Two new, very different shows have managed to crack my viewing schedule, occupied as I have been these last few days re-viewing Seasons 2 and 3 of "Lost" (more about that later). I feel as if the writer's strike has pretty much rendered this entire television season impotent -- few if any of this year's freshman shows are going to make it to a second season. Many are already cancelled and forgotten. For different reasons, it's starting to resemble the season of 2001-02, where viewers universally announced with their remotes that they simply didn't have the emotional energy to commit to any new programs.

So why do I persevere and keep watching all of these pilots? I don't know. It's cheaper than going to the movies.

"Breaking Bad" The premise sounds like a slight inversion of Showtime's "Weeds," but quite early on in the pilot to AMC's new series with Bryan Cranston the creators make it clear that Jenji Kohan's show merely provided a launching-off point and the tone and goals here are quite different. Cranston, who had a weird energy even for a sitcom dad on "Malcolm in the Middle" and was as dark and disturbing on "How I Met Your Mother" as that show gets, doesn't mug in the least as high school chem teacher Walter White. White responds to a terminal cancer diagnosis by seeking out a lowlife former student (Aaron Paul) and opening a meth lab, ostensibly to provide security for his wife and handicapped son. What quickly becomes apparent as Cranston, his eyes motionless and dead, begins to cheat, lie, poison, kill, and dismember is that the whole speed dealer thing is just a front to allow Walter to treat the world as unpleasantly as it has treated him. While "Weeds" spent its whole first season putting its characters in place before things really started accelerating in the second, "Breaking Bad" sends Walter out into the deep waters almost from the very beginning, and it's the right choice -- while slower-paced, this is a tenser, higher-stakes show. Walter's customers aren't harmless cheery slackers like Nancy Botwin's, they're unpleasant and dangerous people -- and so is his principal confederate, Paul as a callow and arrogant addict. "Breaking Bad" can walk the line between finely dramatic and just hard to watch -- creator Vince Gilligan, off a long run on "The X-Files," gives his antihero a finely assembled set of frustrations, from the contempt of his students to a nicely nuanced supporting role by R.J. Mitte as Walter's son, whose cerebral palsy gives him a poignant physical need for his father's assistance even while he still resents his dad in the accepted teenaged way.

The show has a built-in clock with Walter's illness (and its status as a short-run basic cable series), which kind of takes away the one word of warning I might give -- this sort of tension exercise can't really be sustained over multiple seasons. "Weeds," which didn't start out anywhere near as high-stakes, more or less burned itself out by the third season. "Breaking Bad" seems designed to be a 12- or 20-episode self-contained story, something we're seeing more and more of on cable TV these days (ESPN's "The Bronx Is Burning" was pretty good) and something of which I wholly approve.

"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" Thanks, but no thanks. SKYNET should still be your go-to reference when you need to name-check a fictional futuristic computer that will be death of us all, but the Terminator TV spinoff neither detracts much from the blissfully mindless first two films nor adds anything of interest. It's well-cast, with Lena Headey effectively stepping in for Linda Hamilton, Richard T. Jones getting more than is really there out of a stock menacing government-y guy role, and the minute Summer Glau looking lovely if not really selling a weird River/Schwarzenegger-hybrid robot delivery. "Sarah Connor Chronicles" is all action, which is kind of cool to see on TV (and it hasn't cheated thus far, all the episodes have had big-screen effects budgets). But... after a certain point you run into a lot of problems, not the least of which is credibility. Is John Connor, a wary but otherwise completely unskilled kid, going to managed to escape point-blank small arms fire from programmed killing machines from the future every week? See, that doesn't work. In a two-hour movie, you buy these crazy escapes because things keep moving quickly enough for there to be something else to hold your attention by the time the gunfire quiets enough to let you really consider the matter. For a weekly series, you've got plenty of time to wonder why John hasn't gotten shot yet. For television the basic Terminator plot has been rotated a little to emphasize the modern, non-science fiction analogues to Sarah Connor's plight, but not enough -- this is still mostly special effects chasing people around, and the Terminator mythology (to the extent that it's even coherent; the three films all loudly contradict one another) isn't rich enough to sustain a series. Really, they should have been happy to have gotten two pretty good movies out of it. If people were really lining up to give Glau money to kick ass in front of a greenscreen, couldn't they have just laid out for Firefly: Phase II?