There’s been a lot of furor in Hollywood over a Christian witness video made by Angus T. Jones, who for ten seasons has played the half man on Two and a Half Men, in which he calls out the show that’s been his paycheck, asking viewers:

Please stop filling your head with filth. Please. People say it’s just entertainment. The fact that it’s entertainment. Do some research on the effects of television and your brain and I promise you you’ll have a decision to make when it comes to the television…It’s bad news. I don’t know if it means any more coming from me. But you might have heard it otherwise. But watch out…A lot of people don’t like to think how deceptive the enemy is. He’s been doing this a lot longer than any of us have been around…You cannot be a true, God-fearing person and be on a show like that.

The video itself is a rambling splice of several conversations, in which Jones discusses how he came to Seventh Day Adventism, what the series of study videos he’s endorsing in this clip means to him, and, in fairly generic terms, what he’s learned about the impact of entertainment on viewers:

I understand why this is an entertainment industry story—Jones is effectively pulling an inverse Charlie Sheen, whose meltdown-fueled insults to the show’s producers got him fired, and explaining why he’s too rectitudinous to continue working on Two and a Half Men, which maybe says something about a past expiration date for a show that was once one of CBS’s biggest hits. And certainly it’s fair for critics to ask whether Jones intends to stop cashing a paycheck and live up to his standards for being “a true, God-fearing person.”

But I’d actually like to hear in more detail what Jones thinks about the show where he effectively grew up. How did Two and a Half Men affect Jones’ views of women? What did the show’s perspective teach him about what it means to be a good man, and a successful man, if the two ideas are different? When he interacts with fans of the show, do they seem to be taking away different messages than the ones he thought he grew up conveying? How does he feel about Jake, the character he’s playing, specifically? I’d imagine Jones’ critique of the show might skew more towards the show’s deviations from Biblically-ordained gender roles, where mine might focus on the show’s dismissive attitudes about women. And I’m more likely to blame the work of Man rather than the Adversary for creating those images and disseminating those attitudes. But I don’t think Jones is wrong to take culture, or his role in producing it, seriously.

One of the weirdest things about writing about mainstream film and television is constantly glimpsing the gap between the values in the work that many (though emphatically not all) writers and directors produce, and the values that they themselves hold. I was particularly struck by this reading today that Chuck Lorre held back vanity cards–the logos shown at the end of television episodes that Lorre often uses as editorial space–that directly commented on the presidential election from this week’s episode of Two and a Half Men. Instead, he told viewers to look for the card on the internet, where this statement appeared:

What does it say about us when we are simultaneously pro-life and pro AK-47′s? What does it say about us when God’s will would allow a rapist to ask for shared custody and child support payments? What does it say about us when a black guy’s in charge and we say things like “it’s time to take America back”? What does it say about us when we think the institution of marriage is threatened by gay people who love each other, but not by idiotic game shows like “The Bachelor”? What does it say about us when we export democracy with Hellfire missiles, then restrict the right to vote here? What does it say about us when we build nuclear submarines to defend against exploding vests? What does it say about us when we think a guy who doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, keeps his money offshore, stubs his toe and says “H-E-double hockey sticks” and wears magical underwear can feel our pain? What does it say about us when we demand less government and more FEMA? What does it say about us when we completely forgot the colossal shit storm we were in four years ago? The answer, my friends, is not blowing in the wind. The answer is, “We are fucking crazy.”

Now, I’m not into Mormon-bashing, which is an unfortunate thing a lot of liberals have fallen into during this election cycle. But it’s kind of fascinating to see Lorre go straight for the nuances of, say, the rape and abortion debate. This is a guy who could make literally any television show he wanted, and any network would want to buy it. I kind of want to know what his dream show that reflects his values looks like. Because Depressed Womanizing Ashton Kutcher kind of seems like a comedown.

When I read over the weekend that Thomas Kinkaide had died at the age of 54, I immediately thought of Susan Orlean’s 2001 profile of the painter, who rejected critical opinion of his work as schmaltzy and sold his work as part of the extremely lucrative collectibles market. Orlean points out of Kinkaide’s life story, in which he grew up poor and fatherless, left a Christian school for a secular art school before having a powerful conversion experience that lead him to dedicate himself to optimism in art, “It’s as good a story as you could hope for,” she wrote, “if you want to make a point about perseverance and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and appreciating life’s bounty; even the bad parts of the story are good, because it’s easier not to begrudge Kinkade his fortune when you are reminded that he was a poor kid who had to struggle, who rejected the smarty-pants liberal establishment to follow his heart, and who is proud of having earned his way into the ultimate American aristocracy of successful entrepreneurs.”

