When the broadcast television season began several weeks ago, one of the things that stood out most from network to networks was the ratings. NBC may have started to claw its way out of the ratings cellar with Revolution, one of the few bona fide hits of fall, but lots of its broadcast counterparts found themselves in trouble. CBS, normally top of the heap, saw two of its new entries, drama Made In Jersey and sitcom Partners, tank out of the gate. Fox renewed two new comedies, The Mindy Project and Ben and Kate, despite the fact that they debuted with half the audience their comedy block anchor, New Girl, started out with a year before. On Twitter, my fellow television critics mused that they’d always thought there was the potential for the bottom to fall out of the broadcast television model, but that they didn’t see it coming so soon. At the same time, cable shows like FX’s Sons of Anarchy were creeping up in the ratings, beating the networks in the core demographic of viewers if not in total viewers. Network television seems to have lost its sense of what it can do better than cable, and to be floundering in developing shows as a result.

But it would be great for network to get its groove back, and not just because it’s one of the few media that can create an ongoing mass cultural phenomenon. As demand grows for alternatives to bundled cable, it’s important for broadcast television to be a vigorous, vibrant alternative to cable networks so it’s in those cable networks’ interests to compete however they can for viewers. And for those of us who love great television, it would be fantastic to see the end of a race to the lowest common denominator, and to see good programming catch on. While there’s no guarantee that doing the right, creative thing will garner network audiences, here are four ideas for how broadcast television can rediscover what makes it unique.

1. Avoid Special Effects Arms Races: Subscription support means that HBO can afford to spend $60 million a season on Game of Thrones, building a complex fictional world that includes castles, dragons, and ice zombies. Network television, especially given declining viewership and correspondingly shrinking ad rates, won’t ever be able to keep up with that kind of investment. So it shouldn’t try, settling for shows that look bad, or that end up blowing their budgets on CGI dinosaurs rather than acting talent. I may not like NBC’s Revolution much, but when it comes to genre, it’s doing the right thing, building a post-apocalyptic society that is dense with forest rather than full of heavily made-up zombies or other magical creatures. Constraints can make for a lot of creativity. Network should accept its limitations, and build smart worlds within them.

2. Shorter Seasons: I’ve written about this repeatedly. But an obsessive focus on producing high numbers of episodes of shows is a great driver of mediocre concepts, and of overextending successful series like How I Met Your Mother. Miniseries and shorter seasons are a great way to attract excellent actors to television, whether it’s Sigourney Weaver in Political Animals, an effort I think was doomed by its time slot or Kevin Bacon, who will arrive on Fox this winter playing an alcoholic FBI agent in The Following. It would also be a way to fit stories to the number of episodes actually needed to tell them, one of the great strengths of British television. And shorter seasons and miniseries would also help solve one of television’s most pernicious scheduling problems: month-long hiatuses on shows that have just begun to hit their stride. The television season is an artificial construction and a not particularly logical one. It’s time to start experimenting with alternatives to it that serve stories and audiences instead.

3. Genuinely Family-Friendly Shows: The success of Downton Abbey is an illustration of a serious gap in the television market: programming that people of all ages can watch, enjoy, and discuss. So much of what’s on television is narrowly targeted or toned by age right now—a show like New Girl wouldn’t even be close to appropriate for a pre-teen audience, but its appeal has a cutoff well inside the target demographic. CBS’s Partners may be an attempt to speak to a younger generation whose friend groups have always included gay couples, but in tone and style, it’s aimed more at older viewers who are still getting used to the idea. Setting aside in-jokes or concepts that are targeted at certain demographics and trying for concepts and tones that are more universal could meet the needs of entire families. The 8 PM hour is considered a dead zone on broadcast television right now, which is too bad. There’s no reason to waste the hour after homework and before a reasonable bed time.

4. Innovate Around Sex And Violence: There’s an odd perception that much of cable television’s edge over broadcast is due to the fact that cable shows can depict sexual and violent situations that would be verboten—or at least risk drawing very heavy fines—on network television. Fox is attempting to chase cable standards with The Following, its extremely violent serial killer show, but across the board, I think that’s a mistake. Too often, cable’s taken its licenses as mandates, and produced sex and violence unmoored from narrative or emotional demands. Network could compete not by courting FCC censure, but by making the leadup to sex sensual and adult, and countering body-of-the-week callousness by making deaths real losses with devastating impact. You don’t have to see a character’s head get bashed in for their death to feel debilitating.

