Oh, the movies themselves are still with us; I’m not implying otherwise. Despite declining attendance and lots of attendant public hand-wringing, Hollywood continues to turn a profit by cranking out massively expensive, effects-driven franchise pictures that can play around the world. As perverse as this sounds, we’re arguably in a new golden age for global cinema, at least in aesthetic terms. With the cost of making a professional-looking movie dropping ever closer to zero, aspiring directors and ambitious new films are emerging from all corners of the globe and all sectors of society.

This year’s NYFF lineup – which kicks off Friday night with the premiere of Ang Lee’s 3-D “Life of Pi,” a movie that admittedly might find a pretty big audience – features films made in Romania, Turkey, the Philippines, Zaire, Chile and Mexico, alongside your standard art-house fare from the heavy-hitter European nations. Based on everything I’ve seen so far and everything I’ve heard from others, it’s an exceptionally strong sampler of global cinema. But let’s be honest: Outside Manhattan and beyond a dwindling coterie of journalists, bloggers and obsessive film buffs, almost nobody will notice or care. The festival itself will be packed, but that’s as much about its event status as a centerpiece of New York’s fall calendar as anything else. Later on, films like Portuguese director Valeria Sarmiento’s Napoleonic War epic “Lines of Wellington” or Chinese director Song Fang’s intimate “Memories Look at Me” will be fortunate to get momentary theatrical runs in New York and Los Angeles. Other films in the festival may never again play on a big screen in the United States, going straight to VOD and DVD.

If the NYFF once seemed like a central, if rather snooty, landmark on the American cultural scene, it’s now something closer to a marginal, high-culture preservation society, more akin than ever to its Lincoln Center neighbors, the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. I have no problem with that; I love the opera and wish I could afford to go more often, as in ever. (If the film festival is pretty expensive, in moviegoing terms, at $20 to $25 for most tickets, that’s still a bargain compared to the “Ring Cycle.”) It’s just that there’s no point in pretending that movies play the same dominant role in our culture that they once did or that art-house movies of the sort the NYFF so lovingly curates have any impact at all on the American cultural mainstream.

Let me concede right now that I’m overstating the case a little for dramatic effect. But just a little. For every oddball little movie that breaks through into the national conversation – so far in 2012 that list includes “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which are strikingly similar films – there are hundreds of others that briefly get hyped by people like me and then sink without a trace. Your average episode of “Breaking Bad” or “The Good Wife” or “Louie” will generate many times more debate and conversation – more actual excitement — than all except perhaps a half-dozen movies released this year (and most of those will involve superheroes).

Film culture, at least in the sense people once used that phrase, is dead or dying. Back in what we might call the Susan Sontag era, discussion and debate about movies was often perceived as the icy-cool cutting edge of American intellectual life. Today it’s a moribund and desiccated leftover that’s been cut off from ordinary life, from the mainstream of pop culture and even from what remains of highbrow or intellectual culture. While this becomes most obvious when discussing an overtly elitist phenomenon like the NYFF, it’s also true on a bigger scale. Here are the last four best-picture winners at the Oscars: “The Artist,” “The King’s Speech,” “The Hurt Locker” and “Slumdog Millionaire.” How much time have you spent, cumulatively, talking about those movies with your friends?

Now, if you’re about to protest that what I just wrote reflects my own bias and snobbery, let me cut you off at the pass. Celebrity gossip is still with us, of course, and as I think Jesus once said, always will be. But that has long been almost completely divorced from discussion of movies or any other specific cultural products. There are certainly areas of film culture that not merely remain alive but have thrived and metastasized beyond all reckoning, especially the heated and immensely detailed discussions of all things having to do with science fiction, fantasy and comic-book movies. (This is another parallel to what happened in the publishing world, where fantasy became the mainstream and literary fiction is, commercially speaking, an afterthought.) I usually strive to avoid the term “fanboy,” but former Los Angeles Times blogger Geoff Boucher, a leading avatar in that realm, has embraced it without shame.

