It’s been, if I’m to be perfectly honest, a disappointing season of fall television. Promising shows like The Mindy Project haven’t lived up to their potential. Sophomores like Homeland have given me heartburn, even if they still have credit to draw on. And even a new show I love, Nashville, hasn’t attracted viewers in numbers that would make me feel secure about its future. As with baseball, this is a wait until next year kind of game, which is why I was so excited to get my hands on Josef Adalian’s guide to the dramas in development for the 2013-2014 fall television. These are seven of the non-S.H.I.E.L.D. shows that have me feeling most excited, which doesn’t mean that they’ll actually make it to the air, or be good when they get there, or last. But hope springs eternal, and here are the things that will carry me through the upcoming hiatus and hopes of better when we return in midseason.

1. LA Woman (NBC): Graham Yost, who runs Justified, on a network, with what sounds like a female main character, in a spy drama? Yes please. Maybe they can get Carla Gugino, who’s been spending a lot of time on television as a guest star of late, to star and make us all remember Karen Sisco.

2. Meridian Hills (The CW): I like feminism, Mila Kunis, and period pieces, so the idea of Mila Kunis producing a period piece about the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment that’s about feminism invading the country club, sort of like The Help but without all the condescending soft racism and stereotyping, sounds like something that would make me very happy. Also like the strangest thing to make it on air ever, if that actually comes to pass. But I’m glad to see Kunis’s Seth MacFarlane-assisted clout’s at least going to some interesting chance-taking.

3. Untitled Surgeon General show (NBC): As someone who interviewed not one but two surgeon generals when I was in high school, and who loves David Kessler’s A Question of Intent , I am naturally predisposed to be excited about the idea of this project. For the rest of you who aren’t similarly hilariously dorky? This show has the potential to do two different things: come up with a way to make a medical procedural that’s about health policy, and offer up a reminder that there are parts of the federal government that do things other than try to catch terrorists.

4. Untitled George Washington show from Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson (NBC) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Fox): My belief that we should have a lot more Revolutionary War and colonial America in our popular culture is a matter of public record. Washington isn’t necessarily the character I’d choose, but the Hudson River Valley is a fascinating place. And I’m glad to see some networks making the effort to tap a weirdly untapped part of our history and cultural memory.

5. Sex Diaries adaptation (ABC): Since I complained yesterday that our television has gotten more violent and more interested in violence without any corresponding interest in sex and sexuality, I’m curious to see what will come of this adaptation of one of New York Magazine’s most famous features. Also, just from a format perspective, I’m curious to see how ABC adapts the feature. Will we spend an episode on a character? Have the show follow a small bundle of characters whose sex lives are interacting with each other? Pass off from miniseries to miniseries?

6. Wired (The CW): With the exception of The Big Bang Theory, television spends a lot of time wedging geeks into stories as medical examiners, or quasi-hackers, or nerds at the edge of social circles. I like the idea of a show that recognizes that geekiness is also a big business, and tells an origin story about the rise of Silicon Valley. Think the Nolan Ross stuff that’s been the best part of Revenge this season, but with more room to breathe.

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 been a sense, I think, that AMC struck gold with Mad Men, its advertising-in-the-1960s product of an auteur that arrived very fully formed and confident in itself, and the network has struggled to define its identity since. The Walking Dead is a big, gross, violent popular entertainment that’s struggled to maintain its artistic equilibrium this season. AMC and Veena Sud managed the expectations around The Killing poorly, so a totally solid show left its audience feeling hugely betrayed. And Hell on Wheels felt like a cheap Deadwood ripoff, with the addition of a Wronged Confederate and a poorly-executed stab at racial insight. But Deadline has a list of the pilots AMC is apparently considering, and a lot of them sound pretty fantastic:

I hear the six scripts that made the cut this year are: Chris Mundy‘s Low Winter Sun, an adaptation of the New Zealand Gothic murder mystery series, Craig Silverstein‘s Turn, about George Washington’s spy ring, Richard LaGravenese‘s Philly Lawyer, about a law student, Jake Paltrow & Robbie Kinberg‘s Crystal Pines, about a journalist who gets cloned, Jason Cahill‘s F/V Mean Tide, about a Maine lobster fishing family, and Kerry Williamson‘s Sacred Games, an epic story of crime and punishment in modern Mumbai based on the novel by Vikram Chandra.

Concept-wise, I think Turn, Crystal Pines, F/V Mean Tide, and Sacred Games sound most promising. Turn would be both a new kind of period show and an answer to the dearth of Revolutionary War stories in pop culture, a weird omission I’ve noted before. And Washington’s spies were a fascinating group that included women and Quakers as well as your conventional breed of dudely badass, and they ran operations including my personal favorite, the effort to getting Hessian mercenaries to defect en masse by offering them land and getting them snugly with American women they then felt compelled to marry. Crystal Pines would be an awesome opportunity for a single actor to play two roles. The lobster wars portrayed in F/V Mean Tide are a real thing and would be a rich story engine in a novel setting. And I would love so much for a show set in India that isn’t Outsourced. Mad Men stands out because it’s a highly, highly original concept rather than a riff on an existing one. AMC needs to display that confidence again.

Hendrick Hertzberg joins my call for more Revolutionary War movies, saying in particular that we should have a definitive Alexander Hamilton biopic. I agree, though I might recommend an adaptation of David Liss’s The Whiskey Rebels instead of a more straightforward approach. But I also think this points to a larger problem: we need a more creative approach to biopics that’s oriented towards truly great stories instead of just the most famous people who a talented actor would enjoy impersonating. To wit, ten suggestions from American history.

