Even without an official announcement, Wiig’s twirly, teary departure is enough to make even the most casual fans of the show crank up the Adele and mainline a tub of Edy’s Grand. It doesn’t matter that fellow castmates Andy Samberg and Jason Sudeikis have reportedly moved on from the show as well. They leave behind established male cast members like Seth Meyers, Fred Armisen and Bill Hader. Wiig, on the other hand, blows a gaping hole in the show’s female lineup. The 24-year-old Abby Elliott, who moves up the rung to the show’s senior lady cast member, is now its biggest female star. But she’s yet to display that versatility or command the clout that Wiig has. Kate McKinnon may yet bust out into full-blown “SNL” stardom, but she’s only been on the show for five minutes.

And so, after years of cultivating a stunning roster of formidable female talent — Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler and Wiig — the show is, for the moment anyway, back to a state of relative desolation it hasn’t seen since the ’90s, an era that reached its nadir when Janeane Garofalo bailed midseason. It’s a strange, disconnected moment for “SNL,” right as women are making grand enough strides in television and film comedy that we’ve magically attained “labia saturation.” And though Wiig will no doubt continue to dominate in movies as a writer and performer, it’s sad that she leaves behind no true heirs on a show that, especially in an election year, remains so influential.

Visibly emotional and flanked by current cast members as well as the likes of Chris Kattan, Rachel Dratch, Steve Martin and Chris Parnell, and an especially rollicking Amy Poehler, new alumna Wiig didn’t depart “SNL” alone. She took with her Gilly,  the tiny-handed Judice,  Target Lady, Suze Orman and even Tan Mom. Why were so many people red-eyed on Saturday? Because on the stage that night stood a woman with incredibly big shoes to fill – and one very small hat.

As I was watching this episode, “Curriculum Unavailable,” I remember calmly thinking something like, “Huh. That would really explain Leonard.” The possibility that “Community” might be about to “St. Elsewhere” its audience (“St. Elsewhere” ended on the reveal that everything that had happened in the series had all taken place inside the mind of an autistic boy) was not particularly alarming to me. Group psychosis explained a lot about the show’s extremely dark psychology, and, anyway, on “Community,” stranger things had happened.

As of late Friday evening, when “Community’s” creator and showrunner Dan Harmon was abruptly fired by Sony from the show he obsessively oversaw, I’ve realized that the real reason I was unphased by “Curriculum Unavailable” was because I was already very comfortable with thinking about “Community” as the figment of someone’s feverish imagination. That someone was just Dan Harmon.

Writing about “2 Broke Girls” recently, I noted that there is a fault line running through television where art rubs up against commerce. I should have saved that metaphor, because this “Community” situation is like an 8.0 on the art-commerce Richter scale. Consider the aftershocks: The perpetually low-rated, but fanatically beloved “Community” was just renewed by NBC for a fourth, 13-episode season. Why renew it just to fire the guy responsible for it? To escape the bad press of canceling a critically acclaimed series? Or is it the opposite impulse — to make enough episodes to get the show into syndication?

Harmon is an infamously — and self-proclaimed — difficult guy to work for and with. Earlier this year, he got into a public fight with “Community’s” Chevy Chase after Harmon played an incensed voice mail from Chase at a public event. Harmon apologized, though not to Chase, and a few weeks later was back to calling him a jerk on Twitter. If Harmon’s behavior was bad enough to get him fired, it was also the same crazy mentality that made “Community” one of the strangest shows to ever air on network television. How badly behaved does a great artist have to be to get kicked off his own creation without so much as a phone call?

Speaking about “Community” last week, before the news about Harmon was public, Bob Greenblatt, the head of NBC, said “Shows lose showrunners all the time and do well.” This is and isn’t true. Workaday TV shows, procedurals, sitcoms, long-running dramas, change showrunners all the time. But for the growing number of auteurist series driven largely by one personality — everything from “The Sopranos” and ‘The Wire” to “Louie” and, yes, “Community” — a showrunner change is not common, and is usually about as imaginable or advisable as Matt Weiner getting fired from “Mad Men” and that show soldiering on without him. It happens — Aaron Sorkin left “The West Wing” after four years, for example — but the shows are never the same.

