Jon: Well, this is a show about h-words—oh, screw it, it's not worth trying to beat around this ridiculous bush. "I Just Want My Pants Back" is the show about hipsters, and its relative accuracy is impressive yet unnerving. Feeling the latter often makes it difficult to acknowledge the former, especially since it’s airing on the "Teen Mom" network and has one of the greatest lead-ins of all time, "Jersey Shore."

In "Pants," Jason (aka Jay) and Tina are hip young post-grads who smoke pot in bar bathrooms and talk about their sex droughts and screwy relationships in a post-Juno repartee that doesn’t seem too impossible, but maybe that’s cause you like to think you and your friends rap like that. But maybe you kinda do!

Exaggeration is always somewhat necessary in television, but what’s really neat about the first two episodes of "Pants" is that everything holding it together seems somewhat real and familiar. Premise: Jay gets laid and his titular pants stolen—and obviously finding said pants (and mystery thief, Jane) becomes a metaphor for discovering oneself. Jay’s best friend Tina wasn’t given a whole lot to do in the pilot except spit out some solid one-liners, but she showed signs of inner turmoil in episode two as she grappled with waiting for a post-fight text from her chocolatier/poet squeeze, Brett, as well as deflowering her 19-year-old intern. After the pilot I got the sense that Jay and Tina’s friendship would eventually morph into your typical will they/won’t they relationship, but I’m not so sure now—which is actually a very good thing, sitcom conventions be damned. And straight up, I like that "Pants" hits so close to home on a level that goes beyond pop references and good location scouting (not that that’s not important), and lands somewhere much more personal.

For those who haven't yet indulged: to the preview clip!

RJ: When we first heard of this show, I was afraid. With stuff like "2 Broke Girls" and "The New Girl" lightly depicting youthful, hip, Williamsburg-inspired culture, I became almost defensive and territorial when you told me about this “more accurate” portrayal of hipster life. Not to mention the casual Wavves namedrop (and the non-casual score collaboration), some nug huffing, and a so-bored, yet positive-minded protagonist whose current life’s a chore. Holding down a shitty job as an assistant to a strangely perverted and outrageously cruel casting director (played by the always stellar Chris Parnell), Jay reaches out to hilarious, wackadoo magazine publisher Lench (who’s latest project, All Naturals, focuses on environmental sustainability and hot chicks—“think models with 70’s-era bush in hemp bikinis teaching you how to compost”), because he’s thinking of getting into “music journalism.” I’ll admit I was hating myself for not being an investment banker when they dropped that on my dome, but I ended up finding all of it endearing. Sure, it’s hard to see my lifestyle and career choices caricatured onscreen. But if it didn’t feel real, would I feel this exposed?

Now, hipsters vs. suits is an eternal struggle on par with cats vs. dogs, the Empire vs. the Rebel Alliance, and Lana Del Rey vs. the word “authentic.” Standing in stark contrast to Jay and Tina, their friends Eric and Stacey aren’t quite typical suits (that title goes to the sexually repressed lawyers that Jay and Tina seduce at the All Naturals launch party), but their chosen path of grad/med school over Jay and Tina’s free wheeling lifestyle represent some sort of “safer” route and perhaps even a minor case of “selling out.” Eric and Stacey aren’t culturally clueless; I’m pretty sure Eric fits Urban Dictionary’s definition of “blipster” while Stacey’s the one who initially name-drops Wavves, wanting to momentarily reclaim her punk past by celebrating her birthday at a super secret show. Instead of keeping up with an “alternative” lifestyle into early adulthood (like Jay and Tina), Eric and Stacey have chosen a domestic path with more structure and security. Tina digs the couple as they make out over the crock pot Eric gifts to Stacey, but beyond her snark lies an unsettling contrast. While Jay and Tina can act like their life choices make them too cool for adulthood, they can’t deny Eric and Stacey’s genuine happiness and fulfilment as they struggle to find their own, professional and personal. I’ll take it one step further: as a 23-year-old freelance writer living in Williamsburg who took a year off from undergrad, ditched Politics for a fresh English degree and a maybe-career in music writing, seeing just how happy Eric and Stacey are makes me wonder about my path myself.

Jon: "Pants" never makes Eric and Stacey seem lame—I mean, they make couples Wii tennis, buying a mattress and quizzing each other with flash cards of diseases seem pretty dope. Sure, Jay and Tina take some jabs at them (“They’re hip, they’re new, they’re loud,” says Jay after Stacey expresses interest in the Wavves show), but neither lifestyle is really glorified. Jay comes across looking pretty awful when he forgets to pick up the Wavves tickets from the Craigslist dude cause he was finger-banging the freaky-deaky lawyer chick instead. With that in mind, what I find odd and almost off-putting, but ultimately compelling, about this contrast is that most, if not all, attractive-young-people-finding-themselves-in-a-big-city sitcoms revolve around these relatively stable characters like Eric and Stacey, by now so familiar that you kinda know people like them in real life. So when the ostensibly directionless, “just wingin’ it” hipster is juxtaposed with these tried-and-true characters, and you can relate to him on a more personal level than you ever could with Ross or Monica or Ted Mosby, you suddenly see yourself as a trope. Ugh, and then his references are spot on, and his one-liners kill, and then you’re watching the pilot for the first time and he drops that music journalism bomb and all you can do is yell at your TV but then not turn it off. Because it’s funny, and as much as you want to believe it is, it's actually not pandering to anyone, and the "Pants" people know that Arcade Fire isn’t performing at Music Hall of Williamsburg these days.

