Han Lee, of '2 Broke Girls'

Last season, television’s most anodyne evening got a shot of hipness in the form of Sex and the City executive producer Michael Patrick King’s new series, 2 Broke Girls. The CBS comedy about young ladies in Brooklyn was an instant hit, kicking off a season-long discussion about girl-women on TV (viz. Girls, New Girl) and getting hailed as a slice-of-life comedy by those who thought that a permanent war over the sartorial choices of “hipsters” coupled with the protagonists’ burning ambition to open a cupcake shop seemed an apt depiction of life in the big city.

But there was another element to the show—something we hadn’t seen in a while. The Tiffany Network’s new Monday night sitcom was brazenly, shockingly, unapologetically racist.

Among the tokenish cast of minorities called upon to behave in baldly stereotypical ways are restaurant manager Han Lee (Matthew Moy), who comes in for mockery for his apparent asexuality and his utter misunderstanding of American culture. (Are his hilarious mispronunciations an homage to Mickey Rooney’s unforgettable turn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s?) Earl, played by Garrett Morris, is a hep-cat jazz musician of the sort one might encounter if whisked back in time half a century or so, or in the reeaal cool fantasies of a white person who’s never met a black person, while Oleg (Jonathan Kite) is a sexually voracious Ukrainian with a pan-Eastern European accent. “You’re so stinky, my mother in Korea called me and said, ‘What’s that smell?’” Han tells Oleg in a typical moment of sparkling repartee. To which Oleg replies with an unkind evaluation of the boss’s manhood.

It’s almost enough to make you long for the days of NBC’s Must-See TV—or even the springtime debates over Lena Dunham’s Girls—when we all complained that prime time was too white!

When asked about 2 Broke Girls’s use of stereotypes, Mr. King offered up his own homosexuality as a sort of license to offend.

“I’m gay,” the producer said at this year’s Television Critics Association press tour. “I put in gay stereotypes every week! I don’t find it offensive. I find it comic to take everybody down, which is what we are doing.”

Gay male humor has historically been predicated on an irreverent disdain for propriety—which, in this day and age, has apparently come to include the gleeful bashing of ethnic minorities. After all, if you’re gay, you’re a minority too: it’s a rainbow-colored “get out of jail free” card, per Mr. King’s argument, entitling the bearer to say whatever he likes. “What is or isn’t acceptable as funny in 2012 seems to be a very abstract idea,” Mr. King wrote in a recent essay in Entertainment Weekly (not online). He added that the way he knows that his gags about race do not cross the line is that the live audience at 2 Broke Girls tapings laughs.

The argument makes you wonder where exactly the show recruits its live audience. Just because idiotic racial humor has a fan base doesn’t mean it belongs on prime-time television.

Besides which, there’s a difference between laughing because something is funny and laughing because it is shocking or transgresses certain boundaries of taste. Take the new NBC comedy The New Normal, whose title refers to gay male parenting but could also be taken as an allusion to the increasingly racy and race-conscious television landscape. The show’s creator, Ryan Murphy, whose other current network series is the racially diverse, often irreverent Glee, seems to think that bigoted humor is the fabric that knits a family together. In a recent episode, a racist lady-of-a-certain-age played by Ellen Barkin finally comes to accept the gay man (Andrew Rannells) for whom her daughter is acting as a surrogate. They bond over an ethnic joke—something about adopted Chinese babies coming with egg rolls. It’s sort of a heartwarming moment, but not quite. The family that mocks Chinese babies together stays together?

The series’s sole regular minority character is Mr. Rannells’s assistant at his haute TV-production job. She’s a brash, aggressive black woman of the sort that’s been sassing up the small screen forever, or at least since the heyday of Jackée.

Interestingly, the assistant on The New Normal is played by a Real Housewife of Atlanta, NeNe Leakes, meaning that she came to national attention under the watchful eye of Andy Cohen, the Bravo executive. Mr. Cohen, who also happens to be gay, seems to have his own blind spots when it comes to racial humor. A recent leitmotif of his talk show, Watch What Happens, involves the host, lovingly or not, replaying for laughs a local news clip of a heavily accented black woman talking about her house catching on fire. It’s not impossible for ethnic humor to be funny—far from it. But there’s a certain humanity missing from these shows, where the object of humor isn’t other characters but simple stereotypes. And while gay producers certainly didn’t invent narrow-minded humor, they have lately made it their own.

