Margulies is a potent enough screen presence that this part of the show could be interesting, but Canterbury's self-destructive streak gets overshadowed by all the Leg Show material and the overheated courtroom theatrics.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles happens to contain that show's most interesting character. It just ain't Sarah Connor.

The guys are so polite and harmless that it's hard to dislike them even when they repeat themselves in such a short span.

Lewis is a strong enough actor (again, see "Band of Brothers") that there are moments where he pulls together all these tics into a character who could be interesting, but too much time gets wasted on pedestrian mysteries to give him room to work.

So long as Lewis is around, Life will be several steps above those cookie-cutter police procedurals.

The pieces shouldn't fit together--Earl's celestial presence with Grace's raging sex life, discussions of metaphysics with police procedural plots--but somehow they do.

Fringe is just good enough to watch with or without the ads. But with Abrams, you expect more than "just good enough."

For the most part, they're neither fish nor fowl: not gory enough for the "Saw"/"Hostel" crowd, and not genuinely scary enough for anybody else.

Baker has an unforced masculinity that allows him to play likable bastards like this, and with the other regular characters (played by Robin Tunney, Owain Yeoman, Tim Kang and Amanda Righetti) so far ciphers at best, he's able to carry the show by his lonesome.

Whedon is a vastly better storyteller than anyone involved in "My Own Worst Enemy," so Dollhouse can be very engaging, even if the premise doesn't make sense. Dushku isn't as versatile as the role demands--many weeks, the only difference in Echo's persona seems to be her wardrobe--but Whedon and his writers certainly are.

It's fun and diverting, and certainly has the potential to be much more, based on Thomas' work on the original series--and the glimpses we see of Cannavale and Paulson in these roles. But right now, it seems less a great romance rekindled than a reunion fueled by nostalgia instead of passion.

There's plenty of humiliation in I Survived a Japanese Game Show as well, but there it's so varied and strange--and very much in keeping with what I understand of those shows--that it doesn't get repetitive or annoying.

Despite a wonderful cast put to good use, a very well-designed parallel world and some marvelous turns of phrase, I can't help admiring Kings more than I actually liked it.

Basically, it's a dumber version of "The Shield." Swayze's performance and the always-memorable Chicago locales are frequently undercut by dialogue that's clumsy and/or spells out things we can see for ourselves, and by model-turned-actor Fimmel, last seen on the WB's deservedly short-lived "Tarzan" remake.

The new TNT drama Leverage isn't a great show, but it may just be the exact right show at the exact right time.

Katic has the more thankless role, as the actress in this scenario inevitably does, but the necessary sparks fly when she and Fillion are on screen together swapping barbs, and hopefully as time goes on, she'll get more to do than play kindergarten teacher to Castle. How much you like the series will depend almost entirely on how you enjoy watching these two spar; for me, that was enough.

Neither trainwreck nor masterpiece, the new "90210" was exactly what nobody expected it would be: remarkably faithful in tone and spirit to the original adventures of Brandon, Brenda, Scott Scanlon and company.

Conan was simultaneously reassuring his fans that he wasn't going to change too much in the new gig, and telling the traditional Tonight audience what they might expect from the new landlord. This was the smart, and really only, play Conan could make on night one of such a high-profile job. I just wish the execution had been a little better.

Easy Money was created by Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, who wrote for "The Sopranos," and the show in many ways feels like a low-budget HBO (or FX) series.

I don't know that there's a long-running series here--even the pilot runs out of steam before the end--but I did laugh several times.

When I tell you that Weeds is off to a good start with Monday (Aug. 16) night's sixth season premiere, you have to know that what I'm saying is that it's pushing the story forward in interesting ways, not that Weeds has gone back to being the show it was in Season Two.

Bored to Death (created by real-life novelist--but not private dick--Jonathan Ames) as a whole is so dry in its comedy that there's very little margin for error. (Like the "Star Trek" movies, I found myself enjoying the even-numbered episodes and struggling through the odd-numbered ones.)

It looks great, makes good use of Los Angeles locations and has a solid ensemble cast (including Regina King and Tom Everett Scott as detectives). But it feels emotionally empty in the same way "Third Watch" so often did.

Cougar Town, on the other hand, is still finding itself, but it’s already much better than the title would suggest.

