I am a big TV dork. I've got dozens of tapes of various shows I have enjoyed over the years, waiting on a shelf for the lazy afternoon on which they are called to duty. But lately something has changed. In the last two fall programming slates, only two shows -- Fox's doomed-from-the-start Firefly and Arrested Development -- caught my interest. Cable filled some of the slack for a little while, but I got rid of that last fall because it just wasn't worth the money. With The West Wing successfully turned into unwatchable, uninspired melodrama, I'm down to six shows in which I have an active interest.

So now it's mid-season time, and the networks have decided that I am once again a desired demographic. They've launched four new shows (plus a fifth on NBC's snobby cousin, Bravo) which all look good enough to check out. Thanks to the miracle that is Bittorrent, checked them out I have.

First is ABC's Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital, based on Denmark's Lars Von Trier's Riget. I haven't seen the original, and I've avoided most discussion of the adaptation that focuses on how inferior it must be to the original. I'm not much of a Von Trier fan, to be honest. However, it's pretty clear that King is making the series his own. The two-part premiere centers around a famous artist living in semi-rural Maine, who is hit by a van and nearly killed while jogging. King himself is writing the scripts (or, at least, is the credited writer) and in the hit and run scene, he and director Craig Baxley did an amazing job portraying the confusion and violence of the situation. After the accident, the artist meets a spirit animal-style anteater, which is rendered in quite good (for TV) CGI, even if it sounds too much like Nicholson in "The Shining." Even though it hasn't really gone anywhere yet, I like the atmosphere King is building and I'm surprisingly impressed with Andrew McCarthy as the antihero Clooney stand-in. This one's got a lot of potential, and is a lot better than other recent King/ABC productions.

Next is Fox's Cracking Up, a laughtrackless sitcom created by Mike White, writer of "The Good Girl" and "School of Rock." It's got Jason Schwartzmann, finally finding something interesting after "Rushmore," in the lead as a psychology grad student sent to be the live-in counselor for a normal kid in a family of repressed weirdos. This one had the potential to be a new Malcolm in the Middle, but I see it following closer to the path of Oliver Beene. It's trying so hard, but it just isn't that funny. There's way too much music doing the job that a laughtrack otherwise would. Molly Shannon needs to be used as creepy-subdued, not manic-zany; the scene when she drunkenly comes on to Schwartzmann in the second episode is the only funny bit they've found for her. The rest of the cast needs to go back to acting camp and learn how not to look like they're acting. Somebody's got to tell them that a network sitcom is not Improv 101 at Santa Clara CC. I'll probably stick with this for a few more episodes, because I really want to like it, but it's looking grim.

Elsewhere on Fox is Wonderfalls, exec. produced by Tim Minear of Angel and Firefly. He was one of my favorite writers on those shows, and is the reason I was so anxious to see this one. It airs in the deathslot of Friday at 9PM, right after CBS's similar but sacramented Joan of Arcadia, which probably means it's not going to last. However, the premiere was brilliant. I've read that the original pilot played things a little meaner than the broadcast version, which is no surprise, but I really like pretty much everything they're doing here. The characters are interesting and have quickly established complex relationships. The humor is both smart and silly and visual style is enthralling. It's never going to succeed unless it's rescheduled, but I'll dutifully stick around as long as Fox sticks with it.

I wasn't expecting to give CBS the time of day this year, but there was something about Century City that I couldn't get over. A lawyer show set 25 years in the future (note to execs: 25 years isn't really that long, you should've set it in 2105 or so) sounds like either potential genius or a recipe for disaster. After one episode, it looks more like the latter than the former. There are only three major uses of the future setting in the premiere. One is basically a throwaway in which lawyers from the protagonist firm use teleholograms to hold a preliminary hearing with a DA and a judge. Another sets up the main plot's case -- David Paymer, as the direct opposite of his Line of Fire hardass, is a kvetchy loser who clones himself to get a son, and then clones the sick son to get a matching liver (I don't think they ever addressed why Paymer couldn't give the son part of his liver). Lastly, the writers have invented a 2009 Act of Congress which apparently allows every last motion in a trial to be put before a jury, thus allowing the plot to address not the criminal charges against Paymer's character, but whether the government can hold the evidence it's using, i.e. the son's cloned cells. For the first three acts, the show took a typically CBS attitude towards scientific progress and the future in general -- it was unbelievably conservative. The last act redeemed it a little bit, probably due to the fact that our heroes would've lost had the story stayed on that track. I may tune in to future episodes to see what kind of development they have in store, but this doesn't look like a winner at the moment.

And then there's HBO's, er, Bravo's Significant Others, a semi-improvisational comedy about three couples in marriages of various lengths, all of whom go to the same therapist. The tone -- bother visually and thematically -- reminds me of The Larry Sanders Show. The characters are all at least a little snarky, the wit is quick and subtle and there are machinations a-plenty. It'll probably have a hard time getting the mainstream play a comedy on HBO or even Showtime gets, but hopefully the barrage of promotion on Today will give it a boost.