I had one of those weekends where you sit down on the couch and get up three days later having watched four seasons of How I Met Your Mother. And while at first there wouldn’t appear to be much that a Friends-like CBS sitcom and a quirky HBO show from Mike White, the show that How I Met Your Mother most reminds me of is Enlightened. They’re both shows about compromise, but while Enlightened‘s Amy Jellicoe rages against a system that makes her dreams futile, How I Met Your Mother is all about anaesthetizing the pain of selling out.

One of my favorite scenes in Enlightened is when Amy, desperate to escape a corporate job that she hates (and is admittedly terrible at and makes no effort to succeed in), interviews for her dream gig at a homeless shelter. It’s something that would use her skills and that she’d find fulfilling. And it pays less on an annual basis than she owes in debt from her stint in the treatment center. Laura Dern does an incredible job of selling how dreadful that revelation is to Amy, and how insanity-inducing it is that the non-profit system is set up so that only a very small number of the people who would like to work there can actually do so under existing conditions.

Beyond that scene, Enlightened makes clear why Amy hates her job, even if we ultimately can’t entirely sympathize with her approach to it. Dougie, her boss, is crude and unprofessional. Amy’s ideas for making her company stronger and more socially responsible are blown off, and when they finally get attention, she’s set up as the entertainment by a vicious group of executives. It’s humiliating, and it’s boring, and we can sympathize with her desire to get away from it.

How I Met Your Mother, on the other hand, kind of blunts Marshall’s ultimate decision to walk away from trying to work in environmental law when he first does it (I know he leaves Goliath National Bank in future episodes, I just haven’t gotten to them yet). The montage of him standing in front of the mirror, psyching himself up with increasingly diminishing returns, as he goes on job interviews is funny, but it doesn’t actually communicate the loss of a life-long dream (never mind that the show doesn’t really communicate that Marshall is a committed environmentalist other than telling us repeatedly that he is). The fact that Lily’s enormous credit card debt basically forces him to take a corporate job after he’s fired from his first firm should be a deep betrayal with long-term consequences and the show basically deals with it in two episodes.

And even though we’re told that Marshall’s given up on the whole reason he went to law school, the show suggests that ultimately it’s no big deal. When he goes to work at his first law firm, the voiceover tells us that he ends up representing a hazardous amusement park. But we never see him handle one of its manifold issues, which both could have been great plot fodder and could have presented actual moral dilemmas that show what it meant for Marshall to sell out. And when Marshall ends up working for Barney at Goliath National Bank, rather than something that makes him miserable, the job actually looks fine. He and Barney hang out on the roof drinking beer, Marshall appears to get along with his coworkers and to feel no particular qualms about the work that he’s doing. The biggest problem he faces is finding a place where he can go to the bathroom in peace.

I think it’s probably true that most folks aren’t working jobs that are perfect reflections of their passions: it’s not like Amy and Marshall are alone in ending up in a place other than the one they hoped to be. But I appreciate Amy’s raging hope. And there’s something rather quietly sad about seeing Marshall surrender. How I Met Your Mother doesn’t have to—and shouldn’t—be Enlightened. But I wish it respected its characters enough to spend some more time with their pain and disappointment.

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.

The bridge is yours.

-The only celebrity memoir I’d even contemplate purchasing.

-Another reason you should catch up on Enlightened so you can watch it next season.

-Michael Chabon on his life-long relationship with Edgar Rice Burroughs.

-Amazon v. the Independent Publishers Group.

-This is basically the perfect role for Ben Stiller:

Spurred on by Laura Dern’s Golden Globes win for her roles as Amy Jellicoe, I’ve been catching up on Enlightened. It’s a fascinating show, one of the more uncomfortable things I’ve ever watched in its combination of Amy’s intense selfishness and immaturity and New Age preachiness. But I’m also struck by how much it’s a story about what it means to work for a company you think is actively harming the world, and how difficult it is to do socially responsible work.

The company that Amy worked for before her breakdown, and that she finds herself attempting to reform, is literally called Abaddon, after the place of destruction in Jewish religious texts and the king of the Pit in Revelation. Amy hopes to implement a corporate responsibility program when she comes back to work after her stint in rehab, but instead finds herself in the basement, consigned to a program for people the company considers kooks, but who they can’t fire. When she tries to convince HR to give her a task force or let her act as a community liaison by giving the department head a printout of stories about Abaddon’s environmental and labor problems, the woman is actively frightened that talking about those issues will get them both fired. Amy’s former assistant shuts her down when Amy suggests that they could be getting into bed with a company responsible for industrial accidents in India. The inertia and terror are deep.

And when Amy tries to get a job with a non-profit, she’s devastated to learn that the salary on offer at a place where she thinks she’d fit in is $26,000, just $2,000 more than her bill from the rehab center. “I can’t live on $26,000 a year. I’m in debt, I’m living with my mother,” Amy cries to the man interviewing her for a job at a homeless shelter. “There are all these things I want to do. And I can’t. And it’s so frustrating.” Of course it is. And it’s a huge problem that we can’t make socially responsible and socially fulfilling work financially rewarding, much less viable, for people with debt and bills.