Maybe part of the reason that "Human Target," tonight at 8 on Fox, doesn't appeal to me is that Christopher Chance has chosen a path "Burn Notice's" Michael Westen rejected -- being smart muscle for hire.

Or maybe the show is a disappointment because it's possible to see almost every "twist" coming a mile away.

Every single scene, every action beat, every cheesy line of dialogue is recycled from some other action movie or adventure franchise. In last week's episode, Chance (Mark Valley) heads for a remote bar owned by an old flame. I predicted that she would be really hot and that at some point, she'd slap him. Guess what? She was really hot, and at one point she slapped him.

What is it with TV writers today? I get the feeling, not just from "Human Target," that there is a large subset of writers for whom throwing out pop-culture references represents the bulk of their creative achievement.

I get that for many TV writers (and executives), having seen every big-budget studio movie since "Star Wars," having read a lot of comic books and having obsessed over iconic TV shows represent important parts of their aesthetic education. But is that all you've got?

Even if some of the iconic TV shows and movies of the past few decades were themselves recycling age-old storytelling elements -- "Star Wars" is Joseph Campbell with Wookiees and robots -- those TV shows and movies had their own variation on the story to tell, and they used memorable characters to do it.

"Fringe" (which returns April 1) sometimes feels like a pastiche of sci-fi and horror movie tropes in search of a coherent mythology (or what you could call "something to say"). But the show sometimes rises above its inconsistencies -- once in a while, it rises well above them and achieves something almost poetic.

It's not just one-hour shows that serve up leftovers and pretend they're gourmet cuisine. "Community" doesn't quite work for me because the show proudly and loudly celebrates every single pop-culture reference that it throws at the audience.

Yes, "Community," I saw and loved "The Breakfast Club" too. And yes, it can be funny that Abed (Danny Pudi) sees every moment in his life through the prism of movies and TV shows. But still, there isn't much more to "Community" than that.

That isn't the case with "Chuck," in which the constant pop-culture references are a fun side dish, not necessarily the main course, or with "Parks and Recreation."

Even if last week's episode was a pretty standard outing, this unmissable NBC comedy is slowly building the characters' relationships with care and satisfying subtlety. At this point, "Parks and Recreation" can put almost any combination of characters together and get pleasing results.

"Human Target," on the other hand, so underemploys its cast that it nearly amounts to a crime against filmed entertainment. Too often, Chi McBride and Jackie Earle Haley are shunted to the side, uttering lines that would make a beginning screenwriter blush (or should).

It's not that I demand that "Human Target" have the complexity of "Burn Notice" at its best. But "Human Target" doesn't even appear to be trying all that hard to be mediocre. When all you're really expecting is a moderately fun, moderately exciting slice of escapism and the whole enterprise still falls flatter than the lamest big-budget movie sequel, you could call that missing the target.

TV columnist Rob Owen's Tuned In+ is featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.