Cable's healthy summer crop

For the next few weeks, I plan to spend most of my waking hours thinking, talking and writing about television.

But with back-to-back trips to San Diego’s fabled Comic-Con and the Television Critics Association’s summer meetings — this year in sunny Pasadena, Calif. — what I probably won’t be doing much is watching TV.

You might not think I’d be missing much in a summer when only the scheduling of NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” took precedence over Wednesday night’s presidential press conference and ABC’s “Wipeout” describes most of the broadcast networks’ ratings.

My DVR, however, suggests otherwise.

Thanks to a healthy (and not so healthy) cable menu, it’s likely to be nearly full by the time I get back.

And with all due respect to the legions who are looking for love in all the wrong places and with all the wrong people, I don’t expect to find much in the way of “reality” waiting for me.

Those people in the “Big Brother” ant farm have been getting along just fine without me for years, even if they might not get along with one another.

Besides, outside of my family and friends, I haven’t any time for so-called real people, not with:

Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie,” 10:30 p.m. Mondays.

Edie Falco (“The Sopranos”) stars as a pretty good nurse who just happens to be a drug addict in one of the summer’s best shows.

Falco’s terrific in the part — no surprise there — but as the show continues, it’s good to see the writers aren’t cutting Jackie any slack.

Yes, it seemed odd that a wife and mother could conduct an affair with the hospital pharmacist with almost no one, including her lover, knowing about her double life, but as Jackie’s carefully constructed web of lies starts to fray, we’re getting a look at addiction that’s as real as anything you’ll see on A&E’s “Intervention.”

But with a lot more laughs.

NBC’s “Kings,” 8 p.m. Saturdays.

Yes, it’s been canceled, and, yes, almost no one seems to be watching the episodes NBC’s been burning off for the past several weeks — the finale’s this weekend — but sooner or later, some of you are going to see it on DVD and realize that in the summer of 2009, this was the best show on television you weren’t watching.

Ian McShane, who seems to have brought his cadence, if not his entire vocabulary, from HBO’s “Deadwood,” stars as the king of a fictional country that looks a lot like ours in a show based, loosely, on the story of David and Goliath.

Strange and yet remarkably accessible, it’s the one show this summer, other than this week’s “Torchwood: Children of Earth” miniseries on BBC America, that’s stayed with me long after the set was off.

USA’s “Royal Pains,” 10 p.m. Thursdays.

One of the silliest scripted shows on television is also the one I most look forward to lately, thanks to a combination of acting chemistry and its writers’ knowledge of biology.

No, it’s not realistic that Hamptons concierge doctor Hank Lawson (Mark Feuerstein) can do more with stuff you’d find around the house than most physicians could with an entire trauma center behind them, but after years of watching Fox’s “House” order very expensive tests on a whim, it makes for a nice change.

Add in Paulo Costanza as Hank’s entrepreneurial brother, Evan, and Reshma Shetty as a physician’s assistant with a lot to hide and you have the perfect summer cocktail: sweet, breezy and mildly intoxicating.

Lifetime’s “Drop Dead Diva” and “Army Wives,” 9 and 10 p.m. Sundays.

Just as silly as “Royal Pains” but with a much higher estrogen level, “Drop Dead Diva” stars Brooke Elliott as a bimbo who dies and wakes up in the plus-sized body of a brilliant lawyer. It’s early yet — the show’s only been on a couple of weeks — but I want to see more.

The dead-bimbo angle aside, “Diva’s” a light and bright lead-in to the soapier “Army Wives,” which focuses on the women — and men — left behind when our troops go to war.

Besides being the best work Kim Delaney’s done in years, it’s a timely look at the stresses and sacrifices inherent in any conflict.

What else I’m watching (or recording) this summer: HBO’s “True Blood,” TNT’s “The Closer,” “Saving Grace” and the gradually improving “Leverage,” and the odd “Doctor Who” special (the latest, “Planet of the Dead,” premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday on BBC America).

As for “Wipeout,” well, at my house, that’s just what happens when the DVR gets full.