After a few months of really frothy, juvenile programming, I’m so hopelessly mired in the superficial, puerile charms of the worst that TV has to offer, the relatively restrained fall lineup doesn’t hold much appeal for me. Even “The Amazing Race,” a much higher-quality show than, say, “Rock Star,” seems way too self-serious for my taste. Damn it, if I can’t hear the worst version of “Don’t You Forget About Me” ever performed, I’m just not interested. I mean, come on. Can a bungee-jumping Road Block really compare to “rocker” Dana thinking she’s a rebel for getting a treble clef, of all ridiculous band-geek things, tattooed on her hip, or Dave Navarro telling freaky Zayra that if the show were called “Rock Star: Pluto,” she would definitely win?

So snap to it, ham biscuits! For every minute that passes, you’re missing another really gimpy, harebrained show that’s airing right now, and if you don’t take advantage of it, once that far weightier fall programming rolls in, you’re going to feel like you passed up your chance to experience something bewitchingly infantile, something sublimely insubstantial. Don’t cheat yourself out of a big, sugary serving of empty summer TV. You’re going to pine for it when it’s gone, mark my words!

An eeeevil dermatologist?
At least tune in for “Big Brother All-Stars” (9 p.m. EDT Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays on CBS) soon, before the demonic winning streak currently enjoyed by Dr. Will and Mike Boogie, aka “Chill Town,” finally comes to an end.

For the record, I’ve always hated “Big Brother,” from its monotonous set to its dippy competitions to the disingenuous brayings of Julie Chen to the repugnant imbeciles they cast on the show. Nothing could be a purer waste of time than watching these sad people plot against each other for three full hours a week.

Here’s the twist: This season you’ve got the usual band of twerps and meatheads, sure, but two deeply disturbed sociopaths are among them, and even though they’ve stated their intention to foil everyone else’s plans, even though they’re utterly untrustworthy, even though one of them has actually won “Big Brother” before, they’ve still managed to manipulate their way out of danger, week after week.

These two aren’t just run-of-the-mill schemers, either. Their game plan constantly changes. As the other houseguests piss each other off, or make strategic moves that are destined to come back to haunt them, Mike and Will always seem to come up with plans that don’t threaten to turn the other houseguests against them. I don’t even understand how they do it, but somehow they can manage to kiss ass, strategize, put bad ideas in other people’s heads and remain loyal only to themselves, and yet it never seems to get them into trouble. In fact, the two are gaining favor with everyone in the house, while James and Janelle and Marcellas and Danielle are all starting to have targets on their backs for their sneaky maneuvers. Basically, Will and Mike are the puppet masters of the whole house, and no one else even realizes it.

You have to trust me, it’s a heady thing to watch these two in action. Take this past Tuesday. Will and Mike basically lost the veto competition, even though they were supposed to be working to help one of their fake alliances, because they traded in points for prizes — Will got $5,000 and Mike got a plasma TV and a trip to Aruba. Since the game was set up so that no one would know who took the prizes, not only did they lie about what they took, but, recognizing that they needed to create another enemy for the group to evict, they “confided” in a few people that they both thought it must’ve been Marcellas who took all the prizes for himself. We see this plan occur to them, we see them giggle about it, and then, we see it actually working. For those of us who have a soft spot in our hearts for scheming sociopaths, scenes like this are just too rich to miss.

And best of all, they’re as incredulous and as amazed as the viewers at home. They keep sneaking off to the Diary Room together and laughing at how completely blind everyone is to what they’re doing. If they weren’t so damn good at it, it might be infuriating. But seeing the other slow-moving animals of the house get duped is irresistible. Basically, “Big Brother All-Stars” is like an antidote for every terrible minute of any season of “Big Brother” you’ve ever watched in the past. Now if only there were such a remedy for the time you’ve wasted in crappy relationships…

High times
For those in search of slightly more substantive fare, the second season of “Weeds” premieres this week (10 p.m. EDT, Monday, Aug. 24, on Showtime) and damn, is it good. For more details, look for my review Monday morning on Salon. In the meantime, though, let me throw “Weeds” fans a little teaser by telling you that the theme song, Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes,” will be performed by a different musician or band each week. The episodes I saw featured Elvis Costello, Death Cab for Cutie and Engelbert Humperdinck, and they were all fantastic, but I’m particularly looking forward to the versions by Ozomatli and Regina Spektor. It’s official: “Weeds” is the coolest show on TV.

Mean girls
You know, if you’re so uncool that you care about cool (which I am), and if “Weeds” is the coolest show, then “Laguna Beach” (premieres 10 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 16, on MTV) may be the most odious, revolting show on television. In fact, “Laguna Beach” is a program so abhorrent and vile that it can make you deeply ashamed to be a human being. Seeing these vicious little mutants milling about against a golden, glowing landscape, prattling on in their tedious native tongue about nothing in particular, driving around in their luxury cars, shopping endlessly for ridiculous, overpriced clothes, throwing wretched little parties, and stoking the fires of each other’s worst impulses is like having your body hair tweezed off by an angry drunk. This show will suck the soul right out of your body and leave you rotting like lunchmeat in the sun. “Laguna Beach” makes “Big Brother” look like “Touched by an Angel.” In short, it’s a foul, reprehensible exercise in shallowness and spite that makes me feel angry, irritable and sick to my stomach every time I watch it. Needless to say, I can’t stop watching it.

Of course, we all recognize that most teenagers are wretched little beasts with nothing of interest to say. We know very well that teenagers are designed to torture and punish everyone around them with the sound of their shrill, screechy, callow voices, squealing out their shallow, hurtful or just downright stupid thoughts. But what’s truly disturbing about these creepy little freaks is that, even though they may be the most deeply uncool humans on the planet (if you’re uncool enough to care about that sort of thing, which I am), they nonetheless share in the illusion that they’re the coolest humans around, that the word “cool” begins and ends with them. Not only are they incredibly uncool to begin with, but they’re also uncool to care so much about who’s cool and who isn’t, plus they think that they’re the very coolest, which is the least cool thing of all! And sadly, studies have shown that no amount of belittling them, demeaning them publicly or smacking them right in the middle of their empty faces has the slightest impact on the delusional level of narcissism that flourishes in their teenage minds!

This is also why we’re all a little nostalgic about our teen years. Even the shittiest teenage experience carries with it the vague glow of promise, or at least the notion that, no matter how crappy everything is, it would still look pretty good in a music video.

These delusions are part of what make teenagers so unbearable. And if you think average, everyday teenagers are scary, throw the little cads into a sunny, lustrous setting, give them big fistfuls of free cash and credit cards and shiny cars with leather interiors, and watch them evolve instantly into fiendish, self-serving demons more hideous than can be imagined.

Which brings us to the third season of “Laguna Beach,” where we meet our brand-new heroine, Tessa, and her friend Raquel, or “Rocky” for short. Tessa was once friends with Kyndra, a catty wildebeest with triple-processed blond hair and big, dumb, bovine eyes, but their friendship fell apart when Kyndra began to surround herself with other mean-spirited cows and left the more mild-mannered, thoughtful Tessa in the dust. Those familiar with the first two seasons of “Laguna Beach” will immediately wonder why Tessa is the lead character, here, instead of Kyndra. After all, Kyndra, like Kristen and L.C. before her, is the vaguely glamorous ringleader of a big group and appears to have many of the inarticulate Neanderthal guys in the school at her beck and call. Or, as she so gracelessly puts it, “I’m glad that we have our boys. I love that we own them, basically.”

Kyndra obviously belongs on top of the wildebeest food chain, as evidenced by her ability to conveniently ignore the fact that her crush, Cameron, the beefy dim-bulb who everyone has declared the hottest guy around, is hanging out with Jessica. (You might remember Jessica as the slightly irritating pushover who followed Jason around like a lost puppy last season.) Why Jessica, who has graduated from high school, is content not only to demean herself with a high school junior, but to compete for the guy with other high school girls, is anyone’s guess. Oh yeah, it’s all being broadcast on national television! I almost forgot.

Cameron’s motivations are a little easier to parse. Apparently having spent the summer months alone with his Abdominizer, his brand-new six-pack abs are on full display, and it seems he’s going to have a lot of success leveraging his overdeveloped man-titties for some grade-A booty and a lot of air time. The first order of business? Take Jessica on a romantic date to a restaurant, sit at the bar, and then watch the basketball game the entire time she’s talking. Next? Go to a party at Kyndra’s and spend the night with her. Dude! Way to pin the tail on the whoring sea donkey!

Keep in mind, Cameron the two-timing skeezer has already been referred to as “a good guy” by half of the women on the show, while all of the same women simultaneously lament that “Girls are so mean” and “Girls are sketchy” and so on. There’s a double standard at play, to be sure, but there’s also something else: The real drama here is between women, not men. Ultimately, men just aren’t formidable enough or interesting enough to the girls to constitute worthwhile jousting opponents. Even the cameras seem bored with Cameron and the other chumpy high school dudes, limiting coverage to the same “So what’s up?” conversations between two guys, as they limply throw the basketball around or play a few sloppy holes of golf together.

Meanwhile, though, what the ladies of “Laguna Beach” truly savor is not the booty or the conquest itself, but the notion of having “won out” over the other ladies. Naturally, then, the three-headed hydra of doom herself, Kyndra, hardly feels remorseful after a night with someone else’s guy. “Are him and Jessica still together?” she asks her too-cool-for-school friend, Cami. “It doesn’t matter,” Cami responds, affecting that air of indifference that, however transparent, seems pretty effective on her tribe. “Does she like him?” Kyndra persists. “Because if she does, that makes it more fun!” Ah, the breathtaking sight of a Bad News Jane, taking her first shaky steps in a quest to become a ruthless, backstabbing slut muffin!

Are these girls really that sketchy, though, or are they much smarter than they look, smart enough to know that the producers and the audiences at home want a catfight more than anything else, perpetuating that age-old story about how women are nasty and merciless to each other? Or is the main narrative here about how rich teenagers are malignant predators? What’s worse, an obvious double standard, a bunch of truly nasty girls, or the idea that some normal teenagers of average nastiness are willing to play up their basest urges in order to please the sick, aging voyeurs (like me) at home on the couch?

Regardless of the true nature of its subject, one thing is for certain: “Laguna Beach” is so repugnant and contemptible, watching it is just like sticking your head into a bucket of lukewarm split-pea soup and then wandering, blind, over the nearest cliff.

Open up your eyes
In other words, it’s a very special show for the masochists among us. Strangely enough, though, renowned masochist Morgan Spurlock, who directed the Oscar-nominated documentary “Super Size Me,” has created a show that’s the polar opposite of MTV’s teen-reality purgatory: “30 Days” (9 p.m. EDT Wednesdays on FX). Unlike “Laguna Beach,” a reality show that gives you the temporary illusion that most people are really stupid and sick and rotten to the core, “30 Days” is a reality show that broadens your horizons while reviving your hope in humanity. In fact, watching “30 Days” is sort of like lying at the bottom of a cliff, covered in split-pea soup, when a good Samaritan wanders by, wipes off your face, gives you a ride to the nearest diner, and buys you a cup of coffee and a big slice of hot cherry pie. Mmm, pie!

Now in its second season, “30 Days” takes average people and places them in situations that are likely to open their minds or at least change their perspectives. During the first season, host Spurlock and his girlfriend tried to live on minimum-wage salaries for a month, and the results were terrifyingly bleak: They couldn’t afford to pay their rent or feed themselves, and their jobs were so tiring and awful that they came home grumpy and mean, with serious back pain, to boot. Last season, the show also sent a Christian to live with a Muslim family, sent a straight man to live with a gay man in the Castro, and put the concerned mom of a drinking teenager on a monthlong alcohol binge.

This season the show is tackling even weightier fare. The premiere episode focused on Frank George, an anti-immigration activist who was sent to live with a family of illegal immigrants. Although George remained staunchly opposed to illegal immigration, he grew close to the family over the course of the month. After visiting the ramshackle homes and awful conditions that the family left behind in Mexico, he recognized that the family didn’t have much choice but to seek out another life — it was a matter of survival for them.

In upcoming episodes, atheists clash with Christians and pro-lifers take on pro-choice activists. One of my favorite episodes, though, (airing 10 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 16) introduces Tom, a former football player with stress- and anger-management issues, to some New Age methods for relaxing and expressing his emotions. At first, the producers thrust Tom into some seriously alienating situations, including an awkward ritual featuring middle-aged women chanting, “We all come from the goddess, and to her we shall return!” while Tom looks ready to crawl out of his skin. Tom’s girlfriend, Misti, is less than pleased with the whole thing, clearly equating the word “spiritual” with some kind of voodoo that will steal Tom’s soul and bring God’s wrath down upon them. (That’s “Laguna Beach” that does that, Misti, not New Age religion.) Misti also seems a little bit jealous of Tom’s female life coach, who spends all this time talking to Tom about his emotions and giving him advice about letting go of his anger — the same advice Misti has been trying to give him for years, only now, suddenly, Tom is listening.

But when Misti finally meets Tom’s life coach, she really likes her and changes her mind about the whole thing. And you really have to hand it to the producers for finding Tom in the first place — he, and most of the other guinea pigs willing to engage in this elaborate social experiment, are really open-hearted, lovable people. Even though they might seem reticent and closed-minded at first, their eyes are usually opened by their exposure to other people’s lives and perspectives. “It’s just been wonderful for us,” Misti tells the life coach. “I mean, we’re so much happier, and he is so much happier.” Aww.

If you miss the whole season of “30 Days” — and you really shouldn’t — don’t you dare miss the sixth episode, in which Spurlock gets sent to prison for almost a month. If you’re lucky enough not to have any sense of what life in prison is like, brace yourself — it’s not nearly as relaxing or as interesting as it looks on “Prison Break.”

In conclusion
While the last sweltering days of summer wear on as slowly as this very long column does, don’t be fooled: You only have a few short weeks left to savor the most ludicrous and vacuous TV programs of the year. Even as you anxiously await a whole new slate of shows, eager to see Michael C. Hall playing a murderous forensics expert (Showtime’s “Dexter”) or to catch Aaron Sorkin’s “Sports Night”-like drama about a “Saturday Night Live”-style skit show (NBC’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”), I want to urge you to live in the moment. The sweet nectar of summer TV is still yours for the taking! Don’t let the cool winds of autumn blow through before you indulge in your share of foolish summer fare.

Next: “Weeds” screws with suburbia! Then: Don’t miss Salon TV Week (Aug. 21-25) featuring our fall preview, our third annual Emmy poll, the shows we’d most like to cancel, and much, much more!

What no one tells you, of course, is that the former inevitably turns into the latter. No sooner have you put the finishing touches on your masterpiece than a phalanx of professionally smooth humans gathers to discuss how to peddle your brand to the appropriate demographic. “Who is your demographic, do you think?” they’ll ask you.

I don’t know, you’ll answer. Crazy people? Angry people? People who just want to create something lasting but end up pissing away their prime in extended Twitter exchanges and tedious teleconferencing calls?

Desperately seeking status

Just don’t say so out loud. Too many sullen artists and brilliant recluses have made that mistake before you, and they have a laundry room filled with glorious unsold paintings or brilliant unsold manuscripts to show for it. Face it, you’re going to have to sell something, eventually. Even surgeons and priests and teachers and executives at charitable foundations (especially them) have to sell something. Don’t stay in denial about the need to sell forever, because, short of genius grants and the kindness of strangers, the creative life isn’t possible without sales.

That said, it’s hard not to get fatigued by the swirling, bullshit-polluted waters of the promotional universe, with its gluppity glup and shloppity shlop. Think too long and hard about selling yourself into a new life, and soon you won’t be able to separate your “brand” from your actual personality, or differentiate between your friends and your professional networks. Then you’ll need to seek professional help — whether that’s with a psychotherapist or a social media marketing consultant is anybody’s guess.

HBO’s “How to Make It in America” (premieres 10 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 14) dives straight into the eternal hellfire of a self-promoting universe without apology, and, bewilderingly enough, does so with a scruffy, scattered, early-30-something dude who can’t seem to decide if he’d rather pass out business cards or pass out from drinking too many vodka shots at a loft party in Williamsburg. Our hero Ben (Bryan Greenberg) faces that timeless dilemma: follow another pipe dream, or pass the pipe?

Befitting a man who’s half stuck in the past — drinking too much and waking up in unfamiliar apartments — and half stuck in some dingy present he never anticipated, Ben wears a haunted look of ambition and dread and hope and self-hatred. Even when he tells you his next big plan, there’s a wavering in his voice that asks, “Will I ever make anything of myself or am I just a big loser?”

This makes the half-hour dramedy “How to Make It in America” a little bit like “Entourage,” except without the money, the fame or the hot girls. (“Entourage” executive producers Mark Wahlberg and Rob Weiss are also producers on this show.) Well, no, there are hot girls here, too, but they won’t sleep with these guys, because they’re obviously not friends with a big-time movie star.

Yes, as annoying as it is to watch Drama and Turtle harvest lip-glossy sea donkeys with their flaccid pickup lines, it’s even more disturbing to watch guys not get the girls because they’re not well-connected. No one is rising above anything in this picture; the underlying ego-driven, self-promoting, screw-or-be-screwed backdrop is still there, it’s just that we’re hanging out with the have-nots this time instead of the haves. When Ben’s friend Gingy (Shannyn Sossamon) tells him she’s going to give him one of their friend Tim’s photographs as a gift, he replies, “That’s great, I mean these are like a framed reminder of what losers all my friends are.”

Ben is kind of a dick, but you can hardly blame him. He’s constantly confronted with the fact that he’s stuck in limbo, that he hasn’t actually achieved anything, that his dreams might never come true. Ben’s ex, Rachel (Lake Bell), has moved on to a guy who’s opening a bar in Manhattan. When Ben tries to hit on a girl at a party, she introduces him to her other suitor at the party, saying, “Marco is a painter. He just got back from a solo show in Mexico City.”

This is the third show on HBO’s roster (along with “Bored to Death” and, to a lesser extent, “Flight of the Conchords”) that dabbles in the hipster-manchild milieu of Brooklyn, displacing Carrie Bradshaw’s Manhattan as the place where strivers dream big and sleep around and fumble for a cigarette in gloves with the fingers cut off. 

Despite his comment about what losers his friends are, everyone around Ben seems to at least be pursuing some creative goal, whereas Ben works in retail, moons over his ex, and frets about being a nobody — that is, until he and his friend Cam (Victor Rasuk) dream up a scheme so crazy, it just might work!

Your own personal interest in “How to Make It in America” mostly relies on whether you can relate to Ben’s plight of drunken despair mixed with uneasy ambition (I certainly can) and whether you want to relive those years (I certainly don’t), let alone relive them against a backdrop of apparently soulless, skin-deep debauchery. 

That said, Ben and Cam have their share of unsophisticated, naive charms. They’re at least a little grittier and more imaginative than the first-year corporate lawyers of ABC’s “The Deep End” or the competitive doctors-in-training of “Grey’s Anatomy” and the other cute professional-class underlings that we’re supposed to feel sorry for because — oh dear! — they’re not big swinging dicks yet. On those shows, the stakes have to be artificially pumped up by cancer and alcoholic moms and married lovers because otherwise, would we really believe that whether or not “Grey’s” Christina Yang gets to practice cardiothoracic surgery techniques before she actually starts a cardiothoracic surgery residency is going to determine her fate as a doctor?

Ben, on the other hand, is reduced to hanging out at the end of a long table at a bar, hoping to get a few minutes of face time with fashion designer John Varvatos, because he needs some connections to start his designer jean business. When he asks the guy next to him, “You a friend of John’s?” the guy responds, “No! I’m a friend of his, and he’s a friend of a friend of John’s,” you can’t help but cringe. At least we’re provided with a reminder of the sorts of things most of us would never be willing to do for money, fame or even hot girls. Even after kissing ass with reckless abandon, Ben and Cam are only granted an informational interview with one of Varvatos’ associates, who immediately tells them that they’re kidding themselves.

Meanwhile, even Ben’s egocentric blowhard friends are reduced to hustling constantly, whether they’re successful or not. “I didn’t find photography, photography found me,” Ben’s friend Tim (Is that Billy Lush?) tells some strangers at his gallery opening. “I was living in a halfway house, I stole a camera from The Wiz, and I just started shooting. I mean, true art is all in the streets, everything else is bullshit. By the way, I’m having a very special deal on my 20 by 24 prints …” See also: Johnny Drama, take deux.

But the lowest moments of the show come when Ben and Cam bicker over whether or not they should dip into criminal territory to get the ball rolling.

Cam: Shady or not, at least I’m still going for it, not working for the man like you.

Ben: What are you, 12? How long are you going to keep saying “Fuck the man” for?

Cam: Until we are the man!

Hold on a minute. Was that Turtle talking?

So that’s what it all boils down to: Ben and Cam want to be the man. They’re not designing jeans because they’re passionate about fashion — not as far as we can tell, anyway. They just want to have more money and get laid more often.

If this were a show about creative passion, then maybe Ben and Cam would be a little more interesting than the glossy professional yuppies on every other channel, straining to make that promotion and bag that babe. Unfortunately, as Ben and Cam demonstrate, more often than not the desire to “make it” is exactly as vague and empty as those two words imply. 

“How to Make It in America” may have set out to create a humbler, more down-to-earth version of “Entourage,” but it mostly succeeds at reminding us that not having fame or money doesn’t necessarily make you more down to earth. From world-famous pop stars like John Mayer to that kid who made fun of your shoes in the fifth grade, douche bags are born, not made.

Sure, it starts out innocently enough. “Addy” (Addison, played by Kate Walsh) is dashing around the medical offices where she works, and she bumps into some snag: the practice’s budget is in the red or someone forgot to make more coffee in the break room or someone’s wife stopped by to call her a whore. Addy doesn’t take kindly to such stressors – you’ll recall that her character moved from Seattle Grace (on “Grey’s”) down to sunny L.A. for a change of scenery, and so Shonda Rhimes could build a whole new show around a manic, eye-rolling, sexually compulsive redhead who’s also – you guessed it – the best gynecological surgeon anywhere in the known universe.

Like most busy and important surgeons, Addy spends most of her time mooning over some man or blurting out long-winded tirades about how everything is all mixed up inside of her, sort of like the spunky heroine of a Beverly Cleary novel, except with shinier hair and eyebrows plucked into a skeptical, vaguely demonic arch that says, “I’m not buying it, mister!” and also, “Should I sleep with you now, or later, during the strummy indie pop ballad montage?”

Anyway, Addy and her ragtag assortment of new-age-cliché-spewing, middle-aged, oversexed colleagues get into a colorful bickering match, and then – and this is where you have to start watching your back – a doe-eyed little child is wheeled in or hobbles in on his own or is led in by an obviously screwed-up drug addict of a parent, and even though at first it just looks like a minor subplot, soon a gaping hole opens up in the sexy-single-doctors-argue-flirting universe and the entire show is swallowed up by a deep, black abyss of sniffling toddlers with terribly negligent or uncaring parents and dead moms and single dads who can’t hug their own children without giving them wretched diseases, and before you know it, you’re surrounded by snotty tissues.

You think I’m exaggerating. So let’s just review the imperiled-child subplot on the last few episodes of the show, shall we?

Subplot A: Adorable saucer-eyed blond boy answers door, insists his mom is “a really good mother” in heartbreakingly earnest tone, but then reveals that she’s a hoarder! He’s living in a puddle of his own filth! The cast on his arm is infected! Mommy, meanwhile, can’t explain any of it to the drippy therapist lady Violet (Amy Brenneman). Finally, Child Protective Services is on its way over to take the little darling honey lamb away from his Mommy! Oh nooo! At the last minute, Mommy breaks down crying and admits that three years earlier she dumped her husband for no good reason! One day her ex picked up their daughter for his weekend visit and … they both drove over a cliff and died! It was all Mommy’s fault for dumping her perfectly good man, and for not letting her daughter stay home (she wanted to stay home with her brother, who was sick, but Mommy wouldn’t let her!) and, well, that’s why she started hoarding, the poor, poor woman! But look, she’s ready to make a change! She just threw out that bag of junk! And that one! Sniff, sniff.

Subplot B: Dell, the plucky male midwife at the office, has a pretty little daughter, Betsy, with his wife, who’s a former drug addict. As he’s driving away from the house one night, it explodes into flames! His wife and child are seriously injured! It turns out his wife was cooking meth on the stove – and Dell had found a pipe earlier but still left his daughter alone with his wife, so it was all his fault the whole thing happened! Betsy wants to see her mommy to say goodbye before Mommy dies but Dell won’t let them see each other. Mommy dies! Betsy is furious and hates her daddy forever and ever!

Subplot C: Woman gives birth to baby, but won’t even hold him after he’s born, because all she wants is the cord blood, which she needs to save her twin daughters’ lives. But there’s a hitch; there’s only enough to save one daughter. Oh God, how will Mom and Dad ever choose between their two little girls? Mom flat-out refuses to choose, but Dad admits that he has a favorite, which prompts Mom to tell Dad that he’s going to hell. Mom and Dad cry, baby boy cries, twin daughters cry, Addy cries, etc. Finally one daughter gets sick and they give the cord blood to the other one, and of course the camera is there so we can watch the whole family tell her, “Sorry, honey, but we’re going to save your sister and let you die.” Naturally, instead of telling them all that she hates their guts, the girl says something crazy like “You must survive!” to her sister, and then valiantly prepares to die as we far less valiantly cry our eyes out.

Those stories are just the tip of the iceberg. I also remember an episode where two parents ditched their kid, then admitted, when questioned, that they did it because the kid was, like, a major incovenience. Then there was another couple trying to have a baby just to harvest the cord blood. There was the single dad who couldn’t be in the same room with his immunity-compromised older daughter because he would get sick and probably die if he did, but eventually he couldn’t stand to see her alone anymore, so he left his toddler son behind, even though that meant he’d die and leave the kid fatherless. (And yes, we watched as he reunited with his daughter while his heartbroken toddler cried outside the door.)

How do the writers even come up with these scenarios, anyway? Do they just sit around in the writers’ room saying, “Hmm … Would it be crazy to have a kid eaten alive by enormous rats while his parents looked on, helplessly? Could we do that? What about a flesh-eating virus, that could work, couldn’t it?”

The strange thing with “Private Practice” is that you think you’re watching this middle-aged, professional-class, not very funny, not very sexy version of “Sex and the City,” and then suddenly you’re surrounded by miserable, weeping children and bad, sick, confused, exhausted parents. Next time we’re looking for those kinds of kicks, we’ll skip the little shop of melodramatic horrors and hang out in the sick kids’ waiting room at the local children’s clinic instead.

“It’s the Others, dude,” Hurley answers. “They caught us … again.”

Oh dear. It’s the Others (again), and they caught us (again). And just in case the repetitive nature of this show is, ahem, lost on you, the entire episode seems to be made up of nothing but questions.

“Who are you? Why are you holding us here?”

“I just lied to him, didn’t I?”

“So did they tell you why they burnt me with a hot poker?”

“Who do you care about, Kate?”

“So, what happened to your handcuffs?”

“Why are they after you? What did you do?”

Of course, after the discovery of the hatch or Charles Widmore’s evil corporation or the Dharma Initiative’s disturbing experiment, things really had to get simpler. Blaming misguided scientific experiments or some corporation? Maybe in 2005, but these days that stuff is beyond played. It’s the bread and butter of “Fringe” and, Christ, “Eureka!” and probably five or six shows on Nickelodeon and ABC Family, for that matter. No, far better just to scrap all of that and go back to the one thing that everyone scoffed at in the very beginning: the smoke monster!

And by the smoke monster, of course, we mean a pure, simple force of evil, now embodied in the dead, eeeeevil Locke. So even as the questions fly about, we’re just biding time, because all of the various folds that made this show intriguing – character studies, well-scripted flashbacks, unpredictable power struggles, retro eeriness that conjured up the Milgram obedience experiment – all of these things are flattened out into Good vs. Evil. In fact, everything about the current course of events feels like a retread of a really bad Indiana Jones movie (“Indy, cover your heart!”).

So mystical guy/other Other Dogen tortures Sayid as a “test,” then admits to Jack that they were planning to poison Sayid:

Dogen: We believe he has been claimed.

Jack: Claimed? By what?

Dogen: There is a darkness growing in him, and once it reaches his heart, everything your friend once was will be gone.

Jack: How can you be sure of that?

Dogen: Because it happened to your sister.

Oh my god! Finally a truly shocking revelation: Locke is Jack’s sister!

No wonder they, like, totally never, ever got along at all, dude!

OK, sure, he’s probably talking about Jack’s half-sister, Claire. Another question answered with a question. Claire is evil now? And yes, it’s almost enough to keep you watching, if you didn’t suspect that, in the end, it will all boil down to explosions, fisticuffs and a few mediocre revelations trumped up to be shocking and weighty. But then, if there was one thing we knew when we started watching this show six years ago, it was that the ending would be a disappointment. That’s just the smoke-and-mirrors nature of the smoke monster.

Don’t tell that to the promo team at ABC, though. Immediately after the last scene of Tuesday night’s episode, we cut to a preview for the next episode with a voice-over that bellows, “This is it! The final episodes of television’s biggest phenomenon are here! The time for questions is over!“

Come on, guy. The time for questions is so not over. But you had to go and say that, didn’t you? Now we’ll tune in next week in spite of ourselves, hoping for some real answers for once, and at the end of another hour, we’ll say to ourselves, “Yep. They caught us … again.” 

The Puppy Bowl

Maybe the men in shiny white tights no longer seem like adequate visual eye candy to match your outsize libido, or maybe you’re so old that what really makes your heartbeat race uncontrollably at this point is the sight of a 4-month old Chihuahua-pug mix, clumsily chasing a squeaky football toy across the goal line while a 3-month-old Lab-collie mix pounces on her own tail. Does this mean you’re a sad shell of your former self, or does it simply mean that you’re finally mature enough to acknowledge that nothing can make you lose sight of your own mortality quite as quickly as the sight of baby animals cavorting?

This year the festivities (3-5 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 7, on Animal Planet) include bunny cheerleaders, hamsters flying a blimp, and a kitten halftime show that’s guaranteed 100 percent clean and devoid of nipple flashing. And remember, your kids will enjoy the kittens a lot more than listening to Grandpa humming “Pinball Wizard” along with the Who, who are playing at halftime on the real Super Bowl.

The Puppy Bowl even features a human referee, who makes calls like “unnecessary ruffness.” Yes, sounds like you’d better watch with the sound off, or risk being so thoroughly polluted by Excessive Cuteness (also a personal foul) that you end up adorning your back dashboards with plush toys or take to wearing rainbow suspenders without irony for the rest of your days on earth, a style choice that’s at least as bad as singing along to “Won’t Get Fooled Again” for the 50,000,000th time in your life.

The Who?

Remember the old adage, “Those who never stop singing ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ are destined to get fooled more often than anyone else”? Still, nostalgia has a way of making fools of all of us. What else can explain why the network geniuses would turn back the clocks and break out another boomer indulgence for the halftime show this year? Let’s see, there was Springsteen, Tom Petty, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney … Apparently in the wake of nipplegate, TV execs suspect that if anyone under 65 is involved in the show, it’ll immediately devolve into a debauched, orgiastic spectacle of biblical, traditional-family-toppling proportions.

Why is it, though, that when marketing and development and publicity people want to cater to “the mainstream,” they’re always torn between peppy preteens, country-pop sensations, and guitar-solo-wielding retirees? When you turn on your TV set for some big concert, why is it always a prepubescent hottie you’ve never seen before or the classic rock radio that was playing when your high school boyfriend drove you to Hardee’s in his yellow Pinto for the first time?

News flash! Pete Townshend has revealed a part of the Who’s set list! It seems they plan to play — wait for it — “Baba O’Riley,” “Who Are You,” “Pinball Wizard” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”! Man, I can’t wait to hear “Pinball Wizard” again, I haven’t heard that song in at least a week now. But speaking of being damned for all time, there’s always …

Faith Bowl III

It’s only natural that after several hours of watching various manly Christian hunks point toward the heavens and offer a big shout-out to the Man Upstairs in the wake of each particularly effective tackle or 5-yard gain, you’ll want to pay homage to the big boss-man in the sky yourself. Why not flip over to the Faith Bowl III on your local Catholic network, where “professional Catholic athletes” will “discuss how they live out their faith in the public arena of professional sports and what challenges to family life they face.” I can imagine a variety of challenges to family life that might come up for professional athletes, from locker room bare-ass bumps (or “moon landings” — thank you, “Modern Family”)  to the steady parade of bunny cheerleaders and assorted roving rodents in heat wandering around after every practice, anxious to snag a man with a million-dollar salary and glutes of steel.

Panelists will discuss “a sound Christian family life, and the important role of a husband and father in being a ‘true man.’” But unless the panelists are going to demonstrate their true manliness by disrobing and then killing gigantic roaches lurking in the shower or putting on some tight short-shorts and soaping up one of the luxury vehicles parked in their driveways, we’re not sure about the visual interest of this segment. The show’s producers might consider swapping out former baseball star Mike Piazza for someone who’ll look a little hotter loading up a washing machine wearing a French maid’s uniform, like, say… pretty much anyone else.

But speaking of offensive, there’s also …

The Ball Bowl

OK, fine. Comedy Central’s Super Bowl programming block is actually called “Tailgate Party 10,” but come on, it’s a ball-themed movie marathon that includes “Meatballs,” “Spaceballs,” “Balls of Fury” and “The Nutsacker.”

OK, I made that last one up. But speaking of far-fetched tie-ins, don’t forget…

The Toilet Bowl

Yes, the DIY Network just had to find the most fragile of threads to herd audiences from the big game to its third annual potty-centric festivities. Yes, thanks to the Broke But Aspirational Housewife Channel, while your resident ball-scratchers are fully engulfed in America’s yearly, fully sanctioned plunge into semi-violent homoerotica, you can sneak off to the bedroom TV set and escape into a world of dream bathrooms, bathroom makeovers and extravagant trips to Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Fascinating, really, how one’s fixation on potties seems to correspond inversely to one’s fixation on potty humor. You’re either the sort of animal who repeats a fart joke from “Spaceballs” or you’re the kind who daydreams about having a bathroom the size of a kitchen (and a kitchen the size of a living room, and a living room the size of a basketball court).

And then there’s Matt Muenster, a darling little morsel of a home contractor who’s happy to fill the Nate Berkus role in the American housewives’ extreme makeover fantasy, bathroom remodeling edition. If Mike Piazza won’t put on a bunny costume and retile our half-bath, we’re pretty sure that this smiling sweetie will. Mmm, look how he can caulk and talk at the same time! We ladies love a truly adaptive male — particularly on a day when our own captive beasts appear incapable of doing much more than grinding potato chip crumbs into the rug every time one of their boyfriends on-screen crushes one of his boyfriends on the field.

So let’s see: Puppy lovers, nostalgic boomers, homoerotic beastmasters, Christians, the testicle-obsessed and the bathroom-fixture-fixated. That pretty much covers all of us, doesn’t it?

Congratulations, TV executives! You’ve reduced the American population down to six key demographics. Just recognize that Christians don’t buy stuff, puppy lovers get distracted easily and wander off, the bathroom-fixture-fixated are prone to start cleaning their own bathrooms during the commercial breaks, and nostalgic boomers fall asleep by 9 p.m. — presumably because they’re hoping that, with a little more sleep, they won’t get fooled again tomorrow.

Not bloody likely. Either way, enjoy the nacho-cheese-and-beer-induced paralysis and have a happy Super Bowl Sunday, America!

Oh yeah, and his back hurts like crazy when he’s on his feet all day. In other words, you’d have to have ice water flowing through your veins not to enjoy this elaborate P.R. experiment in spite of yourself. It’s pretty tough to resist the heartwarming tale of Larry O’Donnell, president of Waste Management, who gamely agrees to pretend to be a new hire named Randy Lawrence who’s training in several different low-level positions within his company. Larry is eager, he says, to get a closer look at how the business functions and what the experience of working its lower-level positions might be like.

And sure, Larry is likable enough in his role as a humbler, entry-level version of himself. He does seem to feel horribly guilty for the ways that his company’s policies have been misused or misinterpreted by supervisors, leading to humiliation, inconvenience or overall job dissatisfaction of the ranks. One low-level supervisor runs to clock in after lunch to avoid having her paycheck docked by her boss; a trash collector pees in a cup while she’s out collecting trash, because there’s no time to stop and use the bathroom; a female office worker holds down four different positions at the company at once even though she’s only paid for one job, and she’s about to foreclose on her dream house. (Imagine how the company’s publicists and the show’s producers drooled when they wandered across that very timely P.R. gold mine.)

The workers involved all seem very capable. Larry, meanwhile, can’t do much of anything right in his role as a regular working Joe. Delightfully enough, a supervisor named Walter fires Larry after watching him haplessly attempting to pick up trash on a littered hillside for just a couple of hours.

“Nice workin’ with you, but you just don’t have it,” Walter tells Larry.

“Walter is the only person who ever fired me in my whole career,” Larry says. Well, Larry, that’s because you haven’t technically been working all these years, nor have any of us who sit in front of our computers or talk on the phone or go to meetings all day long, not compared to what working-class people do all day. And when you see Larry in action, you sort of have to wonder how the man worked his way up the ladder in the first place. Meanwhile, Fred, a guy who cleans out Waste Management’s porta-potties swiftly and efficiently without ever complaining about the work, a guy who coaches Larry enthusiastically all day long, seems like natural management material.

“We’re like hunters, we see her prey, we creep up on it,” Fred tells Larry the day they work together, referring to a cluster of portable toilets.

Larry is truly impressed with Fred’s work. He really is. In fact, his experience doing these crappy jobs for his own company will forever change his management style — that’s what he tells a gathering of employees at the pep-rally-style conclusion of the show. And really, he does seem genuine when he says it. But short of seeing Fred promoted and watching as raises are awarded to every last one of the capable workers we met, should we care? Shouldn’t all CEOs be forced to do the really bad jobs at their companies, so they understand how their passing decisions and cost-cutting maneuvers affect real human beings?

It would be nice if this sort of thing might happen without the cameras running. It would be nice if businesses simply started to police themselves, to take on a commitment to fairness and justice instead of simply answering to the board and the stockholders and the bottom line.

That’s a little too much to expect — or at least that’s what the captains of industry and the Once-lers of all stripes tell us. So, instead, we’ll have to soothe ourselves with publicist-invented fairy tales.