If you saw the finale of “Enlightened” last night — only half-jokingly titled “Burn it Down” — you know that Amy made good on her promises to confront her employer, the giant drug company Abaddon, about the callousness and illegality that she uncovered through research. You also know that Amy, who survived a breakdown so severe that it sent her into rehab, is especially outraged about her own department, which is developing software that figures out how to work employees as hard as possible while paying them as a little as possible. “Enlightened” is not an explicitly political series — not in the way that “South Park” is, or that “The West Wing” was — and yet the corporate intrigue aspects strike to the heart of the moral crisis that’s convulsing this nation. The image of Amy fantasizing about pouring gasoline on the floors of Abaddon’s headquarters and setting it ablaze was chilling — and as metaphor, perfect. Do we continue to accept business as usual out of a weary belief that change is just too hard? Or do we say something, and do something, even if means enduring humiliation and abuse? Do we continue to live in this rotting house, or do we burn it down?

“I will not be afraid,” Amy said, walking into her office to demand a meeting with department heads and address the problems, her light blue blouse and yellow skirt standing out in a sea of corporate greys and blacks. “I will be bolder.”

It also helps to be “crazy,” one of the epithets that some of Amy’s co-workers use when they talk about her. Some people, of course, really are mentally ill, or at least so emotionally disturbed that nothing they say is of much use to anybody. But such epithets can also be used to stigmatize people who act and think in ways that call out the powers that be on their arrogance and complacency. The easiest way to neutralize a bringer of bad news is to stigmatize the messenger, either by calling her crazy (which is more or less what the board did after Amy left the room, revealing that they only let her speak to them as a joke) or by settling on some other pejorative phrase, such as “lazy bums” or “dirty smelly hippies” or any of the other retro smears trotted out in arguments about Occupy Wall Street.

One of the many wonderful things about “Enlightened” is that you can’t take anything that that pops out of its characters’ mouths at face value — especially not Amy’s remarks and requests, which are often self-serving. We’re quite aware that Amy is a terrible employee and is acting at least partly out of personal grievance. She wants to get back some of the power she lost when she went into rehab and lost her executive position, and she’s hurt by overhearing the board calling her crazy. But it’s also true — in life and in this series — that righteous action needn’t come from a disinterested place to be worth pursuing. Politics is personal.

“We can blow this place wide open!” Amy excitedly tells her co-worker, Tyler (Mike White), urging him to help her hack into the email system and retrieve correspondence proving that the company’s executives are hopelessly corrupt. “Why would we want to do that?” Tyler asks.

It’s also worth noting the difference between real-world Amy and the Amy we see and hear in the show’s contemplative, voice-over segments. Many of the lines that I quoted in this piece occur in what you might call a “protected space” — inside Amy’s roaming mind. The character that we see in these sequences is a best-case-scenario version of Amy. I think her statements express the show’s true outlook on life, its sense of what is possible, without sarcasm, irony or winking. It’s a benevolent and even inspirational view. It’s very easy to sneer and snicker at. It’s valuable. And right now it’s almost nonexistent on TV.

“Enlightened” might be a great series even without the parts about Amy’s workplace crusade. White, Dern and their collaborators have a keen ear for the way that people deceive each other and themselves. As TVLine’s Michael Slezak, another renewal booster, wrote, Amy is “the most tantalizingly/unapologetically unlikable lead character in recent memory” — and considering how many comically unlikable characters there are on television, that’s a bold statement. At the same time, though, “Enlightened” has compassion for foibles and empathy for pain. Last week’s episode — essentially a solo turn by Diane Ladd, who plays Dern’s elderly, widowed mom on the show, and is Dern’s mom in real life — might have been the most moving half-hour of TV I’ve seen this year, as good as the best of “Louie.” The scene between Ladd’s character and Amy’s druggie ex-husband Levi (Luke Wilson) in the kitchen had the sting of observed truth, each character reopening old wounds and saying and doing things that real human beings would actually say and do. As I said in an earlier piece about the show, the series is as merciless as can be without being mean. It sees through everyone’s b.s., including Amy’s.

