You don't know Jack(ie)

 Yes, I know that L.A. is a thriving metropolis filled with interesting people and good food and breathtaking vistas. But it's also, occasionally, a stinking, smoky hellhole. To be fair, the smog is nothing like it was back in the early '90s -- except when the hills are on fire. Then the skyscrapers are obscured by dense smoke, the kids and the dogs have to stay inside, and every hour of the day looks like sunset. Sadly, though, the news lady on TV has had so much Botox that she can barely move her mouth, let alone offer up a facial expression appropriate to the spectacle of million-dollar homes engulfed in flames.

This is the ultra-crabby, dystopic perspective I bring to the finale of "Nurse Jackie," which I cannot, in good faith, allow to pass without comment. Because like Los Angeles, which either looks green and charming or overheated, smoggy and plagued by its ill-considered, unsustainable nature, "Nurse Jackie" is alternately winning and pointless, witty and painful, spirited and wildly frustrating.

Sure, we could rave about how convincingly Edie Falco inhabits her role as a devil-may-care E.R. nurse with a drug habit and an unfortunate propensity for cheating on her perfectly wonderful husband with a nice-guy pharmacist. We could discuss Eve Best's delicious turn as the unrepentantly self-centered Dr. O'Hara, or Anna Deavere Smith's almost cartoonish take on unforgiving hospital bureaucrat Mrs. Akalitus.

Or, we could muse about the sociocultural ramifications of not one, not two, but three TV shows about nurses on the schedule this summer and fall, from Showtime's "Nurse Jackie" to TNT's "Hawthorne" to NBC's forthcoming "Mercy," all focused on these tireless heroines struggling to keep their patients alive and well. In the depths of the recession, the harried leisure classes of "Lipstick Jungle" and "Dirty Sexy Money" and "Privileged" have been elbowed out not by doctors or lawyers or Indian chiefs, but by common nurse ladies, fighting the good fight for the common man, armed only with the stubborn, righteous insistence that doctors are, more often than not, self-serving twats. Naturally I don't need to tell you that this us-against-them routine gets old faster than the mumbling zombie woman on the local news, struggling to emote as her city is overcome by hellfire and damnation. And I don't need to mention that "Nurse Jackie" should, by all rights, be the dark and somewhat jaunty antidote to the self-serious foolishness of "HawthoRNe" (oh God, that name alone!) and "Mercy."

 Ultimately, there's only one thing you need to know about the first season of "Nurse Jackie": When the first episode begins, it's tough to understand why Nurse Jackie would cheat on her perfectly dreamy husband, and when the last episode ends, we still don't get it. In other words, we spend 12 episodes watching Jackie act like an asshole without ever understanding why.

 OK, fine, she's an addict. She has a problem, and she's in denial. She still tries, sure. She wants her family to be happy. She really loves Eddie (Paul Schulze), the pharmacist. They have great sex. So do she and her husband. Both of these guys are just swell. But we knew all of this by the end of the first episode, and we never learned a single new thing since then.

 And also, how plausible is it that an exhausted nurse with a serious pill problem and two little kids at home is having wild and delicious sex with not one but two men? Not only that, but a dashing young doctor in the E.R. also decides that this frankly rather haggard, depraved-looking woman is his one true love?

 Just as Los Angeles pretends to be a suitable home for several million human beings, when it is, in truth, a horrible sprawling sham packed with overpriced stucco hovels on tiny tracts of land, a gigantic human mistake that demands resources pumped and trucked and shipped in from faraway places, so, too, does "Nurse Jackie" pretend to be a comedy (or a drama?) suitable for several million viewers, when it is, in truth, a disjointed, reckless sham packed with bewitching jokes, a wicked romp that ultimately goes nowhere. At the end of the season, Jackie is the same mysterious blank slate that she was at the beginning.

And when Eddie finds out that she has a husband and kids, what happens? Nothing. Eddie gets drunk and acts weird, apparently without blowing Jackie's cover, and Jackie is left freaking out and scarfing drugs, just like she was at the beginning.

That's not a cliffhanger. That's a flying leap off a cliff, landing with a Wile E. Coyote thud in the dust. We watch the dust cloud rise and then, the credits roll. Without any character development, there is no story. We feel about as confused as Eddie does when he sees that Jackie is living a double life. He never really knew Jackie at all, and neither did we.