While watching the new fall television pilots and revisiting some old shows that are back this fall, I was struck by a worrisome conclusion. There are a lot of shows that have picked the wrong person to place at the center of their storytelling at the expense of much better characters, or that are treating people other than their true main characters as if they’re the main attraction for purpose of advertising. A bad offender on the latter score this fall is Last Resort, which is running print ads that make it appear as if Scott Speedman is the show’s star, rather than Andre Braugher, who dominates the pilot, for reasons you can probably do the math about. But while it’s one thing to start a show with the assumption that one character is the hook and to have others emerge, it’s a shame to watch a show spend seasons focused on the wrong people.

1. Boardwalk Empire: Now in its third season, Boardwalk Empire remains convinced that the best thing it has going for it is Nucky Thompson, who isn’t much more than a chance for Steve Buschemi to show off and wear great suits. But its strongest assets lie elsewhere. How fantastic would a version of Boardwalk Empire that focused on Chalky White and the rise of an East Coast black middle class and aristocracy be? What about Kelly Macdonald’s fantastic Margaret Schroeder, a woman who transformed her lot in life and now is determined to pay it forward through philanthropy, even if it means challenging a powerful head doctor at a hospital over the cause of maternal health? And then there’s Richard Harrow, mutilated in war, grieving the loss of Angela Darmody, one of the few people who ever understood him, and now raising her child with Gillian Darmody as a monstrous replacement mommy. But any chance the show had to be about soldiers returning from World War I appears to have died with Jimmy Darmody last season, replaced by the increasing presence of showy mobsters, and Boardwalk Empire is poorer for all its lost possibility.

2. How I Met Your Mother: I get it. This show is the story of how Ted met the mother of his children. But it’s also an illustration of the weaknesses of selling sitcoms, which are designed to go on forever, on premises that really only feel viable for a short time. Marshall and Lily’s split, reunion, and road to parenthood, experiment with suburbanization, and return to the city is the true big arc story of How I Met Your Mother. And I’m as sick of waiting for Ted to grow up as Ted is as waiting for the love of his life to show up.

3. Revolution: NBC’s new post-apocalyptic drama wants to capture the cachet of The Hunger Games so badly that it turned its main character, Charlie, into a person I refuse to call anything but Fake Katniss. She’s got a leather jacket, a bow, a penchant for woodsiness, but entirely lacks a personality. And Revolution has the same problem that The Hunger Games does: the world it’s set in and the events it explores means that what the knowing adults are up to is vastly more interesting as story material than watching kids run around. At least The Hunger Games‘ kids were relatively well-developed. Revolution doesn’t even have that going for it, and it’s particularly painful to see it focus on its CW-quality leads when Zack Orth’s former Google executive character’s been relegated to the wings, and assigned the task of providing Hurley-style quips.

4. New Girl: Watching the premiere episode of the second season of New Girl, I was struck by two things. First, Jess isn’t even close to the new girl in the apartment she shares with her male roommates anymore. And second, the show found its legs last year when it turned into an exploration of masculinity, rather than a celebration of Jess’s Manic Pixie grade school teacher. Jess isn’t a terrible character, and the show’s pokes fun at some of the whimsy-cures-everything attitude that was so gratingly front and center early in the show’s first season. But still, if it weren’t for all the branding that went into making New Girl a Zooey Deschanel vehicle that’s probably impossible to undo at this point, it would be nice to see the show recenter on the ensemble that makes it so strong.

5. Modern Family: ABC’s smash hit made waves in the offseason when production was delayed on new episodes because of a nasty contract dispute between the producers and the show’s adult stars. It’s too bad, because increasingly, they’re the least interesting part of the show. Mitch and Cam are a TV-sterilized sexless gay couple. Gloria’s a bombshell stereotype. Claire gets stuck with periods-make-ladies-crazy storylines. But the kids remain the most winning part of Modern Family. If the families involved had some more children, you could build an entire show about the dynamics of the siblings and cousins. And in a television environment where kids get to be props more than actual people, a program from the perspective of young people would be fascinating.