“Community” seems to me particularly poorly designed to continue without Harmon. If “Community” were a more standard comedy, the new showrunners — two writers from “Happy Endings” — would just have to take the seven characters and make them funny. But causing belly laughs seems secondary to “Community’s” précis, which emphasizes being exhilaratingly clever, formalistically inventive and impressively bonkers over being laugh-out-loud hilarious. Harmon’s approach to television has always been almost athletic: With each episode, he sets out to break his previous record for genre bending, to outdo what everyone else has done before. To make “Community” “Community” then, the new writers don’t just have to tell jokes, they have to maintain its outdo spirit. They have to outrun or at least keep pace with Dan Harmon’s brain.

And because of his “let’s boldly go where no TV show has ever gone before!” ethos, Harmon has long since made his brain a major, off-screen character on “Community.” More than most other showrunners, even the great ones, one can feel Harmon in each episode, egging the show on to new heights, exposing the mechanics of the genre. I could watch Troy and Abed do their secret handshake 1,000 times a day, but I don’t watch “Community” for Troy and Abed, adorable besties that they are. I watch for the episodes with multiple timelines, for Dungeons & Dragons games come to life, for claymation Christmas specials, and for “My Dinner With Andre” and “Die Hard” spoofs. I watch for Dan Harmon’s unmatched and, now it seems, unsustainable ambition. Oh, damn it. I guess I mean watched.

This year, about 20 new shows will premiere in the fall, with another dozen waiting in the mid-season wings. There are dramas about haunted luxury apartments, islands armed with nuclear arsenals and the making of Vegas. There are procedurals starring Sherlock Holmes, Jersey girls turned lawyers and a Mob Doctor. One show has Mrs. Coach playing a country singer, one has Kelly Kapoor falling into a swimming pool while riding a bicycle, and another has Kevin Bacon chasing serial killers. There are two sitcoms starring gay people, one about a family who lives next door to aliens, and others featuring Matthew Perry, Lily Tomlin, Dane Cook and a screeching monkey. If each network had at least one show last year about a sexually active, provocative, sassy woman — the lady sitcoms — there is no such equivalent trend this year. There is just a lot of TV, some of which will be good, and most of which will be bad. Here are my thoughts on what look to be the best and worst shows of the upcoming season, network by network.

CBS is the most stable and highest-ranked network in the land, a position it has held for many years by eschewing any and all concerns about both coolness and quality. CBS does not put on risky, ambitious shows some small portion of the Internet will fall in love with and loudly plead for, whatever the show’s ratings. That is a move for losers like NBC. CBS, instead, puts on things that work, and the things that work on CBS are usually polished, ultra-competent procedurals and comedies that make me want to gouge my eyes out, but that are the most popular in America. So, arriving on CBS this fall: “Elementary,” starring a tattooed Johnny Lee Miller as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu as Dr. Joan Watson, his drug minder;  “Made in Jersey,” about a Snooki turned lawyer and made good, starring a charming British actress (Janet Montgomery, whom CBS insisted I would like, and, aggravatingly, I really, really did ) putting on a very thick Jersey accent; and “Partners,” a sitcom about two best friends, a straight guy and a gay guy (played by the delightful Michael Urie), in serious relationships, a sort of progressive premise for CBS, until you see the trailer. CBS is stretching itself this year with one big, ambitious show, with a bland name. “Vegas” stars Dennis Quaid as a good guy and Michael Chiklis as a bad one in 1960s Sin City. There is a lot of “buzz” around this program, but all I could think when watching was that in the ‘60s, shaved heads were not a thing (ahem, Mr. Chiklis), and that CBS will find a way to make this boring.