But it’s the connection between Amy’s personal psychodrama and her workplace that puts the series over the top, and turns it into something more than a quirky half-hour show about a troubled woman living with her mother. It’s a reminder of how work defines us, and in some cases deforms us, along with everyone we know — and the soul-crushing opposition that rises up whenever we try to change anything about it.

We need a show like this right now, and not just because it’s a great comedy and a great character study. Beneath its comic brilliance and formal daring, it believes in a better future, a better country, a better human race. And if you rolled your eyes at that last line, you should work for Abaddon.

I thought about tone during that haunting close-up of the soon-to-be-late James Darmody smoking a cigarette by an open window. There was really no reason why such a simple moment should have summoned such force. Michael Pitt wasn’t selling the moment at all. He was just sitting there smoking. Yet the accumulated weight of Jimmy’s trauma — his wife’s death and his tragic inability to feel his way through it thanks to his war experience, his Oedipally perverse childhood, and a life spent among super-macho gangsters — came through loud and clear. Pitt’s posture, gestures and slightly mask-like expressions were exactly right, just as his gentleness during the beachside pony-ride scene with Jimmy’s son was exactly right, and as his ego-free coolness during that rain-soaked final sequence was exactly right. I love how Pitt delivered Jimmy’s statement to Nucky about what to expect after your first killing: 48 hours of nausea. It reclaimed a bit of dignity for Jimmy in his final moments — the implication being that this was first time that Nucky, the butcher of Atlantic City, ever personally killed anyone — but it was not particularly boastful or petty. Jimmy was just a guy who had nothing to lose, delivering information.

Pitt’s acting was always good, if a bit vague and guarded early on — an understandable response to being ask to play a character who was whatever the show needed him to be at any given instant — but he was especially strong during the last five episodes, probably because the writing sharpened up, and he hit his peak last night. The performance was free of 21st-century neuroses, which is by no means the same thing as being untroubled. When Jimmy said he died in the trenches during the war, there was nothing self-dramatizing about it. The character was just reporting the facts as he saw them. Pitt’s acting, here and earlier on the show, was retro, but not ostentatiously so. It seemed to be pitched somewhere between 1940s-era Joel McCrea or Dana Andrews and the kinds of performances that Montgomery Clift gave in the 1950s, which were soulful and tormented, but never never over-indicated or begged for sympathy.

In retrospect, I think the tone of Pitt’s performance is the tone “Boardwalk” should have hit, or should have tried to hit, from the beginning. I went back and re-watched sections of season one and the first half of season two before writing this piece, and I was struck by how much less focused and confident it was. The show was bloody and sexy and profane and handsomely produced, and it had great sequences and moments, but it seemed insecure and prone to distraction, forever adding new characters, subplots and locations instead of exploring what it had already created. It had the brash but shallow confidence of a gambler or a con man. Tonally and rhythmically it was all over the place. Its philosophical and theological banter felt forced, and frankly still does. (Margaret to Nucky in “To the Lost:” “So your version of God asks nothing.” Nucky: “There is more God in the love I feel for you and those children than in all the churches in Rome.”) And some of the violence — like a lot of pay-cable violence — seemed to be there just because the show knew it could do it. “Boardwalk” struggled a lot, I suspect, with the legacy of “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos,” and probably all of those purgatorial gangster films by co-executive producer Martin Scorsese, who won an Emmy for directing the “Boardwalk” pilot. There were times when the show seemed as though it was trying and failing to capture the rough magic of its obvious inspirations, instead of finding its own voice in a somewhat lesser mode that it was actually good at: a modern cable version of default old-movie storytelling, lively but not deep and not really trying to be. In that sense, Nucky’s hateful kiss-off to Jimmy felt like a bracing recognition that “Boardwalk Empire” is what it is, and is content to be that thing: “You don’t know me, James. You never did. I .. am not … seeking .. forgiveness.”

