Huffington Post television critic and friend of the blog Maureen Ryan talked to a bunch of comedy showrunners and came up with seven ideas for what’s holding comedy development and the growth of comedy audiences back. You should read it to consider all of them, but I wanted to pull out this particular point:

3. For a show to succeed on a broadcast network right now, does it have to appeal to a wider range of people?

The characters on “Modern Family” — one of the few solid comedy hits in recent years — represent many age ranges and ethnicities, and the comedy appeals to a similarly wide range of viewers. Groff says that the history of “Happy Endings” has served as something of a “reality check” for him — and perhaps for networks buying younger-skewing shows.

“I do go, ‘We did a pretty good version [of a show about people under 30]: a funny, appealing, accessible show with a great cast, and it’s struggling,’” Groff said. The answer might be to make sure that future shows “definitely appeal to enough” 35- to 49-year-old viewers, and find ways to “monetize or count in the ratings the ones who watch other ways,” he said.

I’m a big believer in the idea that shows should be more diverse for practical reasons: you’ll have more hooks on which to hang plot points and character conflicts, and more details with which to build up your characters into actual people, and if you do well in developing characters who reflect markets that are underserved, you might actually pull in viewers you didn’t know were out there for you to find.

But I don’t know that this alone is enough to pull in four-quadrant viewership, and a lot of viewers from all of those quadrants. If representing a diverse range of experiences alone was enough to make a show a monster hit, Community and Go On should be bucking with Modern Family in the rankings, but if I start thinking about that scenario too much, I’ll get depressed. Instead, I think the key to Modern Family isn’t just that it represents so many kinds of people, but what it represents them doing. In Modern Family, young or old, male or female, gay or straight, white or Latino, you can live in gorgeous, expansive California homes, in financial security, with strong family support, and a lot of sunshine. Similarly, NCIS a drama that includes nerds and punks, frat boys and Mossad officers, an irascible Brit and the ur-daddy figure of television, Leroy Jethro Gibbs himself, all kicking ass in the name of American security.

It may be that characters provide useful hooks for viewers, but setting and scenario matter more. The Big Bang Theory, for example, features characters that many viewers can’t identify with or wouldn’t want to identify with because they’re geniuses, esoteric scientists, or have significant social deficiencies. But as nerd culture has taken over mass media and nerds have accrued social capital, it makes sense that a world of geeks would suddenly be a much more desirable setting. Similarly, the world of Two and a Half Men bears no resemblance to my actual life, and probably isn’t a place I’d care to visit if I were mysteriously zapped into my television (I would most likely end up running a spritely news blog in Pawnee, Indiana), but I can see why a playboy’s world is one that plenty of folks would be amused to drop in on.

The problem is that finding appealing scenarios is an awful lot more difficult and less predictable than plugging in demographics and casting accordingly. But viewers deserve both. It’s not enough to be represented on screen if the person you’re supposed to relate to isn’t doing anything you find appealing or admirable.

Over at NPR, Linda Holmes has a lovely post about the fallacies of pretending that “the masses” or “Middle America” are some sort of homogenous block of cultural consumers, or that “the lowest common denominator” is something we should have contempt for, rather than embrace:

I’ve always found the lowest common denominator kind of a cozy concept, particularly because you kind of do it by feel — it’s a translator that lets you take two things that seem to be vibrating on different frequencies and unlock them so they can fit together instead of bumping into each other.

But somehow in culture, “lowest common denominator” has become a way to describe not what’s unifying but what’s worst, as if we all come together where we are awful and stupid. In fact, when we do all come together in large numbers, it’s usually not where we are awful and stupid, particularly not because we are awful and stupid. We come together where there’s enough commonality to let people talk to each other about the same thing. How did that become a slam, unless we assume that the purpose of culture, and of our own tastes, is to efficiently separate those who favor wheat from those who are more into chaff?

The lowest common denominator on a huge scale, in fact, is probably something like The Avengers or the Oscars or the Super Bowl, none of which is embraced for its scandalous or scatological qualities, but all of which are popular simply because lots of people think it’s fun to watch them. And as silly as those things are, their commonality is actually their most redeeming quality — that it’s the lowest common denominator across surprisingly diverse populations is the best thing about the Super Bowl, not the worst. It’s certainly the best thing about the Oscars.

