Monsters have had their claws, paws, and pallid fingers around the throat of pop culture for the better part of a decade now. Twilight and True Blood repopularized the idea of vampirism as a stand-in for sex and other-ness. Zombies have been used to represent everything from our lingering fears of Osama bin Laden in low-budget horror movie Osombie to the Cuban government's disengagement with reality in Juan of the Dead to (possibly) Nazis in The Walking Dead. Monsters are so prevalent they've even replaced the standard crime-show roster of serial killers and sexual deviants on Grimm, NBC's police procedural about a Portland detective-turned-beastie-hunter.

So it's not surprising that NBC—which found moderate success with Grimm—has yet again raided the lair for inspiration. The network, after years of ratings troubles, spent $10 million on the pilot for Mockingbird Lane, a reboot of The Munsters, the sitcom about a charmingly monstrous family that ran on CBS from 1964 to 1966. The series premiere will run on Friday night as a Halloween special. What NBC got for its money was a handsome illustration of just how played-out monsters have become: the televisual equivalent of a sexy Halloween costume—spectacular but uninteresting.

Mockingbird Lane is a handsome illustration of just how played-out monsters have become. It's the televisual equivalent of a sexy Halloween costume—spectacular but uninteresting.

Mockingbird Lane isn't scary, and that's deliberate. The first monster to show up is mistaken for "some mysterious wild baby bear out there in the forest eating all our sugar cereal," in the words of an unsuspecting Boy Scout. When Marilyn (Charity Wakefield) goes house-hunting for her family after Eddie's (Mason Cook) transformation into that "mysterious wild baby bear" during a camping trip with his scout pack—he doesn't remember the incident—makes it prudent for the Munsters to relocate, her realtor tells her that she shouldn't consider a certain house because the former owner was a serial killer. "There may be dead homeless people in the walls," the realtor says. Marilyn's response is twee, sticky-sweet: "Then they found a home after all!" When Eddie's father Herman (Jerry O'Connell), who is jerry-rigged together from bits and pieces of other people, notices that his heart, his last original body part, is failing, his realization is set to The Magnetic Fields. Grandpa (Eddie Izzard) may turn the neighbors into his blood slaves, but mostly so they can paint the Munsters' suspiciously immaculate haunted house. When Grandpa takes his full, monstrous form, he resembles nothing so much as a hunk of well-chewed bubble gum with wings.

So if we aren't supposed to be frightened of the Munsters, what are they for? Mockingbird Lane has stripped away the working-class symbolism of The Munsters, which at the time was meant as more direct commentary on a kind of family sitcom that doesn't quite exist anymore, replaced by self-aware, upper-middle-class juggernauts like ABC's Modern Family. Herman no longer works at a funeral home, or even seems to work at all, and Lily's so ethereal—she appears in clouds of smoke and wears designer frocks weaved for her by friendly spiders—it's hard to imagine her starting up even so posh a business as a beauty parlor. Grandpa may disdain the neighbors, but that's just because they're human and not for any more-revealing reason. Marilyn, the sole member of the family who doesn't exhibit any monstrous traits, is presented more as a chipper agent of the Munsters' interests than, as she was in the original, someone whose values and sense of self turned out very differently than they might have otherwise had she grown up in a fully human family. There's no real sense of darkness Marilyn is either drawn to or has to conceal from the world at large: Everything happening around her is too brightly lit and flip in tone for the show to communicate any sense of danger.

MORE ON TELEVISION

The 'Jersey Shore' Curse: Why MTV's Smart New Show Is Probably Doomed

Q&A: Homeland's Damian Lewis

The Wire, a Decade Later

Nashville Might Save the TV Musical, Y'all

It's a touching, but it's also an illustration of just how common we've made monsters, how fully we've stripped them of their power. If monsters can stand in for every problem that we have, then there's no real difference in representation between coming from a slightly wacky family and living as a member of a group that suffers from substantive discrimination, or between frustration with, say, antiquated sexual norms and having to battle genuine human cruelty. To paraphrase The Incredibles' take on another genre that's in the process of having every drop wrung out of it: When everyone's a monster, no one will be.

Monsters have had their claws, paws, and pallid fingers around the throat of pop culture for the better part of a decade now. Twilight and True Blood repopularized the idea of vampirism as a stand-in for sex and other-ness. Zombies have been used to represent everything from our lingering fears of Osama bin Laden in low-budget horror movie Osombie to the Cuban government's disengagement with reality in Juan of the Dead to (possibly) Nazis in The Walking Dead. Monsters are so prevalent they've even replaced the standard crime-show roster of serial killers and sexual deviants on Grimm, NBC's police procedural about a Portland detective-turned-beastie-hunter.

So it's not surprising that NBC—which found moderate success with Grimm—has yet again raided the lair for inspiration. The network, after years of ratings troubles, spent $10 million on the pilot for Mockingbird Lane, a reboot of The Munsters, the sitcom about a charmingly monstrous family that ran on CBS from 1964 to 1966. The series premiere will run on Friday night as a Halloween special. What NBC got for its money was a handsome illustration of just how played-out monsters have become: the televisual equivalent of a sexy Halloween costume—spectacular but uninteresting.

Mockingbird Lane is a handsome illustration of just how played-out monsters have become. It's the televisual equivalent of a sexy Halloween costume—spectacular but uninteresting.

Mockingbird Lane isn't scary, and that's deliberate. The first monster to show up is mistaken for "some mysterious wild baby bear out there in the forest eating all our sugar cereal," in the words of an unsuspecting Boy Scout. When Marilyn (Charity Wakefield) goes house-hunting for her family after Eddie's (Mason Cook) transformation into that "mysterious wild baby bear" during a camping trip with his scout pack—he doesn't remember the incident—makes it prudent for the Munsters to relocate, her realtor tells her that she shouldn't consider a certain house because the former owner was a serial killer. "There may be dead homeless people in the walls," the realtor says. Marilyn's response is twee, sticky-sweet: "Then they found a home after all!" When Eddie's father Herman (Jerry O'Connell), who is jerry-rigged together from bits and pieces of other people, notices that his heart, his last original body part, is failing, his realization is set to The Magnetic Fields. Grandpa (Eddie Izzard) may turn the neighbors into his blood slaves, but mostly so they can paint the Munsters' suspiciously immaculate haunted house. When Grandpa takes his full, monstrous form, he resembles nothing so much as a hunk of well-chewed bubble gum with wings.

So if we aren't supposed to be frightened of the Munsters, what are they for? Mockingbird Lane has stripped away the working-class symbolism of The Munsters, which at the time was meant as more direct commentary on a kind of family sitcom that doesn't quite exist anymore, replaced by self-aware, upper-middle-class juggernauts like ABC's Modern Family. Herman no longer works at a funeral home, or even seems to work at all, and Lily's so ethereal—she appears in clouds of smoke and wears designer frocks weaved for her by friendly spiders—it's hard to imagine her starting up even so posh a business as a beauty parlor. Grandpa may disdain the neighbors, but that's just because they're human and not for any more-revealing reason. Marilyn, the sole member of the family who doesn't exhibit any monstrous traits, is presented more as a chipper agent of the Munsters' interests than, as she was in the original, someone whose values and sense of self turned out very differently than they might have otherwise had she grown up in a fully human family. There's no real sense of darkness Marilyn is either drawn to or has to conceal from the world at large: Everything happening around her is too brightly lit and flip in tone for the show to communicate any sense of danger.

MORE ON TELEVISION

The 'Jersey Shore' Curse: Why MTV's Smart New Show Is Probably Doomed

Q&A: Homeland's Damian Lewis

The Wire, a Decade Later

Nashville Might Save the TV Musical, Y'all

It's a touching, but it's also an illustration of just how common we've made monsters, how fully we've stripped them of their power. If monsters can stand in for every problem that we have, then there's no real difference in representation between coming from a slightly wacky family and living as a member of a group that suffers from substantive discrimination, or between frustration with, say, antiquated sexual norms and having to battle genuine human cruelty. To paraphrase The Incredibles' take on another genre that's in the process of having every drop wrung out of it: When everyone's a monster, no one will be.

Fall television always starts out with a bang. But for two of the most promising dramas of the fall, ABC's military drama Last Resort, which begins tonight at 8 pm, and Showtime's Homeland, which returns on Sunday after cleaning up at the Emmys for its freshman season, those explosions are literal, not metaphorical. Last Resort, about a submarine crew that takes refuge on a tropical island rather than launch nuclear missiles at Pakistan, begins when someone else decides to detonate the weapons anyway. And Homeland, about CIA agents trying to bring down a master terrorist, and the turned prisoner of war who helped discredit one of them, begins under the shadow of an even more realistic proposition: Israel has just bombed Iran's nuclear facilities.

It's not surprising that Homeland's success would prompt other networks to try to replicate its searing look at geopolitical anxiety. And though Last Resort is on a network and has a decidedly soapier feel, the show could be an excellent companion piece for Homeland. Where Homeland is about how to fight an ill-defined war with limited resources, Last Resort is a fantasy of how the United States would respond to the madness of war if we had the freedom and resources to be a truly model nation, without the need for moral compromise.

Last Resort reaches that rather simple premise through a complex set of events. While crossing the Equator, and after picking up a team of Navy SEALS in duress, Captain Marcus Chaplin (Andre Braugher) gets an order to fire nuclear weapons at Pakistan. But he receives the command through a backup channel only meant to be used in case the government has been overthrown. Things are, in fact, bad at home, with the president facing impeachment and government officials resigning in protest of his policies, but a check reveals things are otherwise proceeding as normal. The show implies that the command isn't legitimate, but the question of what cabal or conspiracy ordered it is one of the long-term mysteries Last Resort seems set to explore.

MORE ON TELEVISION

The Secret to Women-Driven Sitcoms: Relationships, Not Raunch

Fall TV Preview: Questions About Homeland, The Office, and More

What's So Funny About Guys Raising Kids?

Why Do So Many Pretty Female Comedians Pretend They're Ugly?

American Idol Is Not Dead Yet

Actors Who Couldn't Shake Their Most Memorable TV Roles

When Marcus questions the orders, he's removed from command and replaced with his executive officer Sam Kendal (Scott Speedman), who finds himself similarly in doubt. When they hesitate, their submarine is fired upon by another American warship, and they go to ground on an island with a NATO outpost, an active black market, and a super-hot bartender (Diechen Lachman), but no apparent existing formal government. While much of his crew is concerned with getting home and defend themselves against the mutiny charges that will certainly be pending against them, Marcus gets another idea. He'll stay, leave behind whatever conspiracies are taking over American politics, and try to see if he can be a better, more compassionate leader than the people who ordered him to annihilate 5 million people without an explanation.

"We could do better," Marcus reflects of the country that he feels betrayed him, both by giving him immoral orders and then trying to kill him for seeking clarification of them. "Starting from scratch." By scratch, he means a combination of Ronald Reagan's playbook for dealing with the Russians, the Geneva Conventions, speechifying that might make even a more cynical Aaron Sorkin's heart go pitter-patter, and a whole mess of military hardware.

His ship, as defense contractor Kylie Sinclair (Autumn Resser) gushes back in Washington as she seduces a Congressional staffer, is self-sustaining and full of enough weaponry to "basically wipe out anything, anywhere, any time." And thanks to Kylie's ingenuity, it's packing a next-gen cloaking device as well. When the U.S. sends warplanes to attack the sub, Marcus borrows from Reagan's strategy of firing the air traffic controllers to make Russia think he was unstable—a bit of history he imparted to Sam in his stateroom before the mission took its turn. He then fires a nuclear missile to detonate outside of Washington, DC to show the American government that he's serious about defending his newly-declared independence. More in sorrow than in anger, he recounts how "From our submarine, we have watched as the fabric of trust between the government and its people has been torn."

After the Cold War flares up again and the crew gets its hands on some enterprising Russian commandos, Marcus declares, "Now, as Americans, there's no debate about the fate of our POWs" before ordering them taken into humane custody. And in a fit of exasperation familiar to anyone who's ever wished they could knock two world leader's heads together, Marcus takes over the NATO communications system and leaves a Russian minister to explain what he was doing ordering the commando's raid on the island to the American Secretary of Defense, who would like Marcus and his crew back, along with their extremely powerful submarine.

This is governance by wishful thinking, a fantasy cocktail of realpolitik, nuclear deterrence, and human rights with a jaunty tropical cocktail umbrella anchoring all the garnishes together. Andre Braugher is a television actor of the finest caliber, able to convey with the corners of his mouth or a hitched-up forehead what some of his peers would need a canvas 72 feet wide and 53 feet high to show an audience. And it's fun to see him, as Marcus—unrestrained by the laws of the United States, the constraints of its political conventions, or conventional geopolitics—give the better angels of his nature free reign. But watching Braugher play George Washington and everyone else in the large and uneven cast try to keep up with him isn't yet as exciting as seeing the far more consistent cast in Homeland face down the prospect of cataclysmic terrorism.

When we meet up with bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) six months after her bout of electroshock therapy in the second season of Homeland, she's living quietly at home with her sister and father, teaching English to a class of new immigrants, and occasionally keeping an eye on the news. One of her agents, the abused second wife of a Hezbollah commander, resurfaces in Lebanon and asks to speak to Carrie personally, forcing her mentor Saul (Mandy Patinkin) and her former boss at the CIA, David Estes (David Harewood) to ask her to come back into the field. This is a big deal, as she disgraced herself in season one by investigating Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) and was fired from the CIA for accusing him of being a terrorist. Where Marcus has the ability to compel obedience within the chain of command and to force it on the local populace because of his control of overwhelming firepower makes him a stand-alone nuclear power, Saul, David, and Carrie can rely only on trust and relationships that can fracture in an instant.

The single greatest asset they had, whether Estes in particular was ever willing to acknowledge it or not is Carrie's brain. But it has been badly degraded by the circumstances in which she was drummed out of the agency. "It fucked me up, Saul," she tells them midway through their mission. "Being wrong about Brody. It fucked me up. Because I have never been so sure and so wrong. And it's that fact that I still can't get my head around. It makes me unable to trust my own thoughts. Every time I think I see something clearly now, it just disappears." The great cruelty of the damage done to Carrie, of course, is that everything she's been told was wrong was actually correct. Brody did intend to kill Vice President Walden—who now is courting Brody, a Congressman who took his seat in a special election, to join him in on his presidential ticket—and himself. It was Carrie's wild dash to Brody's family that convinced his daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor) to call him at the crucial moment at which he was going to go through with his plan, and it was the need for Carrie's words to Dana not to be true that convinced Brody not to detonate his suicide vest.

If Last Resort is to be the story of the damage done to the American government by a grand conspiracy, Homeland is the more personal story of how it's possible for people to destroy themselves and each other without the hidden hand of a cabal to urge the knife forward. It's about the fragility of instincts and trust on which the state of world affairs balances so tenuously and personally. The idea that a single person or a single encounter can be the fulcrum on which all things rest can also be a weakness for Homeland. The show has always relied, to a certain extent, on coincidences, a tendency that's exacerbated considerably in the first two episodes for the show, once to reignite Brody's banked loyalties to Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban), the second to kickstart Carrie's redemption. The latter feels particularly frustrating, at least as it's presented initially. Carrie's brilliant brokenness damaged her career, and it would be more rewarding to see her work her way out of the hole she dug for herself than to have some of her credibility problems resolved by a Deus Ex Mathison.

But despite some of those more questionable steps, its cast has always given Homeland an astonishing emotional integrity that allows the show a certain leeway when it comes to plot. It may be a significant coincidence that forces Carrie back into espionage work, but her tremulous, triumphant smile when she successfully evades a man who is tailing her in Lebanon makes it matter more that she's there at all than how she got there. "Ever think we'd be doing this again?" Saul asks her as they oversee a complex operation. "I hoped," she tells him, before making it clear she doesn't assume the agency is taking her back. "I know, don't get used to it."

The test for Homeland in its second season is whether the show can turn a difficult premise into something we can get used to, and can consistently expect to be as good as it has been at its best. And for Last Resort, which debuts in a difficult time slot, it will be to prove that watching the world burn can be as compelling as watching a woman recognize a terrible truth in her own living room.

Fall television always starts out with a bang. But for two of the most promising dramas of the fall, ABC's military drama Last Resort, which begins tonight at 8 pm, and Showtime's Homeland, which returns on Sunday after cleaning up at the Emmys for its freshman season, those explosions are literal, not metaphorical. Last Resort, about a submarine crew that takes refuge on a tropical island rather than launch nuclear missiles at Pakistan, begins when someone else decides to detonate the weapons anyway. And Homeland, about CIA agents trying to bring down a master terrorist, and the turned prisoner of war who helped discredit one of them, begins under the shadow of an even more realistic proposition: Israel has just bombed Iran's nuclear facilities.

It's not surprising that Homeland's success would prompt other networks to try to replicate its searing look at geopolitical anxiety. And though Last Resort is on a network and has a decidedly soapier feel, the show could be an excellent companion piece for Homeland. Where Homeland is about how to fight an ill-defined war with limited resources, Last Resort is a fantasy of how the United States would respond to the madness of war if we had the freedom and resources to be a truly model nation, without the need for moral compromise.

Last Resort reaches that rather simple premise through a complex set of events. While crossing the Equator, and after picking up a team of Navy SEALS in duress, Captain Marcus Chaplin (Andre Braugher) gets an order to fire nuclear weapons at Pakistan. But he receives the command through a backup channel only meant to be used in case the government has been overthrown. Things are, in fact, bad at home, with the president facing impeachment and government officials resigning in protest of his policies, but a check reveals things are otherwise proceeding as normal. The show implies that the command isn't legitimate, but the question of what cabal or conspiracy ordered it is one of the long-term mysteries Last Resort seems set to explore.

MORE ON TELEVISION

The Secret to Women-Driven Sitcoms: Relationships, Not Raunch

Fall TV Preview: Questions About Homeland, The Office, and More

What's So Funny About Guys Raising Kids?

Why Do So Many Pretty Female Comedians Pretend They're Ugly?

American Idol Is Not Dead Yet

Actors Who Couldn't Shake Their Most Memorable TV Roles

When Marcus questions the orders, he's removed from command and replaced with his executive officer Sam Kendal (Scott Speedman), who finds himself similarly in doubt. When they hesitate, their submarine is fired upon by another American warship, and they go to ground on an island with a NATO outpost, an active black market, and a super-hot bartender (Diechen Lachman), but no apparent existing formal government. While much of his crew is concerned with getting home and defend themselves against the mutiny charges that will certainly be pending against them, Marcus gets another idea. He'll stay, leave behind whatever conspiracies are taking over American politics, and try to see if he can be a better, more compassionate leader than the people who ordered him to annihilate 5 million people without an explanation.

