Some of those failed Comedy Central shows have attempted to create comedy with a satiric edge more akin to Dave Chappelle than Tosh’s frat-boy humor. Unfortunately, those shows have done a lousy job of it, amounting to uninspired clones. Chocolate News was the “Black” Daily Show; of course, Mind of Mencia was the “Latino” Chappelle’s Show. But these exhibited none of Chappelle’s talent for comically exploiting audience anxieties about race and identity politics, which, it turns out, is more difficult than it looks. However outrageous his sketches might be (the first episode featured Clayton Bigsby, “Black White Supremacist”) Chappelle was doing some complicated cultural work, making meaningful comedy if not outright satire for an audience that was “post-PC” not because it dismissed identity politics, but had largely internalized them.

I’m not sure what the success of Tosh.0 tells us about the “post-PC” status of the Comedy Central audience—at least I can’t speculate on it right here at the moment. But I am anxious to continue to watch the latest program to follow Tosh.0, Key and Peele, which appears to be tentatively picking up the mantel of satiric sketch comedy that Chappelle abandoned, largely due to his concerns about what meanings audiences were making from it. But if the premiere episode of Key and Peele is any indication, it will do so in a much more restrained way. That premiere contained nothing so shocking as Chappelle’s Clayton Bigsby, and one reviewer, in fact, described the duo’s comedy as “genteel.”

What I thought was both interesting and funny about the show was how almost every segment centered on the performance of identity. When Key and Peele appeared onstage after the opening segment, they immediately told the audience they were both biracial, and made jokes based on the notion that they routinely “adjust our Blackness” depending on the company they are in. Although the first of these jokes was that they do this to terrify white people, the segment ended by suggesting that the “Blackest” performances occur when “white-sounding-black-guys” get together. Rather than keeping the focus on race, (and this is wise given the 18-34 male demo) most of the segments focused on the performance of masculinity. In the cold-open, the two “man/Black up” their phone conversations to save face in front of one another; in another, they recount to each other arguments with their wives or girlfriends, culminating in calling them “Bitch,” but always in supreme fear they will be caught doing so. A recurring bit in the show parodied Lil Wayne in prison, where he becomes very self-conscious about putting on his tough guy act.

For my money, the best segment of the show had actually been circulating on YouTube prior to the premiere, and already has an ancillary Twitter feed: #obamatranslated. That segment featured Peele doing a spot-on impression of Obama while Key serves as his “Anger Translator.” The lines for Peele’s Obama must have come verbatim from an assortment of his real comments, but Key’s impassioned and physically animated translations (such as shouting “I am not a Muslim” through a megaphone when the Tea Party is mentioned) served as the kind of catharsis, for me at least, that I’ve been wishing to get from a caricature of the president but no one (including Fred Armisen) has been able to get a good angle on Obama. It takes two, apparently.

Maybe Chappelle’s Show was a program for the Bush era, when it took something really significant to shock and it felt good when it did so. And maybe Key & Peele is a show for the Obama era, not because—like Obama—its stars are biracial or “genteel,” but because culture that intentionally shocks has become so mundane. The comforting reassurance of the sitcom has morphed into every episode Family Guy meeting its quota of “bad taste” by offending enough different “interest groups” that audiences are sure none of it can actually mean anything or matter to anyone. And however much South Park’s creators might like us to believe there’s a qualitative difference between the comic irreverence of Family Guy and South Park’s satire, I have to confess that what had once seemed to me an air of indignant outrage, now seems more like studied insouciance.

There are some things that should remain shocking. A congressman shouting “liar” at the president, for example. The suggestion that there is actually a “War on Christmas.” The fact that Mitt Romney is worth more money than the previous eight presidents combined. I hope Key & Peele choose to satirize this stuff, because I’ll be watching, and I hope some of the Tosh.0 crowd sticks around and does so, too.

Why don’t we have more period comedies on American television? True, there was That 70s Show, and Freaks and Geeks was a period show, but it was really a drama with lots of funny moments. I first started wondering about this after spending a week in bed with the flu, a stint I survived with help from the first season of Blackadder, the BBC historical sitcom starring Rowan Atkinson. I did this at the behest of an Antenna call to watch something canonic we hadn’t ever seen. Blackadder was laugh-outloud, silly-funny. Its most lasting effect on me, though, was wondering why Americans haven’t mined their history as a comic setting as effectively as the British. Granted the UK has got a thousand-year or so start on us (I was an English major, not an English history major, so I can’t be sure, exactly.). I also wonder if this lack of depth works in combination with our tendency to label any comedy that references the world outside of TV “satire,” and thus socially meaningful. In other words, we can’t set a comedy far enough in the past that it not be considered comic commentary on the present. Maybe I’m missing some veiled jabs, but Blackadder didn’t seem preoccupied with commenting upon Margaret Thatcher or the House of Windsor circa 1983.

I suspect that the execs at ABC picking up pilots in 2011 believe that the TV audience is primed for period dramas. Pan Am sounds pretty much like Mad Men on a plane, after all. The program is from Sony Pictures TV and ER veteran Jack Orman. I suppose this means we can expect more edge-of-your-couch moments than Mad Men, mini-skirted stewardesses racing to serve scotch and sodas in the nick of time before customers decide to switch to Braniff. Poe seems a savvy pick up on the heels of the success of Seth Grahame-Smith’s recent literary/horror novels Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (coming to theatres in June 2012!) and you can be sure a reference to House made its way into the pitch as well. Programs featuring brooding, damaged-but-brilliant protagonists demand one-word eponymous titles, after all. Still, those zombie/literary novels are all about comic juxtaposition.

