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This may be the line that Jessica Lange was born to say, in the role she was born to play, on a TV show perfectly suited to her fluttery intensity. Her character Constance delivered it over a tight shot of a ham festooned with moist pineapple slices being thrust into the camera's lens, as if the show were being broadcast in 3-D. It was a perfect kick-off to "Smoldering Children," the 10th episode of the first season of "American Horror Story."

Written by "X-Files" veteran James Wong and directed by Michael Lehmann ("Heathers"), the hour greatly escalated the madness on this already demented show. Created by "Glee" executive producers Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, the series seems to be inventing a new kind of horror -- a 21st-century, short-attention-span-theater version, with no lulls. The traditional buildup to the big scare? Booooo-ring. Perhaps operating under the assumption -- not unwarranted -- that most viewers are watching the program on DVR or illegal download and will just fast-forward to the "good parts" anyhow, they've decided to save us all the bother. Every few seconds there's a fabulously bitchy one-liner, a grim bit of exposition or a surprisingly deft transition between the two, or a beating or stabbing or disembowelment or horrendous searing of flesh, or a faintly S&M-dungeon-flavored sex scene, or a revelation that a character you thought was alive was actually dead all along, or that the heroine has been impregnated by both her husband and by a black-rubber-suited spectral hunk and is carrying both of their children.

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Tonight's installment of the boxing drama "Lights Out" (10 p.m./9 Central), "The Shot," is a Get on the Train episode -- modest and economical, yet so densely packed that I've seen it three times but continue to notice new things. (FX has posted the first couple of episodes here if you want to catch up.)

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Yes, of course the governments of the world are a big joke, society is full of shit, rules are made for breaking, common wisdom is anything but wise, blah blah blah. You won't find any arguments from us there. But that doesn't mean we're going to run around setting shit on fire. Walking on the wild side, shunning conformity -- that kind of unfocused lashing out sounds so exhausting. Who has the kind of time and money it takes to exercise their free will anymore?

Maybe if we were loaded and had lots of handservants to keep us organized and vacuum our floors and watch our kids, then we could lounge about, chain-smoking and questioning authority and such. Surely filthy rich capitalists have the resources for extracurricular sticking-it-to-the-man types of activities. Yes, once we're landed gentry, then we can challenge the dominant paradigm at our leisure, just like Karl Marx and his tony surrealist friends!

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All of this questioning can make me long for the sociopathic days of my youth, when I cast aside notions of my own responsibilities in favor of questions like: What's his problem? What's her point? Why isn't he in love with me, when I'm obviously delightful? Am I drunker than everyone else here?

Strangely, I still wake up feeling confused and exhausted just as often.

Am I good enough? Obviously not. Where's the coffee?

Just one word: Plastics

The insecurity of adulthood looms around every corner this season on "Nip/Tuck" (premieres 10 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 14, on FX), a show that has reinvented itself more times than most of the plastic surgery addicts who frequent the offices of McNamara/Troy. After all, since its first season back in 2003, "Nip/Tuck" has been, at various times, a medical soap, a melodrama and a murder mystery. But based on the unexpected hilarity of this Wednesday's season premiere, "Nip/Tuck" probably should've been a comedy all along.

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And has there ever been a more depressing sign of TV's demise than the move by NBC to give Jay Leno, the epitome of a guy who's flatly bad at his job but continues to be promoted for reasons utterly mysterious to mortal man, a whopping five hours of prime-time real estate, thereby saving themselves from the unpleasant work of finding worthwhile programming to fill their nightly 10 p.m. slot? 

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It's important to be spontaneous in life (it'll keep you young!) as long as you take the proper measures to beat every last remaining drop of spontaneity out of each new situation (it'll keep you alive!). This is the carpe diem paradox: You can seize the day all you want, as long as it doesn't involve risking your life or tapping into your retirement savings.

Maybe if we didn't need so much complicated paperwork and so many high-priced consultants just to live responsibly in this modern world, it would be possible to stop and smell the flowers. But to stop and breathe in the sweet scent of floral blooms without calculating the tax ramifications, the subsequent loss in income and the potential damage you'll incur to future earnings isn't just irresponsible -- it's downright reckless.

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Professional, upbeat, focused, detail-oriented people are just creepy, let's face it. Maybe that's why most of us instinctively distrust politicians. "He really seems to have his shit together," is the natural precursor to the question, "What's wrong with him, anyway?" It's not that we're driven to find some hidden flaw; it's that most of us can't personally comprehend what would motivate a person to get their dry-cleaning done in a timely fashion. There's just something a little nefarious about maintaining a consistently polished image.

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These days, crazy is the new lovable. All you need to get viewers hooked on a character is a succulent psychological disorder or two: Awww, he's so obsessive-compulsive! Look, an alcoholic with violent mood swings! How cute! Her sense of self is so malleable. Oh, I love it when she gets all socially withdrawn and displays flattened affect like that!