Lots of folks have jumped on the subsequent pieces about Kinkaide that suggested the real story was less than flattering, involving everything from sexual harassment, to defraudment of the franchisees who ran Kinkaide’s galleries, to public urination. While I think it’s fine to debunk the narrative, it’s also worth getting at precisely why that narrative, and Kinkaide’s paintings, were so compelling to so many people, especially if you get frustrated with what seems like the perpetual American default to simplistic popular culture when more complex and interesting alternatives are available. Orlean wrote:

“I created a system of marketing compatible with American art,” Kinkade said to me recently. “I believe in ‘aspire to’ art. I want my work to be available but not common. I want it to be a dignified component of everyday life. It’s good to dream about things. It’s like dreaming of owning a Rolex ~n instead, you dream about owning a seventy-five-thousand-dollar print.” In fact, a lot of limited- edition art is about dreaming; so many of the paintings portray wistful images of a noble and romantic past that never was, or the anti-intellectual innocence of fairies and animals, or mythical heroes who can never fail and never fade…

“I have this certain ability to have in my mind an image that means something to real people,” he said, sitting on a sofa across the room from the easels. “The No. 1 quote critics give me is ‘Thom, your work is irrelevant.’ Now, that’s a fascinating, fascinating comment. Yes, irrelevant to the little subculture, this microculture, of modern art. But here’s the point: My art is relevant because it’s relevant to ten million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture, not the least. Because I’m relevant to real people.” He sat up and started to laugh. “I remember that quote, man! It was a great quote! It was ‘The Louvre is full of dead pictures by dead artists.’ And you know, that’s the dead art we don’t want anything to do with!” He laughed again and slapped his thighs. “We’re the art of life, man! We’re bringing the life back to art!”

Nostalgia is a powerful thing, whether it’s an old-fashioned fantasy of a multi-ethnic army coming to rescue us from the newfangled threat of giant robots, or the promise of escape to a non-existent bucolic paradise. When it comes to pop culture, the comfortable are deeply averse to being disturbed. It’s the rare pop culture engine that can get huge numbers of people voluntarily invested in something that will be profoundly disruptive. That’s not a reason to think less of people who like Thomas Kinkaide, or Two and a Half Men—just to think harder about how we can build those engines, and to recognize the magnitude of the challenge.

Last week kicked off with Two and a Half Men creator Lee Aronsohn‘s declaration that, in terms of raunchy comedies starring women on television, “Enough ladies. I get it. You have periods…we’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.” So it’s wonderfully refreshing to hear Judd Apatow, when asked about his recent projects that star and are about women, and about the female comedy boom, say:

I got bored of penises. I said, ‘enough of that.’ No, I just like immaturity, I like to show people struggle and try to figure out who they are. I’m a guy and so it leaned guy for a while. But one of the projects I’m most proud of is Freaks and Geeks, which is about a woman in high school struggling to figure out which group she wants to belong to, so for me, it goes back and forth…It’s just because it’s a single camera show and we’re on HBO and it’s uncensored. There are limitations when you’re doing a sitcom, in terms of language and how long you have to tell a story. But we’re big fans of all of those shows. My friend Jake Kasdan, who produced Freaks and Geeks, is one of the producers on New Girl and we’re all obsessed.

It’s always funny to me that anyone would remember Freaks and Geeks as anything other than a show with male and female co-main characters. I suppose that has something to do with the fact that Linda Cardellini’s subsequent career been much, much quieter than that of almost any actor with a significant role on the show. John Francis Daley’s on Bones and has launched a successful screenwriting career. Seth Rogen and Jason Segel have morphed from manboys to heartthrobs. James Franco is James Franco.

Given how much time men and women devote to figuring out each other’s behavior and motivations—and how they should tailor their behavior in response—in real life, it’s always struck me as bizarre to assume that men would only want to watch stories about men or that women would only want to watch stories about women. Apatow’s curiosity shouldn’t seem so refreshing and logical. But in the world we live in, he’s practically a beacon of sanity.

In our conversation about Two and a Half Men creator Lee Aronsohn’s recent complaint that, in terms of bodily female humor on television, “we’re approaching peak vagina on television,” one line of defense was that he was simply expressing a perfectly legitimate preference. His comments weren’t as horrifying as those of the racist fans of The Hunger Games who, in response to a character who is described as dark-skinned in the books being played by an African-American actress, tweeted things like “Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad #ihatemyself.” But both strains of thinking get at something important: preferences in art aren’t neutral things unaffected by larger cultural forces that shield the people who hold them from any charges of racism, sexism, or homophobia.

Dan Savage wrote as much recently in response to a reader who wanted to know if his preference for masculine white men made him a jerk or biased: “You’re entitled to your preferences — but I hope your preferences are yours. I hope you’ve given your taste in men some thought and you can honestly say that these are your preferences, Masculine Man, and not just gay beauty ideals and/or masculinity standards that the culture stuffed down your throat and up your ass. And if they’re your preferences, well, you’re entitled to them. But you’re not entitled to be an asshole about them.”

