If last year was the he-cession television season, with a series of unsuccessful shows about the struggles of men to stay financially solvent in the downturn, this is the year of the stay-at home father figure. On Fox, Ben & Kate, and on NBC, Guys With Kids and The New Normal are all, with varying degrees of success, exploring what fatherhood means.

The best of the pilots for these shows I’ve seen is that for Ben & Kate, created by Dana Fox, who was an adviser on New Girl, and this year is out on her own. In that show, Ben Fox, who is based closely on Fox’s real-life brother, is a shiftless man who ends up moving home to live with his sister Kate and her daughter. Kate is a single mother, and Ben ends up deciding to take over her daughter’s care, an idea that both frees Kate up to get her life back on track, and spurs Ben on a road to maturity he’s thoroughly avoided. When I asked Fox at her panel how she would avoid falling into the cliche of treating men with small children as if they were inherently hilarious, she said she hoped to create a specific dynamic that would avoid that trap.

“Growing up he got into so much trouble,” Fox said of her brother. “He’s a really, really smart guy who intentionally does incredibly dumb things all the time and would get us into so much trouble…And the thing that I noticed was that he was “the” world’s greatest father, and I sort of thought, like, in a million years, if you had met my brother when he was younger, you would never think that he could have kept two children alive, much less actually kept them happy and well adjusted…I realized that, you know, this character who was so sort of inherently goofy himself and so young at heart himself could talk on the same level to this kid. And when they talk, it’s like two grown ups talking. He doesn’t talk down to her. He really thinks that…they’re kind of best friends.”

That’s a terrific dynamic for a showrunner to articulate, specific and fully realized, and the Ben & Kate pilot really captures the relationship Fox described. If only Guys With Kids and The New Normal, which play out the dudes-with-babies-are-riotous dynamic inflected alternately by heterosexuality and homosexuality, had the same level of insight.

Guys With Kids is neatly encapsulated by what Jimmy Fallon, who created the show, described as his inspiration for it in his session yesterday. “[He and his producing partner] were just talking about all the guys that we were seeing around New York City and Time Square, like with the Baby Bjorns and the babies on the backs of their bikes, and I was saying, like, these are like young good looking guys,” he told the audience. “They’re just embracing the role of dad, and we both said at the same time ‘DILFs.’” That phrase became the working title for the pitch, and while it may be a new (and deeply unnecessary) turn of phrase, the show that’s resulted from it, about a group of young fathers who live in the same New York apartment building, feels like a refugee from 1995. All the humor is predicated on the idea that men wearing baby bjorns, or in fact, spending time with their children during the work day, is such a strange and comical juxtaposition that it will inherently produce laughs. The premise might have worked if the show presented itself as a broader version of NBC’s Up All Night that ditched the extremely wealthy parents of the title and simply taken the fact that men take care of children as a matter of course, exploring the specific relationships they have with their children instead. But the story is a long way from that happier medium.

The New Normal, by contrast, perhaps could only be made in 2012, but that hardly makes it free from cliches, some of which undermine the show’s entire message. In this sitcom, from Glee and American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy, a gay couple, played by Girls’ Andrew Rannells’ and Justin Bartha, decide they want to have a child together and choose as their surrogate a single mother who hopes to use the money from surrogacy to go back to law school. It’s not a bad premise, but it gets off on an extremely sour note: the couple begins thinking surrogacy because Rannells’ character falls in love with a baby in a department store who is wearing an adorable sweater. It’s a sequence that confirms all the worst stereotypes about gay men as materialistic, selfish, shallow, even seeking instant gratification, and it’s done extremely effectively.

“My partner and I have been having conversations about surrogacy and meeting with people and talking about it,” Murphy said. “We’re really writing hopefully a great depth to this couple, and it’s not hard to be it’s not easy to be a gay couple having a child. We deal with those issues. For me, obviously as somebody who very much does have that dream, I don’t feel that way. I would never feel that way.” That may be his hope, but the gaps between Murphy’s emotions and his execution is clear throughout The New Normal.

