This weekend, Comedy Central will air its roast of Rosanne Barr. The timing for the comedienne seems simultaneously painful and fortuitous. Her NBC pilot Downwardly Mobile, an attempt to recreate the magic of Roseanne with its portrait of recession-wracked resident of a trailer park, wasn’t picked up. Her previous show, a reality program about her macadamia nut farm in Hawaii, was an embarrassment and failed to earn a renewal. Twitter’s provided Barr with a platform she’s frequently used in service of obscene and counterproductive political rants. And her campaign for president’s continued long past the point when it could be either a career-revitalizing stunt or a sharp jab at the major-party contenders. The roast will either be an embarrassment, or a chance for Barr to demonstrate a gameness that could revitalize her public persona.

But leading up to the taping and in the aftermath of it, the coverage has been dominated by insult comic and Friar’s Club Roastmaster General Jeffrey Ross, who showed up to the red carpet dressed as Joe Paterno and then joked that Seth Green, who is a redhead, hadn’t “gotten this much attention since you shot all those people in Aurora.” (Comedy Central subsequently said it would cut the joke.) I understand that the schtick is meant to be offensive, but in both cases they’re so anemic and grasping that it’s hard for me to muster much in the way of reaction to them. Especially given that they’re sort of lame by the kind of standards Ross has laid out for himself.

I’ve been spending some time with Ross’s I Only Roast the Ones I Love: How to Bust Balls Without Burning Bridges, in part because I recognize that insult comedy is not a form that I feel naturally comfortable assessing. And his intentions in it, as stated, make a lot of sense. “It is the Roastmaster’s belief that gracing someone you admire with unfiltered honesty is the highest form of respect you can pay them—especially when it’s delivered in the form of a well-crafted joke,” he writes.”When I was asked about producing a roast for boxer Mike Tyson I felt like I had to decline because under my own criteria he just didn’t seem a worthy recipient. I just couldn’t wrap my brain around honoring a convicted rapist and part-time cannibal.” That’s a really interesting intention, especially partnered with the mandate Ross lays out to insert some deep and genuine kindness in a roast, both to hammer down that the event is an honor, and because in the midst of peeling the skin off someone, saying what you love best about them has a greater impact.

The problem comes for insult comics, I think, when their jokes don’t live up to those intentions, which themselves lay out really rich and sensitive comedic territory. It’s not actually true, I don’t think, to say that Seth Green doesn’t have a lot of fun, because he seems to have a pretty awesome job for a grown person and a generally satisfactory life, and the joke doesn’t get at anything about either him, or the man who killed twelve people in Aurora, Colorado. Similarly, Ross cites Larry the Cable guy’s joke as part of what he’s learned to armor himself against, “I get a lot of flak from critics for being homophobic, but lemme tell you somethin’…I think having invited Jeff Ross here tonight proves how much I love the queers,” fails to live up to Ross’s roast standards. What ends up being revealing about that joke is precisely its dishonesty: Larry isn’t willing to declare himself either gay-friendly or a homophobobe, so he employs a “some of my best friends are” ruse that ALSO doesn’t reveal anything true about its subject.

I really think most comedy that fails and ends up being offensive or hurtful is reaching, in its tellers’ intentions, for some kind of truth, and fails when people have profoundly different visions of what’s true, or what the comic wants to argue against. Daniel Tosh set himself up to battle a straw feminist in suggesting that rape always is funny when all he had to argue is that under certain circumstances, jokes about sexual assault can be funny and powerful. He ended up singed, and apparently, rethinking his act. I think Dane Cook wanted to say something true about the awful mundanity of the Aurora shootings, but didn’t ground the routine in commonly-held feelings about The Dark Knight Rises, and was too soon besides. The mistake in situations like these is thinking the truth is obvious or close by, when in reality, it tends to require more careful excavation. That doesn’t mean comedians can’t play a part in that process, but that they sometimes deny themselves a useful role in it.

