No wonder the aliens lost interest in us back in the late ’60s. Like dimwitted teenagers with bad impulse control, we’re a little too pathetic to bother monitoring us very closely. I’m sure the lizard demons of Zambular in the Galaxy of Termitrax are up to far worse.

We’re certainly pretty spoiled when it comes to TV comedies. Here we have “30 Rock,” “The Office,” “Bored to Death,” “Parks and Recreation,” “Modern Family,” a veritable cornucopia of comedic treasures, and what do we want? More, more, more. More funny, more laughs, more rolling on the floor gasping for air. Remember the olden days, when there were only three good comedies on TV? The rest featured lazy but lovable suburban fathers surrounded by machinery they couldn’t service themselves — see also: soothing tales of learned helplessness to make the ineffectual masses feel less soft and worthless.

But we always want more, don’t we? We’re fixated on novelty, we’ve got to know what else might make us laugh. Do we crave comedy as a means of escaping how squishy and alienated and overwhelmed we’ve become? More laughter, more forgetting!

First, it’s time to state the obvious: Most new sitcoms are awful. Trying to discern which have a fighting chance of not sucking requires turning the processor in your head down a notch and suspending your disbelief as much as possible.

Once these adjustments are made, Fox’s “Raising Hope” (9 p.m. Tuesdays) can seem downright plucky and charming. Sure, this comedy about a clueless kid named Jimmy and his tacky, wacky family trying to raise a baby (Dad had a one-night stand with Mom, who was a serial killer and died in the electric chair) goes to all of the white-trash clichés immediately: Great grandma is senile and tries to breast-feed the baby, the ladies of the house smoke, Mom puts “day old” stickers on stuff at the grocery store to get a discount. We can predict that in the next episode, everyone will be eating Ho Hos for breakfast and carrying the baby through town in a wheelbarrow.

But Martha Plimpton and Garret Dillahunt as the dumb dad’s parents really make this one impossible to ignore completely. And even though we’ve already got “Oh no the ugly chick likes me” jokes and “You’re right, the baby’s limbs could get amputated this way” jokes and other material that might make you smile but never laugh, there’s also a slightly disturbed tone here that’s hard to match on sitcoms about yuppies having bad hair days.

Take this exchange between Virginia (Plimpton) and her son Jimmy (Lucas Neff):

Jimmy: Well, I can’t just let her cry. I’m pretty sure she already hates me. She never smiles.

Burt: Yeah, I noticed that. I was making funny faces at her last night for like an hour. And nothing!

Virginia: Maybe she’s just a bitch.

In another scene, Virginia explains why the secondhand smoke from her cigarettes won’t hurt the baby for years. “Jimmy, smoke rises. She’s not gonna be tall enough to breathe it for a long time.”

In other words, once you get into this show’s particular spirit of stupid, it’s a little bit contagious. Depending how susceptible you are to a spirit of stupid, of course. Me, I am well nigh powerless to it.

Next up: ABC’s “Better With You” (8:30 p.m. Wednesdays), a sitcom about yuppies having bad hair days. This is the kind of show that you can imagine your sorority sisters from college (and their boyfriends) watching, since it’s all about cute girls with super-glossy flat-ironed hair who are, like, so in love with their boyfriends/husbands but, like, why are guys so dumb about stuff anyways? When, in last week’s episode, Mia (Joanna Garcia) says to her peppy sister Maddie (Jennifer Finnegan), “What is it with boys and fire stations?” it sent a cold shiver down my spine, a terrible flashback to a time spent among young women who found it strangely comforting to depict themselves and the opposite sex as mere children.

I feel that I should stand up for this wobbly little comedy, though, because, when you peel back the repetitive coupling shtick (“Oh, that really is how couples act when they’ve been together for years! Teehee!”), you’ve still got writing that’s smart enough to show some promise as well as a very talented cast. Finnegan and Garcia are convincing and likable, actually, as sisters trying to manage their idiot “boys,” and Josh Cooke (Ben) and Jake Lacy (Casey) are both charismatic and funny as their respective idiots. Debra Jo Rupp, so memorable as the mom on “That ’70s Show,” is fantastic as mom Vicky here.