I think Ben & Kate stands a chance of being excellent, Guys With Kids could develop into a sold if unmemorable show, and The New Normal may be simply too bounded by Murphy’s private obsessions, including Real Housewife Nene Leakes, to reconcile its ambitions and what it actually offers to the world. But the show demonstrates the challenge of trying to do shows about men taking up their share of childcare. We live in a world where for some people, that’s a new normal, and for others, it’s unfathomable to the point of hilarity.

Okay, which one of you jokers decided it would be a good idea to give Ryan Murphy another television series? Haven’t we learned anything about the results of positive reinforcement? Keep doing it, and he’s going to think this kind of behavior is acceptable.

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.
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I’m not a Ryan Murphy fan — neither increasingly grim plastic surgery nor singing after-school specials are really my jam (though I love me some Brittany and Santana) — but I admit I’m intrigued by his new show, American Horror Story, about a couple who, in the wake of a miscarriage, move to Los Angeles for a fresh start only to find out that their new house is haunted. He’s already hit the obvious button with all his might by declaring that “the monster in the closet is infidelity,” which should be a change for star Connie Britton after the end of Friday Night Lights. And I’m less interested in this show in particular than in the possibility that it could take horror shows mainstream.

Glee succeeded less by founding a new genre of television show, or firmly establishing it for the first time, than by revitalizing a genre that’s had its ebbs and flows. America has always been pretty fond of its musicals. But with the exception of Twin Peaks, if that counts, I’m hard-pressed to think of a horror television show that a) develops a story from episode-to-episode rather than being a showcase for one-offs, b) that is considered a television classic, c) that is scary in the way that horror movies are scary and visceral. So American Horror Story, if it works, could break new ground even if it’s on cable TV rather than the networks, where you’d have to compromise quite considerable on sex and violence a la Buffy to avoid the wrath of the FCC.

I’m curious about horror in part because I have an extremely hard time watching it myself, and am tentatively working towards understanding it better. When I was quite young, a friend’s mother read me a graphic novel version of Frankenstein that shook me so deeply that I had very traumatic nightmares for a long time, and I tend to avoid the kind of imagery and scenarios that would trigger those kinds of dreams again. I’m trying to get better — I did survive all of Drag Me to Hell in theaters, and I’m planning to see the Straw Dogs remake, if that counts as horror. So take everything I’m about to say here with an enormous grain of salt.

But I do wonder if there’s something about horror that’s better suited for movies than for television. It’s hard to sustain the tension of a horror action sequences (is that the right thing to call murders? Or attacks?) from week to week if you’re cliff-hangering them. It’s a genre that involves getting incredibly wound up incredibly quickly and then getting a fairly quick release. It’s hard to buy the idea of a family staying in a house of horrors for a long time before they get killed or are driven out of it, unless the terrible things that happen to them are calibrated in such a way that they’re either drawn into the darkness or don’t realize what’s going on for a while. And I also wonder if some of the social issues that horror movies bring up, like extremely violent sexual assault, or violent crime, are the kinds of things that mass American audiences can only bear to look at for a short time, and which, psychologically, we need our pop culture to provide quick resolution to. There’s a difference between watching Doctor Melfi get raped, knowing she’s alive, and watching her struggle emotionally with the consequences of that assault over a television season; watching two teenage girls get raped, tortured, and violently murdered, only to have their parents rape, torture, and murder their killers in return for two hours in a movie theater; and watching extremely violent, or extremely tense things happen over 12 to 22 hours. For certain kinds of very bad things, we tend to demand that our pop culture anesthetizes us with distance, or salves us with revenge. It’s not that you couldn’t spread out I Spit On Your Grave over a 12-episode season, but would you want to?

Obviously Buffy worked, but that was in part because the show was very funny rather than straightforwardly frightening or shocking, because it was a procedural where at least some monsters were vanquished every episode, and because the special effects were calibrated at a point where they were immersive enough to suspend disbelief but not realistic enough to be genuinely disturbing. For American Horror Story, and any successors it has, I imaging much will depend on what tone the show settles on, and how precisely it manages to stay on whatever sweet spot it finds. Given Ryan Murphy’s tonal track record, that may be difficult.