Central Park Five, the latest documentary directed by Ken Burns with his long-term collaborator David McMahon and Burns’ daughter Sarah, is a searing portrait of how detectives and prosecutors coerced confessions out of Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Kharey Wise, which also implicated Yusef Salaam, in the 1989 rape and assault of Trisha Meili. McCray, Richardson, Wise, Salaam, and Santana, who I had the privilege to meet and speak with yesterday, had their convictions vacated in 2002. Matias Reyes, whose DNA has been matched to that found on Meili’s body (there were no DNA matches between Meili and the Five), has confessed to the crime. In other words, the facts of the coercions, the false convictions, and the true perpetrator are not controversial, even if the city of New York has yet to settle a civil suit filed by the Five. So it was disappointing to hear from Burns yesterday at the Television Critics Association press tour that some of his regular and long-term funders had been afraid to back the project.

“A good deal of the money also came from the Atlantic Philanthropies, a foundation we had not had any relation with before, but who is willing to take on a sizable part of our budget in large part because so many others had avoided what they feared would be too controversial aspects of this story,” he explained in his introduction to the film.

Burns refused to name names, and was gracious about the fact that underwriters always have a lot of choices, even from among his slate of projects, but he didn’t mince words about the funders who expressed anxieties about the subject material or the tone of the film.

“I did not begrudge sponsors. They’re not obligated,” he explained. “We normally sort of work on a ten year plan. We have a film on the history of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Sarah and Dave and I are working a film on Jackie Robinson. Lynn Novick, who’s been here before, and Sarah Botstein and I are in the middle of a massive series on the history of the Vietnam War. Dayton Duncan, who we were here with last summer on The Dust Bowl, and I are in the middle of researching and beginning to write a history of country music. We have a biography planned of Ernest Hemingway. All of those things are part of it. And underwriters have had a chance to sort of cherry-pick and choose what they want to do. And these are tough times for underwriting. And I think particularly for some, the notion of not knowing what the final product would look like, it was something that prudence suggested they stay away of, which is sad.”

But Burns also offered a rebuke to the idea that his other movies are sentimental or uncontroversial—or unconcerned with racial justice in the way Central Park Five is.

“There are aspects…in almost all the films in which we’ve been unwilling, in fact unable, to present a comfortable, sentimental or nostalgic version of American history,” he said. “And more often than not, scratching the surface of American history, we’ve dealt with race and this is certainly about that. I think it speaks volumes, this story, about America and our tortured racial history.”

The coverage of the Central Park Fives’ exoneration wasn’t nearly as loud as the media calls, in some cases, for them to be literally hung when New Yorkers were convinced they were guilty. Central Park Five is an opportunity to correct that balance, and to give Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise, and Yusef Salaam back some of their dignity and names, some of the slim recompense available to them, given that the years they lost to prison are unrecoverable. It also could help shift the sentiment on their civil suit against the city, which also cannot restore those years, but could give the Five some compensation for lost earnings and lost time to develop their careers. It’s a real shame that any funder would be more willing to back an argument about race in history when the victims of cruelty aren’t available to be helped, than to support the funding of a project about a shameful event of recent memory that could do some substantive good today.

That Joss Whedon’s upcoming S.H.I.E.L.D. show is in development at ABC is less a matter of it being a fit for the network, which focuses heavily on female-centric and family dramas, and more a matter of corporate synergy, now that that ABC and Marvel are both owned by Disney. At the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena yesterday, ABC president Paul Lee got asked how an action show will fit into his lineup, particularly after the cancellation of Last Resort, the fairly gender-balanced thriller about the crew of a nuclear submarine. His answer was less than fully revealing, in part because he only has a script, rather than a full pilot—much less multiple episodes. He explained:

Marvel has the ability to bring the whole family around it. The truth about Joss is he has some great relationships in it. So there are a lot of really funny
male/female relationships, some very flirtatious ones that go through it. But it’s also Joss, too, and it’s Marvel, and there’s a lot of action to it. So we haven’t yet seen the pilot. We fast-tracked that before the others. We are going to see it a lot earlier than the others. And we are very hopeful that that’s going to move forward to series, and we will build our marketing campaign early for it. But we do see that as a possibility of a show that we can bring both men and women and kids to.

