AV Club is making fun of Nicole Richie for getting a hip-mom sitcom. While I definitely find the daughter-of-privilege-jumps-the-creative-process-line thing annoying (one of the Kardashians recently did it too, landing on One Life to Live), I actually don’t feel as vexed by this news. More so than her buddy Paris Hilton, Richie’s drug problem appears to have been serious and debilitating rather than recreational. She But she also appears to have put the work into turning herself into a productive adult and mother. She broke with Rachel Zoe amidst rumors that the stylist was encouraging her to stay unhealthily thin. These days, she seems cute, and kicky, and a devoted mom, and if she wants to get back into working closer to full-time, who am I to mock her for pursuing something commercially viable?

Redemption narratives are, themselves, a commercial product. It’s impossible to know how genuine the changes in Richie’s life are, or what they mean to her. But they sell magazines, and talk-show interviews, and gossip columns. They sell us on the idea that we want to see someone succeed, and so we turn out to watch their television shows and see their movies to see if they really have it together, and to make ourselves feel good for supporting someone who has improved their life via willpower, by which we mean expensive rehabilitation facilities. We get to think we’re moral participants in their success, we’re virtuous for enjoying junk.

I went to see Morning Glory on Friday with a group of female journalist friends, including Shani Hilton and Latoya Peterson. I think we expected it to be a guilty pleasure, a lot of Rachel McAdams being adorable, Patrick Wilson being delicious, and Harrison Ford being grumpy, and of course it was all of those things. But we found ourselves howling in the theater; I can’t remember the last time I’ve laughed so hard. It’s one of the truer movies I’ve seen about the practice of journalism, particularly the daily grind of non-investigative journalism (which normally gets the most screen time). And it’s a delightfully non-punitive movie about a woman who loves her work.

A number of the critiques of Morning Glory have compared the movie unfavorably to Network. That leap makes a certain amount of sense: they’re both about the news business. But I think Morning Glory is just weird and sincere enough, and just fluffy (folks who have seen the movie will get the joke) enough, that its true predecessor is Soapdish, the terrific 1991 movie about life on a soap opera set that starred a cast even more ridiculously accomplished than Morning Glory‘s: Sally Field, Kevin Klein, Whoopi Goldberg, Robert Downey Jr. before the drugs, Elisabeth Shue, a young Terri Hatcher.

Both shows are just a little bit over the line. Morning Glory has an escalating serious jokes about the gimmicks McAdams’ producer subjects her weather man to, while Soapdish is based around the soaps come to life. Soapdish is probably the better movie if only because Morning Glory would have benefitted from embracing its weirdness a bit more. High emotional keys stick out less in melodrama.

But Morning Glory‘s real strength is that it’s a romantic comedy that could have cut out its romance entirely and still have been a successful, entirely engaging movie. For once, the main character’s passion for her work is a genuine, consuming, fully-developed passion. And as a result, it’s much easy to see how her love interest finds her interesting and how they have real problems—even if he’s not that interesting himself.

Over the weekend at The Atlantic, I took a look at Sarah Palin’s Alaska, which premiered last night. As I wrote, it’s no great shakes as a political statement or a conservationist documentary, but as reality television, it’s pretty promising:

In the first episode, that family—particularly the Palins’ younger, less-exposed daughters Willow and Piper—make an for an appealing supporting cast.

“My mom is super-busy, she is addicted to the Blackberry,” Piper announces prior to a salmon-fishing trip in bear country, nailing a parody of her mother pecking away on her smartphone. In another moment, she calls her mother “Sarah,” to needle her, and later roars enthusiastically at a bear who gets a little too close to their fishing boat, even as her mother warns her “If you hook the bear, he would get ticked off.”

With Bristol (and perhaps conveniently, her son) out of the house in the first episode, Willow gets to be the source of the standard complement of teen-hijinks jokes. “This gate, it’s not just for Trig, it’s for no boys allowed upstairs” Sarah declares when Andy, who appears to be Willow’s boyfriend, comes over for a visit and finds himself blocked by a safety gate for Palin’s two-year-old. “You can text her up there.”

I should probably take the show, and Palin herself, a bit more seriously than this. But if I were her, and got paid millions of dollars to do work like this, I’d never give it up. Being president is an awful, stressful job that ages you prematurely and exposes your family to a terrible and tremendous tide of criticism. Going fishing and hiking and hanging out on a gorgeous lake, even with a nosy neighbor, sounds a lot better.