How progressive!

So forgive me if I’m not peeing my pants over The New Normal, because I have my doubts about how well the story will be handled, even though it’s featuring gay characters. Because they’re something Murphy is a bit of an expert on and still manages to fuck up royally on a regular basis. The leads are living the middle class white gay male dream, positioning a very specific kind of family and life as “the new normal.” Notably, it’s the safest and most mundane type of unconventional family; two people in a devoted long term relationship who are clearly financially stable and want to have a baby.

Way to go out on a limb for the team there, Ryan.

And, of course, surrogacy is an issue with tremendous legal, social, and ethical implications, a lot of which are being heatedly discussed in the public forum right now because people aren’t sure where it fits into the social framework. This is all very new stuff. Are we sure we trust Ryan Murphy with it? 

Right in the preview, surrogacy is compared to “being an Easy Bake Oven,” an indicator of the contempt Murphy and the writing team apparently have for women’s bodies. The followup says the surrogate has “no rights to the cupcake.” You’re killing me, Ryan.

A neat, dismissive, and contemptuous handling of surrogacy. This is a show that is supposed to revolve around the relationship between the two men and the woman who carries their child, but I have my doubts about the progressiveness and sensitivity of the handling, given Murphy’s record. The need to make juvenile jokes about it in the preview speaks poorly of the show’s prospects.

NBC is trying to have its cake and eat it too here with a potentially controversial and “edgy” show cast as a comedy (like Glee) in an attempt to avoid responsibility for the content. Will viewers let them get away with it, or will they be more alert to Murphy’s tricks this time around?

First, there’s the question of whether it would even be effective. I tend to believe, as I’ve written before, that repeatedly telling Hollywood that piracy doesn’t actually hurt their bottom line gives content companies license to ignore people who do pirate content because they’ve been informed over and over again that pirates were never their potential customers in the first place. If NBC or Sony, which produces Community, and therefore shares responsibility for Harmon’s firing with the network on which his show has aired, does pay attention to a spike in pirated Community episodes, it’s more likely to be interpreted as a sign that even the angry audience is weak and unwilling to give up the show entirely. This is not a tactic that will move the hearts that broke Harmon’s.

Second, as much as Harmon’s singular vision has informed Community, he isn’t the only person who works on his creation. The actors who have turned in great work for the show, and who are at least publicly deeply distressed by Harmon’s departure, don’t deserve to be punished with declining ratings for a decision that’s beyond their control. If, under the new regime, they continue to turn in good, enjoyable work, it seems unfair to try to drive their chances of continuing to do that work into the ground, perhaps before they even know if they’d like to continue doing it.

And there are people other than Harmon who write Community. We should continue to give them credit if they continue to do good work even absent his tutelage. I’d particularly really like female writers like Megan Ganz and Annie Mebane to have creative and ratings success and to get credentialed by their work with a new regime of showrunners. As upsetting as Harmon’s firing is, I’d like to see people who share some of his wild and wonderful approach to television out there and succeeding to keep the flame he lit alive. Dan Harmon isn’t the only person working on Community I want to support, or keep an eye on to see what tremendously exciting things they do best. Dan Harmon isn’t the only person involved in Community who’s worth trying to keep the ratings up for so they’ll get renewed or have credibility pitching other shows in the future, particularly if you care about weird, smart, innovative, self-reflective television. Maybe pirating or driving down the ratings on those other people’s work will make someone out there feel like they’re in solidarity with Dan Harmon. But it isn’t an effective way to support the kind of work he’s given us for three years, or to make sure we see more like in the future.

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:

Seriously, this is a show that says things like “We used electricity for everything. Even to grown food and pump water. But after the blackout, nothing worked. Not even car engines or jet turbines. Hell, even batteries. All of it. Gone forever.” Except that absent some mysterious magical thing or scientific nonsense Abrams and Eric Kripke, his co-creator dream up for introduction at some point, electricity doesn’t have an on-off switch: it’s generated by many different methods. Messing with the grid that distributes electricity is not the same thing as removing our capacity to ever generate and distribute more of is. We don’t use electricity to make airplanes stay up, we use jet fuel—20.2 billion gallons of it annually as of 2009. And while hybrid electric cars are on the market, those too rely on internal combustion engines, which in turn are powered by fossil fuels.