So it’s easy to be taken aback by "Pants" because it’s about a lifestyle and culture that prides itself on individualism and rejection of certain norms... a lifestyle that's already become commodified, even standardized. On the surface "Pants" seems like a consequence of those latter issues, but maybe the show’s existence is proof that this cultural movement [Editor's Note: Williamsburg is a cultural movement now???] that’s been building over the past decade-plus hasn’t so much cheapened but simply become a kind of pop culture in its own right. And there really isn’t anything necessarily wrong with that.

RJ: Kinda know people like them in real life? Try the vast overwhelming majority of my childhood and college friends. While most of them never were any sort of former “authentic punk” like Stacey, almost all of them are now young professionals working in banking or consulting, or drowning in 2L or clinicals. Yet they’re pop-cultural aware and consume with relatively careful curation; that Wavves exchange between Stacey and Jay happened in my life a few times almost exactly verbatim because my friends found Nathan Williams’ music on their own. The cultural lines that used to separate stale adulthood and “safe” career choices from hip, cool youth and a risky pursuit of passions and dreams are now blurred (I’m aware of “cool dads” but think of “superrad gnarbone dads” who take their kids to the skatepark with no helmets, let them eat cookies for breakfast, and bump Superchunk at Gymboree). I think you’re right, this is proof of a cultural movement that’s been building. [Editor's Note: Oh my God.] Many young adults take a path with “safe” career while intelligently and actively consuming culture. They’re not hipsters but they’re not exactly suits, and they’re certainly not suits just pretending to be hip. They’re something new and perhaps they’re the result of this movement that you point out.

So the question is: will "Pants" continue this blurred line? Or will it attempt to redefine those cultural boundaries between “hip” and “safe”? On one hand, seeing Jay and Tina’s successes may inspire Eric and Stacey to reject their “safer” paths, find their “true selves,” and relapse into freewheeling hipsterdom. But if Jay and Tina realize there’s a way to enter adulthood and domesticity without sacrificing their gnarly youth and authentic art tastes, wouldn’t that be more indicative of today’s culture, which has blurred the line where Stacey, Eric, and my friends exist between hipster and suit?

Jon: I want to see where they go with this dichotomy too, but based on the endearing portrayals of both sides (I suppose props should go here to creator David Rosen, who also wrote the book the show’s based on), I can’t imagine "Pants" singling out one as more “authentic” than the other. If "Pants" went the path of glorifying the indie-artistic-doobie-blowin’ lifestyle as a means of achieving self-actualization as opposed to the aspiring-doctor/yuppie weekend warrior, well I’d be out. Luckily, I don’t think that’s what’s going on here at all.

Though I dug the pilot, episode two wasn’t as solid: Eric and Stacey’s mattress plot allowed for some good jokes, but ultimately went nowhere; and while Jay and Tina’s sexcapades were pretty funny (i.e. the bartender Tibetan throat singing her ex’s name while boinking Jay), only the “Tina & The Intern” storyline was that compelling, albeit completely unrealistic—there’s no way a virgin could ever gaff so hard and still spit such courageous game like that to his boss. And get laid. Twice. I mean "Pants" is kind of absurd, enjoyably. No one’s boss would deliver a chop-licking monologue about nailing a pregnant woman, like Parnell does—but then we’ve all had fucked-up bosses.

But that leaves me with one last obnoxiously hyper-conscious question: Do I like "Pants" more because it’s written, acted and shot quite well and tells an engaging story? Or more because I get a narcissistic kick out of seeing an sensationalized version of the culture I live in—and maybe even parts my life—on-screen depicted with enough accuracy (the devil’s in the details, bro) that I feel like my life is important and legitimate and could totally be a sitcom? I dunno, probably a lot of both. Stoked for next week.

RJ: I’d tune out immediately if "Pants" became some self-righteous arms race of authenticity or fulfillment, but I don’t think it’ll come to that either. I’m a little afraid that the show might devolve into a hookup Chronicles of Gnarnia, but Jay’s “music journalism” plot looks to be the real force here, or so we (egotistically) hope. And of course, he still needs those pants back. Let’s be real, that narcissistic joy manifests so well because of the writing: it feels dangerously close to our real lives and cultural interests, adds heavy spice (because everyone knows music writers are really huge dweebs who would be terrified to fridge fuck), and drives us to consider our own journeys (which, really, have just begun). We’ll see if our lives and this culture are television worthy in the long run, but at least right now "Pants" shows they’re entertaining and substantial enough to warrant closer examination by both hipsters and non-hipsters alike. As two obnoxious, former-suburban, Willburg-livin’ altbros, we’ll take that iota of validation.

Jon Blistein and RJ Cubarrubia spend their afternoons at Billboard and have also written at places like RollingStone.com, The L Magazine, Impose and Nerve.com.

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Talk about doing it wrong. If only they'd named her Marilyn Monroe, and the musical was based on Karen Carpenter.

Good news: while reviews of the show have been embargoed, even though they've circulated DVDs to the New York City elite media, which is, not incidentally, made up of gays and single women who like being catty, any recent boarder of an American Airlines flight has gotten to see the first episode! I caught it Friday night, and boy is it... well it's... "expensive" seems accurate. (If you're not flying, you can even watch it on Netflix.)

Maybe it'll be great? Debra Messing (who actually is given a husband and a family in the show—talk about ways to alienate your single lady demo) and her best gay (presumably; gayness telegraphed by his "chatty hands") are back in the game with a brassy producer (the getting-divorced character played by an extremely taut Anjelica Huston) with a Big Musical! But they must Make Sacrifices to play the Broadway Game as they begin to cast their Marilyn, working with an Evil Scheming Fosse-alike. What Marilyn will win? Will it be the sassy unfamous one with the bosoms? Or will it be the newcomer with the heart of gold, who wears a dress literally adorned with cherries to her call-back?

Tune in for the second episode to find out which over-produced musical song rendition will win! Or don't bother. Because it's not actually campy: "The show slogs through one grave, brow-knitting plotline after another," is how one brave soul put it.

To be fair, I could go for this show, but the way they treat the music is so dreadful. The songs are Broadway-good (not really a compliment in my book but here we are) but they don't let anyone sing; everything is so relentlessly over-studio'd and done up Real Big, what's the point? The current TV audience is used to "American Idol"; we're not afraid to hear people actually sing, but we're being really quite protected here. The music here is more like being trapped in an elevator with Celine Dion's backing tracks blaring at you. That takes away half the fun, and then what are you left with?

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Years before he created Nerdist Industries, Chris was already sowing the seeds of his enterprise. He spent his adolescence seeking out nerd artifacts such as comics, video games and comedy tapes as if they were the missing shard of the Dark Crystal. Here, he talks about working with David Cross at his first job, what nerds did before the Internet, and how building Nerdist Industries has been like a game of SimCity.

Grace Bello: You wrote in Wired that nerds were "once a tortured subrace of humans condemned to hiding in dark corners from the brutal hand of social torment [and are] now captains of industry!" How do the fans of your show and your podcast feel about that? Do they agree? Or do you get emails that say, like, "Oh, actually, I'm still a closeted nerd"?

Chris Hardwick: Well, more and more people are "coming out" about it as nerds. If you were a nerd when I was growing up, in the '80s, you were socially ostracized. We were just into things that most other kids were not into. There was a consumer electronics thing happening, but it's not like every store sold computers; there wasn't an Apple store. You'd have to build your own computer. And most kids who were concerned with being popular wouldn't take the time to do it. It took work. And the only reason you would do that extra work and sacrifice any kind of social life is if you were really passionate about what you were pursuing. And we were. And those were things like computers and chess club and comic books and things like that. But now everything's so readily available everywhere, all the time. People don't necessarily have to be into just one or two things anymore. Also, when I was growing up, nerds weren't billionaires yet. So the popular kids now have sort of glommed on to the nerds because now nerds are powerful. There was no money for nerds then, which meant that there was no political gain, which meant that there was no manipulation of the nerds. If it manifested itself in any way, it was sort of like nerds tutoring the dumb, popular kids. That was the sort of power that the nerds would have.

Through your podcast, you get to meet some really amazing people, like Jon Hamm, Patrick Stewart and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Of the guests you've met, who have you been the most starstruck by?

Most of the people who have been on the show are friends of mine. I knew Jon for years before he did the podcast. Patrick Stewart, I'd never met before; I was pretty starstruck by him. Neil Tyson, I had not met before—and is it weird to say you're starstruck by an astrophysicist? He would actually mathematically be able to tell me the impact of how starstruck by him I was. It's great. Every nerd icon I've always looked up to, I'm systematically interacting with all of them in some sort of capacity. I always flash back to me as a kid; if someone were to have told me then, "Someday, you're going to be friends with Weird Al." It's like, "What?" I almost can't process it. I'm a fanboy as much as anyone else in this community. I think I've managed to compartmentalize my brain and hold the fan stuff down really deep, and it comes out when I'm not around people.