"We could do better," Marcus reflects of the country that he feels betrayed him, both by giving him immoral orders and then trying to kill him for seeking clarification of them. "Starting from scratch." By scratch, he means a combination of Ronald Reagan's playbook for dealing with the Russians, the Geneva Conventions, speechifying that might make even a more cynical Aaron Sorkin's heart go pitter-patter, and a whole mess of military hardware.

His ship, as defense contractor Kylie Sinclair (Autumn Resser) gushes back in Washington as she seduces a Congressional staffer, is self-sustaining and full of enough weaponry to "basically wipe out anything, anywhere, any time." And thanks to Kylie's ingenuity, it's packing a next-gen cloaking device as well. When the U.S. sends warplanes to attack the sub, Marcus borrows from Reagan's strategy of firing the air traffic controllers to make Russia think he was unstable—a bit of history he imparted to Sam in his stateroom before the mission took its turn. He then fires a nuclear missile to detonate outside of Washington, DC to show the American government that he's serious about defending his newly-declared independence. More in sorrow than in anger, he recounts how "From our submarine, we have watched as the fabric of trust between the government and its people has been torn."

After the Cold War flares up again and the crew gets its hands on some enterprising Russian commandos, Marcus declares, "Now, as Americans, there's no debate about the fate of our POWs" before ordering them taken into humane custody. And in a fit of exasperation familiar to anyone who's ever wished they could knock two world leader's heads together, Marcus takes over the NATO communications system and leaves a Russian minister to explain what he was doing ordering the commando's raid on the island to the American Secretary of Defense, who would like Marcus and his crew back, along with their extremely powerful submarine.

This is governance by wishful thinking, a fantasy cocktail of realpolitik, nuclear deterrence, and human rights with a jaunty tropical cocktail umbrella anchoring all the garnishes together. Andre Braugher is a television actor of the finest caliber, able to convey with the corners of his mouth or a hitched-up forehead what some of his peers would need a canvas 72 feet wide and 53 feet high to show an audience. And it's fun to see him, as Marcus—unrestrained by the laws of the United States, the constraints of its political conventions, or conventional geopolitics—give the better angels of his nature free reign. But watching Braugher play George Washington and everyone else in the large and uneven cast try to keep up with him isn't yet as exciting as seeing the far more consistent cast in Homeland face down the prospect of cataclysmic terrorism.

When we meet up with bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) six months after her bout of electroshock therapy in the second season of Homeland, she's living quietly at home with her sister and father, teaching English to a class of new immigrants, and occasionally keeping an eye on the news. One of her agents, the abused second wife of a Hezbollah commander, resurfaces in Lebanon and asks to speak to Carrie personally, forcing her mentor Saul (Mandy Patinkin) and her former boss at the CIA, David Estes (David Harewood) to ask her to come back into the field. This is a big deal, as she disgraced herself in season one by investigating Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) and was fired from the CIA for accusing him of being a terrorist. Where Marcus has the ability to compel obedience within the chain of command and to force it on the local populace because of his control of overwhelming firepower makes him a stand-alone nuclear power, Saul, David, and Carrie can rely only on trust and relationships that can fracture in an instant.

The single greatest asset they had, whether Estes in particular was ever willing to acknowledge it or not is Carrie's brain. But it has been badly degraded by the circumstances in which she was drummed out of the agency. "It fucked me up, Saul," she tells them midway through their mission. "Being wrong about Brody. It fucked me up. Because I have never been so sure and so wrong. And it's that fact that I still can't get my head around. It makes me unable to trust my own thoughts. Every time I think I see something clearly now, it just disappears." The great cruelty of the damage done to Carrie, of course, is that everything she's been told was wrong was actually correct. Brody did intend to kill Vice President Walden—who now is courting Brody, a Congressman who took his seat in a special election, to join him in on his presidential ticket—and himself. It was Carrie's wild dash to Brody's family that convinced his daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor) to call him at the crucial moment at which he was going to go through with his plan, and it was the need for Carrie's words to Dana not to be true that convinced Brody not to detonate his suicide vest.

If Last Resort is to be the story of the damage done to the American government by a grand conspiracy, Homeland is the more personal story of how it's possible for people to destroy themselves and each other without the hidden hand of a cabal to urge the knife forward. It's about the fragility of instincts and trust on which the state of world affairs balances so tenuously and personally. The idea that a single person or a single encounter can be the fulcrum on which all things rest can also be a weakness for Homeland. The show has always relied, to a certain extent, on coincidences, a tendency that's exacerbated considerably in the first two episodes for the show, once to reignite Brody's banked loyalties to Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban), the second to kickstart Carrie's redemption. The latter feels particularly frustrating, at least as it's presented initially. Carrie's brilliant brokenness damaged her career, and it would be more rewarding to see her work her way out of the hole she dug for herself than to have some of her credibility problems resolved by a Deus Ex Mathison.

But despite some of those more questionable steps, its cast has always given Homeland an astonishing emotional integrity that allows the show a certain leeway when it comes to plot. It may be a significant coincidence that forces Carrie back into espionage work, but her tremulous, triumphant smile when she successfully evades a man who is tailing her in Lebanon makes it matter more that she's there at all than how she got there. "Ever think we'd be doing this again?" Saul asks her as they oversee a complex operation. "I hoped," she tells him, before making it clear she doesn't assume the agency is taking her back. "I know, don't get used to it."

The test for Homeland in its second season is whether the show can turn a difficult premise into something we can get used to, and can consistently expect to be as good as it has been at its best. And for Last Resort, which debuts in a difficult time slot, it will be to prove that watching the world burn can be as compelling as watching a woman recognize a terrible truth in her own living room.

After the huge critical and commercial success of last year's Bridesmaids, it's no surprise that television networks tried to copy the movie's formula. Perhaps because it was easiest to replicate, the first factor the network seized about was the film's raunchiness. On CBS, the ladies of 2 Broke Girls talked about their lady bits almost as frequently as the show made racial jokes, which is to say, all the time. NBC bought two dirty-girl shows, Are You There, Chelsea?, based on talk show host Chelsea Handler's memoirs, and Whitney, from comedienne Whitney Cummings, who also created 2 Broke Girls. On Chelsea, the titular character was a hard-living bartender who moved to within walking distance of her job rather than moderate her drinking so she could continue to drive safely. On Whitney, Cummings spent early episodes vamping around her apartment in a nurse's outfit and strutting around her lobby in a tiny skirt and heels.

The primary personality component these women had was an air of sexual vulgarity, an only mildly successful strategy. Are You There, Chelsea? was cancelled after its first season, and Whitney barely made it back for a second: NBC exiled it to Friday nights, pairing it with Community, which has similarly dismal prospects of survival. Only 2 Broke Girls was a real hit. None of these shows—not even 2 Broke Girls—really captured what made Bridesmaids a hit. The movie was successful not simply because it celebrated a freer form of female sexuality, but also because it portrayed the loneliness, anxiety, and complicated friendships that come with being a woman today.

This season, two new shows do explore the deeper themes that Bridesmaids raised: The Mindy Project, from The Office graduate Mindy Kaling, and Ben and Kate, created by Dana Fox, a consultant on Fox's sophomore sitcom New Girl. (The three shows will be airing as a block on Tuesday nights.)

MORE ON THE BRIDESMAIDS EFFECT

Are TV's Bridesmaids Knock-Offs Good for Women?

Bachelorette: Too Evil to Be a Bridesmaids Clone

A Bridesmaids Rebuttal: This Isn't the Movie We've Been Waiting For

Women Get Growing Pains, Too

Kate (Dakota Johnson), the main character in Ben and Kate—which appears to be the fall's best, most confident new comedy—is uncertain about sex, or "the sex," as she refers to it a conversation with her best friend BJ (a hilarious Lucy Punch). A single mother who's raised her grade school-aged daughter Maddie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) without apparent financial support from Maddie's father or emotional or practical help from her parents. Kate gets a boost—with caveats—when her brother Ben (Nat Faxon, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for The Descendants) moves home to try to win back his old girlfriend and ends up revitalized by hanging out with his niece. "There's so much I want to say!" Ben tells Maddie, who quickly becomes his confidante. "Why are you so young right now!"

Unlike the heroines of the first year of TV's lady-comedy boom, which was dominated by female characters with sharp tongues, Kate is a fundamentally nice person whose sweetness protects herself and her fragile little family. Kate lives a modest life, with Maddie at the center of her world. She's like Bridesmaids' Annie Walker (Kristen Wiig), whose friendship with Lillian (Maya Rudolph) was the main thing she had left after the recession claimed her bakery and her relationship with her fiance. When we first meet Kate, she's begun dating a new man and is preparing to sleep with him for the first time, an event that's delayed by Ben crashing their date in a ski mask he donned so he wouldn't be recognized stealing cable. Kate is anxious about the prospect of a new relationship, worried about the fact that she hasn't had sex with anyone since Maddie's birth, and concerned about Ben who, for all of his goofiness, is so vulnerable at the prospect of his ex getting married to that he's willing to enlist his niece to help him crash the wedding.

For all of Ben's wacky scheming and Kate's uncertainty, threats to their family snap them into action. Kate gives Ben the words he needs to make his pitch to his ex-girlfriend to take him back. And Ben reacts when he finds out that Kate's beau isn't what he seems. "Stay away from my sister, before you find out what six years of krav maga looks like," Ben tells the man. "Well, more like a year and a half. Plus four years on and off." Ben and Kate may not have all the tools to forge the kind of successful adulthoods that are so often the subject of network television shows. But like Annie, we're meeting these wonderful siblings at the point at which they're realizing it takes more than luchador masks—or as Ben tells Kate at once point, "I need your car. And a pinata. And six dresses sizes eight through 12."—to build a life. Watching them tackle growing up together is going to be an awful lot of fun.

Mindy Lahiri, the heroine of The Mindy Project, is further along in the journey to adulthood than Ben and Kate: She's a successful obstetrician (a profession that was inspired by Mindy Kaling's late mother). But her professional accomplishments are balanced out by the occasional muck she makes of her personal life. A pop-culture obsessive whose approach to college was "Total freedom. No supervision. I could watch romantic comedies whenever I wanted," Mindy begins the show in meltdown mode. The boyfriend she met-cute with in an elevator (Bill Hader) has dumped her and quickly married a younger Serbian woman who isn't on a career track. "By the way, are we totally sure that she is not a war criminal?" Mindy asks as she toasts the less-than-delighted couple at their wedding. "Come on, am I the only one who saw Angelina Jolie's movie?"

Mindy's acerbic selfishness is both an asset to and a problem for The Mindy Project, which isn't always clear on whether its main character is someone we can root for in a straightforward manner or a low-level anti-heroine. It's very funny to watch her drunkenly peddle through the suburbs on a purloined bike, hollering "Racist!" at a car that gets a little bit too close. It's less charming to watch her miss a patient's delivery and then complain when the doctor who stood in for her (Chris Messina) ends up getting the woman's business on a more permanent basis. Similarly, it's entertaining to watch a young boy, translating for his veiled and pregnant mother, call Mindy a drunk. It's less so to watch her complain about being sent poor patients rather than wealthy ones. There's a lot of comedy to wring out of Mindy's spoiled, insensitive behavior, but The Mindy Project doesn't do enough in its first episode to establish the space between how Mindy sees herself and how the show, and by extension the audience, perceives her. Mindy's going to need a trajectory that requires more reckoning than simply attempting not to sleep with a hot colleague if we're supposed to find her straightforwardly sympathetic—just like Bridesmaids' Annie, who had to reckon with her possessiveness of Lillian in order to save her friend's wedding and discover a baseline from which to rebuild her life. The Mindy Project has time to figure itself out, and I'm optimistic that it can.

Bridesmaids worked because there were real consequences to the movie, not because of the pooping-in-the-street scene, or the jokes about John Hamm's penis. Annie lost her job, had to move back in with her mother, and fell into a deep depression before she was able to rebuild her life. She risked her oldest friendship and her pride. There's hope that Ben and Kate and The Mindy Project will have similarly high stakes. Ben and Kate already has Maddie as a weight ballasting the show. However much her mother and uncle screw up, they love her desperately and are eager to raise her right. The Mindy Project is pretty funny just being, as Mindy's best friend Gwen puts it, "a documentary about a criminally insane spinster." The question is whether The Mindy Project intends to pursue a more meaningful project.

After the huge critical and commercial success of last year's Bridesmaids, it's no surprise that television networks tried to copy the movie's formula. Perhaps because it was easiest to replicate, the first factor the network seized about was the film's raunchiness. On CBS, the ladies of 2 Broke Girls talked about their lady bits almost as frequently as the show made racial jokes, which is to say, all the time. NBC bought two dirty-girl shows, Are You There, Chelsea?, based on talk show host Chelsea Handler's memoirs, and Whitney, from comedienne Whitney Cummings, who also created 2 Broke Girls. On Chelsea, the titular character was a hard-living bartender who moved to within walking distance of her job rather than moderate her drinking so she could continue to drive safely. On Whitney, Cummings spent early episodes vamping around her apartment in a nurse's outfit and strutting around her lobby in a tiny skirt and heels.

The primary personality component these women had was an air of sexual vulgarity, an only mildly successful strategy. Are You There, Chelsea? was cancelled after its first season, and Whitney barely made it back for a second: NBC exiled it to Friday nights, pairing it with Community, which has similarly dismal prospects of survival. Only 2 Broke Girls was a real hit. None of these shows—not even 2 Broke Girls—really captured what made Bridesmaids a hit. The movie was successful not simply because it celebrated a freer form of female sexuality, but also because it portrayed the loneliness, anxiety, and complicated friendships that come with being a woman today.

This season, two new shows do explore the deeper themes that Bridesmaids raised: The Mindy Project, from The Office graduate Mindy Kaling, and Ben and Kate, created by Dana Fox, a consultant on Fox's sophomore sitcom New Girl. (The three shows will be airing as a block on Tuesday nights.)

MORE ON THE BRIDESMAIDS EFFECT

Are TV's Bridesmaids Knock-Offs Good for Women?

Bachelorette: Too Evil to Be a Bridesmaids Clone

A Bridesmaids Rebuttal: This Isn't the Movie We've Been Waiting For

Women Get Growing Pains, Too

Kate (Dakota Johnson), the main character in Ben and Kate—which appears to be the fall's best, most confident new comedy—is uncertain about sex, or "the sex," as she refers to it a conversation with her best friend BJ (a hilarious Lucy Punch). A single mother who's raised her grade school-aged daughter Maddie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) without apparent financial support from Maddie's father or emotional or practical help from her parents. Kate gets a boost—with caveats—when her brother Ben (Nat Faxon, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for The Descendants) moves home to try to win back his old girlfriend and ends up revitalized by hanging out with his niece. "There's so much I want to say!" Ben tells Maddie, who quickly becomes his confidante. "Why are you so young right now!"

Unlike the heroines of the first year of TV's lady-comedy boom, which was dominated by female characters with sharp tongues, Kate is a fundamentally nice person whose sweetness protects herself and her fragile little family. Kate lives a modest life, with Maddie at the center of her world. She's like Bridesmaids' Annie Walker (Kristen Wiig), whose friendship with Lillian (Maya Rudolph) was the main thing she had left after the recession claimed her bakery and her relationship with her fiance. When we first meet Kate, she's begun dating a new man and is preparing to sleep with him for the first time, an event that's delayed by Ben crashing their date in a ski mask he donned so he wouldn't be recognized stealing cable. Kate is anxious about the prospect of a new relationship, worried about the fact that she hasn't had sex with anyone since Maddie's birth, and concerned about Ben who, for all of his goofiness, is so vulnerable at the prospect of his ex getting married to that he's willing to enlist his niece to help him crash the wedding.

For all of Ben's wacky scheming and Kate's uncertainty, threats to their family snap them into action. Kate gives Ben the words he needs to make his pitch to his ex-girlfriend to take him back. And Ben reacts when he finds out that Kate's beau isn't what he seems. "Stay away from my sister, before you find out what six years of krav maga looks like," Ben tells the man. "Well, more like a year and a half. Plus four years on and off." Ben and Kate may not have all the tools to forge the kind of successful adulthoods that are so often the subject of network television shows. But like Annie, we're meeting these wonderful siblings at the point at which they're realizing it takes more than luchador masks—or as Ben tells Kate at once point, "I need your car. And a pinata. And six dresses sizes eight through 12."—to build a life. Watching them tackle growing up together is going to be an awful lot of fun.

Mindy Lahiri, the heroine of The Mindy Project, is further along in the journey to adulthood than Ben and Kate: She's a successful obstetrician (a profession that was inspired by Mindy Kaling's late mother). But her professional accomplishments are balanced out by the occasional muck she makes of her personal life. A pop-culture obsessive whose approach to college was "Total freedom. No supervision. I could watch romantic comedies whenever I wanted," Mindy begins the show in meltdown mode. The boyfriend she met-cute with in an elevator (Bill Hader) has dumped her and quickly married a younger Serbian woman who isn't on a career track. "By the way, are we totally sure that she is not a war criminal?" Mindy asks as she toasts the less-than-delighted couple at their wedding. "Come on, am I the only one who saw Angelina Jolie's movie?"

Mindy's acerbic selfishness is both an asset to and a problem for The Mindy Project, which isn't always clear on whether its main character is someone we can root for in a straightforward manner or a low-level anti-heroine. It's very funny to watch her drunkenly peddle through the suburbs on a purloined bike, hollering "Racist!" at a car that gets a little bit too close. It's less charming to watch her miss a patient's delivery and then complain when the doctor who stood in for her (Chris Messina) ends up getting the woman's business on a more permanent basis. Similarly, it's entertaining to watch a young boy, translating for his veiled and pregnant mother, call Mindy a drunk. It's less so to watch her complain about being sent poor patients rather than wealthy ones. There's a lot of comedy to wring out of Mindy's spoiled, insensitive behavior, but The Mindy Project doesn't do enough in its first episode to establish the space between how Mindy sees herself and how the show, and by extension the audience, perceives her. Mindy's going to need a trajectory that requires more reckoning than simply attempting not to sleep with a hot colleague if we're supposed to find her straightforwardly sympathetic—just like Bridesmaids' Annie, who had to reckon with her possessiveness of Lillian in order to save her friend's wedding and discover a baseline from which to rebuild her life. The Mindy Project has time to figure itself out, and I'm optimistic that it can.

