I’ve written in the past that perhaps the greatest sign of Hollywood’s racism is the deeply boring white actors it gives chance after chance when compared to the wildly talented black actors it refuses to aggressively promote and develop. But the industry is determined to keep giving these fellows chances. So not to get all Regina George about it, but here are five boring white dudes I wish Hollywood would stop trying to make happen. Because to some degree or another, it’s never going to happen. I’m not saying these men don’t deserve to find work, or that they’re bad people (with one exception). But if Hollywood has limited capital and advertising dollars to spend, it could be spending it more interesting places.

1. David Lyons: There is no penance too great to be done for The Cape, NBC’s epically awful attempt at a superhero story. There’s nothing wrong with trying to make a show that looks and feels like old-timey comics, but it doesn’t work when a stump is standing in for your lead actor. But Lyons is getting another shot, in the J.J. Abrams show that people are still insisting is about “a world where all forms of energy have mysteriously cdased to exist.” I guess from one ludicrous premise to the next?

2. Alex Pettyfer: Need a generic-looking dude for your adaptation of a book that came out of James Frey’s Young Adult fiction factory? For your silly remake of Beauty and the Beast? Pettyfer is your dude, as long as you don’t mind him acting like a diva on-set (or the rumors that he stalks his ex-girlfriends). Bland handsomeness is a dime a dozen. If only Hollywood was willing to jettison the bland jerks, and recognize that they can get bland personalities to match, and at least get to neutral.

3. Jason O’Mara: To be fair, Terra Nova had problems other than its totally generic leading man, including expensive special effects paired with a total lack of careful thought about what to do with its promising concept. But O’Mara didn’t exactly bring anything special or original to the party. But never fear: of course he’s getting another shot, this time, in a new show from CBS about former Las Vegas Mayor Ralph Lamb.

4. Sam Worthington: Perhaps the most egregious example on this list, Worthington’s the face of two franchises—Avatar and the Titans movies, despite an utter lack of a personality or much in the way of a range of facial expressions. Neither franchise is particularly dependent on Worthington’s performance, but man I’d like a more interesting actor to get at least a bit of the credit for carrying them.

5. Zac Efron: Yeah, I know, there’s the teen and tween factor. But strip Efron of his trademark swoop of hair and the opportunity to sing overblown songs on the Disney channel, and it’s not particularly clear what his appeal is or his talents are. Sure, there’s a viable romantic comedy market out there, but people like Channing Tatum, who have actual personalities, might have an up on Efron there. We ladies? Not stupid.

The Los Angeles Times has a piece up looking at the panic in Hollywood over the failures of John Carter, Terra Nova, Luck, and Hugo, all projects with extremely well-connected talent attached that none the less failed to find the audiences that would make them successes—and would make them profitable. Writer Patrick Goldstein blames a lack of relatable heroes at the center of each project, and interviews blog favorite Gavin Polone, who suggests that studios just don’t have any idea what audiences like anymore. Here are five ideas for what they might learn from these particular projects:

1. Bland doesn’t mean broadly appealing: I admire Taylor Kitsch’s abs, but if you haven’t seen Friday Night Lights (and many people haven’t), it’s not clear what his hook is other than his extreme handsomeness. Is he self-deprecating-but-not-really like George Clooney? Does he have a gift for physical comedy like the one Channing Tatum surprised people with in 21 Jump Street? Similarly, Jason O’Mara on Terra Nova was perhaps the epitome of the flavorless hunks Hollywood’s tried to peddle us over the last decade. There’s just nothing to him, but they’re convinced we’ll like him anyway. Being inoffensive is not the same time as being appealing to a broad swath of viewers, and it’s time for Hollywood to stop treating leading men that way.

2. Concepts matter: I’ve beat this horse on Terra Nova a lot, but it’s really not enough to throw robot dinosaurs at us and be assured we’ll be entertained and engaged. If anything, John Carter had the opposite problem. There are a ton of good concepts to draw on there, and there simply wasn’t enough time to explore them all. The movie might have been better if it could give us a sense of the nature of the conflict between Mars’ humans, or sharped the relationship between those societies and the Tharks. Instead, it had to rush through everything. So two rules: 1) Make sure your concept is well-developed and good, and 2) Make sure it’s a match for your form.

3. Your private interests are not inherently fascinating: There are horse-racing fans who share David Milch’s intensity for the sport, but there are not many of them—it’s why the sport is in trouble. And while there are more people who care about movie history, they’re still not the majority of the movie-going audience. Hugo‘s $73 million in domestic box office may be worse considering what it cost to make, but it’s not like The Artist has lit the world on fire, either. Even after its Best Picture win, it’s only taken in $42 million. Fascinating things may emerge from creators’ private passions, but just because they feel strongly about something doesn’t mean it’s inherently going to pull in an audience to match.

4. The 3D jig is up: It may jack up ticket costs, but it’s not like we don’t notice. And it’s particularly irritating when 3D doesn’t add a single thing to a movie and gives viewers a headache along with it. 3D may be an attractive way to get your movie to the Chinese market, which is allowing more 3D and Imax American movies into its theaters, but that doesn’t mean it can replace storytelling, characterization or acting here.

5. The hero doesn’t always have to be a dude: I tend to think that Hugo’s hero should remain who it is, though Chloe Moretz’s Isabelle was delightful. But Dejah Thoris is vastly more interesting than John Carter; anyone would have been more interesting than O’Mara in the lead in Terra Nova; and watching a woman try to break into top-flight jockeying might have been more interested than David Milch’s latest foray into Dudeland.

