At first glance, you'd think that Starz' new series Spartacus: Blood and Sand was a cheap, shameless attempt to cash in on the fast-waning popularity of 300 and Gladiator, with a heaping pile of man- and ladyflesh thrown in just to one-up HBO's already tawdry Rome.

Let's be honest here: The first episode of Caprica, the much-ballyhooed spinoff of Ron Moore and David Eick's mostly amazing relaunch of Battlestar Galactica, is just OK. It's listless and a bit loopy for much of its first hour, displaying more of the noodly quasi-mystical elements that sandbagged the end of Galactica than the gut-wrenching moral and physical perils that defined the bulk of the series. But that's fine by me -- I still don't care much for the initial miniseries that brought Galactica back to TV, but the series shaped up quickly from there. And the way Caprica's pilot picks up steam in its second hour leaves me intrigued enough to look forward to the rest of its first season.

Fifty-eight years before a petulant robot Dean Stockwell will turn it and 11 other planets into smoldering nuclear craters, Caprica is a smugly wealthy enclave of power and privilege. Its inhabitants, many of whom seem blithely racist toward residents of less shiny planets, worship the same pantheon of Greek gods that got a lot of lip service in Galactica. They're pretty much like us, except for the occasional spaceship or virtual-reality "holoband." Capricans have TV shows, restaurants, cars, sporting events, and oh yes, religiously motivated terrorist bombings. Except in this case, the whacko fundamentalists have this crazy notion that instead of many gods, there's just one all-knowing, all-powerful deity with an ironclad grip on the notions of right and wrong.

Well, most of us, as far as I know. Anyone heard from Rywalt in a while? (I kid, I kid.) Some quick observations about televisual stuff:

- I begin to suspect that Glee creator Ryan Murphy has a split personality. Evil Ryan Murphy loves to create shows stocked with shrill, hateful stereotypes at which he can point and laugh, take cheap shots, and feel smugly superior. He then makes them do inane things in the name of ginning up cheap drama. Good Ryan Murphy loves to peel back those characters' vile and aggravating facades to reveal the honest humanity beneath, in subtle, impressive, and occasionally heart-tugging ways.

Evil Murphy seemed to be winning the coin toss in Glee's initial episodes -- apparently, deciding to start an early '90s cover band magically turns you into a total jerk, but only for an hour or so -- but Good Murphy's been coming back strong lately. And for a show that proudly tries to be a bastion of sweetness and light, last night's long-overdue confrontation between nice-guy music teacher Will Schuester and his godawful wife Terri about the pregnancy she'd been (lamely and improbably) faking was ugly and frightening in all the very best ways. I just wish the show would at least occasionally remember that the minority members of its cast, you know, exist.

At least Jane Lynch's Sue Sylvester is flat-out awesome, a walking cauldron of leathery, tracksuited malice in human form. Consistently hilarious, and with believable and almost sympathetic motives beneath her cartoon villainy, she seems to be gunning hard for a Best Supporting Actress Emmy this year -- and deservedly so.

- The folks behind USA's White Collar seem to be taking the "amiable" part of the network's "amiable procedurals with larger-than-life characters" mission a bit too much to heart. I only wish the show's plots, characterization, and dialogue were as snappy as Matthew Bomer's wardrobe. The writers seem too content to let con man Neil Caffrey coast on Bomer's innate charm and near-preposterous good looks, rather than giving him a personality beyond, "I steal stuff! And I'm handsome!" (Seriously, for a guy hellbent on finding his missing girlfriend, the dude will flirt with a seemingly endless parade of hot ladies at the drop of a vintage '50s Sinatra-style hat.)

I like Tim DeKay's grumbly, frumpy, regular-Joe FBI guy, and he and Bomer have good rapport. But The Middleman's Natalie Morales is pretty much wasted as Generic Attractive Lady Who's Only in the Show for the Rakish Antihero to Banter With. I keep wishing her earnest, Eisenhower-jacketed employer from her previous series would turn up to spirit her off to solve some far more exciting case that didn't involve, I don't know, forged bearer bonds or something.

