So, it’s fall again, and you find yourself, remote in hand, convinced that the television landscape is nothing but one giant View couch populated by Sally Fields, Rosie O’Donnells, Joy Behars and Alicia Silverstones. Hollywood’s most delightful elite crammed together, bony-starlet elbow to gastric-bypassed booty, happy to serve up daily entertainment with a side of condescension, smut, and a cheap political jab for every plot line!

It can get discouraging out there for a red-blooded conservative searching for good original programming without any sermons from our betters in Blue America. Walking into the fall line-up without a guide, you’re more vulnerable than a Democratic staffer at a NASCAR race. So, here’s a way to get good and inoculated.

I search the good, the bad, and the ugly to bring you a report of what is acceptable and even—dare I say it?—enjoyable for conservative consumption.

Friday Night Lights (NBC Fridays 9/8c): In this case “critically acclaimed” is not a stand-in for “soul-crushingly boring and produced by an approved left-of-center team with left-of-center axes to grind, thereby making it worthy of statuettes, but not actual breathing audiences in search of entertainment.”

No, “Friday Night Lights” is critically acclaimed with good reason. It’s one of the most well-acted, sensitive, authentic dramas I’ve ever seen on TV. I shied away from the show at first because the title implied a tour de force of small-town stereotypes—characters dripping in overdone accents, a town that’s grid-iron gripped but with a looser hold on fidelity, morality and the finer things in life. Let’s face it. The stage was set for some serious Hollywood belittling.

But Hollywood got this one right. I covered high-school football in a town much like the fictional Dillon, Texas. Every episode I watch is such an accurate portrayal of the people I knew and loved there—their struggles, their driving forces, their triumphs and their shortcomings—that it feels like an eerie trip back home.

Dancing With the Stars (ABC Mondays 8/7c): Tune in to this show for some wholesome Fred-and-Ginger-style entertainment. There are glitzy stars and glitzier ballroom professionals, paired to bring foxtrots and quicksteps to a new generation. There’s also a live band and singers, making this the triple threat of network offerings. Truly old-school.

As a bonus, this season features Jennie Garth. Judging from her performances so far, Kelly Taylor has recovered quite nicely from her date rape, eating disorder, brief cult membership, drug addiction, gunshot wound, and the scars from that house fire, in order to come back a-waltzing.

Small warning on the skimpy outfits.

Everybody Hates Chris (CW Mondays 8/7c): Based on Chris Rock’s childhood, this comedy based in 1980s New York City, is fundamentally about family—a good family. Chris is the oldest of three children in a household that might be short on money but is never short on values. His father Julius works several jobs at a time to support the family while his mother Rochelle rules the household with no small helping of high expectations and serious punishment for anyone who gets out of line.

Plots focus on Chris’ struggles with adolescence, fitting in at his mostly white school (Chris does several bus transfers a day to attend a better school than the one in his neighborhood, at his mother’s insistence), and his parents’ constant battle to teach their children right from wrong in an environment that doesn’t always help them out.

As an example of the example Julius sets for his kids, this is the subplot for last week’s episode:

Julius secretly tries to find extra work when he must use his vacation days.

House (FOX Tuesdays 9/8c) and Scrubs (NBC Thursdays 9:30/8:30c): You’ll probably think I’m crazy claiming I see conservative messages in medical shows. But, as a conservative, my point-of-view is so seldom represented on TV in a positive light, that I’m sometimes mightily delighted by seeing it treated with mere fairness.

Last season’s “House” saw at least one moral dilemma that deeply affected the famously misanthropic, atheist medical genius. When asked to perform risky surgery on a baby in the womb at the risk of a weakened mother, Dr. House refuses until convinced by his superior. During the surgery, when the mother starts to slip, he’s poised to cut the baby’s umbilical cord (a move that would have surely killed it) until the baby reaches out of the open womb to grab his finger.

The scene was an obvious allusion to photographer Michael Clancy’s famous fetal surgery photo , which has touched hearts around the world, and the unborn child made an impact on House as very little does. Continued...