Last night’s Revenge brought us yet more twists and turns in ABC’s monumentally and fantastically soapy drama—don’t worry, I won’t tell you what happened—leading me to wonder when they’re going to be ready to throw in the towel on this one. Jack may not be ready to move on, but some of us are starting to get a little frustrated with the ongoing tension. You know what I’m sayin’?

Don’t get me wrong: I am a huge fan of Revenge and I eagerly dissect it in my email with friends each morning after a new episode, but it’s starting to wander big time, and that’s because, like all good drama, it has an expiration date. The question is whether the production team and ABC are going to recognize that, or if they’re going to draw this painfully out in an effort to milk every possible drop of ratings out of it.

So far, Revenge is going pretty strong ratings-wise, and ABC’s renewed it for fall in a pretty plum spot on Sunday nights, allowing it to replace Desperate Housewives and pairing it with the unexpectedly popular Once Upon A Time. (Sorry if this is controversial, but I really can’t get into Once Upon A Time, you guys.) It’s obviously immensely successful because it speaks to the deep desire in all of us to tear out the hearts of our enemies and eat them for breakfast with a little raspberry jam. Er, maybe that’s just me. 

I think I’m supposed to say that Revenge is all about love and passion and emotion and how these things drive us to do weird and horrible things to each other, but I’m pretty pragmatic so I really just watch the show for the revenge and the plotting. Because I do love me some revenge, and Emily’s cool, calculating scheme is interesting to watch as it unfolds (and collapses, as the case may be). It’s sort of like seeing vultures swirling around and taking leisurely pecks now and then rather than just getting down and getting to it. Yes, I just compared Emily Thorne to a vulture.

So, the thing is, this show is ostensibly based on The Count of Monte Cristo, which is also deliciously soapy, I will freely admit, but does actually have a clearly defined endpoint as well as a steadily moving plot that is designed to pull things together in the end and keep you reading. It was, after all, a serial, which meant Dumas needed to come up with reasons to keep people reading when the next installment came out. And I’m starting to feel like Revenge is losing its focus, which in turn is making me lose my focus. And that’s a bad thing, people.

Every week there’s a new attempt to flip the narrative right on its head, which is the point of soapy drama, but the stacking of incidents on top of each other makes it increasingly more baroque and harder to track. The cast of characters is growing and I’m reminded of the too many cooks problem; how many people can we add to this kitchen before it gets totally out of control? Because we seem to be rapidly getting there. There are only so many double crossings, backstabbings, and new players viewers can follow and stay invested in the show. If my Twitter feed last night was any indicator, some viewers are starting to reach saturation point.

Revenge is finding itself in the same place Lost was as it shed fans in later seasons. It’s getting so damn complicated that if you haven’t been watching from the start and focusing on each episode, you’re going to get lost (ha ha). This is not the kind of show you can randomly pick up and still follow and enjoy. As the storyline gets more absurd, we start to wonder if there’s any kind of point here; is there anyone on deck up there keeping us on course, or are we actually just adrift in the Sea of Abandoned Plots, waiting for rescue?

So here’s my advice to Revenge: Quit while you’re ahead. Know your end date. Tighten up your storylines. Map this out and take us on a fun ride to the end. I want to see you go out with a decisive bang when it’s time, not dwindle and fade away into nothing. Maybe you’ve got another season or two in you, but sit down and have a serious think about how you want those seasons to go and make them explosive, driven, and fast-paced.

Because I love this show and I love these characters. Wow do I love these characters. There are so many women doing exciting and sneaky and amazing things on Revenge and I especially adore watching Thorne’s character development as she gets deeper and deeper into this hole she’s digging for herself. And I’m totally in love with Nolan as a character; he’s a man who just gets more fascinating by the minute and I like that the rich playboy has turned into Emily’s ally and the closest thing she has to a real friend over time, but he’s got his own stuff going on too. Though stuffed shirt Daniel kind of bores me, the rest of the Graysons are fascinating. Particularly Victoria, which woah, what is that girl up to half the time?! I don’t even know.

And yes, I like the machinations and twists and turns. Revenge is a labyrinth of delights, but it’s also a house of cards, and it’s getting a bit wobbly ’round the base. Keep me hooked ’til the bitter end, Revenge. I’m begging you.

What do you think about Revenge‘s prospects, gang? Talk to me!

We’re deep in the midst of pilot season casting frenzy, the time of year when networks cast a bunch of actors and start figuring out what’s actually going to work in their schedules come fall. We’re a long way from any of these concepts actually being a show. But in browsing through the Hollywood Reporter’s list of all the shows in development right now, these are the ten—from a story about an Alaskan cult to a secessionist nuclear sub—that have me most excited. And after how disappointing the 2011-2012 pilot season was, I need some pick-me-ups:

Counter Culture, ABC: Look, I’d probably be in for a show about older women running a diner in Texas under any circumstances—we need some sort of recompense for Good Christian Bitches, and I’ve been excited for stories about women who are in the demographic I’ll be joining in a couple of decades. And I’d sort of like to see a female-led equivalent of Cheers. But given that Margo Martindale’s in the cast, I’m particularly excited. She’s always fantastic, and if the show’s willing to make jokes about Mags Bennett’s Apple Pie, all the better.

Untitled Dan Fogelman project, ABC: I love Comedy Central’s Ugly Americans, the network’s riff on immigration reform but with actual aliens and monsters. And I have a lot of Men in Black nostalgia. Maybe that makes me weak. But a show about a gated community full of aliens sounds pretty funny. And potentially a great way to riff on the inherent weirdness of the one percent.

Last Resort, ABC: Given how deeply Hollywood and the military are intertwined, I almost can’t believe that a major network is making a show about a nuclear submarine crew who refuse to fire the missiles they have aboard and go AWOL, declaring themselves a tiny, independent nuclear nation. It might be awful, but the fact that something this wonky about nuclear policy (and this potentially anti-war) is being made at all has my ears all pricked up. Also, it stars Andre Braugher.

Partners, CBS: Okay, I may be rooting for this show in part because I want it to beat Ryan Murphy’s The New Normal in the gay-family-comedies-of-fall-2012 competition. But the cast, which includes Ugly Betty’s wonderful Michael Urie, David Krumholtz, who can ride the good vibe of 10 Things I Hate About You literally forever, and Brandon Routh, who’s been doing a wonderful job of reinventing himself as something other than simply amazingly handsome, is strong. And more comedies about gay men and straight men who are uncomplicatedly friends are a nice thing to have, and a step beyond the sassy gay archetype.

Untitled Louis C.K., Spike Feresten, CBS: If Louis C.K. wasn’t involved in this show about young people trying to make it in the recession economy, I’m not sure I’d be interested. And even his streak outside of Louie is a little uneven. But C.K. is on a streak so hot right now that I’d be excited for anything he’s even tangentially involved with.
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It was depressing, for a number of reasons, to hear about a comedy that ABC is putting into production called The Smart One. I love Portia di Rossi, whose wonderful comedic talent has languished since Arrested Development and Better Off Ted went off the air. But this is not an enlightening premise: “The show follows two sisters: de Rossi’s smart one and [Malin] Akerman’s dumb one. De Rossi’s character goes to work for her dimmer, but more popular sister who is a former beauty queen currently serving as the mayor of a city.” It’s especially irritating to see ABC doubling down on dumb-but-pretty stereotypes because television is actually doing a nice job with female politicians—nicer, perhaps, than our politics at large, where women remain underrepresented.

I feel like I don’t even have to spend time discussing the foremost example of this trend, Leslie Knope, the civil servant who’s running for Pawnee, Indiana City Council on Parks and Recreation. But I will say this, anyway: whatever long-time fans of the show think of Parks and Recreation’s tonal and plot problems this season, the fact that they’ve got a woman on television running for office, and are taking her anxieties about that process seriously and generally respectfully, is kind of remarkable. Leslie may make hilarious miscalculations, and things may go wrong in her campaign, but the show’s never questioned the idea that Leslie’s desire to serve is deep and genuine, and that she’d make an absolutely fantastic member of City Council. Parks and Recreation‘s contempt for the laziness, entitlement and incompetence of Bobby Newport, the vastly wealthy heir to a destructive company who is trying to buy the seat Leslie’s running for, is particularly bracing given the role that billionaires are playing in supporting the various Republican candidates in this year’s primary campaign.

