When Fox announced that it would be airing The Mindy Project, a sitcom by The Office star and writer Mindy Kaling, based in part on Kaling’s own mother’s work as an OB/GYN, I had high hopes. Like many freshman comedies, particularly its timeslot partner New Girl, The Mindy Project had a first season that involved throwing a lot of elements at the wall to see what stuck and what didn’t. Last night’s finale of The Mindy Project, though, contained a near-perfect sequence that united the series’ two core elements, the practice of medicine, and the pursuit of romantic comedy perfect, and provided a terrific template for how the show can follow New Girl‘s lead and level up dramatically in its second season.

Pulled out of a party to celebrate Mindy and Casey’s moving to Haiti for a year that had become an utter disaster after Danny’s ex-wife had praised his androgyny in a photograph, Mindy had tried to get Casey to break up with her by demanding that he propose, and Casey, unaware that he was playing relationship poker, called her bet and asked her to marry him on the advice of “the Notorious G.O.D.” and she freaked out, Mindy, Danny, and Jeremy ran off to deliver triplets. Their display of extreme competence, set, in a flashback to the premiere, to M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls,” not only gave Mindy a professional win and the ensemble a nice character moment, with Jeremy bragging that the triplet that he was responsible for “had the highest Apgar score.” But the willingness of Mindy’s patients to embrace the chaos of triplets also gave her a critical insight in what she needs to have a grand romantic comedy moment, and it isn’t a checklist of compatibility, or a meet cute in an elevator: it was courage. She rushed to Casey’s apartment, delivered a demented speech on the gap between her aspirations to be in a serious relationship and her actual ability to handle her dream scenario, revealed her chopped-off hair, and reunited with her pastor boyfriend.

This is The Mindy Project‘s sweet spot, the interaction between Mindy’s role as an expert in the mechanics of what it takes to have safe sex or deliver a health baby, or what makes an individual moment cinema-worthy, and her total lack of understanding about how two people get to a point where they want to have a baby in the first place. The finest episodes of the show’s first season were the ones where Mindy’s work helped her realize important things about her approach to dating and relationships—and ultimately made a sly argument that even if Mindy has to run out of dates and parties to deliver children, her commitment to her career is actually one of the things that’s helping her make incremental progress towards a healthier personal life.
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Ta-Nehisi is reading Raymond Chandler, and in exploring Philip Marlowe’s distaste for some of the women in his path, his observation that “It’s so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible,” turns to the question of visibile manifestation of male desire, and its relationship to shame:

Erection is not a choice. It happens to men whether they like it or not. It happens to young boys in the morning whether they have dreamed about sex or not. It happens to them in the movies, in gym class, at breakfast, during sixth period Algebra. It happens in the presence of humans who they find attractive, and it happens in the presence of humans whom they claim are not attractive at all. It is provoked by memory, by perfume, by song, by laughter and by absolutely nothing at all. Erection is not merely sexual desire, but the physical manifestation of that desire.

Masculinity’s central tenet is control—and perhaps most importantly, control of the body. Nothing contradicts that edict like erections. It unmans you, it compels you through sensations you scarcely understand. And it threatens to expose you, to humiliates you, in front of everyone. Laugh now at the boy at the middle school dance, who gets an erection on the slow number (God help him if he has orgasm.) But he does not forget that laughter, nor does he forget what prompted it. That boy is going to be a rapper. Or a painter. Or an author of fictions where men are men and somehow are invulnerable to the humiliating effects of the female form.

In the comments to that post, a number of people, rightly, bring up Prince as an example of someone who managed to decouple desire and shame, which I think is exactly right. When he sings in “When Doves Cry,” “Touch if you will my stomach / Feel how it trembles inside / You’ve got the butterflies all tied up / Don’t make me chase you / Even doves have pride,” Prince is offering up evidence of his arousal and embracing the power dynamic his desire occasions. The woman he’s speaking to has the initiative there. There is the possibility that he will be rejected or shamed. But he’s also gained power by being willing to run those risks, to speak honestly to her.