Of course, getting back to TV, I’m really talking about two different kinds of programs here: those simply set in a period and those with historical subject matter. Recently, cable network after cable network chickened out on airing The Kennedys, a historical drama about the family often described as the closest thing to a royal family America has ever had. Personally, I think that whatever behind-the-scenes Shriver/Kennedy arm-twisting went on to stop the show from airing only underscored gut-feelings of programming execs that the Kennedys have already received their TV-soap-due a hundred times over.

Now, a sitcom about the Kennedys, that’s something America could go nuts over. The liberals could laugh with the Kennedys and the conservatives could laugh at them, an inversion of All in the Family, with much more appealing mise-en-scene. Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis…the scripts would write themselves. And imagine the stunt-casting possibilities! I think Paul Giamatti would make a hilarious Fidel Castro. And Marilyn Monroe, anyone? If Quentin Tarantino can rewrite WW2 with a spectacular murder of Adolph Hitler, surely the producers could put off the JFK assassination to 1965 at least.

Maybe America is too uptight when it comes to the Kennedys. Trey Parker and Matt Stone did a pretty good job with a first family sitcom in 2000’s That’s My Bush!, and since ten years have passed, it now feels like a historical comedy. Still, there’s no need to venture from the 1960s of Mad Men and Pan Am for a new show. How about a historical comedy about the Lyndon B. Johnson administration? Lyndon Baines, Lady Bird, Lynda Bird, Luci Baines—sounds like a sitcom family to me. Hell, Jim Belushi even looks like LBJ.

This past Sunday marked the latest installment in what has become a semiannual event in my household. About every 12 or 18 months, the desirability of the HBO original programming lineup teams up with my frustration over lousy DSL download speeds and my lingering conscience about copyright infringement to convince me it’s worth $15 a month to subscribe. This warm feeling usually lasts three or four months, till I become miffed with the indeterminate period between seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and admit there’s nothing so culturally relevant about True Blood that I can’t wait for the DVD release.

The blessed event was initiated this year by the premiere of David Simon’s new series, Treme. I was tipped off by a colleague’s Facebook post, and more importantly, my eagerness to subscribe was surely motivated by a desire to make up for my embarrassingly belated immersion in The Wire. I belong among those who were too busy watching Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, Deadwood, and, yes, The Sopranos (not to mention already depressed by consecutive George W. Bush “administrations”) to dedicate TV time to The Wire’s narrative-ly complex social realism.

But, no more! For I have drunk the David Simon Kool-Aid. Said beverage must have been the “electric” kind Tom Wolfe wrote about, because it has inspired hallucinogenic dreams of impossible spinoffs—a sitcom with Omar and Brother Muozone managing a vegetarian diner a la Alice or Cheers, or a re-vamped X-Files starring Bubbles and Kima as paranormal investigators.

And so, last Sunday, I eagerly plied my wife and honored guests with a big bottle of (cheap!) Pinot Grigio in anticipation of impending David Simon greatness. Who better to wield quality television as a bludgeon against government incompetence and malevolent neglect, not to mention the continued lack of public will to rebuild the great American city of New Orleans?

Indeed, Treme delivered on all the expected markers of quality TV circa 2010, an era in which The Wire, not Sex and the City or The Sopranos reigns as model of HBO’s “not TV.” Here are a few key elements:

1. Intertextual pleasures, i.e. former Wire cast members in prominent roles. “There’s the guy that played Lester Freamon, and isn’t the actress that played his girlfriend in season one now his daughter?!”
2. Film actors whose careers have veered dangerously off-course, seeking to re-establish cred while pretending to be happy working on HBO because “It’s Not TV.” John Goodman and Steve Zahn, I’m talking to you.
3. A self-important attitude that reassures us of our own distinction through the lack of sensational content. For example, Treme’s timeframe is comfortably post-Katrina, thereby keeping truly horrific images of Katrina’s devastation off-screen, because we care, but we don’t really want to see that. And we already know that we care, so what’s the point?
4. Arty title sequence: The moldy, spotted walls of flooded houses as backdrop for credits, self-consciously implicate us in our desire to see material evidence of human suffering as abstract backdrop. Or, maybe they just look cool.
5. Flagrant disregard for traditional TV runtimes. Just when you think the Treme pilot is going to go all 55+ minutes like The Wire, it keeps going! And going. Till a properly poignant, but no too poignant, moment.

Perhaps my preoccupation with improbable spinoffs of The Wire is evidence David Simon’s work leaves me, at least subconsciously, cold. How about cutting loose a little? Why such a realist route, however artfully created, to quality TV/cultural critique?

The aforementioned colleague’s Facebook post linked to a newspaper column in the form of a letter from David Simon to the people of New Orleans. The letter somewhat smugly addressed “fact-grounded literalists” who Simon anticipates will complain about the historical inaccuracies and anachronisms bound to populate his fictionalization of post-Katrina New Orleans. Borrowing a line from Picasso, Simon says art is the lie that shows us the truth. As for Treme,

“It is not journalism. It is not documentary. It is a fictional representation set in a real time and place, replete with moments of inside humor, local celebrity and galloping, unrestrained meta. At moments, if we do our jobs correctly, it may feel real.”

Is feeling “real” the most we can hope for from a TV auteur with so much skill and creative control? For all the pleasures of Treme’s graceful, respectful representation of post-Katrina New Orleans, I couldn’t help itching for a bit more crazy. Say, just a little of the crazy deftly at work in Werner Herzog’s post-Katrina Bad Lieutenant. Or the crazy of the American West re-imagined and represented by Deadwood. Or the crazy of Tony Soprano watching a bear wander around his backyard pool. I’m not talking Lost-style, narrative enigma-crazy.

Just television that embraces the representational power of fiction, rather than feeling the need to justify or excuse it.

*Apologies to Lester Bangs, who is long-dead anyway.