How did you cultivate your interests in comedy and comics while growing up? That was pre-Internet, so were you lurking in arcades and comic book shops?

That's exactly it. The distribution is much wider now, but back then, we just had a different way of acquiring that content. If it meant something to you, you would find it. It was almost more satisfying as a nerd, in a way, because you did have to go on a quest for those things. And they were treasures that you had to hunt to find, whether it was underground comedy tapes that you would trade with someone or old comic books that you would trade—it was more in the physical world and it wasn't a digital process. It also wasn't instant gratification. It was definitely delayed gratification and a little bit of a crapshoot with what you'd be able to find. Then you'd also get accidentally exposed to things, and there was kind of a nerd pride to being aware of things that people didn't know. You had discovered this hidden treasure that was very personal. Whereas now, you click on a website, and there's a suggestion engine. We take for granted that you can find anything and that you're going to stumble across stuff. But there was a time when you actually had to work for it.

I don't know if anyone chooses to be a comedian; I think it's something that you feel compelled to do. It's pretty unrewarding for a long time, you know. You're performing for two people, and you're constantly asking yourself, "Am I doing the right thing?" If it's not something that you are genetically predisposed to doing, you'll quit doing it. The only reward that you have for so long is just the fact that you're doing it. So I feel like I don't know what else I would have done with my life. It just so happens that all my sub-interests were things like technology and sci-fi and video games and comic books. But stand-up comedy was always the thing for me.

Who were your comedy heroes when you were growing up?

Steve Martin. I had all the Steve Martin records. George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Rodney Dangerfield, Bill Hicks, Emo Philips, Bill Cosby... If there was a comedy special on TV, I taped it. I watched everything. It wasn't like I limited myself to one kind of comic. I liked all different flavors of comedy. And people don't really watch comedy that way anymore; we're such a niche-y culture where you can surround yourself with very specific kinds of things. But I watched any kind of stand-up. I loved it all.

Do you find doing the podcast as fulfilling as performing stand-up in front of an audience?

Well, it's fulfilling, but it's fulfilling in a different way. They're completely different forms of communication. In The Nerdist podcast, we're conversational, and we don't go out of our way to craft jokes in the podcast. There isn't a live audience for most of the podcast; although we do live shows every once in a while. But stand-up is just you and the audience. And you have jokes that you've written: some of them are going to work, some of them may not. If they don't, you've gotta figure out how to make them work really fast. They're completely different but both satisfying.

What advice would you give to a young, aspiring comedian who's trying to start his or her career?

We talk about this on the podcast a lot. There's not really any advice other than "you have to start performing." You can't even give someone advice until they've been on stage a bunch of times. It's not anything that you have to prepare for six months to do. You just get up and start doing it. That's how you figure it out. There's no fast track way. There's no real way to prepare for it because it's unlike anything else you've ever done. Find open mics in your area, go to open mics, get up on stage as much as possible. When you've been performing for a few months, then you can kind of take stock and figure out where you're at and what you seem to be gravitating towards. It's really about getting onstage and being comfortable talking in front of people.

Can you tell me about what it was like working on "Trashed," the MTV game show you hosted in 1994? I mean, what was it like working with Brian Posehn and David Cross back then, both of whom would later go on to do "Mr. Show," among other awesome things?

Yeah. Doug Benson worked on that show, Janeane Garofalo did stuff on the show, Steve Higgins—who was the head writer for "SNL" and who's the announcer on the Fallon show, Joel Hodgson from "Mystery Science Theater 3000"... It was an insane group of people to work with as my first job. All I can remember is not really knowing what I was doing. I was shouting a lot because I thought being louder was more entertaining. We were all young comedian types trying to figure it out, but it was such an amazing group of people, and at the same time, the people in that cast were in this sort of parallel alternative comedy scene that had just migrated from San Francisco down to L.A. That was the group that sort of spawned the David Crosses and Patton Oswalts of the world. When I look back on it, it's not like anyone was going, "We're all a part of this scene that's gonna ultimately yield a bunch of delicious comedy fruit!" They were just like-minded comics who weren't getting stage time at the clubs and made their own thing happen. It was great for me. I was right out of college and I was working on MTV. It was a weird, fun experience.

You know, "Trashed," I thought, was going to be a big hit show. It was fun, and I thought, "Of course people are going to watch this fun show!" And no one really watched it. So it went away pretty quickly. So when they offered me the job hosting "Singled Out," what I had learned was that, well, shows get cancelled right away. I was not mentally prepared for that show to be successful at all. It wasn't until three seasons in that I finally thought, "Oh, maybe it is doing OK." I don't know; I guess it was the right show at the right time with the right age group, you know? I'm sure the show would be ridiculous and tame by today's standards. At the time, there really wasn't anything else like it. I don't know why it resonated so much with people in a certain age group. But now, if I meet people who were between the ages of 13 and 24 when that show was on the air, those people still remember it.