1. Harriet Tubman: The Underground Railroad is one of the coolest things to happen in American history, and it’s only part of what makes Harriet Tubman awesome. Tubman made 13 runs on the Underground Railroad, an act of outrageous courage given the fate that would have awaited her as a conductor were she ever caught. She was the first woman to head up a Union military expedition—which involved guiding ships past a river Confederate forces had mined—during which she helped free more than 700 slaves. And she did all of this despite having seizures and headaches. And it might be fun to see Viola Davis cut loose a little bit post The Help, or to see C.C.H. Pounder deploy her glorious steeliness on an iconic portrayal of Tubman.

2. Ida Tarbell, Ida Wells and Nellie Bly: I’m a sucker for movies about journalists, and these three women are best in class. From Tarbell’s investigation of Standard Oil, which set the standard for document-based investigative journalism going forward; to Wells’ reporting on lynching in America; to Bly’s expose of the state of mental health treatment for the poor, all three were absolutely fearless, telling stories about bureaucracies and norms and prompting reform or efforts at reform. Too often, journalism movies and television shows have to gin up absolutely ridiculous plots to up the stakes—sorry, State of Play, I love you, but it’s true. But sometimes journalists go where the government won’t, even within our own country, at considerable risk to themselves. All three roles would be juicy, but I’d particularly like to see Kerry Washington, so wonderful in The Last King of Scotland, play Wells, who was just a few years younger than Washington is now when she gave her seminal speech on lynching.
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The bridge is yours.

-PETA arrives at the logical destination of the journey it’s been on all these years.

-Seriously, can we make the Revolutionary War movie where George Washington fights off British bioweapons?

-Are reality camera crews any different from news reporters when it comes to distracting a team?

-Of course there’s a West Memphis 3 feature film already in the works.

-American Horror story looks reasonably attractive:

A week ago today, I complained that we don’t have enough movies about the Founding Fathers. Today, I get news that Johnny Depp is producing, and may star in, a movie about Paul Revere and the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

I suspect that no matter how this comes to pass, it will be more Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s version, less David Hackett Fischer’s (if you haven’t read Paul Revere’s Ride, I recommend it highly). The thing that’s always impressed me about Revere’s ride is not that he made it all the way, because he didn’t, but that once he was out of British custody, he came back to Lexington and snuck a bunch of John Hancock’s papers out of Buckman Tavern — while the battle was still going on behind him. It’s an act of rather stupendous badassery enabled by the general confusion about everything that was going on at the time.

But then, the whole Battle of Lexington and Concord, despite the fact that the Colonials got badly beaten at Lexington, is really kind of astonishing. That the Colonial forces activated this theoretical plan based on disused defense practices from times when clashes with Native Americans were more frequent, and that it worked, is tremendous and exciting and moving — and it should be. There are a lot of ways to tell the heroic stories of that day, including my favorite, an elderly man who basically set up a sniper station to shoot at the British as they marched past his house, was bayonetted repeatedly, survived, and went on to remarry and live another decade. Paul Revere is an easily dramatized way into the story, but a movie about it that takes a broader scope is potentially much more interesting, particularly if it deprives Depp chances to mug wildly while on horseback, and maybe do something Jack Sparrow-like, including getting knocked off said horse by a low-hanging tree limb. And given that all the relevant buildings in Lexington are still standing, it would be cool if they shot locally.

I read Harlow Giles Unger’s biography of Patrick Henry Lion of Liberty over the weekend (I think the rest of this summer is going to be a lot of alternating between the Founding Fathers and big science fiction novels), and it struck me all over again how few movies we have about the Revolutionary War. I’d looked into this a couple of years ago, but it’s really kind of stunning. The success of America’s war for independence from Great Britain is incredibly remarkable, the people who prosecuted that war are referenced constantly in our current political conversations, and yet we don’t have more than a handful of movies about the conflict or the people who ran it. April Morning, Benedict Arnold: A Question of Honor, The Crossing, John Adams, and Valley Forge are all television projects. The last big Revolutionary War blockbuster, The Patriot, came out in 2000, and even that wasn’t that enormous a success: it netted $113,330,342 at the domestic box office, just $3 million more than the movie cost to make.

So what’s the problem? I think there are a couple. First, Revolutionary War action sequences are a real challenge. We are too distant from the realities of musket and bayonet fighting, and there’s no way the scenes will seem as exciting as Michael Bay and the Siege of Chicago or any other big Transformers-style action spectacles. But if you get up close and personal with what it takes to kill someone else by sticking a large but not necessarily very sharp blade into them, you’re hitting hard-R territory. World War II battles are in closer accord with what we consider exciting, there are explosions, rapid movements, and larger-scale engagements. Plus, the stakes are familiar. America v. Hitler’s a debate that can be solved with unusual swiftness.

And therein lies the second challenge of Revolutionary War movies. America v. King George III is also a relatively easy debate to settle quickly, but George III isn’t really manifestable, the Atlantic Ocean dilutes the conflict a bit. And besides, the real debate is between the Founding Fathers themselves, and their successes and failures lay the groundwork for everything from the Civil War to the treatment of Native Americans. But those conflicts pay off down the road. And getting folks in their seats for a battle royale over the question of whether Locke or Plutarch’s more correct about the nature of law isn’t necessarily easy. Given the distorted debates about our Founders, their goals, intentions, and outlooks, movies about the nature of Americans’ origins could get awfully didactic and limited awfully quickly.

And finally, these are complicated men. Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings? Patrick Henry’s rather clueless move to take for his second wife a woman his son was in love with? The Founders are hard to make movies about if we treat them if they’re distant gods, so wise and so important as to be divine — we can’t reckon with that. But we don’t necessarily want to reckon with them as men either. We’d rather believe the Founding Fathers across the board had modern ideas about slavery than accept the messy, ugly compromises they made both in their personal and political lives. If we’re so anxious about their beliefs, we’re probably not ready to accept them as full persons.