Lead characters still have back stories, but they're usually accompanied by a psychiatric interpretation that justifies a whole host of dangerous quirks, from grandiosity to paranoia to sociopathic tendencies. Robert McKee's screenwriting bible "Story" has been replaced by the DSM-IV: Writers simply close their eyes and point to a page, then delight in the possibilities presented by long lists of lively maladies and disturbing behavioral tics.

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But now they're all a Google search away: the foot fetishists, the lactose intolerant, the Dungeon Masters, the chronically fatigued, the Sailor Moon fan fiction writers, the plushies. Today, instead of making friends with like-minded hobbyists and Hobbits, you just wander around alone on eBay, or write elaborate posts on Amazon about your Japanese anime-punk wiki and your Kenyan emo and the really great Czechoslovakian graphic novel you're reading.

Nowadays, the underground is aboveground, and subverting the dominant paradigm is the dominant paradigm.

And a bottle of rum
What I really mean to say is that I hate pirates. I don't like their pierced noses or their eyeliner or their tangled hair or the way they talk like Keith Richards or the big hooks they use in place of their amputated hands. Pirates are just thieves and murderers who are romanticized because they roam the high seas. Come on now, who really wants to roam the high seas, vomiting and getting scurvy, except for the half insane?

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No other cop show offers up quite as breathtaking a finale as "The Shield," and this sixth season is no exception: Mackey (Michael Chiklis) has done it again. Just when it looked like he'd be damned for all time, disgracefully dismissed from the Farmington police department without fanfare, he pulled off his best trick yet, stumbling on a "trunk full of leverage" pilfered from one of high-level wheeler and dealer Cruz Pezuela's (FJ Rio) men. Having recognized that blowing the lid off the San Marcos murders and playing Pezuela against his former ally Aceveda (Benito Martinez) was the only way to save his badge, Mackey spent the last few hours before he was supposed to appear in front of the review board gathering evidence and deciding on his best course.

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But for all of his countless flaws and terrible ideas, the Misguided Idealist has more passion in his little finger than a roomful of Passive-Aggressive Worrywarts, Self-Conscious Ironists, Bloviating Blowhards and Naysaying Neurotics combined. While the rest of us can list a million reasons to do nothing and keep quiet, to sit on the sidelines and whine softly until it's all over and there's nothing left to hope for anyway, the Misguided Idealist sticks his neck out, and this hard, cold world does the chopping. But even as the realities and facts come crumbling down around him, even as his big head rolls across the chopping block, he offers us a brief reprieve from our stagnant lives, where we toe the line and act appropriately and do what's done, all without an original thought in our big, empty heads.

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Every time I read about Oscar season -- which, like Christmas, seems to start earlier and earlier each year -- I think of that poor, depressed Santa down the street. There's so much speculation and pointless blathering dedicated to the Oscars each year and it starts so early and it's so relentless and so exceptionally tedious, that it's hard not to feel exhausted by it all well before the big night rolls around.

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Spurlock's liver has gotten back to normal since the film came out, but his life hasn't. In May, he released a book, "Don't Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America," pounding home the brutal facts about fast food he'd explored on film. And his new TV show, "30 Days," which premieres on FX this week, applies the experimental gimmick of "Super Size Me" to new landscapes, all with a political edge: How would it feel to be a Muslim for a month? What would it be like to be a binge drinker for that long?

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In fact, this new half-hour dramedy is just like "Sex and the City" -- if you replace New York with Las Vegas, substitute witty female yuppies looking for a good time with charmless, no-account gambling addicts, drug addicts and con men looking for a quick buck, and swap the snappy dialogue and clever jokes for predictable dialogue and weak attempts at dark humor.

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-- President Lyndon B. Johnson, Aug. 5, 1964

"Saddam Hussein is a threat to our nation ... I think the threat is real, and so do a lot of other people in my government. And since I believe the threat is real, and since my most important job is to protect the security of the American people, that's precisely what we'll do."

-- President George W. Bush, March 6, 2003

"It's naive and even irresponsible for a grown-up today to get her or his information about foreign policy and war and peace exclusively from the administration in power."

-- Daniel Ellsberg, Salon, Nov. 19, 2002

With our country at the brink of war, Daniel Ellsberg's words feel more relevant than ever. Of course, most of us are quick to count ourselves among the responsible grown-ups, those smart enough to take the administration's biases into account before believing its message. Still, the shock of a sneak attack like 9/11 has the power to mess with our psychological bearings as a nation. We'd like to believe that the administration has privileged, damning information about the Iraqi regime, because we'd prefer to believe that there's some way of predicting and preventing future terrorist attacks. Otherwise, the insecurity we face on a daily basis becomes almost intolerable.

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Mackey heads an LAPD "elite strike team unit" that operates, in the familiar parlance of rogue cop dramas, under its own set of rules. Kind to hookers and children but resentful of new precinct chief David Aceveda (Benito Martinez), who insists that he follow routine police procedure (and refrain, for example, from torturing a drug dealer with a pair of pliers), he is the outlaw left hand of the otherwise not-so-long arm of the law.

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