Then there are sites like Nikki Finke’s Deadline and Sharon Waxman’s The Wrap, which create a surprising amount of heat by covering the deal-making and backstage chessboard movements at the Hollywood studios, production companies and talent agencies. Given that film production is one of the few remaining profit centers of American industry, I certainly can’t argue that stuff isn’t newsworthy. But why anyone who isn’t directly involved would be interested remains a little mysterious. One could argue that, in our era of consumer capitalism, films have been revealed as manufactured commodities rather than works of art, and people root for certain film franchises or producers or studios in the same way they root for Apple over Samsung, GM over Ford, or the Red Sox over the Yankees.

Film culture — in my now-defunct Susan Sontag sense — has a history, and I think it pretty much ended with “Pulp Fiction,” the brief indie-film boom of the late ’90s and the rise of the Internet. It’s just taken us a while to realize it. When the NYFF was launched in 1963, the films of the French New Wave were the hottest things on roller skates, and the Mt. Rushmore Great Men of postwar art cinema – Bergman, Truffaut, Fellini, Kurosawa – were at or near their career peaks. Cocktail party debate among the chattering classes often revolved around existentially inflected, black-and-white works like “L’Avventura,” “Last Year at Marienbad” or violent, generationally-defined American films like “Easy Rider” and “Bonnie and Clyde,” along with the contentious reviews published by Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris and numerous others. Those who hadn’t seen such films, or hadn’t “gotten” them, felt not so subtly left out.

I’m not claiming, by the way, that the unquestioned elitism that underlay that kind of film culture was necessarily constructive. In fact, I would say that the New York-based media and intelligentsia had an outsized cultural influence that simply isn’t possible today. But the point of those conversations was never supposed to be discussing the films in pure or formal terms; it was all about what they meant, what they told us about the human soul or the emptiness of contemporary existence or the evils of capitalism. (Or at least about the importance of getting laid, a reliable constant.)

By the following decade, the decade of the “Godfather” films and “The French Connection” and “Taxi Driver,” the discussion had broadened to include American cinema both past and present. A new generation of young male filmmakers, each in his own way steeped in film culture, began to push for the magical combination of artistic legitimacy and popular success. In an odd way, that was the beginning of the end. Two of those young rebels, of course, were named George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who are correctly credited with permanently shifting Hollywood’s business model away from adult-oriented drama and toward teenage summer blockbusters.

Lucas and Spielberg are both devoted film lovers who have themselves made several cinematic landmarks and have inspired cult-like followings who study their work with monastic devotion. I guess it’s ironic, then, that they also created the conditions under which movies became seen primarily as machine-made production units whose significance was best understood in external terms – profit or loss, tickets sold, awards won – rather than in internal, aesthetic and inherently subjective terms.

That tension between viewing movies as art and as commerce is as old as the medium itself. But the sense that cinema was where you could find the most engrossing stories and characters — as well as a level of artistic ambition that was adventurous but, let’s say, not totally obscurantist – began to fade after the “Jaws” and “Star Wars” era, even though (or perhaps because) those were among the most discussed and most influential works in movie history. As I see it, film culture made a couple of last stands with the indie-film waves of the ’80s and ’90s, which brought us first Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch and Steven Soderbergh, and then Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson.

It’s definitely not a coincidence that the biggest critic of those years and an important advocate for most of those filmmakers was Roger Ebert, who has turned the Internet to his advantage like almost no one else and has prospered both as a populist movie critic and all-purpose cultural commentator. It’s also no coincidence that the mid-to-late ’90s zone of movies like “Pulp Fiction” and “Fargo” and “Fight Club” overlaps with the explosion of Internet culture and the venture into original drama by the cable network formerly known as Home Box Office. I almost don’t need to add that it preceded the birth of YouTube and the spread of mobile devices, developments that undercut the traditional hegemony of movies even more.

How many movies made since 1999 have captured the center of cultural discourse and made grownups feel like they needed to see them and needed to have an opinion about them the way that Chase’s TV series or “The Wire” or “Six Feet Under” did? The “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “The Dark Knight” and “Avatar”? I’ll give you those, although I know plenty of people who never bothered to catch the latter two. “Black Swan” or “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” or “The Social Network”? Maybe, or almost. “Brokeback Mountain” or the “Harry Potter” movies? I don’t think so.

