Christopher Lawrence

It’s no secret that this Christmas will be one of the toughest in years — you probably realized that the first time you wrapped a present in your Lehman Brothers stock certificates — but TV is here to help.

It’s starting to feel like losing a friend. A friend who shot a fellow cop in the face, tortured and killed suspects, put seized drugs back on the streets he patrolled and started a bloody war between a Mexican cartel and the Armenian mob just to help cover his tracks, but a friend nonetheless.

Whenever cable series come to town, they usually gloss over everything not included in the Vegas Variety Pack: a buffet, some showgirls, a wedding chapel Elvis impersonator and a bachelorette party complete with matching Ed Hardy T-shirts and lower-back tattoos.

I’ve never been much good at denying my urges — the low point being my set of commemorative plates commemorating the first set of commemorative plates — but I live like a monk compared to Dexter Morgan and Hank Moody.

Neither can lay claim to the title of the scariest thing on TV — after a couple of minutes of CNBC’s stock ticker, I spent the other day hiding under my bed — but nobody does spooky quite like “Fringe” (9 p.m. Tuesdays, KVVU-TV, Channel 5) and “Supernatural” (9 p.m. Thursdays, KVCW-TV, Channel 33).

Over the years, it’s been pretty easy to marginalize the fantasy genre. After all, aside from the occasional Hollywood blockbuster, the closest the sword-and-sorcery set usually gets to the mainstream is the songs of Ronnie James Dio and the murals on the sides of custom vans.