Bridesmaids worked because there were real consequences to the movie, not because of the pooping-in-the-street scene, or the jokes about John Hamm's penis. Annie lost her job, had to move back in with her mother, and fell into a deep depression before she was able to rebuild her life. She risked her oldest friendship and her pride. There's hope that Ben and Kate and The Mindy Project will have similarly high stakes. Ben and Kate already has Maddie as a weight ballasting the show. However much her mother and uncle screw up, they love her desperately and are eager to raise her right. The Mindy Project is pretty funny just being, as Mindy's best friend Gwen puts it, "a documentary about a criminally insane spinster." The question is whether The Mindy Project intends to pursue a more meaningful project.

After the huge critical and commercial success of last year's Bridesmaids, it's no surprise that television networks tried to copy the movie's formula. Perhaps because it was easiest to replicate, the first factor the network seized about was the film's raunchiness. On CBS, the ladies of 2 Broke Girls talked about their lady bits almost as frequently as the show made racial jokes, which is to say, all the time. NBC bought two dirty-girl shows, Are You There, Chelsea?, based on talk show host Chelsea Handler's memoirs, and Whitney, from comedienne Whitney Cummings, who also created 2 Broke Girls. On Chelsea, the titular character was a hard-living bartender who moved to within walking distance of her job rather than moderate her drinking so she could continue to drive safely. On Whitney, Cummings spent early episodes vamping around her apartment in a nurse's outfit and strutting around her lobby in a tiny skirt and heels.

The primary personality component these women had was an air of sexual vulgarity, an only mildly successful strategy. Are You There, Chelsea? was cancelled after its first season, and Whitney barely made it back for a second: NBC exiled it to Friday nights, pairing it with Community, which has similarly dismal prospects of survival. Only 2 Broke Girls was a real hit. None of these shows—not even 2 Broke Girls—really captured what made Bridesmaids a hit. The movie was successful not simply because it celebrated a freer form of female sexuality, but also because it portrayed the loneliness, anxiety, and complicated friendships that come with being a woman today.

This season, two new shows do explore the deeper themes that Bridesmaids raised: The Mindy Project, from The Office graduate Mindy Kaling, and Ben and Kate, created by Dana Fox, a consultant on Fox's sophomore sitcom New Girl. (The three shows will be airing as a block on Tuesday nights.)

MORE ON THE BRIDESMAIDS EFFECT

Are TV's Bridesmaids Knock-Offs Good for Women?

Bachelorette: Too Evil to Be a Bridesmaids Clone

A Bridesmaids Rebuttal: This Isn't the Movie We've Been Waiting For

Women Get Growing Pains, Too

Kate (Dakota Johnson), the main character in Ben and Kate—which appears to be the fall's best, most confident new comedy—is uncertain about sex, or "the sex," as she refers to it a conversation with her best friend BJ (a hilarious Lucy Punch). A single mother who's raised her grade school-aged daughter Maddie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) without apparent financial support from Maddie's father or emotional or practical help from her parents. Kate gets a boost—with caveats—when her brother Ben (Nat Faxon, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for The Descendants) moves home to try to win back his old girlfriend and ends up revitalized by hanging out with his niece. "There's so much I want to say!" Ben tells Maddie, who quickly becomes his confidante. "Why are you so young right now!"

Unlike the heroines of the first year of TV's lady-comedy boom, which was dominated by female characters with sharp tongues, Kate is a fundamentally nice person whose sweetness protects herself and her fragile little family. Kate lives a modest life, with Maddie at the center of her world. She's like Bridesmaids' Annie Walker (Kristen Wiig), whose friendship with Lillian (Maya Rudolph) was the main thing she had left after the recession claimed her bakery and her relationship with her fiance. When we first meet Kate, she's begun dating a new man and is preparing to sleep with him for the first time, an event that's delayed by Ben crashing their date in a ski mask he donned so he wouldn't be recognized stealing cable. Kate is anxious about the prospect of a new relationship, worried about the fact that she hasn't had sex with anyone since Maddie's birth, and concerned about Ben who, for all of his goofiness, is so vulnerable at the prospect of his ex getting married to that he's willing to enlist his niece to help him crash the wedding.

For all of Ben's wacky scheming and Kate's uncertainty, threats to their family snap them into action. Kate gives Ben the words he needs to make his pitch to his ex-girlfriend to take him back. And Ben reacts when he finds out that Kate's beau isn't what he seems. "Stay away from my sister, before you find out what six years of krav maga looks like," Ben tells the man. "Well, more like a year and a half. Plus four years on and off." Ben and Kate may not have all the tools to forge the kind of successful adulthoods that are so often the subject of network television shows. But like Annie, we're meeting these wonderful siblings at the point at which they're realizing it takes more than luchador masks—or as Ben tells Kate at once point, "I need your car. And a pinata. And six dresses sizes eight through 12."—to build a life. Watching them tackle growing up together is going to be an awful lot of fun.

Mindy Lahiri, the heroine of The Mindy Project, is further along in the journey to adulthood than Ben and Kate: She's a successful obstetrician (a profession that was inspired by Mindy Kaling's late mother). But her professional accomplishments are balanced out by the occasional muck she makes of her personal life. A pop-culture obsessive whose approach to college was "Total freedom. No supervision. I could watch romantic comedies whenever I wanted," Mindy begins the show in meltdown mode. The boyfriend she met-cute with in an elevator (Bill Hader) has dumped her and quickly married a younger Serbian woman who isn't on a career track. "By the way, are we totally sure that she is not a war criminal?" Mindy asks as she toasts the less-than-delighted couple at their wedding. "Come on, am I the only one who saw Angelina Jolie's movie?"

Mindy's acerbic selfishness is both an asset to and a problem for The Mindy Project, which isn't always clear on whether its main character is someone we can root for in a straightforward manner or a low-level anti-heroine. It's very funny to watch her drunkenly peddle through the suburbs on a purloined bike, hollering "Racist!" at a car that gets a little bit too close. It's less charming to watch her miss a patient's delivery and then complain when the doctor who stood in for her (Chris Messina) ends up getting the woman's business on a more permanent basis. Similarly, it's entertaining to watch a young boy, translating for his veiled and pregnant mother, call Mindy a drunk. It's less so to watch her complain about being sent poor patients rather than wealthy ones. There's a lot of comedy to wring out of Mindy's spoiled, insensitive behavior, but The Mindy Project doesn't do enough in its first episode to establish the space between how Mindy sees herself and how the show, and by extension the audience, perceives her. Mindy's going to need a trajectory that requires more reckoning than simply attempting not to sleep with a hot colleague if we're supposed to find her straightforwardly sympathetic—just like Bridesmaids' Annie, who had to reckon with her possessiveness of Lillian in order to save her friend's wedding and discover a baseline from which to rebuild her life. The Mindy Project has time to figure itself out, and I'm optimistic that it can.

Bridesmaids worked because there were real consequences to the movie, not because of the pooping-in-the-street scene, or the jokes about John Hamm's penis. Annie lost her job, had to move back in with her mother, and fell into a deep depression before she was able to rebuild her life. She risked her oldest friendship and her pride. There's hope that Ben and Kate and The Mindy Project will have similarly high stakes. Ben and Kate already has Maddie as a weight ballasting the show. However much her mother and uncle screw up, they love her desperately and are eager to raise her right. The Mindy Project is pretty funny just being, as Mindy's best friend Gwen puts it, "a documentary about a criminally insane spinster." The question is whether The Mindy Project intends to pursue a more meaningful project.

Last fall, as part of its attempts to dig its way out of the ratings cellar, NBC debuted a charming comedy called Up All Night about a television executive and her husband, who decides to stay home to raise their baby daughter. The show was a modest success, and will return with some changes for a second season later this month. But it appears to have given NBC ideas. This fall, in keeping with its efforts to woo audiences with hunky firefighters, apocalypses, and Matthew Perry, the network's offering up two much broader shows about men raising children and thinking about how to build their families.

The most superficially important difference between The New Normal, which begins airing on Tuesday, and Guys With Kids, which premieres Wednesday, is that the men in the first show are a gay couple, and in the latter, they are three heterosexual buddies. Guys With Kids drably draws its humor from a retrograde vision of family in which it constitutes a wacky switch to have men instead of women caring for children. The New Normal gets more mileage by tackling a truly modern dilemma: what it's like for men who assumed that their sexual orientation would keep them from becoming fathers at all to build a family with the full participation of the surrogate who will carry their child.

Guys With Kids is a sitcom based on the idea that it's inherently amusing to watch the male members of a species care for their young. At the Television Critics Association press tour in January, creator Jimmy Fallon said that the origin of the show was a conversation with his producing partner. "We were just talking about all the guys that we were seeing around New York City and Time Square, like with the Baby Bjorns and the babies on the backs of their bikes, and I was saying, like, these are like young, good-looking guys," Fallon said. "They're just embracing the role of dad, and we both said at the same time 'DILFs.'" That's a pretty accurate indication of the show's level of humor and sophistication.

MORE ON TELEVISION

Fall TV Preview: Questions About Homeland, The Office, and More

Why Do So Many Pretty Female Comedians Pretend They're Ugly?

American Idol Is Not Dead Yet

Actors Who Couldn't Shake Their Most Memorable TV Roles

If you can put aside the idea that it's a revelation to anyone that sometimes men take care of their children (especially given that NBC already has a sitcom with the same concept, the much betterUp All Night), the setup for Guys With Kids isn't inherently terrible. Gary (Anthony Anderson) and Nick (Zach Cregger) are young fathers who live in the same building in New York City. Their friend Chris (Jesse Bradford), who was divorced from his wife, Sheila, shortly after the birth of their son Ernie, moves into the building so he can have some help when he has custody of the baby.

Chris and Sheila's relationship might be engaging if she wasn't a shrew who refuses to listen to Chris on parenting decisions. "She just says, 'He grew inside me,' and boom, argument's over," Chris complains. "Ernie can't watch Goodfellas with me." The other fellows aren't much more nuanced. Gary is exhausted by taking care of his children and his lack of a life outside his family. And just because he's shouldering the burdens that he assumed his wife would take on doesn't mean he's not a walking embodiment of a cliched, detatched father. He's the kind of guy who loses his baby in a bar and later tries to grab a quickie with his wife in their bathroom, moaning to the child who wants to get in, "This is all we have!" That leaves Nick as the standout of the bunch by sole virtue of not being a terrible stereotype. And because the moment when he tells Chris, who has asked Nick to babysit Ernie, "I know how to take care of babies. Get off my land!" is the highwater mark for amusement in the pilot. It would be one thing to show these men struggling with the challenges of raising children and what it means for their senses of themselves to be stay-at-home dads. It's another to ask us to invest in men who seem dumb, who act childish rather than creative.

The network does a little better with The New Normal, an attempt to capitalize on Ryan Murphy'sGlee and American Horror Story hot streak. As the show's title suggests, its portrait of a gay couple, Bryan (Andrew Rannells) and David (Justin Bartha) deciding to have a child is a forceful, and often blunt, attempt to update our default image of the American family.

The New Normal's main throwback is Bryan, who through the pilot is an elegant stereotype, the kind of person Glee's Kurt Hummel will be when he grows up and makes enough money to hire Real Housewives veteran Nene Leakes as his assistant. Bryan is the half of the couple who kickstarts his and Daniel's baby journey after a chance encounter with an angelic child in a department store. He returns home toting a tiny sweater and a mission. "When I saw that miniature person—whose skin was flawless, by the way—I finally got it," he tells David. "I want us to have baby clothes, and a baby to wear them." Later, he tells the director of their surrogacy service, "I would like a skinny blonde child who doesn't cry. Is that extra?" Murphy loves his queens, and sometimes his devotion to them gets in the way of his gay characters being real people.

That's particularly too bad in this case, because it's interesting to watch two men whose plans for their lives never involved children do a lifetime's worth of dreaming all in a rush. Bryan convinces David that he wants to have a child because "You are the kindest man I've ever had the pleasure to love. You would be an amazing father." Daniel, an ob/gyn, breaks down in the room with Goldie, their surrogate, before she's scheduled to be inseminated. "I'm always the guy everyone counts on. When do I get to fall apart?" he asks her. "You know I've delivered over 1,000 babies in my life and I don't know if I've ever held one that was over four minutes old. What if I'm not ready to be a dad?"

What makes someone ready to be a father, and how gay men who hadn't expected to raise children think about their families are an interesting questions. Bryan may conform to some stereotypes of gay men, but at least the stereotype is operating in new circumstances. It will be interesting to keep up with The New Normal to see how Bryan's meticulous approach to life, and his affection for ballsy women affects how he treats Goldie, Goldie's smartass daughter, and his own eventual daughter or son. Watching the bro-dads of Guys With Kids treat the basics of parenting, familiar to many the women in the audience, as if they're somehow novel, or as if they should get points for doing what women are expected to pull off all the time, is decidedly less compelling.

Bryan starts as a stereotype. But Chris, Gary, and Nick sometimes manage to sound even more like bitchy queens than he does, even as they're haunted by the ghosts of past fathers who think they know best.

Last fall, as part of its attempts to dig its way out of the ratings cellar, NBC debuted a charming comedy called Up All Night about a television executive and her husband, who decides to stay home to raise their baby daughter. The show was a modest success, and will return with some changes for a second season later this month. But it appears to have given NBC ideas. This fall, in keeping with its efforts to woo audiences with hunky firefighters, apocalypses, and Matthew Perry, the network's offering up two much broader shows about men raising children and thinking about how to build their families.

The most superficially important difference between The New Normal, which begins airing on Tuesday, and Guys With Kids, which premieres Wednesday, is that the men in the first show are a gay couple, and in the latter, they are three heterosexual buddies. Guys With Kids drably draws its humor from a retrograde vision of family in which it constitutes a wacky switch to have men instead of women caring for children. The New Normal gets more mileage by tackling a truly modern dilemma: what it's like for men who assumed that their sexual orientation would keep them from becoming fathers at all to build a family with the full participation of the surrogate who will carry their child.

Guys With Kids is a sitcom based on the idea that it's inherently amusing to watch the male members of a species care for their young. At the Television Critics Association press tour in January, creator Jimmy Fallon said that the origin of the show was a conversation with his producing partner. "We were just talking about all the guys that we were seeing around New York City and Time Square, like with the Baby Bjorns and the babies on the backs of their bikes, and I was saying, like, these are like young, good-looking guys," Fallon said. "They're just embracing the role of dad, and we both said at the same time 'DILFs.'" That's a pretty accurate indication of the show's level of humor and sophistication.

MORE ON TELEVISION

Fall TV Preview: Questions About Homeland, The Office, and More

Why Do So Many Pretty Female Comedians Pretend They're Ugly?

American Idol Is Not Dead Yet

Actors Who Couldn't Shake Their Most Memorable TV Roles

If you can put aside the idea that it's a revelation to anyone that sometimes men take care of their children (especially given that NBC already has a sitcom with the same concept, the much betterUp All Night), the setup for Guys With Kids isn't inherently terrible. Gary (Anthony Anderson) and Nick (Zach Cregger) are young fathers who live in the same building in New York City. Their friend Chris (Jesse Bradford), who was divorced from his wife, Sheila, shortly after the birth of their son Ernie, moves into the building so he can have some help when he has custody of the baby.

Chris and Sheila's relationship might be engaging if she wasn't a shrew who refuses to listen to Chris on parenting decisions. "She just says, 'He grew inside me,' and boom, argument's over," Chris complains. "Ernie can't watch Goodfellas with me." The other fellows aren't much more nuanced. Gary is exhausted by taking care of his children and his lack of a life outside his family. And just because he's shouldering the burdens that he assumed his wife would take on doesn't mean he's not a walking embodiment of a cliched, detatched father. He's the kind of guy who loses his baby in a bar and later tries to grab a quickie with his wife in their bathroom, moaning to the child who wants to get in, "This is all we have!" That leaves Nick as the standout of the bunch by sole virtue of not being a terrible stereotype. And because the moment when he tells Chris, who has asked Nick to babysit Ernie, "I know how to take care of babies. Get off my land!" is the highwater mark for amusement in the pilot. It would be one thing to show these men struggling with the challenges of raising children and what it means for their senses of themselves to be stay-at-home dads. It's another to ask us to invest in men who seem dumb, who act childish rather than creative.

The network does a little better with The New Normal, an attempt to capitalize on Ryan Murphy'sGlee and American Horror Story hot streak. As the show's title suggests, its portrait of a gay couple, Bryan (Andrew Rannells) and David (Justin Bartha) deciding to have a child is a forceful, and often blunt, attempt to update our default image of the American family.

The New Normal's main throwback is Bryan, who through the pilot is an elegant stereotype, the kind of person Glee's Kurt Hummel will be when he grows up and makes enough money to hire Real Housewives veteran Nene Leakes as his assistant. Bryan is the half of the couple who kickstarts his and Daniel's baby journey after a chance encounter with an angelic child in a department store. He returns home toting a tiny sweater and a mission. "When I saw that miniature person—whose skin was flawless, by the way—I finally got it," he tells David. "I want us to have baby clothes, and a baby to wear them." Later, he tells the director of their surrogacy service, "I would like a skinny blonde child who doesn't cry. Is that extra?" Murphy loves his queens, and sometimes his devotion to them gets in the way of his gay characters being real people.

That's particularly too bad in this case, because it's interesting to watch two men whose plans for their lives never involved children do a lifetime's worth of dreaming all in a rush. Bryan convinces David that he wants to have a child because "You are the kindest man I've ever had the pleasure to love. You would be an amazing father." Daniel, an ob/gyn, breaks down in the room with Goldie, their surrogate, before she's scheduled to be inseminated. "I'm always the guy everyone counts on. When do I get to fall apart?" he asks her. "You know I've delivered over 1,000 babies in my life and I don't know if I've ever held one that was over four minutes old. What if I'm not ready to be a dad?"

What makes someone ready to be a father, and how gay men who hadn't expected to raise children think about their families are an interesting questions. Bryan may conform to some stereotypes of gay men, but at least the stereotype is operating in new circumstances. It will be interesting to keep up with The New Normal to see how Bryan's meticulous approach to life, and his affection for ballsy women affects how he treats Goldie, Goldie's smartass daughter, and his own eventual daughter or son. Watching the bro-dads of Guys With Kids treat the basics of parenting, familiar to many the women in the audience, as if they're somehow novel, or as if they should get points for doing what women are expected to pull off all the time, is decidedly less compelling.

Bryan starts as a stereotype. But Chris, Gary, and Nick sometimes manage to sound even more like bitchy queens than he does, even as they're haunted by the ghosts of past fathers who think they know best.

