I'm having a hard time with television right now. Now that Breaking Bad is over, I guess my favorite ongoing TV show is Girls. And that's a fine favorite TV show to have. And it's not the only TV show I enjoy; I like Parks and Recreation a lot, too, for example. But most of the shows I follow now are comedies. I'm running low on compelling dramas. Homeland is losing me. And I watched the first two episodes of both Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and The Blacklist, and they're both terrible.

S.H.I.E.L.D had one clever scene in two episodes—that interrogation bit—and it's got Clark Gregg, who is incredibly watchable. Everything else about the show is dumb. The actors are generally awful. The effects waver between great and laughable. Maybe it'll find its feet, but I'm having a hard time imagining what that would look like. Firefly had all sorts of potential in its first few episodes; Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has Clark Gregg, and not much else besides a tenuous relationship with Joss Whedon. It looks hopeless from here.

The Blacklist has James Spader, who is always fun to watch. But the show itself feels sloppy, and a sloppy television show about a super-genius is a failure. It's basically your standard FBI show starring Lex Luthor, which isn't a bad premise, but it feels as bland as everything else on network TV, which is a shame.

Maybe there's no solution to my problem. Maybe I just need to start watching the Univision version of Breaking Bad. My Spanish could use some serious brushing up, anyway: