Slate’s Troy Patterson gives us a staccato rundown on Eleventh Hour, Kath & Kim, My Own Worst Enemy, Crusoe, The Ex-List, Sex Change Hospital (really?), Gimme My Reality Show, Living With The Wolfman, and Stylista, none of which appear to be any good. Surprise.

The intro:

There is a fearful asymmetry between the way that critics and audiences experience the fall TV season. The former watch shows straight through on DVD; the latter take them as the Lord and David Sarnoff intended, with commercials. Critics tend to watch new shows alone with their wretched selves; normal people frequently gather around the electronic hearth in groups with the opportunity to talk over the programming in a social fashion, as opposed to just yelling at the cable box. Most unnaturally of all, it’s the duty of the critic working on assignment to view even the most obvious dreck in its entirety (in order to confirm that it keeps being drecky), whereas regular audience members presented with substandard entertainment are at liberty to follow their tastes and change the channel—or, if the situation demands and local gun laws permit, shoot the television.

On Wednesday night—nagged by these last two points and hopeful of closing the gap between viewer and reviewer—your correspondent acted on a lark and tried an experiment. I invited some friends over, gathered a handful of promotional screeners of new pilots, and established some loose rules: Whenever a member of our little focus group grew hopelessly fed up with (or insulted by, or contemptuous of …) a show, she would signal her weariness by tinkling a bell. Once someone else had seconded the motion, we would be done with that program and move on to the next. Tyranny in action!

For Patterson’s complete breakdown, click here.

Over at Salon, Heather Havrilesky is more positive and tries to make sense of these shows through the prism of our world falling apart, only without irony.

Are you in the mood to watch leading men with deep, penetrating eyes thrown into extraordinary circumstances? Do you want to see these men solving mysteries, nabbing criminals or engaging in international espionage, even as the planet crumbles under their feet? If so, stay tuned for a brand-new slew of suspense-thrillers coming to a television near you.

Sadly, though, most of us are too distracted by the fact that the world is falling to pieces each day in a suspense-thriller of our own design. Where are our saviors with the expressive eyes, the ones who might lead us, Jesus-like, through this quagmire? Presumably they all moved to Hollywood to appear on TV dramas, leaving us with one honorable but absent-minded professor who won’t make any claims that he’s a miracle worker, and one angry old turtle who brags that he can turn water into wine, flanked by a hapless backcountry sidekick pulled straight from the set of the latest quirky Alaskan dramedy.

At least the soulful-looking men on our television screens are angry and panicked and filled with dismay at the crumbling state of things. At least we can relate to their confusion and fear and bewilderment. At least, through them, we can pretend that solving crimes and blowing Russian thugs to smithereens is an option. At least there’s a soothing moral at the end, one to calm your nerves after you’ve given your last dime to the professorial non-miracle worker in the hopes that, despite his humble claims, he can stop the whole world from imploding.

Now go destroy your TV.

(the video above is an audio/visual doppleganger to what follows)