I think that, in the wake of Fox’s decision to cancel Terra Nova, its once-promising but ultimately dull science fiction show about people fleeing a polluted planet to reset humanity’s past, James Poniewozik is right that the failure of the show will diminish the chances of networks taking a chance on purely sci-fi show in the future:

The networks do still occasionally do science fiction, of course; Fringe is still hanging on on Fox, for instance. But since Lost, and the many failures to re-create its success, they’ve tended to focus on small-scale, real-world shows with little sci-fi twists (Person of Interest, Alcatraz) or fantasy (Once Upon a Time, Grimm). The epic-scale, effects-intensive sci-fi show has always been a tough sell on the networks, and to its credit, Terra Nova was trying a brand of sci-fi we hadn’t seen a lot on TV. Now big sci-fi will be an even tougher sell.

This is unfortunate. But it raises what I think is an important question both for the networks and for those of us who would like to see a lot more quality science fiction shows on them: can we think more creatively about communicating that the stories we’re telling are set in the future without using a lot, or any, special effects?

Obviously, the answer ought to be yes. The Handmaid’s Tale, one of the most chilling dystopias in literary memory, requires some mass-produced costumes, but most of the work of communicating that we’re in a very different place with very different values is done through language and the norms that govern the interactions between characters. Children of Men has some effects work of the shooting-things-and-blowing-things-up variety, but most of the way we understand that things are dreadful is, once again, done through costuming, through the news footage that we see aired on television broadcasts the characters watch, through their demeanor and what gets them excited.

In other words, doing world-building due diligence up front could eliminate costly effects work down the line. Language is definitely something that evolves, and evolves rapidly, and is a clear and entirely free way to signal that you’re in a different place. The substitution of “frack” for “fuck” in Battlestar Galactica may have seemed goofy at first, but the term has definitively entered the lexicon, geek and otherwise (I imagine it’s one of the reasons “fracking” for “hydraulic fracturing” sounds persuasively negative, as well as nice and crackly). Ditto for graphic design: the gorgeous orange and white butterfly flag iconography at the heart of Kings, the red logos and typography in Ralph Fiennes’ slightly futuristic adaptation of Coriolanus, or the cut-off corners on the paper in Battlestar were all cheap ways to visually cue that we’re not in the present, at least as we know it. And while etiquette and behavior may seem like dorky considerations, they’re also a terrific way of communicating where power lies, and how intense the division between classes and castes is. Writing a guide to character interaction, whether in terms of address, physical contact, or relative physical positioning might seem silly up front, but it could also create a coherent sense of being in a vastly different setting.

Cool toys and the reshaping of our environment are some of what will make our future look and feel very different. But many of the changes will be seated within ourselves, and our attitudes. We can make science fiction that’s somewhere in between Person of Interest and Terra Nova, and that’s more genuinely interested in exploring possible futures than either one of those shows.

The bridge is yours.

-Game of Thrones: ruining America’s youth!

-DC Comics’ sexist relaunch totally worked.

-Pretty sure I’m responsible for a ridiculous amount of the 2 billion hours of content streamed by Netflix users in the fourth quarter of 2011.

-This is not a hard call: Fox should cancel Terra Nova.

-A Portlandia guide to television hipsters.

Twenty-eight minutes into Terra Nova‘s two-hour premiere, what had been advertised as an ambitious science fiction epic had neatly reduced itself so the only really epic thing about it was that it manages to be both a cop show and a medical drama at the same time. And that’s before we get to Terra Nova and limitations on how much hot water solar cells can heat reignite Classic Family Drama about who stole all the shower water. This is a show that appears to have spent its budget for actors on Stephen Lang, and its budget for ideas on a dinosaur fight choreographer.

I really wanted to like Terra Nova, but I can’t shake the feeling that the much more interesting parts of this setup are back in the polluted, rotting world that our characters are leaving along. There’s a bit of Ender’s Game-like family planning, a clearly punitive legal system, chokingly unbreathable air that a few elite families escape by living in domed cities, and odd implications for what the plan is for Terra Nova. But it’s pretty hard to have a sinister conspiracy when information only travels in one direction, unless everyone planned it beforehand and people involved in it are coming through in waves. Which given the different rates of travel through the rift and the rates of mortality by dinosaur and random disease seems like a dicey proposition.

From what we’ve seen of Terra Nova, the camp’s leaders aren’t really doing that much to try to change the course of human history by organizing human society differently, unless letting teenagers live in a group house and drink in the woods counts as social engineering. It’s sort of annoying to hear Lang’s character, a military man named Taylor, intone, “The world you left behind fell victim to some of the baser instincts of our species…we blew it. We destroyed our home. But we have been entrusted with a second chance. A chance to start over. A chance to get it right,” when Terra Nova looks almost entirely like the universe of characters we see on your average American drama.

Mira, the doctor, says things like, “I didn’t want that for my children…I think they deserve a chance to be part of something real. Something new. Something that has a future.” But what she really seems to want is a chance to hit the reset button personally so her children will grow up in an unspoiled world where they can grow up in clean air. That’s a nice idea, but not a revolutionary one. Similarly, it would be interesting if, like Ender’s parents, Jim and Mira had decided to have a third child out of some sort of conviction, but Jim just says, “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” which is both a weak line of dialogue and a totally vacant justification for an enormously risky act.

The only interesting people here are the Sixers, who are initially described as sinister because “They had an agenda.” But an agenda seems like a pretty reasonable thing to have if you’re going to travel back 85 MILLION YEARS IN THE PAST TO DINOTOPIA. It’s totally bizarre that the show treats the Sixer leader’s declaration that “Control the past. Control the future. These are the key. To everything,” as if it’s some sort of sinister statement. It makes no sense to go back in time without a plan. I don’t doubt that there are sinister conspiracies afoot, maybe even Taylor’s son off leading a gang of Others in the woods or something. But it would be such a boring dodge to have the portal be magic. We need fiction that will help us figure out a whole new world, but not the Aladdin variety.