We expect Mad Men's genius advertising executive Don Draper to wear the best suits, live in a to-die-for apartment furnished in Mid-Century Modern furniture, and dream up beautiful images to sell to an increasingly ugly world. Boardwalk Empire drips with luxuriant period details, while Dexter turns blood spatters into an art form. But over the last four seasons it's been Breaking Bad—set in mundane, sun-baked Albuquerque, and which has its main subjects a retired high school teacher and a small-time thug, hardly glamorous archetypes of either creative genius or diabolical evil—that's been the most visually sumptuous show in America.

Over the course of the show's run, Walter White (Bryan Cranston) has moved from small-time meth cooker looking to provide a financial legacy for his family as he struggled with cancer to a drug kingpin twisted by his desire for the world to recognize his genius. The show's visual landscape has responded to Walter's transformation: Breaking Bad has framed episodes in enigmatic images that only become clear over whole seasons, used disorienting time lapses, and staged standoffs in color-saturated deserts. In its two-part final season, Breaking Bad has gotten even more gorgeous and surreal, its visuals reflecting the distortions Walter White causes in everything he touches.

The season started with a glimpse of the trunk of a car and a cartoonishly enormous gun, detritus from the post-apocalypse washed up in the American southwest. Even more ordinary objects and actions are transformed by the show's visual grammar, often by use of color that makes people or things look newly unfamiliar. In the premiere, the late Gus Fring's (Giancarlo Esposito) lieutenant Mike (Jonathan Banks) looks like he's feeding chickens on Mars.

And ordinary objects appear in tremendously unexpected places, like a shot of a Los Pollos Hermanos logo in a pristine office building very far from Albuquerque. Jesse's cheerful Roomba turns out to conceal a deadly secret.

This week, Walt and Jesse come up a new plan to begin cooking in houses that have been prepared for fumigation, giving us the eerie images of a medical tent set up in an otherwise abandoned home, a photo of a blissfully unaware family watching over Walt and Jesse's cooking, and later, our two main characters relaxing on a couch not their own, enjoying beers in hazmat suits while watching television. In the world of Breaking Bad, normality is prone to violent disruption, and everything we believe we know about people and organizations is subject to sudden reinterpretation.

Breaking Bad is also fundamentally a Western, and the show uses the wide-open spaces of New Mexico to frame grand spectacles that illustrate the scale of the emotional takes for its characters. In the premiere, as Mike, having learned that Walt killed Gus, rushes towards a confrontation with Walt and Jesse, the shot makes it look like their cars have collided instead of blowing past each other, enveloping each vehicle in a temporary dust storm. The scale of secrets and enmities between Breaking Bad's central players is so grand it can only be envisioned in collisions, represented by extreme weather.

Later, after Walt executes his daring attempt to erase Gus's surveillance files, he and Jesse leave an abandoned truck resting peacefully but at what ought to be an impossible angle up against a building. The cops who find it are utterly perplexed, unable to fathom how the vehicle got there, or what the people who got it there were doing. In the past, Walt's ability to use ordinary chemicals to upset the conventional wisdom of methamphetamine production or to defend himself from the industry's worst thugs was a wonderful, dark joke—in the immortal words of Walt's partner Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), "Yeah, Mr. White! Yeah, science!" But as Walt's motivations have grown darker, things like that unnaturally positioned truck suggest that he is disturbing forces both moral and natural.

The more mundane images have an eerie power to them, too. Hank, investigating the fire at the warehouse where Jesse and Walt used to cook, dons the kind of protective gear that his unknown antagonists wore at their work. It's striking to see Hank take on the mantle of Walt's twisted office in pursuit of the man he doesn't know is his brother-in-law. If one of the themes of this season becomes Hank closing in on Walt, it will be as if he who wears the protective breathing apparatus holds the power.

Walt can even turn breakfast food ominous, neatly stacking his bacon on a diner plate, ripping it in half, and rearranging it into a "52" to mark his birthday, an image that calls back to our first introduction to Mr. White, and that also happens to evoke a skull. Maybe as Walt's become more and more an image of the evil he's embraced, with the tight flesh on his shaved head showing the outlines of his cranium, he can't help seeing death's heads everywhere.

We expect Mad Men's genius advertising executive Don Draper to wear the best suits, live in a to-die-for apartment furnished in Mid-Century Modern furniture, and dream up beautiful images to sell to an increasingly ugly world. Boardwalk Empire drips with luxuriant period details, while Dexter turns blood spatters into an art form. But over the last four seasons it's been Breaking Bad—set in mundane, sun-baked Albuquerque, and which has its main subjects a retired high school teacher and a small-time thug, hardly glamorous archetypes of either creative genius or diabolical evil—that's been the most visually sumptuous show in America.

Over the course of the show's run, Walter White (Bryan Cranston) has moved from small-time meth cooker looking to provide a financial legacy for his family as he struggled with cancer to a drug kingpin twisted by his desire for the world to recognize his genius. The show's visual landscape has responded to Walter's transformation: Breaking Bad has framed episodes in enigmatic images that only become clear over whole seasons, used disorienting time lapses, and staged standoffs in color-saturated deserts. In its two-part final season, Breaking Bad has gotten even more gorgeous and surreal, its visuals reflecting the distortions Walter White causes in everything he touches.

The season started with a glimpse of the trunk of a car and a cartoonishly enormous gun, detritus from the post-apocalypse washed up in the American southwest. Even more ordinary objects and actions are transformed by the show's visual grammar, often by use of color that makes people or things look newly unfamiliar. In the premiere, the late Gus Fring's (Giancarlo Esposito) lieutenant Mike (Jonathan Banks) looks like he's feeding chickens on Mars.

And ordinary objects appear in tremendously unexpected places, like a shot of a Los Pollos Hermanos logo in a pristine office building very far from Albuquerque. Jesse's cheerful Roomba turns out to conceal a deadly secret.

This week, Walt and Jesse come up a new plan to begin cooking in houses that have been prepared for fumigation, giving us the eerie images of a medical tent set up in an otherwise abandoned home, a photo of a blissfully unaware family watching over Walt and Jesse's cooking, and later, our two main characters relaxing on a couch not their own, enjoying beers in hazmat suits while watching television. In the world of Breaking Bad, normality is prone to violent disruption, and everything we believe we know about people and organizations is subject to sudden reinterpretation.

Breaking Bad is also fundamentally a Western, and the show uses the wide-open spaces of New Mexico to frame grand spectacles that illustrate the scale of the emotional takes for its characters. In the premiere, as Mike, having learned that Walt killed Gus, rushes towards a confrontation with Walt and Jesse, the shot makes it look like their cars have collided instead of blowing past each other, enveloping each vehicle in a temporary dust storm. The scale of secrets and enmities between Breaking Bad's central players is so grand it can only be envisioned in collisions, represented by extreme weather.

Later, after Walt executes his daring attempt to erase Gus's surveillance files, he and Jesse leave an abandoned truck resting peacefully but at what ought to be an impossible angle up against a building. The cops who find it are utterly perplexed, unable to fathom how the vehicle got there, or what the people who got it there were doing. In the past, Walt's ability to use ordinary chemicals to upset the conventional wisdom of methamphetamine production or to defend himself from the industry's worst thugs was a wonderful, dark joke—in the immortal words of Walt's partner Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), "Yeah, Mr. White! Yeah, science!" But as Walt's motivations have grown darker, things like that unnaturally positioned truck suggest that he is disturbing forces both moral and natural.

The more mundane images have an eerie power to them, too. Hank, investigating the fire at the warehouse where Jesse and Walt used to cook, dons the kind of protective gear that his unknown antagonists wore at their work. It's striking to see Hank take on the mantle of Walt's twisted office in pursuit of the man he doesn't know is his brother-in-law. If one of the themes of this season becomes Hank closing in on Walt, it will be as if he who wears the protective breathing apparatus holds the power.

Walt can even turn breakfast food ominous, neatly stacking his bacon on a diner plate, ripping it in half, and rearranging it into a "52" to mark his birthday, an image that calls back to our first introduction to Mr. White, and that also happens to evoke a skull. Maybe as Walt's become more and more an image of the evil he's embraced, with the tight flesh on his shaved head showing the outlines of his cranium, he can't help seeing death's heads everywhere.

"What is it like launching your career by stepping on the throat of someone else's marriage?" Elaine Barrish (Sigourney Weaver), the former First Lady, now the Secretary of State, asks columnist Susan Berg (Carla Gugino), when the two women meet for tea in an early scene of USA Network's Political Animals. Later she adds, "No Pulitzers to speak of since, though." It would be a sharp jab in any circumstances, but the scene's particularly delicious because it's a kind of alternate history. Political Animals has no intention of disguising that Elaine is a stand-in for Hillary Clinton, and Susan represents Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist who made her name covering Bill Clinton's infidelities. Watching them throw barbs at each other—and eventually work toward a collaborative detente—is a satisfying, sudsy thought experiment about the interaction of power and emotion in Washington.

Political Animals is the rare show that genuinely seems to love powerful women, letting them look good and sound smart, and giving their lives complexity and texture without any need to humiliate them to make them more relatable. The pleasure Political Animals takes in letting its actresses go at each other on big issues is particularly remarkable when contrasted with two recently debuted HBO shows that have premiered in recent months: The Newsroom, which turns women into ditzy functionaries for powerful men, and Veep, a brittle office comedy that just happens to be set among a highly dysfunctional Vice Presidential staff.

Political Animals's Elaine is brilliant and competent, and one of the pleasures of the show comes from seeing her as a version of Hillary Clinton who is tougher on her Bill (here called Bud, and played with a thick coat of oil by Ciaran Hinds) than in real life. "I know, given your epic levels of narcissism, that it's impossible for you to fathom this loss has nothing to do with you, but imagine for a moment that it doesn't," Elaine tells the husband she's about to kick to the curb in the pilot episode, after she concedes her run for the presidency. "The country loves you, Bud. They will always love you. It's me they have mixed feelings about."

MORE ON TELEVISION

Breaking Bad Could Beat the Curse of the Failed Final Season

10 TV Shows to Watch This Summer

Each Episode of Futurama Takes at Least a Year to Make

The Wire, a Decade Later

The Future of Video Games Could Look a Lot Like Television

The Pretentious Condescension of The Newsroom

By contrast Selina Meyer, the vice president in Veep, is a disaster: Michael Scott in more expensive shoes and a bigger office. She doesn't clash with powerful men: She's barely in the room with any of them, yearning after a call from the president that never comes, childishly excited when she gets a short chance to stand in for him, getting groped by a prominent dead Senator. The joke is supposed to be Selina and Washington's collective dysfunctionality, but even in Washington, it's hard to believe people this silly would rise this far.

And Elaine isn't the only woman Political Animals likes and respects. The show also has Susan, the columnist. The events of the series kick off when Susan leverages a promise not to publish a damaging story about Elaine's son TJ (Sebastian Stan), who was outed while a teenager in the White House and remains vulnerable. In exchange for keeping quiet, Elaine lets Susan shadow her during a weekend when her younger son, Douglas (James Wolk), is celebrating his engagement—and the first time Susan and Bud will have spent together since their divorce. The weekend takes on new significance when Iran detains four American-born journalists working in the country, convicts them in a show trial, and threatens to execute them, leaving Elaine to balance reading the regime's intentions and meeting her family's needs.

Political Animals is concerned with Susan's success and her navigation of her ethics and attempts to build a new relationship with Elaine, who hated Susan's White House coverage. That's not an easy task. "I always thought you were a lesbian," Elaine's mother tells Susan venomously when Susan arrives for her first dinner with the family. "But you sure know how to throw yourself together. Unlike my daughter. But then, she has strength of character. And you're just a rotten little thing who makes a living saying really smart, really nasty things about people." And she's facing competition at work from Georgia, an up-and-coming blogger. Unlike other shows and movies that treat bloggers as if they're mysterious creatures, Political Animals lays out Susan and Georgia's professional differences over which types of content are important, and when it's worth blowing up relationships with sources. The conversations between women can be bruising and mean, but they're not catfights: They come from genuine hurts and serious differences.

The women of Political Animals have interests and ambitions of their own, unlike those on The Newsroom. MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), the ostensibly hypercompetent producer and veteran war correspondent, divides her time between getting hysterical when a colleague thinks her boss and ex-boyfriend cheated on her and giving rudimentary journalism lectures. Maggie (Alison Pill) spends more time vacillating between her current boyfriend and her future one than developing her career.

Political Animals lets its women have weaknesses, too. It just doesn't turn them into shrieking jello when faced with something difficult. The show explores the characters' vulnerabilities most compellingly when it wades into the debate about work-life balance discussed in Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic cover story. While the Clintons only had to contend with the public treatment of Chelsea, Political Animals doubles the size of the Barrish family and ups the complications of their problems. Elaine has to navigate Bud's sexpot actress girlfriend—her body, as Bud's agent points out, is insured so if "She gets hit by a car, or a piano falls on her boobs, she's covered." She also has to deal with TJ's efforts to build a life and career for himself after a stint in rehab, and planning Douglas's engagement party. "We're having 300 people at the zoo because your mother likes elephants!" his fiancee complains. It's a lot, and Political Animals strikes precisely the right balance between illustrating the challenge and letting Elaine struggle with and shine in difficulty.

Veep's got no real interests in such questions. Selina is divorced, and unlike Elaine, doesn't seem to have much of a relationship with her ex-husband. Her daughter is an independent adult whose biggest need is a little time with her mother. And when the show raised the prospect of Selina becoming pregnant by her boyfriend, the show scuttled away from the possibility with a convenient miscarriage.

"Just once, I would like to accomplish something in this city without having to spend all my energy navigating the short-sighted, selfish, self-involved and oh-so-fragile male egoes that suck up all the oxygen in this town," Elaine says at one point, exasperated, by the posturing she's having to wade through. Political Animals feels like the kind of show we could have more often if her fantasy played out in Hollywood instead of Washington.

"What is it like launching your career by stepping on the throat of someone else's marriage?" Elaine Barrish (Sigourney Weaver), the former First Lady, now the Secretary of State, asks columnist Susan Berg (Carla Gugino), when the two women meet for tea in an early scene of USA Network's Political Animals. Later she adds, "No Pulitzers to speak of since, though." It would be a sharp jab in any circumstances, but the scene's particularly delicious because it's a kind of alternate history. Political Animals has no intention of disguising that Elaine is a stand-in for Hillary Clinton, and Susan represents Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist who made her name covering Bill Clinton's infidelities. Watching them throw barbs at each other—and eventually work toward a collaborative detente—is a satisfying, sudsy thought experiment about the interaction of power and emotion in Washington.

Political Animals is the rare show that genuinely seems to love powerful women, letting them look good and sound smart, and giving their lives complexity and texture without any need to humiliate them to make them more relatable. The pleasure Political Animals takes in letting its actresses go at each other on big issues is particularly remarkable when contrasted with two recently debuted HBO shows that have premiered in recent months: The Newsroom, which turns women into ditzy functionaries for powerful men, and Veep, a brittle office comedy that just happens to be set among a highly dysfunctional Vice Presidential staff.

Political Animals's Elaine is brilliant and competent, and one of the pleasures of the show comes from seeing her as a version of Hillary Clinton who is tougher on her Bill (here called Bud, and played with a thick coat of oil by Ciaran Hinds) than in real life. "I know, given your epic levels of narcissism, that it's impossible for you to fathom this loss has nothing to do with you, but imagine for a moment that it doesn't," Elaine tells the husband she's about to kick to the curb in the pilot episode, after she concedes her run for the presidency. "The country loves you, Bud. They will always love you. It's me they have mixed feelings about."

MORE ON TELEVISION

Breaking Bad Could Beat the Curse of the Failed Final Season

10 TV Shows to Watch This Summer

Each Episode of Futurama Takes at Least a Year to Make

The Wire, a Decade Later

The Future of Video Games Could Look a Lot Like Television

The Pretentious Condescension of The Newsroom

By contrast Selina Meyer, the vice president in Veep, is a disaster: Michael Scott in more expensive shoes and a bigger office. She doesn't clash with powerful men: She's barely in the room with any of them, yearning after a call from the president that never comes, childishly excited when she gets a short chance to stand in for him, getting groped by a prominent dead Senator. The joke is supposed to be Selina and Washington's collective dysfunctionality, but even in Washington, it's hard to believe people this silly would rise this far.

And Elaine isn't the only woman Political Animals likes and respects. The show also has Susan, the columnist. The events of the series kick off when Susan leverages a promise not to publish a damaging story about Elaine's son TJ (Sebastian Stan), who was outed while a teenager in the White House and remains vulnerable. In exchange for keeping quiet, Elaine lets Susan shadow her during a weekend when her younger son, Douglas (James Wolk), is celebrating his engagement—and the first time Susan and Bud will have spent together since their divorce. The weekend takes on new significance when Iran detains four American-born journalists working in the country, convicts them in a show trial, and threatens to execute them, leaving Elaine to balance reading the regime's intentions and meeting her family's needs.

Political Animals is concerned with Susan's success and her navigation of her ethics and attempts to build a new relationship with Elaine, who hated Susan's White House coverage. That's not an easy task. "I always thought you were a lesbian," Elaine's mother tells Susan venomously when Susan arrives for her first dinner with the family. "But you sure know how to throw yourself together. Unlike my daughter. But then, she has strength of character. And you're just a rotten little thing who makes a living saying really smart, really nasty things about people." And she's facing competition at work from Georgia, an up-and-coming blogger. Unlike other shows and movies that treat bloggers as if they're mysterious creatures, Political Animals lays out Susan and Georgia's professional differences over which types of content are important, and when it's worth blowing up relationships with sources. The conversations between women can be bruising and mean, but they're not catfights: They come from genuine hurts and serious differences.

The women of Political Animals have interests and ambitions of their own, unlike those on The Newsroom. MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), the ostensibly hypercompetent producer and veteran war correspondent, divides her time between getting hysterical when a colleague thinks her boss and ex-boyfriend cheated on her and giving rudimentary journalism lectures. Maggie (Alison Pill) spends more time vacillating between her current boyfriend and her future one than developing her career.

Political Animals lets its women have weaknesses, too. It just doesn't turn them into shrieking jello when faced with something difficult. The show explores the characters' vulnerabilities most compellingly when it wades into the debate about work-life balance discussed in Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic cover story. While the Clintons only had to contend with the public treatment of Chelsea, Political Animals doubles the size of the Barrish family and ups the complications of their problems. Elaine has to navigate Bud's sexpot actress girlfriend—her body, as Bud's agent points out, is insured so if "She gets hit by a car, or a piano falls on her boobs, she's covered." She also has to deal with TJ's efforts to build a life and career for himself after a stint in rehab, and planning Douglas's engagement party. "We're having 300 people at the zoo because your mother likes elephants!" his fiancee complains. It's a lot, and Political Animals strikes precisely the right balance between illustrating the challenge and letting Elaine struggle with and shine in difficulty.

