Let's hope the second two hours of this season are filled with nail-biting suspense, Heather, because the first two were duds, with too much set-up. Not just duds, but bad enough to make me long for Kim and the cougar. Well, almost.

Yes, Jack is superhuman and cartoonish and I buy that. Yes, 24 is wild, frantic, over-heated and sometimes silly, but doesn't usually pile up so many weaknesses and incongruities, like

1--weak dialogue. "I'm not some idealistic flag-burning--" Who talks like that, and what the hell does it mean, and how did it apply to the point at hand?

2--No FBI agent would arrest the President's sister, sorry. Not believable.

3--Jack is always right. All the other characters who have interacted with Jack before know this. Why didn't they listen? Just for the sake of moving the story along. Tacky.

4--What administration would make a deal with terrorists without looking more deeply at their motives?

5--What administration would give its intel and security info over to terrorists without some kind of back-up?

6--Two doors are kicked open in this first two hours with just one kick. Front doors of houses? Jive jive jive.

I'll keep watching, but I'm worried that the show's amazing success has turned the heads of its writers.

...and since the CW not only chose to give it ZERO publicity and pulled it after a whopping three episodes, no one else does. Trigger finger much? This is the CW, not NBC so I wonder why the sudden concern about ratings?

..and love to sing along with it, which must look pretty silly, given that I'm a 41-year-old staright guy.

No, it's just that on cable you can say "fuck" and show titties. That's why people left the networks in droves.

The Big Three networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, used to produce scripted hour-long dramas and half-hour comedies. Now they go cheap and toss out "reality shows" which require no weekly plot, no written script, no characterization at all. And cable gives us The Sopranos, The Wire, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Extras, Ali G, etc.

Hmm... maybe cable is the new PBS, where we used to watch Masterpiece Theater, Monty Python, The Prisoner, Rock Follies, Adrian Mole, etc?

But people watch it anyway. Not a single one of the women on the show look anything like any of the lesbians I know. Not saying there are no lesbians who look like that. Just saying they are rarer than the show would lead us to believe.

But really, you know that choosing not to watch it would lead it to be cancelled, not revamped to make it more realistic. And then it would be cancelled, according to network executive/morons, not because it sucks and is stupid, but because there is no market for a show about lesbians.

The fact that air-headed men still buy into the "lesbians are HAWT!" nonsense is at least half the reason behind this show. I gotta tell ya, of all the lesbians I know, there are exactly zero of them that I find attractive. Not saying lesbians are ugly. Saying that there is no attraction for women who aren't interested in men.

American culture mostly sucks, and TV is the basement of American culture. If Heather Havrilesky can enjoy it, more power to her. I will stick to reading about it on the internet, not actually watching it.

Labia?

Lick?

Languid?

Loquacious?

Landing Strip?

There's no point in putting up disclaimers like "I don't kill gay people at night" or "Some of my best friends..." because, if you're determined to hate me, it won't matter.

My point is that these Showtime shows are simply "branded" as being gay. If they were about straight people they'd be cancelled in ten minutes over on Fox. From what I've seen, there's nothing very special or very good about them; it's only the "gay friendly" label that keeps people watching.

On the old Quinn Martin series "The Invaders," one episode was the Black People episode. For the most part the series had been all caucasian, and someone must have shamed Martin into doing something with black people. So he had a couple of black actors appear on this episode, and produced black aliens. (Besides the un-bendable pinky finger, the black aliens' palms were not pink-colored; they were the uniform brown color of the rest of their skin.)

That episode closed with some yadda, yadda, yadda about brotherhood and how the few black humans who survived now knew there was an "alien race" out to kill them. And that was that. I don't believe there were any more black characters in any other episodes, alien or human.

So, by doing an episode which contained some stuff about black people, did Quinn Martin prove himself not to be a racist? Did he break the color line in mid-60's dramatic television? I'll bet all he did was get a grumbling notice of approval in "Jet" or "Ebony" about it. ("Hey, David Vincent comes up against black aliens. We're so appreciative.")

Meanwhile, an earlier Showtime series, "Brothers," was the first series to have gay characters on a regular basis. It even had a "flaming" character, Donald Maltby, who was more than just a rimshot joke; he could become deadly serious. This show was forgotten, perhaps because it did something that the current Showtime "gay shows" don't do; they showed gay people as people, interacting with the whole world, not just other gay people.

But that isn't what Showtime wanted. So they ghettoize gays and lesbians. They're pursuing them as a niche audience, an audience which just happens to spend a lot more on entertainment (pay cable channels included) than the hetero audience. Hey, there's a whole night of shows that do a lot of gay stuff! None dare call it exploitation.

Hey, "Weeds" has its characters encountering a gay drug dealer and a gay FBI agent. We're so appreciative.

There are a million and one shows about straight people, so any shows at all about gay people stand out. And, unfortunately, they command loyalty for the same reason. Even when they suck, in the grand tradition of 99.999% of all gay-themed literature.

The L Word's first show of the new season was spine-tinglingly, hair-rendingly, AWFUL. It's been going downhill anyway, but last Sunday managed to reach new levels of making the characters into cardboard cutouts. My willing suspension of disbelief works only so well.

Bette's sister manages to track her down at this hotel precisely how?

Marina shows up out of the blue and Jennie and her new gf suddenly end up in an almost-threesome with her? (Somehow, I think we're supposed to feel sorry for Jenny. Somehow, I'm failing.)

We dispose of Lara with two lines of dialogue?

Carla abandons her sleeping stepchild to the tender mercies of her unstable other-stepchild?

...and so forth.

Before the show, my partner observed to me that every gay woman we know was settling down to watch. After the show, I observed to her that that collective shriek was the sound of every gay woman we know yelling, "WTF was that crap?!" at the TV.

There are good storylines that the show could pursue, but it's ignoring them. Even the sex scenes were wooden and awful. If we're going to watch this dreck, can we have some good sex scenes?

But the shameful part is that we're watching the damn show tonight. This is the only show with gay female main characters on it and we want to see ourselves, even though it's seeing ourselves in a funhouse mirror with pink light. And because we keep watching, it can continue to suck.