In tonight’s finale of Parks & Recreation, we’ll find out if Leslie Knope won or lost the City Council seat she’s been campaigning for all season, but it’s still not clear if we’ll return to Pawnee next season to see Leslie take her place alongside Councilman Hauser in victory or revitalize the Parks Department in defeat. The same is true for Greendale Community College and the TGS writers’ room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The speculation is that 30 Rock will be back for a short season, and that if Parks & Rec and Community get pickups, they’ll be shorter orders as well. That might mean fewer episodes of shows we love. But creatively, it strikes me as a good thing.

I’m a long-time advocate of shorter seasons, and I think we’ve seen a lot of illustrations of the foibles of trying to fit 22-episode orders into a 40-week period this year. Revenge‘s long hiatus slowed the momentum of the ABC Hamptons-set thriller down to a crawl, and the show’s gotten baroque and full of moody shots in its attempt to fill up episode space since its return. Community‘s disappearance from NBC’s airwaves for an agonizing and indefinite period left fans waiting, and while NBC tossed out and then yanked sitcoms like Best Friends Forever and Bent in quick succession. Now I understand that shows fail, networks need to replace things that aren’t working at all, and fans don’t want to wait a long time for their favorite shows to come back. But I’d much rather see short, excellent seasons of shows that are suited to it, and to see them run continuously rather than spaced out in seemingly random ways.

NBC’s Thursday night comedies seem uniquely suited to shorter, smarter seasons. 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation‘s shortened seasons were their best for entirely different reasons. 30 Rock‘s second season was shortened by the writers’ strike, but it was a hilarious, joke-dense season. “SeinfeldVision” and “MILF Island” were fantastic riffs on the industry that preceded the “Queen of Jordan” running gag the show is using now. “Greenzo” featured two of the show’s best-ever cameos in David Schwimmer and Al Gore. And “Sandwich Day” turned Liz’s love of food into a sign of something other than middle-aged singleton schlubbiness. No one has ever made scarfing a sub look so poignant before or since.

Parks and Recreation‘s shortened third season had tons of great comedic beats as well, but it also illustrated how sitcoms can pull off strong serialization without dropping plotlines for a long stretch of episodes or producing episodes that don’t work as standalones. The stated major arc of the season was the question of whether Ben and Leslie would get together, a will-they-or-won’t-they that fit neatly into a wide variety of settings. And it turned out that Leslie’s victories in restoring the Harvest Festival, over her rivals in Eagleton, and in organizing Lil’ Sebastian’s funeral were actually setting up Leslie being asked to run for office. The show didn’t always hit the same beats, and in fact in episodes like “April and Andy’s Fancy Party” and “The Fight,” we got to see a number of the vulnerabilities that would plague Leslie in her campaign this season, namely her desire for control.

The 22-odd episode season may be an industry convention, but that doesn’t mean it’s a creative imperative. If the 2012-2013 season is going to be the last year we have 30 Rock, Parks & Recreation and Community, I’d rather have one of those shows on every night for 36 to 45 straight weeks (with exceptions for holidays), and to have those episodes be uniformly excellent, no filler. And if television’s really just about selling soap, I’ve got to believe it might sell better with new programming rather than reruns and schedule gaps.

The bridge is yours.

-Gaming consoles apparently amount for 1 percent of American residential energy use.

-A history of gunshots in music.

-This is…quite a review.

-Did Alec Baldwin inadvertently reveal 30 Rock‘s cancellation?

-Can it please just be Avengers time already?

James Poniewozik points out that, because of how television production works, the economy characters have to work with in television shows will always lag behind where we actually are:

Does TV have some sort of agenda to talk down the economy? Do programmers realize that average Americans are hurting far more than the statistics and positive spin might make it show? The truth, if you follow the TV business, is neither so nefarious nor profound. Whenever TV chases social trends and zeitgeist plots, there’s a lag time. It takes months or even years to develop scripted shows, and often by the time TV jumps on a trend in the headlines, the headlines have changed. Just as it was quite a while before primetime shows addressed the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, you’d have to expect it to be a while before they reflected any recovery. (Just look at the recent Work It, thankfully no longer with us, in which two guys dressed in drag to get jobs to play off the already-dated “mancession” trend.)

