The news that Lisa Edelstein is quitting House is a tragedy for people who want to see more hot Jews and competent administrators in our mass media. Our popular culture, particularly our procedural shows, are heavily skewed towards storylines where our Slightly Rebellious Heroes Tell The Administrator To Shove It And Save Lives, usually by continuing to investigate crimes or treat patients. Usually, the immediate supervisors of those Slightly Rebellious Heroes are on their side, rather than on the side of the higher-ups. We have very few shows where the administrator saying no is a sympathetic figure, much less a romantic or heroic one. Cuddy was the very rare exception.

That said, part of the reason Cuddy gets to be a Hero Administrator to the audience is that she knuckles under to House his team pretty regularly. Unless she thinks she’s getting a career $100 million value out of House (plus the $50,000 she’s built into the annual budget to defend him from lawsuits), blowing up a relationship with a major donor to defend his continued employment may not have been such a great call. Also, unless Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital is in every other area of practice the single most efficient hospital on the planet, House’s team must drive up average health care costs like crazy, much of it spent on testing and treatment that lead absolutely nowhere because, as we all know, diagnostic insights arrive as bolts out of the blue. Atul Gawande would probably tell Cuddy to fire House and invest in a really good preventative care program. But in the world of television, if she followed his advice, Cuddy would just be another evil bureaucrat.

To a certain extent, Cuddy’s behavior is fairly realistic. As that Gawande article points out, hospitals have strong incentives to order as many tests and as many procedures as possible totally irrespective of how much they actually improve patients’ health. And it may be that House is part of a larger cycle: some folks have theorized that the show contributes to patients’ desire for heroic care and more tests and procedures. I’m glad we had an image of a smart, savvy, sympathetic woman administrator on television for as long as we did. I just wish she was a hero for advocating for things that were actually good for us.

I really want to like Fox’s Terra Nova, but I worry that the show has mistaken a story about how to engineer a utopian society for a story about how to walk with dinosaurs:

I think it’s really important to have fiction that helps us work through the implications of our worst-case scenarios. I don’t really think we’re going to hit 2027 and have everyone be infertile, but having had the marvelous experience of feeling what it likes to have my asthma exacerbated by air pollution in China, I think it’s a more reasonable to think about how bad air quality might be by 2149, the date when Terra Nova starts. And in either case, the likelihood of any sci-fi scenario coming to pass isn’t really the point: how we imagine we’d play out the scenarios is the important thing.

And that’s what makes me worry that Terra Nova will be a missed opportunity. First, if you establish your new society in a world where dinosaurs exist and assume that your defenses against them and tools for hunting them (if they’re going to be your primary meat supply) are going to be dependent on technology and resources developed on your homeworld, you’re kind of in trouble. Either your supplies will run out, and you’re not going to be able to drive away from T. Rexes or shoot them; or you’re going to be so inextricably tied to your old world to keep the supply chain up that it’s going to be impossible for you to really start over. Second, if you’re actually starting a new human society, one that’s sustainable but produces radically different development outcomes, it’s probably worth considering whether you want it to include things like nuclear families, property ownership, electricity, and badly-acted teen romantic angst, and if you don’t, how you enforce the new rules and get immigrants to adhere to new patterns with a minimum of backlash-inspiring coercion. Without actual thinking about those things, this is just Jurassic Park with the dude from Avatar, which may be a formula for high ad rates, but isn’t nearly as interesting a television show as one about really having a do-over on human civilization.

It’s taken me a while to catch up on this season of Treme, but I’m finally on track. I still think the show has weak spots. The overlap with actors from Treme and The Wire is significant enough to be distracting, as is the presence of Slightly Alternate Universe Tom Colicchio and Eric Ripert. The show’s recapitulation of political events feels a bit like a time capsule. And it’s a baggier show than I would always like, though I will watch musicians fiddle around forever, particularly when brass is involved.

But one thing that’s struck me as particularly strong this season is the way Treme is dealing with sexual assault and its aftermath. The scene where LaDonna gets assaulted in her bar isn’t as brutal as the scene where Dr. Melfi gets raped in The Sopranos, but her fear is raw and powerful, her pool cue whipping ineffectually through the dark air. Khandi Alexander is a remarkable actress, and it’s both horrifying and a wonderful piece of craft to watch her face as a doctor performs a vaginal exam in the hospital to check her for signs of sexual assault, to watch herself steel herself to take the pills that will guard her against sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy, to watch her smile with a marked-up face, through missing teeth. Unlike Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, where swift prosecution and conviction offer the promise of healing within the programming hour, there’s no police investigation going on, no warm and fuzzy sense that LaDonna’s going to be okay. LaDonna could close up the bar, move to Baton Rouge with her husband—it’s more complex than if she was simply too poor to move away—and the show has a respect for that complexity.

Similarly, the attack on Dr. Melfi is incredibly hard to watch (it’s in the episode “Employee of the Month,” if you want to check it out)—you’re really forced to sit through something horrible, rather than given the mercy of a shot that cuts away from the worst of it. But her pain and rage are powerful and sustained. I appreciate that The Sopranos respected that damage enough to let it linger, rather than curing her for the comfort of the audience. Most of the time, the premium cable networks get criticized for taking advantage of their ability to show explicit sex to titillate viewers. But that same license also means that HBO, Showtime, and the other pay cablers also get to show the starkness of sexual assault in a way that primetime television can’t.