Mad Men behaves like nothing else on television, a distinction that, after the impressive ratings boost during the bleak, sinewy, and leisurely paced third season, is beginning to beam with triumph—insofar as a lyrically cynical, ethically convoluted portrait of early-’60s corporate marketing can be said to “beam.” Brimming with enigmatic, meticulously cultivated details that have endeared it to film buffs in particular, Mad Men imagines mid-century Americana as a dreamily, if painfully, transformative era, where the difference between heroism and villainy is often determined by corporate hierarchy, where sexual politics carry strong overtones of distaff uprising and masculine uncertainty, and where the dalliances and secret-harboring shoeboxes of business titans like Sterling-Cooper creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm) seem to reference noir’s prototypes rather than the genre itself.

Instead of attempting to milk the nostalgic milieu for the usual lollypop-cheap family values, even by way of inversion, the show’s period social consciousness has continued to succeed by gently floating between contemporary non-topical commentary and irresistible flourishes of historical scholarship. Even a casual conversation about the paradox of perceptive empathy (is your color blue the same as mine?), significantly occurring between Don and an extramarital lover-cum-schoolteacher, subtly notes the subliminal tension-trafficking that typified the time’s psychology. And the pervasive nicotine-, alcohol-, and hate-infused social exchanges ruthlessly expose what we always suspected about our grandparents’ careerism—namely, that it was just as self-loathingly cutthroat and emotionally debilitating as that of our gig economy. And if we aren’t half-guiltily sacrificing African-American doormen on our way to the top anymore, Mad Men might amorally observe the lack of opportunities to do so rather than any progressively dissuading civil obligations.

Season one of HBO’s—or, rather, Steve Dildarian’s—The Life and Times of Tim was possibly the animated cable curio of 2009. Eschewing the hyperrealist ribaldry and pop misappropriation with which the Adult Swim juggernaut has continued churning out meta catchphrases and anthropomorphic food stuffs worth silk-screening onto shoulder-hugging tees,Tim finds humor in our haplessly sublimated fury toward a quotidian world gone brutal. If Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Robot Chicken seem loosely adapted from manic, late-night culture riffs fueled by junk food and overworked/underpaid exhaustion, Tim embodies the brittle, belittling daytime awkwardness of our dead-end corporate jobs and mind-numbingly mundane relationships—a stunting reality we can only greet with a deadpan shrug and a two-day goatee. And so what if the show’s situational apparatus is often merely comic rather than actually funny? (Though, admittedly, the idea of a co-worker writing off prostitutes as a business expense by forging Kinko’s receipts inspires a newfound form of admirable laughter.) Who can afford hilarity in this economy anyway?

Of all the youngish comedians to ascend to near-household-name status in the mid-to-late aughts, Demetri Martin may be the most deserving of a sketch comedy show. It’s not simply that his laugh-per-minute quotient is considerably higher than most of his Comedy Central-tethered peers (including even more high-profile bearers of the stand-up torch such as Sarah Silverman, whose shtick isn’t always about the great guffaw anyway), but also that he approaches humor as a mechanism for conceptual exploration rather than as a vehicle for inherently gut-busting personality in the manner that Paul F. Tompkins or Patton Oswalt do. Martin’s modest delivery wavers between deliciously deadpan and infectiously juvenile, but he manages genuinely funny observations—whether articulated in brief, Steven Wright-inspired jabs or broken down via graphs and charts on the sizable pad that often accompanies him on stage.

Important Things with Demetri Martin, however, proves that a gift for angular one-liners and comedic ideas, along with bona fide variety writing experience (Martin toiled on Conan O’Brien’s late night show for a season) won’t necessarily transcend the dull mediocrity of most cable-based primetime. Martin is likeable and talented enough for one to assume that he just hasn’t yet found a successful way to translate his wooly wordplay and jangly, guitar-assisted punchlines into the structure of 22-minute, three-act programs, but it’s hard to imagine that a stand-up comedian who conceives of such orderly, premeditated specials—Martin has a knack for sensing when bits like surprise guests and goof metrics have outworn their welcome—would have issue with the transition to studio television.

Debra J. Solomon isn’t quite Joni Mitchell, and her animated diary-musical Getting Over Him in Eight Songs or Less isn’t quite what a Bill Plympton adaptation of Blue might look like, but there are enough traces of the bruised feminism of the former and the fearless fluidity of the latter to warrant a casual comparison. The 30-minute short, which will air smarmily as part of HBO2’s Valentine’s Day lineup, propels us through the Kübler-Ross-like cycle Solomon experienced after the expiration of her marriage: She slogs from desperation to barbed self-criticism to clingy extroversion to sexual doubt to, finally, acceptance and anticipation of the future, examining each step toward newfound independence with raw candor, bulbous caricatures, and three-chord (or less) piano ditties.

Solomon’s vision isn’t terribly ambitious (the self-analysis in each respective stage of heartbreak is never any more nuanced than “I don’t know how to live without my husband” and “I think I’m gonna be okay after all”), but she compensates for her lack of complexity with an unusually likeable animating style, not to mention a mercifully brief running time. Her choppy, amorphously mobile sketches, in which corpulent characters are continually shape-shifting into anthropomorphic gender symbols and swimming in seas of nervous squiggles, may provoke comparisons to curvy, jittery Red Bull commercials, but they also resemble some of the deceptive crudity of Signe Baumane’s early work, particularly in the manner that they askewedly dote on female anatomy with pudgy, hyperrealist fascination. In one especially vulnerable number entitled “Teach Me to Be a Woman,” Solomon’s hand-drawn avatar peers up at an apartment window and sees in the svelte lower half of a nude, freshly sexed female everything she isn’t; the irony is that the anonymous Venus is only a few steps away from a plump Monty Python cutout with a shriveled head and ballooned mammaries.