I was splayed out in front of the tube the other day when I realized, with a start, that my life had lost all meaning. Or maybe it was just that 'House Hunters' was on.

I couldn't tell. So I flipped to 'The Real Housewives of Poughkeepsie.' ('All hell breaks looks when Kathy discovers a no-boil recipe for lasagna.') Yet I still couldn't shake my ennui.

Then, like divine intervention, I realized what was wrong. Everything on TV was just too flat.

I've got a four-year-old, 42-inch flat-screen TV that hangs ostentatiously above the mantle. But, according to the news from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, flat is out.

Instead, according to the hucksters at CES, the latest and greatest TVs are curved, offering viewers a left-to-right concavity, like watching TV on a skateboarder's half-pipe. And, somehow, curved screens make TV better, TV makers say.

TV is stuck in an innovation cul-de-sac. There are no new ideas in TV hardware that are worth paying for, so, thanks to competition and production efficiencies, good TVs keep getting cheaper. The cheaper they get, the more desperate TV makers become, filling their sets with more and more useless piffle.

From 3D to 4K to curved screens to Sony's strange 'wedge-shaped' sets (don't ask), we are witnessing an industry out of ideas, casting about in the dark for something -- anything -- that might persuade us to part with our money.

The death of innovation in TV hasn't come about because TVs are perfect. Far from it. It remains a big hassle to find something you want to watch, or to stream TV shows and movies without consulting a handful of remotes, or to navigate your cable system's byzantine menus.

But TV makers aren't in a position to address any of these real problems. They don't have the clout to make significant deals with entertainment companies, which would be necessary to fix the problem of having to subscribe to many services in order to watch everything that you would like. They can't alter the way cable systems bundle channels, which might make it easier to cut your monthly bill.

And TV makers, like everyone else, can't make all the devices connected to your TV obey a single, friendly on-screen interface -- which would, ultimately, be the best way to crack the problem of annoying living-room tech. (Microsoft has gotten closest to doing this with its Xbox One, but it required a hefty investment in new technologies like speech-recognition and motion-tracking that TV makers likely can't afford on their razor-thin margins.)

In the absence of solving what really ails TV, manufacturers add on extras meant to fatten their profits. Take 3D, a feature that has been marketed with messianic zeal for the past few years (2010, if you didn't know, was actually billed by some as the Year of 3D TV.)

Where did that go? Nowhere. 3D was awkward (those glasses), uncomfortable (some people got headaches), and not really very interesting (there weren't many 3D shows to watch.)

This year 3D is all but dead at CES; one manufacturer, Vizio, has pulled the feature entirely, and others haven't been talking it up.

The failure of 3D doesn't necessarily mean that future TV novelties are doomed, but it sure isn't a good sign. This year, the new craze is ultra high-definition TVs, also called 4K TVs, which sport very high-resolution screens. But I question how much more high def we want our screens to be, especially in a large room from far away. To my aging eyes, today's HD is pretty good, so why pay more?

And 4K is plagued by the same Catch-22 that hobbled 3D: Until people buy a lot of 4K sets, entertainment companies don't have much incentive to produce 4K content. But without much content, there's little reason to buy a 4K TV.

Sure, Netflix said it will be streaming 'House of Cards' in 4K, but you'll need an Internet connectioncapable of 15 megabits per second to get it -- which is about twice as fast as the average American broadband line. I'll be more optimistic when broadcast networks sign on.

Add all of this together and you get a pretty solid piece of consumer advice: Go ahead and buy a cheap TV, as BuzzFeed's John Herrman wrote recently. The TV-panel industry has become so efficient that it can produce really good-looking displays at low prices. And you don't need much more than a good display in a TV, since add-ons like Internet streaming are much better provided by set-top boxes like Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Roku and videogame systems like Xbox and PlayStation.

What if you really, really want extras like curves and 4K? Your best bet is to wait, wait, wait. If 4K is really going to take off, you'll get a much better TV for less money in a couple of years than you will today.

TV makers aren't going to like this advice. But that's tough -- like their cousins, the PC makers, and perhaps soon, smartphone makers as well, they're hooked to the terrible, hyperscaling efficiencies afforded by global tech production. Nobody can fight these efficiencies. (That's why I'm skeptical we'll ever see an Apple-made TV set.)