It’s also worth, as a counterpoint to Marlowe’s contempt, to consider Agent Cooper and Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks:

Her appearance in his bed is a repetition of Carmen Sternwood’s attempts to seduce Marlowe. But rather than reacting with disgust to his own attraction to her, or anger at her for arousing him, Cooper is kind, and self-denying. “What I want and what I need are two different things,” he tells her. His desire for her can exist within a web of his other values, including his devotion to the F.B.I. And perhaps most importantly, Cooper isn’t angry at Audrey for wanting him, an emotion that seems to underscore Marlowe’s repulsion to a number of the women that he encounters.

Because that’s the critical other half of this conversation, one that I discussed in part yesterday in exploring why James Bond and other sex objects designed for women’s consumption can be so threatening. If men can be shamed for visible and involuntary evidence of arousal, both because they’re deemed to have slipped in their control, and because they risk sexual rejection from the women who have prompted their reaction, women can be shamed for voluntarily expressing arousal and asking that their sexual needs be met. Such requests meet with such complicated reactions because they fracture sex, raising the possibility that for men and women, intercourse assumes varying levels of importance and delivers different levels of satisfaction. In other words, a positive reaction to evidence of male desire is the beginning of a negotiation, not the end of it. And that negotiation is a culturally fraught one.
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When the broadcast television season began several weeks ago, one of the things that stood out most from network to networks was the ratings. NBC may have started to claw its way out of the ratings cellar with Revolution, one of the few bona fide hits of fall, but lots of its broadcast counterparts found themselves in trouble. CBS, normally top of the heap, saw two of its new entries, drama Made In Jersey and sitcom Partners, tank out of the gate. Fox renewed two new comedies, The Mindy Project and Ben and Kate, despite the fact that they debuted with half the audience their comedy block anchor, New Girl, started out with a year before. On Twitter, my fellow television critics mused that they’d always thought there was the potential for the bottom to fall out of the broadcast television model, but that they didn’t see it coming so soon. At the same time, cable shows like FX’s Sons of Anarchy were creeping up in the ratings, beating the networks in the core demographic of viewers if not in total viewers. Network television seems to have lost its sense of what it can do better than cable, and to be floundering in developing shows as a result.

But it would be great for network to get its groove back, and not just because it’s one of the few media that can create an ongoing mass cultural phenomenon. As demand grows for alternatives to bundled cable, it’s important for broadcast television to be a vigorous, vibrant alternative to cable networks so it’s in those cable networks’ interests to compete however they can for viewers. And for those of us who love great television, it would be fantastic to see the end of a race to the lowest common denominator, and to see good programming catch on. While there’s no guarantee that doing the right, creative thing will garner network audiences, here are four ideas for how broadcast television can rediscover what makes it unique.

1. Avoid Special Effects Arms Races: Subscription support means that HBO can afford to spend $60 million a season on Game of Thrones, building a complex fictional world that includes castles, dragons, and ice zombies. Network television, especially given declining viewership and correspondingly shrinking ad rates, won’t ever be able to keep up with that kind of investment. So it shouldn’t try, settling for shows that look bad, or that end up blowing their budgets on CGI dinosaurs rather than acting talent. I may not like NBC’s Revolution much, but when it comes to genre, it’s doing the right thing, building a post-apocalyptic society that is dense with forest rather than full of heavily made-up zombies or other magical creatures. Constraints can make for a lot of creativity. Network should accept its limitations, and build smart worlds within them.

2. Shorter Seasons: I’ve written about this repeatedly. But an obsessive focus on producing high numbers of episodes of shows is a great driver of mediocre concepts, and of overextending successful series like How I Met Your Mother. Miniseries and shorter seasons are a great way to attract excellent actors to television, whether it’s Sigourney Weaver in Political Animals, an effort I think was doomed by its time slot or Kevin Bacon, who will arrive on Fox this winter playing an alcoholic FBI agent in The Following. It would also be a way to fit stories to the number of episodes actually needed to tell them, one of the great strengths of British television. And shorter seasons and miniseries would also help solve one of television’s most pernicious scheduling problems: month-long hiatuses on shows that have just begun to hit their stride. The television season is an artificial construction and a not particularly logical one. It’s time to start experimenting with alternatives to it that serve stories and audiences instead.

