I thought, at first, that I'd spoken too soon. After a dismal first episode that mined every previous vampire story going for any clichés it could find, Moonlight started to show signs of promise. There was some originality in its second and third episodes. The story developed, with the season-long arc you might have expected suddenly coming to fruition straight away. If you've been raised on a diet of Angel and Forever Knight, you'd have thought you'd have known what was coming - and you'd have been wrong.

But things started to drop off in the fourth and fifth episodes. While the fourth episode was still no slouch, it had more than trace amounts of stupidity flowing through its veins, as well as a rock video director to mess things up. And the fifth episode was just ridiculous. Not truly abysmal, but certainly full of blatant absurdities that make no sense to anyone who hasn't been up all night listening to Marilyn Manson records.

The cast are pretty good, although Jason Dohring lacks presence and Shannyn Sossamon is thankfully not present most of the time. It has some niceish moments from time to time, and Mick St John is thankfully not as whiney a git as Angel and Nick Knight were. But it's still a bit dull, a bit stupid and taking a hell of a lot of time getting to the point.

The Medium is Not Enough hereby declares Moonlight is a 4 or “Major Caruso” on The Carusometer quality scale. A Major Caruso corresponds to “a show that David Caruso might exec produce or star in after reading an Anne Rice novel in an airport waiting lounge. After declaring it the 'best story ever writen by a woman', he goes on to cast himself as an immortal Irish vampire with a comb-over. After discovering that he can no longer move fast enough to convince people he has 'human speed', let alone 'vampire speed', he tries to get into character by biting his own thumb. Discovering it hurts too much, he decides that his character will feed on blood through chocolate straws instead, 'a major new innovation in vampire mythology'.”

In retrospect, it was must have been pure masochism that led me to hold out for a fifth episode verdict on Back To You. Maybe it was Kelsey Grammer's presence. Maybe the third episode caught me in a good mood. Whatever it was, it was a mistake, and now I've wasted 50 minutes more of my life.

This is awful. It is unoriginal, unfunny, over-acted, unlikeable rubbish. Do not watch it unless you like the idea of being placed in the village stocks and having rotten tomatoes thrown in your face - because that's how enjoyable it is. Even the retro “filmed in front of a live studio audience” voiceover at the beginning à la Cheers cannot redeem it. If there's any justice in the world, it would be cancelled right now, all surviving copies placed in a bin and then incinerated.

So The Medium Is Not Enough has great pleasure in declaring Back To You has scored a five or 'Full Caruso' on The Carusometer quality scale. A Full Caruso corresponds to “a show in which David Caruso might be responsible for every aspect of production, including starring, directing, producing and writing it. After casting himself as a veteran newscaster who snarls every story and can't read the prompter because he's wearing sunglasses, he's forced first to bribe the audience to laugh at his frequent blonde jokes then to threaten to have them put in jail for 'all the crimes they've no doubt committed' if they don't so much as giggle. However, when the show is aired in Eastern Europe and its frequent jokes about Albanians are translated, the country declares war on Caruso, forcing him to to change his identity and pretend to be an Alpaca breeder in Patagonia. The show is cancelled in his absence, and peace and goodwill once again return to the Earth.”

Oh, it's just arse. I said just about everything that needed to be said back with episode one. There's the germ of a good idea in there - four guys sharing a car and talking about life – and when the show does raise laughs, which it does infrequently, it's always through the scenes set in the car.

It's just when it steps out of the car and into the carpoolers' home life, it becomes complete rubbish. With the slight exception of TJ Miller as the son of one of the carpoolers, there's just no comedy in the ridiculous situations that the writers have created. There could be, but there isn't.

Three episodes are enough. I'm out. I'm not watching it any more.

The Medium is Not Enough hereby declares Carpoolers is a 4 or “Major Caruso” on The Carusometer quality scale. A Major Caruso corresponds to “a show that David Caruso might exec produce or star in after sitting in his SUV for a few hours. After he insists one episode be entirely about the pine-scented air-freshner that hands from the rearview mirror, the cast will rebel, phoning for an ambulance claiming that he's got carbon monoxide poisoning. They'll be gone by the time he returns, leaving him to conduct a 25-minute long monologue instead about the need for capital punishment for anyone who forgets to indicate before changing lanes on the freeway.”

For me, Aliens in America has been the surprise show of this year's Fall season. A programme about a Pakistani exchange student who comes to middle America and encounters prejudice and ignorance wherever he goes? Sounds… great, huh?

However, it's actually been the funniest new comedy of the season so far, and surprisingly touching as well. Much of the comedy stems from Raja's failure to understand the local townspeople's War on Terror-induced fear of him. But it's also his friendship with Justin, the host family's son, and the meaner rules of American High School culture that provide the laughs. Raja can't really get to grips with lying, holding back on declaring his love for his friend in case people think him gay and all the other lessons Justin's already learnt the hard way at High School.

Although we haven't quite re-attained the highs of the first episode, the second and third episodes have been almost as funny and often cut quite near the knuckle, with the third episode in particular raising a few eyebrows with its daring, post-9/11. While Raja is really a little too good to be true, achieving near-Angelic status in his attitudes and behaviour, he's still sufficiently complex to avoid becoming a simple liberal counter-stereotype.

If you fancy a laugh and don't mind watching a show that's mostly about teenagers, I heartily recommend Aliens in America.

The Medium is Not Enough scored a 1 or “Caruso free” rating on The Carusometer. A “Caruso free” rating corresponds to a show that David Caruso might accidentally get sent a script for. After failing to persuade the producers that his acting talents are more than capable of convincing people that he's a 16-year-old Pakistani student, he declares the show un-American and tries to have it banned. The notoriety only makes the show's ratings increase, something that happens even more when he tries to randomly search the cast for 'weapons-grade fertilizer' as they go home each evening.

Does a show that aspires to be intelligent need to have a message? Does the author/auteur behind it need to tell us something about life, the universe and everything and does that need to be something we probably wouldn't have worked out for ourselves?

There's a considerable camp that thinks the answer to both questions is 'yes'. Is it true though? Can't we just enjoy a show without being told something? If the audience is looking for intelligent drama and therefore likely to be composed of intelligent people, is there likely to be a message that an intelligent drama could bring to the audience that it doesn't know already?

It's a vexing issue, probably best solved by a man of letters such as Christopher Hitchens, rather than me, someone who's watched too much television for his own good and has probably got brain rot by now. I can tell which cycle of America's Next Top Model is on Living TV, simply through the set decoration and end theme music of the episode. Mr Hitchens I am not.

I think it's also fair to say that the producers of Dirty Sexy Money are not peers of Christopher Hitchens either, because they're not sure of the answers. They're fudging the issue. They want to imply there's a message to the show. Maybe it's that rich people are complicated and weird and different and spoilt. Maybe it's that they're just like you and me. Maybe it's learn to accept yourself and others' eccentricities if you want to achieve nirvana.

Whether they're pointing they're finger like gawpers at a trust fund freak show or simply Buddhist playwrights in disguise, the producers are hoping that by sticking with some of the conventions of intelligent drama and hoping we'll stick around while they try to work out their message or lack thereof, that they will be producing an intelligent drama that smart, advertiser-friendly, affluent people want to watch. As Hannibal Lecktor used to say in Manhunter, if one does as God does enough times, one will become as God is - that is, if you act like you're producing an intelligent drama for long enough, you will actually end up producing an intelligent drama. Of course, good old Hannibal was talking about killing people because God clearly enjoys doing it so much Himself, but the principle applies.

Whether Dirty Sexy Money is actually an intelligent drama or not is unclear. It's certainly not stupid. It has a good cast, with Donald Sutherland particularly fine as you'd expect, BrianPeter Krause doing a good job of holding everything together, and William Baldwin now scaring me with how similar he is to his brother Alec when playing rich people. It has relatively interesting plots, even if does seem like each episode is like a serialised version of Treasure Hunt, with BrianPeter Krause getting a new clue at the end that takes him off on another exploration of his dad's possible murder the following week. It's also quite funny, with good dialogue and the occasional twist of farce.

But I'm just not sure if there's much point to it. None of the characters are ones you can really identify with, with the possible exception of Krause's. They're not really representative of real rich people or in fact any other human beings on this planet, as far as I can work out. And as of yet, there's no real exploration of these fake people anyway: we're just supposed to marvel at their antics, rather than find out what truly makes them tick.

It's like a comedy-drama sudoku, a puzzle that needs to be solved for no real reason other than it passes the time. It's a well-executed puzzle, but it doesn't really grab me emotionally. I'm probably going to carry on watching for a while, since I like BrianPeter Krause and I like sudokus, but I could quite easily drop it from schedules without missing it, I suspect.

So it turns out there needs to be a point to drama, but only as long as it's because you don't care enough about the characters to watch because of them. Blimey. I am Christopher Hitchens after all. Where's the gin?

The Medium is Not Enough declares Dirty Sexy Money a two or “Partial Caruso” on The Carusometer quality scale. A Partial Caruso corresponds to “a show with two walk-on cameos by David Caruso as a family lawyer. However, when faced with a cast that includes transgender prostitutes, adulterers and professional divorcees, he will storm off, citing 'creative differences' and claiming that he 'thought ”family lawyer“ meant something else'.”

The show's simply not that funny. It occasionally has a few moments of intelligence, when it exposes stereotypes and racist behaviour through people's attitudes to the cavemen - as well as the cavemen's own attitudes. The characters are affable enough. But for the most part, it just doesn't make you laugh. It's just people chiselling away the word “black” in the scripts, replacing it with “cavemen”, and hoping we laugh at the cleverness of it all - and not notice that there aren't any actors from ethnic minorities playing any significant parts, despite the show being about racism.

And yes, it's another show about slackers. Why this sudden craze in programming, I wonder? And will anyone find a decent way of making it funny?

The Medium is Not Enough hereby declares Cavemen is a 4 or “Major Caruso” on The Carusometer quality scale. A Major Caruso corresponds to “a show that David Caruso might exec produce or star in after seeing an advert on television featuring cavemen. However, after deciding that cavemen are too dirty and too likely to vote Democrat, he changes the format of the show to be about a hard-working Polish actor, played by himself, who fights the terrible prejudice that exists in society towards people with red hair and who can't act.”