It’s one thing to prefer stories about male characters, because that’s who you relate to most easily. It’s another to mistake that preference for some sort of proof that stories about men are inherently superior or more sophisticated. If you’d rather not watch gay people have relationships and build families, no one’s forcing you, but it’s worth interrogating why you feel that way. If you’re uncomfortable watching characters carry out their lives in a cramped, less-than-perfectly-maintained house but fine watching characters waltz through unrealistically enormous apartments, you might want to get to the root of that impulse. And if you bond more closely with a white child than with a black one, you should think about what that means on a deeper level than an #ihatemyself hashtag. There’s nothing wrong with treating entertainment as if it’s a source of fun rather than vitamins. But if being comfortable in your enjoyment means being comfortable in a narrow set of ideas, that’s not a neutral position, much less an admirable one.

Lee Aronsohn, the co-creator of the hit comedy sitcom ‘Two and a Half Men,’ issued a host of sexist remarks at a television conference recently, complaining about the over-saturation of female-oriented comedies. “We’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation,” Aronsohn said, adding, “‘Enough, ladies, I get it. You have periods.”

Calling Aronsohn a “sexist creep,” Alyssa Rosenberg noted the comment “tells you everything about how cosseted Hollywood’s disgusting sexists are.” Aronsohn issued a flippant apology on Twitter: “Yes, yes – it was a stupid joke. I’m sorry.”

While Aronsohn elicited widespread anger as a result of his snide insults, he did find one defender: Rush Limbaugh. The hate radio host, who constantly bemoans the “chickification” of various aspects of American life, used that term his defense of Aronsohn, urging women to leave them alone today:

All he’s talking about here is the chickification of his business. He writes sitcoms – he’s a comedy writer. He says the women have taken over. It’s all vagina all the time. We get it! Ok women, let us alone.

Watch it:

Limbaugh is trying to repair his corporate brand with advertisers, hordes of whom have left his show due to his willingness to engage in sexist attacks. Limbaugh is of course a suitable defender of Aronsohn, given his distinguished track record and his willingness to call female advocates “sluts.”

Ladies and gentlemen, your sexist of the day, perhaps your idiot of the year, and winner of the I’m Terrified of the Female Body and Grossed Out By Its Processes Award, Two and a Half Men creator Lee Aronsohn! Who told the Hollywood Reporter that he’s sick of female-centered comedies because “Enough ladies. I get it. You have periods,” and declared that “we’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.”

Because talking about Michael Fassbender’s penis is endlessly entertaining, but having to hear that ladies have menstrual cycles, take birth control pills, and enjoy sex is just unbearable, right? Because even though the number of female characters on television tends to hover in the low 40 percent range, we’re just saturated with vaginas, because god forbid stories about men and their ish don’t absolutely dominate the media? Because even though those shows Aronsohn’s complaining about have actually created more writing and directing jobs for men than women, and resulted in some really awful portrayals as a result, we couldn’t possibly let women come to expect that they’ll have access to stories both about them and by them, could we? Because where would that leave poor, suffering, disadvantaged American men?

Maybe I shouldn’t be shocked that the creator of a show as middlebrow, as worshipping of lotharios, as willing to give a leading man like Charlie Sheen a pass on his behavior with a morals clause that could only punish him for a felony, as Two and a Half Men apparently has a ten-year-old boy’s attitudes towards women and their genitalia. But that Aronsohn is dumb and woman-fearing enough not just to believe this, to blithely admit he believes it to a major publication tells you everything about how cosseted Hollywood’s disgusting sexists are. You want to know why we get what we get on movie and television screens? Why, as Vulture asked after their drama derby assessing the last 25 years of television honored almost no performances by or stories about women, there are a dearth of great women’s dramas? Because there are, apparently, no consequences in Hollywood for being perfectly open about how much you despise women’s bodies and the contours of women’s lives. But hopefully that won’t be the case forever, so Aronsohn and his ilk can get acquainted with what it actually feels like to be marginalized.

It’s not as if characters never leave television shows. Diane and Fraiser both left Cheers, the former for California, the latter for a spinoff. Dr. Addison Montgomery departed Seattle Grace for the bright lights and beaches of Los Angeles. Detective John Munch has transcended franchises, moving from Homicide to Law & Order and popping up everywhere from Arrested Development to the X-Files. But it seems to me we’re entering a period where scripted television feels unusually confident about replacing characters or even entire casts.