I’m fully aware, of course, that most television is based on junk science. But the reason this is particularly disappointing is that Kripke and Abrams are setting up a scenario here that undermines precisely what science fiction has the potential to do: reckon with what we’ve done to ourselves and posit solutions, be they scientific or societal. A magic shutdown scenario, rather than a situation where we’ve run out of fossil fuels, doesn’t require us to grapple with what we’ve done to ourselves—there are no contractions of services, no resource hoarding, no slow adaptation and competition between classes or nations. The blame can and probably will be placed on some sort of mysterious cabal rather than our collective inability to radically change our energy use. And the solution will be in the form of hidden knowledge possessed by an equally small and brilliant cabal, rather than major, painful, realignments in the way we live our lives and innovation that changes it. Setting up its central conceit this way, Revolution is a fantasy of an energy crisis where no one is to blame, in the same way that Tony Stark’s building-powering arc reactor (a great discussion of the relevant zoning issues is available here) is a fantasy that an alternative to fossil fuels is just around the corner.

But at least The Avengers argues that green energy innovation is sexy (as will, apparently, Marion Cotillard in The Dark Knight). That’s much more attractive than a fantasy in which an energy crisis happens to us as innocent victims, rather than an acknowledgement that we happened to the world’s energy reserves.

-Here are Fox and NBC‘s schedules for the fall.

-Some real talk on the reality of friendship segregation and Girls.

-An interview with the creator of The Avengers‘ secret big bad—and a reminder that Marvel could be doing better by the creators of its characters.

-Glad to hear Greg Garcia has a new overall deal.

-This makes me very, very happy:

David Gregory

Given the group’s obvious Republican alliance, it comes as little surprise that the NFIB’s three-day 2012 Small Business Summit, which begins Monday, will feature headliners Karl Rove and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

But the first name and photo on the invitation for the $150-per-person event — Tuesday’s “keynote address” speaker — is NBC’s Meet the Press host David Gregory. He is marketed by NBC as an anchor and “trusted journalist.”

The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics states:

Journalists should:
— Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.

Regardless of whether Gregory is being paid for this event and of what he says in his keynote, allowing the NFIB to raise money for its political mission using his name, reputation, and celebrity appears to be at odds with journalistic ethics.

Gregory did not to respond to a ThinkProgress request for comment.

I’m a long-time advocate of shorter seasons, and I think we’ve seen a lot of illustrations of the foibles of trying to fit 22-episode orders into a 40-week period this year. Revenge‘s long hiatus slowed the momentum of the ABC Hamptons-set thriller down to a crawl, and the show’s gotten baroque and full of moody shots in its attempt to fill up episode space since its return. Community‘s disappearance from NBC’s airwaves for an agonizing and indefinite period left fans waiting, and while NBC tossed out and then yanked sitcoms like Best Friends Forever and Bent in quick succession. Now I understand that shows fail, networks need to replace things that aren’t working at all, and fans don’t want to wait a long time for their favorite shows to come back. But I’d much rather see short, excellent seasons of shows that are suited to it, and to see them run continuously rather than spaced out in seemingly random ways.

NBC’s Thursday night comedies seem uniquely suited to shorter, smarter seasons. 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation‘s shortened seasons were their best for entirely different reasons. 30 Rock‘s second season was shortened by the writers’ strike, but it was a hilarious, joke-dense season. “SeinfeldVision” and “MILF Island” were fantastic riffs on the industry that preceded the “Queen of Jordan” running gag the show is using now. “Greenzo” featured two of the show’s best-ever cameos in David Schwimmer and Al Gore. And “Sandwich Day” turned Liz’s love of food into a sign of something other than middle-aged singleton schlubbiness. No one has ever made scarfing a sub look so poignant before or since.

Parks and Recreation‘s shortened third season had tons of great comedic beats as well, but it also illustrated how sitcoms can pull off strong serialization without dropping plotlines for a long stretch of episodes or producing episodes that don’t work as standalones. The stated major arc of the season was the question of whether Ben and Leslie would get together, a will-they-or-won’t-they that fit neatly into a wide variety of settings. And it turned out that Leslie’s victories in restoring the Harvest Festival, over her rivals in Eagleton, and in organizing Lil’ Sebastian’s funeral were actually setting up Leslie being asked to run for office. The show didn’t always hit the same beats, and in fact in episodes like “April and Andy’s Fancy Party” and “The Fight,” we got to see a number of the vulnerabilities that would plague Leslie in her campaign this season, namely her desire for control.