I am frankly really glad that Lee is talking about S.H.I.E.L.D. as a show that should attract women and families as part of its basic genetics, rather than as as a bonus to go with a core dudebro demographic. But for that to be meaningful—and it’s very different to get women to tune in to an ongoing show than for us to accept a one-off three hours of a movie where we’re in a decided minority—I think he and Whedon have to think about what’s missing from the depictions of women in The Avengers right now, and Marvel has to be willing to let them have at least some flexibility in terms of broadening both the character base and tone of the show.

And one thing that’s missing right now? Aelationships between men and women in this universe that aren’t flirtatious. The Avengers right now is a franchise where female characters are dating their bosses, acting as honey traps, emotionally close to other coworkers in a way that suggests they’re basically in love, or crushing hard on their superheroic fellow soldier only to lose him to entombment in ice. This is not a good argument that men and women can be friends. You’d think that it’s a task so hard as to require superheroics.

The headline out of Netflix’s first appearance at the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena is that the streaming video service has produced 14 more episodes of the beloved cult hit Arrested Development, and will release them all in a single day on a to-be-announced day in May! But we already knew that the episodes were under production. The real news is that Netflix might have found its purpose as a creator of original programming with the Arrested Development experiment. Not resurrecting dead-but-beloved-or-even-merely-liked series, as seems to be the case every time a Terra Nova or a The Killing bites the dust. Not providing an employment program to Steven Van Zandt in between Springsteen tours. Rather, Netflix might just have found its niche in taking the logical step beyond the subject matter innovations of the Golden Age of television, and providing structural flexibility to television storytellers as well as room to tackle new subject material and in new tones.

To back up for a moment, the two most interesting things that Mitch Hurwitz, Arrested Development’s creator, explained about the Netflix episodes had nothing to do with what story they’d tell. Rather, he said first that the episodes would each focus on a different character, that they could be watched in no particular order, and that events in each episode would become clearer as viewers watched more of them. And second, he explained that some of them were different lengths, though they are all roughly thirty minutes long.

That first development is very significant. Television, for all that it’s developed beyond an episodic structure to tell long-arc narratives, is still a fundamentally linear storytelling mechanism. You may be able to marathon The Sopranos just fine, but you can’t shuffle up the order of episodes and have things make sense. A willingness to treat episodes like a series of interlinked short films that can be watched in multiple orders is something Netflix can do particularly because of its strategy of releasing all of the episodes of its shows at once, and because it doesn’t have to build and retain viewers episode to episode the way a network does to keep a reliable stream of advertising revenue flowing. And it means that Netflix could position itself as much better-suited than networks of any type to adapt not-strictly linear narratives with multiple perspectives. Before yesterday, my dream scenarios for Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From The Goon Squad involved the HBO adaptation, and for World War Z involved a series of stand-alone movies or mini-series episodes. Now, I’m excitedly thinking about what they might look like as Netflix series, a thought that has literally never occurred to me about any material before.
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It’s easy to dismiss reality television as a table-flipping, backbiting, redneck-baiting mess, to judge by some of the shows that top the ratings and garner press that ranges from clucking disapproval to horrified fascination. But one of the best things about the cable presentations at the Television Critics Association press tour, which I’ll be at until January 16, is a reminder of just how big the landscape is, and how much fascinating, substantive reality and documentary programming is coming up over the next six months. These are the five shows and documentaries that I’m most looking forward to after hearing their creators and casts talk to us in Pasadena:

1. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House of God, HBO, February 4: Alex Gibney’s documentaries are always fierce and compelling. But he’s found a particularly enraging and moving subject in this novel take on the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church: the attacks on a group of boys at a Catholic school for the deaf, by a priest who was the rare hearing person at the time to speak American Sign Language, an ability that enhanced his sense of priestly authority. Watching the men talk about their experiences as children, and what it meant to them to gather the courage to write to the Vatican to testify to their abuse, to find each other and learn they weren’t alone, and even to confront Father Murphy, who managed to convince the Vatican to let him stay a priest by arguing that he’d repented, is shattering and triumphant. They are, as Gibney put it during the panel for the movie, “people who were voiceless in the hearing world, who nevertheless had their voices heard.”