To paraphrase some of the rest of the piece, we watch Community in red states and worship at the altar of Mark Harmon in NCIS in blue states.

I have to say, I wonder if some of this divide comes from shifts in business models that have divided both television and movies into things with massive audiences and tiny audiences, without much space in between. In movies, we’ve increasingly got tentpoles, many of which are genre movies—which face an inherent critical bias and are siloed into “low” culture no matter how self-serious they get—and smaller independent or foreign films, with smart, adult, not very expensive movies vanishing from the scene. 2012 felt like a rare movie-going year in part because there were a number of mass hits, like Lincoln, Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, and Django Unchained that have both done good or pretty good box office and have received good reviews and been the subject of spirited intellectual debates. The things among our common denominators weren’t inherently the lowest. But I do understand how, if you’re a devotee of those $30 million movies that are vanishing, or if it’s becoming harder for you to find independent and foreign films in theaters and they’re slow to make it to video on demand or to streaming, you might feel a certain amount of resentment. It’s not just that other people want and support other things—it’s that it feels harder to get what you want.

The same is true in television, where there remain some massive hits like Dancing With The Stars, NCIS or The Big Bang Theory, but where the ratings for new comedies in particular have quickly shrunk to the point of invisibility. Watching the struggle of something like Community to stay alive, I don’t blame people for being frustrated that more people aren’t tuning in. But the truth is that something like Community, or Happy Endings, or even 30 Rock, all the self-aware, self-referential, pop-culture examining comedies out there—they have an inherent audience ceiling. And that’s totally okay! One of the blessings of a diversified media environment is that networks will create and keep running weird shows with wacky premises and strange-but-endearing characters long after they would have been nuked in a previous era of television. What fans of those shows want is less for everyone to suddenly ditch Leroy Jethro Gibbs and discover the joys of Dean Pelton, and more for NBC to find a way to make money on its wonderful little curiosities, whether it’s an adjustment to the Nielsen ratings that gets advertisers excited about more delayed watching, or richer syndication deals with Hulu and Netflix.

In other words, if folks are still turning up their noses at what “Middle America” watches when Dan Harmon gets his eleventy-billion new shows on the air in coming seasons, the heck with ‘em. But if folks are upset about what’s getting mass audiences because they’re afraid it threatens what they like, I have more sympathy for people’s desire to get their hands on and provide support to content than they love.

Yahoo’s Chris Wilson has built one of my favorite tools of the election cycle, a survey of network television shows that breaks down which presidential campaigns, party committees, and affiliated groups are advertising are advertising on which programs. A couple of my favorite results:

-Democrats and Republicans are about even in the numbers of ads they’re airing on NCIS, the most popular scripted show on television. No one can resist Mark Harmon, apparently. Now if only one of the candidates would use the show’s Israel politics in a stump speech…

-2 Broke Girls may be crazy, crazy racist, but the first black president’s campaign is targeting viewers of CBS’s recession comedy aggressively: the Obama campaign bought more than 90 percent of the 62 ad buys on the show. Maybe the administration is counting on viewers who identify with Caroline and Max to care more about health care affordability and covered contraception than the idea that racial jokes are hilarious.

-The Voice, NBC’s singing competition, skews Democratic, with 462 of 681 ad buys going to the Obama campaign or Democratic groups and committees. The Olympics, by contrast, had the most Republican-heavy ads, with 250 out of 323 ad buys backing Romney—probably because there was an actual hook there to hang one of the central elements of his campaign on.

-Saturday Night Live, somewhat surprisingly given the show’s history of lampooning Republican candidates, breaks close to even, with 250 Republican ad buys and 258 Democratic ones. Maybe the idea is that the Republicans will catch hate-watchers?

There’s a lot more data there, and the numbers will change as we head into the ad-heavy final weeks of the campaign. But it’s fun to sort through these results, if only to get a sense of who the candidates believe are the target audience for particular shows.