Golden Heart Awards Gala, Great Hall, Cunard Building, 25 Broadway, 7pm, tickets and information can be found at glwd.org; Pratt Golden Gala, Waldorf Astoria, 301 Park Avenue, 6pm, tickets and information can be found at pratt.edu/support_pratt; La Maison Cointreau opening, 632 Hudson Street, private event.

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.

Ryan Murphy (Getty Images)

FX, a network whose luck has lately been a bit mixed, has ordered 13 episodes for its next drama series, entitled American Horror Story. The series, by Glee producers Ryan Murphy (who previously worked with FX on the series Nip/Tuck) and Brad Falchuk, is about a family running from their past by moving to Los Angeles.

A lot's changed since the Nip/Tuck days, and not merely for the ascendant Mr. Murphy: FX recently misfired with the series Terriers and Lights Out, both of which were canceled after one season, and is losing long-running drama series Rescue Me after this season. The network, which remains home to hit Sons of Anarchy and critically acclaimed Justified, can still sway actors, though; the series is to star Dylan McDermott, recent Emmy nominee Connie Britton of Friday Night Lights, and Jessica Lange, the latest Oscar-winner of a certain age to switch screens.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Lovely to Murphy, maybe. Roger Ebert wasn't impressed:

In Italy, [Roberts's character] eats such Pavarottian plates of pasta that I hope one of the things she prayed for in India was deliverance from the sin of gluttony. At one trattoria she apparently orders the entire menu, and I am not making this up.

Ebert sounds like he was grossed out, not scandalized. He finishes his review with some subtle stings, calling the movie "shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue." Eat, Pray Love, says Ebert, "mercifully reverses the life chronology of many people, which is Love Pray Eat."

The ultimate verdict on any controversy in the movie will, as always, be at the box office - and perhaps in upticks in business at your local Olive Garden.

The Oscar-winning actor -- best known for either playing a psychopath or heartthrob, depending on the person you ask -- will reportedly make an appearance on Glee next season. And while this could just be another rumor floating around the series -- OMG, Matthew Morrison and Lea Michele are totally dating -- since there are actually corresponding quotes from Bardem, it simply feels too insane to make up. Said Bardem to EW: "We’re going to rock the house [...] We’re going to do some heavy metal — Spanish heavy metal, which is the worst." OK then!

Bardem's plot will dovetail with the wheelchair bound Artie (played by the non-wheelchair bound Kevin McHale) and will probably feature at least one ridiculous medallion and some leather pants. The story goes that the actor became a "Gleek" (a.k.a. a fan of the Fox series) after watching the first season in a single week and sought out his Eat Pray Love director -- and Glee creator -- Ryan Murphy to beg for a role. Our theory? Columbia Pictures -- and Murphy -- realized that the Julia Roberts-led Eat Pray Love was skewwing older in its tracking and needed to get under-25 girls to the theater. And what better way to do that here in 2010 than to be associated with Glee. Hey, it was either that or vampires...

That Glee is arguably a hit, then, is all the more surprising. The Fox series—which combines elements of High School Musical, American Idol, Election and Rock Band—feels about as suited for success, as its flamboyantly gay character, Kurt Hummel, is suited for playing football. And yet both things have happened during this first season: Glee's a solid-performing phenomenon, and Kurt led the football team in a choreographed dance to Beyonce's "Single Ladies."

Last week's episode, "Wheels," was touted as a game changer by creator Ryan Murphy, because, for the first time, Glee added a layer of humanity to its characters. It was the type of episode necessary to keep the show from falling into flash-in-the-pan status. But there is still more work to be done! Here are some helpful suggestions to keep Glee in it for the long haul; or, at least until everyone graduates high school.

More Kurt singing...

If there is a breakout character among the misfits of Glee—one that isn't named Sue Sylvester and played by the inimitable Jane Lynch—it's the aforementioned Kurt. As played by newcomer Chris Colfer, Kurt has been put through the emotional ringer during season one: he's had to come out of the closet to his father, parry away the gay slurs of classmates, partake in ridiculous musical numbers (see: "Single Ladies") and even showcase honest-to-goodness singing talent (see: his performance of "Defying Gravity"). The more solos he's given in the future, the better.

...but less Mr. Schu rapping!