2. The President’s Gatekeepers, Discovery, July TBD: From Jules and Gédéon Naudet, brothers who were working on a documentary about New York firefighters on September 11 and ended up making 9/11, an insider perspective on the tragedy instead, this documentary includes interviews with all 19 living White House Chiefs of Staff. Executive producer Chris Whipple said it was fascinating to see how, despite the extreme partisan reputations of Chiefs ranging from Dick Cheney, who worked for President Ford, to Rahm Emanuel, the job itself, which most of the Chiefs described as the hardest they’d ever had, involved intense bipartisan cooperation. And the Naudets promise fascinating inside stories, like Bill Daley’s account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Apparently, Daley asked Obama to postpone the White House Correspondent’s Association dinner, but Obama demurred, insisting that everything proceed as normal. During the dinner, Modern Family star Eric Stonestreet got an email that his White House tour had been cancelled, and started asking Daley if something momentous was underfoot. Daley told him a pipe had burst in the White House and promised to personally conduct the tour at a later date. The rest is history.

3. March To Justice, Investigation Discovery, February TBD: I’ll be fascinated to see this movie, if only to see more of Carolyn McKinstry, a survivor of the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing—and a subsequent bombing of her home. At the panel on Saturday, she spoke about the psychological toll of the bombing, and changes in trauma treatment for children in the years since, where early psychological intervention has become the norm. “There was not that type of opportunity for us back then. In fact, we didn’t even talk about this bombing in my home. The only people I talked with were the FBI. They came through regularly, asked questions, and recorded your answers,” she explained. “But my parents didn’t talk about — they didn’t say, ‘Are you afraid? Do you want to talk about what happened? Do you miss your friends?’ We didn’t talk about it at home. I went to school Monday morning at 8:00. No one said anything. It wasn’t mentioned ever at church, at home, or at school.” She’s a powerful reminder that the past isn’t really past, and that we’re grappling not just with the policy implications of the Civil Rights movement, but with the direct and personal memories of people who lived through it.

4. Inside Combat Rescue, Nat Geo, February TBD: One of the aspects of war that’s least reflected in popular culture is the logistics it takes to wage one, whether it’s the actual size and complexity of American forward operating bases, or the supply chains it takes to keep soldiers armed, fed, rested, and protected. For that reason alone, I’m fascinated by Inside Combat Rescue, which documents the efforts of the medical teams who head out in helicopters, retrieve, stabilize, and bring American soldiers back from the front lines of our current conflicts. I’ll be curious to learn more about how Nat Geo worked out the ethics of filming wounded subjects. But it’s a powerful illustration of the cost of war.

Going into the Television Critics Association press tour, one of the shows I was most excited to see shake out was a procedural called Deception, about an African-American police officer, played by Meagan Good, who returns to the white, wealthy family she grew up with because her mother worked for them as a housekeeper to investigate the murder of her childhood best friend. It wasn’t that the show was revolutionary, in fact the reverse: it’s a mashup of ABC soaps like Revenge and Scandal, with a hint of Damages, thanks to the presence of Tate Donovan as the murder victim’s older brother.

But the show operated at the intersection of race and class at a way I thought was fascinating and promising. Good’s Detective Joanna Locasto, only the second woman of color to be the main character on a currently-airing television show, was returning to a setting where she’d grown up on the wrong side of the class divide, not with more money, but with the power of the state on her side. And she and her boss, Will Moreno (Laz Alonso) were in a position that strikes me as almost unprecedented in popular culture: as people of color with substantive power, and particularly police power, who were tasked with investigating and—and personally judging—a decadent and corrupted white family, and with whom the audience is intended to sympathize with absolutely.

That’s an extraordinarily rich scenario, particularly for a network television show. And it’s one that came about in part, as NBC Entertainment President Jennifer Salke explained in NBC’s executive session yesterday morning, “That was a family that was conceived and cast began to be cast as a white family. And we insisted that there be a diverse woman in that role.” I was excited to discuss that scenario and all of its potential with Deception‘s co-creators Gail Berman and Liz Heldens. And so it was disconcerting to see them retreat from the idea that they’d discuss race at all, and to do it as quickly as possible.

