It’s been an interesting season of television. Jumping right into it:

When Glee first went on hiatus, I picked up Fringe as a solution to my lack of television. As with most things J.J. Abrams, it’s a mixed bag. While I recognize that it’s the highest form of sacrilege to insult Lost right now, I couldn’t stand it beyond the first episode of the second season. I handled the smoke monster and the shrieking noises and some quantity of supernatural bullshit; but, considering where the show’s gone from there, I’m glad I got out when I did.

Which isn’t to say that Fringe is a vast departure. The Observers walk across random shots, irritatingly out of focus so you never know whether you’re hallucinating their presence or not, and the mysterious apples and puffs of smoke at commercial breaks are a total crock of shit. Oh, and then there’s all the gratuitous, gut-churning nastiness that masquerades as a plot. For instance, there’s this delightful intestinal parasite of everyone’s fucking worst nightmares:

And yet, I can’t stop watching, which speaks to the show’s overall quality. I described it to someone as the X-Files of the 2000s, and I think that still stands. It’s like J.J. Abrams took all the ideas he had for Lost and, instead of trying to apply them where they clearly Make No Fucking Sense (ie. an island), he put them in downtown Boston with the premise that weird shit is de rigueur for the northeast. Somehow, it works.

And then there’s Modern Family.

On the behalf of anyone who has ever encountered a gay stereotype, I’d like to congratulate ABC and the show’s producers for managing to squeeze each and every one of them into a single couple. That takes serious dedication! A neurotic, slightly cubbish lawyer and his oversized queen of a partner who seems to do nothing but wear paisley and mince around carrying — dear god, does our suffering know no bounds?! — their adopted generically-Asian baby? How groundbreaking.

But the show succeeds in a huge way despite its heavy reliance on clichés, at least in the sense that I can’t stop watching it. A friend described it as the show for people who miss Arrested Development, which is right, to an extent. It uses the same brand of hyperbolic humor that made Arrested Development delightful, but without requiring you to be on the inside of an increasingly complex web of jokes to understand what’s going on. Every episode is pleasantly self-contained, and as a half-hour program, I can’t really ask for more. Except, maybe, for Phil’s death, because he’s not funny at all and occasionally makes me pause the episode I’m watching because he’s so fucking annoying DIE DIE DIE.

In other news, this season of Project Runway is continuing the precedent established last year of keeping everything conceptually the same as the show at its peak but somehow managing to make every episode into a struggle to stay awake. I remember the episodes by the quantity of liquor and dessert it took for me to make it through all 42 minutes. Designing a dress for Heidi? Two screwdrivers and a slice of banana bread. The kids challenge? A very large gin and tonic and six oatmeal-raisin cookies. The one where Anthony was a contrived amalgamation of every negative stereotype of both Southern and gay people? Oh, wait, that’s every episode.

And, lest we forget, Grey’s Anatomy is still trundling along. Except I’m so colossally underwhelmed by this season — even as it manages to eliminate everything that used to annoy me about the show, including but not limited to Izzie, George, and the constant Deredith drama — that I can’t even think of anything especially snarky to say about it. Does no one remember how to make this show good anymore? All the competent writers must have encountered the Superfund site that is Private Practice and died or something, because there’s really no other explanation.