As a show about average people who become superheroes, No Ordinary Family is very promising. It's the "Family" part of the title where the series has problems.

Now, I wouldn't say I loved it. Parts of it I didn't even like. I became quite engaged with what was going on downstairs with the servants, while I found virtually everything having to do with the Granthams (at least the parts unrelated to how they dealt with the staff) a chore to get through.

If it felt much like an episode of one of Conan's old shows, the Conan debut also felt like a middle-of-the-pack example. Some funny bits, some other obligatory moments, and a good feeling to have the guy back, but nothing extraordinary like, say, his final week on "Tonight."

Much like "Cougar Town" was back in the fall of '09, Mr. Sunshine is a show with a lot of likable performers, a solid creative pedigree, occasional laughs and a whole lot of room for improvement.

I don't have much new to say about the third season of Jackie, because the show's strengths and weaknesses are the same as they've always been.

There's a promising show here, and with time maybe Chaos can figure itself out.

Twenty Twelve is ultimately too safe and predictable to be funny enough for the time spent watching it.

The larger problem, though, is that unless you're deeply invested in the fairy tale characters and seeing the variations on their familiar backstories--seeing, for instance, that Snow and Charming had a very different first meeting than the one we know about--then most of the story and character work is flat, despite a cast of likable, game actors.

A good sitcom is much more likely to have started life with a bad pilot than a good drama, and there are little glimmers in each episode that suggest a much better show could come later. But those glimmers are much more obvious in 2 Broke Girls than in "Whitney."

It's not quite good (other than The Swede), but it's also not especially bad (though it has occasional terrible moments.

Though there are some good jokes here and there about the humiliations a little person actor has to endure on your average movie set, for the most part, the biggest laughs have little to do with Davis and everything to do with the celebrity guests.

It's mediocre, but it's at least pleasantly mediocre.

It's much too generic given Abrams' reputation from "Alias," "Lost," the better years of "Fringe" and the "Star Trek" reboot.

NYC 22 feels like the TV version of the show it wants to be.

It's still not anywhere near the ballpark of the earlier AMC shows, and the plot itself remains incredibly frustrating, but there are other aspects that feel closer to the show Sud said she was making last year, rather than the one she actually made.

Hagman--and to a lesser extent fellow returning stars Patrick Duffy and Linda Gray--are so much more fun to watch than their four new, young co-stars that the new Dallas plays less like a passing of the torch than a suggestion that torches were better back in the '80s.

Ultimately, I found Da Vinci's Demons ridiculous but fairly amiable.

It was the usual schtick from Leno--which is probably just what his fans wanted to hear after he'd been out of late night for a year and off TV altogether for weeks--with jokes about the Olympics, Dick Cheney, and, of course, the flagging fortunes of the network he's on.

The show feels cold, like it's holding the audience at arm's length.

As usual, it's all too busy, too tonally inconsistent (the scenes with Bill's parents seem to exist not only on a different series, but a different plane of reality) and too often obscures the terrific work being done by Tripplehorn, Sevigny, Goodwin and Seyfried.

Much as I admire Lilley's ability to pull off a sort of one-man Christopher Guest movie, only one of the three Summer Heights High leads is funny on a consistent basis.

It isn't until the werewolf-themed fourth episode that "Dresden Files" finally gives you a trick worth applauding. Hopefully, there's more of that to come.

A sometimes-promising, sometimes-frustrating, always-overpopulated new sitcom that kicks off this season's odd new trend of shows about relative strangers who become best pals in a hurry.

It's an odd little show, often more David Lynch than David Milch, and after three episodes I'm still not sure I understand it all.

I like her a lot, but the shaggy-dog nature of the storytelling... made the comedy miss about as often as it hit for me.

As epic as Reggie vs. Billy or Billy vs. George were on the sports pages in the summer of Sam, it doesn't feel like quite enough to fill eight hours of scripted drama.

Even though the performances, the writing, directing, etc., are uniformly strong, The Riches is just too unpleasant to make a weekly commitment to.

There's nothing annoying about it, but there's also nothing memorable.

The sex is all implied rather than shown, as is much of the drug use. It's a very PG-13 approach to potentially R-rated subject matter--and that's the problem.

Reaper takes several steps back--and a few steps sideways--suggesting a drunken all-nighter may be in order, if it hasn't happened already.

