In a jaw-dropping panel at the Television Critics Association winter press tour, Sex and the City and 2 Broke Girls creator and producer Michael Patrick King doubled down his defense of the rampant racial and ethnic stereotypes in 2 Broke Girls, suggesting that they would not change even in response to notes from the network that suggested “dimensionalizing” the non-white characters in the supporting cast.

“Nina likes to say we’re an equal opportunity offender…I personally am thrilled with everything we’re doing. I’m happy with the growth. I feel we’re growing. I think there’s room to grow. I’m thrilled with the arena, with CBS, who knows what a big, bold joke means,” he told an audience of critics, many of whom have argued that the show’s signal weakness is its heavy reliance on obvious racial humor. “I don’t find it offensive, any of this. I find it comic to take everybody down…Being a comedy writer gives you permission to be an outsider and poke fun at what people think of other people.”

King defended the jokes about Matthew Moy’s diner manager Han Lee, saying “I like the fact that he’s an immigrant. I like the fact that he’s trying to fit into America. I like the fact that in the last 3 episodes we haven’t made an Asian character, we’ve only made short jokes.”

He also said that he thought the show was an authentic representation of the relationships between people of different races and backgrounds in gentrifying New York neighborhoods.

“I feel that it is broad and brash and very current. It takes place in Williamsburg, NY,” he said. “It is a complete mashup of young, irreverent hipsters, old-school people, different nationalities, different ethnic backgrounds. And what our show represents is that mashup of smart girls and a wide range of characters. Nina [Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment] likes to say we’re an equal opportunity offender. I like to say that the big story about race on our show is so many are represented. The cast is incredibly multi-ethnic, including the regulars and the guest stars. We sort of represent what New York used to be, and still is, a melting pot.”

King did acknowledge that the show would continue to develop supporting characters of color like Garrett Morris’s Earl, who he said got a more substantial storyline in an upcoming episode. And he suggested that while his obligation was to expand the two main characters (who he said had their origins in stereotypes as well) first, he “didn’t think the [supporting] characters were one note. I thought they were the first note.”

But it was an undeniably tense session, with King at one point calling out The Wrap critic Tim Molloy and, in a lame attempt at proving the humor he was defending can work, suggesting that Molloy’s Irish heritage is the source of sexual problems. I’m told that critics asked these kinds of questions at summer press tour, so it’s difficult to believe that CBS in general, which has another broad ethnic show debuting in Rob, or King in particular would have been surprised by them. Perhaps he genuinely believes that these sort of jokes are cutting edge in the same way he suggested that the show’s sex jokes reflect the fact that the show is “8:30, on Monday on CBS in 2012. It’s a very different world than 8:30 on Monday on CBS in 1994.” If this is as far as we’ve come, we’ve got a long haul ahead of us.

“I think we were at a place where a non-white actor could be the lead in a televisions how a long time ago…I just think that people have failed to cast the actors we should have been casting.” -Shonda Rhimes

Despite its silly name, Don’t Trust the B- In Apartment 23 was one of my favorite pilots that I saw this fall. I like Krysten Ritter a whole bunch, and her odd-couple roommate schtick with Dreema Walker felt plausible and funny. Ritter plays Chloe, a manipulative New Yorker who takes roommates only to drive them nuts and keep their deposits, who ends up with more than she bargained for in June, a wholesome Midwesterner who came to New York only to find the job she planned to take wiped out by Bernie Madoff’s fraud. Chloe also maintains a nicely platonic friendship with James Van Der Beek, playing a slightly-altered version of himself a la Larry David, something that, as Ritter said today, is all too rare on television in particular and pop culture in general. I was intrigued by the Madoff references, and other riffs on things like June and Chloe walking out without paying a bar tab and blaming it on times being tough, so I asked creator Nahnatchka Khan what role the recession plays in the show.

“I think we’re trying to make it feel like it exists in the world. I know a lot of my friends are feeling the recession and it’s a real thing that exists,” she said. “Dreema’s going to continue to try to get a job. She’s trying to get hired by a Wall Street firm and people aren’t hiring, so she’s working at the coffee shop with Mark. But not giving up, and that’s the hopeful message. Times are tough but people aren’t giving up.”

