Also, forgive the way this looks. I couldn’t get the software to cooperate tonight. Anyone smarter than WordPress code who wants to fix this, please do so.

Here are a few things that got in my head lately:

1.) The Portlandia sketch from last Friday–the dream of the 1890s. I can’t stop singing it.

2.) Stupid Adele and her stupid song. I also can’t stop singing it. I think this particular song virus afflicted most of America several months ago. Somehow we avoided this infection until a couple weeks ago and it’s only just finally starting to go away. Try not to catch it. If you did, this SNL sketch will help you get over it faster. Good luck!

3.) This “Whistle for Peace in the Congo.” This necklace is not a joke. Am I mistaken for cringing at this kind of product? Yes, some of the proceeds go to charity, yadayada. But really, a crystal encrusted version for $498. Nothing quite says Happy Valentine’s Day like using the memory of murdered African children to sell bedazzled neck jewelry!

4.) The SNL Downton Abbey sketch. This is the only good link I could find. It’s the video after Lana Del Rey. “You pissed off the chicken lady!” Enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In Downton Abbey, the easiest way to tell if a woman is lovable is by checking first to see if she is extremely good-looking, as opposed to merely very pretty. “Very pretty” means she will be pitied openly until she finally learns that she will never be loved, nor not even particularly liked, at which point she becomes a cunning bitch and spoils the lives of those around her so you have a better reason to despise her. The truly excellent-looking are lovable even when they do pretty morally questionable things, like seducing foreign diplomats, fucking them to death, and then hiding their bodies. As for the men, the less handsome they are, the more we are intended to like them.

And there’s a lot of Maggie Smith mugging at everything, cross-class romance, and women despairing that they just want “something to do!” There are easy wartime tears and plenty of pained long-distance eye contact. Americans are clueless wannabes, the Irish are fiery and resentful, and Scots are stout and dependable. Every single time someone kisses or says something secret, it turns out they are interrupted by exactly the wrong person. The show’s body count is higher than on Misfits. At the end of the second season, even Lord Grantham has finally admitted that every member of the household is so embroiled in scandal now that there’s no sense in pretending they are a respectable family any longer.

And yet!

When I don’t actually stop to think about it at all, I really deeply love this show. While watching it, I say things like, “Oh, no! Stop!” and “Finally!” and I may have cried several times during this last episode.

I remember a friend once recommending Six Feet Under to me back when it was on (ten years ago?) by saying that it was a show about extremely uptight people who, in every episode, seem to wring themselves of every possible confession and confrontation without ever giving the sense that they’ve ceased to be tortured by uptightness and secrecy. I think Downton seems to be following the same path. Characters change so much more slowly than events and circumstances that the audience gets that uniquely soapoperish pleasure of dramatic irony.

When I first started watching soap operas, it was All My Children with a group of women at the office where I worked during a summer home from college. We’d sit down to watch and they’d mock me for believing that Leo could ever love Laura, whom he married on her deathbed just before her miraculous heart transplant. “He’s going to make a go of it!” I’d say. “Not with Greenlee still around, he won’t,” they’d say. And lo, they were correct. How did they know? It turns out a good soap opera rewards the careful viewer.

I suppose that’s what these new long-form dramas have to offer. People who wouldn’t be caught dead immersing themselves in One Life to Live or Guiding Light are getting a chance to predict what their favorite characters will do on Breaking Bad or Mad Men. Downton Abbey is basically the same formula, but I think I rather like it.

Fortunately, it’s easy to stay amused, especially with so many great shows to discover. The Boston-NYC Chinatown bus offers long viewing session opportunities, just right for the six-to-eight hour length of most British series. One trip down and back, and you’re done!

Are English shows really smarter, or do they just sound that way? Sure, the accents are a plus, but the writing rocks, too.

Skins proves a strong exception to the one-or-two-series-and-then-quit rule of a lot of the best British shows, yet the format allows for constant reinvention. It follows a group of friends through their sixth-form college (the two years of schooling that roughly correspond to end of high school in the U.S.). They party a lot, but aren’t precocious in the American sense, where most TV teenagers are played by actors pushing thirty. These are real kids, mostly nonprofessionals, acting the hell out of complex, ensemble-driven plots.