Nerd culture seems to be reigning right now; Comic-Cons and superhero movies are really huge franchises. What are some of the more under-the-radar things in nerd culture that you're into right now?

Every year, we do a stand-up comedy special on the podcast—an episode where it's maybe comedians that people haven't heard of yet—just because I was so influenced by comedy specials when I was growing up. That's a good place to start with under-the-radar comedians. There are some British sci-fi shows that I really like. There's this show "The Misfits" that's really fun. Um, "The Fades," premiering on BBC America right before "The Nerdist." I'm a huge "Doctor Who" fan; that seems to have caught on quite a bit in the States, which is good. I always go to Reddit.com; maybe that's more like memes and nerd silliness.

I guess Reddit is a pretty good source for up-and-coming stuff. I mean, that's where these really strange memes come from, like Goths Up Trees.

Yeah, so many things come out of Reddit. It really is a petri dish of memes. It's sort of a playground. I'm really liking Google Plus; I've been using that. Obviously, I'm still on Facebook and Twitter. I still have a MySpace account—it's like an abandoned mining town. All the windows on my profile are probably broken and shuttered. A bunch of graffiti. There's probably a hobo sleeping bag in there that's covered in cobwebs. Google Plus, it's really just a good microblogging service. And now, since Nerdist.com has become more of a website that's not necessarily about me anymore, I wouldn't really put silly, personal things on there. Like, I was in Portland over the holidays, and I passed by this old store, and there was this big sign that said that they were selling cat stickers. So I took a picture of it, and it wasn't really appropriate for Nerdist.com because it's not really a story. It's really more of a Tumblr thing; I have a Tumblr account, I don't use it. But it's perfect for Google Plus. I can put the picture on there, it's in the stream, I can write a little story about where I was and share that. So I feel like it's a cleaner version of Facebook right now.

So, at the moment, you're juggling a ton of things: you're hosting "The Nerdist," you're hosting "Web Soup," you write for Wired, you wrote a book. Is there anything that's still on your comedian or nerd bucket list?

Oh, yeah. There's a ton of things. The whole Nerdist Industries thing that we're building is like a game of SimCity. I want to see how we can grow it and expand it. That's all exciting to me. Now I've partnered with a guy named Peter Levin, who's great. We have this premium YouTube channel. We're doing a bunch of great stuff at Comic-Con. And we have a live theatre space where we do a lot of shows in L.A. It's not like we're going to go start a Nerdist steakhouse or anything; everything is related in some way. It's realizing, "Oh, we have a podcast network! Well, we have a live theater space where they can perform and record shows and do comedy shows and stand-up! And, oh, those podcasts can be developed into television shows!" So everything is complementary. So as far as a bucket list... Oh, I'll tell you something that's on the nerd bucket list: a glass dome underwater lair. I think if Nerdist Industries could be in a glass dome on the ocean floor somewhere, then that would be a big one for me.


Interview condensed, edited and lightly reordered.


Grace Bello is a freelance writer based in New York. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic and on McSweeney's.

Photo by Gilles Mingasson/BBC America.

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Second in a pair of essays today on Louis C.K. Previously: The Louie Bubble.

Winter is the season of television discontent. Months remain before the third season of "Louie" and the second season isn’t on DVD yet. I was late to "Louie," but once I started, I couldn’t stop. I spent a summer weekend in a sweaty fugue state in my hotbox of a 6th-floor Brooklyn apartment, unable to move, obsessively watching the entire first season. I got to an episode where his daughters are off with their mother for a week and he goes on a bender of pizza, ice cream and pot, and then I experienced something oddly meta. My living room wasn’t littered with take-out boxes, but coffee was the only thing I’d consumed for hours and the only limb I’d moved was my right arm—to click the track pad of my laptop to order the next show. My torpor was induced for the same reason as Louie's—my daughter was out of town with her father.

If you share custody of your kids, "Louie" serves as a meditation on single parenting in this way. There have been television shows about single mothers ("Julia," "One Day at a Time," "Kate & Allie," "Murphy Brown"), and there was Fred MacMurray’s 1950’s single widower on "My Three Sons," but an adult in a joint custodial situation is rarely seen on a screen of any size and then always as an “alternative” lifestyle, not as a given. My girl goes back and forth between her father and me nearly every other day. TV-Louie has his kids for half of each week, and his show vividly plumbs the depths of the particular kind of existentialist crisis that such an arrangement elicits.

When my ex-husband and I first separated and I found myself wandering aimlessly around Brooklyn without my daughter, I felt like the part of my identity that had been most constant for four years had been stripped away. Sadness about the loss of my marriage was not at the forefront of my grieving, it was that grieving for my marriage took a back seat to this: I had not signed up to be my child’s mama part-time. I was unprepared for the adjustment that needed to happen and even now, nearly eight years after the fact (along with the relief that time to sleep late, date and exercise brings), I am occasionally bereft when she is with her father for a longer chunk of time and our day-to-day routine is on hiatus, however temporarily. I know what to do now, even if it is just to enjoy being alone, but it still can feel strange.

