I’ve been pretty vocal about the fact that I consider Whitney to be one of the failures of last fall’s boom in television comedies created by women and centered on female characters—it’s been a prime example of the weird spike in deeply irritating supporting sitcom characters, it’s got more men writing its episodes than women, and Whitney Cummings is less appealing as a fictional avatar of herself than she must have been in person to network executives. But the show’s become more likable as it’s gone on. And it’s achieved something rather remarkable in its latest long arc: Whitney may be the only show on television that’s figured out how to handle a bisexual character with clarity and dignity.

I was nervous when Maulik Pancholy left 30 Rock for Whitney. It’s not that Pancholy isn’t a good actor who deserves to play something other than Jack Donaghy’s beleaguered, worshipful assistant. It was that I didn’t think he’d get the opportunity to do much that was interesting on Whitney, where he was part of the grating-friend ensemble, an accountant named Neal locked in a lovey-dovey relationship with a woman named Lily (an increasingly good Zoe Lister Jones). But the show has handed him an enormous slab of red meat: over a series of episodes, Neal and Lily broke off their engagement after it turned out Lily had been lying to Neal about some substantial things. And after their breakup, Neal began seeing a man named Steven he met through work.

In a terrific episode, Whitney handled Neal’s feelings about acknowledging his attractions to men with sensitivity and some of the better humor it’s shown. “There was never an opportunity to explore anything sexual. I mean, we couldn’t even explore cable,” Neal tells Whitney of his conservative family. When he confesses to Alex, Whitney’s long-time boyfriend that “Last night, when you came over, I was kind of on a date,” Alex’s response is entirely nonchalant. “Cool, can I get you a beer?…What, did you want me to offer him an appletini? Don’t be a homophobe, Whit.” And their other friends treat the situation with more investment. “I’m not attracted to all men,” Neal tells crude cop Mark in an effort to reassure him that he won’t get hit on. “You don’t have to be hurtful,” Mark tells him. And when Neal finally confessed to Lily that he’d been avoiding her because “I thought maybe if I waited, I’d have more answers for you…to how this could happen…to what I am,” she reacts with sensitivity—and a surprising level of insight. “You don’t have to be gay or straight, you’re just Neal,” Lily says. “Your sexuality’s fluid. Sometimes, people fall in love with people, not genders.” It might be the first time a sitcom has insisted that our sexual orientation categories aren’t sufficient to describe everyone’s experience, and that makes it rather extraordinary.

And the show hasn’t left it at that. It’s made an ongoing point of showing how Lily and Neal have navigated their post-revelation relationship, going out together, dealing with misperceptions about which one of them men are cruising. The show respects them enough not to make the question of who Neal loves and is attracted do disappear as if it was just an excuse for a Very Special episode. And the plot gave all the characters an opportunity to show off who they are without resorting to unfortunate tics. Neal, and everyone else, got to be fully developed human in a situation with stakes that ranged from re-assesing a friendship to reexamining what you thought your marriage would look like. And that’s worthy of some respect in turn. Whitney may not be my favorite sitcom on the air. But it’s given me a substantial reason to care about where it’s going.

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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This, from a New York Times piece on the comedy boom, seems somewhat off to me:

And then there’s the economy. Mr. Lee said it was a mistake to tie trends too simply to social developments, but in this case, it was inevitable to think of “things like the 1930s and screwball comedies.”

Indeed, socio-economic conditions are being widely credited. Mr. Lorre, who had hits before and after the economy tanked, said, “Comedy thrives during economic downturns. You know, if you’ve had a bad day, laughter is a better remedy than watching a coroner pick shrapnel out of some poor guy’s private parts.”

Ms. Salke said, “It’s all part of stress level.” She said people might look to comedy because they “don’t want to think too hard.” She added, “You’re probably sitting around the table talking about how you’re going to afford the tuition, or you’re not going to have a vacation, or you can’t afford a divorce. You need an escape from that.”

