[A] tepid, paint-by-numbers series.

Ms. Romijn's hourlong show tries to combine the arch satire of "Desperate Housewives" with the chick-lit romance of "Grey's Anatomy," and falls short of both.

ABC Family means well but could not have done worse. Secret Life doesn’t take the fun out of teenage pregnancy, it takes the fun out of television.

Mr. Kelley is a gifted television producer, and “The Wedding Bells” has funny moments, but this series is not a labor of love. It’s a labored effort to simulate romance.

Ethel is tone-deaf and maddeningly incomplete.

Offers a ho-hum monster and the kind of stock characters that we've seen too many times before.

The pilot is not very funny or at all surprising.

Beyoncé: Life Is but a Dream is as contrived as “Madonna: Truth or Dare,” but probably for good reason it is neither daring nor entirely truthful.

Hellcats is basically a soft-porn music video for teenagers.

A tepid knockoff of "Sex and the City."

The producers didn't have any difficulty recruiting a gaggle of vain, vulgar spendthrifts willing to hiss, preen and cry on cue for the camera.

The series is sentimental in a sleek way, and there are surface glints of humor in the script, but mostly, "Brian" is a blander, less distinctive version of "Thirtysomething."

The creators of Mental couldn’t take Gallagher any further up the mean-spirited scale, so instead they went too far in the other direction and ran smack into cliché.

The Deep End is a pale imitation without smart writing, imaginative casting or even a clever conceit.

"Twins" is supposed to be a light-hearted comedy, but there is something ineffably sad about Ms. Griffith's struggle to cheat time, a real-life version of the HBO satire "The Comeback."

It should be funnier, but aptly enough, the pilot fails by also clumsily trying too hard, pushing what should be lighthearted portraits of insecure, inadequate mothers into grotesque caricatures.

It's a dead bore, weighed down by bad writing and a plodding performance by Mr. Corbett, who is to film noir what saltpeter is to sexual attraction.

It is a male version of “The Golden Girls,” but with weaker writing, and older viewers are not saps.

It marks a return to the 80's era of "Dallas," "Dynasty" and "Knots Landing," when the prime-time landscape was dotted with lurid, silly soap operas that provided the kind of catty catharsis that regular shows neglect.

The film's real failure is that it's not terrible enough. Instead it is a respectful and oddly cramped tribute to the legendary love affair between Taylor and Richard Burton that isn't vulgar enough to be entertainingly campy and is too wedded to the myth to riff imaginatively on the couple's gaudy, outsize celebrity.