I’m not saying that movies are now and forever irrelevant, nor am I switching sides in the great “cultural vegetables” debate of 2011 and arguing against the real or potential value of difficult and challenging works of art. (Trying to convince people to watch, you know, Béla Tarr movies instead of clips from last night’s Jimmy Kimmel show, on the other hand, is a waste of everyone’s time.) More than anything else, I’m looking in the mirror and thinking about the purpose of what I do, which is supposed to be communicating with people, sharing ideas and generating discussion.

Film culture in that old-fashioned, top-down genteel-chat sense inherited from Susan Sontag and 1963 doesn’t provide a way to do that anymore, and hasn’t for quite a while. That isn’t the New York Film Festival’s fault or the movie industry’s fault or my fault, but it’s no good pretending it isn’t true. Do we need to find new ways to talk about movies that connect them to the real world and the media landscape as it actually exists? Do we need to get over the idea that the form or medium of cinema is somehow sacred? Will David Chase go back to TV? My magic eight-ball points to yes.

The 50th-anniversary New York Film Festival runs through Oct. 14 at Lincoln Center in New York.

That was the nugget that I brought to Shawn. That’s what we both started to work on. What’s the story? Who are the characters? What would cause, in the course of a pilot episode, this to happen? For a group of patriots who are not having a crisis of conscience or are not secret rogue defectors, what would be the story for them to be separated from their homeland, and turn against their homeland to some degree, by the end of one hour of television? So we worked very, very hard on the plot gestures that would separate them and cause them to question the command that would be believable, dramatic — and not about a crew that just didn’t want to fire nukes one day, even though that’s what they signed up to do.

Were you careful to make sure the show didn’t feel like it was tipping in either a liberal or conservative direction?

Ryan: I like shows where the characters have some politics, but you don’t necessarily know the showrunners’ politics. This is a story more about the executive branch and its power more than about its political leanings. One thing I would say that we are very vigilant about is that I think there is a certain kind of person, in general, that enters the Navy. There’s a specific kind of person who signs up to be in a submarine, a specific kind of person who commands a submarine, and those are not necessarily peacenik types. So it was important to us that this not be a show about people who have a crisis of confidence about pushing a button that fires nuclear weapons. These people are trained and prepared to shoot those weapons when they have valid, proper orders. One thing that Karl and I spent a lot of time with was, well, why did these guys not fire? It’s not because they are secretly peaceniks, it has to be because there is some issue with the order that calls into question the validity of the order. We weren’t trying to make a comment on the peace movement.

Gajdusek: We don’t have a gong to bang, or an ax to grind. We really wanted to make sure the show wasn’t on a political soap box. It was born of a political situation that’s growing in our country, but it’s an epic, and somewhat romantic story of what warfare does to people. It takes into account the current headlines, but it’s not ripped from the headlines. We are not reacting to what happened in China today. But the show is political, obviously. It is about what happens, what could happen, when extremes in a nation stop talking to each other and start to suspect each other. I don’t know if you heard anything about that recently, but it seems to be happening. In that respect the show is political, as much as it posits what could happen if that sort of dialogue goes unchecked in a nation — in our nation.

Shawn, you said at TCA that you didn’t think of “Last Resort” as a political thriller, week in and week out. So, what is it?

Ryan: I think it’s an emotional character drama with incredibly high stakes. And so in that regard, it is a political thriller at the base of some of the scenes. I’m doing a piece on my all-time favorite war movies in advance of the show, so I’ve been thinking about that. And what I’ve realized is a lot of the movies I’m picking aren’t straight-up war movies that are all about shoot-’em-up, blood and guts. They’re about what happens to specific characters in the time of war, under the pressure of war. Think “Casablanca,” think “Dr. Zhivago.” These are movies that deal with characters’ personal lives and the turmoil created by a world in strife. And so the political thriller thing is an aspect of it, but ultimately where I think our show lives and where its heart beats is in the emotional lives of these characters.

How far along are you in mapping out the stories? I don’t envy anyone who is making a show like yours that has a lot of plot mystery because we’re all like, “Do you know how it’s going to end?”