Should we just come right out and call them the Gaycists--those who hold what Lauren Bans of GQ first defined as "the wrongheaded idea that having gay characters gives you carte blanche to cut PC corners elsewhere"? Let’s. A further definition: Out gay men whose knowing, ironic appropriation of racist tropes, and whose self-aware frankness about their own prejudice, sashays right across a line the rest of us have come to respect.

Race and gay culture have always made for an uneasy mix. The black drag queens of Paris is Burning—exiled even from white gay culture—have birthed generations of gay men who’ve picked up the vocal intonations and mannerisms traditionally associated with black women. (Think of Project Runway champion Christian Siriano, for example, or Will & Grace’s Jack in full finger-snapping dudgeon.) For white gay men, a group perpetually exiled from the mainstream, identification with blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups goes hand-in-hand with a sort of mockery that’s as much about the jokester’s outsider status as it is about the target’s. This isn’t new—using the women of Sex and the City as his mouthpiece, Mr. King set an episode of the show in the milieu of black drag queens, with Carrie Bradshaw, known for her love of “ghetto gold,” screeching in faux African-American patois about her drag-ball-style “twirl.” And the camp humor aesthetic, from Paul Lynde through Will & Grace, has always used its practitioners’ outsider status as a pass for universal derision. It’s all in good fun—isn’t it? But the combined airtime given to 2 Broke Girls, The New Normal, the urbane gay couple of Modern Family (who were, admittedly, created by straight people), with their Spanglish-screeching harridan of a sister-in-law, and Andy Cohen’s bickering Atlanta Housewives (whose antics are somehow always more GIF-worthy than those of their white counterparts in other cities) adds up to a troubling conclusion: Now that gay marriage is a reality, any gay man with some disposable income and a sperm sample can become a parent and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is consigned to the history books, affluent white gay men have finally been granted admittance to the majority culture, and as such, they are seizing on a privilege long-beloved of their straight counterparts: trashing minorities!

They laugh at themselves, sure, but with the apparent belief that their flaws are cute. The gay men of The New Normal are gently chided for their affectations, particularly Mr. Rannells’s fastidious dresser—but they hardly come in for the worst of Ms. Barkin’s slurs. Those are reserved for random bystanders, like a black schoolteacher of whom she asks “Hablo English?” Sure, Mr. Murphy’s trademark nihilism means that he mocks just about everyone through her character—but isn’t it all a bit wearying? “It’s very clear that I have great affection for her,” Mr. Murphy told Vogue of Ms. Barkin’s character. “It’s like what I said about the [Christian advocacy group] Million Moms: Watch the show! I get that you feel marginalized and on the outside too! We have more in common than you think!”

Indeed. But despite the fundamental conservatism of much of the entertainment industry, no one’s granting the Million Moms the clout to produce a television show casting themselves as the heroes of their own story. Whatever happened in Mr. Murphy’s past, he’s now the consummate insider, with the social cachet to do whatever he likes in his career or his personal life; that Vogue interview notes that Mr. Murphy and his husband are, like The New Normal’s protagonists, considering having a child through surrogacy. He’s portraying the world the way he sees it—with minorities as window-dressing around gay men. (This seems to be a pattern: On Mr. Murphy’s Glee, Chris Colfer’s gay teen embarks on a lovingly portrayed relationship with a fellow singer, while two Asian students’ relationship gets the derisive nickname “Asian Fusion.”)

Mr. Murphy and some of his colleagues don’t mean any harm. And the shows are far from unwatchable: The New Normal earned a rave review from Slate’s television critic, June Thomas, who happens to be a lesbian. “When the whole of America is listening,” she wrote, “it’s tempting to deny the humor. But I admit it: I laughed.”

Meanwhile, 2 Broke Girls’s ratings success, and the availability of Oleg and Earl one-liners immortalized by YouTube users, indicates that there’s a large constituency who enjoy such ethnic sketches as filtered through Michael Patrick King’s tin ear.

That said, not everyone’s so forgiving of The New Normal and its ilk: Salon’s Willa Paskin wrote that the Ryan Murphy show’s jokes “can be momentarily bracing—this show is going there!—but they’re also unremittingly nasty,” while Asian-American cultural critic Andrew Ti wrote on Grantland that “The pervasive crime of [2 Broke Girls’s] Han Lee really boils down to his infantilized speech patterns, thrown in, I assume, just in case his Asian face didn’t drive the message that He Is Not Like You home enough, and you were starting to think of him as some kind of human being.”

