Personally, I’ve been looking to hire a Boss of Me for years now, but qualified applicants (pushy, intimidating professionals) aren’t generally in the market for such a thankless unpaid position. Even knowing this, I hold out hope that one day I might be oppressed by a tyrannical overlord who never tires of saying things like, “What are you reading? Don’t you have a column due in an hour? Close your browser and get to work, maggot!”

Make me a gold-digging sea donkey!
Others must share my longing for a personal oppressor. What else would explain the proliferation of Bossy Expert reality shows from “Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style” to “Flipping Out” to “How to Look Good Naked” to “Make Me a Supermodel.” TV teaches us that, with the right team of despotic consultants, we might shed our sorrowfully incompetent skins and join the über-human race.

Free will should be reserved for people who are already happy with themselves — you know, nut-jobs like your grandmother, a woman who doesn’t go online or watch TV and doesn’t know any better. She’s not aware that her skin is blotchy and her house is cluttered and her wardrobe isn’t doing her figure any favors and her diet lacks flair and her conversational skills need polishing, so she has no reason to look in the mirror and say, “Sweet Jesus, I wish I had the glowing complexion of Cover Girl Niki Taylor!”

It’s no small wonder that your grandmother would make the ideal reality-show guinea pig. The guileless are an easy mark, and provide the perfect foil for the colorful egomaniacs that have become the ruling class of reality TV. Take the imperious matriarch of “Millionaire Matchmaker,” Patti Stanger, whose calling in life involves bringing together two subsets of society that would otherwise have trouble finding each other: men who want women who are hotter than hell, and women who want men who are richer than hell.

“Millionaire Matchmaker” (10 p.m. Tuesdays on Bravo) covers all of the basic requirements of the Bossy Expert reality-show formula: We start with a pushy, outspoken professional, throw in a team of helpful but oppressed underlings, add a few hapless rich guys and a gaggle of gold-digging sea donkeys, braying over the idea of landing a man with lots of cash in his pockets. To these basic ingredients, we add that crucial spice of all reality recipes, shamelessness. Patti doesn’t need to be coaxed into playing the Colorful Egomaniac. She’s more than happy to loudly demean her underlings and her clients for the sake of the cameras.

As Patti drives to one client’s house in a particularly aggressive mood, she snappily informs the camera. “We’re on our way to see Jeff, the millionaire rocker who’s still living in the ’70s. And he’s not really rocking, he’s a software guy, trying to live out his childhood fantasy that didn’t really materialize into anything!” Um, the guy’s got bad facial hair, wears cowboy boots and plays piano — does that really make him a self-deluded asshole?

But don’t tell that to Patti. Patti sees self-deluded assholes … everywhere! “Millionaire men who were perpetually geeks in their youth, once they make a few bucks, they automatically think that gives them the card to get into the cool club. Sometimes they go over the top without an ounce of style or taste. It’s my job to tell them that they don’t look so cool,” she explains. Sweet mother of Mary. What does give you a card to the cool club? Flat-ironed bangs and a TV show on Bravo?

Next Patti visits Julien, a nice-looking but slightly dorky millionaire who lives with two male friends in a crowded, ugly house. Patti suggests that Julien’s choice to have roommates must be about saving money. “Julien is living like a college student when he’s 28 years old … That’s a lazy, cheap son of a you-know-what,” she tells the camera.

Then she asks Julien, angrily, why he’s living in a “dump.” “What girl’s gonna date you if you live here?

“Is that the right girl, that I want?” Julien asks.

“Oh, trust me,” Stanger answers. “Cheapskate that you are, because you’re living in a house like this, no girl with a spine is gonna date a guy…”

Hold on. If Julien’s happy living with friends, what the hell? He’s in his 20s, why not? But Stanger convinces Julien to start looking for a big, expensive place because she knows that if he stays in his bachelor pad, he’ll disappoint the gold-digging sea donkeys she sends his way.

We meet some of these mythical ladies at a party Patti holds for two clients during each episode. Now, far be it from me to cast aspersions on these young women. Even the best of us sometimes think, “Why not replace the regular, reasonably nice guys I date with filthy-rich, reasonably nice guys, and then I can spend most of my time getting spa treatments, shopping for uncomfortable shoes, and jetting off to Italy to snack on cured meats instead of toiling away at a pointless job for the rest of my life?”

The men grin from ear to ear when they spot the hotties that Patti has found for them. Who knew that the promise of cured meats could attract such a favorable flock?

But something interesting happens when these young, sociable ladies meet these rich, socially awkward men. Yes, the men are delighted, and they eye the pretty young things hungrily. But you can see a sick realization flash across the women’s eyes. Suddenly they recognize how effortful it’s going to be, feigning attraction and interest in someone who’s not all that attractive or interesting to them. You can almost read their minds as they stare down at their hands and try to focus. “Can’t we go out on his yacht or fly on his personal jet and drink a lot of good champagne so I can ignore the fact that he has no social skills and nothing to say?”