“It is a way to sort of deal with race without actually having to talk about it,” Heldens said when I asked her about their plans for dealing with the intersection of race and class issues. “But it’s not really something we talk about too much in the writers’ room.” When Hitfix critic Daniel Fienberg pushed her on it further, citing her experience working on Friday Night Lights, a show that was both diverse and explicitly conscious of racial issues, she retreated even further. “Why it’s not a discussion? I don’t know,” she told him. “I just think it’s sort of there, and, you know, whenever you’re writing a script, you’re always trying to get your page count down so they can shoot it.”
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Brave things don’t often happen on the stage at the Television Critics Association press tour. Executives come on stage and insist that they’re incredibly excited about sitcoms about men cross-dressing to find work in the bad economy, or to praise the creative direction of critically panned dramas. Every actor insists the creators are the best they’ve ever worked for. But occasionally, as has happened twice this press tour, an actor will be bracingly honest about working conditions and creative opportunities in Hollywood. And when they do, the stories they tell are striking.

Yesterday, it was Tippi Hedren, the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Marnie. Signed to a seven-year contract with Hitchcock, Hedren’s working relationship with Hitchcock was initially a positive and beneficial one. But the director was extremely controlling and harassing,, and ultimately gave Hedren an ultimatum: she make herself sexually available to him, or he ruin her career. Hedren refused, and Hitchcock held onto her contract, preventing her from working on other projects, and substantially curtailed her movie career. Now, that story’s being made into an HBO movie, The Girl, premiering in October, starring Sienna Miller as Hedren and Toby Jones as Hitchcock. It’s a movie that gives a sexual harassment victim rather than her harasser the last word. And at a panel presenting the movie, Hedren spoke movingly about the impact Hitchcock’s obsession and harassment had on her personal and professional life.

“People have said, ‘Was he in love with you?’ No, he wasn’t. When you love someone, you treat them well,” she said. “I certainly am not capable of discerning what was going through his mind or why. I certainly gave no indication that I would ever be interested in any kind of a relationship with him.” The trauma of Hitchcock’s harassment had lingered, Hedren said, and her position relative to the director was heightened by her legal powerlessness. “Actually viewing the film, I have to say that when I first heard Toby’s voice at Alfred Hitchcock, my body just froze,” she said. “I had not talked about this issue with Alfred Hitchcock to anyone. Because all those years ago, it was still the studio kind of situation. Studios were the power. And I was at the end of that, and there was absolutely nothing I could do legally whatsoever. There were no laws about this kind of a situation. If this had happened today, I would be a very rich woman.”

And while Sienna Miller, asked about harassment in Hollywood today, suggested that conditions had improved, Hedren acknowledged that sexual quid pro quos might not be a thing of the past. “I hope that young women who do see this film know that they do not have to acquiesce to anything that they do not feel is morally right or that they are dissatisfied with or simply wanting to get out of that situation, that you can have a strength, and you deserve it,” she said. “I can look at myself in the mirror, and I can be proud. I feel strong. And I lived through it beautifully. He ruined my career, but he didn’t ruin my life.” That such a warning is still necessary is a reminder that while a contemporary Hitchcock might not be able to sell his actress’s contract without her consent, the different toll booths to enter the entertainment business charge rather different prices.

Once you’re in the business, of course, the opportunities available to an actor can be limited, and if present, fraught, as actor Lance Reddick reflected during a panel to kick off the final season of Fringe. Asked to reflect on the opportunities available to black actors, he gave a rich, and complex answer.

“It’s a tricky thing when you talk about stereotypes because there’s always you know, for me, there’s in addition to stereotypes there’s also, in my opinion, the whole issue of tokenism,” he said. “I was concerned about falling into the stereotype of the stoic black commander or the angry black commander.” And he said he felt torn about the opportunities he wished were available to them and the fact that he’s had a comparatively rich career. “I feel like I’ve had kind of particularly as a black actor, I’ve had kind of a charmed career because I’ve kind of gone from one kind of great character piece and great shows to another,” he reflected. “So I haven’t really even though I’m always complaining about having fewer opportunities than my white counterparts, I feel like I’ve had kind of a charmed career. So I’m very grateful.”