3. Genuinely Family-Friendly Shows: The success of Downton Abbey is an illustration of a serious gap in the television market: programming that people of all ages can watch, enjoy, and discuss. So much of what’s on television is narrowly targeted or toned by age right now—a show like New Girl wouldn’t even be close to appropriate for a pre-teen audience, but its appeal has a cutoff well inside the target demographic. CBS’s Partners may be an attempt to speak to a younger generation whose friend groups have always included gay couples, but in tone and style, it’s aimed more at older viewers who are still getting used to the idea. Setting aside in-jokes or concepts that are targeted at certain demographics and trying for concepts and tones that are more universal could meet the needs of entire families. The 8 PM hour is considered a dead zone on broadcast television right now, which is too bad. There’s no reason to waste the hour after homework and before a reasonable bed time.

4. Innovate Around Sex And Violence: There’s an odd perception that much of cable television’s edge over broadcast is due to the fact that cable shows can depict sexual and violent situations that would be verboten—or at least risk drawing very heavy fines—on network television. Fox is attempting to chase cable standards with The Following, its extremely violent serial killer show, but across the board, I think that’s a mistake. Too often, cable’s taken its licenses as mandates, and produced sex and violence unmoored from narrative or emotional demands. Network could compete not by courting FCC censure, but by making the leadup to sex sensual and adult, and countering body-of-the-week callousness by making deaths real losses with devastating impact. You don’t have to see a character’s head get bashed in for their death to feel debilitating.

Awards are always a terribly flawed way of determining what makes for good popular culture. Limits on the number of nominees lock deserving contenders out of their categories. Differences between the people who watch television shows or movies and the people in the pool assigned to judge them can produce some truly baffling biases and decisions. And winning doesn’t automatically transform a show’s prospects of staying on the air or an actor’s chance of getting good work in the future. But all of those caveats aside, it can be hugely satisfying to see a small show get the recognition you assume it’ll be denied, or an actor break barriers. And if you want better television, here are the shows and performances you should root for get whatever boost it’s possible to wring out of the Emmys on Sunday.

COMEDY SERIES
Who’s Nominated:
The Big Bang Theory
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Girls
Modern Family
30 Rock
Veep

Who Should Win: Girls

Why: There are a lot of legacy shows on this list, and some very notable omissions, particularly Parks and Recreation, which had a much stronger season than its network counterpart 30 Rock. Given that, I have to root for Girls, one of the few comedies to arrive on television knowing exactly what it was and what its strengths were, even if during its run, creator Lena Dunham had to confront some of its more notable weaknesses and absences, particularly when it came to race. Flawed though it may be, those of us rooting for more personal, low-budget shows—and who would like to see folks of color get the opportunities Dunham and Louis C.K. have—should hope for Girls to take home the statuette over more commercial favorites like The Big Bang Theory.

COMEDY ACTOR
Who’s Nominated:
Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory
Larry David as Himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm
Don Cheadle as Marty Kaan in House of Lies
Louis C.K. as Louie in Louie
Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock
Jon Cryer as Alan Harper in Two and a Half Men

Who Should Win: Louis C.K. or Don Cheadle

Why: It’s impossible to compare C.K.’s exploration of wounded and uncertain middle-aged masculinity and Cheadle’s turn as a hyped-up management consultant struggling to raise his potentially transgender son with tenderness and consideration. House of Lies is an inconsistent mess in comparison to the jewel-like Louie. But C.K. isn’t exactly lacking in recognition. And Cheadle’s playing a character who’s more distant from his real self than C.K. Plus, a black actor hasn’t won the Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Emmy since Robert Guillaume for Benson in 1985.