We're not sure who ever thought having a 30-year-old white guy routinely perform rap songs was a good idea, but we can assure you it is not. Mr. Shuster, the glee club leader, is charming enough (and thanks to Matthew Morrison, is blessed with a great voice), but why all the rapping? It's like nails on chalkboard. Please, never again.

More mash-ups...

From what we've been lead to believe, glee club acapella groups love performing mash-ups of popular songs, but thus far on Glee we've only been treated to two (Bon Jovi's "It's My Life"/Usher's "Confession, Pt. II" and Beyonce's "Halo"/Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine"). And, wouldn't you know it, they were both been performance highlights. The joy of Glee is in its ability to take songs and show them off in a different light; without mash-ups and remixes, it risks becoming karaoke.

...but less auto-tune and production!

Albeit it karaoke with the sheen of a T-Pain song. Must every number on Glee be over-produced to the point of suffocation? Just once, we'd love to hear a song filled with the natural din of room sound and not the perfect stillness of a recording studio. Glee would do well to take a cue from Jay-Z: no more auto-tune!

More Quinn, the manipulating Queen Bee...

Every show needs a good adversary, and while Glee had originally set up Sue Sylvester to fill that role, Ms. Lynch's towering-cum-hilarious performance has made her a fan favorite. But what of Quinn Fabray (Dianna Argon)? The former cheerleader is so unappealing that whenever she's on screen we're hoping for a stray meteor to fall on her head. She's fantastically awful! Embrace the dark side and keep Quinn away from anything that requires her to smile, play nice or, heaven help us, sing.

...but less Terri, the shrill wife!

On the flipside of Quinn, there's Jessalyn Gilsig as Will's pregnancy-faking wife, Terri. We assume she's supposed to be someone audiences love-to-hate, but in reality, we just hate her. Her entire plotline is contrived and annoying and if her character didn't exist, Glee would immediately be three times better. Mr. Murphy, get ready for a course correction. Might we remind you of our favorite deus ex machina, the stray meteor?

We found ourselves kinda stunned by what happened on television last night. No, not that Republican congressman Joe Wilson heckled the president of the United States during his address to the joint session on Congress—seriously? “You lie?” This isn’t a town hall meeting in South Carolina, buddy!—but that we really found ourselves falling in love with Glee. If you would have told us in May that we’d be legitimately excited to see where this series goes over the course of season one, we’re not sure we would have believed you. Perhaps the use of Don’t Stop Believin’ at the end of the pilot was more prescient than it first appeared.

As we wrote back then, despite possessing a plethora of excellent moving parts—the premise, the cast—the pilot episode of Glee was choppy, derivative and forced: too much like an Alexander Payne movie and too much like the long-forgotten—though not by us!—Miss Guided with Judy Greer but with too much preciousness to be sustainable beyond the pilot. However, in the first episode of the season, everything was on-point and focused, a complete turnaround from before. The situations and, most importantly, the characters, were given a chance to breath and exist. In the pilot, creator Ryan Murphy didn’t just hijack Mr. Payne’s Middle American palette, but also his utter contempt for the characters he created. The students and teachers on Glee didn’t seem like human beings as much as they seemed like vessels to make jokes at their expense. Now, though, they’re more than just punch lines and excuses for choreographed dances; they’re human beings that people can empathize with. The derisive Payne sense of humor has been replaced by something more akin to 30 Rock: You’re laughing with them and not at them.

That Mr. Murphy also gets an epic performance out of Jane Lynch doesn’t hurt either. Ms. Lynch has long been one of the most talented comedic actresses working in Hollywood—we still think she could have gotten an Oscar nomination for Role Models—but on Glee she takes things to another level. Simply, she’s a riot on the show; Ms. Lynch’s screen-time-to-laugh-line ratio almost breaks down to 1-to-1. We can barely even think of something she said that wasn’t funny—our favorite: “That was the most offensive thing I’ve seen in twenty years of teaching, and that includes an elementary school production of Hair.”

We guess our now-love of Glee can be easily summed up with what teacher Will Schuster (Matthew Morrison) relayed to one of his students about glee club during the episode: “It was cool, we had fun and that is what glee is supposed to be about.” Glee isn’t about to replace oxygen, but it’s quite possibly the most fun we’ve had watching television in months. And, really, what’s wrong with that?

