I have a confession to make. It’s a TV confession, and it’s serious: I like to watch this show called The Gates. It’s a bad show. I mean, it’s a bad, bad, bad, bad show. It’s about all these people who live in a gated community in some weird place where there is never any weather. The air is always warm enough to permit sleeveless dresses and plenty of daytime decolletage but cool enough that no one ever breaks a sweat. Or an expression. It’s supposed to be a show full of grimaces and gasps: there are wampyres! and werewolves! succubi and witches! But the actors, men, women, even, I fear, the children, have all gone in for such an incredible combination of injectables, of lip plumpification and brow-freezeration, that no one can move any part except their eyeballs, and their eyeballs mostly roll around in confusion. One time this one lady who plays a British vampire was supposed to register outrage that she quickly has to mask with a look of warm welcome, and it was the same face both times.

Everyone on the show drives an SUV the size of my house and the wives all run bake sales and the husbands run rabdillion dollar multinational blood labs, or maybe synthetic wolf-fur manufacturing emporiums, I’m not sure. They don’t work very hard, in any case, because they are always cruising around the Gates in their giant black cars or staring blankly at each other across California King-size marble kitchen islands. It’s like Nero designed the sets, I swear.

I worry sometimes that the show thinks it’s revealing new things about the suburbs: sometimes a perfect lawn does not indicate a perfect character. Sometimes it indicates. . . creepy bones and stuff are buried under there! And then I worry that the show is just a cynical mishmash of money-making tropes. Maybe those things are true, but most of all I think the show is out of its mind. Characters appear and disappear willy nilly. Someone shows up at the start of what you think is going to be a major arc and then, wham! Dead due to wampyre! It sort of wants to be True Blood, but because it’s on network TV, it’s all ridiculously constrained and full of the dorky innuendo I remember from my pre-teen days watching Dynasty and The Colbys and Falcon Crest. Lorenzo Lamas, I loved you.

And I think that’s why I like it. Sometimes I get tired of seeing everything, either because the sex or blood or misery is over the top and gratuitous, or because it isn’t. The Gates is so randomly cut and pieced together but so uniformly shot and acted you feel you could watch any scene from any episode in any order and it would make the same amount of sense. It’s like one of those kids’ puzzles where all the pieces are perfect squares and the point is to make the picture whole of, say, a parrot or a giraffe, but even if you put the piece with the giraffe’s face where his foot should go, you still know it’s a giraffe’s face. The other shows I watch are more like one of those puzzles made out of a Seurat or a Turner painting, a piece of blue shadow with a brown blur on one prong that might be the sky or might be the water or might be the ship’s sails or the fabric of the lady’s dress or the bank of flowers, and anyway even when you have the whole puzzle done the scene will never make sense or stop breaking your heart.

So I guess sometimes I want my TV like a giraffe puzzle, especially when I am a little sick or a little blue, or just worn out in the ways it feels like only painless TV can fix. TV and rice pudding I overcooked myself, and dog and cat and the old WindChaser oscillating heater, and, to end with a confession as bad as I began, The Cure. The album? Disintegration.