As David Carr said so well in this essay a few weeks ago, television is now the opposite of a wasteland. It is instead a lovely Olmstedian park, filled with glorious wonders, shady reclines and scary but usually not too harmful caves and dark forests. It is a Golden Age, basically, for television.

In exploring this Golden Age, Carr and others usually focus on a few shows that are almost invariably “edgy.” They include the late, great The Wire, of which I am a bigger fan than anyone I wager, to lesser but still artfully done shows like Homeland, Justified, Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire and so on.

I’m as big a fan of naked women as anyone (I’m not a fan of graphic violence, but I’ll leave that point aside for now.) But even conceding the appeal of boobs and butts, dialogue that includes profanity and edgy subject matter, how about a shout out for the great shows on television now that are not edgy, that are not pushing boundaries, at least not in such obvious ways?

Two shows that I have been enjoying are ABC’s The Goldbergs and NBC’s Growing up Fisher. Both are mainstream network shows, so they have a greater challenge being good. They have to appeal to more people. They are family comedies. But despite these burdens, both are really good. They have appealing characters. The Goldbergs is about a big Jewish family in the 1980s, although so far their Jewishness is never mentioned. Growing up Fisher is about a family that includes a blind father, who is gutsy and fearless.

One reason I like the two shows no doubt is that both have a journalistic flavor to them. Both are essentially memoirs, because they are based on the writer/producer’s actual history. This makes it easier for them to explore real social forces and situations. (In the case of Growing up Fisher, the show is set in contemporary times – a mistake in my opinion. It doesn’t square with the show being narrated by the grown-up voice of the kid in the show.)

Enjoying these shows prompted me to think that Wholesome is the New Black. Meaning, perhaps the edgiest thing to do nowadays is not to be edgy. To explore that great middle ground, and to do so with skill.

Both shows have their faults. Interestingly, both fail in my opinion in attempting here and there to be edgy, mostly in matters sexual. Both shows feature a 11 to 12 year old boy as a central character. In both of these shows, the boy is often obsessed with the opposite sex. This provides an opportunity to get into various situations. This bugs me, because boys of that age are not obsessively into girls. They are not obsessing about boobs and butts, which is how both shows occasionally depict their protagonists. Give them two more years. I bet the shows do this because they think it will help them loop in a demographic that is sex obsessed. This may be true, but I don’t like it because it makes the shows false.

But that flaw aside, both shows are really good and worth watching. And both are evidence that today, Wholesome is the New Black.