Veep's got no real interests in such questions. Selina is divorced, and unlike Elaine, doesn't seem to have much of a relationship with her ex-husband. Her daughter is an independent adult whose biggest need is a little time with her mother. And when the show raised the prospect of Selina becoming pregnant by her boyfriend, the show scuttled away from the possibility with a convenient miscarriage.

"Just once, I would like to accomplish something in this city without having to spend all my energy navigating the short-sighted, selfish, self-involved and oh-so-fragile male egoes that suck up all the oxygen in this town," Elaine says at one point, exasperated, by the posturing she's having to wade through. Political Animals feels like the kind of show we could have more often if her fantasy played out in Hollywood instead of Washington.

The trailer didn't lie: Magic Mike, Steven Soderbergh's male-stripper movie based on the real-life experiences of his star, Channing Tatum, is a perfect film for bachelorette parties. Tatum as a Tampa stripper, Alex Pettyfer as the young man he recruits to join his crew, Matthew McConaughey as a club-owner, and Matt Bomer and Joe Manganiello as members of their ensemble, are better on the eyes than any real-life All-Male Revue.

But for all the fun as it's possible to have with Magic Mike, the movie has a serious subject: the recession. These strippers are marginally employed men trying to move up the economic ladder in a state with the second-highest foreclosure rate in the country, and their struggles show how financial need leads people to deceive each another—and, more importantly, themselves.

Unlike most stripper movies, this is a world where the nastiness happens off-stage, not on it.

At the work site, Mike meets Adam (Pettyfer), whose forfeited football scholarship ended his chance at college. He's trying aimlessly to break into construction, or cell phone sales, or anything that will keep his conscientious sister Brooke (a lovely Cody Horn) from nagging him. Brooke's boyfriend, lording his importance as an insurance adjuster over his date and her brother, brags of his toughness with his clients: "I just have to be the guy who has to tell them they don't get to rebuild their houses," with a strange kind of pride—he's the guy enforcing an end to the American dream. When Mike takes Adam for a night out on Tampa's club scene and tells him that he needs to lose the tennis shoes he wore to the construction site, Adam explains, "These are the only shoes I have." That small glimpse of pitifulness convinces Mike to "adopt" Adam. He takes him to a bar to see how girls respond, then throws him on the stage at the strip club where he works. Adam instantly becomes a star.

Mike and his friends have a vague idea of what economic success looks like. Dallas, the club-owner played by McConaughey, dreams of having children whom he can force to watch Jim Cramer's Mad Money. Mike dons glasses for a meeting with a bank officer about a small-business loan. But they're naive about the obstacles that face them. When the loan officer tells Mike his credit score is unacceptably low, he pushes a pile of cash at her, asking "Does this look distressed?" And as Tatum's considerable charm falters, he slips into one of the many new modes he's shown this year in movies from The Vow to 21 Jump Street, telling her bitterly, "I read the papers. The only thing that's distressed is y'all."

Stripping turns out to be an unreliable means to success. When Adam, giddy from his first night on stage, starts handing money to Dallas as part of his cut, Dallas tells him magnanimously, "Every man keeps every dollar he makes on that stage. Plus the 50 that I owe you." But later in the movie, when Mike finds out that Dallas has given Adam a partnership in a new club he plans to open in Miami—and slashed the share Mike was promised—Dallas is quick to remind Mike of the limits to his value. "You are worth the cash you pry out of their purses, and you know that better than anyone," Dallas says.

MORE ON MOVIES

The Death of Big-Budget Comedies?

Woody Allen Has Officially Lost It

Does It Matter If the Heroine of 'Brave' Is Gay?

I Babysat the 'Moonrise Kingdom' Kid

Our Picks for Which Film to Catch, Each Week of Summer

But the movie gains subtle depth when Mike begins questioning whether stripping is the transitional enterprise he's always told himself it is, and whether it can actually get him where he wants to go. Dallas cuts Mike's equity percentage in the new club. Joanna (a surprisingly good Olivia Munn), an occasional lover of Mike's who we later find out met him while doing research towards her psychology degree, loses interest as Mike turns introspective. "You don't need to talk," she tells him. "Just look pretty."

And Mike finds himself drawn to Brooke, a quietly moral (though never prudish) woman repelled by Mike's self-deception more than his profession, even as she tells him that when Adam told her he was stripping, "I was hoping this was a joke." He confesses, "It is pretty funny." Their flirtation follows a pattern: Brooke voicing skepticism of Mike's plans or objections to Mike and Adam's stripping, and Mike making light of her concerns. When she asks him to remember the people who live their lives during the day, Mike jokes, "So you're not a vampire? This isn't going to work at all."

But when tragedy strikes them, Mike has no real defense. Brooke eviscerates his delusions, shouting at him, "I see you. I fucking see you." He's wearing baggy sweatpants instead of a thong, and in that moment he's never been more naked.

The trailer didn't lie: Magic Mike, Steven Soderbergh's male-stripper movie based on the real-life experiences of his star, Channing Tatum, is a perfect film for bachelorette parties. Tatum as a Tampa stripper, Alex Pettyfer as the young man he recruits to join his crew, Matthew McConaughey as a club-owner, and Matt Bomer and Joe Manganiello as members of their ensemble, are better on the eyes than any real-life All-Male Revue.

But for all the fun as it's possible to have with Magic Mike, the movie has a serious subject: the recession. These strippers are marginally employed men trying to move up the economic ladder in a state with the second-highest foreclosure rate in the country, and their struggles show how financial need leads people to deceive each another—and, more importantly, themselves.

Unlike most stripper movies, this is a world where the nastiness happens off-stage, not on it.

At the work site, Mike meets Adam (Pettyfer), whose forfeited football scholarship ended his chance at college. He's trying aimlessly to break into construction, or cell phone sales, or anything that will keep his conscientious sister Brooke (a lovely Cody Horn) from nagging him. Brooke's boyfriend, lording his importance as an insurance adjuster over his date and her brother, brags of his toughness with his clients: "I just have to be the guy who has to tell them they don't get to rebuild their houses," with a strange kind of pride—he's the guy enforcing an end to the American dream. When Mike takes Adam for a night out on Tampa's club scene and tells him that he needs to lose the tennis shoes he wore to the construction site, Adam explains, "These are the only shoes I have." That small glimpse of pitifulness convinces Mike to "adopt" Adam. He takes him to a bar to see how girls respond, then throws him on the stage at the strip club where he works. Adam instantly becomes a star.

Mike and his friends have a vague idea of what economic success looks like. Dallas, the club-owner played by McConaughey, dreams of having children whom he can force to watch Jim Cramer's Mad Money. Mike dons glasses for a meeting with a bank officer about a small-business loan. But they're naive about the obstacles that face them. When the loan officer tells Mike his credit score is unacceptably low, he pushes a pile of cash at her, asking "Does this look distressed?" And as Tatum's considerable charm falters, he slips into one of the many new modes he's shown this year in movies from The Vow to 21 Jump Street, telling her bitterly, "I read the papers. The only thing that's distressed is y'all."

Stripping turns out to be an unreliable means to success. When Adam, giddy from his first night on stage, starts handing money to Dallas as part of his cut, Dallas tells him magnanimously, "Every man keeps every dollar he makes on that stage. Plus the 50 that I owe you." But later in the movie, when Mike finds out that Dallas has given Adam a partnership in a new club he plans to open in Miami—and slashed the share Mike was promised—Dallas is quick to remind Mike of the limits to his value. "You are worth the cash you pry out of their purses, and you know that better than anyone," Dallas says.

MORE ON MOVIES

The Death of Big-Budget Comedies?

Woody Allen Has Officially Lost It

Does It Matter If the Heroine of 'Brave' Is Gay?

I Babysat the 'Moonrise Kingdom' Kid

Our Picks for Which Film to Catch, Each Week of Summer

But the movie gains subtle depth when Mike begins questioning whether stripping is the transitional enterprise he's always told himself it is, and whether it can actually get him where he wants to go. Dallas cuts Mike's equity percentage in the new club. Joanna (a surprisingly good Olivia Munn), an occasional lover of Mike's who we later find out met him while doing research towards her psychology degree, loses interest as Mike turns introspective. "You don't need to talk," she tells him. "Just look pretty."

And Mike finds himself drawn to Brooke, a quietly moral (though never prudish) woman repelled by Mike's self-deception more than his profession, even as she tells him that when Adam told her he was stripping, "I was hoping this was a joke." He confesses, "It is pretty funny." Their flirtation follows a pattern: Brooke voicing skepticism of Mike's plans or objections to Mike and Adam's stripping, and Mike making light of her concerns. When she asks him to remember the people who live their lives during the day, Mike jokes, "So you're not a vampire? This isn't going to work at all."

But when tragedy strikes them, Mike has no real defense. Brooke eviscerates his delusions, shouting at him, "I see you. I fucking see you." He's wearing baggy sweatpants instead of a thong, and in that moment he's never been more naked.

There is no greater illustration of the gap between television's artistic ambitions and its supposed commercial realities than the new Thursday night comedy lineup on FX. Starting this week the network juxtaposes the premiere of Charlie Sheen's new, loose sitcom adaptation of the Adam Sandler franchise Anger Management with the third season of Louis C.K.'s astonishingly original comedy, Louie.

The Charlie Sheen business has been very valuable for FX in the past: The network has relied heavily on syndication of Two and a Half Men to bolster its investments in original programming since 2010. Anger Management, if it succeeds—and it seems it may, given the strong initial ad sales for the program—and reaches the number of episodes at which it could be sold in syndication to another network, the show would provide a nice financial base to the network. However crude the decision to hire a man with a long history of violence against women and addiction issues that lead him into wildly unprofessional meltdowns may be, the numbers behind it are clearly alluring to FX.

Sheen's take does not elevate the material. He plays Charlie Goodson, a minor league baseball player who becomes a therapist after his explosive anger derails his athletic career. The sets where Charlie holds his therapy groups, raises his daughter, and romances women look so cheap it's like FX was trying to maximize profit up front. The characters who populate Goodson's therapy groups are cast-offs from decades-old shows: an effeminate gay man named Patrick, a bitter and homophobic Vietnam veteran named Ed, Lacey, a hot chick with no identifiable personality traits other than a violent hatred of men, and Nolan, a passive beta male attracted to angry people who mostly serves as a contrast to Charlie's sexual and professional success. In one scene, we're meant to think that Charlie is progressive because he makes Ed put a dollar in a jar for every time he uses the word "queer" in-session, but in another, he serves up prison rape jokes about gay men as if they're uproarious.

MORE ON TELEVISION

TV Loves to Give Stars a Second (or Third) Chance

10 TV Shows to Watch This Summer

Each Episode of Futurama Takes at Least a Year to Make

The Wire, a Decade Later

The Future of Video Games Could Look a Lot Like Television

The Pretentious Condescension of The Newsroom

And then there are the women. Anger Management's women and Charlie's relationships with them are meant to be one of the artistic selling points of the show. FX President John Landgraf told me in a January interview that "Part of what the show is about, frankly, is a kind of comeuppance. For example, he has a teenaged daughter, he has an ex-wife, his ex-wife has questionable tastes in men, and he was the first of her questionable tastes in men. But now, as a co-parent, he has to deal with a series of men in his 13-year-old daughter's life." A show in which Charlie Sheen explored his relationships with women--from his fondness for prostitutes, to the fiancee he accidentally shot, to the ex-wife who obtained a restraining order against him--would be riveting television that would fit in well with FX's deep examinations of masculinity, violence, and sex. Anger Management is not that show.

Jennifer (Shawnee Smith), Charlie's ex-wife, reacts with great amiability to the news that he cheated on her in a prior life, and to the parade of unstable women he marches through their anxious daughter Sam's (Daniela Bobadilla) life. Kate (Selma Blair), is Charlie's fuck buddy, best friend, and therapist, the kind of woman who apparently loves to be told, "You're the best kind of friend, you know. No attachments whatsoever," and "If you're just going to stand there and drink beer and criticize me, you could at least take off your top." And the second episode of Anger Management is one of the ugliest things I've ever seen on television, an entire half-hour dedicated to mocking an unattractive woman for having the temerity to think that Charlie would be attracted to her.

Far from forcing him to reevaluate his relationships with them, the women in Anger Management are around to fulfill Charlie's needs, from sex to child care, perfectly. In the world of the show, Charlie's anger did damage only to himself, when he busted his own knee trying to break a bat after being heckled by fans at a game. If Anger Management was meant to be an artistic engagement with Sheen's own past, it would have to actually address his responsibility for the ways he's hurt other people, and to confront the fact that women exist for some reason other than to cater to his whims.

The treatment of actresses like Blair is a perfect point of contrast between Anger Management and Louie, a show that continues to grow and evolve in exciting new directions. Where Anger Management uses Blair to satisfy Charlie's needs, Louie casts Melissa Leo and Parker Posey, among other actresses, as grown women whose identities present serious challenges to Louie's sense of the world and of himself. Leo's character directly questions, in a funny and obscene sequence, Louie's willingness to accept a blowjob, but his total lack of desire to reciprocate. Posey's character drags him on an adventurous night around New York City that tests his desire for ease rather than connection.

In previous seasons of the show, Louie had a schtick where Louie interacts with younger, very attractive women with different worldviews than his own and tries to relate to them, as when he spent an evening with an abstinence advocate or charmed a professional cheerleader on a USO tour in Afghanistan. It was a device that let him communicate his openness to the world, but that also fell into a familiar trap of pairing middle-aged Louie with much more attractive, younger sparring (if not sexual) partners. This year, C.K. is paired up with equals, including a gay man who gives him a tour of Miami and challenges Louie's sexual comfort in ways the show has explored only fleetingly in previous episodes, and the show is richer, and weirder for it.

Much of the early third season of Louie feels, even more than usual, like an exploration of what it means to try to seize and transform one's life in middle age. "You get 45 miles to the gallon," a salesman tells Louie when he wanders into a motorcycle shop in a fit of crisis. "So it's actually smart to buy a motorcycle!" Louie says, charmed by the sudden appearance of a practical reason to make an impractical decision. He loves who his children are becoming, and shares a joke his daughter Jane told him with an audience at one of his performances. He explains that it kicks off with the line, "'Who didn't let the gorilla into the ballet?' And she said, 'Just the people who are in charge of that decision. Their judgement was that it wasn't a good idea to let him in.'..The whole story's in my head of people going into the ballet theater, and the gorilla with his head down, trying to text and not be noticed." Louie is relating not just the joke, but his pleasure that his daughter has grown up into an independent person who is creative in ways he never could have been himself, but that he admires not just as her father, but as a comedian.

By this point, FX doesn't really need to make an effort to sell Louie: It's an established critical hit, if not a vast generator of revenue for the network. But there's something particularly sad about seeing FX put so much energy into trying to sell the American viewing public a bland, ugly sitcom that would have been rejected by even its most milquetoast competitors, while Louis C.K. is making personally and artistically transformative television on a much lower budget, one time slot over.

There is no greater illustration of the gap between television's artistic ambitions and its supposed commercial realities than the new Thursday night comedy lineup on FX. Starting this week the network juxtaposes the premiere of Charlie Sheen's new, loose sitcom adaptation of the Adam Sandler franchise Anger Management with the third season of Louis C.K.'s astonishingly original comedy, Louie.

The Charlie Sheen business has been very valuable for FX in the past: The network has relied heavily on syndication of Two and a Half Men to bolster its investments in original programming since 2010. Anger Management, if it succeeds—and it seems it may, given the strong initial ad sales for the program—and reaches the number of episodes at which it could be sold in syndication to another network, the show would provide a nice financial base to the network. However crude the decision to hire a man with a long history of violence against women and addiction issues that lead him into wildly unprofessional meltdowns may be, the numbers behind it are clearly alluring to FX.

Sheen's take does not elevate the material. He plays Charlie Goodson, a minor league baseball player who becomes a therapist after his explosive anger derails his athletic career. The sets where Charlie holds his therapy groups, raises his daughter, and romances women look so cheap it's like FX was trying to maximize profit up front. The characters who populate Goodson's therapy groups are cast-offs from decades-old shows: an effeminate gay man named Patrick, a bitter and homophobic Vietnam veteran named Ed, Lacey, a hot chick with no identifiable personality traits other than a violent hatred of men, and Nolan, a passive beta male attracted to angry people who mostly serves as a contrast to Charlie's sexual and professional success. In one scene, we're meant to think that Charlie is progressive because he makes Ed put a dollar in a jar for every time he uses the word "queer" in-session, but in another, he serves up prison rape jokes about gay men as if they're uproarious.

MORE ON TELEVISION

TV Loves to Give Stars a Second (or Third) Chance

10 TV Shows to Watch This Summer

Each Episode of Futurama Takes at Least a Year to Make

The Wire, a Decade Later

The Future of Video Games Could Look a Lot Like Television

The Pretentious Condescension of The Newsroom

And then there are the women. Anger Management's women and Charlie's relationships with them are meant to be one of the artistic selling points of the show. FX President John Landgraf told me in a January interview that "Part of what the show is about, frankly, is a kind of comeuppance. For example, he has a teenaged daughter, he has an ex-wife, his ex-wife has questionable tastes in men, and he was the first of her questionable tastes in men. But now, as a co-parent, he has to deal with a series of men in his 13-year-old daughter's life." A show in which Charlie Sheen explored his relationships with women--from his fondness for prostitutes, to the fiancee he accidentally shot, to the ex-wife who obtained a restraining order against him--would be riveting television that would fit in well with FX's deep examinations of masculinity, violence, and sex. Anger Management is not that show.

Jennifer (Shawnee Smith), Charlie's ex-wife, reacts with great amiability to the news that he cheated on her in a prior life, and to the parade of unstable women he marches through their anxious daughter Sam's (Daniela Bobadilla) life. Kate (Selma Blair), is Charlie's fuck buddy, best friend, and therapist, the kind of woman who apparently loves to be told, "You're the best kind of friend, you know. No attachments whatsoever," and "If you're just going to stand there and drink beer and criticize me, you could at least take off your top." And the second episode of Anger Management is one of the ugliest things I've ever seen on television, an entire half-hour dedicated to mocking an unattractive woman for having the temerity to think that Charlie would be attracted to her.