To say that crumbs, even delicious ones, don’t constitute a full dinner is a brave act in Hollywood. Reddick’s talent is undeniable, and exposing his frustrations with the limitations of his ability to use them is an important thing to tell the very critics who would love to see him work more. And both Hedren and Reddick are a reminder that Hollywood is in the business of illusion, and that sometimes includes self-deception.

“One of the lucky things one of the nice, sort of, unintended consequences of working for HBO is that the entire season is written, shot, and locked in the can before the first episode airs,” Aaron Sorkin said at the panel for his show The Newsroom at the Television Critics Association press tour on Wednesday. “So even if you are tempted to try to write a little bit differently to please the people or change someone’s mind, you can’t do it. The season is done.” In other words, he’s happy with his show even if critics dislike it, saying that he “a hundred percent disagree[s]” with viewers who have been perturbed by his portrayals of women. If there was one theme to the exchange, it was that there’s a gap between what Sorkin sees in his own show, and what critics are seeing on screen.

And that division was even more striking because of a presentation earlier in the day of a show that is exactly what Sorkin seems to want The Newsroom to be, only it’s not airing on HBO and Sorkin didn’t create it: The Hour, a period piece about British news broadcasting in the fifties, that aired its first season on BBC America last summer.

Where The Newsroom began with vague arguments about will (and Will) and has moved into the nebulous motivations of his cranky corporate overlords, The Hour has clearly-delineated obstacles to the excellent reporting of the news. In the first season of The Hour (as was also the case with the miniseries State of Play), the show’s public broadcasters struggled to get a story out despite significant reporting hurdles thrown up by the government and pressure applied by the agents of state. In the second season, star Romola Garai, who plays producer Bel Rowley, explains that “There’s a new character that comes in at ITV, which is the big rival to the BBC. It’s launched at the beginning of the series. And they have their own show, which is very much a competitor to ‘The Hour.’ And their Head of News is a very dashing and attractive man who Bel hates and then grows to find curiously attractive.” That’s a specific and important story to tell, and one that requires more specific contrasts between styles and ethics of reporting (as well as more new characters), one that Will hints at in his monologue about providing advertising-free space for news broadcasting, that The Hour will spend part of six full episodes on.

And where The Newsroom has Neal as its blogger caricature, Don as the producer who wants to do right but is failing at it, and Maggie as, apparently, the person designated for Sorkin to establish and then “have them slip on as many banana peels as you want,” as he put it on Wednesday, The Hour’s characters are more clearly connected to larger positions and larger pressure points. This season on The Hour, Hector (Dominic West), the aristocratic anchor who found his nerve in the previous season, will find himself disgruntled when he’s forced to share the position with Freddie (Ben Whishaw), the young, radical reporter who backed him up previously. And The Hour’s creator Abi Morgan explained that they’re part of a larger alignment within the galaxy of the show.

“You have that internal triangle going on as well with Bel as the kind of mediator of those two,” she explained. “And then the bigger one is the birth of other channels, in particular ITV, and it’s about the commercial success of a commercial channel like ITV versus a public service broadcaster like the BBC. So we have that, and then, on a wider level, it’s about Britain aligning itself with America, trying to compete with America, but also the friend of America. So it has a bigger issue about the nuclear arms race and their relationship with America and really the kind of duck and cover terror of the late ’50s where life felt very short and very prescient.”

Morgan promised other issues as well: race, in the form of booming immigration to Britain and the far-right response to it, as well as a love triangle between a black secretary, a black doctor, and a second-generation British Jew; the rise of glamor and celebrity culture imported from the U.S., which Morgan said would go to Hector’s head; and the launch of Sputnik. The Newsroom‘s response to these issues has been to treat anti-immigrant bigots like fools rather than powerful forces and to provide an opportunity for Will’s saintliness even as he makes a range of equal-opportunity offensive comments, and to egregiously insult women who work in and consume celebrity culture.

