It’s the beginning of the end of an era at NBC. We’ve known for months now that this season of 30 Rock will be that venerable sitcom’s last. Yesterday, showrunner Greg Daniels announced that The Office will wrap up this season as well. Community‘s changed showrunner hands as well, after the firing of Dan Harmon, and it’s hard to know if that shift will produce a show that will earn a fifth season. Parks and Recreation may be the last show on the network’s Thursday night comedy with a serious chance of continuing beyond the spring of 2013.

But while it will be difficult to say goodbye to all of these sitcoms, which have significantly defined my adult television watching, with departure comes opportunity. There’s an enormous amount of talent tied up in these comparatively low-rated shows, and I’m excited to see what everyone involved with them is going to do next. Some of them, like The Office’s Steve Carrell and Mindy Kaling have already departed for movie careers or new projects. Here are seven ideas for what other people who have given us so much fun on Thursday nights could do once their shows end.

1. Mike Schur should make a show about a television news station: The Parks and Recreation creator, who just signed a new deal with Universal Television, ran the Weekend Update segment during his stint on Saturday Night Live. On Parks and Rec, local talk show host Joan Callamezzo and anchor Perd Hapley are among the funniest supporting characters anywhere on television. TV needs a fantastic, cutting satire of news that isn’t created by Aaron Sorkin. Schur’s the guy to give it to us.

2. Amy Poehler and Tina Fey should play best friends who are mothers to young children: Poehler already gave cinematic birth to Fay’s daughter in Baby Mama. They’re hilarious whenever they’re in the same frame together. And given that television is obsessed with the novel idea of men raising their own young right now, in shows from ABC Family’s Baby Daddy to NBC’s upcoming shows The New Normal and Guys With Kids. Maybe now that we’ve gotten used to the idea that men have to give up things to raise children and that those adjustments take time, American audiences are ready to be sympathetic to mothers, who have always been in that position.

3. Put Aisha Muharrar, Megan Ganz, Katie Dippold, Kay Cannon, and Annie Mebane in a room and produce whatever they come up with: I’m not sure NBC gets enough credit for this, but its Thursday night comedies employ a mind-blowing number of smart young female writers. I would watch anything any of these women, or any combination of these women, put together in a heartbeat.

4. Keith Powell and Alison Brie should have an arc on a show where they date: If I have one complaint about 30 Rock over the years, it’s been the waste of the show’s incredibly strong supporting cast. As Toofer, Powell’s been very funny as the fussy, high class Harvard graduate who’s sometimes driven nuts by his fellow writers. I’d love to see him play off Brie, who’s been perfect as the precise Annie Edison over three years on Community, and deserves a chance to play the kind of sexy adult she plays on AMC and in movies on a broadcast show. Maybe in a program where Alec Baldwin plays Brie’s boss. If I can’t get that, I’ll take a spinoff web series about Grizz and Dot Comm in compensation.

5. Develop a show around Retta as a stand-up comedian: Her performance as Donna has been incredible on Parks and Rec, and while cable networks are falling all over themselves to give show deals to white male comedians, Retta seems like she could crush it on network. Showbiz shows haven’t worked particularly well on NBC of late—Up All Night is cutting its talk show to focus more on the characters at home. But whether Retta did something about doing stand-up, or based in her routines, I’d love to see her sidle in from the corner of the frame to claim center stage.

6. Craig Robinson. Judah Friedlander. Road trip: Two big guys, one good at projecting surprising empathy and precision, the other with a particular talent for reveling in mess, perversion, relationships with Susan Sarandon, and dressing up in women’s clothes and teaching self-defense lessons. I may not have been lured by The Hangover or other buddies-behaving-badly movies, but these guys would get me in the seats.

7. Adam Scott, Danny Pudi, Ellie Kemper as neighbors, and possibly roommates: Ben deserves a break from April and Andy. Have Scott, Kemper, and Pudi occupy the three apartments around the end of the hall. Put Kemper in the middle one and you’ve got the physical and actorly set up for a very nerdy, adorably enthusiastic love triangle.

It’s not as if characters never leave television shows. Diane and Fraiser both left Cheers, the former for California, the latter for a spinoff. Dr. Addison Montgomery departed Seattle Grace for the bright lights and beaches of Los Angeles. Detective John Munch has transcended franchises, moving from Homicide to Law & Order and popping up everywhere from Arrested Development to the X-Files. But it seems to me we’re entering a period where scripted television feels unusually confident about replacing characters or even entire casts.