Ryan: I guess the only thing I can say is that I feel that I’ve successfully navigated that challenge once before with “The Shield,” where we did seven seasons. And one lesson I’ve learned there is that it’s much like holding a bird. Hold it too loose and it flies away, hold it too tight and you crush it. You have to know places you’re going, and yet also allow yourself the freedom to change course along the way, as you discover things. So, to answer the question, Karl and I have some long-range places we know we want to go with some of the characters, we’ve sketched out the first 13 episodes, we’ve broken the stories for the first 10, we have scripts for the first eight, and we’ve filmed the first four. So we’re down the road on this, and fortunately for us it’s not been a problem coming up with stories. I know some people watch the pilot and think, “Wow! I really love that but you can’t do that every week and this should’ve been a movie not a TV show.” I heard that criticism in a couple places. But I can tell you, having spent time in the writers’ room the past few months, that it has not been hard to find story engines to make these episodes go.

“The Shield,” like “Last Resort,” was a show about a rule-breaker, though Vic Mackey was a less honorable guy than the characters on “Last Resort.” Shawn, is that just a coincidence or is rule-breaking a theme you’re interested in?

Ryan: It’s probably not a coincidence. It’s probably an area that I’m interested in. I do have the cover this time of Karl being the originator of this thing. I worked with David Mamet for four years on “The Unit,” and one of the things he always said was that great drama wasn’t the choice between right and wrong, great drama was the choice between two wrongs. And in many ways that is the pilot episode of “Last Resort.” You have the submarine crew who have a valid order coming through a channel that it shouldn’t be coming through. Is that an order that they should follow, or not? When they call for verification the answers they get aren’t very satisfying; should they fire or not? There’s an argument that they should and there’s an argument that they shouldn’t. And, to put those characters in a position where they have to make a choice between two wrongs is great drama. There were similar choices that I think Vic Mackey had to make, similar choices that the Delta Force team on “The Unit” had to make. So in a way that’s a thread to rescue myself, but I also think it’s a thread of great drama going back to Shakespeare’s time.

In the pilot, I found myself sympathizing with the two sailors who decide against firing the nukes. Are they our heroes, or is their characterization going to get more complex?

Ryan: It’s an interesting question because, I think first of all, not everyone is going to have exactly your reaction.

I’m sure that’s true.

Ryan: Some people are going to have some questions about what they did, and that’s fine as well. But of course you want everyone to fall in love with these characters and we’re working our asses off to make sure that happens.

Gajdusek: This is a situation, this is a story about power, and the people who have it, and people who don’t have it, and what it’s like to have power on this island. Power does things to people. It will change over time.

Andre Braugher plays the captain of the sub, Capt. Chaplin, the man in charge, who talks about being “crazy enough.” Is he crazy enough, or just actually crazy?

Gajdusek: We talk a lot about Chaplin being George Washington or Colonel Kurtz. That’s one of the mysteries of the show: Can this guy lead these people to be some sort of great new symbol of one of the most righteous choices in the world, or will he spiral them down a path they can’t back out of into something dark and not good? And that’s one of the pulls of the show to us.

Shawn, you’ve had shows canceled after their first seasons: “Chicago Code” and “Terriers.” Does that make you nervous about this one?

Ryan: I would say that it makes me feel the opposite. First of all, I had the great fortune of the first show that I created running seven seasons, that we got to choose when the show would end and we ended it on our own terms. I knew at the time that that was a very rare occurrence and, in a way, “The Shield” gave me carte blanche to fail. I’ve made good series, and they’ve been canceled, and I’ve seen some series go on TV that I wasn’t impressed with that have done well. The lesson I’ve learned is you shouldn’t leave anything in the locker room. You should really go for it, and be as audacious as you can possibly be, because there may be only 13 episodes of this show we ever make. So why get conservative and worry about it? Make it as well as you can, and that gives the show the best chance to succeed, because the more original it feels, the more daring it feels, the more likely I think audiences will gravitate toward it.

In a way, it would almost be really daunting right now if someone from the future would come back and tell me, “Hey, guess what, Shawn? This show is going to run eight years.” I’d be thinking about Episode 85 more than I’m thinking about Episode 8 right now. It’s good just to be able to focus on these 13 episodes, and say how can we make these 13 episodes as truly great as they can possibly be? And I find that invigorating, and somewhat digestible, in a way that if somebody told me I have to make eight seasons right now it would be intimidating, and that would scare me a little bit.