Yes, there’s a lot of chatter about how to manipulate the boys that’s less than compelling, but the scene where Ben invites Casey to a wrestling match (“hug fighting” Casey demeaningly calls it) by dropping to his hands and knees in the opposite direction yelping, “Let’s do this!” made me laugh out loud. Josh Cooke steals most of his scenes, actually — watch him and you’ll see — and somehow I can’t help thinking that this show could be a serious guilty pleasure, once the writers are given a few months to hit their stride.

Likewise, Fox’s “Running Wilde” (9:30 p.m. Tuesdays) may take a while to start firing on all pistons, but there’s so much potential there that it’s tough to turn your eyes away. Naturally any show created by “Arrested Development’s” Mitch Hurwitz and starring Will Arnett, David Cross and Keri Russell is going to get tons of attention, but this comedy has stumbled a little out of the block. Russell isn’t the surest bet as a comedic actress, and her scenes tend to be a little confusing: “Are we actually supposed to care about this person? Is this a drama? Why is she talking to him?” are the natural questions that arise from interactions between an over-the-top farcical presence like Arnett and a very earnest type like Russell.

On the other hand, as formulaic a formula as the rich-bastard-falls-for-plucky-environmentalist might be, you can’t really argue with dialogue like this (which really does need to slow down a notch for the old folks like me to appreciate it):

Emmy: I don’t believe that one person is worth the energy it takes to heat 80 gallons of water for a bath.

Steve: Oh, well, you may not be worth it, but I am.

Emmy: I was talking about personal worth.

Steve: Yes, and I’m saying that I have far more personal worth than you do, but I’m not judging you for it.

Emmy: Steve, I am judging you.

Steve: Overruled!

Since we’re all judging each other these days for having too much money or being too lazy — or for being too judgmental about the rich and the lazy — these scenes unearth something very essential about the sickness and sadness of life in America these days. And no one gets to the heart of disturbed, pampered people quite like Hurwitz.

Emmy: I couldn’t figure out how to use your dishwasher.

Steve: Who, Oleg? Oh, just push the dish into his chest, he’ll take it from there.

Ultimately, we could grow to like these freaks, and the big effort here (that feels a little awkward now) is clearly to make Emmy and Steve into sympathetic characters. You know, more sympathetic than, say, Gob or Lucille Bluth. When Steve’s assistant Migo laments how little Steve’s parents cared for him, Steve replies, “No, they care about me. They just choose not to show it with words or actions.”

“Running Wilde” will obviously be a little bit of a disappointment to those who miss “Arrested Development” (and who doesn’t?), but this is exactly the sort of show that is tweaked enough and smart enough to improve vastly over the coming months. Remember, even “Arrested Development” didn’t completely make sense until about halfway into its first season.

Of course, if you really want to see Will Arnett and David Cross in fine form, you’ll tune in for IFC’s “The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret” (10 p.m. Fridays), which boasts the best pilot episode of the fall season, hands down. (Seriously, look for it on Hulu or catch a repeat performance of the first episode on IFC; I think I’ve watched Will Arnett’s hilarious opening scene five times now, and it’s funnier every time I see it.)

David Cross plays Todd Margaret, an ineffectual dim bulb who foolishly gets promoted (by over-the-top corporate nightmare boss played by Arnett) to sell energy drinks in the U.K. Margaret can’t do anything right, and each episode escalates from bad to worse as he, well, makes one increasingly bad decision after another. Along the way he’s plagued by a somewhat demonic, far smarter underling (Blake Harrison) and a love interest (Sharon Horgan) with an enthusiasm for molecular gastronomy who raves to Todd about “Helium-fused chicken balloons,” then makes him a meal that includes “pancetta-scented air” (“Ham farts?” he asks).

All of which lands “Todd Margaret” somewhere between “The Office” and “The Jerk,” which is a fine hybrid indeed. Although every second of this comedy is far from genius, the disturbed mood and unique mean-spirited flavor of it all points to what the network comedies are so often lacking: bold choices that border on the absurd. As a development executive might put it, this is what people like these days, and this is what’s working on “Modern Family” and “Parks and Recreation” and “30 Rock.” The sooner the networks can grasp that, the sooner everyone will spend less time flat-ironing hair and more time inventing something half-mad that we’ll savor more than pancetta-scented air. And with any luck, we’ll squeeze in a few more laughs before the lizard demons of Zambular descend and harvest our gizzards for their protein shakes. 

While some romantic solutions might occur to us — Roger should marry Joan and have her child, Don should go back to being Dick Whitman and settle down with Faye, Lane should divorce his wife and live happily ever after in America — these men, like most of us, are too attached to the forces that oppress them to ever break free. 

As “Hands and Knees” presents the challenges of living authentically and representing your truest self unapologetically, the central characters demonstrate that authenticity is often easily overshadowed by a driving compulsion to maintain the status quo. As disappointingly unwilling to take leaps of faith as these characters can be, week after week, the unique genius of “Mad Men” lies in its ability to dramatize conservatism, conformity, repression and regression in ways that make the act of refusing to take action feel like the most dramatic choice of all.

As always, Joan remains the paragon of keeping up appearances at the cost of her own happiness. It’s incredible how, even when she’s not letting down her guard, we know what Joan really wants, and we can see how far she is from getting it. Even with so many crises in the mix, Joan’s scene with Roger at lunch may be the most devastating of them all.

Roger: I hate his. I wouldn’t change anything. But I hate that it happened.

Joan: I understand.

Roger: Don’t you feel the same way? I haven’t stopped thinking about you. Maybe I’m in love with you.

Joan: So you want to keep it?

Roger: No, of course not. It’s just … if there’s gonna be something between us, I don’t want it to start this way. Do you? With a scandal?

Joan: I see.

Roger: I guess you could keep it — it wouldn’t be my child, let’s make that clear.

Here we are, back to Roger the child and Joan the adult. Even as she refuses to show her cards (“I understand,” “I see”), she gives Roger an opportunity to surprise her. Naturally, though, all he cares about is not messing up whatever sordid affair or “something between us” he happens to want at that moment. It’s hard not to pity Roger, seeing how completely blind he is to himself. He has no idea that the words “Maybe I’m in love with you” are utterly undermined, to a woman, by the words “It wouldn’t be my child, let’s make that clear.” When he says, “I hate this,” all he means is that he hates that his chances at a fiery affair have been blown out of the water.

As sad as it is to see Roger sputtering through life like a confused infant, it’s even sadder to witness how cleanly and smoothly Joan eliminates tragic experiences from her story. After her initial panic, she becomes calm and distant and goes to the abortion doctor alone. Even when the woman in the waiting room says, “There’s no one to talk to” and Joan agrees, Joan responds with a lie. The impossibility of her ever having a real friend outside of Greg and Roger has never been clearer. But Joan has her story and she’s sticking to it. “We avoided a tragedy,” she tells Roger, as if the pregnancy were just an obstacle in the road that they swerved to miss, as if the baby and the promise of something transcendent between them were just figments of their imagination. “You’re so beautiful,” Roger replies, entranced this time not by Joan’s real self, but by her ability to cast all of her needs aside for the sake of her winning narrative.

Meanwhile, Don finally has a chance to throw his own winning narrative aside. After weeks of confronting his problems and evolving, he encounters a rare opportunity to escape his elaborate house of cards: the feds are investigating him, and his secretary Megan has submitted background information that includes obvious lies. Even though he’s been a sour drunk for most of the season, we’ve never seen Don unravel as completely as he does when he discovers Megan’s mistake (which, of course, she had no reason to know was a mistake). Then Don does what he’s never done before: He puts himself before work. Instead of sallying forth with a knot in his gut, he retreats to his apartment with Faye and has a panic attack. He tries to shoo Faye away, but she tells him (in stark contrast to Betty), “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving you like this.” Even more surprisingly, Don doesn’t start swilling liquor, and instead comes clean to Faye about his past, saying, “I’m tired of running.” For Faye, who’s more excited by the truth than anything else, this confession is far from a deal breaker, and may be the most romantic moment of their entire relationship. Even though Faye can play along with the straight world, wearing her fake wedding ring and murmuring the same professional dulcimer tones that Joan does as she leaves Don’s office, beneath it all Faye is all about the truth and nothing but the truth.

But see how Don begins each encounter with Faye with the words “I really should’ve called, I apologize”? He’s being held to a higher standard than ever, and it’s bringing out an unfamiliar honesty (and discomfort) in him. Even though this is his big chance to be with someone who’ll see him for who he really is and treat him as a friend and partner instead of a provider and Daddy figure, he’s not completely up to the task. We can see the strain in his face in his scenes with Faye now, from the time she cried about not having children to the scene in “Hands and Knees” when she tells him, “We’ll figure out what to do.”

In contrast to Faye, who gives men who’ve wronged her the what-for (and tells them what they can go do in the ocean when they ask too much of her), Don’s secretary Megan is as obedient and loyal as a lap dog. Even though she had no way of knowing that Don’s personal information couldn’t be revealed to the feds, she takes all of the blame like a naughty child, telling him, “Oh my god, I’m so embarrassed. You’re right, you’re absolutely right. If you want to fire me, I’d understand completely.” This is the fumbling baby version of Joan’s more deliberate, controlled, “I understand, I see,” and it’s the kind of talk that sets Don at ease and plays into his constructed, ego-driven view of himself. Even though Faye says they’ll figure out what to do together, Don already knows what he’s going to do, alone. Faye (mature, supportive woman) walks out, replaced by Megan (obsequious little girl) who says she “messed so many things up,” then mentions that she has a date, the same way Don’s former secretary Allison asked about taking a date to the Christmas party right before Don slept with her.

Apologetic childishness and fawning may be salve to the narcissist’s soul, but Megan obviously embodies the impoverished future that lies ahead for Don if he simply refuses to evolve. When he gazes at her putting on lipstick in that last scene, she might as well be striking him over the head with a cane, then grinding his hand into the carpet with her high heel.

Even as we watch Don or the other characters of “Mad Men” take baby steps to a more fulfilling life, ultimately the hurdles are too daunting, and they’re forced to face the future with passive resignation. (“We’ll see,” is how Don responds to Faye’s impassioned call to action, to figure it out as a team.) By sidestepping “hard feelings,” by averting their eyes from tragedy, by reducing catastrophes to “things” that just “happen,” these sad souls block off every path to their own salvation. But without any hope of emancipation from such a passive, inauthentic existence, they reduce themselves to shadows, moving across the wall at night. Every chance to change the future is already in the past. “There’s nothing you can do. Nothing you could do. That’s just the way it is,” Lee Garner Jr. of Lucky Strike tells Roger, and Roger replies, “We’re dead, you know that? The question is when.” 

Jimmy tries to “clock in” as if nothing has happened, but Nucky angrily rebukes him; their business and personal relationships have been ended in one fell swoop. It doesn’t help that, in spite of Nucky’s attempt to pin the blame on Margaret Schroeder’s late and unlamented husband, Van Alden has come knocking on Nucky’s door, or that Arnold Rothstein, “Boardwalk Empire’s” most chilling and cold-blooded villain, blames him as well, to the tune of demanding $100,000 in reparations. (Incidentally, I wonder how many people have watched thus far and have yet to connect Michael Stuhlbarg’s gelid sociopath with the beleaguered college professor of “A Serious Man.” The performances are polar opposites, but each equally convincing.) But it’s clear that what angers Nucky most is the personal betrayal. We learn more about Jimmy’s background this episode (more on that in a second), namely that he was either raised without a father or wishes he had been, and since he said last week that he’d been currying Nucky’s favor “since the age of 12,” it’s likely he served as Jimmy’s surrogate dad, which makes the wound even deeper. Nucky cuts Jimmy off at the knees, simultaneously terminating his employment and informing him that he owes Nucky $3,000, to offset the trouble he’s caused. When Jimmy finally manages to scrape it together, Nucky takes the payment and immediately slaps it down on the roulette table, shrugging off the inevitable loss as if it’s nothing — which of course, to him, it is. It’s a naked display of superior power, a keen humiliation Jimmy will be nursing for some time.

You have to wonder, though, if Nucky knows who he’s dealing with. As Jimmy tells anyone who will listen, fighting in the first World War changed him. Nucky may crack wise about the brutality of “Huns,” but Jimmy has seen it firsthand. When he tells Nucky he and Al had no choice but to kill the men in the woods, it’s in the “but mom …” tones of a chastised teenager. Remorse doesn’t enter into it, even with Nucky. “I said I was sorry,” Jimmy whines. “Oh really?” Nucky shoots back. “When was that?”

We’re only two episodes in, but it’s worth noting that so far the writers (or rather creator Terence Winter, who’s credited with both scripts) has put more effort into defining Jimmy than the show’s ostensible protagonist. We know so far that Nucky’s not to be trifled with, that he’s a charmer when he needs to be, as when he boosts a visiting cutlery supplier’s chances of scoring with a young chippie by fibbing that her date will be a judge in the city’s upcoming beauty pageant. (The Miss America pageant began the following year.) But apart from the shots of him mooning over his dead wife’s picture — and yes, that is “Deadwood” actress Molly Parker, whom we can no doubt count on showing up in a flashback somewhere down the road — we’ve got precious little idea what makes Nucky tick.

Compare Nucky’s relative blank slate with Jimmy’s back-to-back scenes this week. In the first, he and his wife are in bed and getting amorous, as their son sleeps in the corner. She tells him it’s “not a good time” for sex, so he suggests that they do it “the French way,” which means her going down on him. Jimmy’s suggestion that this particular sex act is something he’s only heard his fellow doughboys discuss probably strains credulity, but the way Pitt plays it, you at least half-believe it. He is, by his own token, a murderer, but he’s also still a child.

A little fellatio has nothing on the perversion of the following scene, where we’re introduced to Jimmy’s mother, Gillian (Gretchen Mol). We first see her in rehearsal for a titillating revue, in a mesh bodysuit with her breasts barely covered by spangles. (The subject is Odysseus, and she is one of the sirens who nearly lured him to his doom. But that probably won’t be significant.) When she sees Jimmy in the dressing room, she jumps into his arms and wraps her legs around his torso, smothering him with kisses and calling him “my baby” in a manner that deliberately evokes the passion of long-separated lovers rather than a semi-estranged mother and son. Assuming that we’ve not just been misled for the sake of a cheap gag, the incestuous subtext is so blatant that the writers will have to work hard to pay it off in future episodes.

Most of the rest of what happens this week still has the feel of pieces being moved into place. The enmity between Nucky and Rothstein deepens; Capone beats (and probably kills) a reporter asking questions about Big Jim’s murder; Nucky’s brother Eli warns Margaret Schroeder to protest less loudly about her husband’s innocence, and offers her a payoff to smooth things over; and Van Alden tells his boss he thinks Nucky is a “bigger fish” than Arnold Rothstein. Oh, and that missing fifth body? He turns up in the woods, very much alive, and interrupts the long-delayed tryst between the cutlery salesman and his grudging mistress. Here again, the symbolism seems awfully thick; the sex-and-death juxtaposition is the stuff of sophomore theater workshops. But at least this time it’s played for laughs, with the salesman’s moans and his partner’s grunts turning to frightened screams to match those of the half-dead man in front of them.