I hear rumbles that a big swerve is coming in next week's fall finale. If it's what I think it is, good. The show needs a shot of adrenalin, and some actual wit and verve. It wants to be champagne and caviar, but it comes across more like Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

- Community keeps getting better every week, combining insane hilarity, unexpected character development, and startlingly effective moments of real pathos. And if you missed Danny Pudi's dead-on impersonation of Christian Bale's Batman in the Halloween episode, get thee to Hulu posthaste.

- Good shows in need of your viewership are returning to the airwaves this week. Joss Whedon's DOA Dollhouse begins to burn off its final nine episodes Friday, and if history -- and its last two top-notch episodes -- have taught us anything, it's that Whedon shows tend to get really good right before they're prematurely cancelled. Also, the show is now fortified with your recommended weekly allowance of Summer Glau, which is never a bad thing. And ABC's awesome, ratings-challenged Better Off Ted returns to a somewhat dismal time slot after whatever's left of Scrubs. It's funny. You should watch it. Case closed.

A few months ago I got my first HDTV, a nice big 50-inch Samsung plasma.  It's only 720p but it was on sale (since plasmas are being discontinued).

Until recently I didn't have any true HD sources.  I have my PC hooked up to it and it does some silly resolution like 1600x1200 or something, but it's run through the analog VGA port and so not really true HD.  It looks lovely, but it's not as good as it can get.  Also, I don't have a remote control for the damned thing.

Last week I finally went ahead and sprung for a TiVo HD and Verizon FiOS.  Now I have true HD through the HDMI port.  Even at only 720p, it's still excellent.

Before you judge Dan Harmon, know this: The man has done terrible things in the name of comedy.

In his five-minute Web shorts for the ahead-of-its-time site Channel 101, Harmon has played sidekick to an underwear-clad Jack Black, farted lasers as the world's least likely superhero, and pretended to be Hannah Montana, complete with a blonde wig and a bright yellow mumu. (You probably don't want to watch that last link at work, or while eating, or, you know, ever.) But no matter how absurd the situations he's put himself and others in, Harmon's consistently demonstrated a rock-solid understanding of the fundamentals of good writing.

I'm glad to see that moving up to the network big leagues hasn't changed that. Community, Harmon's new series for NBC, may be less outrageous than his Channel 101 skits, but it's no less funny or well-scripted. The pilot never actually made me laugh out loud, but its clever characters, fun performances, and witty dialogue had me grinning throughout.

I saw my second part-episode of Sex Decoy: Love Stings last night. If you cringe at the pun in the title then you've pretty much felt what it's like to watch the show, only shorter. It's one of the most painfully dreadful things I've seen in a long time. I've said before that reality TV is all about making viewers feel better about themselves because at least they're not THOSE PEOPLE. But this time I think it may be about making viewers feel worse because THOSE PEOPLE are really of the same species.

The show follows Sandra and her three daughters who are named Kashmir, Jasmine and Xanadu. If you name your daughters that way you've got to know they're going to grow up to be strippers, and sure enough two of the three are! The third is still underage.

So Sandra is trying to get the girls more involved in her business, which is being paid by insecure women to set traps catching their cheating men on video. Apparently there's a whole industry devoted to sending ridiculously hot, slutty women to seduce unfortunate schlubs while their jealous beady-eyed soulmates watch on hidden camera. And it's much more respectable than taking your clothes off onstage. Maybe.

During the first show we watched, this woman sent the team after her boyfriend/husband person, the lead singer in a bar band. Good lord, where did these people grow up? If your man is the lead singer in a bar band, he is fucking other women. That's why men join bar bands. So she hired Sandra's company which hired some hilariously hot chick to pose as a rock journalist and come on to the singer as hard as humanly possible.

As this was unfolding on our TV, I told my long-suffering wife that she could save her money if she ever considered hiring this company: If a woman that far above my pay grade ever came on to me like that, I'd totally fall for it. Any man would, let alone a guy in a band. No contest. It's totally unfair.

In the second one, they sent one of the daughters -- her first undercover assignment as a ravenous slut, although I guess as a stripper she had some experience -- after this guy working in his music studio. She showed up at the door saying she was lost and needed to use the bathroom, then she settled in and began tempting him into meeting her at a party later for a threesome -- including anal.