Like many critics, I tend to want NBC to succeed if only because it gave me 30 Rock, Community, and the utterly sublime Parks and Recreation, and would like the network to be rewarded for sticking with those shows with improving ratings. But the last five or six months have neither given me faith that America will suddenly and against its basic stated desires recognize the fundamental greatness of watching Leslie Knope run for office, nor that NBC has a plan that will work to provide a subsidy for its weird, brilliant shows. And this analysis from Deadline—which, mind you, is analysis, not fact—kind of confirms my sadness:

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:

At the beginning of this year, when I looked at the female comedic archetypes the television season had given us in a highly-touted year of funny women, and that it was teeing up to deliver, there seemed to be four clear categories: the Woodland Creature for those wide-eyed innocents like New Girl‘s Jess and Are You There, Chelsea?‘s DeeDee, the Crude Broad for 2 Broke Girls‘ Max and the titular character in Are You There, Chelsea?, the Rueful Blonde, which includes Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23‘s June, GCB‘s Amanda, and House of Lies‘ Jeanie, and the Somewhat-Wise woman, embodied by Veep‘s Selina Meyer. The truth is that, despite their differences, the members of these clubs have more in common than they are different. They’re all conventionally attractive, set-upon—though not precisely in the manner of the screwball heroine—and in a hurry. They, and babes like Whitney Cummings with legs for miles and the quirk slapped on like eyeshadow, don’t pose much of a challenge to our sense of what women can, and should be.

I was thinking about this in the context of the news, presumably leaked by NBC itself, that Sarah Silverman’s untitled comedy pilot and Roseanne Barr’s Downwardly Mobile, about the recession-wracked residents of a trailer park, aren’t testing particularly well and may be in danger of not getting picked up. And I was thinking of that news in the context of our discussion about Girls, and whether we’re ready for female anti-heroes who are anti-heroic because they’re passive, or whiny, or weird, not because they act like decisive, evil men.

Roseanne Barr and Sarah Silverman in real life, and Lena Dunham’s character on Girls, Hannah Hovarth, don’t act like the women who fall into those four categories. Barr isn’t wafer-thin (she never was), and she isn’t one of those Hollywood women who’s aged into Blythe Danner-like pale, imperious elegance. She’s outspoken about gender and class, attractive traits in an industry bound by iron bands of sexism and wealth. But her Twitter feed can be weirdly combative, her run for the Green Party presidential nomination an odd distraction in a year when she also was supposed to be serious about getting a follow-up to Roseanne off the ground. Some days, Roseanne feels more like Amy Jellicoe, the naive corporate drone who constantly runs up against her own limitations and self-created obstacles in HBO’s Enlightened: it would be nice to root for her, but she’s making it awfully hard.

Silverman’s less hard to reckon with, but she’s just as challenging. Though she’s attractive, she often dresses as if to consternate fashion commentators (a trait I find somewhat endearing). She’s 41, an in-between age when actresses are often no longer treated as if they could sexually appeal to anyone, but before they’re old enough to be grand dames, liberated from their attractiveness and freed to be spymasters or schemers. On-screen, she tends to play either tightly-wound parodies of hard-charging women, whether as producer Alexi Darling in the movie adaptation of Rent, or Patti, Mike White’s horrible, careerist girlfriend in School of Rock, or unsettling naifs like her self-absorbed character in The Sarah Silverman program, who makes Hannah Hovarth look like a model of charity and selfelessness.

And though the debate over Girls has died down somewhat, there are clearly a lot of people who remain very angry with Hannah, who are appalled by her poor choices, insist that Dunham shouldn’t get credit for displaying a body that’s so far from the Hollywood norm, angrily reject the idea that people could have sex that bad or make decisions that emotionally awkward. This discomfort can get ugly, but it’s also very interesting in a world where we’re supposed to sympathize with characters who fret about invisible imperfections, who are allowed, even expected to be humiliated before they can be resurrected for our enjoyment and moral satisfaction. You can make terrible, naive life choices, whether you’re a drunk like Chelsea or blind to your husband’s massive embezzlement scheme like Amanda, but as long as you’re gorgeous and fairly conventional, your wounds will be cooed over, rather than publicly sowed with salt. It’s like how Hollywood likes female geeks as long as the only signifier of their geekdom is a pair of glasses. We’re not conditioned to emotionally attach to women who are genuinely weird.

