I once went to a SoHo art gallery opening with a friend of mine, a painter, who worked at the gallery by day as an office manager. After I had walked the length of the place and looked at the entire exhibit, he led me behind the reception desk and showed me a painting by the same artist which wasn’t in the show. “Look, isn’t it good?” he said. It was a shoddily painted portrait of a man’s head enclosed in a crude circle of red paint. All around the portrait were messy, vertical streaks of yellow paint. I looked a little longer—and I’m not clueless about art—but I didn’t get it. Finally, I asked him why. And he said, “I guess it’s just so bad you can’t stop looking at it.”

This is sort of the way I feel about “Gilmore Girls,” a show I used to watch in shame and secret. Despite S Shirazi’s recent claim that some episodes—the ones written by Amy Sherman-Palladino—are good, in actual fact, the series is just bad across the board—so amazingly bad that I couldn’t stop myself from watching.

For those who don’t know the show, the Gilmore “girls” are a young mother Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) and her daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel) who live in a quaint Connecticut town known as Stars Hollow. Lorelai got pregnant with Rory at sixteen—an adolescent indiscretion that got her kicked out by her affluent and willfully unlikeable parents—and at the start of the show, Rory is, aptly, sixteen. Lorelai, who rejects her family’s wealth to live her life on her own terms, manages to be a successful single mother who runs her own business—The Dragonfly Inn—and to raise a bright, Ivy-League-bound daughter. The show’s signature is its overly clever, overly literate mother-daughter gab, which is delivered at the rate of U-bahn traffic; but the speedy dialogue is also its Achilles’ heel, since it plays more like incompetent acting than practiced wit.

The main problem with the show, as far as I can tell, is that nothing ever happens and no one ever gets together. In early seasons, Rory must choose between Dean, fair All-American grocery stock boy, and Jess, the darker juvenile delinquent who reads books. (Jess is also the nephew of the small town’s diner-owner, Luke, who evolves into Lorelai’s primary love interest.) It’s the classic Wuthering Heights triangle with Rory as Catherine, Dean as the light-haired Linton, and Jess as the brooding Heathcliff; of course, if you have any sense at all (forget the fact that you’re a person who’s watching the show), you are rooting for Jess, played by Milo Ventimiglia, who was a better actor than anyone else on the show.

But amazingly, the producers didn’t capitalize on their one charismatic actor or their one promising plotline. Jess runs off screen more often than he comes on it, and Rory spends precious little time with either him or Dean. In one highly promoted episode, when the triangle has already ceased to be a plotline, Dean pays Rory a friendly visit at Yale (he’s married to someone else now) and walks back with her to her dorm at the end of the night only to run into Jess, who’s appeared in Connecticut from centuries of absence. Mind you, this all happens in the last five minutes of the show. Jess pulls Rory aside and away from Dean and asks her, in his characteristic bad-boy urgency, to run away with him.

As far as I know, in TV Drama Writing 101, this is precisely the kind of romantic suspense you are laboring to create, and hence, having however minimally created it, you should not squander it. (Remember when Joey had to choose between Pacey and Dawson on “Dawson’s Creek”? That choice was played out for so long that there were posters and billboards all over America to remind us we needed to know the outcome.) But squander it they do. There is no cliffhanger, there is no impassioned explication of past wrongs, no declaration of once unsaid devotion; no, audience, there is not even making out. Rory hesitates for a fraction of a second and then says, decisively, no. Then Jess runs out of her dorm in rejection.

That’s it? That’s all we get after nearly an hour of watching quirky, “loveable” townspeople bicker over some inconsequential town problem? Because that’s what the rest of the show was.

If drama is the incitement of conflicting forces, then suspense is the balance struck between giving and withholding such incitement. It shouldn’t be a difficult task, which is why even the most formulaic TV shows can be so absorbing. Mix together a few culturally available archetypes and the same human conflicts will naturally emerge, potent as ever; intersperse with other storylines to prevent quick unfolding, and voilŕ: addictive TV. What is difficult, it would seem to me, is transcending genre and formula with good writing, good acting, good chemistry, and all the rest. But the GG writers seem not even to get the formula. They’ve somehow mistaken withholding with mere delaying. I call it delaying because the primary plotlines are not interspersed between minor or peripheral plotlines. Rather, they’re interspersed with (or, in some cases, being shoved to the very end of the episode by) mere filler, since the townspeople’s stories rarely, if ever, get carried over from one episode to the next.

Which brings me to a more pertinent question: Why are the townspeople even in the show to begin with? It’s been pointed out to me that this cast of characters may have been modeled after the Northern Exposure kooks, but if so, the show’s writers just aren’t able to pull it off. Where the NE weirdos provided local texture and wisdom, the Stars Hollow coterie only annoys—after all, what can realistically be expected when you give Sally Struthers a recurring role on your TV show? They’re not weird enough to be memorable, and Connecticut simply can’t generate the same kind of low-grade mythos that Alaska can.

In the current season, Rory’s boyfriend is Logan, a blonde Yale legacy whose parents run in the same circle as Rory’s stodgy grandparents. He calls her “Ace” and belongs to a secret society that holds exclusive parties in the woods where members test each other’s grit by jumping off a tall platform with only an open umbrella. In many respects, Logan is an even worse misstep as romantic lead than Dean, because his coming from money only reminds us that Rory too comes from money (we sometimes forget this because Lorelai is cut off from her parents and their wealth), a fact that undermines what is potentially appealing about the show’s premise—a plucky mother-daughter pair whose smarts get them through life’s woes and disappointments. In any case, he doesn’t have even half of Jess’ appeal, since, when it comes to screen currency, a rich Ivy League WASP who writes for the student paper will always lose out to a penniless, tortured rebel who reads books.

Lorelai’s romantic interests are even more boring. There’s mealy-mouthed Luke who owns a business, but is sold to us as “working-class” because he wears a baseball cap backwards and drives a pick-up. And then there’s Rory’s father, Christopher, who appears once every several episodes to sleep with Lorelai and mess things up with Lorelai and Luke’s fragile romance. The only problem is that we don’t really care if Lorelai and Luke ever get together, so the threat doesn’t frustrate us in the way proper thwarting should.

The show’s script development was initially funded by the Family Friendly Forum, a Christian group, and perhaps this provides some explanation for its blandness. But that can’t be it either. If you judge by “Seventh Heaven,” Christians like their TV just as tawdry and melodramatic as the rest of us.

In a way, GG ropes you in because there are glimpses of the show’s potential everywhere. You can detect that the people behind it are smart, since such clever dialogue—however wooden the delivery—must come from somewhere. But it is curious that the writers can be intelligent enough to write that dialogue, yet not bright enough to grasp the most basic tenets of TV writing. To me, GG feels half-hearted to the point of suspicion—it’s like a mafia storefront with only twenty cans of olive oil in the store. Something else is definitely going on back there—perhaps some marketing experiment to discover how little stimulation Americans require to get hooked on something. Where is our threshold exactly? That the series has enjoyed such success—it’s in its seventh season—seems indicative of how low our bar for consumption has become. We’ll buy that crappy American car, we’ll take the good five minutes of an hour-long show, and yes, we’ll take that bad painting in the corner too.