Yes, “Millionaire Matchmaker” demonstrates very clearly that all work and no play make Jack a dull boy — albeit a filthy-rich dull boy. And while we may feel real empathy in our hearts for the plight of the gold-digging sea donkey — never quite extinct but never truly thriving either — we have a little less feeling for the rich guys, mostly because they are thriving in spite of the fact that they’re hapless little dudes with crappy personalities.

Plus, it’s tough to cheer them on when they say they’re looking for a “Winona Ryder” type who’s “no older than 32″ when most of these guys seem to be over 40. Patti sees long-term problems with matching middle-aged men with women young enough to be their granddaughters, and she seems to enjoy rolling her eyes and grumbling every time she meets another enthusiastic cradle-robber.

Anyway, there’s plenty to chuckle and snort at here, but the bottom line is that a show as hopelessly shallow and cheesy as “Millionaire Matchmaker” should really be more fun to watch. Unfortunately, Patti is so showy about her opinions and some of the scenes appear so staged that it all feels a little forced and stupid.

Why would a rich guy put up with such a bossy woman bossing him around anyway? And more important, how can I find someone that bossy to boss me around, too?

Odd couple
Maybe that’s what Bernard Lafferty was thinking when he went to work for famed tobacco heiress Doris Duke. HBO’s new original movie “Bernard and Doris” (premieres at 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 9) imagines what the relationship between the tycoon and her trusted butler, confidant and friend Bernard might’ve looked like, behind closed doors.

Instead of presenting Doris Duke as a cartoon of the colorful, egomaniacal heiress, Susan Sarandon and director Bob Balaban paint a portrait of a woman whose paranoia and miserly ways arose from a lonely lifetime spent wondering whom she could trust.

At first, when Doris hires Bernard (played by Ralph Fiennes) as a butler, she treats him like just another hand-servant on her staff. And with Bernard’s somewhat creepy devotion to former employers Elizabeth Taylor and Peggy Lee, we imagine that he could be a deluded, nefarious loner who’s secretly casting a greedy eye on Doris’ fortune. Slowly but surely, though, Bernard gains Doris’ trust, and she begins to see him as a kindred spirit.

The growth of their relationship is subtle, and might be lost along the way in less talented hands. But Fiennes and Sarandon are obviously skilled actors who have the range to flit effortlessly from charismatic to creepy and back. Sarandon brings so much heart and flair to Doris Duke, it’s impossible to imagine anyone else doing justice to this role. Sarandon’s Doris isn’t just another rich demon, she’s a self-possessed, opinionated woman who has a real appreciation for intelligence and eccentricity in others. She recognizes that Bernard is unique and gives him a kind of love and approval that he seems starved for. Fiennes, in turn, brings a believability to Bernard, and doesn’t overplay his sexuality (he’s gay). You can see a light go on in Fiennes’ eyes when Doris is drawing him out of his shell.

This is a small story, the kind of film that doesn’t find its way into theaters anymore these days, so it feels exciting to discover such a sure-footed, smart, subtle movie on TV. Instead of giving us the same old story of the rich diva and the sycophant, director Bob Balaban brings to life an unexpectedly sweet and lasting connection between two otherwise isolated, searching people. Don’t miss this one, and be sure to look for my interview with Susan Sarandon on Salon later this week.

Ladies who power-lunch
Speaking of rich, powerful boss ladies, I was relieved to discover that, although NBC’s “Lipstick Jungle” is just as fluffy and soapy as you’d imagine a show based on a book by Candace Bushnell should be, it’s still far smarter and more appealing than ABC’s rich-and-powerful-lady fluff-fest “Cashmere Mafia.”

Where “Cashmere Mafia” is pert and cutesy, “Lipstick Jungle” (premieres 10 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 7, on NBC) is reasonably snappy and substantive. Brooke Shields, Kim Raver and Lindsay Price are all well cast as women who wield power convincingly, and the show doesn’t reduce its confident leads to giggling, insecure teenagers like so many other female-dominated dramas do. Sure, there are a few scenes where Nico (Raver) is rendered breathless and googly-eyed by a younger suitor, but her struggle to justify her behavior and hide the truth from her close friends is treated with the weight that it deserves.

Even Victory (Price), who’s being romanced by billionaire Joe (played by Andrew McCarthy), doesn’t giggle and “aw shucks” her way through her lines, nor does she moon over Joe and his money. She’s much too preoccupied by her stalling career as a fashion designer, so she sweetly but firmly makes it clear to Joe that she doesn’t have lots of time to fly around on his private jet, eating snow crabs and sampling cured meats. (Hey Joe, Patti Stanger has a pretty selection of ass magnets who don’t have inconvenient “careers” or “hobbies” that might stand in the way of your good time.)

“Lipstick Jungle” isn’t perfect, but the dialogue is sharp and funny, and for once, we’re given female characters who don’t sacrifice their dignity or personal power for the sake of another lovable, goofy story line that’s guaranteed not to intimidate female viewers. These women are making tough choices, they’re good friends to each other, and they feel fairly genuine in the show’s first two episodes. Here’s hoping the show’s producers will stick to their guns (even if their overbearing network bosses disagree) and stay committed to these unapologetically strong female characters.

Island living
Meanwhile, I sort of wish the overbearing network bosses at ABC would give some explicit, detailed instructions to the masterminds at “Lost” (9 p.m. Thursdays on ABC), something along the lines of “We can’t spend another season stuck on that damn island trying to figure out who’s good and who’s bad, so don’t try to make us!”

Here’s my beef. (Spoiler alert: If you missed last Thursday’s premiere of “Lost,” don’t read this.) The castaways are about to get rescued. There’s a helicopter and everything. Why not stick with that mood, have everybody hug and cry, get some people on the damn helicopter and have it fly off? Maybe the rest of the castaways have to wait until the helicopter comes back. Eventually, when no helicopter returns, the castaways who were left behind might start to wonder if the rescuers were eeevil, plus they’d get the news of Charlie and freak out. Maybe the castaways on the helicopter are given some explanation as to why they’ll return home without the others. But they go home, there’s a parade, they try to enjoy it all. Of course there are questions looming, plus some mysterious circumstances …

I don’t have it all mapped out. All I’m saying is that, with a rescue, the writers had an opportunity to do something new. Let’s see everyone get excited and stay excited for one episode. Of course one or two characters are suspicious of the whole thing, to keep up the suspense. But let’s see a few of the castaways happily take a helicopter home; let’s see some of them rejoining society and feeling relieved about it for half a minute.

Yes, there are the flash forwards, but they might as well be flashbacks, because they’re just as isolated and magical. Charlie appears to Hugo with ominous warnings. Doesn’t that scene feel like a “Lost” Mad Lib? “[Character name] who is actually [adjective] appears to [character name] as [opposite of adjective] and says, ‘You have to [verb] before [character name] is [past tense verb]!’”

Instead, what do you know? The helicopter doesn’t land anywhere but drops someone off in a parachute, and now we’ve got Henry Gale (or Michael or Ana Lucia or Locke) all over again. Is he good or is he eeeeevil? Let’s hold a gun to his head/torture him/befriend him/ask him questions/put him in a pit in the ground/lock him up and find out!

Obviously some of the castaways are going to make it off the island eventually; maybe it’ll even happen soon. But we need to have some new experiences and stray away from this dominant, ominous mood in every single scene. There have been episodes that were relatively light in the past. It’s not like there can’t be trouble brewing when some of the castaways are excited to leave. Must they all mourn Charlie together, when there’s a helicopter on the way? Must they all struggle with whether to join Locke or not? Can’t one among them be as self-interested as Michael? In the first two seasons, all of the castaways had a lot of flaws. Now it seems like they’re all valiant heroes, each more courageous than the last, one-upping each other with one act of self-sacrifice after another.

And enough with the visions and the magic! They don’t propel this story forward anymore. We know by now that these visions rarely add up or come back into play, so we don’t trust them or take them as anything but “Now the scene gets really spooky!”

This perspective won’t come as a surprise to those of you who gave up on “Lost” long ago (who will chime in on letters to remind us just how long ago you knew that “Lost” was a lost cause) or to those of you who love “Lost” with a passion and find an intricate, interrelated web of meaning in every little detail, but personally, I don’t see how the writers could take a rescue and make it feel like something that’s already happened on the show before.

Don’t forget to boss
I do want to add that mapping out the right path for “Lost” is a seriously difficult undertaking, one that’s a world apart from doing the paint-by-numbers plotting of a procedural drama or even a nighttime soap. The show’s writers are in uncharted territory — or they will be whenever they go back to work. It’s not really their fault that they’re writing the same scenes that they’ve written before, any more than it’s our fault that we’re so lumpy, sullen and slovenly after so many years on the earth, or that we expect to extract so much promise and meaning from our TV sets. Let’s face it, we all need new bosses, bosses who’ll bossily boss us around until we come close to resembling those capable, industrious human beings who walked the earth 200 years ago.

Next week … Fanboys join the fray on “Survivor,” while “The L Word” fumbles but doesn’t drop the soap!

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.