Clearly the guy has never left his house because anyone who's seen movies like "Species" or "Lifeforce" or any of a hundred other titles would know when a ridiculously gorgeous woman -- or even a skanky stripper -- comes on to you out of nowhere, your choices explaining what's going on are a) you've inexplicably, suddenly, and surprisingly become vastly more attractive to the opposite sex or b) she's an alien/vampire/killer robot who's going to eat you before you come.

In this case she was bait in a trap where your wife will run in, slap you upside your cheating head, and berate your tiny penis in front of the whole world, or anyway in front of the infinitesmal fraction of the world that watches this trashy, trashy show.

I can't say what made me watch this aside from the fact that every other channel I turned to at the time was running commericals. Honestly, I tried uplifting, educational programs before settling on this one. Still, I watched it. You'd think maybe it's worth it for the prurient shots of the stripper daughters and the wildly over-made-up surgically enhanced mother, but in fact any time the camera gets closer to any of them you start wishing they'd pull back a bit, like when you get a glimpse of that hot chick down the block so you go out of your way to walk over for a closer look and realize she's not so much a hot chick as a fifty-year-old meth addict chain-smoking outside because her mother's inside on oxygen.

I suppose the other attraction of the show is watching the evil scumbag cheating men get their public comeuppance -- Sandra comes across as having some serious issues with the male of the species, always raving about their "coming clean" and so on -- except I don't see these guys as being especially evil scumbags, just regular guys I probably wouldn't like very much but who are only trying to live their crappy little lives. I feel bad for them, surrounded as they are by jealous, nasty harpies who lead them on with promises of anal sex and then morph into slimy space creatures and eat them.

Although, honestly, I feel much worse for myself, since I watched the show.

So the other night, while watching the season's final episodes of the still-awesome-and-actually-sorta-getting-even-better Better Off Ted, I saw this:

Bad enough that the impending denizens of ABC's "Comedy Wednesday" shuffle shamefacedly into their new fake house with all the confidence of cattle headed for a date with a compressed-air gun and a meat saw. (In the brief glimpse we get of Kelsey Grammar, you can practically see the man wishing he'd invested his "Frasier" earnings more prudently.) But when every single one of your supposedly hilarious stars gets absolutely blown off the screen, comedywise, by the creepy guy from "Lost"? In less than 30 seconds?

That, my friends, is the sound of absolutely no one laughing on Wednesday nights. At least, not on ABC.

Just a quick post to inform anyone who hadn't been within a mile of BBC America for, oh, the past three months that Being Human finally premiered last Saturday. The story of a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost all sharing a flat in Edinburgh Bristol happily remains just as big-hearted, funny, and spine-tinglingly creepy in series form as it did in its pilot.

New cast members Aidan Turner (as Mitchell the vampire) and the delightfully bubbly Leonora Critchlow (Annie the ghost) manage to improve on the already-good actors they've replaced from the pilot. Russell Tovey (George the dorky werewolf) remains the show's highlight, able to switch deftly from nervous comedy to hair-raising screams of anguish as he wolfs out.

The subplot about Mitchell's darkly ambitious vampire pals now feels a lot fresher and more interesting, in part thanks to Jason Watkins filling Adrian Lester's shoes as head bloodsucker Herrick. He's now a police sergeant, which gives the character an air of ominous authoritarian menace, and as written by creator Toby Whithouse and portrayed by Watkins, Herrick walks a fine and unnerving line between charming and terrifying.

In short, it's a winner of a show for sci-fi and horror fans -- the rare jaunt into scary territory that's also truly, wonderfully funny, and has real sympathy for its well-drawn characters. Unless you're out on the prowl for fresh blood, locked in the basement for your "time of the month," or too immaterial to pick up the remote, give it a try.

Things go bump in the night Saturdays at 9 p.m. on BBC America.

Hear that low, rhythmic rumbling sound in the distance, drawing ever nearer as Wednesday, July 15 approaches? That, my friends, is what John Rogers -- co-creator of TNT's terrific heist-caper series Leverage -- refers to as The Fun Train. And it's going full steam ahead.