That quality came through in this episode, which had the polish and snap of another classic Prohibition-era retro-gangster flick, “Miller’s Crossing,” but mostly minus the flamboyance. A rare exception was the crosscut montage that juxtaposed Esther Randolph rehearsing her opening statement while putting on her courtroom clothes, Jimmy and Richard extracting a Nucky-exonerating confession/suicide note from an alderman at gunpoint, and Nucky and Margaret getting married to inoculate Margaret against having to testify against her husband; the direct address of the camera and the whirling camera moves were very Coen brothers, and in contrast to most of the music on “Boardwalk,” the classical piano score was not “justified” by being, say, performed in a saloon or played on a Victrola.

There was an unabashed movie-ness to the sequence — an exuberant yet controlled showmanship — that the drama has never before attempted. There wasn’t a trace of Coppola-style solemnity; the sequence just flew by, and the camera seemed to be tap-dancing around the actors. Jimmy’s last moments were nearly as old-movie cinematic. Having a psychologically damaged vet buy it in the shadow of a war memorial was already verging on too much; and yet somehow having the shocking double-cross and execution happen on a melodramatically dark-and-stormy night put the whole sequence over the top in a good way. “To the Lost” director Tim van Patten, who helmed some of the best “Sopranos” and “Boardwalk” episodes, is the kind of filmmaker who would have anonymously directed five B-pictures a year under the old studio system, then been discovered in the 1960s by the French. Winter’s script was filled with quotable lines that had an early-talking-pictures hard-boiled cadence. (When the judge asked Esther if she wanted to pursue a case that had fallen to pieces or withdraw and “get your ducks in a row,” she replied, “I’ll take the ducks, your honor.”) The more enthusiastically “Boardwalk” embraces an old movie style and tone, and the less it grasps for “Godfather” or “Sopranos”-like depth, the better it is. The episode even had hints of sneaky Hays Code-era moralizing. Between Margaret’s giving herself a backdoor to redemption by signing the highway land deed over to the church and the revelation that the Commodore left his estate to the housekeeper who was framed for trying to poison him (Jimmy tore up the document, but still — hilarious!), you have wonder if the “Boardwalk” universe is really godless after all.

None of this, of course, erases the fact that “Boardwalk” spent roughly a season-and-a-half figuring out what to be, overloading its narrative with an excess of characterization and incident and putting most of its women into dependent little boxes. (Things got better on all fronts year the end, though, and Esther’s interrogation of Margaret was one of the season’s sharpest, truest scenes.) And they might as well keep whacking major characters, because a lot of them are, dramatically speaking, toast anyway. The writers systematically pulverized Special Agent Van Alden like Chalky’s men whaling on those abducted Klansmen, to the point where his character lay in pieces; he should probably just stay in Cicero with his nanny-wife. And minus Jimmy and the Commodore, I don’t see what the show can do with Gillian. But still! What a great hour. Winter and company seem to have figured out something essential. I hope they build on it.

The Faulkner acquisition is only the latest prize in a literary shopping spree for HBO and other television companies. The premium cable network is currently at work on adaptations of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad, and Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods,” in addition to its ongoing series based on the novels of George R.R. Martin (“Game of Thrones”) and Charlaine Harris (“True Blood”). Fox will be turning Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” into an hour-long dramatic series, as well, and Salman Rushdie is at work on an original show, “Next People,” for Showtime. The novel and television are commingling as never before. And it’s about time.

Television and the novel, while not exactly soul mates, have a lot more in common than the novel and theatrical film. Yet any novelist can testify that the second most common question he or she hears from readers (after “Where do you get your ideas?”) is “Who would you like to see playing [main character] in the movie?” Fantasizing about the film version of a favorite book seems to be very common, but you have to wonder why. Rarely are a book’s most devoted admirers satisfied by the film, although when they are — as with the Harry Potter, “Twilight” and “The Lord of the Rings” franchises — popular enthusiasm can certainly be enormous.

Far more often, however, the results are disappointing — let the recent adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” stand as a case in point. Much of a novel has to be cut to fit a 90- to 120-minute dramatization, and this can mean more than just the loss of supporting characters or scenes. Most movies conform to a three-act structure (some screenwriters will insist that it’s actually a four-act structure), a form with a proven ability to hold audiences’ interest through a single viewing. Novels, meant to be read over multiple sittings, have more freedom. Trimming a novel like “Bleak House” to fit the three-act format alters the fundamental shape of the work, often subtracting from the novel the very roominess and complication that made you love it in the first place.