The most high-profile case may not have been voluntary or planned: CBS subbed in Ashton Kutcher for Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men, ending the latter character’s run on the show with a fast and not particularly deep workaround. But it came at a time when lots of television shows were deciding that setting and concept were more important than individual characters. The Office saw the departure of Michael Scott, and if the show has seemed creatively moribund since his last episode, its problems really began once Jim and Pam got together. The core cast of the show may change further if Mindy Kaling’s show gets a pickup at Fox, ending her run on NBC as Kelly Kapoor. While it may not be totally clear what’s happening with Glee next year, some of the cast seems likely to depart, whether for a spinoff, or for other projects as graduation approaches for some of the kids at McKinley High. American Horror Story was specifically designed, even if we didn’t know it at the beginning, to replace almost the entire cast every season. And while a new show the CW has ordered may end up following its main character over multiple seasons, its combat-in-the-arena storyline sounds like it could accomodate a whole new cast every season, if need be.

I’d imagine that some of this is driven by the success of reality television on two fronts. Audiences have clearly become comfortable with swapping out contestants and Housewives as long as their replacements continue to fill the same tropes as their predecessors, and in shows like Glee where the characters are more schtick than actual people, and where the structure demands turnover, it probably wouldn’t been too wrenching for audiences to see actors phased in and out. Making sure actors on scripted shows know they’re replaceable also serves another function: it makes the actors who really need the work less powerful in contract negotiations if they know the show is comfortable replacing them at any point. And phasing characters in and out makes it easier for big stars to commit to television shows without worrying about waking up fourteen years later and having everyone forget that they used to compete for Academy Awards. It might have seemed inexplicable that Connie Britton would sign up for a three-year run of eating brains and having ghost-sex, but as a season-long reset button that lets her remind people she’s something other than Mrs. Coach, it makes more sense.

What does it mean in terms of storytelling? I think that’s yet to be seen. While rotating casts do make most actors less critical in favor of setting, atmosphere, and the internal rules of the world that will govern all characters’ behavior, a few anchor characters will still be important. What bodes poorly for Glee and well for American Horror Story, to take the two rotating-cast-shows from the same creator, is that Glee’s tentpole is the increasingly unlikable and not particularly rational staff, led by Will Schuster, while Jessica Lange still has scenery to chomp as creepy Murder House neighbor Constance in American Horror Story. And the concepts have to be good: both Glee and American Horror Story, while neither show is my cup of tea, have concepts that provide procedural-like structures. Every week, songs will be sung or people will die horribly, and folks will turn in to hear those songs and watch those killings. All of which probably lends itself to a focus on episodic, rather than serialized, shows. It’s difficult for me to believe that anyone is tuning in to Glee because they’re deeply invested in and attentive to the coherence of Rachel Berry’s journey any more.

Does that mean we’re going to enter a period of sloppy storytelling? I hope not. Episodic doesn’t have to mean inconsistent. And moving characters along can give a show an emotional integrity it might not have otherwise. But if characters are going to move in and out of shows, the main motivation shouldn’t be to break the power of actors, but to tell specific kinds of stories.

Justin Long is working on ensuring his long-term employability in case Mitt Romney becomes our next president by proving he can nail a Mitt Romney impersonation:

And this is a dandy summary of Bain Capital: “We buy up struggling companies, and we streamline them. We make them better, smarter, more efficient. Mostly by firing people.” To my mind, the idea that Romney is enthusiastic about firing people, combined with the phoniness of the “my friends” verbal tic, is probably the best attack on him. There’s nothing worse than someone who thinks he’s connecting with folks but has no idea that he’s expressing ideas or philosophies that are actually offensive or reveal him to be out of touch.

In other words, President Obama should desperately hope that America decides that Mitt Romney is Michael Scott but with more sexual success and better suits. It’s one thing to watch someone desperately try to connect with the people he’s got working for him. It’s quite another to work for that person, or to have your country lead by him. I hope this does become a regular feature. Impressions helped define Sarah Palin. And the longer the Republican primary continues, the longer comedians will have to try out and perfect their material for fall, no matter who the eventual Republican nominee is.

There’s something very strange about declaring that just because Parks and Recreation creates a meme-a-minute that it’s a semi-intelligent show, or that it’s “less risky” than its relatively ossified counterparts, 30 Rock and The Office:

Welcome to the meme-ification of the sitcom, a phenomenon in which the latest iteration of television comedy writing anticipates and includes the Internet as a secondary delivery vehicle right from the start. In the last couple of years a particularly digestible style of writing has emerged, well suited to various attention spans and bandwidths: on these shows, and also “2 Broke Girls” on CBS and “Man Up!” on ABC.

