I’ve written in the past about the challenges in putting female anti-heroes on television: if they behave decisively and malignantly, they don’t get the credit male anti-heroes do for conforming to gender norms, and if they are weak, or indecisive, or self-obsessed, they’re treated as if they’re distasteful rather than admirable. But another challenge in getting more female anti-heroes on screen is getting networks to try to make them, rather than simply the cable channels that have made their reputations on male anti-heroes.

I think the creators of The Mob Doctor, a drama which stars Jordana Spiro as a surgeon who does medical favors for the Chicago mob to pay the debt she incurred to get her brother out of trouble, are setting up impossible expectations when they suggest that the show will be “ER meets the Sopranos,” as Rob Wright did on Monday. But I think Josh Berman, Wright’s co-creator is on to something, when he talks about the long arc it takes to build a female anti-hero on a network, where viewers will have to build a long investment in Dr. Grace Devlin before they begin following her through the development process that will turn her from a woman stuck doing bad things in difficult circumstances to a genuine anti-hero who embraces stepping over a carefully calibrated moral line.

“We’ve really mapped out her character, and we want it to feel very organic,” Berman said. “And we want to take a woman who never thought this was going to be her life and slowly watch her transform into someone she maybe didn’t think she would become, but is quite confident and happy with who she is. And we’re going to do that slowly. You know, we have milestones over the first season…So hopefully we can deliver on that.”

This strikes me as an astute insight. Viewers of cable shows have become conditioned to come to new programming ready to identify with or root for someone who behaves badly or aberrantly. Within the first episode, we expect to see the contradictions of Tony Soprano as a mobster and family man, Al Swearengen as a tyrant and a man of sympathy to sex workers, Walter White as chemistry teacher and meth genius, Lena Dunham as vain, lazy striver and as cuttingly observant friend. On networks, viewers expect to be introduced to characters who are, with slight variations, straightforwardly worthy of a rooting interest without serious moral complication. Even when a character like Dr. House arrives as a cantankerous jerk, it took a while for House to make him uncomfortably transgressive—his wounds were always obvious enough to provide a psychological backgrounder on his orneriness.

I’m not sure The Mob Doctor is going to be the show that executes this premise successfully, based on the pilot. I like star Jordana Spiro, especially from her tenure on My Boys, where she played a Chicago sports reporter, but there’s a fair bit of melodrama and silliness going on around her. But I think Berman is laying out an important formula, one that if we want richer, more complex women on television, it would be wise to keep in mind that we have to strap in for the long haul.

“I’ve never really had that issue put before me before,” Kevin Reilly, entertainment president of Fox said on Monday morning. I’d just asked him about the latest report from San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, which revealed that in the 2010-2011 television season, Fox had fewer women working behind the camera than any other broadcast network—a measly 18 percent, and the second lowest-number of female characters, 39 percent of characters narrowly beating out NBC’s 36, and whether Fox’s female-lead comedy boom was a response to those figures. I honestly didn’t think it was a hard question. But apparently, in the entertainment industry, it remains a surprising and unexpected one.

Reilly pivoted to the number of women who watch the network, saying “Fox is traditionally thought of as a male core network. Whether it’s our history of genre or animation, we still have that access point, and we have shows that deliver equally with men and women. When you’ve seen with shows like American Idol, we have not only the highest concentration of women, but young women. We’re not in the one-quadarant business.” Which is nice for Fox, and meeting the needs of female viewers is a worthy goal, but Reilly’s response kind of misses the point. (To his credit, I spoke to Reilly after the session, and he’s promised a follow-up after he’s looked at the SDSU report, which I look forward to.) If you don’t want to be a one-quadrant network, it might help not to have one-quadrant writers.

That’s particularly true on a show like The Mindy Project, which isn’t just a show about a young woman navigating work and life, but about women’s health issues. But, while there are female writers other than Mindy Kaling working on the show, the writers’ room is majority male, and the male writers who have joined the show have received the lion’s share of the media attention as the show has staffed up. “I think our greatest asset is we have at the top of the show the greatest female half-hour writer in television,” executive producer Matt Warburton said when I asked him what the male writers were bringing to women’s health and work-life balance topics. And Kaling gave the answer that almost every executive in Hollywood gives when asked about diversity: “We’re looking for people who can write women super-well,” she said. “That said, we are alwasy looking for really funny female writers. That’s something we’re looking forward in the future,” implying that the current state of affairs was a matter of money rather than hiring decisions.