The 22-odd episode season may be an industry convention, but that doesn’t mean it’s a creative imperative. If the 2012-2013 season is going to be the last year we have 30 Rock, Parks & Recreation and Community, I’d rather have one of those shows on every night for 36 to 45 straight weeks (with exceptions for holidays), and to have those episodes be uniformly excellent, no filler. And if television’s really just about selling soap, I’ve got to believe it might sell better with new programming rather than reruns and schedule gaps.

Management said, “What the hell are you doing? Why are you developing Will and Grace?” It’s network television, and we have advertisers to answer to. Advertisers are not ready to embrace, at the core of a show, a relationship between a gay man and straight woman. What are you doing?…As I looked at the world, we lived in a world where I saw that relationship all the time. It was this gap. Television had ignored it. I knew that Max and David had a great feel for that world and those characters. They just needed to be convinced that we would actually go forward with it if they wrote it. I said to them, “If you do a great job, we’ll have to.” And that’s what they did. So then in order to kind of hip-check my management, I made sure that I went to Jimmy Burrows. When Jimmy fell in love with the project, I knew that no one could stand in the way…Lo and behold, advertisers said, “Oh, this is a really funny show.” That’s all they saw. So there was no protest. There was no advertiser boycott. It just went on and continued to carry the torch of what Must See TV stood for.

It’s one of the clearest cases I’ve ever seen of executives being afraid to greenlight something they didn’t have personal experience with, and overestimating the negative reaction as a result. I’m sure there are others. It’s rather sad to me that if someone doesn’t see a potential audience or kinds of relationships with their own eyes, they’d be unable to imagine that it exists. I don’t assume that my experience is the sum total of the world, and I do believe it’s incumbent on me to broaden that pool of experiences I have to draw on. Gay men and their straight female friends aren’t unicorns. Neither are middle-class black families. It’s infinitely irksome that gatekeepers wouldn’t have learned this basic lesson, and that it keeps the world of entertainment smaller and more limited by poverty of imagination than it has to be.

Between June 2011 and February of this year, 70 percent of all one-on-one interviewees on the four biggest political talk shows — NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday — were Republicans. The numbers were even more lopsided in favor of men and white guests:

As FAIR notes, the bias in favor of Republicans is not entirely attributable to the presidential elections. While the lean towards the right is more pronounced than in years past thanks to the contentious Republican nomination contest, the heavy favor that Sunday show bookers have towards Republicans is not new. In 2004, a mirror image of 2012 in that Democrats were looking to unseat a Republican incumbent in the White House, Republicans still held a 57-43 percent edge in 2003, and a 56-44 percent advantage in 2004.

Compared to other metrics though, the imbalance of political ideology seems almost insignificant. Across all four shows over the eight month period, there were just 36 appearances by women during one-on-one interviews compared to 228 men. And of those 36, 17 were Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). Meanwhile, there 242 appearances by white guests, compared to just 15 by African-Americans (seven of those being Hermain Cain), four by Arab-Americans, and three by Latinos.

It was, of course, tragic that Community went on a long hiatus if only for the show’s prospects and for our collective enjoyment. But who knew that the show’s long absence from airways denied us a hilarious sitcom riff on Mitt Romney’s declaration in Iowa last summer that “corporations are people, my friend.” Because it’s hard to imagine a show other than Community where an actual personification of a corporation—in this case, a hunky blond named Subway who wants to open a non-profit shelter for disabled animals, reads 1984, and pushes all of Britta Perry’s buttons—would walk jauntily onto the scene. Especially at a time when the show’s deepest friendship is in the middle of a reassessment.