Far from forcing him to reevaluate his relationships with them, the women in Anger Management are around to fulfill Charlie's needs, from sex to child care, perfectly. In the world of the show, Charlie's anger did damage only to himself, when he busted his own knee trying to break a bat after being heckled by fans at a game. If Anger Management was meant to be an artistic engagement with Sheen's own past, it would have to actually address his responsibility for the ways he's hurt other people, and to confront the fact that women exist for some reason other than to cater to his whims.

The treatment of actresses like Blair is a perfect point of contrast between Anger Management and Louie, a show that continues to grow and evolve in exciting new directions. Where Anger Management uses Blair to satisfy Charlie's needs, Louie casts Melissa Leo and Parker Posey, among other actresses, as grown women whose identities present serious challenges to Louie's sense of the world and of himself. Leo's character directly questions, in a funny and obscene sequence, Louie's willingness to accept a blowjob, but his total lack of desire to reciprocate. Posey's character drags him on an adventurous night around New York City that tests his desire for ease rather than connection.

In previous seasons of the show, Louie had a schtick where Louie interacts with younger, very attractive women with different worldviews than his own and tries to relate to them, as when he spent an evening with an abstinence advocate or charmed a professional cheerleader on a USO tour in Afghanistan. It was a device that let him communicate his openness to the world, but that also fell into a familiar trap of pairing middle-aged Louie with much more attractive, younger sparring (if not sexual) partners. This year, C.K. is paired up with equals, including a gay man who gives him a tour of Miami and challenges Louie's sexual comfort in ways the show has explored only fleetingly in previous episodes, and the show is richer, and weirder for it.

Much of the early third season of Louie feels, even more than usual, like an exploration of what it means to try to seize and transform one's life in middle age. "You get 45 miles to the gallon," a salesman tells Louie when he wanders into a motorcycle shop in a fit of crisis. "So it's actually smart to buy a motorcycle!" Louie says, charmed by the sudden appearance of a practical reason to make an impractical decision. He loves who his children are becoming, and shares a joke his daughter Jane told him with an audience at one of his performances. He explains that it kicks off with the line, "'Who didn't let the gorilla into the ballet?' And she said, 'Just the people who are in charge of that decision. Their judgement was that it wasn't a good idea to let him in.'..The whole story's in my head of people going into the ballet theater, and the gorilla with his head down, trying to text and not be noticed." Louie is relating not just the joke, but his pleasure that his daughter has grown up into an independent person who is creative in ways he never could have been himself, but that he admires not just as her father, but as a comedian.

By this point, FX doesn't really need to make an effort to sell Louie: It's an established critical hit, if not a vast generator of revenue for the network. But there's something particularly sad about seeing FX put so much energy into trying to sell the American viewing public a bland, ugly sitcom that would have been rejected by even its most milquetoast competitors, while Louis C.K. is making personally and artistically transformative television on a much lower budget, one time slot over.

"He's not going to look like an elite Northeastern prick?" a cameraman asks MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), a cable news executive producer, at the end of the first episode of The Newsroom. The "he" is Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), a formerly bland anchor who has blown up his reputation with a rant that was circulated on YouTube. "He is," MacKenzie acknowledges. "Let's make that sexy again."

Therein lies the problem with The Newsroom, a new HBO show by West Wing and Social Network writer-director Aaron Sorkin, which premieres Sunday at 10 pm. A series with great self-confidence but no discernibly unique ideas, The Newsroom is determined to dress up old models as the future of journalism, even as it blithely skates over the realities of the news business and the real work of reporting.

The Newsroom appears to operate on a hierarchy of condescension. At the top is executive Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston), who describes MacKenzie as if she's a fragile flower rather than an experienced war correspondent. He says, "She's mentally and physically exhausted...and she's been to way too many funerals for a girl her age. She wants to come home." Will, a notch below him, is unpleasant to everyone in sight, starting in the opening sequences, when he tells a college girl, "You are, without a doubt, the member of the worst period generation period ever period." (The show later validates Will's nastiness to her by making her seem spoiled and entitled: She sues her college for emotional distress.) Don (Thomas Sadoski), Will's soon-to-be-former executive producer, can't risk snarking on MacKenzie, his replacement, "She's like a sophomore poli-sci major at Sarah Lawrence." Jim, MacKenzie's deputy, snaps back: "She's exactly like that. I guess the only difference are her two Peabodies and the scar on her stomach from covering a Shiite protest in Islamabad."

Sorkin's characters are often accused of sounding alike. Here, what they have in common is a sense that they're superior to someone who hasn't submitted to their needs, wishes, and worldview.

At the bottom of this miserable totem pole is Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill), formerly an intern, promoted only recently to be Will's assistant, who is condescended to by everyone. "He didn't promote you, honey. He thought you were his assistant," Don, her negging nebbish of a boyfriend tells her at the beginning of the episode. Will, trying to prove he's attentive to his staff, insists that her name is Ellen. MacKenzie declares that Maggie is "me, before I grew into myself and got hotter with age!" And when Maggie volunteers for a reporting task, both Don and Jim treat Maggie like an idiot. "Can you do this? You can't just look it up on Wikipedia," Don tells her. "It's true, Maggie," warns Jim.

MORE ON TELEVISION

10 TV Shows to Watch This Summer

Each Episode of Futurama Takes at Least a Year to Make

The Wire, a Decade Later

The Future of Video Games Could Look a Lot Like Television

The TV Musical Is Dead

It might be nice if this felt like some sort of critique of the way powerful men in journalism ignore and fail to mentor young women, or of the grinding, low-paid jobs that people of both genders increasingly have to accept if they hope for a long-term future in the field. Part of journalism's problem, after all, is a generational one: Young reporters are being asked to do more, with less supervision and training, and for lower salaries. But the only salary or housing situation that's mentioned in the pilot is Jim's. Maggie feels soggy, rather than stifled—she tells flimsy lies to her parents to cover for Don, who is too commitment-phobic to go to dinner with them after dating Maggie for four months. And the show is too invested in establishing MacKenzie and Jim as heroes to make them recognize that their treatment of Maggie is unkind rather than charming.

It would be easier to overlook this persistent unpleasantness if The Newsroom had hard truths to utter about the state of American political discourse or piercing insights into the workings of cable news. But Sorkin seems unaware or unwilling to admit that quite a lot of people like polarized cable news. Fox & Friends, the conspiracy-theory peddling morning show with a Stanford-educated anchor who regularly plays dumb, is the highest-rated morning show on cable television. People have their own facts, something Will bemoans, not simply because his fellow anchors have fed them those alternate worldviews, but because cable news has found it profitable to cater to conspiracies and angers already well-entrenched among Americans. Suggesting that an abrasive Keith Olbermann clone—and no matter how much Sorkin protests, Will resembles no one so much as Sorkin's prior muse for Sports Night—can show the people a great light is simultaneously naively optimistic in its assessment of American television viewers and a kind of blinkered gesture of noblesse oblige.

And the show makes what perhaps will be a fatal mistake in having its crusading journalists cover recent news events. Sorkin told New York magazine, "I have no political sophistication or media sophistication, so if I was talking to Howard Kurtz or you, you could easily dismantle whatever argument I'm going to make." But having his characters re-report existing stories means The Newsroom is inevitably offering a critique of the work done by real journalists.

This is particularly grating given how poorly The Newsroom handles its first such rewriting of history, the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In Sorkin's version of history, Will's team breaks the whole story of the disaster wide open in a matter of hours. How? By caring where others don't, through personal connections to key sources, and because of magical knowledge the team's blogger gained through building an elementary school baking soda volcano. If the sequence is meant to suggest that publications could have moved faster by caring, it ignores that no one, anywhere, knew what caused the explosion for more than two days in part because the fires on the rig couldn't be extinguished, and that reporters were vigorously reporting out regulatory and corporate failures in the immediate aftermath of the story, but that it took time and Freedom of Information Act requests to break the stories. It's convenient, and partially true, to believe that failure of will and interest contributes to bad journalism in America. It's also wildly insulting to working journalists in all mediums to suggest that they don't want it enough.

And ultimately, Will's tone isn't very different from the ultra-liberal and the ultra-conservative who hissed and scratched and gave him a case of vertigo in the show's opening sequence. His producers praise him for aggression in interviews, regardless of what information he actually gets out of corporate flacks and beleaguered civil servants. Declaring, "You know why people don't like liberals? Because they lose" is not actually more insightful than a conservative commentator complaining about the National Endowment for the Arts because "I am not happy to pay for a painting I don't want to look at, poetry I don't want to read."

Will works at the Atlantis Cable Network, a name no doubt meant to suggest a lost remnant of a glorious age, or to underscore that in what Sorkin sees as a hopelessly blighted environment, a show of the kind Will and MacKenzie will build could only ever be a pleasant fiction. But if The Newsroom is Aaron Sorkin's vision for the future of news, I'm content to let it rest below the waves.

"He's not going to look like an elite Northeastern prick?" a cameraman asks MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), a cable news executive producer, at the end of the first episode of The Newsroom. The "he" is Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), a formerly bland anchor who has blown up his reputation with a rant that was circulated on YouTube. "He is," MacKenzie acknowledges. "Let's make that sexy again."

Therein lies the problem with The Newsroom, a new HBO show by West Wing and Social Network writer-director Aaron Sorkin, which premieres Sunday at 10 pm. A series with great self-confidence but no discernibly unique ideas, The Newsroom is determined to dress up old models as the future of journalism, even as it blithely skates over the realities of the news business and the real work of reporting.

The Newsroom appears to operate on a hierarchy of condescension. At the top is executive Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston), who describes MacKenzie as if she's a fragile flower rather than an experienced war correspondent. He says, "She's mentally and physically exhausted...and she's been to way too many funerals for a girl her age. She wants to come home." Will, a notch below him, is unpleasant to everyone in sight, starting in the opening sequences, when he tells a college girl, "You are, without a doubt, the member of the worst period generation period ever period." (The show later validates Will's nastiness to her by making her seem spoiled and entitled: She sues her college for emotional distress.) Don (Thomas Sadoski), Will's soon-to-be-former executive producer, can't risk snarking on MacKenzie, his replacement, "She's like a sophomore poli-sci major at Sarah Lawrence." Jim, MacKenzie's deputy, snaps back: "She's exactly like that. I guess the only difference are her two Peabodies and the scar on her stomach from covering a Shiite protest in Islamabad."

Sorkin's characters are often accused of sounding alike. Here, what they have in common is a sense that they're superior to someone who hasn't submitted to their needs, wishes, and worldview.

At the bottom of this miserable totem pole is Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill), formerly an intern, promoted only recently to be Will's assistant, who is condescended to by everyone. "He didn't promote you, honey. He thought you were his assistant," Don, her negging nebbish of a boyfriend tells her at the beginning of the episode. Will, trying to prove he's attentive to his staff, insists that her name is Ellen. MacKenzie declares that Maggie is "me, before I grew into myself and got hotter with age!" And when Maggie volunteers for a reporting task, both Don and Jim treat Maggie like an idiot. "Can you do this? You can't just look it up on Wikipedia," Don tells her. "It's true, Maggie," warns Jim.

MORE ON TELEVISION

10 TV Shows to Watch This Summer

Each Episode of Futurama Takes at Least a Year to Make

The Wire, a Decade Later

The Future of Video Games Could Look a Lot Like Television

The TV Musical Is Dead

It might be nice if this felt like some sort of critique of the way powerful men in journalism ignore and fail to mentor young women, or of the grinding, low-paid jobs that people of both genders increasingly have to accept if they hope for a long-term future in the field. Part of journalism's problem, after all, is a generational one: Young reporters are being asked to do more, with less supervision and training, and for lower salaries. But the only salary or housing situation that's mentioned in the pilot is Jim's. Maggie feels soggy, rather than stifled—she tells flimsy lies to her parents to cover for Don, who is too commitment-phobic to go to dinner with them after dating Maggie for four months. And the show is too invested in establishing MacKenzie and Jim as heroes to make them recognize that their treatment of Maggie is unkind rather than charming.

It would be easier to overlook this persistent unpleasantness if The Newsroom had hard truths to utter about the state of American political discourse or piercing insights into the workings of cable news. But Sorkin seems unaware or unwilling to admit that quite a lot of people like polarized cable news. Fox & Friends, the conspiracy-theory peddling morning show with a Stanford-educated anchor who regularly plays dumb, is the highest-rated morning show on cable television. People have their own facts, something Will bemoans, not simply because his fellow anchors have fed them those alternate worldviews, but because cable news has found it profitable to cater to conspiracies and angers already well-entrenched among Americans. Suggesting that an abrasive Keith Olbermann clone—and no matter how much Sorkin protests, Will resembles no one so much as Sorkin's prior muse for Sports Night—can show the people a great light is simultaneously naively optimistic in its assessment of American television viewers and a kind of blinkered gesture of noblesse oblige.

And the show makes what perhaps will be a fatal mistake in having its crusading journalists cover recent news events. Sorkin told New York magazine, "I have no political sophistication or media sophistication, so if I was talking to Howard Kurtz or you, you could easily dismantle whatever argument I'm going to make." But having his characters re-report existing stories means The Newsroom is inevitably offering a critique of the work done by real journalists.

This is particularly grating given how poorly The Newsroom handles its first such rewriting of history, the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In Sorkin's version of history, Will's team breaks the whole story of the disaster wide open in a matter of hours. How? By caring where others don't, through personal connections to key sources, and because of magical knowledge the team's blogger gained through building an elementary school baking soda volcano. If the sequence is meant to suggest that publications could have moved faster by caring, it ignores that no one, anywhere, knew what caused the explosion for more than two days in part because the fires on the rig couldn't be extinguished, and that reporters were vigorously reporting out regulatory and corporate failures in the immediate aftermath of the story, but that it took time and Freedom of Information Act requests to break the stories. It's convenient, and partially true, to believe that failure of will and interest contributes to bad journalism in America. It's also wildly insulting to working journalists in all mediums to suggest that they don't want it enough.

And ultimately, Will's tone isn't very different from the ultra-liberal and the ultra-conservative who hissed and scratched and gave him a case of vertigo in the show's opening sequence. His producers praise him for aggression in interviews, regardless of what information he actually gets out of corporate flacks and beleaguered civil servants. Declaring, "You know why people don't like liberals? Because they lose" is not actually more insightful than a conservative commentator complaining about the National Endowment for the Arts because "I am not happy to pay for a painting I don't want to look at, poetry I don't want to read."

Will works at the Atlantis Cable Network, a name no doubt meant to suggest a lost remnant of a glorious age, or to underscore that in what Sorkin sees as a hopelessly blighted environment, a show of the kind Will and MacKenzie will build could only ever be a pleasant fiction. But if The Newsroom is Aaron Sorkin's vision for the future of news, I'm content to let it rest below the waves.

This month saw the release of Shadow and Bone, the first novel in author Leigh Bardugo's trilogy about magicians in a world called Ravka with strong echoes of Tsarist Russia. Shadow and Bone follows the adventures of Alina and Mal, orphans raised and educated on a lord's estate who end up cannon fodder in the king's army. Their lives seem destined to be nasty, brutish, and short. But when they're sent to the border of a magical wasteland, Alina's magical powers—which she's tried to keep hidden so she won't be separated from Mal—manifest themselves, and she's spirited off to join the Grisha, the order of the king's magicians. There, Alina finds herself drawn to the mysterious Darkling, the head of the order, as she's educated in the Small Science, the Grisha magic that has its roots in chemistry and biology. We spoke with Bardugo about creating fantasy worlds that are based in real history, designing magical systems that make sense, and rehabilitating Rasputin.

How'd you decide to set the series in tsarist Russia? It's a great setting, darker in some ways than the medieval Europe where a lot of fairy tales are set, but it seems to be ignored by a lot of writers.

The first thing I should say is that it's not tsarist Russia—it's a world that's inspired by tsarist Russia. People seem to hear that there's a different cultural touchstone being used than Medieval England, and...they instantly go to alternate history. Even seeing the map and given all the things that are happening in it, they still seem to go to alternate Russia, which is a bit of a surprise to me. I knew I wanted to take readers someplace different. I love the standard fantasy setting of Medieval England and Medieval Europe, but I wanted to go somewhere different. I got into the world-building phase, I went to a used bookstore, and I was poking through old travel books and textbooks, and i came across this Russian imperial atlas. There was a cover with three men in fur hats next to a sledge in snow. I started flipping through it, and it had trade logs, and military campaigns, and shifting borders, and pretty much instantly I knew this was the right world for the book. There were already these fundamental issues, deep divisions in class, this ill-equipped army, this idea of an elite drawn from other countries and called upon to defend the country. That was all stuff, power dynamics that were already emerging in the narrative, and finding tsarist Russia as an inspiration helped to bring them into focus.

Alina has great magical power, but she's concealed it for much of her life, even though revealing it would have won her a better life. That sort of ambiguous attitude towards her abilities is something of a diversion from the standard fantasy narrative, where characters are usually excited to discover their powers. Talk me through her motivations.

I guess there's two things: One is that I wanted power to operate differently in this world. Power in superhero stories and in magic, when people use it, it drains them. It makes them more tired or it drains them. I wanted power to feed the people that used it. I wanted it to make the people who used it stronger, more powerful, and beautiful. That was one of the tents of being a Grisha. The message that I hope is at the heart of the book, the things that you fear most in yourself, that make you different, and that keep you from being like everyone else are also the things that give you power. Alina's greatest desire as an orphan and a refugee is to find someplace to belong. She doesn't want to leave her home behind, and her only home is with Mal. The story is really about her coming to accept that there are things more important than being accepted. She goes through a lot of transformations in the story. She has this makeover, but it doesn't take. When you are that deeply needy of other people's approval and love, that's not going to get you right with the world. What gets her right or gets her closer to right is being able to accept being powerful and that the path to power freaks people out. It's not something everyone is comfortable with, it makes her different.

MORE ON BOOKS

What's Missing From Oprah's Book Club 2.0

Does Reading Really Set Women Free?

Young-Adult Fiction for Smart Adults

From Harry Potter to Twilight, the Enduring Draw of Young Adult Fiction

I also love that you've got a religious mystic, an adviser to the royal family who's one of the more sympathetic figures at court. Are you trying to rehabilitate Rasputin?

I wanted to play with the idea...that when you abdicate power, when you give it to someone else, bad things happen. It doesn't matter if you give it to somebody good or somebody bad. The easy thing is with great power comes great responsibility. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there are a lot of ways to abdicate power. You can hide power, you can delegate it...One of the appeals of Rasputin is he has the answers. One of the appeals of the Darkling is he has the answers. These people turn to Alina because they want her to have the answers. It's a very compelling thing to look to someone else to lead. And I wouldn't say that I was trying in any way to rehabilitate Rasputin, who, frankly, given how hard it was to kill him, I wouldn't want to bring him back. But the Aparat is meant to evoke a lot of our suspicions and fears about the particular character. People who don't know anything about Russian history know that name.