Lorre’s core comedy, the goofy, escapist Two and a Half Men, has seen its ratings fall from 28 million in this year’s premiere to 15 million for the last episode. And a lot of the comedies that are resonating — or, in an anemic ratings season, at least have gotten pickups — tap directly into contemporary issues if not into anxieties, whether it’s the class politics of 2 Broke Girls, the biggest new comedy of the fall, the post-college roommate scenario of New Girl, or the domestic trials of Up All Night and Whitney. Even Modern Family, cited for its excellence as one of the causes of the comedy resurgence, is nodding to the zeitgeist by having Claire Dunphy run for town council.

I do think it’s true that television has generally become more about providing aspirational models to audiences rather than reflections of their lived experiences. But even though that’s the case, the characters in popular comedies today still have problems that bear some small relation to those faced by their audiences, even if the consequences are cushioned by wealth or the scale is different — Jay’s business having trouble on Modern Family, for example, probably wouldn’t mean that his family gets foreclosed on. These are not the problems of, say, a con woman and a beer heir who meet cute on a cruise ship in The Lady Eve, or a professor and a gang moll in Ball of Fire, challenges that might be fun to watch but none of us could ever possibly have. We are not ignoring our mortgages to chase a leopard through the suburbs. Comedy characters today may be somewhat more secure than comedy watchers, but they’re helping us mediate the challenges of contemporary life, not escape them entirely.

In a sense, Whitney feels like the most conventional new sitcom to hit airwaves this fall (at least of the shows I’ve been checking out, and so I didn’t have extremely high expectations for it). Unlike 2 Broke Girls, also the product of Whitney creator and star Whitney Cummings, it doesn’t have a particularly strong frame narrative. And unfortunately, like Free Agents, it’s got a deeply annoying cast of backup characters including a piggish police officer, a drunk divorcee (who, to be fair, gets the great line when someone tells her she can’t wear pants to a wedding “I pay alimony to a husband who does spoken word for a living. I could wear cargo pants.”), and an irritatingly in love couple. Are we really getting less of Maulik Pancholy on 30 Rock so he can do this?

Fortunately, Cummings and Chris D’Elia, who plays her character’s long-term boyfriend Alex, have a really nice warm chemistry. The opening scene of them sparring over the bathroom mirror, eyeliner on Whitney’s temple, Alex using Whitney’s hoodie as a towel, all felt natural and fun, like an actual couple that’s been together for five years but still enjoys pushing each other’s buttons.

As for the rest of the show, Whitney feels like something that I’m glad exists, even if I don’t really feel engaged by it. Are there more dramatic, or funnier ways to illustrate the problems that couples, both straight and more particularly gay, face on things like hospital visitation than to have Whitney try to talk her way to Alex’s beside in the hospital while she’s wearing a sexy nurse’s outfit? Sure, but it’s still useful to have someone dramatize it. Is Alex declaring, “You can forget Cosmo studies, and your can forget your Mom, and forget all that stuff. This is about me and you. This is the best part of being together for so long. You can wear your hair up, or down, or hoodies, or whatever, I don’t care,” the last word in feminism? No, but it’s still the kind of thing that it’s good to have people say until women stop pressuring themselves about marriage.

I’m not particularly fond of The Sarah Silverman Program, because I’m not incredibly compelled or amused by the character’s aggressive ignorance and lack of sense of appropriateness, which feel much like artifice than an effort to reach something genuine. Saying something ridiculous and offensive that no one would ever say is funny in a limited way—saying something ridiculous and offensive that many of us think or feel but almost no one would dare vocalize or admit to thinking is both funny and scathing. But I’m more intrigued by the show she’s apparently trying to sell right now, a thinly-veiled riff on her life after her breakup with Jimmy Kimmel. I’ve really loved Silverman in smaller roles, like that of amoral news producer Alexi Darling in the movie adaptation of Rent:

Or as Mike White’s abrasive girlfriend in School of Rock:

Rather than offering herself, or a persona, up for judgement, both of these characters judged and categorized other people in ways that were sometimes grievously wrong. I’d be curious to see her do something less artificial than The Sarah Silverman Program, where she’s actually self-aware, and sympathetic despite her flaws because of it. I don’t think she’s as lacerating as Louis C.K., and given that this will be on NBC rather than cable station, I imagine the subject material will be somewhat toned-down. But I give Silverman credit for being less afraid to beat up on herself or be ridiculous than say, her network-mate Whitney Cummings seems to be: