1. Congressional Offices: Most of the time, Hollywood loves to portray Congressmen as minor figures who get in the way of the President’s agenda, and who can be dismissed or shamed with a single big speech. It would be much more interesting to flip the script and focus on a Senator or Representative who often serves as a swing vote. You could have legislative fights that come down to the wire in a realistic way, told from the perspective of people who are getting lobbied rather than doing the lobbying, and decisions that are either genuinely heroic or transparently self-interested. And if it’s a Representative, you get a big reelection subplot every two years.

2. Agencies: Pop culture forgets almost all the time that the executive branch isn’t limited to the White House, though it makes an exception for the FBI and national security agencies. You could set an awesome drama in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights, or Treasury’s Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes division, or a hilarious Parks and Recreation-like comedy at a minor agency like the Office of Personnel Management, whose preternaturally cheery director John Berry is essentially a real-life Leslie Knope.

3. Political Publications: The hell with the noble, Watergate journalistic tradition of the Washington Post, or the kind of supposed truth-telling Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom will try to celebrate. If you want a sense of how stories blow up in Washington and minor gaffes become huge stories only to be forgotten again, set a show at a political tabloid like Politico or a website like Huffington Post. Young reporters party hard, scrap hard for stories, and have hilarious stories from the campaign trail. And it’s a setting that lets a show tackle everything from elections, to sex scandals, to legislative fights.

4. Advocacy Groups and Trade associations: Has no one learned the lessons of Thank You For Smoking? If, God forbid, Parks and Recreation comes to an end, someone really should snap Rob Lowe up, make use of his surprisingly excellent comic timing, and write a show where his character is the head of some hilarious or malevolent advocacy group or trade association. Want to know why Washington is messed up? It’s not because of a lack of rhetorical force by the president. It’s about money and distractions, some of them provided by
these kinds of organizations.

5. Think Tanks: Friend of the Blog Chris Marcil actually got me thinking about this list when he tweeted “Has anyone pitched a Washington show set at a think tank? They seem like places where people do nothing but have B-stories and go on NPR.” Some of that’s true, but if you want episodes about where political ideas come from, you could do worse than think tanks. Plus, there’s the hilarity of think tank softball.

I was thinking about this in the context of the news, presumably leaked by NBC itself, that Sarah Silverman’s untitled comedy pilot and Roseanne Barr’s Downwardly Mobile, about the recession-wracked residents of a trailer park, aren’t testing particularly well and may be in danger of not getting picked up. And I was thinking of that news in the context of our discussion about Girls, and whether we’re ready for female anti-heroes who are anti-heroic because they’re passive, or whiny, or weird, not because they act like decisive, evil men.

Roseanne Barr and Sarah Silverman in real life, and Lena Dunham’s character on Girls, Hannah Hovarth, don’t act like the women who fall into those four categories. Barr isn’t wafer-thin (she never was), and she isn’t one of those Hollywood women who’s aged into Blythe Danner-like pale, imperious elegance. She’s outspoken about gender and class, attractive traits in an industry bound by iron bands of sexism and wealth. But her Twitter feed can be weirdly combative, her run for the Green Party presidential nomination an odd distraction in a year when she also was supposed to be serious about getting a follow-up to Roseanne off the ground. Some days, Roseanne feels more like Amy Jellicoe, the naive corporate drone who constantly runs up against her own limitations and self-created obstacles in HBO’s Enlightened: it would be nice to root for her, but she’s making it awfully hard.

Silverman’s less hard to reckon with, but she’s just as challenging. Though she’s attractive, she often dresses as if to consternate fashion commentators (a trait I find somewhat endearing). She’s 41, an in-between age when actresses are often no longer treated as if they could sexually appeal to anyone, but before they’re old enough to be grand dames, liberated from their attractiveness and freed to be spymasters or schemers. On-screen, she tends to play either tightly-wound parodies of hard-charging women, whether as producer Alexi Darling in the movie adaptation of Rent, or Patti, Mike White’s horrible, careerist girlfriend in School of Rock, or unsettling naifs like her self-absorbed character in The Sarah Silverman program, who makes Hannah Hovarth look like a model of charity and selfelessness.