There’s a semi-intelligence to these sitcoms: smarter than traditional multi-camera, laugh-tracked shows, but less risky than single-camera progressive fare like “The Office” and “30 Rock.” The meme-ified series compose a new middlebrow, creative enough to alienate conventional sitcom fans and attract viewers in search of a challenge but not complex or jarring enough to be off-putting. (Despite its savvy writing “Community” on NBC is probably a hair too dense to fit this bill.) Their humor plays well for 30 minutes, but is also reducible and portable in ways that make sense online: punch lines are more like catch phrases that feel like Twitter hashtags, and scenes with celebrations, dances and odd body movements look hilarious when looped endlessly as a GIF.

First, if anything, 30 Rock‘s vastly more tied to the news cycle and the pop culture than Parks and Recreation is. And The Office is on its second cycle of the same story: that’s the defined inverse of risky. In both cases, Parks and Recreation‘s relentless optimism and commitment to making an argument about the value of public service are so square, so different from either the irony-saturation or the manufactured, bland cheeriness of most other fare on television that the show’s themes and tone have come out the other side and are cool again.

But more to the point, just because something’s meme-ifiable doesn’t mean it’s stupid. Juxtaposition humor is really hard: something like the Swanson Pyramid of Greatness has to come from a place of both deep character development and great writing. The sight of a very butch man in a tiny hat and veil, the kind of dance GIF this piece refers to, could easily get reduced to a bad drag joke, but in the Parks’ writers hands and on the capable head of Nick Offerman, it’s something far weirder and more delightful.

And it makes a lot of sense that the smart, generally sophisticated characters who populate these kinds of shows, would get meme-y in their actual lives: the Internet’s elevated the kind of in-jokes that groups of friends have had since Sam Malone ran a popular Boston watering hole, given people a tool to broadcast the narratives that govern their relationships. Sure, there’s a cyclical relationship between pop culture and real life, and shows provide grist for the mill. But having your characters act like people act in real life doesn’t mean you’re anti-intellectual or only partially bright. You can fulfill people’s fantasies of living in the culture that they love by letting them talk to their favorite reality stars, like Andy Cohen does on his Bravo late-night show. Or you can show them a riff on their group of friends that turns out jokes a little faster, that loves and fights at a slightly higher tempo, and make your audience wish they were that smart — and then go out the next day to prove it.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but I finally started playing Portal over the weekend, got through level nine, and enough cannot be said about how charming the game is. Because I haven’t played video games or been around gamers in any substantive way in a decade, I wasn’t as struck as Becky Chambers was by the opportunity to play as a woman (though Chambers’ piece is excellent). Instead, what struck me is the way the game’s sense of humor dovetails with larger trends in entertainment, particularly comedies set in corporations.

The minute GLaDOS declared in her menacingly chipper way: “Remember,’Take Your Daughter to Work Day’ is a great opportunity to have her tested,” I immediately thought of Veronica Palmer, the hilariously amoral executive from Better Off Ted. Veronica’s the kind of person who is perfectly comfortable freezing a man for science only to be annoyed when he emerges from the experience with a tendency to shriek unexpectedly; who when Ted, the senior vice president who works for for her, brings his daughter Rose to work and asks Veronica to look after the little girl, teaches Rose how to lay people off; who works with Ted to fake a major company initiative when rumor accidentally spreads that they’re on to something awesome. In other words, she is beyond the realms of usual corporate malfeasance into the realm of the hilariously evil. If she were Jack Donaghy, she’d be turning children orange and selling dangerously defective grills to North Korea. If she were Michael Scott, she’d run an office so depressing and No Exit-y that day-to-day life would become a comedy of the absurd. GLaDOS offers chipper warnings that various force fields might yank out Chell’s fillings, and that under certain circumstances, you’ll die and get a note in your permanent record (and I understand that worse is yet to come).

This mismatch between tone and content feels like an important hallmark of our corporate comedy to me. The things all these characters are doing are wildly malfeasant, but they’re not actually so malfeasant as to be unrealistic—in fact, sometimes, reality is worse than what we can imagine. Even Veronica Palmer would quail at Don Blakenship. But I think most Americans don’t really think we’ll do without corporations, or that we’ll radically change their role in American life. I’d like to believe that’s different. But until it is, joking about corporate power helps us reconcile ourselves to big companies’ role in our day-to-day lives, whether they’re employing us or building the world around us. It is to cry, but day-to-day, it helps to laugh.