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’s true Lindsay Lohan was not exceptionally good on Saturday Night Live this weekend, though the Real Housewives of Disney sketch was brilliant and Kristen Wiig should definitely play a dissolute princess again at some point:

But the main thing the furor over her appearance on the show made me think about was why the question of whether Lohan could—and should—be working again is even close to as heated as discussions about Chris Brown and Charlie Sheen. Vulture wants to know why she keeps getting chances in the industry (and totally mischaracterizes her performance and character in Prairie Home Companion, for the record). Gawker treats the question of whether she was good on the show as a Zen koan in need of extensive contemplation.

Lindsay Lohan has absolutely had some issues. She appears to have had substantial problems with substance abuse. She stole some jewelry and was punished for her. She apparently behaved somewhat badly on the set of her movie Georgia Rule—Jane Fonda, who has not had such a hot streak picking projects herself lately, complained about Lohan. She’s potentially a lesbian in a climate that can be pretty limiting to the career prospects of gay women. She also has a notoriously dysfunctional family, who have placed obligations on her ranging from having to support her mother to dealing with her father who’s done everything from condemn Lohan’s relationship with Samantha Ronson to be arrested for battering his girlfriend. That’s quite a bit to put up with, but Hollywood’s had quite a nice little streak of rehabilitating women with similar issues. Britney Spears has a steady boyfriend, a resurrected career, and custody of her kids bad. Nicole Richie’s overcome both eating and substance issues to launch a successful jewelry line and have a couple of deeply adorable munchkins. Paris Hilton, the most notorious of a generation of Hollywood party girls, has quieted down. Given the extent of Lohan’s talent and the trajectory of her peers, it’s totally reasonable that she’d be given subsequent chances.

Charlie Sheen has also had some issues. Unlike Lohan, however, the harm he’s done is as much to other people as it is himself. He’s got substance abuse issues he’s been treated for repeatedly. He’s also shot, strangled, and thrown a woman to the ground. And if it’s true that he’s been largely professional and together when he’s on the job, throwing a months-long temper tantrum about his current and former employer and getting a $25 million settlement is at least as costly and distracting as anything Lohan ever did. And Sheen’s talent-based glory days are at least as far from his present as Lohan’s are from hers—maybe even further. It’s pretty bizarre that doing harm to yourself makes you a pathetic object of condemnation but doing harm to others earns you supporters who are eager to forgive you or regard you as a badass.

The bridge is yours.

-This is a pretty plausible explanation for why CBS does so well.

-Louis C.K. starts a movement.

-Jonny Lee Miller is Sherlock Holmes because why not?

-Chernobyl as horror movie.

-And the streak continues:

Undercover Boss, the CBS show based on a British program of the same name that began airing in the United States in 2010, may have been the programming decision that was most responsive to the recession. By disguising the CEOs and other top executives of major American corporations and sending them out to the front lines of their organizations, Undercover Boss played to the fantasy of showing your employer what your life is really like and how hard your work really is. At a time when executives can seem impossibly distant from the average worker and from viewers at home, Undercover Boss makes CEOs seem accessible—and sometimes, the boss’s experiences end up translating into company-wide changes in policy. Such was the case at Kendall-Jackson Vineyard Estates, where president Rick Tigner went undercover and into the company’s fields and processing facilities in an episode of the show that aired last weekend. I talked to Mr. Tigner at the Television Critics Association press tour about what he learned about immigration reform, sustainable wine production, and being the face of a major company at a time when America doesn’t love CEOs—and why he decided to start a language program for his workers and give them more vacation time. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you decide to go on the show in the first place?

Caroline here, who works for the company, she was actually researching how to, you know, give an award to one of our employees. And so she was going on the CBS site, they have some sort of employee-recognition program, and with that she saw the Undercover Boss program and then connected the two. And really, I think as a company, you know, our culture of helping employees and understanding their story just connected.

You came on the show after going through a rough period, you mentioned through ’08 and ’09. Was there a sense that this was sort of a positive way to show that you were coming back or to show that you were reaching out?

It’s interesting. When you go through a difficult time and you have, you know, lay-offs, or we call right-sizing or downsizing…The reality was is that, you know, we still want to do the right things for our employees…When the show was offered to us, you know, it would have been a great thing for us to help the morale of the company.

Now you said when you went on the show that you found that some of your directives hadn’t made it all the way down the chain of command.

When I did the show, there’s always these concepts of “Do people understand that it’s quality first?” You know, it’s one of our visions and values…But on that one division—our distribution and trucking division— you know, that part had not gotten through. You know, so there was a management issue, I think, or communication issue there…the management is not necessarily overwhelmed, but just they were so busy trying to drive that business, so that some of the level of service at the driver level, they kind of lost sight of it…I worked with an employee who actually, you know, I would argue—maybe not the most stellar employee on that particular day. He also just had a bad day, you know. Didn’t mean he was a bad guy, and doesn’t mean he can’t be a great employee.

One thing I thought was interesting that you mentioned was finding you had some communications issues with your Spanish-speaking workers. You said that wasn’t something that had occurred to you before. How much did you know about the actual sort of ethnic composition of your workforce?

I have a very good understanding of the composition, but I really probably had not enough knowledge that our frontline managers didn’t have the ability to communicate with them. Now, the person I worked with was one, a new employee, and a young employee, so she hasn’t had enough time or experience necessary to learn Spanish. She might have over time. Don’t get me wrong. We have a lot of other people who are frontline managers in production who speak Spanish. But the reality is we have some that don’t…Being someone who I think—I always think I’m a pretty good communicator, who had the inability to communicate on my very first day I did the show. I was like, “Wow, this is a problem.” But it’s a problem that’s addressable…

I can’t make you learn another language. It’s difficult. I can’t force you to do it. You have to want to do it…It’s been six months since the show. And right now we’re just in the process of implementing the whole project because it took time to hire the training manager, to get all of the Rosetta Stone licenses, to work on the tuition payments because we’re doing more than just one type of training… And then also for the Spanish-speaking employees, who actually get paid, you know, throughout the day, we’re doing it during the work hours versus making them stay after work to do it. But the English-speaking management employees, they do their day jobs, and then they stay later because it’s sort of optional for them.
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This makes me exceedingly happy: CBS just bought a recession-themed sitcom pilot from Louis C.K. and Spike Feresten. Not a lot of details yet on anything other than the fact that that the show will apparently be about “young people who are trying to achieve their creative dreams.” But I’d follow C.K. into a burning building at this point if he promised me that content was inside it and I’d get to consume it before I succumbed to smoke inhalation.

I also think this is an interesting experiment in whether C.K.’s deeply compelling brand of honesty and moral comedy can find a mass audience, and whether he can do it without the explicitness that’s made Louie such a wonderful discussion of sex and gender from a man’s perspective. I hope the former will be true — I’d love to see a show that combines the sometimes-painful optimism of something like Parks and Recreation with the class consciousness of Raising Hope and the lived-in friendships of Happy Endings do well. On the second, while C.K. may (outside of race) get the most attention for his routines about sex and sexual humiliation, his up-front approach to things like buying a house, or having his daughters prefer their mother to him, or professional failure would translate extremely well to the networks without requiring him to compromise the material at all.

I’d also really like a show from him (or really, from anyone) to continue the trend that Southland started of having the characters talk like real people of those backgrounds and in those circumstances would, but bleeping them out. We’ve seen a bit of this on Parks and Recreation, where the generally clean-spoken characters occasionally lapse into real-world profanity, and on other shows, but I think it would be decent practice to do a bit more of it. Television doesn’t just capture characters in the least-stressful moments of their lives — quite the reverse. I can understand why we’ve got some limitations on speaking words aloud in prime time (even though I think its the job of parents to keep their kids away from content they find generally objectionable), but I think it would make sense to find a compromise that keeps the kiddies’ ears clean while trusting adults to know what’s really being said.

The bridge is yours.

-Who needs product integration when you can set the show at the company?

-New Frank Ocean!

-Thinking about democracy and the internet beyond SOPA.

-Get your Avatar: The Legend of Korra fix with this clip.

-Apple is super-upset about the Times’ series on working conditions in their supply chain.