But maybe it’s not just the gays who are taking their seat at the table and ingratiating themselves with a rude blast of ethnocentric realness. Take Mindy Kaling’s new series, The Mindy Project, which debuted Tuesday night, featuring the Office star as an obstetrician. While the Indian-American actress, who is also the series’s creator, doesn’t mine her own background for humor, she tosses stones at a Serbian character (a “war criminal”), Gabourey Sidibe (she’s still a punchline?) and her character’s immigrant patient base (“This office is not an inflatable raft!”). Characters like Ms. Kaling’s on The Mindy Project or the gay couples of Modern Family and The New Normal or the two broke girls may belong to groups that have been underrepresented on television until recently, but if they see any irony in their easy mockery of other marginalized groups, it’s not making it to the screen.

That said, The New Normal shows signs of growth; though its most recent episode has Ms. Leakes’s character talking about how black people are always late, and a deeply unsettling joke about Tiger Woods’s lust for white women, the plot, in which the central couple wonder why they have no black friends, manages to play on the edge and actually say something about privilege, rather than throwing jibes at those who don’t have it.

It may not be normal, but it certainly does feel new.

As if to reward us for buying tickets to Bridesmaids, the networks were suddenly bullish on “girl”-centric comedies—ABC snagged New Girl, CBS bought 2 Broke Girls, NBC bought Whitney, named for and written by the girl who created 2 Broke Girls, and HBO green-lit Girls, which was not only on-trend title-wise, but also came with Bridesmaids producer Judd Apatow’s imprimatur.

These four shows represented the largest female television boom since the end of Sex and the City, which had demonstrated how lucrative female-centric TV could be, but had also proven difficult to replicate. Networks produced shows about women of similar age and temperament—Cashmere Mafia, Lipstick Jungle—but they failed to stick. TBS broadcast re-runs of SatC which were about 15 minutes long after being trimmed of the sex scenes.

Now seven years gone, the series’ influence still looms over the new female-centric shows. AV Club has already portrayed Girls as a recession-era Sex and the City for a younger generation. The first female-centric show on HBO since the departure of Carrie and the gang, focuses on three young women—“Hannah (Lena Dunham), an eternal intern at a publishing house in SoHo and a hopeful writer; Marnie (Allison Williams), a sexy, bitchy, and ambitious assistant at a slick political PR firm whose goal is to practice environmental law; and Jessa (Jemima Kirke), a space cadet with hippie tendencies who wants to be an artist/educator,” as the press release put it—managing their careers, their relationships, and their friendships with one another in trendy Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

On a press tour for 2 Broke Girls, Sex and the City creator Michael Patrick King insisted his new series had “completely different DNA.” This much is true: Sex and the City’s heroines fetishized Magnolia Bakery cupcakes, while 2 Broke Girls’ heroines capitalized on that trend by marking up the prices of the homemade cupcakes they sell to hipster sheep in the Williamsburg diner where they wait tables.

In fact, one of the more surprising trends found in this crop of female-written television is their marked departure from the sort of third-wave Cosmos-and-Manolos sexual empowerment that was the earlier show’s hallmark. Quite the opposite: In the pilot episode of each of the new series, the star’s sexual humiliation is presented as the obstacle that establishes the season’s narrative arc.

The premise of New Girl is that Jess (Zooey Deschanel) has to move in with a bunch of dudes she finds on Craigslist, after coming home her to surprise her boyfriend with an amateur strip tease and finding him banging his own new girl. (As Lucille Ball might put it: “Waaaah!”) 2 Broke Girls’ Max (Kat Dennings) also catches her boyfriend messing around in her bed in Episode 1; kicking him to the curb frees up apartment space for Caroline, the second broke girl. And Whitney foretells a season of rom-com clichés with the lead character’s attempt to “spice things up” with her boyfriend by donning a nurse’s costume for some role-play, a farce which ends with the poor guy in need of emergency care from a real nurse.

And if Tiny Furniture is any indication, sexual humiliation is also a theme of Ms. Dunham’s. In the film, Aura (played Ms. Dunham), smokes a joint with her co-worker before having a regrettable sexual encounter with him in a Dumbo construction site. It’s a much darker scene than the sexual slapstick found in the New Girl and Whitney, but the message is the same: look at what degradation an otherwise competent and confident young woman will endure for the approval (affection and commitment are not even on the table) of an aloof, good-looking guy.

