“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.

On Friday, Todd VanDerWerff tweeted that one of the producers of Starz’s new political show, Boss, told reporters that “At no point during the show do we refer to parties.”

It’s entirely possible to make shows about politicians without referring to their party affiliations, especially if you show them mostly in isolation, brooding over power and tactics, and even easier if you don’t engage with policy, just with the exercise of brute force. But especially if you’re making a television program about tough-as-nails Chicago politicians, eschewing party politics means you’re giving up most of the means by which that brute force is exercised, and by which the objects of that force are defined. If you’re going to have enemies in political stories, you have to figure out who they are, and parties are useful identifiers, whether your foe is an ideological rival, a procedural one, or your rival for position within the hierarchy of the party itself.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that the folks who make smart television don’t want to risk their audience before a show even starts airing, especially if, like Starz, you’re trying to establish yourself as destination channel for smart original content that doesn’t involve people getting naked and killing each other in arenas. But Democratic and Republican politics don’t play out the same way on the local level — even in big cities — as they do nationally. Parks and Recreation‘s been an incredibly effective demonstration of that. It would be entirely possible to have Kelsey Grammar, who is playing a Rahm-like politician on the show Boss, have Rahm’s personally aggressive style without attaching Rahm’s voting record and stances in the Obama administration to him, using a series of local issues and relationships with local stakeholders to define him as a Democrat or a Republican.

Or even if that’s too touchy, why not invent a couple of fictional political parties? That kind of work happens most often in science fiction, scabrous satirical humor, or in Dave Barry books, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be done in more realistic dramas, in ways that are usefully thought-provoking. I’d be curious to see a long-running exploration of what it would be like to have one party that’s fairly interventionist on both moral and social safety net issues, opposing abortion, equal rights for gay couples, and the death penalty while supporting universal health care and heavy taxes on the wealthiest citizens positioned against a much more staunchly libertarian party that’s pro-choice, low-tax, low social services, etc. One of the best things about Kings was that it didn’t spend a lot of time explaining the new framework that it was operating in: the show just sort of plunged in and let you figure out the importance of the powerfully active military-industrial complex. While I like Kings, it’s also reasonably obvious why it didn’t find a network following — the lead actor simply isn’t very good, and the religious stuff is incredible, but probably would have found a more natural audience on a network like HBO, which also would have found alternative ways to support its heavy production costs.

But I don’t think that fate would necessarily attach to a show that was more of our world, with smaller but significant tweaks to the positions that, bundled together, define political parties. We can make a nigh-infinite number of television shows about the nature of power as a raw, elemental thing (especially if they star Ian McShane). But they’re not the only kind of fiction we need to help us consider our political system and the future that our politics will define. Our parties are held together by duct tape, temperamental similarities, entrenched hatred, tears, and determination, but not necessarily by consensus or logic. We’re settled into them for now, but at some point, someone more effective than the Reform Party, or No Labels, or Unity ’08 might come along and present a viable alternative. Our pop culture’s daintiness about parties is in odd contrast to the brutality of our political contests.