Over the last two television seasons, both Fox and NBC have both tried to make science fiction and fantasy shows work, focusing heavily on the visuals rather than the conceptual and emotional architecture underneath them. Both Terra Nova and Revolution look good. Fox spent money to make sure its dinosaurs didn’t look like an embarrassment. In its pilot, Revolution’s abandoned shells of airplanes and overgrown Major League baseball stadiums have a handsome air of decay. But watching both those shows and the finale of SyFy’s Lost Girl in recent days, it’s striking the extent to which shows seem to be able to pull off either the look or the ideas, but rarely both.

For much of its first two seasons, Lost Girl managed to be a relatively low-effects show for a story set amongst the fae. The episodes relied on physical props, on people acting as if they’d been controlled, on wild eyes and good makeup and what looked like surprisingly enjoyable sex for basic cable. But in the second half of the second season, as succubus Bo and her human and fae comrades went to war against a powerful antagonist called the Garuda, the show’s effects faltered. Suddenly, it looked a lot more like Charmed, the WB show about three sisters who also happened to be witches, which started airing in 1998. The Garuda’s lair, like those of the demons the sisters faced down on Charmed, looked more like a basement hideaway than an evil citadel. His wings of fire were transparently terrible animation rather than a compelling deception. But even though the fight scenes looked disappointing, everything that surrounded them worked. The show had ideas it wanted to explore—Bo’s confrontation with the Garuda was a way for her to finally accept leadership within her community, and a tool for her to confront issues in some of her relationships with both humans and fae—and the actors involved had the chops to pull it off.

Terra Nova and Revolution both look a lot better than Lost Girl, a Canadian import that fits well into SyFy’s lineup, a place where the core audience is used to doing a little extra work to suspend disbelief. But even if the visuals on Revolution make it easy to believe that the population of the United States has dramatically shrunk, and that Wrigley Field is overgrown, the show’s ideas and acting interfere with its emotional credibility. If Revolution was interested in exploring what life was like after the clock turned dramatically back on technological development, we could enjoy the sight of the lost world, we could explore the things things they’ve built to replace lost conveniences, the infrastructure that once held society together. Instead, there are pesky questions hanging around the premise. If Ben Matheson knows why the electricity went out, why has he kept silent for fifteen years? Why does electricity work in Grace’s attic if it doesn’t wear anywhere else? Why aren’t people building steam engines? I understand that the show intends to answer these questions, but it’s hard to imagine that the answers will be good enough to justify the irritations of the inconsistencies, or that Tracy Spiridakos, the show’s CW-style lead actress, can provide enough emotional weight to give us consequences beyond the setup.

I’d love science fiction and fantasy shows that both look great and have great setups. But Battlestar Galacticas are few and far between. And apparently they aren’t frequent enough, or big enough hits to convince networks that their shows need to have concepts, visuals, and people who can actually act. Revolution‘s off to a good start, ratings-wise: 11.7 million people tuned in to its pilot, boosted by a lead-in from The Voice. But genre fans shouldn’t let networks buy them off with things that look good but don’t have anything underneath the hood. And if we have to pick one or the other, I’ll take solid worldbuilding and actors who can carry that world on their shoulders over pretty, flimsy pictures.

I’d expected the sharpest questions at the panel for Revolution, NBC’s dystopian drama about a world where electricity ceases to function, would be about the show’s rather uneven execution of its premise. But the panel for the show went in a different direction entirely when creator Eric Kripke, explaining the rules of the world, explained that “Guns are possible in the world, but they’re confiscated, because we’re living in the Monroe Republic, which is a dictatorship, and they’ve taken away people’s right to bear arms.” Star Giancarlo Esposito, who plays the enforcer for that regime, continued the theme. “Can you imagine not having the right to bear arms, not having the right to protect your family or yourself?” he asked. His character is a enforcer for the Republic, the person who is confiscating those arms, who believes himself to be “the one step that is keeping everyone safe. Without him there would be total anarchy.”

These are freighted statements in any context, but after the shooting at The Dark Knight Rises in Colorado last week, they read as particularly uncomfortable. And HitFix’s Dan Fienberg asked Kripke whether he was comfortable with having the show, and his and the cast’s remarks about it, out in a world that’s embarking on another painful round of conversations about our unwillingness to seriously consider gun control.