Was there anything you had to tone down for the show to be on network television?

Ryan: No, we didn’t have any issues. I’ve worked in the cable universe, I’ve worked in the network universe, and you know what the rules are. I don’t think we’ve had any battles with ABC Standards & Practices. We know which words you can say and what you can’t say. We know how much skin you can show, and how much sex you can get in your sex scenes. And this is a show that I think belongs on broadcast TV. It doesn’t require F-bombs and strippers to tell it. So I have no problem with that at all.

Is that all that makes something a cable show, F-bombs and strippers?

Ryan: I don’t want to say that is true in all cases. But I think there are some shows on some premium-cable networks that utilize that kind of stuff simply because they can, more than it is necessary to tell the story.

Are there shows that you guys had in mind while you were making this?

Ryan: After we had made the pilot, and after we had broken the first batch of episodes of the show, I went and watched Season 1 of “Homeland,” which was really great. So I can’t say that that was an inspiration because we had already made the pilot and we were already into the first batch of the episode. But that’s a look into a very specific corner of a government universe, a high-stakes terrorist universe, that really impressed me. I would say it certainly set the bar that I would love to be able to reach on our show.

Gajdusek: We’re aware of the comparisons to “Lost” from where we shoot, and we have some people kind of stuck on an island. So we work to make sure we are not treading the same waters. Someone also pointed out that we were in the sort of formation of “Battlestar Galactica.” It’s a group of people on their own, up against the world, and they have to figure out the rules of staying alive, and what happens when you’re under that kind of pressure to stay alive, and what happens internally. And I thought, “Well, that’s kind of true and that’s great, because that was a great show.”

Ryan: And I’ve watched all the episodes of that. It’s more like these shows set a bar, and you want to reach them. There was a moment in the writers’ room the other day where an idea was pitched, and I was like, “Well, they did something kind of similar to that on Season 1 of ‘Lost,’ so I don’t think we can do it.” We have to remain unique. There is a little bit of “Lost” DNA in our show, there is a little bit of “Battlestar Galactica” DNA in the show. I bring a little bit of “The Shield” DNA. And yet “Last Resort” ultimately has to be its own thing, distinguishable from all those others. So in that sense it’s useful to watch something like “Homeland” and say, OK, that’s how good TV can be, let’s try to do that good or better, and yet stay away from the things that they did.

“Homeland’s” only rival for best full-body television experience is AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” the other series that takes adrenaline blasts as seriously as it does psychological acuity. But it has been a long time since I found myself celebrating meth-lord and megalomaniac Walter White’s good fortune. (Hiding my head under a pillow, now that’s another story.) I have no such reservations about cheering for the indefatigable, loony Carrie Mathison whose vindication cannot come soon enough, because unlike Walt and his charming, shithead ilk, she’s on the side of right.

It is the great irony of “Homeland” — and the source of its pure, pulpy pleasures — that it is simultaneously the TV drama most plugged into modern-day geopolitical realities and the one constructed along the most old-fashioned lines. In the age of the antihero, Carrie Mathison is an honest-to-god hero. Dedicated to keeping America safe, she is making TV safe for good guys in the process.

Carrie — who really deserves a swaggier name — is often mistaken for an antihero. She is deeply flawed, stubborn, reckless, self-righteous and occasionally unethical. As played by the uncannily excellent Danes, she is an amalgamation of perfectly communicated contradictions, heartbreakingly fragile and unyieldingly steely, unhinged and single-minded, a basket case and a genius. Last season, her instincts led her to violate Brody’s First Amendment rights by putting him under illegal surveillance. When that failed, she began sleeping with him. Flailing around for a way to bail herself out of trouble, she once hit on her mentor Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), a breach of etiquette so profound it almost amounts to a violation of the incest taboo.

Yet despite all her bad behavior, Carrie does not belong in the exclusive and chic Crap Dudes Club alongside Walt, Don Draper, Tony Soprano or Stringer Bell, and it’s not just because she has a vagina. (Though, yes, there’s that too.) Carrie is not a bad person we care about  in spite of her atrocious actions: She’s a well-meaning person who sometimes makes mistakes. Carrie is dedicated to saving American citizens from gruesome deaths. That is her job and her passion. If she has crossed ethical lines — and she has, repeatedly — it has been to protect people, not to harm them. She’s a hero, flaws and all.

But heroism is complicated on “Homeland,” which is nothing if not sophisticated. This is a series predicated on an American war hero turning against the United States because of its amoral droning program: There is no white hats are good, black hats are bad level of simplicity at play here. Carrie is female, cerebral, unstable and often irrational, not exactly the typical description of an American badass. Brody, the righteous, principled, self-identified patriot — a guy so dashing he’s being asked to be vice president — is the one who is the traitor. On “Homeland,” the sympathetic terrorist looks like a hero, and the hero looks like a supporting character. (What are Don Draper’s exes but Carrie Mathisons without a calling or a chance?) Rooting for her is simultaneously easy and radical.

If there’s one sticking point with “Homeland’s” new season — and, for some, its first — it is plausibility. I’ll keep it vague, because if there is any show one should come to unspoiled, it’s “Homeland,” but in the second episode there are two major coincidences, one of which seemed wholly unnecessary to me. “Homeland” is about a conspiracy, but hopefully it does not succumb to being a conspiracy, relying on Dickensian plot turns when less dramatic ones would do.

And yet the most outlandish aspect of “Homeland” — that Brody and Carrie have not only slept together, but are maybe in an extremely twisted version of something like love — remains one of the show’s most exciting and moving qualities. (As if being a heart-stopping, ethically responsible thriller starring a singular character it’s morally safe to love did not fire enough dopamine receptors, “Homeland” had to throw the most electric and perverse romantic dynamic on television into the mix as well.)

In Season 1, Brody and Carrie fell upon each other not just in some tawdry or manipulative way, but like lonely ghosts finally come upon someone who could see them. The crux of their relationship — as with so many in “Homeland”—  was recognition: They saw each other true. As the new season begins, Carrie is devastated as a person and a spy that her judgment about Brody could have been so wrong. Meanwhile, the only person in the whole world who knows Carrie is right about Brody being a terrorist — other than us— is Brody. How do you stay away from the person who sees you most clearly? I hope the answer is you can’t. My heart started beating faster just thinking about it.

Early in the episode, Capt. Chaplin tells Sam (don’t think it didn’t take everything I had not to call him Ben. “Felicity” dies hard) a story about why Ronald Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers. If you’re “the man with your finger on the button, they have to think you’re crazy,” he explains. This is an introduction to some of the show’s major themes— the future struggle between the better and lesser angels of Capt. Chaplin’s nature, as well as everyone else’s, and the strategic value of that lesser nature — but it also sounds a near-deafening dog whistle that “Last Resort” is not some pacifist, conscientious objector, anti-military soft pedal. When Chaplin and Kendal disobey orders, it’s not because they object on principle to unleashing nuclear bombs on civilians. These men are soldiers who are not opposed to violence when it’s necessary.

If “Last Resort’s” characters put their faith in anything, it’s in the power of Mutual Assured Destruction to keep the world safe, not in anti-proliferation treaties. After the United States (or some rogue elements of its government) has launched two nukes in Pakistan, unprovoked, Capt. Chaplin points out that Pakistan had no power to harm the homeland. Should have invested in some long-range missiles, Pakistan!  Later, Chaplin successfully saves his crew from certain death only because of his nuclear stockpile. “Last Resort” exists in a world where deterrence has been breached, and reestablished: Chaplin is betting his crew’s life it will hold. It remains to be seen whether “Last Resort” has as much confidence in MAD as he does. (If it does, remind me to write a piece when “Last Resort” starts getting syndicated in Iran.)

If  “Last Resort” sounds like some poli-sci class masquerading as a TV show, I assure you, it’s not. The first episode nimbly sneaks slips of big ideas in between the action set pieces and a vast amount of plot mechanics. (Some shows are just about newbie lawyers.) How do you build a new nation? What’s the role of violence in peacemaking? What’s the experience of women in the military? What makes a leader or government legitimate? These are all ideas hinted in 42 minutes that also introduce a gargantuan cast including the aforementioned characters, as well as NATO employees, various island residents, a pack of Navy SEALSs, Kendal’s wife, an admiral and defense contractor in D.C., and the 140 other soldiers on the Colorado. (This show is not going to have to discover a whole other half of the plane to scrounge up some new characters.) The first two episodes are mostly wham-bam setup, but if “Last Resort” picks up half of the questions it tosses out, it should be fascinating.