 

Blowing in the wind

But while I'm feeling crabby and unforgiving, it's probably time to conquer the worst new show of the fall season, hands down: ABC's "Cougar Town" (premieres 9:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 23), a comedy that's at once insipid, noxious, offensive, and just plain bad  -- hilariously bad, in fact. This is a show so utterly devoid of comedy that it'll make you laugh out loud.

Courteney Cox plays Jules, a desperate, jittery, outspoken, pathetic middle-aged woman with a son who's constantly embarrassed by her. Isn't that karmic retribution for having played the sort of hopelessly stylish, effortlessly wealthy, easily embarrassed young person on "Friends" that cringes at ever becoming pathetic and middle-aged? Just as Jules publicly humiliates her son, she also publicly humiliates Monica Gellar.

But most of all, Courtney Cox should really consider firing her agent and her manager and breaking up with every single friend who allowed her to sign on to this wretchedly, hideously awful sitcom. In fact, it boggles the mind that she's not smart enough to notice that this show is absolutely cringe-inducing and scary.

There are so many examples of creepiness here that it's hard to know where to start. In the first minute of the show, Jules examines her body flaws in the mirror and announces that she looks "like a farm animal." She summarizes by proclaiming, "Crap." And we're off to an enlightened and oh-so-amusing start!

But let's skip the ridiculous details and get right to Cox's best lines:

"Look at that cute guy right there. I'd like to lick his body!"

"You know how it goes, I was 19, I started thinking with my coochie-cooch and then bam, I had a kid!"

"Man, you are hot as balls!"

Yes, she did actually say "coochie-cooch." Jules isn't just an embarrassment to moms or to women in general, she's an embarrassment to humanity at large.

But the best part is when Jules announces to her younger lover, "OK, I'm going to do something that I have not done in years. I told my husband that I hated it, but I don't hate it, I love it." You can only assume that she's going to pull out a bag of cookies or some other misdirection. Instead, she starts unbuttoning the guy's pants. Get it? She's going to give him ... a blow job! Teehee!

Then -- you guessed it -- her son and ex-husband walk in. "There's my boy!" Jules yelps, and her husband says, "Ohhh, you said you hated that!"

Why is comedy this bad simultaneously depressing and vaguely decadent, like smoking crack with your mentally unstable cousin?

Not that I'm suggesting you should move to "Cougar Town," but you should at least stop by for a visit, so you can marvel at the depraved goings-on along with me. After all, there'll be plenty of mediocre new shows on TV this fall, but it might be years before a sitcom this unnervingly awful comes along again. And if there's one thing that's more romantic than ant freeways and billowing clouds of smoke and overpriced desert real estate, it's got to be deeply stupid comedies about pathetic middle-aged women, the roof rats of this golden, glowing age.

While our TV shows paint us all as easily distracted, neurotic, spoiled, grumpy human beings, we chuckle along as if we're above it. "Ah yes, a dark comedy -- a warped, overly cynical take on life!" we say, then blow off even more work to troll the Internet for something shallow or despicable or depraved to distract us from our lazy, irritable, vainglorious selves.

Drugs, not hugs

"Quiet and mean, those are my people. I don't do chatty." -- Nurse Jackie

Imagine if Carmela Soprano woke up this morning, got herself a gun, and blew Tony Soprano's head off. Then, picture Carmela selling her McMansion, cutting up her credit cards, cutting her hair short, throwing out her make-up, and moving to Manhattan to take a job as a kick-ass vigilante nurse, happy to break the rules whenever it means helping ordinary, everyday people to make it through a hard time.

But in this age of darkness, we can't very well stop there, now, can we? Next, we give Carmela a nasty addiction to pain pills, a self-involved doctor friend who takes her out to expensive sushi lunches, a pharmacist lover who slips her free Vicodin, and a sweet husband and two little daughters waiting at home, unaware of Mommy's secret life.

"That doesn't sound like Carmela at all!" you say? Exactly. Welcome to Showtime's "Nurse Jackie" (premieres 10:30 p.m. Monday, June 8) a new half-hour dramedy that's more drama than comedy, showcasing Edie Falco's numerous charms outside of the realm of suburban Mafia angst. Jackie Peyton is a (mostly) good egg with a sharp tongue who doesn't do chatty but who's willing to go to any length to alleviate her patients' suffering.

"Doctors don't heal, they diagnose. We heal," Jackie tells newbie nurse Zoey (Merritt Wever), but doesn't fully explain her policy of healing her patients by any means necessary, whether it translates to protecting them from uncaring hospital administrators, stealing drugs for them, allowing their children into the E.R., respecting their requests to decline treatment or putting a cocky but negligent doctor in his place.