The Small Science is also a nice metaphor for scientific progress and science fiction in general—here, it's magic, but it's a testament to the power scientists have at the moments of great leaps forward.

The idea for the Small Science came from my interest in what happens physically when you mutter a curse or wave a wand. What are we actually seeing? This sort of opaqueness occurs with most magic. That was sort of the first straw. I decided also that I wanted a magic that was highly constrained, because I wanted the advent of modern warfare to play a part in the story. What happens when you bring a gun to a magic fight?...If the magic is constrained, if the magic is bound by rules in a very specific system, things can get really interesting. The Grisha age is ending. Yes, they are more advanced, but they are wholly reliant on these particular skills. While the rest of the world is industrializing and creating things like repeating rifles, Ravka is falling behind.

It's a magical version of molecular chemistry. An Inferni can't just make flame come out of nowhere. They can summon combustible gases, but they still need a flint to create that initial spark. A Heartreader, the Corporalki doesn't just send a magical beam at your chest, they rupture blood vessels and crush your heart in your body without touching you. It's taking science and a loose interpretation of modern chemistry and making it magical.

When I created the Grisha, it was important that they be powerful but that they kind of represent the Jewish brain trust that developed before World War II and after World War II in the US. They're these very talented people that were drawn from all over the world and cast out of places, persecuted, put to death, put in camps. So they all ended up in this one place, and for better or for worse—I think for better—they developed weapons and became a kind of brainy fighting force for the Allied Powers. And that is not is something that is strongly referenced in the book but that was sort of always in my mind in the way that Grisha had been treated. That said, in books two and three, we're going to encounter some Grisha who had no interest in serving the Grisha or the Darkling and kind of went their own way.

So is the Darkling Robert Oppenheimer?

This is not a fully developed metaphor. This is not Russia. And as a Jew researching Russia, a lot of issues come up...there's a kind of fundamental alienation of reading Russian history as a Jew. And I didn't want to get heavily into that. You talked about religion in the context of the story, but I never get specifically into Christianity. That was really important to me. There is no Christ in this world. The religion that is in the world is much closer to the kind of pagan tradition that was in Russia pre-Christianity, and even that grew out of the influence of Christianity, but that couldn't tamp down these local mythologies.

Can you talk about the challenges of world-building in a time when people are constantly looking for analogues? In Game of Thrones, it's the War of the Roses, and people are constantly looking to see what lines up here. What does it take to build a world that's recognizable, but still achieves escape velocity from our own history?

That's interesting. I started out in the first phase of world-building really just looking for a sense of place, the ability to give people a texture and a grounding that would be real enough that would be transporting. Things creep their way into narrative. There were certain things that made their way into the narrative post-research...When I first wrote the book, the main characters had parents because I wanted to avoid the fantasy stereotype of the orphan. Then as I was doing my research, I read about all these men returning from the Napoleonic Wars, who for the first time were fighting beside their serfs, these men who worked their estates. They were staying up long nights around bonfires with them, and living under siege with them and watching them die. There's a story of a noble given a wooden icon by his serf, and it stopped a bullet, saved his life, and when he got home, he built hospitals and orphanages for his serfs. This was the root of what became the Decemberist result. I could not get this out of my head, I had to share it...it changed the whole dynamic of the story. Here are these two kids who have been elevated out of this brutal peasant existence but only slightly. They know how to read and write, but they're still they're cannon fodder, they're still headed for the king's army...I think those resonances with the real world are powerful, they make it interesting. But for some people, there's this feeling of "it's not alternate history" or "it's supposed to be alternate history."

Do you think the power comes from this idea of uncovering secret or lost histories?

I think it can be powerful. At least when I was a kid and a reader, I loved the feeling of wondering whether or not something was real, being able to look up connections. That's why the king's symbol is the Ravkan Double Eagle. That was the symbol of the Romanovs and that has resonance. It instantly places you in the feelings of a world, and you're walking a line between that and what people's expectations may be...I used very few Russian words, but the ones that I did use, I think of them as like little breadcrumbs. If you look them up, there's usually some additional meaning in them. I don't know if a reader will go out of their way to look for it, but if they want to, it's there. It's the kind of thing that I as a fantasy fan geek out over and am excited to be able to build into the story.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

This month saw the release of Shadow and Bone, the first novel in author Leigh Bardugo's trilogy about magicians in a world called Ravka with strong echoes of Tsarist Russia. Shadow and Bone follows the adventures of Alina and Mal, orphans raised and educated on a lord's estate who end up cannon fodder in the king's army. Their lives seem destined to be nasty, brutish, and short. But when they're sent to the border of a magical wasteland, Alina's magical powers—which she's tried to keep hidden so she won't be separated from Mal—manifest themselves, and she's spirited off to join the Grisha, the order of the king's magicians. There, Alina finds herself drawn to the mysterious Darkling, the head of the order, as she's educated in the Small Science, the Grisha magic that has its roots in chemistry and biology. We spoke with Bardugo about creating fantasy worlds that are based in real history, designing magical systems that make sense, and rehabilitating Rasputin.

How'd you decide to set the series in tsarist Russia? It's a great setting, darker in some ways than the medieval Europe where a lot of fairy tales are set, but it seems to be ignored by a lot of writers.

The first thing I should say is that it's not tsarist Russia—it's a world that's inspired by tsarist Russia. People seem to hear that there's a different cultural touchstone being used than Medieval England, and...they instantly go to alternate history. Even seeing the map and given all the things that are happening in it, they still seem to go to alternate Russia, which is a bit of a surprise to me. I knew I wanted to take readers someplace different. I love the standard fantasy setting of Medieval England and Medieval Europe, but I wanted to go somewhere different. I got into the world-building phase, I went to a used bookstore, and I was poking through old travel books and textbooks, and i came across this Russian imperial atlas. There was a cover with three men in fur hats next to a sledge in snow. I started flipping through it, and it had trade logs, and military campaigns, and shifting borders, and pretty much instantly I knew this was the right world for the book. There were already these fundamental issues, deep divisions in class, this ill-equipped army, this idea of an elite drawn from other countries and called upon to defend the country. That was all stuff, power dynamics that were already emerging in the narrative, and finding tsarist Russia as an inspiration helped to bring them into focus.

Alina has great magical power, but she's concealed it for much of her life, even though revealing it would have won her a better life. That sort of ambiguous attitude towards her abilities is something of a diversion from the standard fantasy narrative, where characters are usually excited to discover their powers. Talk me through her motivations.

I guess there's two things: One is that I wanted power to operate differently in this world. Power in superhero stories and in magic, when people use it, it drains them. It makes them more tired or it drains them. I wanted power to feed the people that used it. I wanted it to make the people who used it stronger, more powerful, and beautiful. That was one of the tents of being a Grisha. The message that I hope is at the heart of the book, the things that you fear most in yourself, that make you different, and that keep you from being like everyone else are also the things that give you power. Alina's greatest desire as an orphan and a refugee is to find someplace to belong. She doesn't want to leave her home behind, and her only home is with Mal. The story is really about her coming to accept that there are things more important than being accepted. She goes through a lot of transformations in the story. She has this makeover, but it doesn't take. When you are that deeply needy of other people's approval and love, that's not going to get you right with the world. What gets her right or gets her closer to right is being able to accept being powerful and that the path to power freaks people out. It's not something everyone is comfortable with, it makes her different.

MORE ON BOOKS

What's Missing From Oprah's Book Club 2.0

Does Reading Really Set Women Free?

Young-Adult Fiction for Smart Adults

From Harry Potter to Twilight, the Enduring Draw of Young Adult Fiction

I also love that you've got a religious mystic, an adviser to the royal family who's one of the more sympathetic figures at court. Are you trying to rehabilitate Rasputin?

I wanted to play with the idea...that when you abdicate power, when you give it to someone else, bad things happen. It doesn't matter if you give it to somebody good or somebody bad. The easy thing is with great power comes great responsibility. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there are a lot of ways to abdicate power. You can hide power, you can delegate it...One of the appeals of Rasputin is he has the answers. One of the appeals of the Darkling is he has the answers. These people turn to Alina because they want her to have the answers. It's a very compelling thing to look to someone else to lead. And I wouldn't say that I was trying in any way to rehabilitate Rasputin, who, frankly, given how hard it was to kill him, I wouldn't want to bring him back. But the Aparat is meant to evoke a lot of our suspicions and fears about the particular character. People who don't know anything about Russian history know that name.

The Small Science is also a nice metaphor for scientific progress and science fiction in general—here, it's magic, but it's a testament to the power scientists have at the moments of great leaps forward.

The idea for the Small Science came from my interest in what happens physically when you mutter a curse or wave a wand. What are we actually seeing? This sort of opaqueness occurs with most magic. That was sort of the first straw. I decided also that I wanted a magic that was highly constrained, because I wanted the advent of modern warfare to play a part in the story. What happens when you bring a gun to a magic fight?...If the magic is constrained, if the magic is bound by rules in a very specific system, things can get really interesting. The Grisha age is ending. Yes, they are more advanced, but they are wholly reliant on these particular skills. While the rest of the world is industrializing and creating things like repeating rifles, Ravka is falling behind.

It's a magical version of molecular chemistry. An Inferni can't just make flame come out of nowhere. They can summon combustible gases, but they still need a flint to create that initial spark. A Heartreader, the Corporalki doesn't just send a magical beam at your chest, they rupture blood vessels and crush your heart in your body without touching you. It's taking science and a loose interpretation of modern chemistry and making it magical.

When I created the Grisha, it was important that they be powerful but that they kind of represent the Jewish brain trust that developed before World War II and after World War II in the US. They're these very talented people that were drawn from all over the world and cast out of places, persecuted, put to death, put in camps. So they all ended up in this one place, and for better or for worse—I think for better—they developed weapons and became a kind of brainy fighting force for the Allied Powers. And that is not is something that is strongly referenced in the book but that was sort of always in my mind in the way that Grisha had been treated. That said, in books two and three, we're going to encounter some Grisha who had no interest in serving the Grisha or the Darkling and kind of went their own way.

So is the Darkling Robert Oppenheimer?

This is not a fully developed metaphor. This is not Russia. And as a Jew researching Russia, a lot of issues come up...there's a kind of fundamental alienation of reading Russian history as a Jew. And I didn't want to get heavily into that. You talked about religion in the context of the story, but I never get specifically into Christianity. That was really important to me. There is no Christ in this world. The religion that is in the world is much closer to the kind of pagan tradition that was in Russia pre-Christianity, and even that grew out of the influence of Christianity, but that couldn't tamp down these local mythologies.

Can you talk about the challenges of world-building in a time when people are constantly looking for analogues? In Game of Thrones, it's the War of the Roses, and people are constantly looking to see what lines up here. What does it take to build a world that's recognizable, but still achieves escape velocity from our own history?

That's interesting. I started out in the first phase of world-building really just looking for a sense of place, the ability to give people a texture and a grounding that would be real enough that would be transporting. Things creep their way into narrative. There were certain things that made their way into the narrative post-research...When I first wrote the book, the main characters had parents because I wanted to avoid the fantasy stereotype of the orphan. Then as I was doing my research, I read about all these men returning from the Napoleonic Wars, who for the first time were fighting beside their serfs, these men who worked their estates. They were staying up long nights around bonfires with them, and living under siege with them and watching them die. There's a story of a noble given a wooden icon by his serf, and it stopped a bullet, saved his life, and when he got home, he built hospitals and orphanages for his serfs. This was the root of what became the Decemberist result. I could not get this out of my head, I had to share it...it changed the whole dynamic of the story. Here are these two kids who have been elevated out of this brutal peasant existence but only slightly. They know how to read and write, but they're still they're cannon fodder, they're still headed for the king's army...I think those resonances with the real world are powerful, they make it interesting. But for some people, there's this feeling of "it's not alternate history" or "it's supposed to be alternate history."

Do you think the power comes from this idea of uncovering secret or lost histories?

I think it can be powerful. At least when I was a kid and a reader, I loved the feeling of wondering whether or not something was real, being able to look up connections. That's why the king's symbol is the Ravkan Double Eagle. That was the symbol of the Romanovs and that has resonance. It instantly places you in the feelings of a world, and you're walking a line between that and what people's expectations may be...I used very few Russian words, but the ones that I did use, I think of them as like little breadcrumbs. If you look them up, there's usually some additional meaning in them. I don't know if a reader will go out of their way to look for it, but if they want to, it's there. It's the kind of thing that I as a fantasy fan geek out over and am excited to be able to build into the story.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Most of the time, Hollywood seems confused about how to treat actors with disabilities. Movies and TV shows rely heavily on stories that focus on disabilities themselves rather than the people behind them. The most prominent disabled character on television, Glee's Artie, is played by the able-bodied actor Kevin McHale. And the show's played out a number of miracle-cure storylines for disabled people, from giving Artie mechanical legs that let him walk but that he never uses again, to first giving cheerleader Quinn a surprising recovery from a spinal cord injury and then having her manipulate other characters based on their sympathy for her. Disability is something to be overcome, rather than a vehicle to new perceptions and storytelling opportunities. Peter Dinklage, the actor with dwarfism who's had a critical and commercial breakout as Game of Thrones' acerbic Tyrion Lannister, is a landmark: a disabled person who is sexually desirable, self-confident, and gains, rather than loses, from his unique position. But he's more an exception to the representations of disabled people as saints or vehicles for others' self-improvement than a rule. When Snow White and the Huntsman wanted to cast its dwarves, the producers turned to actors of full stature like Ian McShane, Toby Jones, and Nick Frost, and digitally altered their bodies, rather than employing actors with dwarfism.

Into this confused environment comes the Sundance Channel's Push Girls, a reality show, premiering tonight, about four disabled women in Los Angeles. The show lives within familiar reality-show conventions: It displays attractive women navigating their friendships, relationships, and careers with a dose of producer-injected drama. But Push Girls also revitalizes the genre: The cleavage, flirtations, judgements, and relationship problems help dispel misconceptions about what women who use wheelchairs can and can't do.

MORE ON TELEVISION

10 TV Shows to Watch This Summer

The Wire, a Decade Later

The Future of Video Games Could Look a Lot Like Television

The TV Musical Is Dead

"Yes, I can have sex," declares Tiphany Adams in the pilot's opening scene. "Lots and lots of sex." It's a standard reality-show declaration of naughtiness and desirability, but it's powerful in its context. When Tiphany pulls into a gas station in a sportscar with her wheelchair (or, as she describes it, "26-inch rims on the side of my ass."), two men watch her get out her chair and start to pump her gas. Their initial glances are mildly incredulous, but by the end of the transaction, Tiphany's exchanging long, flirtatious looks with one of her fellow customers. It's rare to want to congratulate a random guy for finding a random woman attractive, but this sort of interaction—an able-bodied person showing clear desire for a person with a disability—is almost invisible from television. Take Glee: When Artie lost his virginity to his able-bodied girlfriend, the show didn't show their first time on screen—the audience learned about it when Artie told his friends he was in a sexual relationship.

In fact, one of the most enjoyable things about Push Girls is the show's comfort with its stars' bodies. We meet Mia Schaikewitz in bed with her boyfriend and follow her through her morning routine, including levering herself into the bathtub. Her nakedness is treated neither with prurience nor condescension. This is simply the way she goes about her day. Despite the reality show genre's attention to bodily imperfection, Push Girls doesn't seem interested into playing into the idea that disabled people have flawed bodies. Tiphany and Mia both discuss the expectation that disabled people will be disheveled or poorly dressed, then hit the gym as a display of strength rather than of weight-loss related anxiety. "I think most people haven't seen sexy in a wheelchair, and that's why they can't picture it," Mia explains. The show's association between strength and sexual appeal is something that pop culture does rarely, even for able-bodied women.

And Push Girls is most dramatic when it's exploring the characters' attempts to make careers in Los Angeles, the most appearance-obsessed place on the planet. Where Bravo reality shows treat the Hollywood ambitions of their stars as ridiculous even while urging them into the recording studio or on stage, Push Girls takes its characters' aspirations seriously. Angela Rockwood and Auti Angel both had entertainment careers before their injuries, Angela as a model and Auti as a backup dancer on hip-hop tours. The show portrays their desires to get back into the game not as a function of boredom, greed, or self-aggrandizement. This is a career, not a dalliance, and one that's driven by financial as well as creative needs. Angela is separated from her husband, and explains that Social Security doesn't pay for the nursing care she needs. And the challenges they face are not a result of their own deluded lack of talent, but a manifestation of Hollywood's narrowness and lack of creativity.

When Angela, who was breaking into movie and television roles when she became a quadriplegic in a car accident, decides to start looking for a new agent, she's treated as if she's some sort of bizarre anomaly. "To my knowledge, I can't think of much advertising featuring people in wheelchairs," a woman at an agency tells her. Later in the conversation, she insists, "We're wheelchair accessible, but there's a staircase."

Anthony, the photographer Angela hires to take her new headshots, initially acts the same way. "Angela has a lot of work," to do, he says. "It's like the guy who didn't have any arms who wanted to pitch in baseball." And he wants to lean the seat back so he can take shots that will conceal that she uses a wheelchair. But she insists that "I have to show a part of the wheelchair to show that I am in a wheelchair," recognizing it doesn't make sense to take shots that might get her in the door only to encounter a shocked reaction and an instant rejection. As Angela talks Anthony through what's happening to her body when she has a leg spasm, he begins to relax, and the photos he takes of her are beautiful. It's a perfect encapsulation of what the show hopes to accomplish, as familiarity overcomes fear and an able-bodied person and a disabled one work together on a project that's a credit to them both.

Whatever happens to Push Girls, it's clear the show is only the beginning for some of the women featured on it. Angela and Auti are involved in My Next Breath, a movie due out in 2014. Their co-stars are members of their acting class, including Mark Povinelli, an actor with dwarfism who was one of the better things about cancelled NBC sitcom Are You There, Chelsea?, Geri Jewell, who with her role on The Facts of Life became the first actor with cerebral palsy to have a regular acting job on television, Farrelly Brothers regular and quadraplegic Danny Murphy, and Lexi Marman, who is deaf. That's a lot of talent, if only Hollywood has the imagination to make use of them.