It wants to be a smart-aleck comedy/thriller hybrid in the spirit of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, but the jokes are rarely clever enough and the thrills rarely exciting enough.

Some of the performances are good, particularly by Deschanel (who gets to sing near the end, good news for anyone who saw "Elf"), McDonough and Cumming, but solid acting and monkeys flying out of, um, someplace aren't enough to justify spending six hours over three nights on a labored attempt to make a classic children's story seem grown-up and cool.

There are moments when John Adams stirs up the passion its author clearly had for the subject -- Adams firing off a rifle in the middle of a battle at sea with a British warship, the first public reading of the Declaration, George Washington (David Morse, in the second-best piece of casting other than Giamatti) whispering his oath of office at his inauguration -- but too often it's just as muddy and dull as its subject was accused of being.

The Flashpoint pilot is competent, but very retro (there's an extended sequence of the team driving to a crisis point with their sirens blaring, the sort of thing that went out 15 years ago) and fairly dull.

While the jokes may be funnier than "King" has been in a long time, the new show also feels more uneven and strained.

It's not a bad show, but the mechanics of how they're going to abduct their latest target are far less engaging than how the team interacts with each other and how each member fights his or her compulsions.

Cleveland isn’t an inherently interesting, or, worse, funny, character. His presence allows the writers (many of them white like Henry and Appel) to tell meta jokes about white people in Hollywood producing entertainment for a black audience, and occasionally some of the racial humor lands.

If Lie to Me wants to elevate itself above all the other shows like it, it not only needs to beef up the quality of its mysteries, but to spend more time focusing on these unexpected downsides of the power to live a life of absolute truths.

It’s a bland, interchangeable bunch, with most of them having a single identifiable trait.

They're flashy and can be briefly shocking or funny or even moving, but the more they go over-the-top, the less impact they have for me.

V has to rise and fall on its story and its characters. Based on the pilot, both of those areas are spotty.

If Guggenheim can deepen the personalities and show how the flash forward really impacted them, then they might have a show here. Because right now, there's an interesting idea, some good production values and a cool cliffhanger, and not much else.

Defying Gravity--an international production with American actors--feels too slight, or silly, to treat as anything but the cheap, disposable summer programming it is.

Right now, it's a work in progress at best.

Where other law shows tend to have one side view the other as the embodiment of evil, here we see that these two are old friends from law school who enjoy the battle of wits even as they're convinced they're on the right side of every fight. On those occasions when The Whole Truth slows down to just let those two bounce off each other, it's a show I almost want to watch. But the rest of it is too fast, and too thin, to bother with.

The show is trying to depict a good cross-section of the city's cop culture. But the scenes with the uniform cops - Ben McKenzie as a young quick study, Michael Cudlitz as his gruff but clever training officer - are just much more vibrant and memorable than anything with the detectives.

There aren't any particularly wince-inducing moments, but nor are the various grabs for the heartstrings as successful as they are when "Grey's" is at its best. No lows, but no highs, either.

There are some likable actors here, and funny moments here and there, but the two episodes I've seen suggest a show not in the league of the established comedies NBC has on that night.

It's a likable cast and the show seems a potentially good companion to "HIMYM" (these characters even hang out in a bar that looks a bit like the "HIMYM" bar shifted 90 degrees), but there's one problem: It's not especially funny. Not yet, anyway.

Season five is a definite improvement on season four, but only to a point. There aren't as many different stories rattling around, but the show's still so crowded that it has to bounce from scene to scene, subplot to subplot, so quickly that very little gets a chance to breathe.

The series as a whole seems much more interested in the love triangle involving Arthur, his bravest knight Leontes (Philip Winchester) and the beautiful Guinevere (Tamsin Egerton) than in actually showing the growth of a king. It doesn't help that parts of that story are bizarrely anachronistic.

Taylor does a strong job of showcasing the show's main set, a recreation of the original Club, and several of the musical numbers (sometimes the Bunnies get to sing, and other times the show casts actors to play '60s musicians like Ike & Tina Turner) really pop. But the show's attempts at social relevance ring hollow, and the main plot leans too heavily on the wooden Cibrian.

There's no there there. Annie's missions each week are forgettable, and most seem to revolve around Annie seeming to get too personally invested, only for her instincts to be proven right over her more jaded colleagues.