In addressing sexual power dynamics, 2 Broke Girls and New Girl should be credited for their half-hearted attempts at making sexual objects of male characters, though they end up stalled by clichés. Guy candy is identified by ripped abs, and male vanity by an eagerness to be shirtless. As a result, though, both shows miscast key male actors (Max’s boyfriend looks more like a Hollister greeter than a Havemeyer heartthrob) and, worse, ignore the the array of more insidious strains of vanity plaguing contemporary men—sneaker collections, heritage whiskeys, taxonomic knowledge of the D.C. hardcore scene, etc.

But even an imperfect representation of the hipster subculture is new to network sitcoms. Forget the glossy allure of Carrie and the girls; this new crop of shows seems determined to present women “as they really are,” i.e., beautiful but quirky. Whitney Cummings is a former model, but on TV she plays a version of herself who embarrasses her boyfriend by wearing the wrong thing, falling down, and eating a lot.

New Girl stars indie dream girl Zooey Deschanel, but her acting (which, here, is limited to wide-eyed expressions, a Pee Wee Herman voice and frequently breaking into song) is not “adorkable,” as the show’s marketing campaign insists, but irritating. It actually reminded me of Will Farrell’s demented “Buddy” character in Elf, in which Ms. Deschanel, ironically, played the mordantly adorkable love interest.

2 Broke Girls comes much closer to nailing the hipster aesthetic. It gets the details so wrong you could cringe (a coveted Strokes shirt should have been vintage Pavement, the crowd coming out of an Arcade Fire concert look more like Fleet Foxes fans), but its tone—blithe racism, rapid-fire and scattershot cultural references, real-life conversations about events that occurred on social networks—perfectly captures the defeated irony of the twentysomething gentrifier, for better or for worse.

The best example is a scene in the pilot, in which Max finds Caroline asleep on the train. Max nudges her, and Caroline jolts awake and shocks Max with a pink Taser she had tucked under her arm.

“I thought I was being raped,” Caroline says, by way of apology.

“That’s not what rape feels like,” Max replies, and the laugh track rolls.

The point doesn’t seem to be that rape is funny, but that, despite occupying a safe and gender-equal New York, rape and the threat of rape are still such a horrifically banal part of the female psychological experience that it is the first word on the tip of Caroline’s tongue when she’s touched unexpectedly.

The new slew of girly shows share another somewhat controversial form of humor. With help from Whitney and 2 Broke Girls, the word “vagina” is fall TV’s biggest trend, according to The New York Times’ Bill Carter. It’s not always anatomically precise, but it’s funny.

“Vagina jokes paid for my house,” Ms. Cummings told the Times. As a comedian who inhabits the same sphere of Hollywood stand-ups who spout off dick jokes in Judd Apatow’s Funny People, she knows how to get a surefire laugh.

But dick jokes were enjoyable in Funny People, for one, because they were improvised by a group of male comedians playing male comedians who are also friends.

If vagina jokes are a form of girl bonding, they’re not used that way in these shows. When 2 Broke Girls’s Max tells a male patron of the diner where she works that when he snaps his fingers to get her attention it makes her vagina dry up, it’s just a more crass example of her character’s relentless hostility.

Which gets at why, ultimately, New Girl, Whitney, and 2 Broke Girls feel like they’re missing something—the female characters are so friendless. Female friendship was the constant in Mr. King’s Sex and the City, but 2 Broke Girls’ Max and Caroline are plainly uncomfortable around one another. They avoid eye contact when revealing personal details, as if saving her best lines for themselves. Whitney and her two friends—nameless shopping and drinking partners—fail the Bechdel test (in which two female characters talk about something other than men). New Girl is less about Jess, who mostly cries, than it is about the dynamics between her three male roommates.

But then, if anyone could provide an update on female friendship, I imagine it would be Ms. Dunham. Tiny Furniture took girl talk beyond the brunch table, to conversations in unmade beds, and through the shower door, while wriggling in and out of outfits with a sense of straight girl physical intimacy rarely depicted on screen. In other words, perfect for vagina jokes.

In anticipation of the show, I’ve been following the writers’ Twitter feeds, where gynecological humor has become an ongoing theme.

“Last summer my gyno said lots of women were coming in worried because ‘they didn’t recognize the sensation of having a vagina in hot weather,’” Ms. Dunham wrote.

“Lena!" a friend replied. "Don’t say 'hot vagina.'" a friend replied.

“If this upsets you,” cautioned Jenni Konner, Girls executive producer, “I’m worried you won’t be able to watch Girls.”