Subway’s appearance on the show is a continuation of the plot that began with Community‘s return: Shirley wanted to own a sandwich shop, but the Dean circumvented her by welcoming a Subway franchise onto campus. Subway (the person) is a way of getting around the Greendale bylaw that requires any on-campus business to be 51-percent student owned. It’s terrific not only for Community to get a chance to make a bid for some of the product placement money liberated by the end of Chuck‘s run on NBC, but for Britta to get a truly entertaining love interest who wasn’t part of the main cast. Britta gets a bad rap for being a buzz-kill, but I appreciate the show acknowledging that it may only be within the disastrous dynamics of the study group that she’s a bore, and there’s a place where her passion is a better fit, and where there’s someone who shares her values and is available for gratifyingly kinky sex.

In keeping with, though in a much more veiled key, I thought it was a nice touch that, as Troy and Abed are facing serious problems in their friendship, Air Conditioning Repair School Dean Laybourne showed up to drive a wedge between them along the lines of their aspirations. Community‘s done a nice job of suggesting that blue-collar jobs can be not just legitimately rewarding but a calling and an art as high as filmmaking. And Laybourne sought to divide his prized target student from his best friends by playing with that idea. To Troy, he implies that Inspector Spacetime and Abed don’t have sufficient respect for Constable Reggie and Troy, that they devalue the work and creativity of the world’s journeymen. And Laybourne exploited Abed’s elitism and nerdery, suggesting that Constable Reggie—and Troy—are a drag on Inspector Spacetime’s wild adventurism and creative spirit.

And if this does escalate to full-scale war, I’m Team Troy and Team Blanket Fort. As much as it’s probably time for Abed to learn some realistic life skills and to experience some failures, it’s also probably time for Troy, now that his friendship with Abed has liberated him from jerky jockdom, to figure out an identity that’s more authentically his own.

Counter Culture, ABC: Look, I’d probably be in for a show about older women running a diner in Texas under any circumstances—we need some sort of recompense for Good Christian Bitches, and I’ve been excited for stories about women who are in the demographic I’ll be joining in a couple of decades. And I’d sort of like to see a female-led equivalent of Cheers. But given that Margo Martindale’s in the cast, I’m particularly excited. She’s always fantastic, and if the show’s willing to make jokes about Mags Bennett’s Apple Pie, all the better.

Untitled Dan Fogelman project, ABC: I love Comedy Central’s Ugly Americans, the network’s riff on immigration reform but with actual aliens and monsters. And I have a lot of Men in Black nostalgia. Maybe that makes me weak. But a show about a gated community full of aliens sounds pretty funny. And potentially a great way to riff on the inherent weirdness of the one percent.

Last Resort, ABC: Given how deeply Hollywood and the military are intertwined, I almost can’t believe that a major network is making a show about a nuclear submarine crew who refuse to fire the missiles they have aboard and go AWOL, declaring themselves a tiny, independent nuclear nation. It might be awful, but the fact that something this wonky about nuclear policy (and this potentially anti-war) is being made at all has my ears all pricked up. Also, it stars Andre Braugher.

Partners, CBS: Okay, I may be rooting for this show in part because I want it to beat Ryan Murphy’s The New Normal in the gay-family-comedies-of-fall-2012 competition. But the cast, which includes Ugly Betty’s wonderful Michael Urie, David Krumholtz, who can ride the good vibe of 10 Things I Hate About You literally forever, and Brandon Routh, who’s been doing a wonderful job of reinventing himself as something other than simply amazingly handsome, is strong. And more comedies about gay men and straight men who are uncomplicatedly friends are a nice thing to have, and a step beyond the sassy gay archetype.

Untitled Louis C.K., Spike Feresten, CBS: If Louis C.K. wasn’t involved in this show about young people trying to make it in the recession economy, I’m not sure I’d be interested. And even his streak outside of Louie is a little uneven. But C.K. is on a streak so hot right now that I’d be excited for anything he’s even tangentially involved with.

Elementary, CBS: I blogged about this show, which stars Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes and Lucy Liu as Watson on Friday. It strikes me as high risk, high reward—it’s not as if this isn’t well-trod territory where people are doing innovative work. But the chance to see how the male-female dynamic works, and to see what Miller and Liu, both somewhat underrated actors to my mind, do together is intriguing.

1600 Penn, NBC: It could very easily be quite silly. But I like the idea of a comedy set in the White House that acknowledges just how weird the presidency and the whole First Family thing is. I like Bill Pullman. And I like Brittany Snow a lot. She’s not going to experience what Sasha and Malia are, by a long shot, but the pressure on First Kids and First Daughters in particular is absolutely insane, and I look forward to seeing someone tackle it.