A couple months ago WNYC announced—like five times in one hour of morning news!—that the percentage of single fathers in New York City had increased by 9%, though single mothers make up 83% of the city’s single parents. This was both surprising and not. Even with the increase, that is still pretty low. It seems to indicate that the dating pool for single mothers must not include many single fathers. And this brings up something about "Louie" that is annoying for the single mama. The dude is always getting propositioned—the unmarried mom at school wants to have uncomplicated sex, the younger woman thinks old men smell good and arranges a one-night stand. It is not that the sex is enviable—in one episode the single mother turns out to be brutally damaged and that Louie jumps through her many hoops is incomprehensible—it’s that dating in New York when you are over forty makes it even more clear it’s a man’s world for simple mathematical reasons. Louie talks about being fat and the sorry state of his package, but he still gets laid—though the women Louie sleeps with are an odd and diverse cast of characters. To his credit, he even shtups Joan Rivers. A single father at 43 in New York City has a library of pussy between 26 and 76 from which to choose; a woman of 42 is not necessarily presented with similar abundance.

Then there’s the difference in the perception of a single dad and a single mom. A father taking care of kids is attractive to women, while a mother on her own is not attracting men like a moth to a flame. Generally, men are praised when they are good and responsible parents. Generally, people don’t applaud a woman for taking on the responsibility of raising her kids; they pity her because she is alone, or remark condescendingly that she is brave and strong. Not to mention that going to a bar and taking home a strange man is not necessarily thought of as a responsible thing for a mother to do. And if she does, unmarried and childless men may be perfectly happy to sleep with her, but they can’t be blamed for preferring the unencumbered.

So I have Louie, my TV alter-ego boyfriend, who, though he tries hard not to come off as a mensch, is so clearly a mensch. A not-so-subtle subtext of the show is that his daughters make him a better man. He seems to viscerally understand how important it is that he is there for his girls. The tricky business of being a single parent is that the doing it all is both the drudgery and the reward. No one else cleans the kitchen or washes the toilet. No one pours you a glass of wine and asks you how your day was, but when your child is home and the chores are done, you sneak into her room, smooth back her hair, press your lips into her forehead, and give thanks for the gift of your life and your ability to care for her. Like all reasonably competent parents, you feel satisfied you have both survived another day. Louie intentionally, or not, makes us applaud him for doing what millions of women around the world are doing solo: taking care of our kids.

And it is hard not to join the chorus. The show makes me both want to fuck Louie and to rock him to sleep. His sexual encounters have been harsh for their complete lack of intimacy and yet here is a man who is besotted by his girls. Until the second season’s episode in which he confessed his love to his single mom friend Pam, there was an odd disconnect. What I had most wanted for Louie was to have was an authentic moment with a woman where he wasn’t just coming onto her or in her but where he was (even for a nanosecond) open to the possibility of letting the right one in. Even though he’s a comic who reveals what most of us would leave unspoken, he would not let down his TV alter-ego’s guard.

And I questioned the possibility of Louie having it all—being a father, emotionally vulnerable, or at least attempting this with a grown woman, while maintaining his caustic sense of humor. Pam also considers Louie a friend and tells him he did a good job declaring his love, but Pam is the man, and Louie, though he has found a worthy object of affection, is thwarted. While Louie's female viewer may have fallen for him, in Pam he has met his match. She is wary and shrewd, and amazingly funny. Her own sad history is written all over her face, and she will not let down her own guard, not to mention that she is not attracted to Louie. (And I won’t give away this season’s finale.)

Unlike Heather Havilesky, who wrote this summer about the portrayal of divorce on TV for the Times, I don’t think Louie is miserable post-marriage. Searching and a bit lost, maybe, in possession of a depressive gene or too, sure, but there is a sense that he’s relieved to be able to figure out how to be a parent on his own. His girls frustrate him but they also make him feel necessary and alive. Single fatherhood is an opportunity for him to discover himself in some important way. I get this. My ex-husband is a much better parent alone than he would have been had we stayed together.

I'd like to think it is possible for single mothers and fathers to go to work, to love and be loved, fuck and be fucked while taking good care of their kids and creating a supportive home in some kind of integrated way. I’d also like to think that second happy partnerships are possible, as is sharing the load. There are times this feels more attainable than others. Though my daughter once wisely informed me “There are no princes in Brooklyn,” I never thought there’d be so many frogs to kiss. And while it can be lovely to make out with amphibians, I find myself wanting more. In the meantime, while I wait for season three, "Louie" reruns are good company. Divorced, funny, and fortysomething, he is doing the best he can parenting his girls. He makes visible that there are other dwellers of this in-between place: single, not childless, looking for love while their ex is with the kids.