This is a pretty by-the-numbers blend of teen angst and horror.

The pilot episode definitely would have benefited from a less-is-more approach, while the series as a whole could use a little more meat and/or logic.

[Thorne's] a likable, charming actress, surrounded by a bunch of familiar, appealing performers (Cohen in particular is someone I've liked a long time, even if the business hasn't known quite what to do with him), and I think there's potential in this idea. But the execution and/or the network aren't right for the idea.

The British show accepts that this is the story of two very damaged individuals and is willing to confront that damage early and often - sometimes seriously and sometimes in black comic fashion. Whether by choice or NBC fiat, Enbom has placed these same characters into a much lighter style, and the fit doesn't work.

The actual version of Unforgettable is so plodding and serious.

There's a potentially good supernatural cop show to be made, and certain pieces in place to make this into that. But the version you'll see on NBC tonight seems to be embracing the show's likely failure by being something few will miss if it doesn't work out.

As set up by White (and Dern, who's a producer and a contributor on the pilot script), Enlightened feels too lightweight to work as a short drama, and too clumsy in its attempts at humor to work that way.

The combination of the characters and the style made the whole shebang much easier for me to take than the movie. Still, I didn't feel any need to watch later episodes.

The Firm at this point doesn't offer much on its own.

My problem with the film is that it's all surface.

Even with all the changes in front of and behind the camera, Smash is fundamentally the same show with the same problems.

The Newsroom is convincing as a faux newscast. It's less convincing as good television.

It's not bad so much as tired: sexual tension between doctors, mysterious ailments that are diagnosed at the last possible second, even the hoary old cliché about the patient who needs life-saving surgery that their religious beliefs forbid.

Anger Management is Charlie Sheen doing what Charlie Sheen does-- on-screen. It's not artful, it's not elegant.

For this show to work long-term, its human characters have to become richer--and funnier--so that they can evolve with the audience long post the point where the writers have run out of tricks that Crystal and her various winged or four-legged co-stars can do.

Though Esposito and Burke are both excellent--and Kripke and Favreau stage a classic swashbuckling swordfight for Miles that's easily the highlight of the first hour--far too much time is spent on the boring (Charlie) or annoying (Danny) teenagers.

There's no character you haven't seen before. More importantly, there's no character that hasn't been done much, much better elsewhere.

The problem is that Zero Hour is either unwilling or unable to be that crazy all the time.

Overall, though, Jon Benjamin Has a Van isn't the next obvious step for Benjamin conquering TV comedy. It's a misfire that mainly made me sad we won't have full new seasons of either "Archer" or "Bob's Burgers" until 2012.

On top of having a dated premise, it just feels tired.

Barring a significant step up in quality--or at least the self-awareness to stop taking its silly plot and characters so seriously--those people [Gen X'ers who loved "Buffy"] will only be watching out of loyalty to a part that Gellar played a long time ago, on two different networks that no longer exist, and not because she's presently doing work that merits that kind of devotion.

Although there aren't any Carrie Bradshaw-esque puns on this show, nor ethnic stereotypes, the comedy feels more frantic and desperate.

At this stage, Man Up! (which was actually created by co-star Chris Moynihan) is a show with forgettable characters, jokes that don't land and a shaky grasp at best on its own premise.

Beyond the problems of time and memory, there's the way that Innocent feels trashy, overwrought and disposable.

When you spend all your time and energy explaining how the trick works, there's precious little left to entertain the audience.

It's just a collection of creepy imagery, lots of screaming and the occasional musical number for Anika Noni Rose.

It's lame and tin-eared.

As a narrative achievement, though, Magic City is a mess, filled with paper-thin characters and clichéd dialogue and storylines. If not for the appealing lead performance by Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Ike, large stretches of the series would be unwatchable, even with all the lovely visuals.

Even with the couples counseling gimmick, Common Law is ultimately too much like every other traditional cop show you've ever seen, even as it's also too much like every other USA show you've ever seen.

None of Men at Work is funny, but the greater sin is how uninspired it feels.

The execution in this case is too shrill and scattered to get any of his points--or jokes--across.

Adult life may be like high school some of the time, but it isn't all of the time--and a show suggesting that it is becomes just as difficult to endure as some of the worse memories of high school itself.