When she's not preventing the system from crushing the sick and uninsured, Jackie is crushing Percocet into her morning coffee. She may have started taking the pills to treat chronic back pain she developed from being on her feet all day, but now it's clear that Jackie is hooked. Against the backdrop of an incredibly difficult, hectic, largely thankless job, it's obvious what the pills give her: an ability to beat back the darkness and cope with whatever unpredictable, messy challenges get wheeled into her E.R. next.

Jackie navigates her world with a dissatisfied smirk plastered on her face, like she's steeling herself in anticipation of the next blow. Every now and then, though, her eyes grow wide with empathy, and we see how much she cares. Once the moment passes, Jackie returns quickly to the picture of no-nonsense efficiency, instructing rookie nurse Zoey not to be so cheery and not to say hi so many times a day, or informing her that only idiots and magicians say "Ta da!" In another actress's hands, this would constitute an implausible tightrope walk, but Falco lends Jackie grit, compassion and an unapologetic, frank flavor of selfishness. This is the toughest sort of character to play, an impossible knot of contradictions, at once funny, kind-hearted, dismissive and slightly nihilistic. It's easy to see why Falco chose this role.

The colorful range of characters around Jackie are equally entertaining, from her close doctor friend Eleanor O'Hara (Eve Best), who's more concerned with pricey lunches and expensive clothes than her patients (albeit in an likeably edgy, British Catherine Keener sort of way) to Mohammed De La Cruz (Haaz Sleiman), a fellow nurse who alternates between supporting Jackie and giving her a hard time. Their cynicism is counterbalanced by the dorky, tiptoeing cheer of Zoey, whose irritating interruptions often serve as a somewhat naive but necessary voice of reason among the world-weary longtime denizens of the E.R.

But even with such a jaded and narcissistic circle of friends, Jackie's affair with Eddie the pharmacist (Paul Schulze, who also played Edie Falco's priest love-interest on "The Sopranos") is tough to parse. Maybe Jackie started sleeping with Eddie to get more pain pills once her legitimate prescription wore out, but now she genuinely loves him -- or at least she seems to in the first episode. Obviously an affair is within the realm of possibility, even for a morally upright person like Jackie. But once you meet her handsome, adoring husband Kevin (Dominic Fumusa) and her two young daughters, the whole picture gets a little confusing. Yes, it would've been a cop-out to make either her husband or Eddie unlikeable. But to present a stridently self-righteous, smart, reasonable woman who's sleeping with two really great guys? That not feasible to me, even with loads of pain pills and an unbelievably stressful job in the mix. Jackie is shocked when Dr. Cooper, a young physician new to the job, grabs her breast and tells her it's a "Tourette's response to stress," but her own response to stress is even more fantastical than his.

 Unfortunately, the affair doesn't make any more sense by the show's sixth episode than it did by the end of the first. How does someone like Jackie end up constructing a double life for herself? Yes, it's easy enough to say that this is a side effect of addiction, that it comes with the territory. But after watching half a season of this show, there should be more hints to Jackie's problems in the mix, beyond the pills. We can see that Eddie may have a more refined, intellectual side than Kevin (who's a bartender) does. But as long as you're working with a dark comedy, why not give one or both of the men some obvious flaws, instead of presenting them both as lovable, great guys? There's something slightly disingenuous about this picture.

TV darkness can take many forms, and after years of watching unnervingly optimistic tripe, it's more than welcome. But sometimes darkness is used to hide the flaws in a concept that doesn't completely hold together. Under the cover of darkness, "Nurse Jackie" veers into wild and woolly territory without clarifying its characters' motivations or its central premise.

Naturally we're willing to forgive these flaws at first; there are more than enough snappy insults and bad attitudes around to keep us happy for a while. But several threads of the story are picked up and dropped again without warning. Jackie is annoyed when Dr. Cooper (Peter Facinelli) strikes up a friendship with Eddie, but it's not quite clear why. Jackie looks likely to get into trouble with her boss, Gloria Akalitus (Anna Deavere Smith), but any real consequences are obviously being saved for the last few episodes of the season.

We do get a glimpse of Jackie's concern for her family when her older daughter, Grace, starts staying up late obsessing about the bubonic plague. Her teacher calls Jackie and Kevin into a conference to tell them Grace has been drawing drab pictures with no sun in them. Jackie is defensive at first, but later asks, "Who draws Florida with no sun? It's the goddamn sunshine state!" Instead of agreeing to treat Grace, Jackie draws a bright yellow sun on her picture, demonstrating her attempts to will her problems out of existence. Unfortunately, though, that subplot disappears almost entirely for two episodes, so that we pretty much forget about it.

