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Ahh, it’s my favorite time of year again.

For all the little kids, that time of year would be Christmas as they rush down to the living room to pounce on their presents with glee and inspect them like swarthy antique appraisers. However, for TV critics, their presents come a little earlier with the arrival of fall and the onslaught of crispy, fresh TV pilots just waiting to be ripped open.

As I caught some of the season’s newest shows, I could not help feeling just plain tired. If we take a look at the fall line-up, everything is the same. They may have different titles and characters, but the commercial, glossy quality is itself about the same.

I think it’s MTV. Television is just way too influenced by MTV; everything looks like it.

Yeah, I blame it on MTV.

I blame MTV for everything: our high crime rates, global starvation and the crumbling virtues of man ... yeah, it all started with MTV.

Manufactured by corporate TV execs drinking lattes in their office, all the shows are obviously catering to sheets of statistics of what the specific cusp of 13-year-olds and 15-year-olds are watching today. The corporate wizards have come up with a strategy to gain teen MTV viewers by placing montages of MTV video clips into the shows themselves.

Take for example, “Fastlane.” “Fastlane” is pretty much self-explanatory: It’s about fast men who drive in fast cars chasing fast women ... very quickly. It’s your new millennium version of “Miami Vice;” however, it’s trying so hard to be edgy it works against itself. With little clips from Madonna’s “Ray of Light” and Dr. Dre’s “Nothing But a G Thang,” it’s so Hollywood slick without any creative plot that I could swear USC was behind it. With a cameo from Fred Durst and VJ, and actor Bill Bellamy as Deaqon – yes with a “Q” – the show is so trendy, it screams, gasps, and bleeds for an MTV audience.

For the more mature audience – basically those that have outgrown watching Britney Spears in public – there’s “Push, Nevada.” Again, another combination of what we’ve seen before. James Pufrock, a straitlaced Internal Revenue Service tax man investigates some fishy business deals in a kooky town called Push.

The special twist to this show is that the lead character, Pufrock, has a Jimmy Stewart complex a la “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” especially when he tries so hard to look moral that he seems constipated. I admit it’s hard to try and jazz up a show about an IRS guy (ooohhh, sounds more attractive than an enema) and to this end the show resorts to something out of MTV. There are shots of a car driving in the desert that I swear was part of a Stone Temple Pilots video.

In addition, there are quick zoom shots that are supposed to make the show look cool for the 21-year-olds and under, but it simply made me kind of ill for a while. I wonder what other types of shots the show will come up with in an attempt to divert the audience’s attention from the fact that Pufrock is talking about the IRS ... again.

I can understand the pressure for TV execs to pump up ratings. With all the novelty ideas coming from HBO and films (both of which are allowed to show more skin), TV networks are absolutely desperate to get people watching.

Especially with “Friends” leaving after this season, all the networks are trying to think quickly of something to put on the airways that can sucker all the viewers into watching. But we all know from HBO and NBC’s sweep of the Emmy’s, it’s good shows (“The Sopranos,” “West Wing”) that tell interesting stories and revamp old formulas that are the heavy hitters. Shows don’t have to resort to sex, drugs and quick zoom shots to get good ratings and critical approval.

Plus, we already have MTV and now MTV2, so what’s the point of watching MTV3, 4 or 5?