Your time is valuable, and you don't want to spend it on shows that are either outright awful or seriously flawed, am I right?

That's the idea behind the following list of iffy and/or terrible new TV shows. They pay me to watch this stuff so you don't have to, and the goal here is to steer you away from fall programs that have awkward premises, wrongheaded casting or sub-par execution of decent ideas.

But never fear, I'll provide descriptions of each comedy and drama as well, on the off chance that you really want to check them out.

I always thought I was a fan of period pieces -- 'Merchant & Ivory,' HBO's 'Rome', Austen adaptations -- but I wish the '60s would go away. Not the '60s as they happened, the '60s as they've been reconstructed by pop culture. Nostalgia for this version is so tedious. The clothes are so specific and so binding, the important historical figures and dates are capital-"I" important, and the rampant inequality on display is plain old gross.

How much of Swingtown is real and how much is pure fiction? According to Mike Kelley, Swingtown's creator, there are elements in the show that come right from his childhood memories of growing up on the North Shore, a trendy suburb of Chicago. But the sex and the swinging? That's mostly creative license.

So were there really sex parties and swinging in the Kelley home? "You know, it comes from imagination, for the most part."

Inspired by 1976, the era of women's liberation, disco-dancing, the end of the Vietnam War, and sexual freedom thanks to the pill and no AIDS, Kelley balances the fantastic elements with nostalgia.