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While watching the new fall television pilots and revisiting some old shows that are back this fall, I was struck by a worrisome conclusion. There are a lot of shows that have picked the wrong person to place at the center of their storytelling at the expense of much better characters, or that are treating people other than their true main characters as if they’re the main attraction for purpose of advertising. A bad offender on the latter score this fall is Last Resort, which is running print ads that make it appear as if Scott Speedman is the show’s star, rather than Andre Braugher, who dominates the pilot, for reasons you can probably do the math about. But while it’s one thing to start a show with the assumption that one character is the hook and to have others emerge, it’s a shame to watch a show spend seasons focused on the wrong people.

1. Boardwalk Empire: Now in its third season, Boardwalk Empire remains convinced that the best thing it has going for it is Nucky Thompson, who isn’t much more than a chance for Steve Buschemi to show off and wear great suits. But its strongest assets lie elsewhere. How fantastic would a version of Boardwalk Empire that focused on Chalky White and the rise of an East Coast black middle class and aristocracy be? What about Kelly Macdonald’s fantastic Margaret Schroeder, a woman who transformed her lot in life and now is determined to pay it forward through philanthropy, even if it means challenging a powerful head doctor at a hospital over the cause of maternal health? And then there’s Richard Harrow, mutilated in war, grieving the loss of Angela Darmody, one of the few people who ever understood him, and now raising her child with Gillian Darmody as a monstrous replacement mommy. But any chance the show had to be about soldiers returning from World War I appears to have died with Jimmy Darmody last season, replaced by the increasing presence of showy mobsters, and Boardwalk Empire is poorer for all its lost possibility.

2. How I Met Your Mother: I get it. This show is the story of how Ted met the mother of his children. But it’s also an illustration of the weaknesses of selling sitcoms, which are designed to go on forever, on premises that really only feel viable for a short time. Marshall and Lily’s split, reunion, and road to parenthood, experiment with suburbanization, and return to the city is the true big arc story of How I Met Your Mother. And I’m as sick of waiting for Ted to grow up as Ted is as waiting for the love of his life to show up.

3. Revolution: NBC’s new post-apocalyptic drama wants to capture the cachet of The Hunger Games so badly that it turned its main character, Charlie, into a person I refuse to call anything but Fake Katniss. She’s got a leather jacket, a bow, a penchant for woodsiness, but entirely lacks a personality. And Revolution has the same problem that The Hunger Games does: the world it’s set in and the events it explores means that what the knowing adults are up to is vastly more interesting as story material than watching kids run around. At least The Hunger Games‘ kids were relatively well-developed. Revolution doesn’t even have that going for it, and it’s particularly painful to see it focus on its CW-quality leads when Zack Orth’s former Google executive character’s been relegated to the wings, and assigned the task of providing Hurley-style quips.

4. New Girl: Watching the premiere episode of the second season of New Girl, I was struck by two things. First, Jess isn’t even close to the new girl in the apartment she shares with her male roommates anymore. And second, the show found its legs last year when it turned into an exploration of masculinity, rather than a celebration of Jess’s Manic Pixie grade school teacher. Jess isn’t a terrible character, and the show’s pokes fun at some of the whimsy-cures-everything attitude that was so gratingly front and center early in the show’s first season. But still, if it weren’t for all the branding that went into making New Girl a Zooey Deschanel vehicle that’s probably impossible to undo at this point, it would be nice to see the show recenter on the ensemble that makes it so strong.

5. Modern Family: ABC’s smash hit made waves in the offseason when production was delayed on new episodes because of a nasty contract dispute between the producers and the show’s adult stars. It’s too bad, because increasingly, they’re the least interesting part of the show. Mitch and Cam are a TV-sterilized sexless gay couple. Gloria’s a bombshell stereotype. Claire gets stuck with periods-make-ladies-crazy storylines. But the kids remain the most winning part of Modern Family. If the families involved had some more children, you could build an entire show about the dynamics of the siblings and cousins. And in a television environment where kids get to be props more than actual people, a program from the perspective of young people would be fascinating.

