Set designers fall into that group you ignore when they're nominations for awards are announced during the Oscars. And yet, creating a strong visual world is everything in a film or TV show.

Which is why it's great that their work and their creativity is being exposed in "Hot Set" (10 p.m. tonight, Syfy), a new competition show that challenges two set designers to create a world in 3 days with a $10,000 budget.

Hosted by Ben Mankiewicz, whose grandfather wrote "Citizen Kane," the show gives production designers a scenario inspired by sci fi, fantasy or horror films -- in the first episode it's a devastated alien landscape -- and a support team, and then lets their imaginations take over.

Revolution

Mondays, 10 p.m. on NBC

Clearly these gloomy times have creative types thinking about the end of the world as we know it because we've seen a bunch of apocalyptical-type shows recently from "Terra Nova" to "Jericho" to "Walking Dead" and "Falling Skies."

Add "Revolution" to that pile. The ambitious drama opens with the loss of not just electricity, but all power -- there are not only no lights, no cellphones, no computers, planes fall out of the sky. In short, modern technology is useless. Fifteen years after the blackout, big cities are no more and America is a series of agrarian towns ruled over by a ruthless militia.

The Mob Doctor
Mondays at 9 p.m.
Fox

I get what Fox is trying to do here: take a run-of-the-mill doc drama and inject some excitement by making the doctor beholden to mobsters and forced to do their bidding on the side. Unfortunately, the pilot wasn't always as exciting as that may sound.

A very likable Jordana Spiro ("My Boys") plays the Chicago surgeon working off her brother's gambling debt to the Moretti mob family. No one knows she's doing this, not even the shiftless brother.

The pilot opens strong with Dr. Devlin in the back room of a veterinary clinic removing a long screwdriver from a mob soldier's head -- without the benefit of x-rays or diagnostic tools -- while he bites down on a rubber chew toy. Intense.

The New Normal
Tuesdays at 9:30 on NBC

The year is 2012 and yet, there are still groups out there protesting a sitcom about two gay men trying to have a baby.

A sitcom.

"The New Normal," debuting Monday at 10 p.m. on NBC, follows the efforts of a committed gay couple having a baby through a surrogate. A couple of weeks ago, a Mormon Church-owned NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City, Utah, refused to air the show, calling it "inappropriate." And the group One Million Moms organized a movement to bombard NBC executives and advertisers with complaints over the show, without even seeing it, saying that the sitcom's goal is to "desensitize America and our children."

After reading all that, I'd planned to watch "The New Normal" out of spite. Lucky for me, it's actually pretty funny and has tons of heart.

We all wish for happily ever afters, but we get a kick out of watching love gone wrong. That's where shows like "Deadly Affairs" (10 tonight, Investigation Discovery) come in. Love doesn't just go wrong in these re-enactments, love kills.

So each episode features two real-life stories of love triangles that ended in murder. Actual friends and family discuss the cases along with journalists and law officers. Actors depict the affairs, arguments, deaths.

Hosting it all is "All My Children" icon Susan Lucci. The funny thing is she's playing Erica Kane, vamping it up, talking about her numerous husbands, and narrating each story with cheesy lines. It's like live-action pulp fiction.

It's all pretty routine; in a world where the Drew Peterson case makes national news, the story of the seemingly loving husband who kills his wife to be with his mistress isn't all that special. It's Lucci's presence and arch and campy comments that make the whole thing a little special, and fun, which is sort of sad when you think about the idea of making murder entertaining.
 

It's hard to dog "Puppy Love" (9 p.m. tonight Hallmark Channel)because the goal of the film is to promote strong relationships between people and pets and help homeless pets get adopted. Indeed, the film's star Candace Cameron Bure is a spokesperson for Pet Project, Hallmark's initiative promoting those aims.

And yet, subtracting its good intent, "Puppy Love" is pretty bland; it relies too heavily on the fact that a main character, played by BugZ, is an adorable well-trained shaggy dog. That's not enough to give the film the charm it should have.

"Sex and the City" has added many things to the pop culture lexicon. Primary among those things is the notion that women travel in packs of four. And so we have "Girlfriend Confidential: LA" (11 p.m. tonight, Oxygen), a reality show about four women living and loving in the City of Angels.

Our Carrie is Eva Marcille, who reality show fans would recognize as an early winner of "America's Next Top Model." Her friends include actress Denyce Lawton (Samantha-ish in her sexual straight talk, but, she says, she only has sex within relationships), who appeared on "Tyler Perry's House of Payne," designer Nikki Chu (a no-nonsense professional like Miranda), and talent/brand manager Kelly Marie Dunn (prudish like Charlotte, though not anywhere as classy).

Since none of these women are well-known the thrust of the plot is showing how getting a taste of the high life makes one strive for more.

Harvey Keitel is in a Lifetime movie. Harvey Keitel.

Thankfully, it's not a bad one. "Fatal Honeymoon" (8 tonight, Lifetime), one of those ripped-from-the-headlines movies Lifetime does regularly, which are my least favorite type of Lifetime movie.

But Harvey Keitel has a way of elevating the things he's in, adding layers and realism to this film, one some viewers already may know the conclusion. And he plays against Billy Miller, who plays Billy on "The Young and the Restless"!

OK, yes, "Smart Cookies" (9 tonight, Hallmark Channel) is an ad for the Girl Scouts timed to celebrate the organization's 100th birthday. But it's such a sweet little film, and so not afraid to have a little fun at the group's expense that you can't hold the sell against it.

Jessalyn Gilsig plays Julie, a high-maintenance, controlling, uptight and successful real estate agent who is pushing to make agent of the year at any cost. Naturally, she has no personal life which means she has no man. Her boss Lola (Patricia Richardson) is eyeing a merger with another firm and wants to shore up the company's social work bonafides. So she assigns Julie to lead a Girl Scout troop for 90 days. Julie doesn't like kids and doesn't want to do it. But she does want to make partner one day.

After my stint screening the post-Civil War brutality depicted in "Hatfields and McCoys," I was a little nervous about watching "Copper" (10 pm, Sunday, BBC America), a crime series set in 1860s New York City.

Thankfully, while it doesn't dodge the violence, brutality or griminess of the era, the depiction isn't graphic. It is, however, ambitious (maybe overly so) and a bit slow moving.

"Copper" is the story of Det. Kevin Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones), an Irish-American cop working in the Five Points neighborhood, the same area depicted in "Gangs of New York." (And the same issues.) Corcoran is a tortured fella, in part, because his wife has disappeared and his daughter was murdered.