And though the debate over Girls has died down somewhat, there are clearly a lot of people who remain very angry with Hannah, who are appalled by her poor choices, insist that Dunham shouldn’t get credit for displaying a body that’s so far from the Hollywood norm, angrily reject the idea that people could have sex that bad or make decisions that emotionally awkward. This discomfort can get ugly, but it’s also very interesting in a world where we’re supposed to sympathize with characters who fret about invisible imperfections, who are allowed, even expected to be humiliated before they can be resurrected for our enjoyment and moral satisfaction. You can make terrible, naive life choices, whether you’re a drunk like Chelsea or blind to your husband’s massive embezzlement scheme like Amanda, but as long as you’re gorgeous and fairly conventional, your wounds will be cooed over, rather than publicly sowed with salt. It’s like how Hollywood likes female geeks as long as the only signifier of their geekdom is a pair of glasses. We’re not conditioned to emotionally attach to women who are genuinely weird.

In addition to the relative genericness of their presentation and general demeanor, the ladies of network television comedy may have gotten a lot of screen time, but they didn’t do much original with it. The closest Jess came to transgressive on New Girl was dating her students’ father. Chelsea’s Female Chauvinist Pig on the show that bears her name is enough of a trope to have a book dissecting the phenomenon she represents. Max’s sour diner waitress on 2 Broke Girls could be the granddaughter of cranky counter gals who have been slinging hash since time immemorial. Talking about her lady bits and their needs doesn’t actually mean she’s treading new territory. GCB‘s Amanda may fight her battles with barbecues and church solos, but they’re the same old wars between mean girls who can’t let go. On Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23, June is one of an infinite number of eager strivers in New York. Her roommate Chloe may be the closest thing to a truly original, transgressive character in the crop, a fiancee-seducing, lesbian-faking psycho who sets her father and her roommate up to help them rebound, a Bizarro-world version of the cult of self-help. But while Chloe is a manic, evil delight as played by Krysten Ritter, she’s not precisely convincingly real. Whitney, which seems doomed given Whitney Cummings’ commitment to a new talk show, posed the most believable challenges to the standard sitcom arc for women: two couples on the show entered and broke off engagements, and rather than being shattered by those decisions, seemed fine. The weddings, it turned out, were eclipsing the work of building their actual relationships. It’s sad that this counts as a major departure from the script, but in this field, I have to give it high marks.

My hope is that as we assess this year of television ladies, the relative success of some of these shows serves as a thin edge of the wedge to get some women on television who are genuinely weird or unusual, rather than just performing slight deviations from the norm. Silverman and Barr may not make it on to NBC this year. But Girls will be back on HBO, keeping the hope for women on television who are awkward, and angry, and not conventionally attractive, and entitled—and in other words more like some of television’s most profitable men—alive. If the only kind of women who can be funny on television can all wear the same size dress and hit the same comedic beats, this year of sitcom women hasn’t won us very much at all.

Every decade gets the political show it deserves, or thinks it deserves, though some decades are pretty disingenuous. “The West Wing” gave us an idealized account of the Clinton era, with a saintly president and high-minded pols. In the ’00s, “24” offered an ultraparanoid version of the Bush era that legitimized torture as the primary means of dealing with a world in a constant state of crisis.

“Veep,” by contrast, comes not to justify Caesar but to goose him. It captures our post-Reagan, post-Clinton, post-Bush, 24-hour tabloid news and Internet-haterade dystopia, and reflects our collective queasy ambivalence toward a political system that we fear simply reflects our own shallowness back at us. If “The West Wing” was a fantasy of hyper-competence, “Veep” is its opposite: a black-humor vision of politics at its bleakest, in which both sides have been co-opted by money and special interests and are reduced to posturing, subterfuge, grandstanding and photo ops. Naturally, it’s hilarious.