The most high-profile case may not have been voluntary or planned: CBS subbed in Ashton Kutcher for Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men, ending the latter character’s run on the show with a fast and not particularly deep workaround. But it came at a time when lots of television shows were deciding that setting and concept were more important than individual characters. The Office saw the departure of Michael Scott, and if the show has seemed creatively moribund since his last episode, its problems really began once Jim and Pam got together. The core cast of the show may change further if Mindy Kaling’s show gets a pickup at Fox, ending her run on NBC as Kelly Kapoor. While it may not be totally clear what’s happening with Glee next year, some of the cast seems likely to depart, whether for a spinoff, or for other projects as graduation approaches for some of the kids at McKinley High. American Horror Story was specifically designed, even if we didn’t know it at the beginning, to replace almost the entire cast every season. And while a new show the CW has ordered may end up following its main character over multiple seasons, its combat-in-the-arena storyline sounds like it could accomodate a whole new cast every season, if need be.

I’d imagine that some of this is driven by the success of reality television on two fronts. Audiences have clearly become comfortable with swapping out contestants and Housewives as long as their replacements continue to fill the same tropes as their predecessors, and in shows like Glee where the characters are more schtick than actual people, and where the structure demands turnover, it probably wouldn’t been too wrenching for audiences to see actors phased in and out. Making sure actors on scripted shows know they’re replaceable also serves another function: it makes the actors who really need the work less powerful in contract negotiations if they know the show is comfortable replacing them at any point. And phasing characters in and out makes it easier for big stars to commit to television shows without worrying about waking up fourteen years later and having everyone forget that they used to compete for Academy Awards. It might have seemed inexplicable that Connie Britton would sign up for a three-year run of eating brains and having ghost-sex, but as a season-long reset button that lets her remind people she’s something other than Mrs. Coach, it makes more sense.

What does it mean in terms of storytelling? I think that’s yet to be seen. While rotating casts do make most actors less critical in favor of setting, atmosphere, and the internal rules of the world that will govern all characters’ behavior, a few anchor characters will still be important. What bodes poorly for Glee and well for American Horror Story, to take the two rotating-cast-shows from the same creator, is that Glee’s tentpole is the increasingly unlikable and not particularly rational staff, led by Will Schuster, while Jessica Lange still has scenery to chomp as creepy Murder House neighbor Constance in American Horror Story. And the concepts have to be good: both Glee and American Horror Story, while neither show is my cup of tea, have concepts that provide procedural-like structures. Every week, songs will be sung or people will die horribly, and folks will turn in to hear those songs and watch those killings. All of which probably lends itself to a focus on episodic, rather than serialized, shows. It’s difficult for me to believe that anyone is tuning in to Glee because they’re deeply invested in and attentive to the coherence of Rachel Berry’s journey any more.

Does that mean we’re going to enter a period of sloppy storytelling? I hope not. Episodic doesn’t have to mean inconsistent. And moving characters along can give a show an emotional integrity it might not have otherwise. But if characters are going to move in and out of shows, the main motivation shouldn’t be to break the power of actors, but to tell specific kinds of stories.

It’s not like I expect Two and a Half Men to be a documentary, but there’s something profoundly strange about the way CBS is framing Ashton Kutcher’s character on the show, who will debut this fall in the wake of Charlie Sheen’s messy exit. The character, named Walden Schmidt, is apparently an “Internet billionaire with a broken heart,” who, for reasons unbeknownst to me or the gods of plausibility, is apparently moving into a Malibu house with a divorced single-father chiropractor and his son to whom he is in no way related.

Now, rich people do strange things. They spend money on products of questionable utility that don’t actually sound enjoyable. They hire people to handle the most intimate details of their lives but get paranoid about their privacy even though they’re giving it a lot up. They do things like start private spaceflight companies (which, given how our government’s cut down on space exploration, may end up being a real public good). If they’re depressed, they hire expensive therapists, and if they’re single and don’t want to be, having billions of dollars (as well as looking like Ashton Kutcher) is a pretty easy way to find a pool of candidates to help you solve that problem.

The thing that’s annoying about having a very rich character (it doesn’t sound from this description like Kutcher’s character will have lost his money in recession or anything) move in with friends or relatives is not that it’s implausibly wacky. It’s that it’s implausibly wacky in a way that makes a very rich character seem more like characters of low to moderate incomes. If it’s scandalous when Eric Schmidt, Google’s married CEO, is seen out with a woman not his wife, it would be profoundly and stock-price-affectingly odd if a billionaire just moved in with a chiropractor and his kid for kicks. I’m sure being a billionaire has its inconveniences, but needing to move home or in with roommates is not one of them. Given how much of our politics is devoted to the idea that the very rich are somehow put-up, or that they’re just like everyone else, when in fact their resources mean that they don’t have to face the same challenges and concerns as everyone else, this kind of fantasy may not be uniquely damaging, but it does reflect something pernicious.