Most of the time, Hollywood seems confused about how to treat actors with disabilities. Movies and TV shows rely heavily on stories that focus on disabilities themselves rather than the people behind them. The most prominent disabled character on television, Glee's Artie, is played by the able-bodied actor Kevin McHale. And the show's played out a number of miracle-cure storylines for disabled people, from giving Artie mechanical legs that let him walk but that he never uses again, to first giving cheerleader Quinn a surprising recovery from a spinal cord injury and then having her manipulate other characters based on their sympathy for her. Disability is something to be overcome, rather than a vehicle to new perceptions and storytelling opportunities. Peter Dinklage, the actor with dwarfism who's had a critical and commercial breakout as Game of Thrones' acerbic Tyrion Lannister, is a landmark: a disabled person who is sexually desirable, self-confident, and gains, rather than loses, from his unique position. But he's more an exception to the representations of disabled people as saints or vehicles for others' self-improvement than a rule. When Snow White and the Huntsman wanted to cast its dwarves, the producers turned to actors of full stature like Ian McShane, Toby Jones, and Nick Frost, and digitally altered their bodies, rather than employing actors with dwarfism.

Into this confused environment comes the Sundance Channel's Push Girls, a reality show, premiering tonight, about four disabled women in Los Angeles. The show lives within familiar reality-show conventions: It displays attractive women navigating their friendships, relationships, and careers with a dose of producer-injected drama. But Push Girls also revitalizes the genre: The cleavage, flirtations, judgements, and relationship problems help dispel misconceptions about what women who use wheelchairs can and can't do.

MORE ON TELEVISION

10 TV Shows to Watch This Summer

The Wire, a Decade Later

The Future of Video Games Could Look a Lot Like Television

The TV Musical Is Dead

"Yes, I can have sex," declares Tiphany Adams in the pilot's opening scene. "Lots and lots of sex." It's a standard reality-show declaration of naughtiness and desirability, but it's powerful in its context. When Tiphany pulls into a gas station in a sportscar with her wheelchair (or, as she describes it, "26-inch rims on the side of my ass."), two men watch her get out her chair and start to pump her gas. Their initial glances are mildly incredulous, but by the end of the transaction, Tiphany's exchanging long, flirtatious looks with one of her fellow customers. It's rare to want to congratulate a random guy for finding a random woman attractive, but this sort of interaction—an able-bodied person showing clear desire for a person with a disability—is almost invisible from television. Take Glee: When Artie lost his virginity to his able-bodied girlfriend, the show didn't show their first time on screen—the audience learned about it when Artie told his friends he was in a sexual relationship.

In fact, one of the most enjoyable things about Push Girls is the show's comfort with its stars' bodies. We meet Mia Schaikewitz in bed with her boyfriend and follow her through her morning routine, including levering herself into the bathtub. Her nakedness is treated neither with prurience nor condescension. This is simply the way she goes about her day. Despite the reality show genre's attention to bodily imperfection, Push Girls doesn't seem interested into playing into the idea that disabled people have flawed bodies. Tiphany and Mia both discuss the expectation that disabled people will be disheveled or poorly dressed, then hit the gym as a display of strength rather than of weight-loss related anxiety. "I think most people haven't seen sexy in a wheelchair, and that's why they can't picture it," Mia explains. The show's association between strength and sexual appeal is something that pop culture does rarely, even for able-bodied women.

And Push Girls is most dramatic when it's exploring the characters' attempts to make careers in Los Angeles, the most appearance-obsessed place on the planet. Where Bravo reality shows treat the Hollywood ambitions of their stars as ridiculous even while urging them into the recording studio or on stage, Push Girls takes its characters' aspirations seriously. Angela Rockwood and Auti Angel both had entertainment careers before their injuries, Angela as a model and Auti as a backup dancer on hip-hop tours. The show portrays their desires to get back into the game not as a function of boredom, greed, or self-aggrandizement. This is a career, not a dalliance, and one that's driven by financial as well as creative needs. Angela is separated from her husband, and explains that Social Security doesn't pay for the nursing care she needs. And the challenges they face are not a result of their own deluded lack of talent, but a manifestation of Hollywood's narrowness and lack of creativity.

When Angela, who was breaking into movie and television roles when she became a quadriplegic in a car accident, decides to start looking for a new agent, she's treated as if she's some sort of bizarre anomaly. "To my knowledge, I can't think of much advertising featuring people in wheelchairs," a woman at an agency tells her. Later in the conversation, she insists, "We're wheelchair accessible, but there's a staircase."

Anthony, the photographer Angela hires to take her new headshots, initially acts the same way. "Angela has a lot of work," to do, he says. "It's like the guy who didn't have any arms who wanted to pitch in baseball." And he wants to lean the seat back so he can take shots that will conceal that she uses a wheelchair. But she insists that "I have to show a part of the wheelchair to show that I am in a wheelchair," recognizing it doesn't make sense to take shots that might get her in the door only to encounter a shocked reaction and an instant rejection. As Angela talks Anthony through what's happening to her body when she has a leg spasm, he begins to relax, and the photos he takes of her are beautiful. It's a perfect encapsulation of what the show hopes to accomplish, as familiarity overcomes fear and an able-bodied person and a disabled one work together on a project that's a credit to them both.

Whatever happens to Push Girls, it's clear the show is only the beginning for some of the women featured on it. Angela and Auti are involved in My Next Breath, a movie due out in 2014. Their co-stars are members of their acting class, including Mark Povinelli, an actor with dwarfism who was one of the better things about cancelled NBC sitcom Are You There, Chelsea?, Geri Jewell, who with her role on The Facts of Life became the first actor with cerebral palsy to have a regular acting job on television, Farrelly Brothers regular and quadraplegic Danny Murphy, and Lexi Marman, who is deaf. That's a lot of talent, if only Hollywood has the imagination to make use of them.

At the roll-out for GCB at the Television Critics Association in January, creator Robert Harling explained why he'd been attracted to the show, a story about Dallas women who jockey for positions both in high society and in church on Sundays. When you tell a story about a religious community, Harling said:

There are rules. And you have to be respectful of those rules. Even if it's a temple or a mosque or whatever, you have to be aware and respectful of faith systems. And, you know, the joy of it is watching these people try to function within these rules. And the rules remain the same. The respect for the faith remains the same...the goal is to watch people try to be good.

It was a promising pitch, especially in a landscape saturated with hospital wards and precinct rooms.

Big ideas in arts and entertainment. See full coverage

So it was disappointing when, a month and a half later, the show that debuted served up barbecue to a warring table full of mean girls who deployed church solos like stilettos and tossed out Bible verses like throwing-stars without much sense that they believed in anything. The things these women had done and continued to do to each other were so unforgivable that I wanted nothing to do with them. Was I supposed to root a former high-school boyfriend-stealer and who spread rumors that less popular girls had sexually transmitted diseases? Was I supposed to embrace as anti-heroes the women who were still exacting their revenge on her 15 years later even though they'd turned out fine, blackballing her from jobs and refusing to help her find a home to rent? It might be queasily amusing when high school students ditch someone far from home without a ride, but when grown-ass women do it to each other, it's just pathetic. These "good Christian bitches" might have been sure they'd be saved from hellfire in the next life, but as far as I could tell, they deserved the suffering they were dishing out to each other in the Dallas heat in this one.

But I stuck by the show out of loyalty to Leslie Bibb, who plays Amanda Vaughn, widowed and returned home after her Ponzi-scheming husband drives his car off a cliff, for Annie Potts' magesterial scarlet bouffant, and for the man-candy. And then one day, I pulled up GCB on Hulu on Monday morning and realized I was watching the show for itself. GCB is no less campy than it was when it premiered—it is an ABC evening soap, after all—but its stereotypes have gained depth and become people, and they've started spending real time at church instead of just talking about it.

MORE ON TELEVISION

On GCB, Mean Girls Never Grow Up

It's Time For Movie Stars to Stop Doing Television Shows

Can Guys Watch Girls?

The Death of Must-See TV

GCB has done some of its richest emotional work with circumstances that other shows might treat as lurid or bizarre. One of them is the marriage of Cricket (Miriam Shor), one of Amanda's high school rivals, and her husband, Blake. Outwardly, they're both professional and intimate partners, co-entrepreneurs in a series of successful businesses and the parents of a teenaged girl. But theirs is a "white marriage"—Blake is gay, and he and Cricket are best friends. Instead of painting Blake as campy and Cricket as deluded, as another primetime show might, GCB has treated them with tenderness. It's explored their mutual jealousy over each other's sexual partners, Cricket's hurt when Blake works with Amanda on a project that is more of a threat to their happy complicity than a mere affair could be, and their desire to have a second child, a more complicated process when the traditional way is distasteful. GCB's portrait of their relationship is attentive to the power of secrets, mutual complicity, and the importance of good company to marriage, issues that often get short shrift.

Cricket and Blake's relationship may seem old-fashioned and weirdly self-denying. But it's just one way the show shows how people with conservative values actually get something positive out of those values, instead of painting them as self-deluding hypocrites. Amanda's mother, Gigi, gets a lot of zingers from her conservative beliefs: She suggests a quick call to former Vice President Dick Cheney for bullet-removal advice; she explains that "I've been through too much to cry. Husband's death, family trauma, democratic administrations. Don't worry. I got this." But she's not just a heartless, Red State stereotype. Her concern for her daughter's well-being is genuine. When Amanda starts working at a local variant of Hooters, Gigi and her Ladies Who Lunch show up at the bar as a show of support. And Gigi's dedication to Dallas institutions is precisely what Amanda needs after her husband dies and the feds seize her home and her furniture out from under her. She might prefer to hibernate and lick her wounds, but holding her chin up and going to church, appearing at Dallas's major social events and fundraisers, and turning out for her daughter's events at school prove to be just what Amanda needs. Sometimes, healing your reputation is a way to heal yourself.

The show also avoids stereotyping with Carlene (Kristin Chenoweth), the girl whom Amanda tortured worst in high school and who is least able to let go of their vendetta. Of all the characters on GCB, Carlene makes the biggest show of submitting to her husband, Ripp (David James Elliott), in accordance with their reading of Scripture. She demurs when he asks her to back down from her feud from Amanda, and takes instruction when she gets overly involved with a church pageant Watching them get hot quoting Bible verses at each other may be a little silly, and I'm not sure that the show makes the case that deferring to my husband would work for women who don't live in the wealthy Bible Belt. But within the GCB universe, it works for Ripp and Carlene, spicing up their sex life and providing a means of dispute resolution. And the show deals honestly with the difficulties of maintaining that power balance, particularly given Carlene's obsession with building a Christian living condo development that Ripp's told her repeatedly can't go up in the U.S. lest it violate equal access laws. It's a wacky dream, but one the show has slowly illuminated as a product of Carlene's former life as an outcast: She wants a refuge.

The characters' antics have been tamped down and channeled in more interesting directions as GCB's paid more attention to the institution that links all these women together: their church. The show's improvement dates from the third episode, when Amanda found herself at an event for Christian singles organized by their pastor, John Tudor (Tyler Jacob Moore). Sure, the exercises, like stuffing pinatas with their relationship secrets, are a little cheesy. But GCB had us realize along with Amanda that that maybe she needed a ceremony, however silly, to mark the end of her marriage and the beginning of her new life. In a later, poignant subplot, Sharon (Jennifer Aspen) gets overinvested in volunteering at the church when she and her husband Zach (Brad Beyer) hit a rough spot, and it's funny to watch this pampered lady tackle Ikea furniture for the first time and henpeck Pastor Tudor on her path to finding purpose. Pastor Tudor himself is blonde and a little blandly sweet, but GCB's provided him with a literally holier-than-thou rival seminary graduate at a neighboring church, and their desire to back their reverend in this earthly struggle gives the main characters something to unify around. The more time they spend pulling together uproariously over-the-top church pageants and scheming to out-smoke and out-sauce the church's male congregants at prestige barbecue competitions, the more fun GCB is.

ABC worried that both Christianity and the word "bitch" in the title would make it harder for GCB to find an audience, and the show, which has its season finale on Sunday, hasn't yet been renewed for a second season. But it turned out that the presence of both of those elements—Christianity and bitchiness—were just fine. In fact, to be successful, GCB just needed to get a little more Jesus into its characters' lives and its plots. And like Texas gals and the guns they occasionally flash, the show just needed to be sure where it was aiming its bitchiness before it pulled the trigger.

At the roll-out for GCB at the Television Critics Association in January, creator Robert Harling explained why he'd been attracted to the show, a story about Dallas women who jockey for positions both in high society and in church on Sundays. When you tell a story about a religious community, Harling said:

There are rules. And you have to be respectful of those rules. Even if it's a temple or a mosque or whatever, you have to be aware and respectful of faith systems. And, you know, the joy of it is watching these people try to function within these rules. And the rules remain the same. The respect for the faith remains the same...the goal is to watch people try to be good.

It was a promising pitch, especially in a landscape saturated with hospital wards and precinct rooms.

Big ideas in arts and entertainment. See full coverage

So it was disappointing when, a month and a half later, the show that debuted served up barbecue to a warring table full of mean girls who deployed church solos like stilettos and tossed out Bible verses like throwing-stars without much sense that they believed in anything. The things these women had done and continued to do to each other were so unforgivable that I wanted nothing to do with them. Was I supposed to root a former high-school boyfriend-stealer and who spread rumors that less popular girls had sexually transmitted diseases? Was I supposed to embrace as anti-heroes the women who were still exacting their revenge on her 15 years later even though they'd turned out fine, blackballing her from jobs and refusing to help her find a home to rent? It might be queasily amusing when high school students ditch someone far from home without a ride, but when grown-ass women do it to each other, it's just pathetic. These "good Christian bitches" might have been sure they'd be saved from hellfire in the next life, but as far as I could tell, they deserved the suffering they were dishing out to each other in the Dallas heat in this one.

But I stuck by the show out of loyalty to Leslie Bibb, who plays Amanda Vaughn, widowed and returned home after her Ponzi-scheming husband drives his car off a cliff, for Annie Potts' magesterial scarlet bouffant, and for the man-candy. And then one day, I pulled up GCB on Hulu on Monday morning and realized I was watching the show for itself. GCB is no less campy than it was when it premiered—it is an ABC evening soap, after all—but its stereotypes have gained depth and become people, and they've started spending real time at church instead of just talking about it.

MORE ON TELEVISION

On GCB, Mean Girls Never Grow Up

It's Time For Movie Stars to Stop Doing Television Shows

Can Guys Watch Girls?

The Death of Must-See TV

GCB has done some of its richest emotional work with circumstances that other shows might treat as lurid or bizarre. One of them is the marriage of Cricket (Miriam Shor), one of Amanda's high school rivals, and her husband, Blake. Outwardly, they're both professional and intimate partners, co-entrepreneurs in a series of successful businesses and the parents of a teenaged girl. But theirs is a "white marriage"—Blake is gay, and he and Cricket are best friends. Instead of painting Blake as campy and Cricket as deluded, as another primetime show might, GCB has treated them with tenderness. It's explored their mutual jealousy over each other's sexual partners, Cricket's hurt when Blake works with Amanda on a project that is more of a threat to their happy complicity than a mere affair could be, and their desire to have a second child, a more complicated process when the traditional way is distasteful. GCB's portrait of their relationship is attentive to the power of secrets, mutual complicity, and the importance of good company to marriage, issues that often get short shrift.

Cricket and Blake's relationship may seem old-fashioned and weirdly self-denying. But it's just one way the show shows how people with conservative values actually get something positive out of those values, instead of painting them as self-deluding hypocrites. Amanda's mother, Gigi, gets a lot of zingers from her conservative beliefs: She suggests a quick call to former Vice President Dick Cheney for bullet-removal advice; she explains that "I've been through too much to cry. Husband's death, family trauma, democratic administrations. Don't worry. I got this." But she's not just a heartless, Red State stereotype. Her concern for her daughter's well-being is genuine. When Amanda starts working at a local variant of Hooters, Gigi and her Ladies Who Lunch show up at the bar as a show of support. And Gigi's dedication to Dallas institutions is precisely what Amanda needs after her husband dies and the feds seize her home and her furniture out from under her. She might prefer to hibernate and lick her wounds, but holding her chin up and going to church, appearing at Dallas's major social events and fundraisers, and turning out for her daughter's events at school prove to be just what Amanda needs. Sometimes, healing your reputation is a way to heal yourself.

The show also avoids stereotyping with Carlene (Kristin Chenoweth), the girl whom Amanda tortured worst in high school and who is least able to let go of their vendetta. Of all the characters on GCB, Carlene makes the biggest show of submitting to her husband, Ripp (David James Elliott), in accordance with their reading of Scripture. She demurs when he asks her to back down from her feud from Amanda, and takes instruction when she gets overly involved with a church pageant Watching them get hot quoting Bible verses at each other may be a little silly, and I'm not sure that the show makes the case that deferring to my husband would work for women who don't live in the wealthy Bible Belt. But within the GCB universe, it works for Ripp and Carlene, spicing up their sex life and providing a means of dispute resolution. And the show deals honestly with the difficulties of maintaining that power balance, particularly given Carlene's obsession with building a Christian living condo development that Ripp's told her repeatedly can't go up in the U.S. lest it violate equal access laws. It's a wacky dream, but one the show has slowly illuminated as a product of Carlene's former life as an outcast: She wants a refuge.

The characters' antics have been tamped down and channeled in more interesting directions as GCB's paid more attention to the institution that links all these women together: their church. The show's improvement dates from the third episode, when Amanda found herself at an event for Christian singles organized by their pastor, John Tudor (Tyler Jacob Moore). Sure, the exercises, like stuffing pinatas with their relationship secrets, are a little cheesy. But GCB had us realize along with Amanda that that maybe she needed a ceremony, however silly, to mark the end of her marriage and the beginning of her new life. In a later, poignant subplot, Sharon (Jennifer Aspen) gets overinvested in volunteering at the church when she and her husband Zach (Brad Beyer) hit a rough spot, and it's funny to watch this pampered lady tackle Ikea furniture for the first time and henpeck Pastor Tudor on her path to finding purpose. Pastor Tudor himself is blonde and a little blandly sweet, but GCB's provided him with a literally holier-than-thou rival seminary graduate at a neighboring church, and their desire to back their reverend in this earthly struggle gives the main characters something to unify around. The more time they spend pulling together uproariously over-the-top church pageants and scheming to out-smoke and out-sauce the church's male congregants at prestige barbecue competitions, the more fun GCB is.

ABC worried that both Christianity and the word "bitch" in the title would make it harder for GCB to find an audience, and the show, which has its season finale on Sunday, hasn't yet been renewed for a second season. But it turned out that the presence of both of those elements—Christianity and bitchiness—were just fine. In fact, to be successful, GCB just needed to get a little more Jesus into its characters' lives and its plots. And like Texas gals and the guns they occasionally flash, the show just needed to be sure where it was aiming its bitchiness before it pulled the trigger.