So before I start, I want to make crystal clear for anyone stumbling across this that all opinions here are my own as a TV viewer and should not reflect at all on the people who choose to employ me so I can continue to afford 8,000 cable channels.

Also, I have two levels of bias alert: Slight Bias Alert means I know a couple of people who are there now but who had nothing to do with the pilot, so I feel comfortable reviewing it in earnest. Bias Alert means I know people heavily involved in the pilot and can’t really give an unbiased review, but I’ll say a couple words about it.

That said, here are the reviews for things I’ve already seen the pilots for, either on TV or via some alternate means:

Chuck (Mondays at 8 on NBC) – Perfect companion to Heroes. I will be shocked if this doesn’t turn into a hit. Zachary Levi is spot-on as the underacheiving geek whose CIA roommate sends him a series of pictures that has all the secrets of the US Government embedded within it, then has a hot chick from the CIA come and try to find out what he knows and possibly kill him. Okay, yes, that makes it sound a bit dopey, but if you thought Heroes was nice and nerdy but maybe a bit too serious, you will definitely love Chuck.

Life (slight bias alert, Wednesdays at 9 on NBC) – I love Damian Lewis (who was wonderful in Band of Brothers), but this show is just weird. They take a run-of-the-mill cop show and try to make it interesting by slapping an out-of-place documentary framing device on it and making the lead cop (Lewis) a man who was recently freed after being framed for murder. Largely, they fail because Lewis’s character comes off as more obnoxiously quirky than anything else.

I will say, I do appreciate a show that both contains Robin Weigert (who was fucking awesome as unrepentant drunk Calamity Jane on Deadwood and who I am always happy to see working) and finds repeated excuses to get smokin’ Sarah Shahi a) in a police uniform, which is hot, and b) out of her shirt, which is hotter. That’ll at least buy them two more episodes on my TiVo.

Back To You (Wednesdays at 8 on Fox) – The first ten minutes of this were not terribly promising, but despite the appearance of a couple of flagrantly obnoxious supporting characters (I’m looking at you, fat young sweaty news director and hot daddy issues latina weathergirl), I think this could turn into a pretty amusing show. Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton are old pros, and it’s their chemistry that makes this work.

I think as long as they try to keep it focused on the more interesting characters (Grammer, Heaton, the local reporter passed over for the anchor job, and delightfully loopy Fred Willard doing his tried, true, and still hilarious shtick as the asshole Sports Guy), this could end up being a long-runner.

K-Ville (bias alert, Mondays at 9 on Fox) – I’ll leave most of my observations out of this except to say the guy they have running the writers room over there used to work at my show, and he is an absolutely outstanding writer. Every script he wrote here was jaw-droppingly awesome. If anyone can make this work over the course of a season, he can. However, I fear this may get stomped hard by the Heroes juggernaut before it gets a chance to fully find its voice.

Journeyman (Mondays at 10 on NBC) – The show’s versions of time travel and its machinations are not terribly well-explained, but Kevin McKidd from Rome does a good to great job in the title role. I was a bit unsure of this show until the final scene of the pilot, which is really a triumph of McKidd’s acting ability. If they can find material that will consistently touch the emotions of the viewer the way that scene does (I shit you not, it gave me goosebumps), this is a show to watch out for.

Bionic Woman (Wednesdays at 9 on NBC) – The reviews for this pilot haven’t been great, but I really enjoyed the action stuff they did, and came off a lot more impressed than I thought I’d be. The non-action aspects were definitely a bit too far into the dark side, but it’s got quite a bit of potential.

There is one big concern I have, and that’s the post-pilot addition of Isaiah Washington to this show after his recent shitcanning at Grey’s due to his violent, homophobic outburst last year and subsequent complete inability to shut his persecution-complexed piehole about said incident. Washington’s got a hell of a lot of talent, but he got fired less than a month before he got this gig for being a loose cannon and potential liability, and his hiring smacks of “any publicity is good publicity” desperation. It does not give me confidence that they’ve been able to patch the flaws in the show on their own.

More to come next weekend after I watch the pile o’stuff premiering this week.

Here’s the long review I promised earlier this week. Bunch of mini-reviews for the pilots I’ve already seen will be up later today.

Many people have been asking me, “What the fuck has happened to HBO lately?” I call it Albrecht’s revenge.