On a character level, there’s a dramatic gap between Bel’s hypercompetence when it’s juxtaposed against Maggie’s perpetual mistakes and the vast gaps in supposedly-genius MacKenzie’s knowledge about basic world facts. Sorkin seems to believe that he’s firmly established MacKenzie as brilliant even though we rarely see her doing substantive work on the show. He insisted that “she’s got the whole meeting with the staff in which she’s extremely deft and a great leader, and then once you nail that down, it’s, for me, permissible to have her hit ‘send all’ instead of just ‘send’,” even as he ignored the wildly hysterical reaction and technical ignorance he wrote for her in the aftermath of that error. Morgan, by contrast, shows Bel doing much more of her job in the first season of The Hour, giving her working life and her affair with Hector balance, and having her excellence in the former be a part of the attraction that leads to the latter. And she outlined plans to expand the relationship between Bel and foreign correspondent Lix, and to contrast them with the women they meet in London’s burgeoning club scene.

Finally, The Newsroom seems plagued by a problem that I don’t think I would have identified before Sorkin and Jeff Daniels’ presentation on Wednesday. Given Sorkin’s history, I think it was reasonable to assume that Will was meant to be a straightforward hero, which is why is deeply unpleasant behavior, particularly towards women comes across as obsessive-repulsive. Now, I think Sorkin believes he’s writing and Daniels believes he’s portraying a nuanced anti-hero, when in reality, Sorkin is struggling to write an anti-hero in a realm where he’s previously written straightforward champions. “We present this Will’s mission to civilize as something, first of all, that people roll their eyes at, and second, that always blows up in his face,” Sorkin said in response to a question from me. “Hubris on this show is always punished.” Except it’s not. When Will’s mission to civilize meets with derision, the women who are offended by him are portrayed as bitches, and in one case, as actually unhinged. When Will reflects with his therapist on his bullying of a Santorum supporter on his show, he feels bad later, but in the broadcast, he ends with the last, tough word, and faces no drop in ratings or professional consequences. Sorkin hasn’t found a transgressive thing for Will to do that makes the audience excited that’s the equivalent of Walt’s cooking meth or Omar robbing drug dealers. Instead, he’s made us feel bad and cranky about his case for values that many of the viewers who dislike the show actually share.

The Hour, on the other hand, has absolutely straightforward flawed heroes, and I think it benefits from that clarity, and its willingness to visit down real consequences. Hector may start the season riding a wave of celebrity at the dramatic expense of his job performance, but from the promo we saw at press tour, he swiftly ends up in the clink for an as-yet-unidentified transgression. That, not a drink in the face, is a true consequences to face for hubris.

Television executives can get skittish about the strangest things, as I wrote earlier this summer about the Maxi pads, sex on kitchen tables, and the Lord’s name taken in vain that freaked out NBC suits during the Must See TV era. And one of the most striking differences between cable and network shows this last week has been the way people making programming for mediums talk about the role of standards and practices in their work.

“I think the only note we’ve gotten so far that makes it more of a network show than a cable show came from Standards this morning,” said Josh Berman, creator of NBC’s Mob Doctor, which stars Jordana Spiro as a young female surgeon who works for the Chicago mob when she isn’t pulling rotations. “We got a note that said ‘When you show the character’s urine, make sure it’s not too yellow, because too yellow violate network standards.’ So other than that, we don’t really differentiate between [making a show for cable and making a show for network.]” It turns out Standards okayed paler yellow urine in the scene. But it’s revealing that standards and practices at NBC thought something this minor was worth its creators time and attention. A show may not lose its artistic integrity through these tiny cuts, but it speaks to a profoundly conservative approach to standards. It’s hard to defend a large vision or a new approach when you’re freaked out by the color of a liquid standing in for urine in a test tube that’s momentarily on screen.

By contrast, Louis C.K. said that his interactions with Darlene Tipton, the vice president for standards and practices at FX and Fox Cable Networks, had been oriented towards a larger goal. “She said that her goal is to keep my show free and that she has a better sense of where the lines are,” he told the reporters at the Television Critics Association press tour. “Her department knows where the phone calls come from and…what fuses you’re more likely to break and where they are. So she keeps me within there. Because if I step too far over and I piss a group off really terribly, then I’m going to get curtailed beyond, you know, lower than I am now, if that makes any sense…So I always look to me, it’s a service to me, the standards.”