Caledonia Kearns' poems have appeared in the New Haven Review and Painted Bride Quarterly. She is the editor of two anthologies of Irish American women's writing, Cabbage and Bones and Motherland. She lives in Brooklyn with her daughter.

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All the same, I think of both their lead characters, Carrie and Amy, as a pair. Both are struggling with the place of work in their lives; neither is particularly adept at maintaining healthy romantic relationships. Both are also suffering from mental illness, although Carrie's is identifiable as bipolar disorder, whereas Amy seems to suffer from a more diffuse sort of ailment on the anxiety/depression spectrum. In their twin sufferings they have become talismans for me in a way that no more overtly politicized depiction of ladies on television has ever quite done—not Peggy of "Mad Men" nor, and this pains me to admit it, even Buffy. They're articulating something new about vulnerability in women that I haven't seen said before, at least not in precisely this way, on television. And I, for one, am hooked.

I use the word "vulnerability" advisedly here. I'm old enough to recall the fall of the Berlin Wall as an interruption of a rerun of “Growing Pains” (or was it "Who's the Boss?"). Those of you who share that description probably also remember that charming interlude in our TV-watching lives where we were invited to contemplate “Ally McBeal” as at once an icon and Grim Reaper of female liberation. Time got in on that game with typical subtlety and thoughtfulness by running a cover image of the disembodied heads of Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem floating in a black void alongside Ally's and the question, "Is Feminism Dead?"

The particulars of the accompanying essay, penned by (oh brother) Ginia Bellafante, are not worth rehashing. For one thing, it's about a show that is now largely and rightfully forgotten. (Though I do sometimes wonder whatever happened to that piano lady.) For another, the essay itself is pretty bad. (In Bellafante's eyes, Katie Roiphe’s greatest sin up to then was appearing in a Coach ad.) And these arguments always take the same utterly depressing tack: step out of line, make a mistake, enjoy cute babies, feel badly, cry at work, be, in other words, wounded and imperfect, and your failings are judged not just as your own, but as those of the entire sisterhood, q.e.d.

Most shows about women have, perhaps unintentionally, made themselves susceptible to this boring, repetitive debate because they simply cannot stop announcing at every available opportunity that they are Television Shows About Women, Goddamnit. (Let's call them TSAWGs.) Whether you want to blame TSAWG creators or network-driven marketing campaigns is immaterial—the fact is that we are meant to see Ally and Buffy and, even to a certain extent, Peggy as leading archetypal female lives, so when they are weak and/or strong and/or prone to cute outfits, we are invited to see "women" as being the same way. This sets a trap for the critic who, while believing in equality, wants her art to be something other than a position paper, as I can say from experience. For your reviews, you then have to work out how to simultaneously applaud any dramatic interest in women’s lives—it being rare enough to begin with—while registering any reservations you may have that such a pat thing as "women's lives" exists. Look. Of course I’ve known Allys and Buffys and Peggys, but I’ve known a hundred other kinds of women too, not all of them middle class and/or white. (I know!) The idea that we share, as women, necessarily common interiorities—rather than common treatment from the world outside our tiny, skull-sized kingdoms—well, it is, and always has been, to put it politely, utter bunk. Flightiness and envy and shame—male, female, whatever, we all have to deal with those emotions. (Go into any bar and you'll find as much emotional need at a table of male investment bankers as you will at the girls' night out a few feet away; there's not as much distance between "you go, girl" and Hugo-Bossed chest-beating as most would like to think.)

Anyway, my point is this: it's important that neither "Homeland" nor "Enlightened" have arrived at the parade bearing that About Women banner. Their female leads don't have to hold up any feminist or post-feminist placards. (Are we at post-post-feminist, pop-culturally speaking, yet? I keep losing track.) Without that freight, the shows can stumble on to obvious-and-yet-not-obvious insights that TSAWGs have traditionally resisted depicting, and to boot get to do so without having to claim for their (also white and middle class) heroines anything other than their own individuality.

Take, for example, the most egregious mistake the otherwise competent and ambitious CIA agent Carrie has made in this inaugural season of "Homeland": when she crosses the line and sleeps with Brody, the ex-POW target she's investigating. The choice is (at least initially) presented to us as one outside of traditional TSAWG protocol when Our Heroine sleeps with Our (Anti)hero. What Carrie does is heedless and impulsive, to be sure, but her choice to do it isn't about lunar cycles or Women In Love or even, in a gesture favoured by analogous TSAWGs like "Alias" and "Damages," an attempt to avenge some perfect idealized man assassinated in a bathtub at the outset of the series. It simply comes out of nowhere, as much bad-idea sex does. (Or so I've, uh, heard.)