Ultimately, it's the exact same tedious show they've been making, under one name or another, for years now.

Williamson may have put thought into what this show is about, but what comes across on screen is an empty exercise in fetishizing the charismatic evil of serial killers.

There are just a lot of crazy, crazy ideas hurled out there with no real thought given to pace or tone or how to mesh them all together.

The new season has a few moments, mostly involving the return from the dead of Jack's old CTU colleague Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard), who now seems to be working for the bad guys. But all the attempts by Jack and his writers to justify every past decision often brings the action to a crawl.

Heroes may be better this year than it was last year, but it's still a very dumb show that just wants you to think it's smart.

It's an hour of unpleasant yet bland people occasionally bumping into each other and saying racially provocative things.

If "Donnellys" wants a shot at doing better than "Studio 60" in its timeslot, it needs at least a hint of a larger-than-life figure.

A work in progress.

On paper, the idea of building a new democracy from the ruins of war while government contractors run amok--in other words, showing what would happen if the reconstruction of Iraq took place in our heartland--is just as strong as the original premise of Jericho. But the execution remains mediocre.

Unfortunately, the idea's a little too thin to support a weekly sitcom.

There's potentially a good show here; the pilot's just a miss.

It's not a great sitcom, not even really a good one, and the strain of trying to sell such mediocre material will no doubt get to Garrett in a few weeks, but it's still vastly better than its companion show.

"Vanished" is already lacking in the kind of star performances that make "Prison Break" or "24" worthwhile even when they're foot-dragging.

[Of the two new soaps,] only "Fashion House" seems to understand that it's supposed to be a guilty pleasure.

Despite two fine leading performances by Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver and a premise that's not like anything else on television, there's something missing in the execution.

Samantha Who? isn't remotely as bad as the worst of this season's rookie class ("Cavemen," "Big Shots," CBS' upcoming "Viva Laughlin"), but it's ultimately forgettable in a way that a show about an amnesiac would probably want to avoid.

There's some amusing material on the margins of the show--the guys use OnStar to settle a debate about the lyrics to a song on the radio, Dougie admits his marriage isn't perfect and his wife "sometimes she gets up in the middle of the night and bakes in her sleep"--but outside of Jerry Minor's winning performance as the overextended but always cheerful Aubrey, it's completely forgettable.

It's a watered-down, TV version of the familiar tale, as bland and inoffensive as possible.

The show plays like bad imitation noir where the private eye can occasionally sink his teeth into the villain.

New Amsterdam is essentially three shows in one: Amsterdam flashing back on all the exciting things he's done in the last 366 years; Amsterdam trying to find The One, and Amsterdam and partner Eva Marquez (Zuleikha Robinson) solving murders like the leads on some kind of supernaturally-charged "Law & Order" spin- off. But only the first of those shows is remotely interesting.

None of those jokes serve any purpose except to be jokes, and they suffer for the fact that real people don't talk, think or act this way.

True Blood looks terrific, especially whenever it has to depict a vampire in action, as they can move almost too fast for the naked eye (but not the high-def camera) to see. But unless the thought of vampire/human love makes your pulse quicken--or, even better, makes you wish you didn't have a pulse to quicken--most of it is not really worth seeing.

The longer you watch the show (I've seen all eight episodes of its first season), the emptier and more frustrating it becomes, to the point where even the brief running time begins to feel too long.

Maybe McBride has more pitches in his arsenal than he's shown so far, but the repertoire on display in Eastbound & Down feels too limited for a long stint on HBO's mound.

The premise is pretty standard Joseph Campbell, journey of the hero stuff, but the execution is poor.

Any show that's willing to go to such a silly place, to have its main character utter a line of dialogue that's like a parody of a parody of stuff these guys were writing two decades ago on "thirtysomething," is not a show I have time for, even if other shows won't be back until April.

Unlike "Life on Mars," the concept seems elastic enough that the show could run for a long time, but first its American producers would need to work on storytelling basics like pacing and developing interesting characters.

The disappointing new project from "Arrested Development" creator Mitchell Hurwitz is mainly a reminder of how much the "Arrested" cast--several of whom provide voice work here--added to that show.

Valentine is more what I was anticipating when I heard about the MRC-on-CW deal: low-budget, disposable and artery-clogging in its levels of cheese.

