Stoner comedies are a venerable staple of cinema, and have been for a long time, but marijuana enthusiasts have tended to hover around the edge of television, particularly on the networks, where they’re more a fodder for jokes than serious contenders for main characters. But as marijuana legalization has become a political reality at the ballot box, pot may move to the center stage on television, too. Entourage producers Rob Weiss, Mark Wahlberg and Steve Levinson, whose tenure on the HBO sitcom gave them some sense of how to make lighting up a bong, or the possession of marijuana, or a dearth of marijuana, funny, just sold a show to Fox , The Happy Tree, about a burned-out lawyer who becomes a spokesman for a marijuana legalization movement. Whether the show ends up making it to the air or not, and if it does, being any good or not, it raises an interesting question: why haven’t we cracked how to make political procedurals?

In recent memory, we’ve had two effective shows that would meet that description, West Wing and Parks and Recreation. Both of those shows illustrate what makes it harder to do a political procedural than a crime show: the fight isn’t the same every week, and the episodes can’t hit the same satisfying rhythm of discover a body, fix on the wrong suspect, find the right suspect, trial, and verdict. On the national level, the dilemmas on West Wing ranged from bringing a recalcitrant Congress to heel, shutting down an advocate who could make trouble for the administration, deciding whether to go to war, or dealing with an assassination attempt. But the throughline was the power of the presidency and how it could be deployed. On Parks and Recreation, the episodes frequently revolve around event planning and execution, a flexible structure that’s carried the show through everything from sister city visits, to weddings, to reunions of Parks Department directors, to campaign stops.

It’s trickier to come up with that kind of structure for a story about a movement, because the tasks are different when you’re outside of government and seeking power rather than wielding it. That doesn’t mean that episodes can’t be organized around the kinds of events Leslie Knope takes on: movements need rallies, and meetings, and election days, which make for terrific climaxes. But rather than a straight episode-by-episode procedural with little continuity across the course of a season, it probably makes more sense to structure a story about a movement like a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, setting up an elected official, a judge, a ballot initiative, or a commission as a Big Bad, and devoting much of the season to a meeting, a change of heart, a defeat, or a victory. Not all the episodes have to deal exclusively with whatever the drive towards victory is, but that fight will give a spine to each season of the show, without which it would be easy for a program like this to become a baggy, bleary collection of jokes about sparking up. It’s not that I don’t like those. But if you want momentum and stakes for something like The Happy Tree, you have to understand that marijuana isn’t just a matter of fancy Hollywood dealers and Harold and Kumar’s business hippies, and figure out how to make questions of enforcement, cultivation, taxation, and distribution interesting beyond Johnny Drama’s desperation for a dispensary hat.

Iranian state television has apparently just handed down a ban on shows where men appear shirtless, and is looking with disapproval on shows about men and women who work together. If True Blood and The Office are out, here in no particular order are five shows we (and the U.K.) could try exporting to or remaking for our favorite wacky-leadered Middle Eastern nation:

1. Entourage: It’s not like any of the show’s romantic relationships (other than Ari and his wife) are remotely compelling, so edit out ever scene of Vince having anonymous sex with a groupie, every scene of Domenick Lombardozzi (can’t. unsee.) and other characters having sex with hookers, and you’ll have a tight little Hollywood business drama. Ari’s Judaism might be a challenge for the Iranian market, though.

2. The League: What more comforting national stereotype can we export than the idea that America’s top doctors, lawyers, etc. become absolutely helpless between September and March in the face of the football season? The League is the perfect tool to explain to international audiences why we’re moving towards a multi-polar planet rather than a uni-polar one, while also expanding our soft power through the unifying awesomeness of football. The sight of Ochocinco rapping is enough to mollify all enemies.

3. Men of a Certain Age: Aches, sexual anxiety, and getting treated badly by your domineering father are all universal emotions. Plus, now that it’s canceled, I bet TNT is hungry for a syndication deal to keep the profits coming from it.

4. Spooks: See what happens when those decadent westerners let men and women work together in charged circumstances? Someone has an unfortunate encounter with a deep-fryer.

5. Real Housewives of…: Hey, if you want women to stay out of the office to avoid tension and can’t stand the sight of passionate romances, it’s hard to do better than the passionless marriages and substance-free lives of Bravo’s Real Housewives. As long as there’s not a ban on wig-snatching or table-flipping, the ladies should do just fine by Iranian state television censors. Or just shoot Real Housewives of Tehran already.

Commenter Carolyn tells me I should keep in mind that “Yes, their lifestyles can be mundane and shallow, but let’s not forget how it started. They left their lives in Queens, NY in order to help Vince become an actor in LA.”

I actually think the show would be a lot more interesting if it was a bit more directly about what it’s like to be not just upwardly mobile but explosively upwardly mobile. There are bits and pieces of their past in there: Vince saying he doesn’t need the toys he has but acknowledging that he likes them and would prefer not to live without them; the constant teasing about whether Eric’s community college experience is worth anything, particularly in comparison to Ari’s Ivy League education; the juxtaposition between Vince and Drama’s mother at home in Queens and her son calling from a radio studio in California to ask her to come to his premiere; Drama’s anxiety as he sees old colleagues working in catering, Party Down from a different perspective. But none of it’s exceptionally well-developed.