Worst: “Partners”

Best: “Elementary”

If you ask, Fox will tell you that it, not CBS, is the most stable and highest-ranked network in the land, and if you just care about people under the age of 49, it is. Since it ain’t broke, Fox isn’t fixing it, putting just three shows on this fall, and holding its extremely creepy, high-profile, Kevin Bacon-hunts-a-serial-killer-with-acolytes drama, “The Following,” for mid-season. Coming in the fall is Mindy Kaling’s poorly named “The Mindy Project” (on the show, she plays a character named Mira), which looks good, and “Ben & Kate,” which is not as cool or buzzy, but I thought looked better. Nat Faxon and Dakota Johnson (daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson) star as the titular siblings, one an overgrown man child, the other a single mom. The trailer is very, very sweet, which would make it a better fit with “New Girl,” that most emo of shows, than the spiky, sardonic “Mindy Project.” The only other show Fox is debuting in the fall is the drama “The Mob Doctor,” about a doctor (“My Boys’” Jordana Spiro) who has to do healthcare-related favors for the mob. I can’t bring myself to dub this “worst,” a little because Spiro is very likable, and a lot because “The Mob Doctor” is clearly the best titled new show of the season.

NBC has been a disaster for years now, and each fall, in the hopes of climbing out of its sorry position, it orders a ton of new shows. This year, it ordered 12, and, unfortunately, none of them look that great. One of the dozen is “Next Caller,” a sitcom starring Dane Cook as a misogynist shock jock forced to work with a female co-host. This show is already a punching bag, likely to remain the season’s go-to example of the crappy sitcom, basically because it stars Dane Cook being a dick. While it’s hard to argue with this logic, by far the most horrible-looking show coming to NBC in the fall is “Guys With Kids,” a multi-camera comedy about three dudes with babies and ladies and no funny lines whatsoever. I’m also not particularly jazzed over the drama “Chicago Fire,” which looks almost exactly like a more melodramatic “Third Watch.”

As for best, well, there’s a lot of “could be OK” on NBC’s schedule: there’s “Go On,” about Matthew Perry in a grief group; Justin Kirk in “Animal Practice” as a pet-loving, people-hating, lady-shagging veterinarian; and Ryan Murphy’s new sitcom about a gay couple and their surrogate, “The New Normal,” which I would be much more excited about if I hadn’t been burned by Murphy so many times before (and if there wasn’t that bad Mariah Carey joke in the promo). That leaves the J.J. Abrams-produced “Revolution,” set 15 years after all the electricity in the world has gone out forever. This may just end up being another irritating, never-ending mystical conspiracy show, but I’m a sucker for anything post-apocalyptic.

Worst: “Guys With Kids”

Best: “Revolution”

Ratings-wise, ABC is not in a much better state than NBC, except it has two new shows I can’t wait for. In “Nashville,” “Friday Night Lights’” Connie Britton stars as an aging country singer who has to figure out the next step of her career while dealing with an obnoxious, successful Taylor Swift-type played by Hayden Pantierre. It’s very, very soapy, but it involves Mrs. Coach singing and saying wise things with a Southern lilt and lots of sequins, and, therefore sounds wonderful to me. Then there’s “Last Resort,” created by “The Shield’s” Shawn Ryan. It stars Andre Braugher as the captain of a submarine who disobeys an order to fire a nuke on Pakistan. He, his crew, and his sub are then pursued by the U.S. military until they land on a tropical island, turn on the sub’s nukes, and start politicking. This is an original, far out premise, plus “Felicity’s” Scott Speedman is in it, and I really missed his mumbling.

