I am forced to watch that series on a regular basis. It bears most of the flaws of contemporary prime time soap opera. Perhaps most annoying is the voiceover narrator that tells us what's happening and sums up the moral at the end for us poor stupid Americans who can't distill the Great Message of the show.

"Grey's" does that, with its title character who doesn't understand any of the Great Message during the show, or remember any of that wisdom for the next show. "Desperate Housewives" does it with its dead narrator delivering the Great Message from an anteroom in Hell where she's waiting for the rest of the cast to arrive. Even "Heroes," the only competent adventure show in prime time, does it with its own dead narrator philosophising about evolution and humanity, as if he were Carl Sagan instead of a disgraced and ignored scientist.

I already went through the "Grey's" agony with "Saint Elsewhere," with the same kind of awful doctors bumbling through failed relationships and emotional agonies. I kept hoping that Stephen Furst would go up to a clerk, say "May I have ten thousand marbles, please?", scatter them all over the floor and watch the rest of the stupid cast trip and break their necks. No such luck. All we learned was that, in the final episode, the whole show was a daydream of a retarded kid staring into a snow globe. We viewers were even more brain-damaged; we actually thought the kid had something to say and paid attention. Now the short bus has dropped that kid off at ABC to produce a similar series, but he's old enough to have hormones, and he's throwing a lot of gratuitous sex into the mix.

Video games are much more hackable than Florida's voting machines. The only first-person shooter I ever really owned, the free version of "Wolvenstein 3-D," had numerous hacks available for it - one changing the fortress into a baseball stadium with players and refs taking the place of the Nazis. Essentially, you had plenty of variety with the hacks to the game without having to buy the paid version. And the hacks to "Grand Theft Auto" for nudity and sex were well known.

I'd bet money that right now, out there in geekdom, some ingenious young code monkey is working on patches for the game that will add more than just firearms and knives; he will have modifications to the character animation that will let characters spurt blood and lose limbs. Maybe even set the school on fire. Of course, he won't be able to sell it, but it'll be the most popular download ever.

And why will he do it? For the same reason the Columbine kids killed, for the same reason that Bush invaded Iraq. Because they can. Because it is the nature of man to be violent. Because the only thing that can temper that urge, morality - whether the kind taught by religions or the civic responsibility taught by philosophy - is ignored in today's America because it gets in the way of convenience and profit, and has been for decades. By everyone, left, right or center.

I am actually troubled by "Bully," not because it's offensive, but because it's not offensive enough. As often happens in popular culture, it reflects its audience. It is too nice a mirror. Put in the guns. Put in the knives. Put in the bottles of acid to throw into the cheerleader's face. Let's make it an accurate reflection of what it is to be a kid in America, 2006. Let's face what bastards we really are...all right, let's be honest, you face what a bastard YOU are. And if you don't believe you are a bastard, then stick to your illusions and just play around with Picachu.

Just when there was a stand-in columnist who was twenty times better than Havrilesly...ah, well, at least she's going to have a greater talent pool from which she can draw new syncopants, because the Republicans lost so heavily in the election. Maybe even Rummy will be reduced to hanging around her Starbucks, earning a few sheckels by kissing her...feet.

Insulting "Brothers and Sisters" is ugly, though; it's insulting the dead. The only novelty in this show, over its 1970's kindred like "Dynasty" and "Dallas," is that instead of trying to carve a part of the rich people's fortune, the rich people are trying to hide that their patriarch was more broke than Michael Jackson. I can even call it a dramatic version of "The Pruitts of South Hampton" a.k.a. "The Phyllis Diller Show," about a rich broad who was secretly broke. (Which, if money was intellectual honesty and heart, would be a perfect parallel to Havrilesky.)

"Brothers and Sisters" will probably buy it by January. "Six Degrees" is already on hiatus, possibly never to return (unless they get a story behind it at least as compelling as that behind "Heroes," which they probably won't.) That makes two hours of ABC prime time that will probably go to old Disney movies.