To her credit, Dana Fox, creator of Ben and Kate, one of the best new sitcoms of the season, about an irresponsible man who moves home to help his sister care for her young child, talked candidly after her panel about some of the challenges of hiring female writers. There are four women on the writing staff of her show, and Fox said she had hoped to hire other female writers who were snapped up by other programs. Fox’s best friend is New Girl creator Liz Merriwether, and she spoke movingly about her desire to promote and support the work of her friends who are female television writers. Even if she’s just getting started on those projects, Fox is a step ahead of the man who runs her network in thinking about diversity in the writers’ room.

Downton Abbey‘s been a tremendous hit for Masterpiece on PBS, and the public broadcaster is responding by importing another period British drama. Call the Midwife, which follows the adventures of a group of young midwives working with Anglican nuns in the exceedingly poor Poplar neighborhood in London’s East End, has been a giant hit in the UK, where its ratings beat out Downton Abbey. It’s a show about what it means for young women who aren’t yet having their own families, and who received their training in modernized hospitals, to deliver the babies of women who have much more experience in the ways of childbirth than their midwives do, and to do so in environments of extreme poverty because their patients mistrusted hospital care.

But it’s also a story about what it meant to be able to provide serious, personalized care for the first time in the immediate aftermath of the implementation of the National Health Service. Midwives made house calls, returned multiple times a day to check on the condition of frail infants, and would keep coming back as long as they were needed. Jessica Raine, who stars in Call the Midwife as a young nurse named Jenny Lee, told me:

The program really champions the NHS because it was very new. It had only just come about. And it’s difficult to imagine England without the NHS, but they didn’t have one. It was a really exciting new thing that the pooor in East London were really benefitting from, and they had not experienced it before. It champioins nurses, it champions people going out in the streetts, which I personally am really proud of becasue I don’t think people in that industry, they’re not celebrated. I love that midwifery has come to the forefront because it’s such an undocumented profession. You get to go into family’s houses, you get home visits, and every sitaution is different.

Call the Midwife is one of the rare cases of fifties or sixties nostalgia where it makes actual sense to want to bring back some elements of that period. There’s no reason to wish for the days of requiring women to have enemas and shave their pubic hair before going into labor, of course, but with serious cuts to National Health staffing underway, there’s something powerful about the dream of extremely personalized care and home support for new parents. The changes to American health care under the Affordable Care Act are just getting started, of course. But Call the Midwife is a reminder both that expanding access to care dramatically changes the lives of people who benefit from it, and requires both the medical professionals who treat them and the patients themselves to make cultural adjustments. It’s the stuff of both great drama, and of better health.

The Downton Abbey panel at the Television Critics Association press tour was a raucous spectacle, with Shirley MacLaine, who will be playing Lady Cora’s American mother, telling raucous stories about Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville, who plays Lord Grantham, ripping open his dress shirt to reveal a “Free Bates” t-shirt, and Brendan Coyle declaring that in Downton personality tests, he comes up as a Lady Mary. But in the midst of all of it, Julian Fellowes, who created the show, offered one of the best explanations I’ve ever seen of how to explore modern concerns in a period framework without becoming thunderously obvious or inappropriate to the period. He said:

There are many subjects that we sort of range among with I don’t know whether it’s women’s rights or homosexuality or whatever, which you wouldn’t find in a novel written in 1906 or whatever. And so you have that freedom. But the discipline is to look at those subjects, but within the context of that period. So you must be careful to try and give people reasonable reactions and emotional responses that are right for their own time and not simply someone who’s been parachuted in from 2012. And that’s the other discipline, really.

I think that’s exactly right, and gets at what’s interesting about period stories. On something like sexual orientation, I understand the impulse to look to history and period stories to demonstrate that people who have been attracted to people of their same gender have always existed. But what’s fascinating about seeing, say, Thomas, live out his life as a gay man in Edwardian England is not, that people had same-sex sexual contact in Edwardian England, but the differences between how he thinks of himself and his sexual and romantic feelings for men or the way the Duke of Crowborough conceives of his relationship with Thomas as separate from his identity, and the way we understand sexual orientation today. It’s the spaces between then and now that are interesting, the distance we’ve traveled, and the understanding that we’ll change again.

In terms of what to expect from season three of Downton Abbey, Fellowes and the cast were very cagey. But the trailer screened before the panel suggested a number of things. The family will face the decimation of Cora’s fortune, something that will change the dynamic between Cora and Robert will change because, as Fellowes said “Cora is less afraid of the future than Robert is. She’s much less afraid of change. And now you’ll start to see more and more of that because she’s less afraid of expressing that.” Mr. Bates remains incarcerated. A rift has come between Thomas and O’Brien, who we see sniping at each other. Lady Sybil and Branson are back from their elopement, something Fellowes suggests may be linked to the Irish Troubles. Branson’s proclivity for causing trouble at dinner doesn’t appear to have abated, though he’s doing it from his seat among the company rather than while standing in as a footman, and his elevation has Carson twitchy. And dear, silly Matthew and Mary are fighting about something big, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping their drive to the altar, or at least for Matthew to insinuate he’s pretty excited to get in Lady Mary’s knickers. I had my quibbles with the melodrama of this last season, but this is a fun, fizzy combination of plots, and I’m looking forward to see how it plays out.