In addition to the relative genericness of their presentation and general demeanor, the ladies of network television comedy may have gotten a lot of screen time, but they didn’t do much original with it. The closest Jess came to transgressive on New Girl was dating her students’ father. Chelsea’s Female Chauvinist Pig on the show that bears her name is enough of a trope to have a book dissecting the phenomenon she represents. Max’s sour diner waitress on 2 Broke Girls could be the granddaughter of cranky counter gals who have been slinging hash since time immemorial. Talking about her lady bits and their needs doesn’t actually mean she’s treading new territory. GCB‘s Amanda may fight her battles with barbecues and church solos, but they’re the same old wars between mean girls who can’t let go. On Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23, June is one of an infinite number of eager strivers in New York. Her roommate Chloe may be the closest thing to a truly original, transgressive character in the crop, a fiancee-seducing, lesbian-faking psycho who sets her father and her roommate up to help them rebound, a Bizarro-world version of the cult of self-help. But while Chloe is a manic, evil delight as played by Krysten Ritter, she’s not precisely convincingly real. Whitney, which seems doomed given Whitney Cummings’ commitment to a new talk show, posed the most believable challenges to the standard sitcom arc for women: two couples on the show entered and broke off engagements, and rather than being shattered by those decisions, seemed fine. The weddings, it turned out, were eclipsing the work of building their actual relationships. It’s sad that this counts as a major departure from the script, but in this field, I have to give it high marks.

My hope is that as we assess this year of television ladies, the relative success of some of these shows serves as a thin edge of the wedge to get some women on television who are genuinely weird or unusual, rather than just performing slight deviations from the norm. Silverman and Barr may not make it on to NBC this year. But Girls will be back on HBO, keeping the hope for women on television who are awkward, and angry, and not conventionally attractive, and entitled—and in other words more like some of television’s most profitable men—alive. If the only kind of women who can be funny on television can all wear the same size dress and hit the same comedic beats, this year of sitcom women hasn’t won us very much at all.

It’s been tremendously disappointing to watch the kind of celebrities who could have used their influence for good in the wake of the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin target George Zimmerman and his family instead.

First, Spike Lee tweeted what he believed to be Zimmerman’s address. It turned out to be the address of an elderly couple who have a son whose middle name is George, but who have no relation whatsoever to the self-appointed vigilante who shot and killed Martin. The Zimmermans say they had to leave their home for fear that they would be targeted for retaliation, and Lee has since apologized to them personally and financially compensated them for the hardship and inconvenience he caused them.

As if that wasn’t enough, comedian Roseanne Barr, who happens to be a candidate for the Green Party nomination for president and is preparing for her return to network television with the NBC sitcom Downwardly Mobile this fall, last night tweeted George Zimmerman’s parents’ correct address. She subsequently deleted the address and tweeted “At first I thought it was good to let ppl know that no one can hide anymore,” a pretty disturbing statement from a long-term feminist who might want to consider what that means for abused women, “But vigilante-ism is what killed trayvon [sic]. I don’t support that.”

Whether the address was right or wrong doesn’t matter. It brings us no closer to justice for Trayvon Martin to terrorize or scold his parents. Holding out the possibility of revealing their address again if Zimmerman isn’t arrested, as Barr did, is utterly ineffective. They don’t have the power to arrest him, or to turn him in to a police department that’s failing to act. No matter how grieved or angered we are, the only way to honor Martin’s death is by demanding that the system work to punish his killer, rather than by joining Zimmerman in abandoning it.

Someone at Public Policy Polling clearly has a sense of humor, because they included comedian Roseanne Barr, who is pursuing the Green Party nomination for President in their latest national polling survey. And even more surprising, the survey found that in a three-way race between President Obama, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and Roseanne, Roseanne pulls 6 percent, ahead of undecided at 5 percent. Those are still minuscule numbers in comparison to Obama, who leads with 47 percent, and Romney, who follows him with 42 percent. And it’s not clear that Roseanne’s numbers will hold under any circumstances: she has a 63 percent disapproval rating and a 14 percent approval rating.

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.

The bridge is yours.

-Those adorable Chipotle pigs appear to be the real big winners of the Grammys.

-Any day with more Andre 3000 in it is a good day.

-Is NBC to the ’10s what CBS was to the ’90s?

-If you like my blog and boats, you should read Robert Farley’s new series on seapower in culture!