Sam Adams writes for the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Onion A.V. Club and the Philadelphia City Paper. Follow him on Twitter at SamuelAAdams or at his blog, Breaking the Line.

And through it all, we’re treated to a steady flow of breathless dialogue the likes of which is aimed at keeping this serial drama in motion:

“Who are you and what do you want?!”

“Open the door! You don’t have to do this!”

“They have a hidden agenda. I know it in my bones.“

“You are my only conduit to the outside!”

“We have to protect ourselves. Can I count on you?“

“I haven’t told you everything!”

These mysterious statements, obscure confessions and creepy generalities tend to fall into the same categories as those offered week after week on “Lost”: 1) What’s going on? 2) Who’s in charge here? 3) What aren’t they telling us? 4) Who is lying? 5) Why should I join/trust you? 6) How do we stop this catastrophe from happening?

But can you keep audiences intrigued using a formula already well honed by “Lost,” particularly when that show didn’t exactly end with a gratifying slew of answers to the million and one mysteries thrown out like cookie crumbs over the course of several years, but rather devolved into a hazy heavenly conclusion filled with hugging and learning? Consider the late-night haiku my friend Jon Grotenstein e-mailed to me during the waning minutes of the “Lost” series finale:

Seventies children

Feinted with “Fantasy Island”

Gave us “The Love Boat”

Casting aside the oddness of friends who write haikus about television shows (or people like me, who fancy such prose worthy of “Ploughshares”), the looming question for even the most fervent serial-drama lover today is: Will any of this add up to anything? Will I invest my precious nighttime hours each week, only to discover that they’re all really giant garden slugs, it’s all been one big dream, or that they all wind up in some pre-heaven way station, smiling warmly at each other, embracing, shedding some tears, and then walking peacefully toward the light? Because if that’s the case, I’d rather flip over to the sitcom about the wisecracking couple who met at Overeaters Anonymous (you know, the one that treats overweight people like human beings, mostly by showing them inadvertently destroying furniture and prattling on about hating exercising and wanting dessert so bad they could kill for it).

Similarly, though, pretty much every single character on “The Event” seems to want something so bad they could kill for it, from the mysterious lady locked in the government facility at Mount Inostranka in Alaska to the scared pilot who hijacks a plane because he’s afraid some masked strangers are going to execute his two daughters. The big trouble with “The Event” isn’t that the stakes aren’t high enough (they’re sky-high) or that the characters don’t have clear motives for taking the desperate measures that they take. The real problem is, we don’t care because there clearly isn’t any larger meaning guiding the action, and the only thing we know about each character is that he/she totally loves his/her fiancé/wife/husband/children sooo much that he/she would do anything to keep them safe.

In a country where many viewers don’t have a lot of thoughtful or idealistic notions outside of a “love of family” — worthy though this love obviously is — this is what passes for character development and premise, over and over again. Even on the most popular TV shows and movies out there, this is often the one humanizing factor, the one guiding principle, the one very simple central thrust of the entire narrative. Even in a smart psychological thriller like “Inception,” what do you ever know about Leo DiCaprio’s character, other than that he loves his wife and wants to get back to his kids? What should merely be a character’s motive stands in for almost everything else, so that all we get is an enormous layer cake of action, all balancing on the faces of two young children. By the time we see the kids’ faces, I half expect them to be hideous monsters or extraterrestrials. (If only.)