In response, Kripke said that he thought his remarks about guns were part of a larger context of the show, which is a metaphor for the American Revolution. “I think we’re talking about, you know, a dictator who is also conscripting soldiers, taxation without representation, taking away the freedoms of what was once the citizens of the United States in a hundred different ways and that what we’re really talking about is, at the end of the day, a very patriotic show that is in many ways about people fighting for freedom, freedoms to be able to go where they want, say what they want, be together with their families,” he said. “I think it’s a much bigger show that is about that is more about, like, what it means to be a citizen of this country and what are the things that are positive about it and what are the things that are worth fighting for.”

But these aren’t neutral concepts, much less agreed-upon ones. And they certainly aren’t issues that have been left behind in our historical past to be resurrected as part of a far-fetched science fiction show. Our political language has been tainted by the suggestion that President Obama wields dictatorial power, and one of the biggest challenges in his presidential campaign had to do with his remarks about how gun owners view their weapons and their relationship to the government. Conversations about taxes remain bitterly divisive. A show that premieres in the heat of a presidential election that portrays an African-American man confiscating white people’s guns and enforcing the will of a dictatorial regime that levies crushing taxes on them may not intend to deliver a specific political message, but it certainly runs the risk of giving credence to certain strains of argument that its creators may not in fact agree with.

It’s worth noting that in the cut of the pilot critics received prior to the session, the first time a private citizen attempts to use a gun he’s stockpiled in violation of the Munroe Republic’s ban on private weapons, he fails. Miserably. The result is a massacre, in which the Monroe Republic militia handily dispatches the residents of the small town who have dared to stand up to them.

Revolution may prove to be a subtle and rich show—Kripke’s discussions of the premise left me much less skeptical than I was previously. But it enters an environment where it can’t possibly be a mere thought experiment, bearing ideas that have not been precisely beneficial to our national conversation. That’s something Kripke and his staff will have to reckon with in a time when even the meaning and conditions of America’s birth are subject to vigorous contention, a wedge to divide rather than to unite us.

There’s something deeply craven about the energy politics of at least the ads for Revolution, the splashy J.J. Abrams apocalypse show that NBC is adding to its schedule this fall. I’ve always been skeptical of the idea of a world where “all forms of energy mysteriously cease to exist,” even as I tend to think hitting the reset button on civilization is interesting. But there’s something particularly cowardly about the approach the show appears to be taking to that amorphous premise: this is a show about energy politics that doesn’t seem to have the courage to even mention that electricity is generated by other things, among them coal, natural gas, and oil.

Seriously, this is a show that says things like “We used electricity for everything. Even to grown food and pump water. But after the blackout, nothing worked. Not even car engines or jet turbines. Hell, even batteries. All of it. Gone forever.” Except that absent some mysterious magical thing or scientific nonsense Abrams and Eric Kripke, his co-creator dream up for introduction at some point, electricity doesn’t have an on-off switch: it’s generated by many different methods. Messing with the grid that distributes electricity is not the same thing as removing our capacity to ever generate and distribute more of is. We don’t use electricity to make airplanes stay up, we use jet fuel—20.2 billion gallons of it annually as of 2009. And while hybrid electric cars are on the market, those too rely on internal combustion engines, which in turn are powered by fossil fuels.

I’m fully aware, of course, that most television is based on junk science. But the reason this is particularly disappointing is that Kripke and Abrams are setting up a scenario here that undermines precisely what science fiction has the potential to do: reckon with what we’ve done to ourselves and posit solutions, be they scientific or societal. A magic shutdown scenario, rather than a situation where we’ve run out of fossil fuels, doesn’t require us to grapple with what we’ve done to ourselves—there are no contractions of services, no resource hoarding, no slow adaptation and competition between classes or nations. The blame can and probably will be placed on some sort of mysterious cabal rather than our collective inability to radically change our energy use. And the solution will be in the form of hidden knowledge possessed by an equally small and brilliant cabal, rather than major, painful, realignments in the way we live our lives and innovation that changes it. Setting up its central conceit this way, Revolution is a fantasy of an energy crisis where no one is to blame, in the same way that Tony Stark’s building-powering arc reactor (a great discussion of the relevant zoning issues is available here) is a fantasy that an alternative to fossil fuels is just around the corner.

But at least The Avengers argues that green energy innovation is sexy (as will, apparently, Marion Cotillard in The Dark Knight). That’s much more attractive than a fantasy in which an energy crisis happens to us as innocent victims, rather than an acknowledgement that we happened to the world’s energy reserves.