It’s probably not wise to get too worked up about live-action cartoons aimed at 11-year-olds. But I found it difficult to watch “Bucket & Skinner’s Epic Adventures” (7 p.m., Nickelodeon) without a haunting sense that pop culture is stuck in an epic rut more than a half century in the making.

“Epic” is pure fantasy, a buddy comedy shot in super- saturated colors, set in a fantasy beach community where the high school has a surfing team and where the students appear to major in weightlifting, wisecracking and Advanced Dude Studies. Taylor Gray stars as Bucket, the “smart” one, while Dillon Lane is Skinner, a space case who occasionally stumbles upon the answer.

Together, the boys navigate the hallways, the cliques and a part-time job while taking time to ogle the girls, including classmate Kelly (Ashley Argota). The boys’ hairdos make their heads seem remarkably oversized, like bobblehead dolls or male Olsen twins.

While their attitudes seem lifted from “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” the plot for the pilot revolves around a school election and echoes films, including “Election” and “Napoleon Dynamite.” In fact, from the surf- town setting to the “Monkees”-style slapstick, every single second and frame of “Bucket & Skinner” seems derived from other sources. If some mad scientist had distilled every goofy kids’ show ever made, he might come up with this. It’s both brilliant and oppressive, and like any synthetic creation, sterile.

Some may find comfort that today’s tweens are watching shows remarkably similar to those enjoyed by their parents or even grandparents. More than half a century separates “Bucket & Skinner” from the silly surf movies of the early 1960s. It’s difficult to imagine the youth culture of that period being pacified or entertained by cultural relics from 1910. By the time “Gidget” came around, the “Andy Hardy” and “Henry Aldrich” teen comedies of the early 1940s were dismissed as hopelessly old and insufferably corny.

In Billy Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece “Sunset Boulevard,” Gloria Swanson played Norma Desmond, a once-famous shut-in who can’t stop watching her old silent films, seen as ancient artifacts of a bygone era. Yet “Boulevard” was made only 20 to 25 years after the end of the silent era. We’re now spoon-feeding children pop relics twice as old as that. In “Sunset Boulevard,” nostalgia was shown to be a kind of mental illness, a tragic affliction resulting in delusion, seclusion and homicide. We seem to have made it our way of life.

Tonight’s other highlights

• A fringe hate group ensnares two brothers on “Flashpoint” (7 p.m., CBS).

• Talks of budget cuts jeopardize the Lions’ quest for a championship season on “Friday Night Lights” (7 p.m., NBC).

• Murder stalks a polygamist marriage on “Bones” (7 p.m., Fox).

• A party ends up on a river’s bottom on “CSI: NY” (8 p.m., CBS)

• Cuddy’s mother (Candice Bergen) is admitted on “House” (8 p.m., Fox).

• Ethics meets candid cameras on “Primetime: What Would You Do?” (8 p.m., ABC).

Cult choice

Kevin Costner and Dennis Hopper star in the ambitious 1995 fantasy “Waterworld” (7:45 p.m., Cinemax).