Be patient a little longer. TV is about to improve greatly with a sudden crop of exciting new offerings -- starting Sunday with a sudden glut of quality TV.
The newest Ken Burns documentary epic on PBS, Prohibition, begins Sunday, as do Showtime's new Homeland series and the same network's Season 6 premiere of Dexter.
But between now and then, we've got four new less than superb prime-time premieres with which to contend, starting with Monday's Terra Nova on Fox and Hart of Dixie on the CW...
Terra Nova (8 p.m. ET Monday) is one of Fox's biggest, and certainly its most expensive, gambles of the year. It's a time-travel adventure series that doubles as a family drama, and has Steven Spielberg's name prominently attached. Then again, so do the Transformers movies, and that doesn't make them any less abysmal.
Terra Nova (seen in photo at top) is less abysmal, really, than overly familiar. The two-hour pilot explains how an estranged family from the near future gets back together just in time to take a one-way time-travel journey to an alternate time stream in the prehistoric past -- a lush, unpolluted jungle paradise, except for the pesky dinosaurs and also-from-the-future guerrilla insurgents.
The explanations never quite make sense, which goes for every other element of this series as well. There ought to be a sigh above the new past-imperfect compound: "Abandon reason, all ye who enter here."
But you want, in a way, for this show to work, since it takes the Lost in Space concept -- which, itself, was Swiss Family Robinson in space, down to the actual Robinson name -- and returns it to Earth, albeit one reached by a Time Tunnel of sorts. (I said this show was overly familiar: to Baby Boomers, especially, it's like a two-hour bout of Sixties TV deja vu.)
But derivative and unexceptional as it is, it's still the best new broadcast network the next few days.
Next best is ABC's Suburgatory, premiering Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. ET. Again, you've seen it all before, plenty of times -- teen kid moves to the suburbs, and hates it.
But it's hard not to like Cheryl Hines from Curb Your Enthusiasm as an overly manicured suburban mom, for starters.
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here's nothing whatsoever to like, though, about Hart of Dixie (9 p.m. ET Monday, CW), starring The O.C.'s Rachel Bilson as a doctor who moves back to her small home town down south and sets up practice.
TVWW contributor Mike Donovan summed it up perfectly, in two words, as "Southern Exposure." See his review, and others, in our TVWW 2011 Fall Preview.
The original Northern Exposure, though, starring Rob Morrow as a young doctor dispatched to small-town Alaska, was wonderful. In Dixie, the only heart is artificial.
And that leaves Thursday's new CBS sitcom, How to Be a Gentleman. I advise you do to the same thing: Leave it.
Wait for the weekend, when the cavalry, in the form of fresh and fabulous new TV offerings, finally arrives...