Though I also suspect that any recovery and boom—if and when there is one—will have to be well along before primetime TV is willing to acknowledge it. TV networks want a great economy to sell ads in, but TV writers probably like working with the assumption that it’s tough out there—not for propaganda reasons but dramatic ones. Hard economic times create conflict. They provide stakes, and they supply motivation. TV thrives on characters with challenges in extreme situations, and a recession provides a perfect reason to have characters go to extremes to put food on the table.

I’d argue, though, that the current crop of recession shows hasn’t actually confronted the economy particularly head-on for the source of drama. The use of Ponzi schemers rather than investment bankers is a perfect example of this. Television’s littered with Madoff-like Ponzi schemers from 2 Broke Girls, to Revenge, to Don’t Trust The Bitch in Apartment 23 all out of proportion to the actual number of Ponzi schemes operating and the damage they did. Outright fraudsters may be sexy and dramatic, but they’re not actually the reason the economy ended up in a recession.

Explaining what did happen is a much more complicated process, something that many shows don’t seem particularly interested in tackling. But there are other ways to get at the long-term changes in the economy that are going to affect characters and constrain their choices for years. Both 30 Rock and 2 Broke Girls have alluded to student loans their characters carry—Liz, when interviewing with a co-op board explains of her loan that “It is outstanding,” and Max labors in service to her debt rather than their future. But rather than shaping their decisions. In both shows, the loans show up briefly and then disappear—Liz talks to Jack about wiping out her debt and saving for retirement, and Max and Caroline pay off Caroline’s debt with a party. In neither show is debt the long-term problem it is in real life. Similarly, we haven’t had a lot of programing that addresses the lack of retirement security: there’s a generation of workers who are going to have to keep working much longer than they anticipated, and there’s drama in that, even if it’s not of the “what desperate act will I take to put food on the table this week” variety. It’s true America may be going to work. But that doesn’t mean that we’ll suddenly stop bearing the consequences of long-term changes in our economy that were under way before the recession started and will have consequences long after it’s over.

One of the reasons I’m excited for Veep, HBO’s upcoming show about a female vice president, is that I think it’ll be an interesting intervention in our ongoing debate about awkward ladies in comedy:

A lot of that conversation has centered around Liz Lemon, and the question of whether the embrace of her awkwardness is also an embrace of mediocrity. The addition to 30 Rock of a page who sees Liz as living a dream life after seasons of emphasizing that she’s given up on her professional dreams and dating beneath her has complicated this perspective. But I think Veep adds a new layer to what Sady Doyle has dubbed Lady Loser Comedy.

Selina, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character, is objectively successful: she is the Vice President of the United States. It’s hard to argue that is in any way, shape, or form a compromise or a failure except by the most utterly insane standards. But as y’all will see in the pilot, she keeps screwing up: uttering politically unfortunate malapropisms, making staff mistakes, being generally socially stiff. But Veep walks a very thin line between treating Selina as if she’s dumb and treating her job as if it’s impossible to do well. And therein, I think, lies the revolutionary potential of awkward female characters. It’s one thing to spend time reveling in just being a mess, which I think is the appeal of Liz Lemon for some people, and also why I’m over the character—I’m just not having fun down there any more. But explorations of female awkwardness that reveal how artificial and ridiculous the conventions that govern so-called dignified female behavior are? That I’m pretty excited for.

I was looking through the acting nominations for the Comedy Awards, and it really struck me that in a lot of ways, 2011 was a richer year for women in comedy than it was for men.

