30 Rock is coming to an end, and sometimes, it’s seemed like that might be the end of Alec Baldwin on television. But the actor just signed a two-year contract with Universal, the studio that produced 30 Rock. And hopefully we’ll get some new projects out of it. While I’ll always miss Jack Donaghy, here are five kinds of roles I’d love to see Baldwin in once he’s no longer committed to wearing tuxedoes after six o’clock.

1. A show about the Mayor of New York: When he’s talking about his career after acting, Baldwin has frequently speculated about running for political office, including for Mayor of New York. Now that Starz has cancelled its drama Boss, which starred Kelsey Grammer as Mayor of Chicago, there’s space for a prestige drama with a middle-aged prestige actor chewing political scenery. Baldwin loves a juicy line reading, and he’s got the elegance to carry it off. Post-Sandy, post-Occupy, and post-crash, it’s time for a show about New York that isn’t confined to Brooklyn a Girls or 2 Broke Girls, and that isn’t confined to young people in New York, either.

2. A romantic comedy about a middle-aged man: Baldwin’s heartbroken, nostalgic visitor to the Italy of his youth was the best part of To Rome With Love. His relationships with powerful women were some of the most entertaining parts of 30 Rock. And from profiles of him, it seems like he’s a romantic in real life. There aren’t enough good romantic comedies for actual adults. And I have mixed feelings about Nancy Meyers and It’s Complicated, in which Baldwin also starred as hound dog rather than as a romantic. But it would be nice to see Baldwin get to indulge those impulses, to be a man who’s sincere about love rather than blowing it off, and experiencing some of the yearnings and insecurities that normally are reserved for women.

3. A mid-life crisis show: Mid-life crises are big for women on television: Laura Dern’s melting down on HBO’s Enlightened. Annette Bening will be doing the same thing on NBC in Save Me. The Newsroom was supposed to, in part, be about a middle-aged man trying to be a better person, but it wasn’t willing to be nearly hard enough on Will McAvoy to be interesting. Watching someone like Baldwin actually go through radically reevaluating his life would be fascinating to watch.

4. A reporting show: Speaking of The Newsroom, television really needs a show that actually understands how reporting works. Thinking of how much fun Bill Nighy has chomping scenery in things like State of Play and Page Eight, I realized that Baldwin may be the closest thing he has to a potential American equivalent. He’d be a delightful editor character in a multi-generational newsroom drama.

Rep. Anthony Weiner may be worried about keeping his current job at the moment, but he’s also got to worry about his next one. Weiner has long wanted to be mayor of New York. And now, the Daily’s reporting that he may have a high-profile rival. Alec Baldwin, who has also long said he wants to run for some sort of political office (he also says 30 Rock is ending, that he’s not doing Rock of Ages, etc.), may be considering getting into the race.

All the reporting’s at the “friend of the actor” level. But this wouldn’t be an insane way for Baldwin to float the prospect of getting into the race, a story in a medium targeted at the kind of elite readers who would be important supporters. And the prospect of Baldwin as a candidate isn’t insane either. The worst scandal in his life is his divorce from Kim Basinger and their ensuing extremely nasty custody dispute. Baldwin himself has kept the issue alive by publishing a book about that fight, but having a tough divorce isn’t the same thing as ending up shirtless on the cover of the Post. Basinger’s lawyer once said Baldwin had been accused of domestic violence, which is a pretty nasty charge to sling without factual basis, and would certainly impact Baldwin’s political chances if it came up again. And Baldwin faces the same obstacle Al Franken did in his campaign for Senate, which is that he’s got a long record of saying things he probably didn’t mean, but that he’ll have to constantly reassert were jokes, including his Clinton impeachment-era statement that “we would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families, for what they’re doing to this country.”

But I think both of those things are surmountable. And 30 Rock‘s certainly prepared Baldwin for some of the more important roles of a lawmaker, including wearing tuxedoes:

dealing with hostile lawmakers:

and maintaining your dignity when under attack by experimental weaponry at a Pentagon briefing: