Skeet shooting
That’s how I felt after watching the third episode of CBS’s “Jericho” last week (8 p.m. Wednesdays). I really loved the pilot, what with all of the mass hysteria and the voice messages from dead parents and the mushroom clouds billowing in the distance. I loved the apocalyptic gloom that hung in the air, and the way that the townspeople gasped in horror at every new bit of information that trickled in from the outside world. Atlanta and Denver, both flattened by nuclear bombs, and no news or radio or Internet reports about what happened or who could be responsible for such widespread destruction.

Sure, there were little, nagging signs that the show might not hold my interest. Our hero, Jake (Skeet Ulrich), had sort of a blank, wide-eyed, open-mouthed look on his face throughout the entire pilot, which made watching him like staring at a cartoon face that’s missing a few crucial features. His love interest, a blond ex-girlfriend named Emily (Ashley Scott), seemed unburdened by a discernible personality, and his second-string love interest, a more regular-looking, down-to-earth schoolteacher named Heather (Sprague Grayden), showed a remarkable lack of flair and spirit, considering that the end of the world was looming ever present. Mom (Pamela Reed) and Dad (Gerald McRaney) didn’t have much to do beyond fussing over Jake and fussing over the town, respectively. But every time I started to think, “Hmm, this seems a little dull,” someone would have a spectacular meltdown, or folks in town would loot the local grocery store, or someone would end up walking down a freeway covered in dead birds, and those deliciously ominous moments sort of erased the dull moments from my memory.

Still, the second episode was far worse: Criminals from a local prison escaped and took Jake’s ex-girlfriend hostage, resulting in some cheesy slow-motion gunplay so badly directed and edited, you’d think you were watching the student film of a Quentin Tarantino fanatic — you know, the kind of guy who communicates entirely by quoting scenes from “Reservoir Dogs”? Then the nuclear storm clouds threatened, which meant that all of the townspeople had to crowd into a clinic shelter and a mine, and then the mine was (perhaps foolishly?) sealed off with an explosion on purpose, I suppose in order to kill most of the people inside so that they didn’t have to die slowly and painfully from radiation sickness. Meanwhile, a local teenage girl dodged the horrors of radiation simply by taping a plastic tarp to the front door of her big house and spending the day with the local misfit kid. Why didn’t all those townsfolk go to her house instead of crowding into a dusty mine? Well, because, that would prevent the popular teenage girl and the resident weirdo from playing a game of cards and becoming, like, sorta like friends!

As bad as the second episode was, though, I still had hope that Skeet and his one-note pals could rebound in the third episode, perhaps with more gruesome deaths and nuclear blasts in the distance and a few well-chosen signs of fresh horrors to come. After all, how hard is it to make a nuclear holocaust dark and suspenseful? Look how morbid and disturbing the nuclear attacks have been in “Battlestar Galactica” or “24.”

Much to my disappointment, the third episode of “Jericho” was sort of like that third date where you both already know you’re not meant for each other, but you’re trying to determine if you can stand each other’s dull talk and slightly unpleasant physical appearance enough to sleep together once or twice, so at least your investment of time and energy has some (albeit meager) return. But halfway through that third episode, the cavalcade of clichéd characters and situations, coming one after the next, was way too much to bear.

The rain stopped, and the townspeople huddling in the mine were rescued in one of the worst scenes I’ve seen on television in a long, long time. As a shovel busted through a pile of black spray-painted Styrofoam “rocks,” the crowd cheered and everyone lifted their hands above their heads in unison like they were auditioning for the next Super Bowl halftime show. Lackluster Second-String Love Interest discovered that one of the guys in the mine, a pal of hers, had a heart attack, but the Old, Surly Guy With Something to Hide with him didn’t tell any of the doctors present. When Lackluster Second-String Love Interest asked why, Old, Surly Guy With Something to Hide warned her not to poke her head in where she’s not wanted, Scooby-Doo style. What could be worse than pumping up the drama and suspense with pointless “mysterious” distractions that have nothing to do with the crisis at hand?

Then there was the Guy Who Knows Too Much, who put on a special fallout suit and took his U-Haul out to a storage unit, where a 50-gallon drum of some unknown but scary substance was stored. As the Guy Who Knows Too Much was cementing the drum of something-or-other into his basement, his wife (let’s call her “Come Back to Bed, Honey”) descended the stairs and asked if the kids could go to the party in town. (The townsfolk were cooking steaks to brighten everyone’s mood in the wake of the apocalypse.) TGWKTM replied “No damn way,” or some such, and suddenly (speaking of pointless mysterious distractions) we were once again trapped in Betty Applewhite’s basement on “Desperate Housewives.”

That’s not even the worst of it. There were all of these rapid-fire scenes that lasted only a few seconds each, in which one terribly lame plot after another was introduced: Jake’s brother (the Jerk) was revealed to be cheating on his wife with a local bartender (the Other Woman). Jake’s mom (Worrying Mom) wanted Jake’s dad (Workaholic Mayor) to slow down and rest because he was sick, but Workaholic Mayor said there was just too much to do right now, damn it! Meanwhile, Popular Girl’s friends showed up at her house, saw Weirdo Kid and said, “What’s he doing here? Skyler, wait! That guy’s a weirdo.”

Of course, we’re feeling the same wave of disgust over “Jericho,” our good date gone horribly, horribly bad. And the worst part is that the whole trite, predictable mess is wrapped in a faux-warm, all-American, community-spirit, “Go Team!” vibe that takes all of the potential for ugliness and inconsolable weeping and gloom and sugars it up with disingenuous touchy-feely dorkiness. Forget “Jericho,” they should call this stinker “Molested by an Angel.” You can scrub and scrub, but you’ll never feel clean again.

Yes, we probably shouldn’t have had four margaritas and bedded this dud on a whim, but who knew? All that’s left to do is gather our clothes and sneak out the door without waking up the dog.

Revenge of the Smith
In contrast to “Jericho,” CBS’s “Smith” (10 p.m. Tuesdays) didn’t have me at “Hello, I’m Ray Liotta and I’m a high-stakes criminal living a double life.” But it did have me at “Hello again, this is Ray Liotta, remember me? I’m very conflicted about my double life, and my wife, played by Virginia Madsen, is suspicious of me, even though she cheated on me with a dentist, of all people.” I guess I was a little bit preoccupied by the fact that AMC’s “Hustle” and FX’s “Thief” also feature teams of misfits pulling off high-profile burglaries when they’re not having heated, spitty discussions about whether to kill the weak link in the chain whose recklessness is threatening to drag the whole group down with him. “Hustle” is slick and polished, “Thief” is almost too dark and depressing to bear, so what could Liotta and Amy Smart and the rest of the “Smith” team possibly be bringing to the big-heist picture that we haven’t seen before?

Upon a second look at the pilot, the answer seemed to lie in the quiet moments of “Smith,” when Bobby (Liotta) is playing jazz piano in his house and his wife, Hope (Madsen), walks in and just looks at him, trying to figure out what he’s hiding from her, or when Bobby and his team send the body of their fellow conspirator off in a motorboat laden with explosives, but not before cuing up that melancholy Imogen Heap song first. Even though we don’t know Bobby very well yet and we’re not sure why he would risk his seemingly good life for a big pile of extra cash that he can’t even show to his wife, there seemed to be a good pairing of dynamic, suspenseful sequences with more contemplative scenes that use the heavy stakes of the criminal’s life as a metaphor for the heavy stakes of modern family life.

Or it looked that way, at first. The second and third episodes mostly felt like a retread of the pilot, with the same alluring but dangerous heist to execute, the same planning session between key players, the same conflicted feelings and suspicions. During the third episode, Bobby’s crew stole a massive automatic gun from a military base, and then carried out an elaborate plan involving several stolen vehicles in order to commandeer an armored truck, which they’re going need to pull off their next heist. But would it really make sense to steal several vehicles right before you’re planning a major crime? Doesn’t that sort of increase the chances that you’ll get caught before the big event goes down? And if you’re going to hijack an armored vehicle or break onto a military base, why not steal a truck full of cash and gold, or lift some pricey weaponry to sell to terrorist high rollers while you’re at it?

I’m not one to quibble with realism if the stakes are high enough and everyone’s having a good time, or at the very least, their hands are sweating uncontrollably. But unrealistic subplots that don’t even get your heart racing? That’s like making out with a throw pillow.

Barking up the wrong trees
Speaking of games of make-believe, the notoriously imaginative Anne Heche has her very own drama this fall called “Men in Trees” (9 p.m. Fridays on ABC). In this “Sex and the City” meets “Northern Exposure” romp, Heche plays Marin Frist, a relationship expert who discovers her fiancé is cheating on her while she’s visiting a small town in Alaska. Instead of returning home to her life in the big city, Frist decides to stay in Alaska and bug the living hell out of all of its quirky, yet lovable residents. Frist is stubbornly determined to wash that man right out of her hair, so she puts on her boots (the ones made for walking) and hums “Goodbye to You” to herself while hurling her wedding dress over the nearest cliff. OK, maybe she doesn’t wash her hair and put on boots first. Maybe she screeches at a raccoon that’s stuck in her room at the hopelessly quaint but zany bed and breakfast where she’s staying — you know, the one that’s run by the liberated whore?

Are you starting to get the sense that this show gets on my nerves? I just hate that spunky gal character who alternates between her plucky plans and occasional adorable breakdowns, where she screeches or giggles or collapses in a heap on the floor, and someone needs to give her a hug or a kick or a romp in the sack. It’s so Ally McBeal, so Carrie Bradshaw (yes, one of the writers from “SATC” created this show), the latest peppy modern incarnation of Audrey Hepburn from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” But what’s fantastic about Holly Golightly, both in the movie and in Truman Capote’s novel, is that she’s downright odd and it’s tough to tell if she’s headstrong and independent or just deluded and desperate. Bradshaw and McBeal both walked that line, but not nearly as gracefully or as charismatically as Golightly did, partially because Golightly was odd and obsessive and risky in ways that Bradshaw and McBeal never managed to be.

And Heche’s character is the least provocative of all, reduced to stompy tantrums and coyness and fits of grandiosity, all better suited to a teenager. She’s brash and gutsy and strong-willed, sure, but she needs help catching a raccoon in her room and moving the furniture around. She needs a man, gosh darn it! And that would be fine, if she weren’t so exasperatingly cute about it; as if, in order to be charming, she’s forced to do her best impression of a small girl. Why can’t female characters be daring and weird instead of cheeky but slightly pathetic? Why can’t our heroine be ever-so-slightly freakish and curmudgeonly, or quick to anger, or shy and contemplative, or pissed off in a less kittenish way? The only lead female characters on TV I can think of who fit the bill are Starbuck and President Roslin of “Battlestar Galactica” and Felicity Huffman’s Lynette of “Desperate Housewives” (the only remotely realistic housewife of the lot).

The point is that when you build a show around a female character or a group of female characters, there’s no reason they have to alternate between delusional independence and hopeless vulnerability. Great women, from Katharine Hepburn to Joan Didion to Alanis Morissette to, well, Felicity Huffman, have a way of exuding strength and vulnerability at the same time. Why can’t we write more of our modern heroines that way? Why can’t a female character struggle with her emotions and reveal that inner conflict through angry remarks (Huffman), through slightly antisocial, intimidating behavior (Didion, Hepburn) or through boldly confessional outbursts (Morissette)? Why does she always have to sigh and shrug and end up with a cute little dab of chocolate pudding on her button nose instead?

Free falling
But my expectations are always too high during the early weeks of the fall season, let’s face it. So many pilots show potential, only to disappoint. I suppose if you never troll the online dating sites or the pages of TV Guide, you never have to peruse so many potentially irritating or catastrophically dull ways to spend your nights. But without a little research, how will you ever meet the drama series of your dreams?

Even though I’ve had a problem with its smug attitude and smartass remarks from early in our first date, I’m still holding out hope for NBC’s “Studio 60″ (10 p.m. Mondays) (and no, I don’t think that Amanda Peet’s Jordan McDeere is colorful or believable enough to fit the bill of strong but complex female heroine, although she’s head and shoulders above most of the other kewpie dolls). I also have some hope for ABC’s “The Nine” (10 p.m. Wednesdays) and “Shark” (10 p.m. Thursdays) and I want to strongly recommend that you watch NBC’s “Friday Night Lights” (8 p.m. Tuesdays) because I think it’s odd and dynamic — and it’s not getting good ratings so far, so it might disappear without getting a decent shot.

I know, I know. Your dance card is already full. But, like a friend of mine always says, “The right plane can’t land if the wrong plane is blocking the runway.” The same goes for TV pilots and first dates. If you spend all of your nights with that smarmy pug from marketing, you’re never going to find the Laird Hamilton meets Jonathan Franzen meets Johnny Depp of your dreams. Likewise, you have to dabble in a lot of new dramas to find the one that will tickle your fancy, and dabbling depends on your ability to overload your DVR with potential time wasters. It’s laborious, sure, but who knows? Maybe someday you’ll find yourself curled up with a drama that doesn’t bore you with its repetitive stories, overwhelm you with its trite observations or irritate you with its arrogance and swagger.

Yes, it looks like it’s time to rent all five seasons of “Six Feet Under” again.

Next week: “Lost,” “The Nine,” “Shark” and the rest of the dramas I’ve callously forsaken my weekly reality fix to watch. Also: The joys of Sundance’s “Iconoclasts.”

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.