Essayist William Deresiewicz has a fascinating look at the evolution of friendship between men and women in the New York Times—and a suggestion for why we don’t see these friendships in popular culture:

So if it’s common now for men and women to be friends, why do we so rarely see it in popular culture? Partly, it’s a narrative problem. Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories about friendships of any kind are relatively rare, especially given what a huge place the relationships have in our lives. And of course, they’re not sexy. Put a man and a woman together in a movie or a novel, and we expect the sparks to fly. Yet it isn’t just a narrative problem, or a Hollywood problem.

This isn’t entirely true, of course: friendships have narratives and experience strains and uncertainties that can be just as impactful and interesting to explore as the stresses of new romantic connections. And one of the hallmarks of the Frat Pack and Judd Apatow is that they treat male friendships with that level of significance. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Andy’s growing connections with his coworkers, and the various ways in which they’re alternately respectful and insensitive, are the catalyst for him to develop his love life, and their friendships are almost as important as his first adult romantic relationship. In Wedding Crashers, John and Jeremy are the most important people in each other’s lives, and the movie is about how those friendships have to change when they start treating women as potentially permanent additions to their lives instead of as temporary interludes. I Love You, Man treats the process of finding a best friend as if it’s as significant as the quest for a permanent partner.

And even if you don’t want to do a 90-minute exploration of friendship in a movie, or believe that friendships are inherently less dramatic than romantic partnering (which strikes me as somewhat strange), that’s not an argument against including friendships between men and women on television, where they can be an established part of the background dynamic rather than foregrounded. New Girl, after a rocky start, has settled into a nice dynamic between Jess and her roommates, and has dealt with the sexual tension question by having the characters be honest about the fact that it exists while also being clear that they don’t intend to act on it. One of the many virtues of Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, which debuts on ABC this Wednesday, is that it features a significant friendship between a man and a woman, the equally funny Krysten Ritter and James Van Der Beek. Peggy Olson and Don Draper are arguably friends on Mad Men, and this season’s Game of Thrones involves Arya’s friendships—or at least alliances—with men. These kinds of stories are far from impossible to tell. It’s not as if men and women who are friends are fictional creatures who have to be conjured into existence.

The bridge is yours.

-Anti-Flag v. Springsteen.

-It’s too bad New Girl‘s ratings have cratered as the show’s gotten much more fun to watch.

-Which science fiction scenario is most likely to happen in the (reasonably) near future?

-I’d actually like Michelle Obama even more than I already do if I thought she was reading Mommy porn.

-Time traveling Aubrey Plaza!

Six months ago, it seemed like we were at the verge of a promising new age in female comedy (at least, if you’re a white lady). Bridesmaids was a big, and unexpected, hit. And it was the beginning of a television season in which the hottest trend was sitcoms created by women. As much as I would have wished for a string of hits, the results have been more predictable. The shows have ranged from the toxic Are You There, Chelsea? and 2 Broke Girls, to the increasingly-tolerable New Girl, to the outright winning Up All Night. And despite the boom in shows created by women, the episodes of these programs have been overwhelmingly directed by men. And men have written slightly more than half the episodes in six shows I examined. If a revolution for women in entertainment is under way, this fall may have been the vanguard, but in both employment of women and depictions of them on television, we’re a long way from victory.

