The Secret Life

of the American Teenager

8 p.m., ABC Family.

Hmmm. Wow. This may be the worst show I have ever seen. The premiere was so bad that I TiVo'd the second one just to see if it had been an atrocious fluke, or was honestly the worst show I had ever seen. After watching the second one last night, I am holding firm in my belief that it is truly as bad as I think it is. The premise is that a “nice” girl from a “good” family - a high school freshman who plays the French horn - goes away to band camp, loses her virginity to the snake-oil-salesman drummer, and oops, gets pregnant. It only takes once, kids. And it doesn't even have to be a good once. Then school starts, and on the first day of school, well, about a zillion things happen, all of them having to do with either teens having sex, having once had sex, wishing they were having sex, talking about sex or vowing to never have sex. The dialogue sounds as if it were written by three 14-year-old girls who were locked in a room with a continous loop of “My So-Called Life” episodes interspersed with maybe some old Billy Graham sermons and the first season of “The Gilmore Girls.” The show is not just preachy, it is screechy preachy. The young actors are all quite good looking, all 100 percent stereotypical. The parents, played by such big names as Molly Ringwald, John Schneider and Josie Bissette, are nearly invisible and also 100 percent stereotypical. I cannot decide if the show's downfall is that it is simply too well-meaning for its own good, or if it's just plain lousy. Watching it, I alternated between wanting to scream, wanting to change the channel, and wanting to hurl my TV out the window.

America's Got Talent

9 p.m., NBC

We are still not in Vegas. Sheesh.

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