Obviously if "Nurse Jackie" were more of a comedy and less of a drama, it might not feel like a problem. It's not as if we demand to understand the motivations and inner workings of Jack Donaghy of "30 Rock" or Michael Scott of "The Office." But a dramedy faces the unfortunate challenge of having to walk a line between believability and farce. If you really want your show to be character-driven -- and there's no doubt that's the aim here -- you have to make sure the characters make some logical sense. Even if they behave illogically, it should all fit together, however sloppily, into some form the audience can connect with.

Showtime is a sucker for half-hour dramedies with an appealingly modern, smart tone: "United States of Tara," "Weeds," even the relatively disappointing "Californication" appeared stylish and fun at first. But clever quips and absurd, edgy plots that lead nowhere are getting harder and harder to rally around. As the first season of "Tara" drew to a close, something about Tara's (Toni Collette) self-consciously casual-cool demeanor started to make her feel far less authentic than her relatively whimsical, absurd alternate personalities. Similarly, "Weeds," which begins its fifth season the same night "Nurse Jackie" premieres, constantly threatens to spiral into such darkness that it'll never find its way out again. While Doug and Andy and the boys always have their high times to cut the tension, this season a pregnant Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker) finds herself trapped in a severely twisted relationship with a menacing Mexican drug lord who, through gritted teeth, threatens her into seeing a Spanish-speaking gynecologist of his choosing. Ha. ha. Hysterical.

The point is, unlike the family sitcom or the procedural drama, the half-hour dramedy genre is relatively young, and that shows in its wobbly plot lines, unsteady character development and unfocused premises. For all of its charms, "Nurse Jackie" needs to offer a little more than an enigmatic nurse and a parade of clever grouches. Sometimes rather than seeking out thoughtful ways to address and resolve the questions and problems they presented at the start of the season, TV writers today hide behind witty quips, lovably flawed characters and the chaos of a morally unsteady universe. In other words, they do what we do: When confronted by complexity, they hide behind insults. It works for a while, but then some larger guiding principle has to come into play. Even to the most pessimistic among us, the darkness gets a little old if there's no sense of order or redemption to balance it out. When will TV pull out of its current nose dive into the inky abyss and find some new flavor of sweetness and light to believe in? Would it kill them to draw a shiny, yellow sun into the picture for a change?

Each year, we nurture hopes that summertime will provide a respite from the impossible expectations of modern life. Even if we have very few vacation plans and tend to work just as hard during the summer, we still stubbornly imagine ourselves with sun-streaked hair, breezing around in linen pants, reading great novels while sipping on icy, fresh lemonade poured from a nearby pitcher. There are no dirty rugs or sulking dogs or neglected babies in our summer fantasies. But the truth is that most of us spend our summers the way we spend the rest of the year: watching "Weeds" and "Project Runway" and "So You Think You Can Dance" while the baby rocks in her automatic swing, patiently awaiting the birth of self-awareness and its accompanying pervasive sense of failure.

The living is queasy

Aw, come on! Darkness and pessimism can be invigorating, fun, even! You just have to lean into the horribly oppressive alienation of our sad little lives in this impoverished modern era, then you'll catch the spirit. Catch that spirit, everybody!

Just look at "Nurse Jackie" (premieres 10:30 p.m. Monday June 8 on Showtime), an unremittingly dark half-hour comedy with a premise I haven't figured out yet (but which I'm contractually obligated to figure out by next week). Jackie (Edie Falco) is a very effective and efficient nurse with a handsome husband and two adorable daughters. She also has a serious pill problem, a lover who doesn't know she's married, and an unnervingly cynical, hopelessly bleak worldview. Jackie demonstrates very clearly that there's real joy to be found in darkness. She also demonstrates just how irresponsible and wrong the modern urge to put yourself first can be. Jackie is the sort of flawed heroine who's made for a world in which self-involved doctors consume sushi lunches while their patients suffer, and bad mothers stick their babies in automatic swings with the soothing "cricket" sounds turned on so loud that their toddler daughters ask, "Where are the crickets?"