Carrie later tells Brody that she originally slept with him to trick him into confessing that he'd been "turned" as a POW in Iraq. But a more recent admission to her mentor Saul, of her fear that she will always be "alone," suggests a more traditional explanation. Perhaps the answer is both, which would be something quite a bit more like real life, wouldn’t it, than an either/or diagnosis. Admittedly, it's often hard to say, in "Homeland," which ambiguities are intentional. The creators are veterans of "24," not a show that evinced a sophisticated understanding of human psychology and thus it's likely that ulterior motives are here as plot devices rather than as tools to deepen character. Whatever the case, Angela Chase Danes manages to take the chaotic writing and unify Carrie into a difficult, loud, excessively blunt mess of a person. It’s not so much that she makes Carrie sympathetic as she makes her recognizable.

In that sense Amy, as played by Laura Dern, is Carrie's polar opposite, far easier to like in her own cringeworthy way. Admittedly, the topology of Mike White's "Enlightened" is more familiarly TSAWG-ish. Amy's vulnerability stems from what seems like the usual suspects of TSAWG breakdowns: a difficult mother, a miscarriage, the (at least partially) consequent breakdown of a marriage, a workplace affair. The potential for the feminine cliché seemed, as I watched those first few episodes, very high. But then I changed my mind. [In "Enlightened," these problems are not presented to us as "female"—though Amy does occasionally harbor certain ambitions for sisterhood at Abbadonn, the company where she works—but rather as existential. This shift of frame is subtle but important. Amy gets to lay claim to questions about meaning and loss and love in terms that are so abstract as to be universal and yet that don't simply capitulate to the (old/white/male) terms of traditional philosophy.

For those of you not yet watching, such an ethos may make "Enlightened" sound fatally pretentious and vague. And it could be—but it isn't. Somehow White's writing manages to straddle the ridiculous and the touching in utterly unmanipulative ways. Here is the scene I'd use to make my pitch to you to start watching: In the fourth episode, Amy goes on a rafting trip with her ex-husband, one that she clearly hopes will renew the bond they once felt. It ends instead with him getting high and confused and fulfilling every cliché of the deadbeat ex-husband you can imagine. He loves Amy, it's clear, but the situation is nonetheless hopeless. And Amy, well, her reaction is neither to run out and buy tissues nor to declare herself “done with men.” Instead, she just ruminates:

You can try to escape the story of your life but you can’t, it happened, the baby died, the dog died, the heart broke, I knew you when you were young, I know your heart broke, too. I will know you when we are both old and maybe wise, I hope wise. I know you now. Your story. Mine isn’t the one I would have chosen in the beginning but I’ll take it. It is my story. It’s only mine. And it’s not over. There’s time. There is time. There is so much time…

Amy delivers this speech while standing in a rose garden on a wide and sunny day. There is no walk home in the rain, with the strums of a strong woman's ballad playing underneath. Nor some vow of renewal and a triumphant martini with three girlfriends, (as we traveling foursomes of women are wont to enjoy). Shedding these cliches, Amy’s Zenlike rejection of hysterical, cuticle-and-life-destroying anxiety about whether she should marry or settle or have kids or freeze her eggs or opt out or keep working or stop being such a goddamned rare spotted owl—well, for the love of Christ, it’s so downright refreshing, even revolutionary, to see these questions thought about in less all/nothing, either/or, fearmongering terms.

Should this trend catch on, of course, some people inevitably may be disappointed—the producers of reductive and silly magazine covers, for example, who won't be able to wring the same sensationalism from "What Me, Marry?" and "Marry Him!"—but I think we could probably learn to carry on anyway.


Related: Laura Dern Is Our Only Hope For Bringing David Lynch Back


Michelle Dean writes in a lot of places, now. Follow her onTwitter

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Bob Balaban (recently directing "Nurse Jackie" episodes) has become a specialist in this: when he made Bernard and Doris, which was distributed by HBO, he told me: "Truthfully if we had a dollar more it would have been easier but we didn't need $20 million to make this movie.... If we had more money, we would have been obligated to have parties and jet planes." So this actually gets financed in an unusual way: the cast does it for the awards and the fun, shoots are quick and, according to Bernard and Doris producer Dana Brunetti (the president of Kevin Spacey's production company) sometimes everyone owns a piece of the film. ("Kind of like working at Starbucks," Brunetti told me.)

So like, with HBO's future slate, James Gandolfini is executive producer of Hemingway and Gellhorn, along with a cast of others: HBO is happy to take on these relatively low-cost productions, with all these names, and they get a product that's perfect for the market... and yet sometimes it can feel like a school play. (Mildred Pierce was the ultimate example of this. So many brilliant components, garnering lots of awards, sometimes adding up to less than something.)

HBO manages series shows, in general, better than movies (and manages documentaries, historically, best of all), and of course it's wonderful that we have access to all this stuff at a really incredibly low subscription price. But there's something of a formula rut to the HBO movie, which is frustrating. It all feels over-elaborated and yet a little under-thought. Playing to sweep the Emmys isn't always a fun game for the rest of us.

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