A television series, however, has the time to spread out and explore the byways and textures of a novel’s imagined world. Furthermore, while theatrical film is a medium in which the director reigns, in television, as Rushdie told the Observer, “the writer is the primary creative artist. You have control in a way that you never have in the cinema. ‘The Sopranos’ was David Chase, ‘The West Wing’ was Aaron Sorkin.” Although television is, like film, a photographic medium, it need not rely as heavily on visual storytelling or gifted but capricious actors to fill in its nuances. Buffy Summers is a memorable character, replete with layers and contradictions, largely because she was written that way — as the undistinguished post-”Buffy” career of actress Sarah Michelle Gellar illustrates.

Nevertheless, apart from a brief miniseries boom in the 1970s and ’80s (“Rich Man, Poor Man,” “Shogun”), the mass-market imperatives of broadcast television kept it and the novel apart until the advent of cable. Literary people wrote off TV as a “vast wasteland” — a fair cop, it must be said — with occasional oases like “Twin Peaks,” the groundbreaking serial drama created by the eccentric film auteur David Lynch. After one thrilling season, Lynch’s relationship with ABC went south, and so did the show, cementing the notion that the medium itself (rather than the broadcast network system) militated against quality and originality.

A network like HBO, however, doesn’t need to attract large audiences; rather, it aims to persuade a much smaller population of subscribers that it’s worth paying a little extra every month to see better programming. With “The Sopranos,” HBO ushered in the idea that serialized drama can aspire to an excellence (particularly in writing and performance) comparable to that of film, and with “The Wire,” critics got in the habit of comparing such series to novels. The fact that established crime novelists like Richard Price and George Pelecanos wrote for “The Wire” surely fostered that notion. Other cable networks expanded the possibilities of the genre with such serial dramas as “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men.”

The influence moves both ways; Egan has said that “The Sopranos” was one inspiration for “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” The novelist Mark Danielewski (“House of Leaves”) recently signed a $1 million contract with Pantheon Books for a serial novel, “The Familiar,” to be published in 27 volumes, with a new book appearing at four-month intervals. Although this naturally reminded quite a few observers of Charles Dickens, who published his novels in serialized installments, when interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, Danielewski said that he’s thinking in terms of five-book “seasons,” citing the television model.

A peculiar twist to these developments is that a novel that must be cut to accommodate a movie-length running time may still be too short to fill a 13-hour season and beyond. Some novelists are now writing additional material based on their supposedly finished works. Gaiman, who recently published an “author’s cut” (with 12,000 more words) of “American Gods” on the 10th anniversary of that novel’s publication, told an audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival that he’s writing a sequel and two spinoff stories, as well as at least two episodes of the series itself.

“American Gods” — which recounts the adventures of assorted deposed pagan deities reduced to working regular jobs in the New World — lends itself well to such add-ons. (Gaiman’s 2005 novel, “Anansi Boys,” is an “American Gods” satellite.) The boundaries of a novel like “The Corrections,” by contrast, seem less porous, yet Franzen recently told New York magazine that he was plumping up “The Corrections” for the HBO adaptation: “Minor characters in the book are becoming very substantial characters in the show, too. It’s fun. I’m coming back to the book as a stranger, essentially 12 years after I wrote it, and I’m filling in blanks that were deliberately blanks, but I’m having the pleasure of filling them in.”

No doubt the print edition of “The Corrections” will remain the canonical version of the novel, but if the additional material is written by Franzen himself, albeit for television, it will have a status that someone else’s adaptation will not. Are the previously undescribed histories of the fictional characters in “The Corrections” actually part of “The Corrections,” even if they don’t appear in the text version of the novel? Will the series end where the book does, or will the narrative continue? If so, for how long, and who will write it?

A definitive ending is one thing that serialized dramas don’t promise. (The agonies of “Deadwood” fans denied such an ending are legendary.) When it comes to literary adaptations, this may be a miscalculation. America’s top-drawer television producers ought to take note of their British counterparts and apply their newly elevated standards to reviving the fine art of the miniseries. After all, even Dickens knew when to call it a day.