I sort of like that perspective. 2 Broke Girls tends to tell specific stories about why the characters don’t have any money. Max grew up poor and has financed her attempts at self-improvement with debt, which haven’t yet paid off for her. Caroline lost her family’s money when it turns out her fortune was built on a foundation of lies. But the people around them seem relatively unaffected by the recession. Han’s trying to make the diner take off, but it’s not like there are very specific problems he has because of the recession. Hipsters continue to spend ridiculous amounts of money. Peach’s friends are only affected by Ponzi schemes, not by their tanking investments.

Other shows are doing one-offs. I think we’ll see a lot of things like Raising Hope‘s planned Occupy Natesville episode, that weave in the symbols of the recession in the same way most people will have glancing contact with the bleeding edge of the conversation without being permanently on the vanguard. But getting that persistent environment right is a tricky thing that involves thinking out your characters’ motivations in a really complete way. People are affected by recessions in ways that they don’t necessarily name, and figuring out how to articulate that and keep their motivations consistent is important.

We’ve had some conversations here about Work It, perhaps the most puzzling new show of 2012. But when asked about an ad that called about the fact that the show doesn’t appear to recognize that transgender people face substantial risks were the gender they were born with to be revealed, ABC entertainment president Paul Lee’s answer was…unfortunate.

“Certainly in terms of the lesbian and gay community, we’re incredibly proud of the work ABC does, and that’s not just Modern Family, it’s Grey’s Anatomy, it’s Private Practice. In that case, I didn’t really get it,” he said. “I loved Tootsie, I think it’s a great thing, so in that particular case, I didn’t get it. But I think that’s me.” And he said that given the sophistication of the rest of the network’s fall lineup, “I thought there was room for a very, very, very, very silly show.”

Which certainly is true, though I thought that one of the better things about Revenge was its deadpan embrace of its deeply campy, silly concept. But then, what do I know. It seems like a fairly unfortunate thing for Lee not to have investigated the fact that what he’s presenting as a wacky way for straight men to cross-dress for gain (which yes, is the same concept as Tootsie) carries real implications and danger for other people. Cross-dressing is not always a trip or a thing that people try on just for kicks. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to choose between expressing your true self even if it involves repeated difficult conversations and the risk of retaliation and presenting yourself the way society expects you to at considerable psychological cost. Dressing like a lady to get a job in a fake hecession to get a job that you wouldn’t actually be a fit for is a deeply silly scenario. Being transgendered and navigating your life is not. Recognizing that Work It has unfortunate blind spots and overlap would seem wisely conciliatory and respectful.

Once upon a time, ABC was planning to air two shows in midseason with the word “bitch” in the title: Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 and Good Christian Bitches. Then, the shows became Apartment 23 and Good Christian Belles. And now they’ll come on air in midseason as Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23 and GCB. When he was asked about it in Pasadena today, Paul Lee, the president of ABC’s entertainment group, said, “on broadcast it turns out it’s a not a word you want to use in the title. But at the same time, [Apartment 23] is a show with so much attitude, and we felt, and the showrunners, that it reflected the irreverence or the outrage of that show…Look, GCB, which officially stands for Good Christian Belles, a good title, a good show.”

This doesn’t really make any sense. Abbreviating an obscenity to its first letter reads reverent, rather than edgy. This is church-ladies-being-naughty language. There’s nothing brave or outrageous about it. And there’s something strange about the idea that “bitch” is the best expression of toughness, or unwillingness to compromise, or to be edgy or interesting. Meredith Brooks has been there and done that more than a decade ago:

And we all know how that turned out. I’m not necessarily the right audience for a reclamation of “bitch,” but I’m not particularly persuaded that the term is evocative by Leslie Bibb’s argument today that “Every human being has a moment of being bitchy. I think on the show is we all sort of test each other. I think when a woman’s a bitch, it’s based on being scared.” We can find non-gendered language that captures that emotion more specifically and precisely. “Bitch” isn’t a word that can sell a TV show because of decency issues. It’s because it’s uncompelling.