At any rate, "Nurse Jackie" is my new favorite show of the summer, so don't miss it. It comes on right after my old favorite show of the summer, "Weeds," which returns for a fifth season next week (premieres at 10 p.m. Monday, June 8, on Showtime). Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) -- see also: the most selfish mommy in the known universe -- is back and worse than ever. She's pregnant with a Mexican drug lord's baby and her kids are starting to hate her outright. If she keeps it up, she'll end up like Celia Hoades (Elizabeth Perkins), who's been kidnapped by her own (abusive, bitter) daughter, Quinn, only no one cares about her enough to pay the ransom. Congratulations to Showtime, for boldly going where no cable network has gone before in bringing us the Selfish Mom Hour. Selfish moms everywhere salute you!

Yes, I recognize that just because you're a mom and you're selfish, that doesn't mean that you're plucky and cute and people should care what you have to say. Instead, think of the Selfish Mom as an archetype, one that serves as a conduit for all of our self-flagellating and thwarted expectations in these trying, alienated times. Having been flooded with too much information on the "right" way to do everything under the sun, we all find ourselves falling short of the mark, over and over again, each day. This must be why shows like Bravo's "Project Runway" (premieres Aug. 20) and "Top Chef Masters" (premieres 10 p.m. Wednesday, June 10) exist -- so we can feel a cathartic purging of self-hatred as we watch professionals flailing their way through impossible challenges and, time and again, failing miserably. They become wildly unprofessional, cursing and sweating and lashing out defensively. Reduced to a jumble of nerves, they begin repeating self-hating mantras for the camera: I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, and people don't like me! Meanwhile, at home, we feel oddly calm and relaxed for the first time all day.

Since Bravo's "Project Runway" replacement, "The Fashion Show" (10 p.m. Thursdays), hasn't been nearly as lively or as compelling as the genuine article, you have to wonder if the spinoff "Top Chef Masters," which features world-renowned chefs instead of newbies, will have the same charms as the original. At least the producers are the same, and no one will be asked to incorporate silky gray harem pants in five different "looks." (Aren't the challenges on "The Fashion Show" awful? This is the worst copy of a good show since the achingly bad Bravo experiment "Step It Up and Dance.")

Gaylords of the dance

Speaking of dance shows, "So You Think You Can Dance" (currently airing on Fox, check listings) is back this summer (and again in the fall), and while the audition phase is less than compelling, this is one of my all-time summer favorites. Controversy has already plagued (or blessed?) this season of the show, thanks to some dismissive comments judge Nigel Lythgoe made about a pair of male auditioners who ballroom danced their way across the stage together. Lithgoe said that he couldn't really get into watching two men ballroom dancing. No big surprise there, really: Lythgoe is hopelessly stodgy and closed-minded for a 50-year-old. He also doesn't like punk rock hairstyles or ripped clothes or self-congratulatory gestures onstage, and he often urges particularly fey dancers to dance in a more manly fashion. If you're in a forgiving mood, all of the above could be excused as aesthetic preferences, however mired in sociocultural prejudices they might be.

Nonetheless, after outrage was expressed by GLAAD, Lythgoe apologized profusely for his comments, thereby cementing the growing impossibility of being an outspoken asshole in public. Now, is that what we really want, people? Do we really want a world devoid of outspoken assholes? PTA meetings will lose their spark, reality TV will go dark. Who will we jeer at over our pudding cups each night?

Unfortunately, this probably means that "So You Think You Can Dance" will soon lose its delectably dorky, unself-conscious tone (particularly since it's set to air in a fall prime-time spot on Fox). Yes, Lythgoe and fellow judge Mary Murphy alternate between an open-minded embrace of any heartfelt artistic expression (to the point of shrieking and weeping openly) and a prickly conservative stance that feels horribly out of touch with the times. But that peculiar friction constitutes one of the primary delights of watching this show. What will the horny old choreographer and the ballroom nut job think of this hip-hop routine? Will they throw their hands to the heavens and praise the Lord for such purity of motion, or will they make some unsubtle comments about a dancer's costume that clearly indicate that Mary thinks she looks too butch, but Nigel wants to do her? This is the Simon Cowell Factor: Their lustful gazes and petty grievances and unfair assessments make us love our favorite dancers all the more feverishly.

At any rate, just know that this show is seriously addictive (if you're in the market for a new addiction, and who isn't?). For a more enlightened yet less aesthetically rigorous offering, you might sample the hip-hoppier-than-thou MTV version, "America's Best Dance Crew" (premieres 10 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 6) with its break-dancing, stunt-sporting, signal-flashing teens. Despite the ne'er-do-well "looks" they sport, Shane Sparks and the other judges recognize that these are good kids, kids who know how to work hard, kids who almost uniformly found meaning in their lives by moving their bodies to the sweet strains of "Let Me See That Booty" and the like. "America's Best Dance Crew" is sort of the scrappy, younger, ghetto cousin to the ballroom dancing and preteen-girl-focused cheese of "So You Think You Can Dance," but together they make a complete meal for former dance team geeks, "Solid Gold" fans and general-purpose dance-loving freak jobs nationwide.