Further reading

The New York Times on David Milch’s planned adaptations of William Faulkner works for HBO

Jonathan Franzen discusses the forthcoming adaptation of “The Corrections” with New York magazine

The Los Angeles Times on Mark Z. Danielewski’s projected serial novel, “The Familiar”

Neil Gaiman describes his work on the HBO series “American Gods” at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, as reported by the Guardian newspaper

Jennifer Egan tells the New York Times about the forthcoming HBO adaptation of “A Visit From the Goon Squad”

White writes all the episodes, and they’re directed by some terrific humanist filmmakers: Miguel Arteta (director of White’s screenwriting-acting breakthrough “Chuck and Buck”), Nicole Holofcener (“Please Give”) and Jonathan Demme (“Something Wild,” “Rachel Getting Married”). The show is fueled by small moments in which people miss opportunities for connection or self-improvement rather than seize them. The only other TV series that can match “Enlightened” in this department is “Louie” — and in some ways “Enlightened” might be more impressive, because it’s so much more tightly structured and outwardly traditional, yet strikes emotional notes that are just as surprising.

The series manages to be corrosive and compassionate at the same time. Amy is our heroine and surrogate. She narrates parts of the series in voice-over, often accompanied by highly subjective camerawork with first-person point-of-view shots and expressionist slow-motion. The bits of the series that Amy narrates are first-person subjective. We’re seeing the world, and Amy, through her perceptions; they’re colored by her experience at the colony and by the supplemental reading she’s being doing since she returned to Los Angeles, went back to work with a demotion, and moved in with her aging mom (Diane Ladd, Dern’s real-life mom). The rest of the show could be described as third-person limited. We’re seeing Amy — and all the other characters, including her mother, her still-drug-addled ex, Levi (Luke Wilson), and her new boss, the socially inept, profane, hot-tempered Dougie (Timm Sharp) — from a detached point-of-view, one that conveys the fullness of the characters’ self-flattering delusions even as it looks through them and sees something like the truth about them. I dislike the self-help phrase “tough love,” but it fits here. Judging from what’s on-screen, there’s no doubt that White and Dern appreciate and empathize with all of these characters even though they don’t cut them so much as a millimeter of slack. What we’re seeing isn’t a cliched “edgy” indie film worldview — a variation of “I love humanity; it’s people I can’t stand.” “Enlightened” is richer than that. It’s merciless yet somehow not misanthropic. The tone is about as warm as can be without turning gooey.

“Enlightened” is probably the sharpest satire of modern white-collar work since the original British version of “The Office,” and its skewering of this world intertwines with its portrait of individual personalities so deftly that you can’t separate them. White has a social satirist’s keen ear and eye. He captures the unsettling blandness of office protocol, politics and jargon, from the chill that workers feel when Human Resources calls them out of the blue to the impressive-sounding word salad labels that the company gives to its departments and projects. (The experimental department to which the newly demoted Amy is assigned is called “Cogentiva.” In tonight’s episode and next week’s, we finally learn exactly what it’s trying to do, and it’s chilling — a program that pushes the dehumanizing aspects of modern work to new depths.)

The series generates great tension and unease from fleeting moments in which characters try to assert power and influence over each other and come up against their own limitations. A running joke in the show’s first season found Amy, who was a supervisor until she freaked out and got fired, trying and failing to arrange a lunch with Krista (Sarah Burns), the former assistant who took over Amy’s job. The show’s graceful handling of this bit of business is but one example of its sophistication. When the slightly flustered, uncomfortable Krista begged off the invitation and told Amy she was going to just eat lunch at her desk, then showed up with co-workers at the same restaurant where Amy was eating lunch, we were encouraged to laugh at Amy’s sputtering anger at being lied to and disrespected; but at the same time, the show acknowledged that a real offense had been committed. Amy had been mistreated by Krista — very likely in more or less the same way that Amy had mistreated Krista back when Amy was the boss of that department. Powerful people don’t have to consider the feelings of less powerful people; it’s just a hard fact of life. “Enlightened” gets that. But when Krista tried to make peace by inviting Amy to lunch, and Amy turned her down to go out with one her Cogentiva co-workers, Tyler (Mike White), “Enlightened” didn’t frame it as a crowd-pleasing comeuppance, but as an example of Amy’s growth, and as a rare, bright moment for the morose, skittish Tyler, who has a crush on Amy. These are the types of interactions that we rarely see on TV because most shows consider them trivial. And yet we encounter them all the time in real life, and they’re not meaningless; in fact they’re as revealing of character, and of our individual stations in life, as much bigger and more obviously dramatic moments.