By contrast, Mel Burke, the city councilwoman Melissa Joan Heart plays on ABC Family’s Melissa & Joey, is essentially Leslie Knope for the non-hipster comedy set. Like Leslie, she’s blonde, fiercely devoted to her small city, somewhat awkward with the press, and prone to lingering sexual tension, though in this case with Joey, the manny she’s hired to take care of her niece and nephew, who are living with her after her brother went to jail for a massive Ponzi scheme. A multi-camera sitcom, Melissa & Joey spends much more time in Mel’s house than in her office, and the wacky antics have more to do with the fact that she has a hunky former banker living in her basement rather than her overwhelming devotion to public service. But that doesn’t mean the show doesn’t have at least some of Parks and Recreation‘s zany sense of politics: in the first-season episode “Seoul Man,” an illegal-domestic-help scandal hit Toledo’s public servants, and it turned out Joey was born in Korea and was having trouble locating the papers establishing his citizenship. It’s nothing revolutionary, but Parks and Recreation and Melissa & Joey share a nice commitment to celebrating women in public life, and to portraying them as more competent and dedicated than the people around them even though they have more burdens and obligations to balance.

There’s no question that the new crop of political shows will have a more varied take on women in politics, and that’s a good thing. Female politicians do misspeak and get themselves int turf wars, as Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ character on Veep does. Inconvenient romances happen in Washington in real life as they do—though perhaps not to the same extent—as they will on ABC’s other political show debuting this spring, Scandal. But it’s one thing to give women in politics complexity and texture. And quite another to have it be hilarious that they’re only there because they’re hot, and voters are too dumb to care that they have no other qualifications.

When we talk about folks downloading copyrighted material outside of legal channels, much of the debate centers around whether or not the downloaders were ever potential consumers. If they are potential consumers who are just choosing not to pay for content, then the question becomes how to deter people who do have the disposable income to pay for things they want to watch or listen to. If we’re assuming that downloaders are not and will never be potential paying customers under current circumstances, then the question becomes which circumstances could induce them to become paying customers. And the circumstances we talk about changing usually involve bringing prices down.

But I wonder if there’s another subset of piracy (again, I think we’ll never get to piracy zero and it’s not productive to aim for that goal) that’s worth considering: downloading that’s driven by the unavailability of material due to staggered international air dates and failure to consider what prices are viable in international markets. I think it’s quite smart of ABC and the creative folks involved in The River (including one Mr. Steven Spielberg) to make sure that the show will be available to UK audiences via iTunes the same time it’ll be available to American audiences in the same format. It’s not the same thing as having a coordinated domestic and international air date, which I think would be preferable in terms of preventing piracy, though riskier in terms of aggregating ratings, would take a long time to set up, and wouldn’t be possible for all shows. But it does mean that folks in the UK have a legal, timely, fairly priced way to get a show that denies them any and all fig leaves to hide behind about torrenting it instead.

Similarly, it’s probably worth considering differential pricing for content in different international markets. If 68 percent of software in Russia is pirated, along with 82 percent of music in Mexico and 90 percent of movies in India, that may be an indicator of a different cultural attitude towards piracy. But it’s also probably worth trying to determine at which prices people in those countries would buy those content through legal channels. Could that create a reverse-piracy problem where customers in developing markets who were paying for content previously try to take advantage of lower prices available elsewhere, or move to piracy? Maybe, though it might simply be too much hassle relative to the savings and quality. In any case, it’s probably worth trying to figure out a mixed strategy that monetizes the content we make here at home and abroad. If piracy is a customer service problem, it’s not just about the needs of American customers.

It’s not exactly surprising that there’d be a lot of interest in politics in a presidential election year, but even given that, the heavy investment by networks in political shows feels unusual. And it’s even more unusual that all the political or Washington shows coming down the pike sound—or are, given what I’ve seen of them—surprisingly smart and fun.

What’s making this an official trend is USA’s announcement that it’s picked up a series called Political Animals. The network’s other Washington show, Covert Affairs, can be a little silly about Washington geography and what kind of shoes Washington women can afford on civil service salaries, but it had a decent sense of the relationship between the press and the administration and of tension over leaks. So I’m not shocked that USA’s first real political drama is doing something intelligent in focusing on a main character who is a not-so-thinly-veiled version of Hillary Rodham Clinton: a former First Lady who is now Secretary of State. The civil service geek in me is pretty excited about this and Kal Penn’s workplace drama set at the UN, both of which are a welcome expansion beyond the White House and spies for subject matter. And I think it’s smart to get out of the legislative process, which by this point is fairly well-worn dramatic territory, and into diplomacy and the press—the main character’s best friend will be a reporter. I don’t exactly count on this to be an accurate depiction of diplomacy any more than I expect Royal Pains to be a penetrating look at the Hamptons, but the concept is savvy, and should provide a couple of good roles for non-twenty-something women.