Most seasons consist of eight episodes, and eight kids make up the main group. Each episode is told from a different character’s point of view, so while the story arcs develop across multiple ranges of vision, we also get one deep look (but only one!) at each character per season. This format makes for brilliant, riveting TV; I wish an American series could adapt it in a way that wasn’t stupid and trusted viewers to keep up. (My So-Called Life sort of tried it way back when, with separate eps that featured Brian, Rickie, and Rayanne, but it was always Angela Chase’s world–the rest of them just lived in it.)

I have only gotten through the first two seasons (there are five to date), so it’s time to exchange one group of sixth-formers for another. But this show really got to me; I am not ready to move on quite yet. It’s that good.

One sort-of guilty pleasure is an action series called Strike Back, about John Porter, a disgraced soldier who signs on with a black-ops division of MI6 to try and redeem himself. Mission after ethically-dubious mission, he strives to do the right thing, even when it conflicts with his creepy boss’s orders. Two things save this show from its own formula: first, each mission gets spread across two hours, which allows it to be fully developed and granted feature-worthy production values, including exotic locations that give the stories verisimilitude. (British audiences don’t seem as terrified of subtitles as American viewers, thank goodness.)

The second thing that makes Strike Back so fun to watch is the presence of Jodhi May as Porter’s liaison in the field. Trust me on this one, guys. May is one of the finest actors working today, and she doesn’t choose bad projects. She won the Best Actress award at Cannes when she was twelve. She is endlessly versatile–films, TV, stage, costumes, accents, you name it. She could be our generation’s Meryl Streep, she’s so good. (Oh, did I mention that she has a literature degree from Oxford? Just sayin’.)

I saved the best (and most embarrassing) one for last: Lip Service. If you can set aside the strange concept (an L Word-type show set in Glasgow) and the god-awful name (seriously, is that the best they could come up with for a lesbian drama?), you will be pleasantly surprised. The show is sexy, incredibly funny, affecting, and wonderfully cast, especially with the luminous Laura Fraser in the central role. Fraser’s Cat Mackenzie has just gotten over her bad-girl ex (Frankie) and started getting serious with a responsible detective sergeant (Sam) when Frankie reenters her life. Which one will Cat choose?

Without giving anything away, I can tell you that I am firmly on the side of

Six hours of charming Scottish accents, ace storytelling, and great love scenes (did I mention the accents?) later, you’re ready for Series 2, coming in Spring 2012. I should get around to watching it this time next year, probably on the Chinatown bus back from New York.

Without a doubt, the greatest show on the air right now is Breaking Bad. What Battlestar Galactica was to the post-9/11, Iraq War zeitgeist–namely, a wildly imagined alternate reality that turns out to have all the resonance and truth of a fable–Breaking Bad is to the current national mood of economic outrage and ethical turmoil. (The protagonist, Walter White, is a high-school chemistry teacher who learns he has terminal cancer. Haunted by the idea of leaving his wife and disabled son with nothing after they pay for his care, he starts cooking and selling meth. That’s the hook. It gets a lot more twisted from there.) I think it’s going to be a high-water mark for any televised show. Plus, Skyler White is one of the most complex and believable female characters ever to appear on TV. One of the greats. Carmela Soprano-level great. Anna Gunn should be winning Emmys all over the place.

If you came down from outer space and decided to learn about humanity by watching TV, you could be forgiven for thinking that literally all of us were doctors, lawyers, cops, or medical examiners. I understand the appeal of these types for writers. They have exciting careers that lend themselves to both episodic and serial plots. But seriously, now. Why not a show about line cooks? Plumbers? Some people who play with kittens and then go out to lunch? But no, every show has to have a dead body, car crashes, gratuitous sexual violence, or a combination of all three. God am I tired of cop shows in particular.

Still, lately I have been following with avid interest three (!) female-fronted cop shows. They all have a light touch and tweak the formula in some pretty entertaining ways.