Ta-Nehisi wrote, about the main characters’ sexual conquests, that “It’s just that my fantasies don’t usually involve scooping the crumbs off the table from my better looking friends–or having a group of loser friends who would do the same with me. It’s really a buzzkill for the whole “hunter” aspect of male mythology. Indeed it replaces the ‘hunter,’ with the ‘moocher.’ If we’re talking about realism, and not fantasy, then I can get with that. But we aren’t, so I can’t.” But I feel like this is also true of the show’s depiction of upward mobility. Is it really that compelling to float along than to be demonstrably excellent, to have things come easy because you’re skillful not because you’re mooching? Maybe I’m a workaholic, and maybe this would be fun for a year, but it doesn’t seem like much of a fantasy for a life. It’s not as if the core characters escaped some sort of life of toil or crushing poverty. They might have been working-class, but it doesn’t seem like any of them every went dramatically without, and the characters are too young to have their present indolence be a reward for years of misery and debt. This isn’t retirement.

So it’s no mistake, now that I’m in the third season, that my favorite character is Lloyd, whose pep talk to Ari immediately after his boss’s epic defenestration is the single most meaningful thing in the entire show:

I’ve worked 18 hours a day to save up the money to put myself through Stanford Business School. While I was there, I cleaned the cafeteria during the hours I wasn’t studying and still graduated top of my class, only to take a job delivering mail to unappreciative overpaid little cocksuckers. And I finally get the big promotion that would allow me to answer your phones and be both racially and sexually harassed for the next nine months. But I know the end game. And you, Ari God, you are it. So stop your fucking whining…and figure out how you’re going to make both of our lives happen tomorrow.

Lloyd’s compromises are the most interesting thing in Entourage right now, his willingness to trade Ari’s insults based on the fact that he’s Asian and gay for apologies afterwards and the opportunity to continue to rise up in the world, to get to another kind of 18-hour days, and as far away from those cafeterias as possible. That scene hints at lost possibilities. Poor gay Asian guys deserve their fantasies, their dreams of glory, just as much as straight, white, and profligate ones do.

Frank Stasio was kind enough to have me on his WUNC show yesterday to talk about divorce in pop culture. You can hear the full audio of the show here. But in prepping for it (and we talk about this a bit on the program), I realize there’s a weird gendered dichotomy to how divorce appears on television. For women, the damage happens before the divorce, while they’re still married, and divorce is an opportunity for renewal. But for men, the damage comes afterward, as they try to recover from the failures of their marriages.

In Happily Divorced, as Heather Havrilesky wrote earlier this summer, Fran Drescher’s amicably divorced from her gay husband, a situation in which the failure of her marriage is something she can’t possibly be responsible for. In The Starter Wife, Debra Messing obviously had been through hell at the end of her marriage, but her stylish single life made divorce look pretty good. The Real Housewives may be fooling themselves, but whichever unlucky woman has her marriage fall apart on-screen generally appears ready to rock and roll once she’s kicked out her husband or signed the papers.

By contrast, in Louie, Louis C.K. can’t find a new girlfriend, his daughters don’t want to stay at his apartment, and when he tries to be the cool parent, he gets them scared on Halloween. This season on Entourage, it seems like Ari can’t do anything right, including finding a way to spend time with his kids. This fall on Free Agents, Hank Azaria will attempt to get over his divorce by sleeping with a coworker who doesn’t really want to be with him.

There are exceptions, of course. On Modern Family, Jay seems pretty happily divorced and remarried to Glorida, and his ex-wife is supposed to be a bit of a mess because she still hasn’t gotten over their split. And in Good Christian Belles, Leslie Bibb’s divorce looks like it’ll affect the reception she gets when she returns to Dallas, giving all the people she tormented back in the day an excuse to judge her:

But it is interesting for all we lionize men on the prowl before they’re married, but if they get married and their marriages break up, we think of men as totally adrift.

Because I like subjecting myself to terrible things for your amusement, I spent a bunch of yesterday watching the first dozen episodes of Entourage in an attempt to figure out what the deal is, or was, and because we’ve been talking about female fantasies a lot lately, so I figured I’d drop in on a male one.

The thing that mostly strikes me is how mundane and repetitive so much of the lifestyle nonsense is — and by extension how much of the main characters’ lives are. Sex and the City works, I think, because the show has stuff happening all the time. All four of the main characters have different jobs that they care a lot about and that fuel numerous plots, whether Carrie’s interviewing a subject, Charlotte’s getting involved with new artists and patrons through the gallery, or Samantha and Miranda are dealing with clients. They sometimes have activities, whether Samantha’s getting herself in trouble trying to get involved with a charity function or Carrie’s doing fundraisers for the NYPD. And they have large and variegated social circles we drop into from time to time. The world is big, and we’re just dropping in on some of it. By contrast, the guys from Entourage do essentially the same things over and over again, looping the eternal mobius strip between the Coffee Bean, Ari’s office, Vince’s house, and various identical-looking parties. This is their whole world, airless and airbrushed.

Secondly, Eric’s the actual hero of the show, right? He’s as close as there is to a sympathetic character among the main four. Unlike Ari, who knows all, E has actual things to learn. Unlike Vince and Johnny, his career isn’t time-limited. Unlike Turtle, he has actual sense. That’s not saying much. When I joked about starting watching the show, Ta-Nehisi warned me that I’d regret it: “What an awful, condescending reflection of male identity.” And maybe E resonates with me because his ambition makes him feel more like a Sex and the City character who has places to go and people to see, than he does like Turtle hustling store credits so he can buy cashmere pajamas.Entourage looks more like a vacation than a fantasy to me: fun for a couple of weeks, but ultimately pretty deadly if you have to do it year after year.