Of Whitney‘s 20 episodes, just 7 were written by women, and of those seven, only three were written by women other than show creator Whitney Cummings. The other show Cummings created, 2 Broke Girls, has been influenced much more by showrunner Michael Patrick King than by Cummings (she wrote just one episode of the show), though it’s actually doing better than Whitney at getting episodes written by women on the air: women have written 9 of the show’s 20 episodes, while men have written 11. On New Girl, almost twice as many episodes were written by men (11) as by women (6). Liz Merriweather, the show’s creator, wrote two out of those 17 episodes. It might be hard to imagine, given how much the show seems like a Female Chauvinist Pig archetype, but a majority of Are You There, Chelsea? episodes are written by women—6 out of 10. And it’s the only show on this list where every episode is directed by a woman, Gail Mancuso, who’s also directed an episode of Suburgatory, and is reteaming with Roseanne Barr on her new NBC sitcom Downwardly Mobile. Suburgatory also has a narrow majority of its episodes scripted by women, including series creator Emily Kapnek, 10 out of 19. And Up All Night is the undisputed champion—in a world where having 13 of a show’s 20 episodes written by women counts as an overwhelming victory.

These numbers are a striking reminder that we can’t count on female showrunners and show creators to do all the work of getting more women working on television programs. And we shouldn’t ask them to. Being a woman doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy working with men, or that you can’t learn from men’s perspectives. And we shouldn’t ask women to deny themselves those pleasures and those insights just to make up the gaps created by men who aren’t curious enough to want to work with women, and as a result are missing out on fresh and exciting perspectives, as well as potential friendships and working partnerships. If women creators or showrunners are solely responsible for getting more women writing for television, then the cancellation of a single show or a mass decision by studios that lady-run or lady-created shows are no longer a trend they want to ride could create a massive dropoff in the number of women writers. Until men and women are equally invested in getting more women’s voices in writers’ rooms, those numbers won’t improve in a permanent way.
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I was looking through the acting nominations for the Comedy Awards, and it really struck me that in a lot of ways, 2011 was a richer year for women in comedy than it was for men.

In movies, Jason Bateman got a nod for Horrible Bosses, Steve Carell was nominated for Crazy, Stupid, Love, Jean Dujardin was tapped for The Artist, Zach Galifianakis for The Hangover Part II, and Owen Wilson for Midnight in Paris. None of these are particularly innovative roles, and all of them (except Dujardin, whose range I don’t really know) fall pretty squarely within these actors’ existing ranges: Bateman is a tense straight man, Carell is sympathetic and slightly clueless, Galifianakis is disconcerting and wild, and Wilson is winsome. There are a few things that I think were left off this list—I’ll defend The Trip until I run out of breath, Patton Oswalt was great and under-recognized for Young Adult, and I’m not really sure why 50/50, which was nominated elsewhere, didn’t score acting nods—but I can’t think of a performance by a man that’s not here that was a revelation. Ditto in TV, which was dominated by utterly predictable nods for Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock, Ty Burrell in Modern Family, Steve Carell in The Office, and Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. I’m glad to see Louis C.K. in there—his performance in Louie was arguably my favorite thing on television in 2011. But it’s not like he has a lot of peers.

For women, on the other hand, the nominations are actually a lot of fun. I didn’t love Horrible Bosses, but seeing Jennifer Aniston get totally raunchy and ridiculous was a fun stretch for her. Ditto for Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher—depending on how she takes her career next, she could leave horrid romantic comedies behind and steer more in the direction of Charlize Theron in Young Adult, who really ought to be here. Melissa McCarthy was a miracle in Bridesmaids, and Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne, who had an utterly breakout performance in that film also could have easily been nominated. Television has its predictable notes—Tina Fey, for a deeply uninspired season of 30 Rock and Sofia Vergara for Modern Family. But you’ve got Zooey Deschanel in there for a debut performance in New Girl, and Maya Rudolph could easily be there for Up All Night, along with Laura Dern in Enlightened, Kat Dennings or Beth Behrs in 2 Broke Girls (that show’s massive flaws are not their fault), any of the women in Community‘s cast or Eliza Coupe or Elisha Cuthbert in Happy Endings.

And if Whitney or Are You There, Chelsea? had been less terrible, and we’d fulfilled all the potential of the lady comedy boom, this could have been an even more crowded field. I may not be equally addicted to every female comedy performance on the market these days. But it seems like there’s a lot of space available for new actresses to enter the field, and for actresses with existing track records to step out of their comfort zones. If those conditions persist, that’s a recipe for an embarrassment of riches.