Whereas NBC’s unpromising shows seem merely blah, ABC’s least promising shows look to be potentially awesome, fascinating misfires. It is the network that aired “Work It,” after all. (ABC does have one merely bad and boring looking sitcom, “The Family Tools.”) First, there is “The Neighbors,” ABC’s highest-profile new comedy, about a family that moves into a suburban community populated by aliens. The family can tell their neighbors are aliens because when they clap their hands over their heads, they transform into green aliens. It’s a very 1980s premise with a single-camera comedy execution, and no good jokes. Then there’s “Zero Hour,” starring “ER’s” Anthony Edwards as a conspiracy theorist drawn into the mother of all conspiracy theories after his wife is kidnapped. The trailer involves clues packaged in the backs of clocks, Nazis, possessed babies, and various other artifacts left over from the “Alias” or “DaVinci Code” sets. Can’t wait.

Best: “Nashville”

“Last Resort”

Worst: “The Neighbors”

“Zero Hour”

But just mentioning Netflix and Hulu, two companies that have thus far rolled out exactly one original scripted program each to not much fanfare, is a compliment of the “It’s better to be talked about than not talked about at all” variety. Hulu and especially Netflix, which will begin airing new episodes of Fox’s former show “Arrested Development” sometime later this year, are on the playing field. Since one of the major distinctions between Hulu and Netflix and broadcast TV is that there’s no proper time to watch their shows, now seemed as good as any to catch up on the two existing series and see if Fox and its brethren have anything to worry about.

Hulu’s “Battleground” is a 13-episode comedy set behind the scenes of a Wisconsin Senate campaign and executed in the mockumentry style of “The Office.” Neflix’s seven-episode “Lilyhammer” is a comedic drama starring “The Sopranos’” Steven Van Zandt as a wise guy who ends up in Norway. Both series are professional, solid and unembarrassing. And even though I stayed up way past my bedtime one night finishing the enjoyable “Battleground,” both it and “Lilyhammer” are the TV equivalent of cautious toe-dipping, Netflix and Hulu’s proof that they can make polished products audiences will recognize as television.

“Battleground” is a well-constructed, low-key series that’s about 75 percent as good as something great. The dialogue is smart, the approach to politics is pleasantly non-histrionic, the characters are likable and so is the candidate. If the broad, idiotic Jordan — the son of the candidate’s husband — feels like a Dwight Schrute knockoff, the rest of the series counterbalances with an assiduous streak of Midwesternness, unshowily getting down to the business at hand, which happens to be putting together a competent, amusing television program. (One of the main characters, a nerdy, nice, newbie staffer who gets the girl by staying nerdy and nice, is a personality type that could only exist in the Illinois-Wisconsin-Minnesota tri-state area. More like him, please.) If you’ve run through episodes of “Veep” and “The West Wing” and “Tanner 88” and you still have an itch to scratch, “Battleground” will do it.

Netflix’s  “Lilyhammer” is not nearly as charming. Van Zandt plays a mobster who requests witness protection in Lilyhammer, because he liked the look of it in the 1992 Olympics. Once in Norway, a country full of snow and reindeer sweaters, electric cars and polite police chiefs, he figures out how to put his gangster skills to use in a new environment. In the first episode, a lone wolf — and that’s not a metaphor for a loner, but an actual sheep-eating wolf — gets a pair of cement shoes. The show feels like a really long indie movie that somehow got distribution, OK reviews and no audience, and now kicks around on your suggested Netflix streams for eternity.

But if the short, funny “Battleground” is both better and better suited to a computer screen than the longer, less funny “Lilyhammer,” Netflix’s strategy still makes more sense than Hulu’s. The great hurdle for both Netflix and Hulu is inserting their series into the conversation. There has to be a subset of people who feel about political comedies or displaced mobsters the way I do about British costume dramas — which is to say that they hunt down programs fitting this description, and watch the hell out of them — but that’s not most people. With thousands of TV shows available to audiences through legal means, and almost all the TV shows ever available through illegal ones, a brand-new series that’s not half bad isn’t going to jump to the top of anyone’s Netflix queue if people aren’t talking about it.