Mental was produced on a relative shoestring by Fox Telecolombia, and there's a flatness not only to the sets (which look not unlike what you might see on a Univision show), but the dialogue and characterizations.

Basically, The Deep End is "Grey's Anatomy" with lawyers, and the execution is as cynical and flat as that premise sounds.

McKellen, and the production design, and some smart use of Brian Wilson songs on the soundtrack (The Beach Boys' "I Know There's an Answer" is the miniseries' cheeky final tune) weren't enough to overcome my need for coherence.

Most of the humor feels like a show that’s trying too hard, except when we’re watching the great-yet-tiny character actress Linda Hunt as the boss of NCIS’s Los Angeles field office.

The material is so inherently dramatic that there are occasional moments where Three Rivers is affecting despite itself. But it's also a danger sign that one of the premiere episode's story lines has absolutely nothing to do with a patient in need of an organ.

The show is so self-conscious of everything it’s doing that nothing has quite the effect its creators want it to have.

Melrose does a better job integrating its two casts, and it embraces what it is: a trashy remake of one of the most memorably trashy hits in primetime history. It's still not good, mind you, but it's more honest and enthusiastic about its badness, you know?

Addison isn't very strong or decisive in her professional capacity either, spending most of the pilot waffling on whether she should have left Seattle Grace.

The one moment people will talk about, and remember, from The Jay Leno Show debut was one of the least comic of Jay's career. It's going to get NBC some water cooler talk, and a lot of website hits, but it's not going to work as a signature "This is why Jay is awesome" clip like I think they were hoping.

Running Wilde is, simply, not very funny. That's unfortunate, but no unforgivable sin. Funny people occasionally make unfunny things. But it's the way that it isn't funny.

The problem is that Glory Daze itself never stakes a claim to its own identity. It's tonally all over the map--and that inconsistency gets in the way of the few potential laughs.

All the color in the margins doesn't matter if the man at the center of the picture is a bore, which Lyons unfortunately is.

Episodes isn't even as funny as Crane and Klarik's last collaboration, the exceedingly mediocre short-lived CBS comedy "The Class" - and that's even considering that the new show features Crane's old "Friends" star Matt LeBlanc delivering a terrific performance as an exaggerated version of himself.

It's a lead performance that's completely at odds with the tone of the rest of the show, and one that makes all the other goofy things even more uncomfortable than usual.

The three episodes I've seen felt flat and airless, outside of the performance by Sam Huntington as the werewolf.

Surely, there are talented American writers not long out of their teens who could have helped craft a new group of characters and stories that reflected their own experiences - and with enough sex and drugs and mayhem to please MTV's need for extra attention.

Over the three episodes USA sent out for review (the pilot, a mid-season episode, and the first season finale), what Kate does only occasionally matches up with the judge's speech, and none of her cases are interesting enough to distinguish Fairly Legal from the abundance of law shows on TV.

It's not painful--there are likable actors and the office setting is loose and fun--but none of the jokes land, at all.

Traffic Light winds up with a negative hat trick, in which I found myself not caring about any of its three male leads, though I did like one of their female co-stars and several of the guests who popped up in the episodes I've seen.

It's formula, and while there's obviously a ton of appetite for that kind of formula in primetime (see the roster of dramas on CBS, FOX, ABC, TNT...), it's not particularly well-executed formula, and it wastes the potential of the one part of the formula that's slightly unique.

It's a very straightforward, sincere, dull accounting of all the trouble caused by Rodrigo, son Cesare (Francois Arnaud, frequently nude), daughter Lucrezia (Holliday Grainger) and company cause with their newfound power and station.

You can blame Winslet, or Haynes, or both, but something doesn't fit, and it wrecks everything, above and beyond spending so much time on a story that could have been just as satisfyingly told at half the length.

Without the overwhelming nostalgia for this particular venue for Pee-wee and these supporting characters, I found The Pee-wee Herman Show on Broadway a long (close to 90 minutes) slog, cute in spots, but mainly just strange--a voyage through the fantasy life of a character I prefer to see fending for himself in a closer approximation of the real world.

It's all incredibly broad, and lacking in any real point of view.

It tries to coast on banter that's not particularly snappy, and on a snickering dependence on sex-related gags and plots.

The whole thing feels like a gross miscalculation--a failed attempt to update Allen's familiar persona for an angrier, more desperate time.

The fictionalized Chelsea occupies that irritating middle ground where she's not likable enough to be watchable when she's just existing, and yet neutered enough that her bad behavior isn't actually all that funny.

With the show so half-hearted about its subject matter, Teenage Daughter has to lean on the hackiest of punchlines.

It could be a problem Allen Gregory solves later on, either by softening its main character (and his dad) or by pushing supporting characters more to the forefront, but the version on display in the pilot is one I have no interest in ever watching again.

But because Lohan seems to be going to a costume party dressed as Taylor while Bowler's giving a performance, the whole thing is an imbalanced mess.

By the third episode, though, we've gone off the rails with another low-level blackmailer somehow getting over on an employee at the supposedly powerful and secretive CTU, and with Jack getting caught up in a plot-delaying detour that's even dumber than the survivalist who held Kim hostage for a few episodes in season two.

Who wants to watch a less funny, vaguely cuddlier House impersonator?

It at times seems like a pornographic parody of "The X-Files."

A lame new sitcom.

Having two nearly identical, equally mediocre sitcoms on the air at the same time isn't exactly a crime, but it seems an awful waste of someone's time and energy.

What the obnoxious "Cashmere Mafia" and now the dull Lipstick Jungle suggest is that it's not as easy to recreate the "Sex and the City" phenomenon as assembling three or four attractive actresses of a certain age and pairing them with a name producer from the HBO show.

The hallucinatory gimmick can only do so much for the same old stories.

"Runaway" is like a Frankenstein's monster stitched together from pieces of dead shows from both networks.

Basically, [the lead character is] a collection of every stereotypical romantic comedy and chick-lit trait, made especially annoying by Heche.

A gimmick in search of a show.

It abandons all of Kelley's strengths, like the legal setting and male bonding, and drowns itself in his weaknesses: women discussing their feelings, women flirting with men, women acting body-conscious... basically, anything involving the female gender.

The show inspires nothing but my apathy.

It's a very special, frustrating kind of bad, one with the power to actually change history.

All the gunplay, pedal-to-the-metal action and cartoon villains cheapen any serious talk of what's going on in the city.

Regardless of how promiscuous its obnoxious hero is, Californication remains a smug, unpleasant ego trip to nowhere.

Journeyman doesn't do anything especially interesting with its time-twisting premise. It's competently produced, but unless you have a tremendous amount of affection for McKidd left over from his work as the insane Lucius Vorenus on HBO's "Rome," it's skippable.

Jamie is our heroine, the one we're supposed to like and care about, but as played by British actress Ryan ("EastEnders," "Jekyll"), she's a mopey blank, badly upstaged every time Sackhoff makes one of her all-too-brief appearances as Corvus.

It is every organ transplant storyline you've ever seen before on "ER" or "Chicago Hope" or elsewhere, told in the most unimaginative fashion possible, acted out by a competent group of actors not given much to play.

They've assembled a cast suffering a major charisma deficit and given them wooden, cliche-riddled dialogue to deliver.

Despite its silly trappings, Farmer Wants a Wife is neither appalling nor unintentionally funny enough to merit sitting through yet another contrived dating show where the biggest prize would be for someone, anyone, to escape with a bit of their dignity intact.

It's not just familiar, but lazy.

Kath & Kim writers, meanwhile, seem to have nothing but contempt for their heroines. Kim is willfully ignorant, rude and obnoxious in a fashion that has no redeeming qualities, and Kath is mainly an unhappy blank who lets her daughter walk all over her.

If you've watched ABC at all this summer, you've essentially seen all Wipeout has to offer: people of various shapes, sizes and ages all falling face-first into the mud while trying to complete an obstacle course that's been designed to be all but impossible to finish unscathed.

There isn't a series here; just the pitch meeting for a very expensive, very loud, very dopey action movie.

The concept and the characters start to wear thin within an episode or two.

I will only say that Suspect Behavior is basically the same show, but other than Whitaker, it's a much less interesting cast and collection of characters, with Garofalo particularly bad.

Jenna Elfman (who plays a newspaper movie critic who gets pregnant after a one-night stand with the young guy on the left, played by Jon Foster) seemed like a loose, natural comedienne, but she's trying way too hard to sell the jokes here-possibly because she knows no one's going to buy them without a whole lot of help.

If you want a show with engaging characters and drama, and not just a public service announcement about the very real value of our country's nurses, then Hawthorne fails to deliver.

The show (which is shot on the old Stars Hollow set from "Gilmore Girls") seems like a WB show circa 2002--not one of the good ones, but a copy of a copy of a copy of one of the good ones.

If you're a teenage boy who loved "300"--or any other demographic who loved "300"--you may well dig all the digitized, slow-motion blood splurts, the abundant nudity (albeit with some of the full frontal coming from male characters as well as female) and the stylized, computer-generated backgrounds. But stay far away if none of those things make you say "Hells yeah!"

Mercy isn't just derivative; it's stridently, obnoxiously derivative.

It’s lazy, predictable and spectacularly tone-deaf.

Brothers is not anything you might classify as "good."

If you're going to do a show about fantasy football, then do it. Go big, or go home. As constructed, The League will leave no one happy.

However you view it--mediocre "House" rip-off, improbable law show or "Like Father, Like Son 2: Judicial Boogaloo"--you have to like Jimmy Smits an awful lot to make Outlaw a Friday appointment. I'm as devoted an "NYPD Blue" fan as they come, and even I'm not willing to make that leap.

[A] cheap, lazy, unfunny mess. Just depressing. Nothing to see here--and hopefully not for long.

This one's not working, and it doesn't matter how many fresh coats of paint or new showrunners they try to slap onto it.

It's all too frantic, too full of obnoxious people contorting themselves into stupid lies in the service of jokes that never quite land.

Though the series is based on the friendship Drescher developed with her real-life husband after he realized he was gay, there's not a second of the debut episode that feels like it has any connection to actual human behavior.

It's a much bigger mess than '70s critics ever accused the original of being.

CGB plays more like a bad parody of Desperate Housewives.

The show around Louis is filled with a lot of creaky set-up/punchline humor, much of it based around forced double entendres.

If it weren't for [Lithgow's] shameless bellowing, "20 Good Years" would be excruciating, instead of the (very) occasionally amusing hackfest it's turned out to be.

Can someone please wake up Charlie Sheen? I know he's tried to build an entire career, Dean Martin-style, on half-lidded apathy, but as one-third of the new CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men, he's practically comatose. [22 Sept 2003, p.T35]

There’s nothing especially novel or insightful, let alone funny, about the show’s take on impending parenthood.

All of the characters speak in the same exposition-heavy voice; their individual quirks... are too calculated to be interesting; and the soundtrack is both too on-the-nose... and, for the most part, 10-15 years too old for the characters.

Pick your adjective--Predictable. Insufferable. Detestable. Tacky. --and it fits.

Painful, pointless, obnoxious... I would almost rather have The Jay Leno Show back.

So they can't use the name, can't use most of the jokes and can't keep the tone of the Twitter feed. Remind me again why CBS wanted to make this into a TV show?

Of the three terrible new shows debuting Thursday night, the ABC drama My Generation is the most disappointing....the execution is just awful--leaden and predictable and eyeroll-inducing at nearly every turn.

It has pretensions of depth and ambition, but really all it's about is whatever cool thing Murphy and Falchuk wanted to do next, hurled at the screen with such reckless abandon that none of it works.

Larry, Henry and virtually every person to walk through "Happy Hour" are broad, obnoxious, lame caricatures, even by the standards of Fox's laughtracked sitcoms.

"Desire" will make you ashamed -- of society at large, if not yourself --whether you like it (chances: minimal) or not (chances: off the charts).

It's the first outright catastrophe of FX's post-"The Shield" era.

Big Shots, an obnoxious waste of time that's likely the season's worst new show.

The issue I have with the rape-by-orangutan scene in Unhitched is that it's not funny, nor does it even seem to be trying to be funny. It's lazy comedy, substituting shock value for wit and invention, and it typifies everything that follows on this lame excuse for a sitcom.

The real problem with the new Knight Rider, though, isn't that it's stupid (again, it's a show about a guy and his talking car) or that Bruening's terrible (the Hoff would be the first to say he's no master thespian). It's that it's a show whose time has long passed.

It is really, really atrocious. Not so-bad-it's-good. Just bad. Plain bad. Why am I watching this?-level bad.