-Oh Kirk Cameron. I miss the wackiness of Listen to Me in comparison to this:

It strikes me as unpromising for Roseanne’s new recession-themed sitcom, Downwardly Mobile, that the comedienne is splitting time between it, and pursuing the Green Party’s nomination for president. I’d be happier with a world where I thought the woman who gave us Roseanne was seriously focused on giving us the show the networks haven’t in difficult economic times. But seeing her step in a disorganized fashion into Ralph Nader’s vacated shoes seems of a piece with her self-aggrandizing, un-self-aware and now-cancelled show about running a macadamia nut farm: scattershot, arrogant, and not particularly attuned to what’s meaningful. Plus, it means NBC has yet another equal time problem on its hands. Per Deadline:

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.

Leslie Knope, working class hero?

This sort of thickheadedness is possible only if one has missed that the composition of the working class hasn’t changed since “All in the Family”. “Reality” shows aside (but how about Mike Rowe’s “Dirty Jobs”?), the top televised fiction programmes are police procedurals like NCIS and CSI and so forth. Cops are labour, right? My favourite network show at present is “Parks and Recreation”, which is a workplace comedy about government employees. Public-sector workers are workers, basically indistinguishable for bricklayers and teamsters, right? Which I guess means that David Foster Wallace’s unfinished, posthumously-published novel about IRS employees, “The Pale King”, is a piece of literature about “the lives of working people”. Or if office jobs aren’t Steinbeck enough, try novelist William T. Vollmann’s recent work of literary non-fiction “Imperial”, which gets intimate with the way we live now if we work illegally on farms in California or in Mexican maquiladoras. One of my favourite recent graphic novels is Benjamin Percy and Danica Novgorodoff’s “Refresh, Refresh”, an adaptation of Mr Percy’s stunning 2005 Paris Review story of the same name, about working class teens and their fathers at war in Iraq. It’s not even hard to point to someone “who makes art out of working-class lives by refusing to prettify them”, if one actually pays attention to contemporary literature, film, and TV.

Thinking about this and my debate with Josh Eidelson from back in July, I think there’s a definitional problem. It’s true that we have a lot of mass pop culture (I’m thinking mainly television and movies here, since books are, unfortunately, mostly niche phenomena these days) about the work lives of working-class people. What we don’t have a lot of is pop culture depictions of what it’s like to be not just working-class but poor inside the office and outside of it. We’re good at lampooning the deadening nature of low-level white collar jobs, but less good at looking at what it’s like to get benefits or deal with scheduling a parent-teacher conference around shift work. I remain unconvinced that there’s a big underserved audience for the latter kind of show, but I think it’s a differential difference that’s worth acknowledging. We’re into working-class shows if we can admire the work itself, or laugh sympathetically with the characters as a way to ease our own pain, but our pop culture is less engaged with the less conventionally heroic aspects of being poor.

I’m still working my way through Roseanne in between everything else (your suggestions are proving insanely addictive), and so I’ve been thinking about what lessons from that show Barr should apply to the new sitcom she’s sold to Fox.

I just loved “Radio Days,” the first season episode where Dan enters a songwriting contest. As the station counts down the winners, Dan and Roseanne hope they won’t get second or third, because they need the $100 first prize much more than a night out, however enjoyable that night out might be. I think part of what worked for me about it was the specificity of that desire: without telling you what Dan or Roseanne makes, that figure gives you a sense of exactly where they stand financially. The intensity of their desire, and their (ultimately self-deluding) certainty that they’ll win is just beautifully acted.

Given that the show is about downward mobility, rather than the upward scramble that was the subject of Roseanne, I think the sitcom will have to strike a particular balance between showing us the pain of giving things and experiences up without being relentlessly depressing, or without making the characters look self-indulgent. It’s one thing for a Manhattan heiress to have to give up her horse, and entirely another one for a family business to have to let a long-term employee go. I also think it’ll be a measure of how fast the transition happens. Will the transition be a death by a thousand little financial cuts? A Beverly Hillbillies in reverse? All of the details are going to have to be just right to bring the emotional impact of the show home. Barr came up working class — her first sitcom came out of her own experience. But I don’t know that she’s moved down a class status, and her latest project based on her life sounds distinctly terrible. Being a genius about television more than a decade ago doesn’t guarantee you’ll strike gold again. But I hope this is good. We need something like it.