First, a huge plug for Rizzoli & Isles. This buddy crime-fighting show (two for one! Rizzoli is the cop and Isles is the medical examiner!) has got to be the gayest thing on TV right now, a hundred times gayer than Glee. Think Cagney & Lacey with all the subtextual subtlety of Xena: Warrior Princess. This thing is a campfest. Apparently there is even a drinking game: every time the eponymous characters touch one another in an overly familiar, gratuitous manner, you have to drink. The game led Dorothy Snarker, the lesbian pop culture blogger (yes, that is a career now), to create this lovely screencap:

The fact that star Angie Harmon is a conservative activist–even speaking at the 2004 Republican National Convention and stumping for John McCain in the 2008 election–makes this delight all the weirder and better. Does she know her character is super gay? Or is she like Charleton Heston in Ben-Hur?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Next, Covert Affairs. The show is as deliciously cheesy as its title. Piper Perabo plays a CIA agent who was recruited right out of grad school for her prodigious talent in foreign languages. It just so happens that she is also canny, fearless, and immensely skilled at running really fast in Louboutin heels. Well, sure. Who among us can’t relate to that?

Perabo transcends her material, devising a deeply winsome lead out of what is, frankly, not a lot of characterization. The person who designed this cheesecake poster should be fired. (Though, to be fair, it does pretty much cover all the bases.)

Maria Bello’s lady detective in Prime Suspect is downright butch by comparison. Naming the show after Helen Mirren’s magisterial UK drama probably does it a disservice, as it is only a very loose adaptation. Still, this series has a lot going for it. Bello’s character Jane Timoney holds her own in an extremely sexist boys’ club, kicking ass at work and still enjoying a pretty rewarding personal life.

I would like to propose my own drinking game for this show. Every time Timoney wears that stupid fedora, take a drink. You will be blotto in no time at all.

A lot of the other dramas I’ve checked out aren’t up to much, so I’m not sure they’ll last more than a season. (Then again, their mediocrity might ensure that they run forever.) Consider the leading characters of A Gifted Man (neurosurgeon, sees dead people), Grimm (cop, sees demon people), Person of Interest (former CIA operative, sees crimes before they happen), and Body of Proof (medical examiner; former neurosurgeon): it’s like the developers went to a charades party where there were only five little slips of paper in the bowl.

But, hey! Sarah Michelle Gellar has a new show! And, believe it or not, it isn’t about a supernatural crime fighter! Ringer has Gellar playing twins, one of whom is rich and extremely devious; the other is a desperate former drug addict trying to stay clean and out of the hands of some organized criminals against whom she is planning to testify. In the pilot, the rich sister (Siobhan) disappears, and the druggie sister (Bridget) assumes her identity. (Yes, this is extremely high-concept.)

If you can get past the idea that a poor, druggie relation would probably have messed-up skin and teeth and therefore probably not be able to pass as a socialite, fooling even the husband, you might love this show. If you don’t mind outrageous nighttime soaps that stop just short of alien abduction in terms of trashy plot twists, you might love this show. And if you dig on the metatextual awesomeness of Gellar mining her past TV roles as a teen soap opera villainess and a badass with a secret double life, you will definitely love this show. Go watch it.

Not a lot is going on in terms of network comedies. Community and Parks & Recreation are still killing it, and until 30 Rock comes back next year, that’s pretty much all. But Showtime seems determined to create a new subgenre: the 30-minute dark comedy, shot with the production values of an hour-long drama, featuring a fortyish female protagonist dealing with some pretty intense shit. The first of these was my dearly departed The United States of Tara. Tara was a Kansas wife and mother with Divided Identity Disorder, whose other personalities were always fouling up her life in hilarious yet incredibly heavy ways. I can think of no one who could play this role so perfectly as the brilliant Toni Collette.

Since then, Nurse Jackie and The Big C have filled the void left by Tara‘s cancellation. While I love that Edie Falco and Laura Linney, dramatic powerhourses both, are working and finding roles on TV when film no longer really wants them for leading ladies, the formula is a bit troubling. Jackie is a nurse with a prescription drug addiction. Cathy has advanced terminal melanoma. Could we please laugh at someone not so completely on the verge of falling apart?

Apparently not, now that HBO has jumped on the bandwagon with Enlightened. Laura Dern must have been sitting at home thinking, “No one does ‘damaged’ better than I do! These ladies are in my wheelhouse! And David Lynch isn’t making movies right now anyway! I had better get to work!”

Demographically, I am the target audience for these shows, so it’s probably no surprise that to me they all seem really, really good. And when the alternative is more crappy reality shows about bratty chefs/fashion designers/adventurers having tantrums at one another, I am all for excellent scripted star vehicles.

Or, you know, I could turn off the TV.

Nah.