There's a meme going around this week, and if you haven't seen it yet, pour yourself a strong cup of coffee and settle in. Yahoo Entertainment has the rundown, but the short version is this: somebody drew a character described as a "solo polyamorous hijabi amputee," stacked every identity label in the modern writer's room onto one poor cartoon woman, and the internet did what the internet does. It laughed until it hurt.

I laughed too, and I'd do it again.

The meme works because of what it's actually aimed at. The hijab isn't the target, and neither are amputees or anybody living their actual life. The checklist is. You've seen the checklist. Every pitch deck has one now, and every character comes out the other side with the same three adjectives bolted on like training wheels. The writers aren't creating a person anymore; they're assembling one from a supplier's catalog, and the meme just said the quiet part with a Sharpie.

I couldn't tell you how many streaming pilots I've given up on lately, but the reason is always the same. The heroine gets introduced like a customs form: her job, her trauma, her identities, her preferences, all recited at me before she's done a single thing. Not one line tells me whether she's brave, or funny, or worth rooting for. Nobody in that writers' room asked the only question that matters, which is: why should we care? They were too busy filling in boxes.

The old studio system had its own sins, heaven knows, and I've written about plenty of them. But when Casablanca was made, nobody handed Michael Curtiz a quota sheet. They handed him a script with people in it. Rick blinding himself to Ilsa's husband, Sam playing it again, Laszlo being worth dying for. We remember those characters more than eighty years later because they were drawn as human beings first and demographics never.

Now flip through the streaming menu and count how many leads you can describe without using a single identity label. Go ahead. I'll wait right here with my reruns of Murder, She Wrote.

The studios will call the meme hateful, and the usual scolds will call it worse. They're welcome to. But a joke this accurate doesn't spread because people are cruel. It spreads because everybody recognizes the product. When your character's Wikipedia page is longer than her personality, the audience can smell it through the screen, and no amount of press-tour scolding about representation will fix it.

Representation done well is just casting and writing done well. Sidney Poitier never needed a checklist. He needed In the Heat of the Night, and a script that treated Virgil Tibbs like the smartest man in every room, because he was. That was always the secret, plain as day.

So yes, I'm keeping the meme. Tape it to the writers' room door, fellas. Consider it notes from the cheap seats, where the tickets cost $18 and we've stopped being polite.