This is true—I’ve seen the pilot for Veep—and it’s uproarious. But it’s not the only show that gets this, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Last night’s Scandal ended with an uproarious parody of the idea that if we got lawmakers of both parties in the room and talked things over sensibly, that Reason Would Prevail and everything would be all right. Faced with a Supreme Court nominee who was facing a prostitution scandal (the hooker he’s patronized turned out to be his wife), gladiator-in-a-suit crisis fixer Olivia Pope combed a DC madam’s records, figured out which Senators had also been her clients, had her minions seek out said men and drop the code words for the sex acts they’d been ordering up all those years, and blackmailed them into keeping their traps shut. It’s an utterly nonsensical scenario, but not actually more nonsensical than the idea that our politicians are people of good will we can just pull together and everything will be all right.

It remains to be seen if USA’s Political Animals, about a First Lady-turned-Secretary of State and her dysfunctional family, and NBC’s 1600 Penn, which will be out this fall, take the same tack. And it’s true that we don’t lack a serious show in the vein of 24, though Homeland‘s paranoia’s aimed more at the national security bureaucracy than at proving we should have all means at our disposal to wring information out of terrorists. But is interesting that a truly idealistic show hasn’t thrived in the age of Obama. Maybe it’s the the ridiculousness of our politics has consequences bigger than the President’s sex life this time around, and idealism would actually be kind of a downer.

A lot of that conversation has centered around Liz Lemon, and the question of whether the embrace of her awkwardness is also an embrace of mediocrity. The addition to 30 Rock of a page who sees Liz as living a dream life after seasons of emphasizing that she’s given up on her professional dreams and dating beneath her has complicated this perspective. But I think Veep adds a new layer to what Sady Doyle has dubbed Lady Loser Comedy.

Selina, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character, is objectively successful: she is the Vice President of the United States. It’s hard to argue that is in any way, shape, or form a compromise or a failure except by the most utterly insane standards. But as y’all will see in the pilot, she keeps screwing up: uttering politically unfortunate malapropisms, making staff mistakes, being generally socially stiff. But Veep walks a very thin line between treating Selina as if she’s dumb and treating her job as if it’s impossible to do well. And therein, I think, lies the revolutionary potential of awkward female characters. It’s one thing to spend time reveling in just being a mess, which I think is the appeal of Liz Lemon for some people, and also why I’m over the character—I’m just not having fun down there any more. But explorations of female awkwardness that reveal how artificial and ridiculous the conventions that govern so-called dignified female behavior are? That I’m pretty excited for.

What’s making this an official trend is USA’s announcement that it’s picked up a series called Political Animals. The network’s other Washington show, Covert Affairs, can be a little silly about Washington geography and what kind of shoes Washington women can afford on civil service salaries, but it had a decent sense of the relationship between the press and the administration and of tension over leaks. So I’m not shocked that USA’s first real political drama is doing something intelligent in focusing on a main character who is a not-so-thinly-veiled version of Hillary Rodham Clinton: a former First Lady who is now Secretary of State. The civil service geek in me is pretty excited about this and Kal Penn’s workplace drama set at the UN, both of which are a welcome expansion beyond the White House and spies for subject matter. And I think it’s smart to get out of the legislative process, which by this point is fairly well-worn dramatic territory, and into diplomacy and the press—the main character’s best friend will be a reporter. I don’t exactly count on this to be an accurate depiction of diplomacy any more than I expect Royal Pains to be a penetrating look at the Hamptons, but the concept is savvy, and should provide a couple of good roles for non-twenty-something women.