Over at NPR’s Monkey See blog, Linda Holmes has a provocative essay up chronicling the decline of Liz Lemon, the harried comedy showrunner who is the star of NBC’s sitcom 30 Rock, from competent if overwhelmed woman to cringing child:

A recent storyline featuring James Marsden as Criss, Liz’s boyfriend who drove a hot-dog truck, was very reminiscent of Dennis the pager salesman. But this time, she didn’t break up with him because Jack gave her the side-eye and forced her to come to terms with the fact that she didn’t want him. She broke up with him because Jack appeared to her as an apparition — her spirit guide, basically — and mocked Criss, mostly for not having any money…Over the course of six seasons, Jack has been fully transformed into a condescending, all-knowing daddy, and Liz has been fully transformed into a needy little girl who is eternally terrified of displeasing him. She’s always had a grudging respect for him, but now she simply reveres him and trusts his judgment more than hers. She was once frazzled but smart, harried but competent, capable of wrangling a bunch of crazy people and then slumping at the end of the day, exhausted but minimally victorious. Now, she’s just dumb, incapable of making her own decisions, and her relationship with Jack is entirely out of balance.

For me, the tipping point with 30 Rock actually came last season when the show decided the next logical place to go in finding ways to be funny about Liz was to utterly sexually humiliate her. Liz was, at the time, dating a commercial pilot with the unfortunate name of Carol and an unfortunate moustache, played by Matt Damon, and they were having bedroom issues. Or, as Liz put it “I freaked out and my junk closed for business. It’s like Fort Knox down there.” The reason? An incident involving a Tom Jones poster, roller skates, the worst haircut anyone could bestow on a child, and a pair of flowered underpants. Liz can’t just have garden-variety intimacy problems: she has to be utterly freakish—and of course, to have Jack help her reach her breakthrough.

The decline of Liz Lemon may be a particular tragedy given how great 30 Rock once was. But when it comes to sex, it’s hardly unprecedented. A number of television comedies have decided to get laughs out of suggesting that their female leads are sexually freakish, and not in a Ludacris-approved kind of way. New Girl‘s done this to Jess twice. First, when she was finally about to sleep with her new boyfriend, the show had Jess overcome her jitters by getting her tangled up in ridiculous lingerie and then had her act out so many exaggerated versions of so many fetishes that she almost scared the poor man to death. More recently, Jess, in an effort to prove that her perennial optimism is always well-founded, ended up almost having a threesome with her creepy landlord. Her inability to read signals in any rational way—and her dancing around her bedroom doing jazz hands after the man proposed a threesome—were not the actions of a rational person.

And Parks and Recreation, which has done an admirable job of making its public servant heroine Leslie Knope into a sex symbol, had a weird slip last season when Leslie’s boss, Ron, discovered that she was dating their immediate superior, Ben. Her big secret was revealed when she accidentally dialed Ron during foreplay with Ben, a leadup that involved the two of them pretending to be historical weird leaders. Ron was disconcerted by the fact that Leslie had kept a secret from him, but the joke was clearly Leslie’s sexual proclivities.

Now, it’s not as if there’s an entirely clear double standard on these shows. On Parks and Recreation, Ron, normally a manly, independent libertarian is reduced to jelly and silliness by the sexual wiles of his ex-wives, to whom he is dangerously susceptible. Jess’s roommates on New Girl are not uniformly romantically successful. But Jack’s sexual quirks are generally treated as evidence of his prowess and manliness. When Liz is shocked that Jack’s girlfriend Avery likes a particular sex act, Jack explains that she appreciates it when it’s well-executed. And during his relationship with liberal Congresswoman C.C. Cunningham, he consistently credits for being sexually adventuresome. It’s too bad that someone like Leslie, who’s otherwise competent, aggressive, smart and attractive couldn’t get credit for sexual creativity rather than becoming the butt of jokes for having specific tastes.