“Ben & Kate” was originally called “Ben Fox Is My Manny,” and the plot kicks off when Ben (Nat Faxon, who won an Oscar for writing “The Descendants”) drops by Kate’s house, uninvited. Immature, incorrigible, big-hearted Ben is always doing stuff like this: showing up randomly, lugging drum sets, or with a blood stain on his shirt, or in a Jason mask, like the big kid with a driver’s license he is. His younger sister, single-mother Kate (the lovely Dakota Johnson, daughter of Don and Melanie Griffith), is a lot more grounded than him, but that isn’t saying much. Johnson has a little California flightiness to her vibe. Her Kate isn’t a type A personality, but she’s more type A than Ben — which means she could be any type from A to Y. Ben needs to grow up a little, and Kate needs to loosen up a little, but they’re not opposites, so much as siblings cut from different corners of the same space-cadet-themed cloth.

If the pilot is a bellwether of what’s to come, “Ben & Kate” will often focus on the siblings’ respective love lives, and Kate’s in particular. (There are, as is required in the setups to most sitcoms, plausible love interests written into the pilot for both siblings. One supporting character has a big crush on Kate and always has. The other, British comedienne Lucy Punch, who really should have her own show, seems destined to be way too much for Ben at some point down the road.) Kate hasn’t had sex since her daughter was born and is finally ready to get back into the romance game, but she’s pretty hapless at it — so hapless, in fact, that Ben has a better read on the not-quite-right guy she’s seeing than she does. Ben knows the dude is bad news because he gives a weak high-five.

But even if “Ben & Kate” is going to explore the messy romantic lives of its leads, it’s already about an extremely functional male-female relationship. Ben and Kate aren’t perfect and they’ve got baggage (dysfunctional parents), but they are both loved, unconditionally, and in the fullness of their personalities, by at least one other person. They may be looking for more, but however messy, complicated, screwed up that search gets, they’re not alone. “Ben & Kate’s” comedy couldn’t be coming from a sweeter place.

Unlike other networks’ previous, hapless attempts to mint their very own “Mad Men” — “Playboy Club,” “Pan Am” and “Magic City,” for example — “Vegas” is not embarrassing. But it is just a gussied-up procedural, which would be fine, if it weren’t so blatantly aiming to be something more. Set in Las Vegas as it’s becoming Las Vegas, “Vegas” has plenty of meaty themes to explore —  corruption vs. the rule of law, development vs. the environment, the country vs. the city — but in the pilot it’s focused on Ralph Lamb solving a murder.

His first case is the death of a young woman out in the desert. Some biker gangs, six years away from being immortalized by Hunter S. Thompson, might have something to do with it, or they might not. Lamb, his brother (“Terra Nova’s” Jason O’Mara, with a part that finally acknowledges his blandness) and his girl-crazy son (“The OC’s” crazy Oliver, all grown up) all work the case, joined by a female ADA played by Carrie Anne Moss, whose anachronistically powerful position goes remarkably unremarked upon. Ralph and his squad are working with horses and rifles and a Native American tracker rather than with high-tech forensic devices, but otherwise the story arc will be familiar to anyone familiar with the beats of  “CSI.”

The model for “Vegas” is not so much “Mad Men” as “The Good Wife,” a week-by-week procedural unusually committed to rich, satisfying, long-term story arcs. But “The Good Wife” is a deep, hard-nosed, cynical show, and “Vegas” has cheesier instincts. It’s the sort of series that absolutely will show a guy on horseback racing a motorcycle, and have the guy on horseback win. In the show’s climactic chase sequence, Lamb tracks down the murderer as he’s getting into his car. Rather than tear after him, Lamb gets out of the car he’s in, so as to better face down the bad guy and his automobile with just a gun. Ralph would rather look cool and risk getting flattened by a coupe doing 80 than take the villain out the safer way. What a swaggering exemplar of the individual American spirit! Have gun, will do something dumb.