Chris Albrecht, the former head of HBO who was unceremoniously booted after getting arrested for beating his girlfriend (and after a previously covered up incident of the same nature was revealed shortly thereafter), really left his former employers in the lurch with the slate he greenlit just prior to his departure. It’s almost as if he knew the jig was up.

John From Cincinatti was an impenetrable mess, chosen to debut in the timeslot following the head-scratching finale of The Sopranos (my mom’s reaction was fairly typical). It flopped spectacularly, and now the next of Albrecht’s hand-picked successors is here to shit all over HBO’s once-pristine reputation.

Someone asked me earlier this week via text message to explain what happens on Tell Me You Love Me, and my 160 character-limited reply was, “boring conversation, boring conversation, fucking, then boring conversation.” In other words, another serious disappointment.

The premise, at first glance, is right up HBO’s alley. A realistic look at marriage that would strip away the layers of bullshit that constantly surround relationships, complete with lots of envelope-pushing sexual situations? It must have sounded like a home run during the pitch.

The problem is in the execution. The scripts shoot for honest but wind up at excruciating. There’s a very fine line in film and television between being really honest about how life is really lived and presenting people with rehashed versions of arguments that they had this morning, and that they’d really prefer not to relive.

The best example I can find of the former is Friday Night Lights, a show that infuses even the angriest arguments with love and humor. Tell Me You Love Me just infuses everything with deep bitterness, and it makes the show incredibly obnoxious.

The other problem with the show is a bit more endemic to its premise than to its specific execution: Dramas about troubled relationships, particularly those which are shooting for realism, are particularly difficult to do well because of the deeply boring nature of most fights to people not actually IN the relationship.

The couple having fertility difficulties might resonate with other couples having fertility difficulties. I, however, have seen this story line one too many times, and the exact same beats are covered in every treatment of it:

“This is my fault for having dried up eggs, this is your fault for having dried up sperm, let’s schedule sex to meet my ovulation schedule, let’s throw out the schedule and just be romantic, this is our fault for not trying hard enough, this is nobody’s fault so let’s just love each other.”

That’s just one example of the mind-numbingly boring plot recycling that goes on between sex scenes in the show. Sadly, in some plotlines, fights aren’t just boring, they’re actively irritating.

Take, for example, the engaged couple of the show. Their troubles begin after she overhears him talking about how he doesn’t think, even though they’re engaged, he’ll ever spend the rest of his life only sleeping with one woman. This sends her into an almost psychotic tizzy, freaking out that because he can’t commit right then and there at that very second to not sleeping with anyone for the next forty to sixty years, he doesn’t really love her enough.

Now, this is a stupid enough premise on its own, but the acting and the writing really turn it into the single most asinine argument you’ve ever heard. Halfway through the second episode I wanted to scream at this poor guy, “Oh my God, RUN! Dump this lunatic before it’s too late!”

And then…there’s the sex. It’s an unavoidable part of the show in a “Wow, did they actually just show that guy’s balls? I think they did. Oh look, there they are again!” sort of way. They also think they’re pushing the envelope by showing a 60-something woman giving her husband a blowjob, but I was simply left with the rather creepy feeling that I’d just walked in on someone else’s parents having sex.

The graphic nature of the sex is supposed to be daring and show deeper levels of a relationship than you can show without it, but if the characters are so annnoying and/or underdeveloped as to leave the viewer completely unable to connect with any of them, the sex can’t come off as anything other than pornographic and prurient.

And believe me, if you’re watching this show for the 2-3 brief sex acts that take place over the course of an hour, you need to go take the $14 a month you’re paying for HBO and go buy some actual pornography, because it’d certainly be sexier and a far more effective means to an end than anything shown here.

The whole thing is just unfortunate, because there are a couple good actors who are wasted in horribly bland parts: Tim DeKay from Carnivàle just can’t do anything with the colorless sad-sack husband who’s lost interest in sex, and Ally Walker as his wife who goes to couples therapy without him is hilariously passive-agressive.

Overall, it’s another serious dent in HBO’s once-impenetrable armor. I won’t even give this the chance I gave John From Cincinnati of watching the whole season, partly since the highly awesome Dexter is starting up in the same timeslot in a couple weeks. I gave JFC that chance because it was so fucking weird and David Milch is so fucking brilliant that I thought maybe, maybe there’s a point to continuing to watch this and it will eventually turn awesome, despite the fact that it never did.

That hope doesn’t exist with this show. For the first time in a while for an HBO show, the season pass is getting deleted from the TiVo tonight. Thanks, Albrecht.