If this is the best that British television has to offer in the way of supernatural entertainment for the under-30 crowd (as it has been touted), then I must sadly report that their best is nowhere near good enough. The series: imagine "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" meets "Charmed" in the world of the movie "The Prophecy," and you end up with this sophomoric piece of trash. Not even the very able and talented cast (Jemima Rooper especially) can save the thematic and plot line disasters that seem to lock this show into appealing to the lowest common denominator. Set at a posh English finishing school or college.

I don't know if colleges in the UK have a student body set in an old estate in the middle of nowhere - where the food is plentiful and the traditionally bad fashion sense of the Brits abounds, dangly earrings, overdone makeup and all - but if they do, they seem like little more than high school with ashtrays.

My problems don't revolve around the exceptionally linear themes or plots that you could drive a jumbo jet through sideways, nor around the alcohol, sex and drug abuse, or even the switch of leads from the first season to the next. I don't even have a problem with the so- called "mythology" of the series, based baggy-pants loosely upon biblical references to the Nephilim and Azazeal (which of course the series spells wrong). Those issues are there, but they are not what bothers me the most about Hex.

I find that I cannot stand any of the characters. None of them have any redemptive value about them at all, and I keep hoping that they all die horribly at the end of each episode. All of them betray each other with casual nonchalance. All of them know the right thing to do in a given situation, and every single one of them does EXACTLY the opposite, for selfish reasons, and then expects everyone else to just understand that they are sorry, that everyone makes mistakes.

Rife throughout the series is the idea that there is no free will. Time and again, every one of the characters sees what they should be doing, but feels helpless (or is just too stupid and weak) to make the correct choice in the situations. Maybe its just British melodrama (and if it is, please forgive me), but creating moral dilemmas that no person with an IQ above the average cretin would make is simply bad TV.

The epitome of this nonsense is the proto-goth, heavy-faced heaven-aligned "heroine" of the second season who is having trouble deciding whether to kill the antichrist Malachi, or play kinky dress-up with him instead. Pathetic.

As well, the initial idea that this is a moral play quickly falls to the wayside, as folk with knives, presumably secret passageways that run through the entire campus, bottles of herbal remedies (I kid you not), and an angelic artifact that looks suspiciously like a computer mouse are all that seem to move the plot along. One is left with the impression that this whole plot was built upon the idea of someone's live-action roleplaying game session.

None of it truly makes sense, and at the end of the day, no one is worth saving. Honestly, I can see why this series was cancelled - there is no one to root for. I almost miss the wooden characterization of Azazeal.

The writers and producers of the series all seemed to forget that the Fox series Millennium tried the whole 'end of days' thing, and once it happened, there was nowhere else to go. Hex is a one-trick pony, and I for one am so very glad to see it finally put down for the diseased and lame thing that it is.

Were I a British viewer interested in seeing good supernatural drama on the telly, I would feel mightily insulted that the producers thought us stupid enough to swallow their garbage, all for the titillation of (un)intentional frontal nudity. Hex is essentially a pre-frontal lobotomy, set to bad mood music.