TV Watch: Could the barren wasteland of this TV season be somehow connected to the barren wasteland of our social and political reality?

Bright lights in the void: I haven't watched this official trailer for Season 3 of Homeland, but you may want to. If the season turned out to be good, I didn't want it spoiled by the preview, and if it didn't, well, I didn't want to waste my time. So far, I'm happier than I could have imagined. It's less of a surprise the The Good Wife is off to a great season start -- less of a surprise, but still an enormous relief.

by Ken

Let's just throw this out as an off-the-cuff thought rather than a closely argued sociocultural treatise, but do you suppose there could be a connection between this godforsaken wasteland of a TV season and our present godforsaken wasteland of a sociopolitical reality? Is it possible that in a time of such acute polarization and rancor, the programming geniuses sense that the safest thing to try to put on people's screens is mush? With one side of the political spectrum being hijacked by a gang of brain-deprived hooligans in furious flight from reality, and the other side cowering in fear of them, the last thing you might want to shovel out there onto the TV pile is any programming with content, or any sort of connection to reality except "Fuck it!!!"

Let me qualify that since my last rant, I've seen glints of hope. The new season of The Good Wife so far seems to me crackling. You have to hope the show won't be overwhelmed by the new reality that Alicia is the wife of the governor-elect. But there's plenty going on, with the impending flight from Lockhart Garner of the uppity fourth-years with partner Alicia (Julianna Margulies) in tow, and you know the greedy understandable insistence of the others on delaying in order to collect their buses is going to lead to all kinds of hell -- it didn't take wily David Lee (Zach Grenier) to figure out what's going on. Plus there's this net of government snooping settling around the firm, which seems to be equal parts NSA Big Brother and Keystone Cops, and has the potential for some intense plot heat as well as mirthful irony. Meanwhle, Stockard Channing has already been usefully back as Alicia's free-wheeling mother, and the Florrick offspring, Zach (the alarmingly adorable Graham Phillips) and Grace (Makenzie Vega) are growing productively. CBS contributes its usual share -- nothing or less -- by maintaining the show on its football-buffeted Sunday-night Dare-You-to-Try-to-Watch TV schedule.

The surprise is that I've found the new season of Homeland quite engaging. There's the ready-made plot engine of the aftermath of the CIA blowing up real good, with the apparent frame of Brody (Damian Lewis), an actual as opposed to figurative congressman-terroris, holding well, and a heap of trouble in the embarrassing revelation of the assorted ties, including the sexual kind, between Brody Carrie (Claire Danes). Even while it was happening it was of course imbecilic and preposterous behavior on both their parts, but it's the kind of imbecilic and preposterous behavior that spells "human," especially where sex is concerned. And now that Carrie is really poised on the edge of nuttitude, Danes's tic-o-rama acting is actually quite appropriate. I don't want to try to analyze too deeply; I'm just thrilled to be back to eagerly anticipating new episodes.

The Big Bang Theory also seems to me to be doing just fine, with an especially felicitous story idea in the response of Sheldon (Jim Parsons, with another Emmy on the mantel) to having his beloved Raiders of the Lost Ark destroyed by Amy (Mayim Bialik) pointing out that Indiana Jones is irrelevant to the outcome of the plot. How would Sheldon respond except by making it a personal mission to destroy something that Amy loves. There are signs too that Amy may be about to begin to wake up to Sheldon's all too obvious shortcomings as a boyfriend. Let it roll.

As for the rest? Well, Blue Bloods seems still to be suffering from the realization that every possible cop-show plot has been not just used but overused. I've started watching Parenthood, largely on the strength of my mind-blowing re-encounter with producer Jason Katims's great triumph, Friday Night Lights, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot going on, and Peter Krause, coming off two of the great series acting performances of our time in Sports Night and Six Feet Under, doesn't seem to have much to do except nag.

Then, ominously, there's the rash of so-called comedies that seem devoted to the proposition that people, but men especially, are hilariously useless slugs. I can't even keep track of them all, but I've sampled a number on the strength of some actors of demonstrated class. I mean, the show with Martin Mull and Peter Riegert as the two fathers whose sons would be that much more conspicuous evolutionary duds if their dads weren't so much worse . . . what's the deal here? It has always seemed as if Mull could make something out of anything, but it turns out that no, he can only make something out of something, and Riegert, well, if he'd been offered a better job, I assume he would have taken it.

Or there's Tony Shalhoub, who has given us such treasurable characterizations as Antonio the fatally insecure taxi driver on Wings and of course as Mr. Monk. Wouldn't you think TV creators would be lining up to lure him into signing on to some really creative projects? Again, if they had, I assume he would have jumped, and we and he would have been spared the embarrassment of this show, whatever the heck it's called. Men, is it? And just to show that lunkish galootdom isn't strictly a male affliction, there's one of our best-loved actors, Allison Janney, mugging her way through, uh, her show, which alarmingly comes to us from Chuck Lorre, who has given us so much better. And now that "sass" has apparently taken the place of actual human qualities, 2 Broke Girls seems to have slipped from borderline promising to barely watchable.

The cable offerings don't seem a whole lot more encouraging. mostly offering a pointy-headed-er version of the same nothingness. The pretentious nothingness of Girls now seems to have been a trailblazer.

It's not just the dismal quality I'm thinking of here, but the quality of that quality. We make no demands on you, viewer, the shows seem to say, we're just there to mark the passing of time and of your lives, which are now either an hour or a half-hour closer to the end.

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