A friend of mine has been touting the brilliance of ABC’s Desperate Housewives for a few months now. So far, it hasn’t taken much effort to resist the urge to join the twenty-odd million Americans that tune into ABC’s top-rated program. After all, this is the same friend who dragged me along to see Cinderella Story. Who needs enemies, right? But last Sunday I finally caved in. Maybe it was too much time in the Miami sun, or maybe it was sheer boredom, but last week, ABC won over another convert to its land of domestic desperation.

But Housewives wouldn’t keep me for long.

Critics have hailed Housewives as a smart and witty satire, a needed jolt for a network saddled with back-to-back episodes of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and The Bachelor. Although watching Housewives is certainly better than listening to an unemployed, single mother of twelve cry when she finds out her kitchen is getting remodeled, what exactly Housewives attempts to so wittily satirize is beyond me. And the show’s formula isn’t too groundbreaking, either. Mix sexy middle-aged women sleeping around their idyllic suburban environs with a little bit of murder thrown in for some mystery and you’ve got Housewives. It’s basically Sex and the Suburbs à la Agatha Christie. The end product is neither funny nor dramatic nor mysterious. As Dave Chapelle would say, “It’s just regular-ass TV.”

“Regular-ass TV,” however, is regular for a reason - it’s the norm. The tragic part is that what should be indistinguishable flops of shows are dominating the prime time ratings. ABC, however, is hardly the worst offender. That title surely belongs to CBS.

Scanning CBS’s scheduled programming for this week, I’m hard pressed to declare which of CBS’s programs is the greatest offender to good taste. Among the top-ten rated programs last week, CBS held 6 of the slots. Everybody Loves Raymond, the prehistoric glow-in-the-dark fish of network comedies, holds one of these spots and will be retired following this week’s final episode. Likely to take its spot, at least for one week, is the made-for-television movie entitled “Amber Frey: Witness for the Prosecution.” It’s stuff like this that makes me yearn for the days of Monica Lewinsky as a prime-time host. Equally troubling is the appearance of both CSI and CSI: Miami near the top of the Nielsen ratings. While it took decades for the once great Law and Order to infest the airwaves with gratuitous and bland spin-offs, CSI has accomplished the feat in a matter of years. This heap of bland programming all comes straight from the network that brought America Rathergate.

NBC doesn’t offer much of an alternative. With The West Wing consigned to rerun status in between episodes of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy on BRAVO and The Apprentice losing steam faster than Donald Trump loses wives, NBC is in trouble not only in the quality category, but also the ratings game. In the absence of any quality shows, there is no longer any such thing as “Must See TV” on NBC.

If there is anything close to a must see lineup these days, it’s certainly on FOX. Despite being home to the worst show on television, the chart-topping American Idol, FOX more than makes up for its inane talent show by hosting two of the best shows on tv. On the comedy front, Arrested Development has been FOX’s golden goose, at least with the critics. Despite lagging ratings, FOX has resolutely stuck by to the brilliant Michael Hurwitz comedy. The typical sitcom is a gruesomely choreographed machine: twenty minutes of show, twenty setups, twenty punchlines, and a canned laugh track. Arrested Development is the opposite. It’s spontaneous, and it’s full of jokes whose punch lines setups come minutes after the setups. Arrested Development is a sitcom turned on its head. It’s sublimely absurd that any network, even one that made a cartoon for adults into a hit, would air such a cynically subversive show.

FOX’s other crown jewel is perhaps the furthest thing from the zany unorthodoxy of Arrested Development. In fact, The O.C. is, on the surface at least, about as typical as a primetime soap opera can get. But the beauty of The O.C. is that it’s not trying to be anything else. While the producers of Desperate Housewives would like their show to be some intellectual satire of modern America, The O.C. is content with being what Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place were before it - iconic soaps of primetime. The show is even self-aware enough to mock itself through “The Valley,” a primetime program that all the fictitious SoCal hotties of Newport Beach watch. The strength of The O.C. is that it never takes itself too seriously. It knows what it is. It knows that it’s supposed to be fun, mindless amusement.

And television is supposed to be fun like that. There’s plenty of room for smart, revolutionary programming like Arrested Development, but there aren’t enough writers and execs in Hollywood gutsy enough to transform the television landscape into something that appeals only to a small, dogmatic cult of cynically sarcastic couch potatoes. That doesn’t mean, however, that America should forever languish in a cesspool of murder-mystery spin-offs, reality TV dating contests, and Scott Peterson specials. And with ratings pretty flat across the board, I wouldn’t be surprised that if the execs at ABC, CBS, and NBC don’t turn out something more inspiring pretty soon, they might all be hearing the two show-stopping words from The Apprentice: You’re Fired.

-Michael B. Greene