As does Veep, HBO’s terrific comedy about a female Vice President dealing with needy staffers, a president who ignores her, and a press corps that picks up on her every misstep. The sitcom, which premieres April 22, certainly is heightened and ridiculous, but the pilot nails the rhythms of speech and attitudes in Washington, along with the obnoxious and prickly gatekeepers and the minor screw-ups that become major catastrophes. “I want it to be right. I want it to be accurate,” creator Armando Iannucci, the force behind In the Thick of It and In the Loop, told me at the Television Critics Association press tour. “I want to know the dull stuff. What time do people get in in the morning? Who do they sit next to? If someone calls from a newspaper or a television show, who takes the call? How do they issue a retraction?” He and star Julia Louis-Dreyfus told me that they continue to consult with advisors on both sides of the aisle in the city, and from what I’ve seen of the show, that care and attention pay off. When a prominent and aged Senator dies, the Vice President muses about the last time she saw him: “He was full of bourbon, and he grabbed my left tit.” Later, when Amy (Anna Chlumsky, who appears to be Iannucci’s current muse), her chief of staff signs her own name to a condolence card for the man instead of the Veep’s, she moans of the screwup “it’s going to look like the Veep couldn’t be bothered to sign a condolence card for one of the most celebrated perverts on the senate.” And the show mines a lot of humor out of the Veep’s lame attempts at humor, a perfect example of official Washington squareness. “I have stepped into the president’s shoes this evening and who knew he wore kitten heels,” the Veep says to kick off a speech. ” Just kidding. He’s more of a stilettos guy.” Sometimes, politics is both small, and small-minded (as is also the case with Hulu’s first original scripted series Battleground, about campaign workers in a Wisconsin Senate race).

And then there’s Scandal, which is essentially Revenge for the Washington set. Based on the experiences of Judy Smith, the Washington crisis manager, the show is soapy as hell. The president is sexy and straying! The cases handled by Kerry Washington’s PR firm are totally over the top. The real estate is improbably gorgeous. But if you can appreciate it for what it is, Scandal is a wonderfully entertaining funhouse look at Washington from Hollywood’s perspective—it’s Hollywood for ugly people with the ugly people subbed out. I imagine it’ll drive real politicos nuts, but if you can suspend disbelief and just enjoy it, Scandal is going to be awfully diverting.

Which is good. Even political junkies need a break from what will undoubtedly be a bruising campaign. And if we can only downshift to political shows, rather than to something entirely off-topic and escapist, it’s nice to know that there will be diverting alternatives to dusting off our West Wing DVDs.

First, there’s CBS’s show about a one-term president who goes home to work at a law firm that will let him take only legal cases that resonate deeply with him. Sounds like some network has an idea for what a certain law-professor-turned-senator-turned-recession-cursed president should do with himself in January 2013! In all seriousness, though, ex-presidents are the one set of public figures that pop culture has never really figured out. There’s My Fellow Americans, which essentially says that it’s probably a good thing more former Commanders in Chief don’t go the George W. Bush brush-clearing-memoir-writing route because otherwise things can only end in wacky road-trip hijinks. Also, tears. Folks like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have given us the sense that presidents who leave office fairly young should do worthy things, but it’s hard to structure a relatable show about peace negotiations or running the Clinton Foundation, and brush-clearing, is, let’s face it, relatively dull to watch on-screen (though accidentally shooting your hunting partner in the face has comedic potential in an era where we like to consume other people’s pain). So apparently, running a law office it is. I really hope said president at some point joins forces with Leslie Knope, decides to put her in the path of his former campaign manager, and the rest is history.

Second, NBC, which really should have pursued the former show so that crossover can actually happen, is adapting Denmark’s Government, the trailer of which sounds exactly like one of the voiceovers in the German television shows Liz Lemon was supposed to watch and summarize for Jack on 30 Rock:

In between this and HBO’s Veep, we’ve got a nice little crop of female-politician shows. My one concern is that rather than serving the valuable purpose of showing us smart, competent women holding extremely important government positions, these shows will have dippy women who in vastly over their well-coiffed little heads and mine a lot of comedy from that proposition. Which I am…not so excited about. In all likelihood, Leslie Knope will just remain the Best At Everything.