I’m headed out tonight to the Television Critics Association Press Tour in Los Angeles, and I’ll be there until August 5. Posting will proceed as usual, though Breaking Bad open threads may be a little sporadic depending on what I can catch in between events, and I may be a little slow to answer emails.

But if you have questions about any new shows debuting this fall, or questions for the networks about their strategies or decision-making, let me know in comments here. I’ll do my best to get them answered, and to bring you everything I can about what’s going to be on your television this fall.

If you still aren’t watching Raising Hope, Fox’s charming comedy about a working-class family raising Hope, the baby who represents the fourth generation in the same house, together, I’d encourage you to check out last week’s episode and reconsider. In that installment, Jimmy Chance, Hope’s young father, decides to try to go back and get his GED, prompting his parents, Burt and Virginia, to confront their fears about falling behind their son in education. While the way Jimmy finally gets his degree is very funny, the episode is really about teaching people who have never had much in the way of education that learning can be tremendously fun and rewarding. Watching Burt, for example, embrace Shakespeare after Jimmy’s coworker Frank tells him to try to picture the action as it unfolds rather than focusing on individual words is lovely: he ends up transfixed by the fight that opens Romeo and Juliet, and he and Frank fence through the supermarket in made-up weapons and armor. It helps that Garrett Dillahunt is wonderful at selling Burt: as he said at the Television Critics Association press tour, “I love playing the fools. I never understand actors who never want to appear weak. I think that’s where we learn so much about people. I enjoy falling down. I enjoy making mistakes. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t let too much get him down.” It’s Burt’s resilience that makes it particularly rewarding when he gets a win.

And Greg Garcia, the show’s creator, has set up an environment where even when the Chances are doing things that most television characters take for granted, like trying to learn basic math, science, and history, they’re never objects of contempt or ridicule. In a world of aspirational television, where schoolteachers like Jess on New Girl live in vast apartments and even goofy characters like Phil Dunphy on Modern Family are wildly successful, that makes the Chances different, and refreshing, even when it’s not easy to pull off. When we spoke at press tour, Garcia acknowledged that he’s been told that not being aspirational might turn viewers off.

“Those are the shows I like so that’s what I’m going to write. Some people are like, when we first started developing this show, they were like ‘Oh, well, I don’t know maybe the house is too dirty and maybe people don’t want to watch,’” he said. “And I was like ‘They’re not in the house, they’re in their house. They’re just watching.’…I like to go to the zoo and watch the lions. I don’t want to be in there with them…I certainly can’t say that’s not true because maybe it is. But I like the show that I write.”

That’s not an entirely comfortable sentiment. But to a certain extent, it’s what we do when we look upwards, too. We judge the Real Housewives in their plastic, manicured homes just as much as we’re amused and a little shocked when Burt and Virginia refuse to act like functional adults. But while we root for the ludicrously rich to fall, we’re cheering for the Chances to win.

Because I’ve written so much about the unifying approach to politics Louis CK has been taking on Louie this year, I made sure to ask him about it when I got the chance yesterday. His answer was in striking context to the very, very funny pontificating by Russell Brand that followed, sample lines of which included, “I think we are passing the time, as human beings, where we look to these people to lead us”; the observation that Mitt Romney sees other billionaires as “Dickensian street urchins, eating gruel with fingerless gloves”; the declarations that “I like metaphorical systems for understanding mortality. Death is confusion; that “Until there is a fundamental spiritual revolution, I don’t care what color, red or blue or black or white, the pigment on their skin or the color on their flags”; and the insistence “the only legitimate distinction in global politics and society is rich or poor.”