The show’s take-no-prisoners view of individual delusion is bracing, too. “Enlightened” doesn’t just see people clearly; it sees through them, identifying every instance of selfishness, self-deception, hypocrisy, cruelty and stupidity as it happens. And yet I never feel that “Enlightened” is looking down its nose at anyone — not even Amy, a chirpy eccentric and entitled brat who seems to think she’s the adorable lead in a Hollywood movie and can do whatever she wants, secure in the knowledge that she’ll be loved no matter what. Amy isn’t on drugs anymore — and the fact that Levi still is was a source of tension in the pilot — but her behavior still has a pungent whiff of the addict’s monstrous narcissism. She’s late to work every day and always has a lame excuse, and even though she’s been working in the department for several weeks, she never does any meaningful work, and still seems to have no sense of what, exactly, they’re all doing down there in that brightly lit basement office/laboratory. (This becomes a source of agonizing comedy in tonight’s episode and next week’s, during which her disastrous attempt to set Dougie up with a co-worker epically backfires, dragging the entire department into a human resources quagmire.)

There’s an opportunistic spaciness to Amy that’s nearly horrifying at times. You understand why Krista wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her, why Dougie finds her exasperating, and why most of her co-workers look slightly panicked whenever she tries to talk to them. Amy always wants something. As far as she’s concerned, other people exist to make her own life easier and to bail her out when she fails, and when other characters call her on this, she seems stunned, almost baffled, as if they’ve suddenly begun describing another person, somebody Amy doesn’t know or care about. Almost every episode contains one or more scene that I call “TV radio” because the behavior is so mortifying that I just can’t watch it; I have to listen to it while sort of half-watching it. (The comedy of mortification is an art in itself, and it has always had a home on HBO, starting with “The Larry Sanders Show” and continuing through “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and the underrated, often deeply unsettling “The Comeback.”)

And yet the show never reduces Amy to a loathsome cartoon or a walking punch line. She’s hard to hate because she means well, and as irritating and often clueless as she is, she truly is trying to be a better person. (We could see this clearly in the Nov. 14 episode, “Sandy,” starring Robin Wright as a friend from the colony who seemed much more at peace than Amy, but turned out to be a lot more dysfunctional.) Amy is hampered by old, bad habits, and by personality traits that she was probably born with, and the more examples we see of her home life, the more we sense that she was grievously wounded during childhood, perhaps by her mom (who seems like a rather cold person) and perhaps by the death of her father as well. In some ways she’s emotionally still a teenager inside — perhaps a little girl. She’s always acting out, always trying to separate and define herself in all the wrong ways. Her resentment at her mother for not letting her borrow the car boiled four decades of tension down to a single conflict, and that teddy bear on her bed becomes more poignant by the week. She’s drawn to underdogs, rebels, victims and martyrs, to the point where she seems to be trying to give other people the heroic help and emotional support that she probably never got herself. She spends her workdays surfing the Internet and reading about social justice and pollution issues related to her company. In the Nov. 7 episode, “Not Enough Good Mothers,” we saw her become obsessed with an undocumented mother who got deported. It’s as if she’s filling up her days with actual and imagined crusades, trying to improve the world in order to avoid having to remake herself.

But in those expressive, narrated first-person sequences, we sense that a better Amy is possible, and that her time at the colony probably did her some good. The incantatory buzzwords and phrases seem to center her; when she invokes them, an enveloping tenderness seems to flow out of her, coloring the whole world — everything that she can see and hear and feel. The title of the series is an ironic joke — Amy is not enlightened, not really — but it’s also a promise, one that the heroine just might deliver on.