Post-dramatic stress syndrome

But we've only scratched the tippity top of the glacier of new and returning shows sliding your way this summer. Don't forget everyone's favorite freelance spy dramedy "Burn Notice" (9 p.m. Thursday June 4, on USA), which returns with its usual, faintly cheesy, speedy finale resolution. After dropping out of the bad guys' helicopter into the ocean and swimming ashore, Michael is up to more trouble within minutes, thanks to a hairy assignment from an old friend.

Afterward you can check out "Royal Pains" (premieres 10 p.m. Thursday, June 4, on USA), a new drama about a doctor, Hank, who loses his job and ends up becoming an on-call physician for high society clients in the Hamptons. Now, most USA shows are a little cheesy on the surface, but this one is also filled with cheese, the kind of cheese that frat boys eat late at night when they're drunk. Like a cross between a dumb version of "House," a smart version of "90210" and a modern version of "MacGyver," "Royal Pains" features lots of hot girls in bikinis, macho emergency doctor maneuvers with plastic baggies and duct tape, and jokes with the word "dude" in them. Hank actually says to his brother, "Do me a favor? Never speak to me again" – and it's supposed to be funny. Like some of the CW's less captivating offerings, this show is a cheese pizza with cheese-stuffed crust. But if that sounds tasty, by all means, enjoy!

Do we have "House" or "Grey's Anatomy" to blame for the fact that medical dramas seem to be making a major comeback? In TNT's "Hawthorne" (9 p.m. June 16), Jada Pinkett Smith plays a nurse, while Fox's "Mental" (9 p.m. Tuesdays) is about an unconventional doctor in a psychiatric ward and "The Listener" (premieres 10 p.m. on Thursday, June 4, on NBC) centers around "a 25-year-old paramedic who has a big secret -- he's a telepath." How original they all sound! Wake me up when it's over.

AMC's "Mad Men" isn't back until August, so let's distract ourselves with more new shows, none of which sound all that good. "The Philanthropist" (premieres 10 p.m. Wednesday, June 24, on NBC) stars James Purefoy (Mark Antony from "Rome") as a rich Romeo who becomes a changed man, and "Merlin" (8 p.m. Sunday, June 21, on NBC) is a 13-episode update of the story of the infamous sorcerer in the city of Camelot, "in a time before history began." Wow, when did history begin, anyway? When jalapeno poppers were invented?

But don't get so distracted by magic that you forget about the second season of "True Blood" (9 p.m. Sunday, June 14, on HBO), in which we rejoin Sookie, Bill and the rest of the gang for more atypical vampires and stereotypical rednecks. And if Sookie's Southern belle feels a little aimless, there's always the focused, ever-hungry, vaguely neurotic energy of Brenda Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) of "The Closer" (returns 9 p.m. Monday, June 8, on TNT).

For those with a thirst for military-themed entertainments, it might be time to peruse the much loved domestic drama "Army Wives" (third season premieres 10 p.m Sunday, June 7, on Lifetime) or the much ignored mystical drama "Kings" (8 p.m. Saturday, June 13-July 25) -- which has been canceled, sadly, but NBC is burning off the second half of the season on (cough, cough) Saturdays. I may be all alone, but oh yes, I'll be watching.

Beyond the fail

Oh sweet Lord, what else, what else? "Entourage" is back in July and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" is back in August and this fake cooking show called "Food Party" (premieres 11:15 p.m., June 9, on IFC) is supposed to be funny, plus HBO has some show about a well-endowed young man, aptly titled "Hung" (premieres 10 p.m. Sunday, June 28) (although at first I assumed the guy from "Top Chef" got his own spinoff). It's all so confusing, there's just too much TV out there, like that goofy Sci Fi show "Eureka" (9 p.m. Friday, July 10, on Sci Fi) or everyone's new favorite adventure-job reality show, "Whale Wars" (9 p.m. Friday, June 5, on Animal Planet) or a million other things. I know I've failed you by not listing every single show, but for the love of Don Draper, remember, summer is for sipping lemonade and feeling smug about your linen pants! Now go get some stupid linen pants and stop thinking about TV already.