And that’s how standards and practices should work: serving the audience by serving the creative interests of creators, writers, and actors. It’s on the audience and critics to provide incentives, in the form of viewership, acclaim, and awards, for content that’s more diverse, or less harmfully sexist, or crude and dumb about gay people, or religious people, or any other kind of people. But standards and practices should treat creatives as their main clients, rather than interest groups. And they should want to preserve as wide an aperture as possible for their clients to do their jobs in, rather than narrowing it, a urine-filled test-tube millimeter at a time.

Over the past several days, I’ve been reading my colleagues reactions to NBC’s executive session at the Television Critics Association press tour, particularly to president Bob Greenblatt’s remarks that, while he loved comedies like Community and Parks and Recreation (a claim that in Community‘s case, I doubt the veracity of), he doesn’t plan to make more of them. “What Greenblatt seems to mean in his formulation is that ‘broadening’ is actually a process of programming shows that are less personal visions of the world by their creators, and more big, easily grasped concepts packaged as big-laff heart-warmers,” wrote Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker. Time’s James Poniewozik wrote “NBC is under no obligation to make challenging, narrow sitcoms that only critics like me love. TV is a business, and that, as history proves, frequently means being a monkey business. Also: you can make big, broad, even dumb comedies that are great!” And Tim Goodman at the Hollywood Reporter weighed in with a close read of Greenblatt’s carefully couched remarks to suggest that “the words used definitely implied what people seemed to fear – that NBC was going to dumb things down in a real hurry. But the unsexy qualifiers that were left out also suggested that Greenblatt was thinking of something more complex – and that is a middle ground where comedy can be broadly appealing while also smart as opposed to a sophisticated lock-box of cleverness that appeals to a niche audience and thus keeps NBC in the basement.”

I agree with all of those assessments, to a certain extent. But I think that the challenges NBC has faced with finding audiences for its current crop of comedies is fairly easy to diagnose, and with an answer that doesn’t come down to merely that they were too smart for a dumb audience. And that diagnosis suggests the beginnings of a formula that NBC can use to fix itself.

NBC’s critically acclaimed comedies are complex both in their concept and in their human details. 30 Rock is not just about the backstage antics at a television show, it’s about the backstage antics of a sketch comedy show, and how those antics are influenced by corporate pressure. Its characters are engaging precisely because they’re not archetypes: instead, the show stars a neurotic, middle-aged single woman, an insecure black star who intellectualizes his stardom, and a depressive corporate executive. Parks and Recreation is about a small town, but a high-concept one with apocalypse cults and Indian massacre sites and wacky Peruvian sister city delegations. Again, the characters themselves are wonderful and rich, whether it’s libertarian Ron Swanson or apathetic April, and they’re highly unusual tropes in an already wacky town. Community, when you think about it, started off as the lowest-concept of these shows, about students at a community college, and initially, only two of its main characters, movie-obsessed Abed and millionaire Pierce were major deviations from existing tropes. And as much as Community‘s been praised for its experimental episodes, which are genius, it’s also been exceptionally good at its entirely conventional storylines, like Troy’s first legal drink.

I think some of NBC’s response to its current woes, and the response that’s been getting much of the attention, has been to think that both its concepts and its specific storylines and haracter need to be as generic as possible. It’s why they’re producing a show like Guys With Kids, which has an increasingly familiar premise—men staying home to raise children—and relies for humor on the exceedingly low-level, generic idea that males of the species caring for their young is inherently hilarious. To its credit, I don’t think NBC’s reaching all the way for the lowest common denominator. Nothing on its schedule has jokes as racist and pandering as 2 Broke Girls, for example, and the network’s new shows are actually strikingly diverse.

But it’s also instructive to watch 1600 Penn, which the network will begin airing in the midseason, and like Guys With Kids, is one of the worst shows of a new pilot crop. That show, like 30 Rock and Community, has a very specific premise: it’s a look inside the dynamics of the first family, something only a handful of living people can actually relate to without reaching for metaphor. The characters within that family are also specific, some in a way that are relatable and universal—a perfectionist daughter, a hypercompetitive dad—and some of whom are less so—a trophy wife second First Lady, a heavy, fratty First Son who is both cause and solution of international crises. The father and daughter work, but the wife and son are weighed down in nasty cliches and implausibility that isn’t actually funny or insightful. Specificity can be as lowest-common denominator as broadness, and NBC has examples of both ways to fail on its fall schedule.
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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.