But on the other hand: sooner or later “Boardwalk Empire” had to kill off somebody who was listed in the show’s opening credits, otherwise it would have seemed like Guest Star Murder Theater, and Angela was definitely the most disposable major character. She never drove important plotlines; mostly she reacted to her husband’s macho shenanigans, sometimes suffering in silence, sometimes acting out. Her appearances tended to tease the same question over and over: “Is Angela being true to herself and flirting with women this week, or trying to pass for straight again?” That’s a fascinating predicament for a female character in male-dominated 1920s Atlantic City, with its boho influence bubbling just under the surface, but “Boardwalk” has yet to address it in a meaningful way. We got a parting taste of Angela’s internal conflict during her final episode, but it ultimately felt like a glorified setup for the surprise of seeing a woman coming out of that bathroom instead of Jimmy. (On TV, when unhappy characters try to set things right with the people who mean the most to them, it often means that death is right around the corner.)

Angela’s demise is mainly notable for what it will or won’t do to Jimmy. He already seems to be in way, way over his head. In the past few episodes, he made a public spectacle of himself by tossing an underling off a balcony at a celebratory party, got outmaneuvered by the supposedly retired Nucky in the liquor business, and failed so miserably at handling the African-American hotel workers’ strike that the stroke-addled Commodore finally blurted out a comprehensible sentence: “Why don’t you show them your cunt?” I’m guessing Angela’s demise will either drive Jimmy to even more hotheaded behavior or send him into a depressive trough of inaction. Either way it’ll reduce Angela to a facet of Jimmy — a catalyst for a gangster’s grief and rage — rather than illuminating her on her own terms.

“Boardwalk Empire” never really knew what to do with Angela, just as it never really knew what do with any of its female characters — except maybe Jimmy Darmody’s mother, Gillian (Gretchen Mol), the Oedipal Lady Macbeth of the seaside. Margaret’s distress over her daughter’s polo paralysis has been more compelling, mainly because it put Kelly Macdonald, one of the best actors in a fine cast, at the center of several episodes in a row. (It also showed a warmer, gentler side of Nucky.) I get the sense that the confession that Margaret really wants and needs to make isn’t that she had sex with that hunky IRA soldier, but that she’s living with (and off) the man who had her husband killed. But as morally and metaphysically fraught as these developments may be, Margaret has never regained the spark that she showed early in Season 1, when she charmed Nucky and proved herself a dazzling social butterfly who could talk politics with actual politicians. Like Angela — and Gillian, and Lucy Danziger, and every other female character of note — she’s diminished by a show that’s ultimately more interested in pissing contests and whackings. It isn’t just Nucky who put her in her place, it’s the series.

The reflexive counter-argument that “Boardwalk Empire” is set in a man’s world almost a hundred years ago — and that deeper, more sharply defined, even autonomous female characters would be unrealistic, or anachronistic — doesn’t wash when you compare it to similarly testosterone-driven but superior shows. “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood,” “Breaking Bad” and even the current “Homeland,” which is set in the male-dominated world of spies, soldiers and politicians, all managed to create women characters who seemed to have a life apart from whatever men they happened to be living with, sleeping with or working for. Carmela Soprano was married to Tony, but she wasn’t overshadowed by him. Alma, Trixie and Calamity Jane on “Deadwood,” Skyler White on “Breaking Bad,” Carrie Mathison on “Homeland” and almost every major female character on “Mad Men” have more depth, more fire, more inner life than any female character on “Boardwalk” save Margaret, and even she often seems to be more of a human pincushion than a character.

U.S Assistant Attorney General Esther Randolph (Julianne Nicholson), who’s loosely based on Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the assistant U.S. attorney general from 1921-29, is a fascinating addition to the show, tormenting Nucky and challenging Van Alden to climb out of his personal shame spiral and recommit himself to law enforcement. But “Boardwalk” also made sure to show her sleeping with a subordinate, and gave us a nice head-to-toe nude shot while they were at it. How long, I wonder, before she ends up in a clinch with Nucky?