At the ABC Family session at the Television Critics Association press tour this morning, I asked the network’s president Michael Riley about the fact that Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation had named ABC Family the leader in portrayals of gay characters, particularly in creating gay characters who weren’t just white men in urban areas. His answer suggested some forward-thinking about diversity — he was the first executive on press tour to talk about the changing demographics of the country, even glancingly:

For us everything we do at ABC family is grounded in storytelling and iconic characters. We never set out to portray anyone anyway. We build up those characters from a multi-dimensional standpoint. We couldn’t be more proud to receive that honor. For us, it’s very much about how we ground everything we do in great story-lines and characters. Millennials are a diverse ground of people. We want to make sure out storytelling really reflects that diversity, and that’s something we keep doing not only in that space but in other multi-dimensional spaces.

He hammered home the generational message over and over again. “Millenials are absolutely voracious around technology,” he noted, talking about the Twitter buzz around Pretty Little Liars. “We always capitalize on anything we can do..for us it’s about being part of that conversation.” And he said, in an assertion I’m intrigued by and would love to see more support for, “Millenials aren’t genre-specific. We aren’t genre-specific.” Now, of course, all of this makes sense for a network that’s specifically aimed at young people. But at some point, all the networks are going to have to make the shifts. ABC Family’s thinking about diversity is a valuable model.

A number of you have been telling me to watch Switched At Birth, and after today’s panel at the Television Critics Association press tour, I can see why you’re all so enthusiastic (I also have the first season DVDs now, so I’ll get on that, likely on the plane home). The show’s creator Lizzy Weiss said it was so important to her that the character of Daphne Vasquez be played by an actress who was deaf or hard of hearing so they would both be fluent in ASL and have a sense of the cultural implications and perspectives of deafness that she limited casting to candidates who didn’t have all their hearing and searched beyond established actresses to find someone who would be right for the part before eventually casting Katie Leclerc, who has Meniere’s disease, for the part.

“It was important to me that the character feel and sound more deaf than Katie is,” Weiss said. “Having a deaf accent is part of being distanced from someone deaf, and I wanted her biological family to feel uncomfortable around her at first…Katie will tell you she worked with people to get that accent right.”

It was genuinely touching to see the rest of the cast talk about what learning ASL — or working on an ASL-friendly set, in the case of Sean Berdy, who had an ASL translator working with him — had meant to them. Vanessa Marano, whose father is a language professor, said she grew up being taught that it was important to be bilingual, and since the show has started, she’s been touched by the fact that the show is used to teach students about ASL and to consider learning it as a second language. Constance Marie, who plays Regina Vasquez, teared up talking about the conversations she’s had with deaf people who have been moved by her portrayal of a hearing woman learning ASL to communicate better with her deaf daughter. All in all, it sounds like a show where the cast ended up having a particularly good experience by learning about a world that wasn’t their own. I’ll check back in once I’m caught up with some thoughts whether that’s made for good TV, too.

So, Tim Kring started out the panel for Touch, his new autistic-people-are-magic show starring Keifer Sutherland as a 9/11 widower by informing us that Sutherland’s character’s son, a white American child, is “the most disenfranchised person on the planet. He’s small, he’s unable to communicate, to make his point known.” Given that, it wasn’t exactly shocking that Kring ended up presenting himself essentially as the Evan Bayh of Hollywood. Rather than lamenting partisanship in Washington, Kring’s come up with something he calls “social benefit storytelling,” which turns out to be a plan to change the world with warm, fuzzy television that avoids actually discussing what it means to have an autistic child.

To be fair, Kring told me that “he show…is really just about putting this message out into the world and trying to create stories that uplift people through this theme of interconnectivity. In terms of actually calling attention to various things, it is a show that aspires to do that, and I would love to have some of the stories we tackle call attention to various issues around the world and use the power of storytelling to create some positive change out there.” And he did cite the idea “that people tens of thousands of mile away would fly planes into this building is a result of our globally connected world.” So I really do hope that if this is going to be a butterfly effect show, it will be one that actually suggests that there are consequences for American policy at home and abroad.

But I’m really turned off by the idea that positive energy is the basis for our failures to connect. There’s nothing wrong with wanted to set a civil tone or approach other people with a spirit of openness, and after 24, I do think it’s good that Keifer Sutherland wants to be involved in a project that preaches those values. But there are structural factors that influence why people are unable to connect with each other and to be civil to each other. You see this in movies like A Better Life—poverty means you can’t be generous, that you don’t have time to build the family life that you want. It’s the reason the broadband gap matters: if you can’t get online, you don’t have access to what Kring called “the emerging story of our time is that we’re more connected to each other than we ever thought or knew, and I think it’s being born out by the whole social networking world that we’re living in.” There’s something odd about wanting to tell stories about the things that keep us from talking each other but starting that show out by inventing a magical alternative to autism.

