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.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a recent speech about Burma’s democracy movement, noted that a leader in the struggle once told her that the country’s activists were educating themselves about the way democratic governments work by watching The West Wing:

All of which got me thinking: what lessons are the political shows we’re airing now teaching people about democracy, American or otherwise?

1. Yelling safeguards the health of the political culture (The Newsroom): America may be the greatest country in the world thanks to an intern Will McAvoy shouted down in the season premiere of Aaron Sorkin’s latest and hired in the finale. But stupid is universal, as is the need to speak truth to it. Hopefully other free journalists in newly-minted democracies will spend their time hollering at actual people in power instead of beauty queens.

2. Niceness and integrity can win the day if you work very, very hard, and your opponent is a transparent idiot (Parks and Recreation): If we want to export democracy, can we mail a lot of Parks and Rec DVDs overseas? Leslie Knope may handle sister city delegations poorly—Viva Mayor Walter Gunderson!—but if she can take down the Man From Sweetums (or Glee‘s Burt Hummel can beat Sue Sylvester’s dirty campaign), maybe upstanding candidates fighting against the tide in corrupted elections everywhere can have a chance.

3. If niceness fails, kitchen sink disposals handle human ears nicely (Boss): Mayor Tom Kane is a Chicago strongman, a reminder that elections can become formalities when you couple machines with a lack of term limits. He’s a useful warning that sometimes the strength of democracy is its inefficiency, and the desire the bulldoze through the process for the sake of getting things done can be an awfully dangerous compulsion, one you can’t indulge once and walk away from.

4. If you’re a sucker for demagoguery, sometimes you get the jerks you deserve (Homeland): William Walden (Jamey Sheridan), the vice president Nicholas Brody almost assassinated in the finale of the first season of Showtime’s Homeland is a blowhard, but an effective one. He’s very good at talking tough about the threat of terrorism, and he’s rising towards the presidency on the strength of his pedantic oratory. And he’s a warning about following the person who makes you feel best, rather than the person who has the best to offer you.

5. Even the lead of the free world can be a sentimental idiot (1600 Penn): This horrendously awful sitcom from Jon Lovett, who used to write speeches for President Obama, starts airing on NBC in January. On a meta level, it’s a reminder that the people behind democratically elected leaders aren’t always visionaries who are upholding the highest ideals of their political systems. And the show itself, about a President who can’t resist indulging his dumb, frat-boy son, is a cautionary tale against seeing the people who represent the people as avatars of the ideals we invest in them.

“A kid like you doesn’t get a job like this unless he’s fucking somebody. Hard. In any sense of the word,” Chicago Mayor Tom Kane (Kelsey Grammer), sounding like Christian Grey of the Fifty Shades Thereof, tells a young campaign aide at the beginning and a new and improved season of Starz’s Boss. Where the last season of the show, which follows Kane as he battles a degenerative neurological condition he’s trying to keep secret even as he tries to push forward an expansion of O’Hare Airport and manage his daughter, a heroin addict, as well as a variety of political counterparts and rivals, this season introduces a series of up-and-coming scrappers in addition to the people who already count among Chicago’s powerful. Their ambition, and the stories of how they move closer to Kane’s orbit, makes Boss more interesting this season, particularly as it locks down some of the sillier tendencies that marked its first year and moves into a fight over the fate of a major Chicago housing project.

One of the things that has always distinguished Boss, and that remains the same this season, has been its sense of grandeur, manifested particularly in its dialogue. Unlike Deadwood, which used a mixture of setting-appropriate argot and contemporary profanity to create a vernacular that brought viewers back in time while making sure cussing retained its force, the language and cadence of Boss‘s characters is deliberately at odds with its setting in modern-day Chicago. Mayor Kane declares in press conferences about contracts for new housing projects that “Avarice will not be tolerated.” His police chief, leading the investigation into who shoots Kane’s wife (Connie Nielsen) at a public event, tells Kane that, though they were once enemies, “I repent.”

Sometimes, that portentousness seems misapplied. “I hate the Oxford comma. I assume you know what that means,” Kane growls at his new aide, Ian Todd (Jonathan Groff, whose malevolence seems better-placed here than it ever did on Glee). “Mental note. I’m indifferent myself, but you won’t see it again,” Ian tells him with a studied blandness. But the archness can be effective, as when Kane muses, “She was more of a my will than thy will kind of person,” to the priest he’s asked to be available if Meredith should need last rites.

And this season, the show has set up a competition around Kane that has heft to match the show’s tone. Rather than simply replacing fembot Kitty O’Neill (Kathleen Robertson) with Todd, Kane hires Mona Fredricks (Sanaa Lathan), a political operator from the South Side of Chicago after she outmaneuvers him in a fight about the future of Lennox Gardens, a housing project standing in for the former Cabrini Green development. While Ian represents established Chicago interests, Mona challenges Kane to consider upping the city’s Section Eight-eligible housing stock and to go with someone other than the entrenched contractor who’s long counted on getting work from the city without having to bid for it. A collision between a black aide and a white one may be a little obvious, but it’s uneasy to see how Kane sides with Mona as a matter of whim and frustration, to realize that change can succeed or fail on a mood rather than on reason.

Another improvement this season is Boss‘s treatment of sex. In the first season, the show occasionally felt as if was trying to meet some sort of Starz-imposed quota with lingering nipple shots and scenes of Ben Zajac (Jeff Hephner), a bright young political candidate, boffing Kitty, who also turned out to be his mistress, in hotel lobbies because he apparently got off on the prospect of getting caught. This time around, there are lingering looks, but the show has some restraints. When Zajac seduces a young, eager campaign aide, the sequence feels more like a comment on his sexual entitlement and lack of discipline than it does an attempt to check a box. And Boss is one of several shows on the fall schedule to take an adult approach to an unwanted pregnancy subplot, eschewing the timid Magical Miscarriages or not-in-character decisions to keep a baby that so much of pop culture defaults to in order to avoid controversy. These approaches, and the attention given to little details like Kane bringing flowers to his daughter Emma’s childhood bedroom to welcome her home from jail make the characters in Boss feel a bit more like people than they did the previous season.

Boss still doesn’t quite hang together for me, which is too bad given how much I want to like it. The show’s devotion to drawing drama from the minutiae of politics, its ability to make a city council vote exciting, and its visual ambition, whether in its gorgeous graphic design or Kane’s visions of a ghostly Meredith or a lizard that stalks him from the desert into his office, are all precisely my speed. But in its attempts to emulate the shows that ushered in the golden age of television, Boss seems to have forgotten to have fun. There’s none of the glee of Peggy Olson hunting down a high, or the humor of Omar in the courtroom. Tom Kane is fighting awfully hard for his kingdom. I just think I’d enjoy it more if he was too.

Considering Boss, and the electoral subplots on Parks and Recreation, Modern Family, and Glee in the Atlantic this week, I was struck by a question: why does pop culture swing between depicting politicians as grotesques or saints when the reality is so vastly more entertaining? Boss swings between really good subplots and moments that seem funny and scary precisely because they’re plausible, and things that seem more like unchecked impulses:

The show succeeds when those gods and monsters are mired in procedure, as Kane and Miller often are. The site of an incumbent governor lofting an iPad into a marsh in a fit of pique and then ordering an aide after it is both very funny and a nice reference to Primary Colors, the satire of the Clinton administration that increasingly looks like the gold standard for explorations of political darkness. Where Boss goes off the rails, though, is when it mistakes luridness with meaningfulness.

A twist on a political sex scandal that leaves an up-and-comer getting it on with his lover in increasingly public places is one of the more genuinely egregious use of cable’s license to depict sex I’ve seen in quite some time. Kane’s daughter, apparently a priest, a doctor, and an addict, checks so many urban-politics boxes at once that her personality disappears under the weight. While there’s no question that Aldermanic debates can be brutal, it feels showy and crude to have Kane tell the City Council, during a contentious debate, “Let the streets run with shit.”

It would be easy to say that our tendency to lionize or demonize politicians is a product of partisanship, but that doesn’t really explain why political pop culture invents wildly baroque scenarios for politicians on television and in movies who are forever knocking up interns and the teenaged daughters of their friends, or unleashing wild chains of vengeance. The emotions involved in politicians’ indiscretions may be difficult to fathom, especially for people in the public eye, unless they’re explained away as the product of self-destructive impulses. But the means of their downfalls are usually fairly prosaic, a Direct Message gone wrong, a hooker and a hotel room and an assumption of invincibility.

And I think, instead, our pop culture politicians vacillate between poisonous and saintly not necessarily because we hate people in the other party, but because we’re let down by our own side, betrayed by our own unrealistic expectations. We want Andrew Shepherd as he is in The American President and we get Jack Stanton from Primary Colors. In pop culture, if they’re saints or rat bastards, we know from the beginning or close enough to it, and any changes are of degree rather than of nature. There are no redemptions. But there are no shocking disappointments, either.

I’ll have more extended thoughts on Boss over the next couple of days leading up to its Friday premiere, but HitFix and AVClub columnist Ryan McGee and Aol TV critic Maureen Ryan were nice enough to join me to talk about the show on their podcast. Like me, Maureen is a former political reporter and, unlike me, lives in Chicago, and so has some interesting theories on why the city is making a resurgence right now. As I say on the podcast, Boss is an uneven show, vacillating between the extremely wonky and the operatic. But it’s got ambitions, which after a fall of sort of low expectations and poor execution, feels refreshing.