Despite a promising and popular premiere — almost 11 million viewers tuned in last Monday night to watch — not only does “The Event” strain credulity over and over again in the next two episodes, but we don’t learn anything new about the characters themselves. In fact, they appear to be lifted whole-cloth from other sources and plopped down in the middle of the action without any extra flourishes or quirks. Sean Walker (Jason Ritter) is an earnest guy who just wants to save his pretty fiancée’s life. Sophia Maguire (Laura Innes) is a world-weary prisoner doing whatever she can to fight for her own freedom — or stick it to The Man, or take over the universe, it’s hard to tell which. President Elias Martinez (Blair Underwood) is an idealist who sometimes lets his principles (whatever they are) prevent him from making pragmatic decisions as a leader. Even in an action-suspense series that’s not character-driven, these aren’t actually characters at all, they’re cardboard cutouts who repeatedly growl lines like, “We can’t trust anyone!” and “You still might have time to save her, but you have to go now!” In one flashback of Sean Walker’s life before the world went mad, which presented a rare chance to teach us something about him beyond the fact that he speaks in a nasally garble and neglects to shave his patchy facial hair, we watch him go goo-goo-eyed for his fiancée back in college. She’s cute, he’s cute, they like each other, end scene. If we really wanted to watch simple-minded teenagers flirt, wouldn’t we be tuned in to the sassy gaggles of catalog models on the CW instead?

In fact, after three full hours of “The Event,” it’s easy to suspect that we’ll spend the rest of the season watching President Martinez argue his principles to the head of the CIA (who we know is evil, because he’s played by Zeljko Ivanek), while Sean runs through crowded hospitals as half a dozen cops make chase, stopping occasionally to plead with others to help him find his lady!

Whether or not there are glowing clouds in the sky that can beam hijacked airliners to the middle of the desert, whether or not the CIA is populated by bad guys or those earnest detainees are evil or Sean’s fiancée is not who she says she is, whether or not it’s all a dream or they’re all part of a government experiment or a corporate conspiracy or they’re all secretly lizardy alien predators underneath their skin, it hardly matters. We’ve learned from our experience with “Lost” that all the Dharma Initiatives and Hanso Foundations and black smoke clouds in the world won’t save us from an endless trek through a jungly island maze as the same minor chords slowly increase their tempo.

But as repetitive and endless a Möbius strip as “Lost” proved itself to be in its final seasons, at least it was provocative for the first three — and at a minimum mildly intriguing after the writers started to resort to a steady flow of gun-wielding thugs and acts of God. At least we knew who Jack and Sawyer and Kate and Locke were before and after they landed on the island. Thanks to some great character-driven flashbacks during the first few seasons, we knew their backgrounds, their fatal flaws, their philosophies, their soft underbellies. Throw in The Hatch and those numbers counting down and Ben Linus held hostage but still spinning lies and those old Dharma Initiative films, plus some genuinely unnerving twists (that often turned on complex character motivations), and you’ve got a damn good TV show. Taken alone, the first three seasons of “Lost” were a smashing success on almost every level, and the last three were intermittently intriguing.

After its flashy premiere, which seemed to suggest that we’d learn more about these characters in weeks to come, all “The Event” has for us in the next two episodes is a few bizarre revelations that feel at once underwhelming and premature, and some explosions and car crashes. In an obvious attempt to give us enough clues and answers along the way, the show’s writers only prove that every path here leads to implausibility, clichés, empty moodiness and things that go “boom.” Maybe this is what will ultimately redeem “Lost,” in the wake of its “Love Boat” ending: a steady procession of serial dramas with far less brains and flair, unraveling over the course of six episodes instead of six seasons. Suddenly it feels more than a little impressive that the “Lost” writers kept that crazy house of cards from falling for so long.

If NBC really wants “The Event” to be its big hit of the season, it should ditch its expensive marketing plans in favor of calling in some heavy hitters to spice up these characters and make the central plot far more compelling. Because as long as the characters aren’t interesting and the story looks destined to go nowhere (fast!), then “The Event” will hardly rise to the level of either “Fantasy Island” or “The Love Boat,” let alone touch “Lost.” Instead, it might as well be just another episode of “CHiPs.” “Look, honey, here comes the part where the Pinto careens across three lanes of traffic and causes a 15-car pileup.” A fascination with the supernatural may have replaced a fascination with superhighways, but the wreckage remains the same.