In movies, Jason Bateman got a nod for Horrible Bosses, Steve Carell was nominated for Crazy, Stupid, Love, Jean Dujardin was tapped for The Artist, Zach Galifianakis for The Hangover Part II, and Owen Wilson for Midnight in Paris. None of these are particularly innovative roles, and all of them (except Dujardin, whose range I don’t really know) fall pretty squarely within these actors’ existing ranges: Bateman is a tense straight man, Carell is sympathetic and slightly clueless, Galifianakis is disconcerting and wild, and Wilson is winsome. There are a few things that I think were left off this list—I’ll defend The Trip until I run out of breath, Patton Oswalt was great and under-recognized for Young Adult, and I’m not really sure why 50/50, which was nominated elsewhere, didn’t score acting nods—but I can’t think of a performance by a man that’s not here that was a revelation. Ditto in TV, which was dominated by utterly predictable nods for Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock, Ty Burrell in Modern Family, Steve Carell in The Office, and Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. I’m glad to see Louis C.K. in there—his performance in Louie was arguably my favorite thing on television in 2011. But it’s not like he has a lot of peers.

For women, on the other hand, the nominations are actually a lot of fun. I didn’t love Horrible Bosses, but seeing Jennifer Aniston get totally raunchy and ridiculous was a fun stretch for her. Ditto for Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher—depending on how she takes her career next, she could leave horrid romantic comedies behind and steer more in the direction of Charlize Theron in Young Adult, who really ought to be here. Melissa McCarthy was a miracle in Bridesmaids, and Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne, who had an utterly breakout performance in that film also could have easily been nominated. Television has its predictable notes—Tina Fey, for a deeply uninspired season of 30 Rock and Sofia Vergara for Modern Family. But you’ve got Zooey Deschanel in there for a debut performance in New Girl, and Maya Rudolph could easily be there for Up All Night, along with Laura Dern in Enlightened, Kat Dennings or Beth Behrs in 2 Broke Girls (that show’s massive flaws are not their fault), any of the women in Community‘s cast or Eliza Coupe or Elisha Cuthbert in Happy Endings.

And if Whitney or Are You There, Chelsea? had been less terrible, and we’d fulfilled all the potential of the lady comedy boom, this could have been an even more crowded field. I may not be equally addicted to every female comedy performance on the market these days. But it seems like there’s a lot of space available for new actresses to enter the field, and for actresses with existing track records to step out of their comfort zones. If those conditions persist, that’s a recipe for an embarrassment of riches.

Over at NPR’s Monkey See blog, Linda Holmes has a provocative essay up chronicling the decline of Liz Lemon, the harried comedy showrunner who is the star of NBC’s sitcom 30 Rock, from competent if overwhelmed woman to cringing child:

A recent storyline featuring James Marsden as Criss, Liz’s boyfriend who drove a hot-dog truck, was very reminiscent of Dennis the pager salesman. But this time, she didn’t break up with him because Jack gave her the side-eye and forced her to come to terms with the fact that she didn’t want him. She broke up with him because Jack appeared to her as an apparition — her spirit guide, basically — and mocked Criss, mostly for not having any money…Over the course of six seasons, Jack has been fully transformed into a condescending, all-knowing daddy, and Liz has been fully transformed into a needy little girl who is eternally terrified of displeasing him. She’s always had a grudging respect for him, but now she simply reveres him and trusts his judgment more than hers. She was once frazzled but smart, harried but competent, capable of wrangling a bunch of crazy people and then slumping at the end of the day, exhausted but minimally victorious. Now, she’s just dumb, incapable of making her own decisions, and her relationship with Jack is entirely out of balance.

For me, the tipping point with 30 Rock actually came last season when the show decided the next logical place to go in finding ways to be funny about Liz was to utterly sexually humiliate her. Liz was, at the time, dating a commercial pilot with the unfortunate name of Carol and an unfortunate moustache, played by Matt Damon, and they were having bedroom issues. Or, as Liz put it “I freaked out and my junk closed for business. It’s like Fort Knox down there.” The reason? An incident involving a Tom Jones poster, roller skates, the worst haircut anyone could bestow on a child, and a pair of flowered underpants. Liz can’t just have garden-variety intimacy problems: she has to be utterly freakish—and of course, to have Jack help her reach her breakthrough.

The decline of Liz Lemon may be a particular tragedy given how great 30 Rock once was. But when it comes to sex, it’s hardly unprecedented. A number of television comedies have decided to get laughs out of suggesting that their female leads are sexually freakish, and not in a Ludacris-approved kind of way. New Girl‘s done this to Jess twice. First, when she was finally about to sleep with her new boyfriend, the show had Jess overcome her jitters by getting her tangled up in ridiculous lingerie and then had her act out so many exaggerated versions of so many fetishes that she almost scared the poor man to death. More recently, Jess, in an effort to prove that her perennial optimism is always well-founded, ended up almost having a threesome with her creepy landlord. Her inability to read signals in any rational way—and her dancing around her bedroom doing jazz hands after the man proposed a threesome—were not the actions of a rational person.

And Parks and Recreation, which has done an admirable job of making its public servant heroine Leslie Knope into a sex symbol, had a weird slip last season when Leslie’s boss, Ron, discovered that she was dating their immediate superior, Ben. Her big secret was revealed when she accidentally dialed Ron during foreplay with Ben, a leadup that involved the two of them pretending to be historical weird leaders. Ron was disconcerted by the fact that Leslie had kept a secret from him, but the joke was clearly Leslie’s sexual proclivities.

Now, it’s not as if there’s an entirely clear double standard on these shows. On Parks and Recreation, Ron, normally a manly, independent libertarian is reduced to jelly and silliness by the sexual wiles of his ex-wives, to whom he is dangerously susceptible. Jess’s roommates on New Girl are not uniformly romantically successful. But Jack’s sexual quirks are generally treated as evidence of his prowess and manliness. When Liz is shocked that Jack’s girlfriend Avery likes a particular sex act, Jack explains that she appreciates it when it’s well-executed. And during his relationship with liberal Congresswoman C.C. Cunningham, he consistently credits for being sexually adventuresome. It’s too bad that someone like Leslie, who’s otherwise competent, aggressive, smart and attractive couldn’t get credit for sexual creativity rather than becoming the butt of jokes for having specific tastes.

The bridge is yours.

-Crowdsourcing special effects: not just for space Nazis.

-It would be great if we could have more shorter shows on network television.

-30 Rock has reached the stage when it’s just throwing famous people at us.

-Earl Sweatshirt is back.

-I’m deeply torn between wishing we could have a new concept and my love of Jeremy Renner:

It turns out that poor, pokey NBC, home of much beloved, wildly creative sitcoms like Community and Parks and Recreation, is the network most willing to trade product placement for financial support for its shows. And while I suppose I should be up in arms about the marching corporatization of our entertainment, I can’t say that the supposed evils of product placement are at the top of my list.

First, there’s a difference between using product placement to make already-cheap shows cheaper, as is the case with reality television as NBC does with The Biggest Loser and The Celebrity Apprentice, and using product placement to subsidize quality but low-rated programming as NBC has done with Friday Night Lights and Chuck. Using donated products to carry out the same repetitive rituals doesn’t actually make the formula of a predictable competition show any more predictable, or the emotional arc of the show any less manufactured. And the small but dedicated audiences for those other kinds of shows are aware enough to recognize artifice when they see it, and to appreciate that they’re enjoying something that’s been kept alive by something other than pure audience size. Better Chuck with the Subway references than no Chuck at all, I guess.

More to the point, the assumption that characters wouldn’t use brands and talk about products actually runs counter to reality. We all have irrational brand loyalties, and talk about products, and recommend stuff to each other. It’s not some dramatic distortion of the universe of the show, as long as the characters aren’t Amish or live in a socialist future, for characters to talk about the things they buy and why they like them.

And finally, for the most part, we’re not dumb. People know what product integration is, and that it’s being done to them. Not every show is going to be 30 Rock and laugh at the concept even as it uses it:

But even if people end up buying a Snapple because Liz Lemon likes it, or shampoo because it makes Robin’s hair look fantastic on How I Met Your Mother (I just started watching, and her hair), or test-driving a car because the main character on Castle does it, this is hardly the worst thing to happen. And for the most part, I suspect people know why they’re doing what they’re doing. It may be foolish to think that I can ever look like Jennifer Morrison without a set full of dresses, extensive plastic surgery, and a magical application of extra tallness. But if I spend a few dollars occasionally because I dig her eye shadow, no harm, no foul, in the indulgence of the fantasy and its immediate debunking.