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.

In “Christmas Waltz,” the latest episode of “Mad Men,” we find out that cars are part of the dream for ad agencies, too – a sign that they’ve arrived, just as owning a car was once a sign of achieving adulthood, something that the staff at SCDP also hasn’t done yet. Instead, like teenagers, they’re stealing money from their corporate parents’ wallets, driving other people’s cars too fast, napping when they should be working, drinking too much, throwing tantrums (and other things) and having sex with near-strangers. And just as it did in America as a whole, this behavior is taking its toll on their personal unions – or will do so before long.

We start off with a Union Jack who’s been unfaithful to a lady by giving “her portion” to a younger and sexier country – one that refused to pay taxes to her forebears long ago. Soaked by the ruinous tax rates of 1960s Britain — and unlike the similarly transplanted Jaguar XKE — Lane has failed in his dream of escape to a new life in the new world, and is instead still yoked to the same two queens, only one of which is willing to forgive and forget his failings. If he’d only followed the advice offered later by Lakshmi, “Tell the truth; that always works,” he might have found a way out. Surely Don, at the least, and probably Roger too, would have understood the marmalade Lane finds himself in and helped him get the money he needed for the Taxman. But Lane’s both British and old-fashioned, a fatal combination in this situation. Like others of his generation, he can’t admit he has a problem and ask for help – a self-reliance that will seem increasingly quaint as the self-help generation begins expecting everyone to aid their self-actualization.

As he’s always done in this group, former beatnik, civil rights activist, and Sterling-Cooper casualty Paul Kinsey leads the way as an early convert to one of the “alternative” religions beginning to capture the imaginations, wallets and entire lives of people feeling emptied out rather than filled up by mid-century American life. Ostensibly seeking to turn Harry Crane into a Hare Krishna, he invites his former co-worker to a spiritual gathering at which a Charlie Manson look-alike strums the sitar and young women try to lure men in, just as they did in other cults during the ’60s.

“Don’t pretend this isn’t strange. That’s why I wanted you to see it,” Paul advises Harry – a quote that sums up a decade of passing strangeness that can’t be explained to those who didn’t see it firsthand. While drugs, orgies and religious cults may seem familiar terrain now, along with their attendant risks, those who tried them when they were new and unusual were more often fascinated by the sense of liberation they imparted – a feeling bolstered by the disapproval of “squares,” such as peers like Harry who lived much as their parents did.

Yet Paul’s too smart or too square himself to be fully taken in – he may have shaved his head, given away all his possessions and changed his name, but he’s hit upon a truth that will later be known as “no matter where you go, there you are.” He’s depressed to find that not even his required-to-love-everyone guru likes him, that his monkey mind won’t calm down and that he’s still burning with worldly ambition despite having worked his way (down) through the entire alphabet soup of ad agencies. And his instincts are good, even if his timing and talents are bad – he spots the cult potential in “Star Trek,” even if he can’t see that that juggernaut “Bewitched” (a show about an ad exec with a troublemaking wife) is about to take it down. In the short run, the hacks will win out over the imaginative innovators, but time will be on Roddenberry’s side, if not Paul’s. (Whether the housewives win out over the admen is of course another story, and another series.)

Having told the truth about his feelings, Paul is rewarded with lies from Harry, who nevertheless proves himself a true friend by not only financing but directing Paul’s dream, urging him to flee the sticky web of Lakshmi for that bright California sunshine that’s always helped Don. Channeling nearly identical words to those that Don used to rouse Peggy from her torpor while in a mental hospital, Harry tells Paul that, “This failure, this life, it will all seem like it happened to someone else” – a belief in reinvention that was increasingly embraced by Americans shedding marriages, family and careers in ways unimaginable even a decade before.

Peggy herself has both the best and worst advice for Paul: suggesting that Harry tell him, “he has to write a better script,” she mysteriously switches to “then he shouldn’t be doing it” when Harry says that even the terrible script they read was hard for Paul to produce. Writing a better script for their lives is precisely what people like Paul were trying to do in that era. It was also harder than they thought it would be — the reason many gave up sooner than they should have. As someone who worked herself into a new life story, and who works hard at her career rather than relying on innate talent, Peggy should know better than to advise giving up so easily.

Like his former employee, Don faces reinvention, needing to move from faking work while napping to making work that wakes clients up. He’s excited not by a car (which he says does nothing for him) but the prospect of the success that landing it as an account would confer. While Roger pickles himself into incoherence in honor of Pearl Harbor, and Lane can’t give a speech that the staff understands, Don gives a rousing one that marshals the troops like Patton – accomplishing a Christmas miracle by making them smile at the prospect of working through the holidays. (But then maybe they hate spending them with their families and are glad for the excuse.)

Having taken Megan’s rejection of advertising as a personal rebuke, Don’s been sulking like a child who claims he’s bored and has nothing to do, and, oh yes, his favorite playmate has moved away (as Megan did by resigning). Challenged first by Pete, who denigrates his laziness, and then by Megan, who scolds him for his sullen defensiveness, he makes good on his promise that “I’d live here if I thought that (pursuing Jaguar) was more than a pipe dream.” The rediscovery of his dreams is spurred in part by a nightmare of a play in which advertising is portrayed as so poisonous that people have to puke it out in order to survive, and in which an actor defiantly proclaims his separation from cultural influence by stating that, “The TV was one thing but I was a person.”  Once again, it seems that Don finds this kind of opposition motivating, just as he at first excitedly takes Megan’s anger as being one of their power games leading to great sex — before she bluntly informs him that “that’s not what this is.”