As does Veep, HBO’s terrific comedy about a female Vice President dealing with needy staffers, a president who ignores her, and a press corps that picks up on her every misstep. The sitcom, which premieres April 22, certainly is heightened and ridiculous, but the pilot nails the rhythms of speech and attitudes in Washington, along with the obnoxious and prickly gatekeepers and the minor screw-ups that become major catastrophes. “I want it to be right. I want it to be accurate,” creator Armando Iannucci, the force behind In the Thick of It and In the Loop, told me at the Television Critics Association press tour. “I want to know the dull stuff. What time do people get in in the morning? Who do they sit next to? If someone calls from a newspaper or a television show, who takes the call? How do they issue a retraction?” He and star Julia Louis-Dreyfus told me that they continue to consult with advisors on both sides of the aisle in the city, and from what I’ve seen of the show, that care and attention pay off. When a prominent and aged Senator dies, the Vice President muses about the last time she saw him: “He was full of bourbon, and he grabbed my left tit.” Later, when Amy (Anna Chlumsky, who appears to be Iannucci’s current muse), her chief of staff signs her own name to a condolence card for the man instead of the Veep’s, she moans of the screwup “it’s going to look like the Veep couldn’t be bothered to sign a condolence card for one of the most celebrated perverts on the senate.” And the show mines a lot of humor out of the Veep’s lame attempts at humor, a perfect example of official Washington squareness. “I have stepped into the president’s shoes this evening and who knew he wore kitten heels,” the Veep says to kick off a speech. ” Just kidding. He’s more of a stilettos guy.” Sometimes, politics is both small, and small-minded (as is also the case with Hulu’s first original scripted series Battleground, about campaign workers in a Wisconsin Senate race).

And then there’s Scandal, which is essentially Revenge for the Washington set. Based on the experiences of Judy Smith, the Washington crisis manager, the show is soapy as hell. The president is sexy and straying! The cases handled by Kerry Washington’s PR firm are totally over the top. The real estate is improbably gorgeous. But if you can appreciate it for what it is, Scandal is a wonderfully entertaining funhouse look at Washington from Hollywood’s perspective—it’s Hollywood for ugly people with the ugly people subbed out. I imagine it’ll drive real politicos nuts, but if you can suspend disbelief and just enjoy it, Scandal is going to be awfully diverting.

Which is good. Even political junkies need a break from what will undoubtedly be a bruising campaign. And if we can only downshift to political shows, rather than to something entirely off-topic and escapist, it’s nice to know that there will be diverting alternatives to dusting off our West Wing DVDs.

Given the press attention given to representatives who share group houses in Washington, I’m actually sort of shocked that no one’s greenlit a movie or television show along those lines. Until now: Arianna Huffington*, seizing yet another obvious opportunity, has sold a show based on a group of lawmakers rooming together to ABC.

This is the second political show ABC’s investing in. The first, Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, which I’d describe as Revenge set in Washington, premieres this spring, and from the episodes I’ve seen, is soapy and dramatic and, despite its inaccuracies, really fun. Given that Greg Malins, who’s the executive producer for How I Met Your Mother, is working with Huffington on this, I’d expect that this show will be a little less over the top, though he is saying things like, “There is no better time to do a show about Washington,” Malinssaid. “It’s such a dynamic place right now, it’s the coolest placein the universe,” and apparently of the three main characters, “One is swept up in the movement of change and goes to D.C. to make a difference; one has been in politics for a long time; and one is a master of the media and sound bites.”

While these are cliches, I think the set-up has the potential to do something important: look at legislators as people. Ideology and policy are important, and I certainly spend a lot of my time complaining about shows that are afraid to name lawmakers’ political parties, or that focus on rhetoric instead of substance. But being a legislator is a deeply weird thing. You’re away from your family and the people you represent for a lot of the time. You live a deeply managed existence, one in which there’s always more information than you can possibly consume and process in a reasonable way coming at you. This is not a good setup to produce sane, balanced people, much less sane, balanced legislation, and that’s worth examining. Plus, Washington is full of super-wacky people who would make for a great sitcom. If one of these lawmakers ends up being based on Barney Frank, I will be so happy.

*I keep forgetting her ex-husband Michael is a movie producer. I saw Save the Date, which his company put out, at Sundance. Review to come.