About a year ago in this newspaper I gave the Showtime series “Dexter” a glowing review, but now I just can’t stomach it. Perhaps I’m just not in the mood for more close-ups of blood and gore and injections in the neck. Perhaps I’ve grown tired of Michael C. Hall’s pre-werewolf features. Or perhaps it’s the show’s advertising campaign that really turns me off: “America’s Favorite Serial Killer.” It makes you wonder what other series they’ll come up with that may inspire similar epithets in the future: “America’s Favorite Pedophile,” “America’s Favorite Cannibal,” “America’s Favorite Torturer,” etc. Anyway, though I saved the first two episodes of the new season on my TiVo, I lasted about five minutes and turned it off.

No doubt it had something to do with my general disillusionment with the new “Fall Season,” now that it’s not so new anymore and is starting to look a little soiled around the edges. A few weeks ago I gave the pilot of ABC’s “Dirty Sexy Money” a review every bit as glowing as I gave “Dexter.” But I missed the show’s second episode because I wanted to check out “Life,” which is on NBC at the same time. (I hadn’t yet realized that, whereas NBC was making the episode of “Life” available on its Web site, ABC wasn’t making “Money” available on its Web site, and I should therefore have watched “Life” on my laptop and “Money” on my television, but sometimes there are only so many “platforms” you can deal with at once.)

So the next time I watched “Money” it was the third episode, and despite the brief recap of the previous week’s action at the beginning, I felt like I’d lost the thread of the thing. What excited me about its first hour now struck me as tiresome in the third. Why should I care about this grotesquely rich New York family with their endless list of manufactured crises that were already beginning to seem less about the characters than about the need to keep the wheels of the plot spinning? Did anyone say anything interesting? Was there a moment of real emotion or intelligence or humor? If so, I missed it. What I was watching seemed less like drama than semi-hysterical, sensationalistic audio-visual clutter.

Then there was ABC’s “Big Shots,” a series I’d been tracking since its debut, in part because of its depiction of four very wealthy men, all CEO types of one kind or another, who complain to each other endlessly about emasculating modern women, although they bed an impressive number of them nonetheless. My interest in this show could partly be boiled down to the question: Does this theme (aggressive female sexuality), which is everywhere in the new season’s shows, reflect something actually going on in society, or is it mainly a product of the sex-addled brains of men who write for television?

To judge from the butt-kicking female fantasy figures at the center of new shows such as “Bionic Woman” and “Chuck,” the cold sexuality of the female cop on “Life,” and the prominence given to transgendered girlfriends on “Money” and “Big Shots” (openly lusted after in the former and the subject of nervous jokes in the latter), I suppose I’d have to split the difference and guess that screenwriters are obsessed with this, but it’s not entirely something they dreamed up in their own skulls. There’s at least some anecdotal evidence, reported in serious newspapers, for the phenomenon, and they’re weaving it into their writing.

For instance, this summer there was an episode of HBO’s whimsical comedy, “Flight of the Conchords,” about two hopelessly naïve indie-rockers from New Zealand trying to make it in New York, in which one of them was seduced by a girl who played the man’s role, all the way from pursuing him, falling asleep on top of him moments after sex, and acting as if he didn’t exist the following day. And the latest episode of “Chuck” saw our hero dancing the tango with a devastatingly beautiful woman who had to take the man’s part in the dance since Chuck had only learned the woman’s. (Not that either of them minded.)

Perhaps some of it has to do with politics, pushing a certain agenda — grrrl power and all that. A few decades ago, the great thriller writer Patricia Highsmith noted that the heroes of her books were almost exclusively male because, unlike women, men are “active,” and therefore — unlike women — suited to stories of adventure. Today’s television writers are trying to change that, but they’re also reflecting a changing reality.

That’s all well and good, but it would be helpful if there were some engaging conversations interspersed with all the action on some of these new shows. Maybe I’m tuning into the wrong programs at the wrong time, but nobody seems to be saying anything worth listening to. Glib ironic banter is about the most you can expect. One wouldn’t want too many American TV shows to sound like French movies, but it would be nice if occasionally people just talked, you know, about how they feel about life, about the changing world around them, what’s happening to New York (God knows, there are enough programs set here!), the price of an apartment today compared to 10 years ago, what they think about the Internet, the war, Islamic fundamentalism, the job market, the state of their own souls, the spread of technology, how people live in other countries, a good book they read — you name it.

I suppose we have C-SPAN and CNN and “Charlie Rose” and cable news and “The View” and dozens of other news and chat shows for that. But drama needs news, too. It’s not enough simply to rip stories from the headlines, as countless cop shows do. The characters need to talk about the subject even as they’re trying to find out “whodunnit.” Instead, we tend to be treated to ever-more dazzling displays of forensics. Only rarely do we discover what the men and women occupying the screen really think and feel about anything of any consequence.

bbernhard@nysun.com