“Lilyhammer” isn’t great, but it is nominally ambitious (it is, in fact, another one of The Fauxpranos), and ambitious TV is the kind that gets people chatting and binge watching. Netflix’s next shows — “Arrested Development” and the David Fincher-Kevin Spacey collaboration “House of Cards” — should get lots of attention, and be a lot better than “Lilyhammer.” Meanwhile, Hulu’s model, to make something solid and small and premiere an episode of it every week, seems totally reasonable and not nearly flashy enough to get its shows to stand out in a very, very crowded field.

There is another way for Hulu to go, and it doesn’t involve spending heaps and heaps of money on famous people and canceled but beloved TV shows. And that’s to make something strange.  “Battleground” and “Lilyhammer” and all the shows that Hulu and Netflix have in the works are exceedingly normal, shows that would fit any TV executive’s idea of what a TV show should be. This seems sensible, as well as small-minded and skittish. Netflix and Hulu aren’t TV networks,  and they should revel in that. (It is not, if you hadn’t heard, such a good time to be a TV network.) Why aren’t they putting on the crazier, weirder shows, cheaper series with odd perspectives and strange time stamps, that are good enough to get people talking and that no network, or even cable channel, could ever put on? Hulu and Netflix want respect, when all they need is buzz, even the buzz of a small, dedicated audience. Netflix and Hulu aren’t just TV, they’re the Internet. They should stop being so boring.

Thanks to Paula Abdul, the bar for speaking coherently as a judge has been set remarkably low. Paula was one of the original judges when “American Idol” began 10 years ago, and she made the jump with Cowell to “X Factor” last year, where she continued to vend her particular brand of addled kindness, never saying anything mean or insightful, and often saying it in spacey and strange ways. Spears is, of course, way more famous than Paula Abdul, and if she sits on the panel and says nice, meaningless things to the contestants each and every show, she will have earned her money. (It’s basically what the booted Nicole Scherzinger did all last season of “X Factor,” and just by virtue of being Britney Spears, Britney will be better at it.)

“X Factor” doesn’t need a hyper-articulate ballbuster to do this job and do it well. The time of sharp, critical insight on the singing shows — which initially seemed so crucial to “Idol’s” massive success — has passed. If viewers regularly lament how dull and plodding the judging rounds are now that even Cowell has tempered his honesty, “Idol” remains the biggest show on television with a judging panel that consists of Steven Tyler, Jennifer Lopez and Randy Jackson, a group as likely to insult a singer as call a newborn baby ugly.

But even if all that’s required of Spears is a season’s worth of banal compliments, that will add up to more sustained speaking than Spears has ever publicly done before. Rarely, if ever, has there been a person as famous as Britney Spears who talks so infrequently. Her most famous moments are all gestural — dancing in music videos, performing on the stage at some MTV awards show, shaving her head, bashing a window. Long before her breakdown, she displayed an uncanny tendency to speak in linguistic white noise, to say sentences that contained almost no content, just lots of y’alls and “you knows” and “oh my goshes” and a basic mood of sweetness, excitement, gratitude, eventually disconnect, and more recently, in her conservatorship years, anxiety and discomfort.

If this doesn’t make Spears a perfect judge for “X Factor” it should make her a perfect character for “X Factor.” The drama of Britney — how she will be, what she will say, and how she will hold up — is a story line at least as compelling as the one that will play out with the performers, if not far more so. We’ve been watching her for 13 years, not merely half a TV season. It’s possible “X Factor” will be as good for her career as “Idol” has been for Jennifer Lopez’s, but it’s more likely it will be uncomfortable and upsetting, a full season of watching a zonked-out Spears nervously navigate a live TV show. But we Americans owe Britney Spears a pension and worker’s comp for pain and suffering risked for our entertainment, and I’m happy a major corporation is paying it out (to the tune of $15 million). However “X-Factor” goes for Britney, I can’t wait to see what she says.