What this is — and what the “this” is – is exactly what people like Paul are trying to figure out, even if they’re stumbling in doing so. By contrast, that old slickster Don feels he can sum up and justify his profession in a single sentence, “People buy things because it makes them feel better,” without realizing that Americans are discovering that consumerism does no such thing, even if they’re not about to entirely renounce the material world as the gurus advise.

Instead, like Joan, they may simply resist the old ways while groping for a new one that remains scary and undefined. Joan won’t let her baby-daddy become a sugar-daddy, and she at first follows Lane’s tactic of refusing to admit she needs help from anyone when Don reaches out to her. As he’s known to do with the ladies, Don quickly breaks down her resistance and whisks her off for a morale-boosting trip to showroom and barroom. In both, Joan’s as much on display as that “most beautiful car in the world,” with men itching to take her for a test drive. But she only has eyes for her designated driver, Don, as he lends an ear to her fears that no one will want a divorced woman with a baby.

Joan’s mother may have produced a daughter who never depends on the kindness of strangers, but she did teach Joan how to be admired. And that’s exactly what Don does for an afternoon, while safely hiding behind Joan’s belief that he’s madly in love with his sexy, young wife (which he is but in a more weary and complicated way than Joan knows). Quoting Bobbi Barrett’s observation that he likes to be bad and then go home and be good, Don nevertheless does the opposite: He does good with Joan and then goes home to Megan where he’s chastised for being bad.

Even as he and Joan flirt deliciously, letting out the latent attraction that fans of the show have been tantalized by for years, he follows Joan’s lead in drawing the line at physical contact. “God, you’re irresistible,” Joan laughs while resisting him with seeming ease, turning down his offer to dance because of “that look” on his face. Even though she claims to miss the kind of trouble that Don alludes getting into with the opposite sex, she coolly evaluates the man at the bar that Don points her toward, defining him by his occupation just as women of her generation tended to do, “Who do you think he is? Advertising? Insurance? Lawyer?” before noting that he probably has an attractive wife at home whose only sin is being too familiar to be desirable any more.

“So you think it’s all him?” Don asks with some surprise, to which Joan responds, yes, because his wife can’t give him what he wants. “He doesn’t know what he wants,” Don argues back, but Joan is having none of it. “He knows. It’s just the way he is. And maybe just the way she is.” Don and Joan share a lack of belief in the power of people to change, other than by shifting partners – as Don advises her to do, glibly touting divorce as a chance to move on to someone better. The idea of moving on to being someone better seems to elude Don, despite his obvious attempts to do just that with Megan. And if he’s unable to see his own agency in that and take credit for it, he’ll be equally unable to take responsibility when things go wrong, including if those roses for Joan were more than just an affectionate gesture (and a joke about her movie star allure). Both Don and Joan are teetering on the edge of adapting to the social changes around them, but both are just old-fashioned enough that writing an even slightly better script is hard for them.

“I want to fly, but I think we’re going to drive,” the banker Walt says to Lane about his upcoming vacation, a statement both about the grounding of aspirations as well as the reality of family life. Complaining that his wife “calls me during the day and she’s peachy, but when I come home, she’s blue,” he fails to connect the dots the way Joan did in realizing that absence makes some hearts grow fonder, while presence can be maddening. When you like your spouse better in theory than in practice, your marriage is in serious trouble. Although she avoids the proverbial rolling pin, Megan looked chillingly like Betty drinking her wine and watching a drunken Don eat his dinner, raising the likelihood that this “perfect” match is headed to a reckoning. And since this episode has Don declare that he didn’t want to deal with an unhappy female employee as well as respond, “Not my morale,” when Lane declared, “Nothing like a surprise for morale,” I think we can expect Don’s comeuppance to be a sudden and painful shock.

“They’re projections,” Harry says to Lane about the predicted first quarter earnings. “They’re derived from reality, but they’re hopes and dreams.” In that, as in his actions with Paul, he shows a clarity that the other characters lack in this episode. Projections are what we see when we look at other people, and far from being real, they’re merely reflections of our hopes and dreams – including our hope that the dreamy new person in our life will change everything, and painlessly. Don’s had that hope about Megan, but in her truthful way, she keeps disabusing him of the notion that it will be that easy. As with Lane’s forged check, problems can be papered over temporarily, but the accounting occurs eventually, and often at the most inconvenient time.

And when you’re dealing with someone’s dreams – as Don is with Megan — the cost of standing in their way can be devastating. As Langston Hughes said in another memorable poem that had a renaissance in the 1960s, “What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun … Or does it explode?” The decade was defined by explosions of various kinds — both the literal bombings both at war and at home, and the figurative blowing up of family life and social norms. With just three episodes to go, the lives of these characters seem far more likely to be blown apart rather than brought neatly together by season’s end.

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.