Beautiful People, NBC: It may be that I just finished a soon-to-be-released (and blogged about, I promise) novel about the rise of uncanny artificial intelligences, but I’m looking forward to NBC’s exploration of a class-stratified society where robots, despite their evolving consciousness, don’t have the same rights as the humans they serve.

Midnight Sun, NBC: Adaptations of Israeli shows have been on kind of a tear lately. Plus, the idea of an FBI agent investigating the disappearance of an Alaska cult sounds like a pretty intriguing show—closed groups and wildernesses have a lot of promise.Julia Stiles is starring in the show—it’s hard for me to think about an actress I’m more excited to see working regularly again. And hey, maybe Twilight fans will accidentally boost the show’s ratings, mistaking it for Stephenie Meyer’s unreleased novel in the series. NBC will take what it can get at some point.

Untitled Mindy Kaling comedy, Fox: Mindy Kaling. As an ob/gyn. Do I actually have to say more about this? If I do, it’s that thank goodness Kaling’s getting sprung from the sinking ship that is The Office, and that given how awful the public conversation around women and reproductive rights has been, maybe television can, for once, provide us with a respite.

Perhaps the central problem of Smash is that it’s predicated on a rivalry that the show is contorting itself to make plausible. There’s no question that Ivy (Megan Hilty) deserves the lead in the Marilyn musical under development over Karen (Katherine McPhee): she’s a more polished Broadway singer, a more accomplished dancer, she has much more experience on the stage, she’s a physical match for Marilyn, and she’s a more dedicated professional. So how does Smash make it seem like an emotionally engaged contest? By making Ivy a shallow bitch. While we get Karen’s home life with her devoted boyfriend and trips home to her friends and supportive family in Iowa, Ivy gets a single phone call home, where it’s clear that things aren’t all right, but we never get any details. Even though she’s clearly more qualified, we’re told Ivy only really gets the part because she slept with Derek, the director, a convenient drama-driving plot device that also happens to reduce a talented performer. Now that we’re in rehearsals, we see Ivy pushing Karen (now a member of the chorus) to the side, even though she’s not exactly doing her job. It’s contrived and irritating.

Then, there’s the show-within-a-show itself. The characters talk endlessly about Marilyn Monroe without revealing anything particularly interesting about her character. The numbers themselves are charming, but ultimately light—maybe it’s just me, but I’m not particularly moved by a faux Marilyn cooing about manipulating men with her sex appeal. The show tells us, rather than shows us, that these artists are having profound experiences with the material—though it does a nice job of showing us how sexy artists can be to non-artists when they’re in their zones.

And I wonder if that combination of material and setting is what’s preventing Smash from becoming the grown-up version of Glee—and would prevent it from being that show even if everything else was clicking. Glee is a hot mess these days, but it can be genuinely daring and moving when it takes on the subject of gay teenagers. But it does so in a setting where everything else is familiar: this is a small town populated with relatively familiar archetypes, the students attend an essentially typical high school, and they’re singing songs almost everyone in the viewing audience has heard before. The gay characters are a minority in a largely straight world. It’s a show that is sometimes about tolerance, and asking to do that from a very safe space for straight, middle-American viewers.

Smash, on the other hand, is asking viewers to come into a world where women and straight men are dominant, framed by music that’s original rather than familiar. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, per se—shows shouldn’t have to star straight dudes to be successful. But I do think that it might be a sign of NBC’s unwillingness or inability to accept that it’s going to have to make some genuinely popular entertainment to score a smash hit. What makes Glee easy to consume isn’t just the renditions of popular hits—it’s the setting. It’s not actually a natural sege from the cover extravaganza that is The Voice and its quartet of judges who represent the full spectrum of the music business to a show about the making of a Broadway musical.

NBC needs to recognize the difference between the two and decide what kind of entertainment it wants to make. If it’s going to make quirky shows or shows that imply that rivals like Glee aren’t grown-up enough, NBC may be consigning itself to a smaller but wealthier group of viewers who are desirable to advertisers. But if it’s going to make big, mass entertainment that it endeavors to make somewhat smarter than its competitors offerings, it needs to do so without giving the impression that it resents having to do it.

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.