The worst show on television? — It's got to be Showtime's Out of Order, a drama about emotionally-damaged Hollywood types.

The show is painful to watch, as people who should have no problems [they're healthy, sucessful, relatively affluent and young], actually endure more self-produced torture than a practicing psychiatrist's entire practice.

And maybe the illustration of this paradox is the only useful thing to come out of this show — the inability of people who have escaped the need to fight for survival to create lives that are proactively fulfilling.

It is in the grand belly-aching tradition of Thirtysomething and Once and Again, shows that each featured middle-class angst as the most prominent recurring character.

But as for the show itself — Eric Stoltz is a wuss, his wife is a crazy bitch and William S. Macy is wasted in his role as a waste of a producer. Stotlz manages to drage himsefl over the same square yard of existential broken glass over and over, getting nowhere toward solving his problem but moving closer and closer to becoming a full-fledged, perhaps justified, adulterer.

In terms of production, there are too many dream sequences, voice-over narrations and alternate reality scenes to create a coherent, watchable narrative. It stinks!