Alpha House

Four senators sharing a Washington house is a promising arrangement for a sitcom and a poor arrangement for anyone hoping to keep a secret. Garry Trudeau's Alpha House finds its comedy in the gap between public authority and the small embarrassments of living with other people.

John Goodman leads an ensemble whose characters spend as much energy protecting their position as doing the work that supposedly earned it. The domestic setting helps. An important man still has to come home, deal with his housemates and discover that somebody else has made his day worse. The jokes are often about vanity and self-preservation rather than the detail of a particular policy.

It is a gentler political comedy than The Thick of It. There is room for the men to be foolish without every scene needing to destroy them, which makes it easy company even when the satire could cut harder.

Choose this for the cast and the household friction. The West Wing offers the more earnest, idealistic view of working in Washington.