CK said the driving force in his political humor was curiosity rather than expertise:

I don’t have any political opinions, I just am very curious. And it’s very interesting to listen to what people say. What’s the best way to run a country and the world? Those are really profound questions. I don’t have the confidence to say that I know one way or another. Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I’m very suspicious. It doesn’t make sense to me that you’d have the same solution to every issue. I just like listening. I try to take people who are way far away from what I think or understand and put a representative of them on my show. I like to try to learn form them. When we did the show with the Christian anti-masturbating lady, it would have been easy to have a stupid Christian anti-masturbating lady…it was more fun to have her be really eloquent and see if I could learn from someone who never masturbates. There really is a very blissful, beautiful idea behind that. I f I could stop, I would be very happy. When I went to Afghanistan with the USO, I’m a pacifist, and I’m really against any violence, and I think there’s zero reason to ever do it. I learned so much from being around those folks, and I feel like I was enriched by it…This is what I saw, here, you guys can make your own opinions. I think it’s better to illuminate shit and learn about it than to opinionate about it…I’m a little dumb. I sleep too much, and I did a lot of drugs when I was a kid. I can’t handle the responsibility of having a political opinion.

I think, as was often the case, that CK is being a bit self-deprecating here. He obviously has some politicized opinions, even if they’re not partisan ones, or specific policy proposals he backs in his humor. This is, after all, a guy who told me after the session that he tries never to connect his love for his daughters to their physical appearance so they won’t think they’re only loved for their looks, which is kind of remarkable and wonderful. And this might be a point in and of itself—that the best way to get us past the worst of our partisan gridlock is not to hold up bipartisanship as a fetish, but to encourage genuine curiosity and idiosyncrasy in our political thinking again.

After a lot of seriousness over the past few days, there was something amusingly wacky about the presentation by Paul Fisher, the model scout who is revamping his network on the CW’s new reality show Remodeled. Even in Hollywood, the man has a world-class ego. Particularly when he started talking about how he’s going to put together a mental health program for women in the industry because “There are 7 million kids around the world who are sticking fingers down their throats…Our industry must take responsibility for the images they’re putting out,” while promoting his show with footage that shows him mercilessly dissecting candidate’s looks. Me being me, I had to ask about the contradiction.

He told me that the best way to fix the problem was “Step one is get in the game. Step two is when you have the muscle,” and said that “One of my dreams, ma’am, is to be able to sit front row at the Calvin Klein show, that Versace show, and not see those size zero, size two models walking down the runway…I promise you everything in my power and my ability, I’m going to try to never see a girl with a size zero or a size one walking down the runway again.” And he suggested he’d die trying to change the industry.

Perhaps I should be less skeptical. But this is coming from a man who talked about how virtuous modeling is because of the charity work models with big deals do, and linked the expansion of his empire to changes he swore would be inevitable in the industry as he gained power. There is something good though about the idea that the culture’s bent enough that charity for the rich is compulsory, and that it’s cooler to argue that models should be healthy and representative as possible instead of embracing heroin chic. That said, I will be sure to poke Mr. Fisher to see if he’s keeping his promise. If he’s going to offer me the moon, I might as well keep after him to deliver it.

“I’m fat. That’s not lost on us…Everyone on TV’s 78 and a half pounds, so we have to address it.” -Billy Gardell

We’ve had a lot of conversations recently about how men are represented in pop culture these days, so I’ve been spending some of my time at the Television Critics Association asking some questions about new male characters that will form a series of posts over the next couple of days.

Shonda Rhimes’ new show Scandal stars a women: Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope, a fictional version of Washington, DC fixer Judy Smith (she represented Monica Lewinsky and Chandra Levy’s family), who is an executive producer on the show. But it’s also about that woman’s relationship with a powerful man, in fact, the powerful man. Olivia’s former boss is the president of the United States, and apparently he’s a single man, who isn’t quite ready to let her go even though she’s returned to private practice. In real life, it’s impossible to imagine a president of the United States who isn’t married. It’s difficult to believe that a man who had never been married or a single divorced man would be able to get over questions around his personal life, though a widower might manage it. But I asked Rhimes if she thought that despite that conception, Americans long for a sexier vision of the president.

” I don’t know if America wants a sexier president” in the real world, she said. “I know when I was working on the show, it was delightful to have a sexier president, to imagine the president as a man as well as a leader of the free world.” She noted later that she hoped the show wouldn’t be pigeon-holed, noting, “I don’t think this is a show about relationships.”

It’s a dichotomy that raises some interesting issues. I don’t know that we’re always very good at letting men express yearning or desire in popular culture, even though we’re at a place where we’re getting more comfortable watching women objectify men on-screen, and presenting men to be objectified by women in the audience. I wonder if it has something to do with a dynamic we see play out repeatedly in American politics, where we constantly downgrade a politician’s power (particularly the president) any time he compromises or doesn’t get everything he wants. Of course, we accept the inevitability of compromise and disappointment in ordinary people’s lives. But it’s hard to imagine someone being both a forceful chief executive and not getting the girl, or getting the girl and then getting dumped. It’s why action stars never have interesting romances: the only outcomes are success, the hero leaving the girl, or the girl dying through the machinations of the villain.