About that star turn: As Rachel, the overachieving (and hated) glee club queen bee, Lea Michele is fabulous. It goes without saying that she has the musical chops—the 22-year-old Bronx native was the lead in the original cast of Broadway’s Spring Awakening, and her voice has an unmistakable, forged-on-stage power. But what makes this performance so notable are the subtle ways Ms. Michele makes Rachel at turns both empathetic and derisible, sometimes within the same take. Sure, she’s a lot like Election’s Tracy Flick, but in the hands of Ms. Michele, Rachel is more likable, self-reflective and, most important, vulnerable. Plus, she sings! Those looking for the next big teen star can end their search.

Ms. Michele aside, everyone else in the cast is spot-on, too: Broadway star Matthew Morrison, here playing the teacher in charge of the glee club, is the latest in a long line of Ryan Atwood look-alikes on television this spring (joining Ryan Atwood himself, Ben McKenzie on Southland and Jeremy Renner on the now-canceled The Unusuals), but he acquits himself nicely as a man struggling with the internal conflict between his teenage dreams and adult responsibilities; Cory Monteith (Kyle XY), as the jock-cum-love interest, is basically just doing Chris Klein in American Pie (or Election, if you’d prefer), but he has an easy chemistry with Ms. Michele that works; and newcomer Amber Riley, who proudly states that she doesn’t want to be a backup singer because “I’m Beyoncé, I ain’t no Kelly Rowand,” might be the funniest person not named Jane Lynch on the entire show.

Yet with all that good will, the problems with Glee rest squarely at the feet of Mr. Murphy. Truth be told, we’ve never seen his appeal—Nip/Tuck was only moderately entertaining during its first season and has now become unwatchable; his adaptation of Running with Scissors was one of the worst movies from 2006—but here he just seems in over his head as a writer-director. The idea for Glee is great—an underdog story that combines high school, pop music and that feel-good quality that millenials so desire—but Mr. Murphy doesn’t seem entirely sure what to do with all the riches he’s been given. Glee’s pilot feels like a total chop job with disorienting leaps from scene-to-scene and distracting voice-overs to patch over the holes. Cogency is apparently not as important to this equation as choreography (which, it should be noted, is pretty impeccable).

Whether Mr. Murphy can take all the pieces and make Glee into something truly worthy of all the pre-premiere chatter is a question that won’t have an answer until the series gets started in earnest on Wednesdays this fall. However, any show that has the temerity to end with a cast sing-along of “Don’t Stop Believing” is a show we’re at least going to add to our DVR list. What can we say? We’re still suckers for Journey.

From Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy, Glee has a pretty bland premise: a new teacher arrives at a high school and tries to revive the fledgling glee club, which is filled with a bunch of social misfits. What separates Glee from every other teen show in the history of teen shows is that the cast members sing actual pop songs, from Katy Perry to Journey—think The Breakfast Club meets Moulin Rouge. Yep, it’s a musical. The cast is filled with a mix of actual Broadway stars and character actors: Matthew Morrison of Hairspray is the teacher; Spring Awakening’s Lea Michele co-stars as the beautiful/annoying outcast/perfectionist; and look out for Victor Garber, Kristen Chenoweth and, in an inspired bit of casting, the always-hilarious Jane Lynch as the cheerleading coach.

Of course, there are a few major problems here that could prevent Glee from achieving any success at all. For starters, Mr. Murphy is pretty much a hack. Nip/Tuck is an unwatchable mess, and his only foray into feature filmmaking was the derisible adaptation of Running with Scissors. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen if television audiences are willing to accept a musical series—judging from the reactions to Viva Laughlin and Cop Rock, we’re guessing they aren’t. Still, we have to give Fox a lot of credit. While the other networks seem content to live and die with the same old tired cop shows and broad sitcoms, Glee represents a Philippe Petit tightrope walk. If it works, it will be a watercooler smash; if it doesn’t, it will be just another cautionary tale to warn people against originality.

Rather than premiere a short run of episodes during the overcrowded next two months, Fox has shrewdly decided Glee stands a better chance at being successful if the pilot airs in the post-American Idol finale timeslot on May 19th. If all goes according to plan, the remaining first season episodes will be on the schedule in the fall. Set your DVR accordingly.