NBC is the network that everyone seems to want to succeed. It gave us Community! And the Office! And Parks and Recreation! And while I think we all recognize that it’s extraordinarily unlikely that shows like that will ever become massive hits, it would feel more just if the network reaped some good karma down the road for doing right by the medium and taking some time out to pander to the lowest common denominator. But there isn’t really karma in business, just work and product development. And the biggest question I had coming out of NBC’s sessions at the Television Critics Association press tour are how long Bob Greenblatt will be given to turn the network around.

“The good news about NBC today is that we have new owners and they’re investing in our business not only with significant financial resources but with their patience,” Greenblatt said. “They’re providing me with everything we need at NBC entertainment to go after prime time.”

The interesting question is how long that patience lasts. Todd VanDerWerff and I were chatting about this, and he pointed out that the network’s cautiousness with The Voice, which they’re running in a normal schedule instead of oversaturating in the name of a quick ratings bump, is a good sign of a long-term game plan. And only the silliest person would have trouble with the concept that it takes a long time to turn a network around, something that effectively means changing audience expectations and consuming patterns. But NBC’s transformation is part of a tricky double-act: the network’s struggle up the ratings ladder as its head of programming learns how to run a network instead of a cable channel.

Greenblatt clearly is in the midst of an adjustment between a cable mindset and a network one. “I’m done with cable. It’s a dying business,” he joked, “And ruining the culture of America.” But there’s no question that he misses cable: he talked with surprising frequency about how sorry he was Prime Suspect hadn’t done better, and said that had it been a cable show, it “would have been picked up in the third episode and declared a hit”; and said that “if I was at Showtime, you’d be calling me a genius for launching one or two good shows in a season.”

And in the short term, NBC’s new launches actually feel very much like cable’s strengths: those that are precision-cut and diamond-honed like Smash, and then inexpensive junk like Are You There, Chelsea?, and very little in between. And in between is network television’s sweet spot. Cable is all about the stuff that you just have to pay to get access to because it’s so compelling, and the stuff that you watch because it’s there and it’s all about getting your money’s worth. Network is the stuff that’s pretty solid. The Firm feels like it ought to be that sort of pretty solid show, something mid-level and pleasant without needing to be either revolutionary in its concepts or perspectives or gorgeous in its execution. But the premise for it is so silly—does Mitch ever come back to testify against the firm? Why would he and Abby ever quit their Caribbean early retirement? What is it with this dude and Evil Law Firms?—that I worry it won’t make it over the hump. A show can be cheap and effective or cheap and cheap, and it’s easier to find the latter than the former—see:Fashion Star—but important to at least seem like you’re searching for the former.

Beyond the three-tier question, there’s the problem of the network’s identity and sense of its core demographics, because nerds isn’t going to cut it (Awake’s Kyle Killen joked at his panel that a room full of critics made up most of Community‘s fan base). At Showtime, Greenblatt developed a set of shows that I think could best be described as melancholy anti-heroes, more accessible and diverse than HBO and FX’s somewhat-scary mostly-white dudes. There’s definitely not a pattern that strong in the slate of programming he rolled out here in Pasadena.

And in terms of demographics, I suppose I’d suggest that between Smash, Bent, Are You There, Chelsea? and Fashion Star, they’re aiming for a less-wealthy version of Bravo’s smart lady contingency. When I followed up with Greenblatt about whether the network could rebuild by trying to lure demographics who have largely walked away from the networks back, he said that seeing more diversity in ensemble casts is “going to happen much faster than a black family or an Asian family show…If somebody brings me the great Asian family show or the great black family show, we’re developing some of that. I just think it’s more likely to see large ensembles with diversity.” Which I think is probably correct, though it remains unfortunate that the representative American family on television is still a majority-white one. If we’re going to be a majority minority nation in 2050 (aeons in entertainment-land), we’re going to need more shows like Rob about white folks learning to live with minorities, except not terrible. I’d love to see Future NBC do something like that.