In NBC’s high-school football drama Friday Night Lights, Coach Taylor’s (Kyle Chandler) 16-year-old daughter has her first suitor. Coach is beside himself. He riles when Matt (Zach Gilford) picks her up in his rickety car. He seethes when Matt comes over uninvited to watch TV. He can’t help checking on them and flips out when he finds his daughter snuggled suspiciously under a blanket. In short, he’s a dad. He knows what those boys are thinking and it’s not good. Betty of ABC’s Ugly Betty, although grown, also lives with her dad. Ignacio (Tony Plana), a gentle and hardworking man, encourages his daughters, Betty (America Ferrera) and single mom Hilda (Ana Ortiz), and tells them that they’re beautiful. Julius (Terry Crews), the dad on the CW’s Everybody Hates Chris, marks every penny his son spends and is always ready to smack him back in line if required.

These three dads have one thing in common: They’re there and they care. In the real world, study after study confirms what humanity has always known: Dads matter. Kids who grow up in homes with dads who are there and who care are less likely to do drugs, drop out of school, become sexually active, and engage in criminal behavior. TV has come a long way since Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, or The Cosby Show, but TV still reflects society’s view of dads. Fathers on TV can be broken into three basic categories: The good, the bad, and the bumbling.

Some dads serve as cautionary tales. They may be bad but the message is good. Reba’s Brock Hart (Christopher Rich) left his wife and three children for a new woman at the beginning of the series. Far from making his life happier, his choice made it much more complicated. Now he has to get along with two women. He misses his children, even though he lives down the street. He regrets his selfish behavior and the negative impact it has had on his children. Much of the drama in ABC’s new offering Brothers and Sisters centers around the revelation of the late patriarch’s long-time affair. The fallout among his adult children and betrayed wife demonstrates the earth-shaking nature of infidelity. Shark, a series about a high-flying defense lawyer turned prosecutor, features a story-line about connecting with his teenage daughter. He barely knows her because he was too busy making money when she was growing up to pay attention. Rattling around his luxurious mansion, they struggle to make the connection that should have been made in childhood.

Then there are the bumbling dads, part of TV’s slobs-with-inexplicably-hot-wives syndrome. According to Jim’s Jim (Jim Belushi) and George Lopez’s George always put their foot in their mouths, fly off the handle, and embody other clichés of clumsy dadhood. Their shapely and wise wives smooth things over. Homer Simpson, father on The Simpsons, can’t understand smart Lisa, can’t control rascally Bart, and focuses too much attention on doughnuts. His wife Marge, hot in her own blue-haired way, picks up the pieces with a quiet growl. While these dads leave a lot to be desired in terms of discipline, wisdom, and in Homer’s case, not bringing nuclear material into the home, they portray a somewhat positive message: “I may be an idiot, but at least I care enough to try.”

But some TV fathers are just plain bad. This often comes, as in real life, when parents put their own desires above the welfare of their children. Bimbo after bimbo parades through Two and a Half Men. Uncle Charlie (Charlie Sheen) instructs young Jake to manipulate, ogle women, and swear despite the bleating protestations of dad Alan (Jon Cryer). In The New Adventures of Old Christine both parents are more interested in bedding new people than in their son. Scrubs, often a thought-provoking show, has reached a post-modern low with a story line in which star Dr. Dorian (Zach Braf) impregnates casual date Kim. In a series of scenes that is intended to be lighthearted, but is more sickening, they whimsically try to decide: parenthood or abortion? Usually intended to be shockingly funny, these dads’ indifference to their children comes off as just mean. In The War at Home, parents wage a losing battle against kids’ behavior, refusing to set any standards higher than emerging from adolescence without a police record. Melodramatic dramas, such as Desperate Housewives and The OC portray parents as selfish and poorly behaved as their children. Sometimes more so. These are the postmodern dads, who figure kids will be kids, teens will party and sleep around, and character is not worth molding. They reflect real-life parents whose biggest fear is to be seen as judgmental or hypocritical.

Happily, good fathers aren’t as hard to find on TV as one might think. Coach Taylor, Ignacio, and Julius portray fatherhood as that magical combination of strength, compassion, hard work, and character, and expectation of the same qualities from offspring. Smallville’s Clark Kent (a.k.a. Superman) draws his sense of truth, justice, and the American Way from the example of decency set by his adoptive father Jonathan (John Schneider) on his Kansas farm. The show portrays the now departed (but appearing occasionally in flashbacks) Jonathan as every bit as heroic as his superhero son. Will Smith, currently starring on the big screen in a fatherhood-centered movie The Pursuit of Happyness, has brought his interest in fatherhood to the small screen as well. He and wife Jada Pinket-Smith, created All of Us, a sitcom about figuring out how to raise a child together after divorce. One of the best aspects of the crime drama Numb3rs is the relationship between FBI agent Don (Rob Morrow), his brother the math genius, (David Krumholtz) and their father Alan (Judd Hirsch). Alan radiates integrity and a close connection with his sons.

Friday Night Lights, a drama centered on a coach of a high-stakes high-school football team, takes it to the highest level. The show is all about dads: ineffective, absent, positive or surrogate. Smash (Gaius Charles), raised in the black part of town with by a single mother, feels the pressure to make something of himself. His response is to start taking steroids to improve his chances at a football career. After telling his mother he needs money for a SAT course, her vibrant but poor church takes a special collection for him, which he spends on steroids. He has no dad checking up on him or teaching the value of hard work. Tim (Taylor Kitsch) clings to an idealized image of his absent father and battles with the one family member who cares enough to stick around, his older brother. He sullenly drifts through life with no moral code to guide him except the code of brotherhood and hard work the football team gives. Lila (Minka Kelly), the pretty cheerleader who sleeps with Tim, her boyfriend’s best friend, has a dad who is there but doesn’t care enough. Lila suffers through public shame over her sexual misdeeds; There is no entity known to humanity crueler than a team of high-school cheerleaders. When her dad finds out that these mean girls have created an explicit website about Lila, he cannot summon up the courage to talk to her about it. She weeps alone in her room while he watches TV. Coach Taylor serves as a father figure to these kids, expecting hard work from them, meting out what discipline he can on the field, and telling them he believes in them when they need to hear it. He steps up to the plate with his own daughter despite his initial panic over her new suitor. Over a game of ping pong, he tells her that boys are lying if they tell her they’re thinking of anything other than sex and food. Then he says, “You’re beautiful, you’re sweet, and you’re sensitive and I don’t want to see you get hurt.” Perhaps it’s not the perfect abstinence-until-marriage message, but Coach Taylor is still telling her what girls need to hear from their fathers: He values her and he’s there to protect her. It’s a message we should expect more from TV.

– Rebecca Cusey watches TV from her couch in Washington, D.C. If you know of any examples of good dads on TV, send her a note.