There's nothing particularly appealing about any of the folks having the close encounters.

Despite the lethargic story and jokes that rarely elicit more than polite chuckles from the studio audience, "Game" is not without potential.

It is obvious in just the first few minutes who the real winners are -- members of the NBC sales department. Collectively, they have taken product placement to new and annoying heights.

That's a lot of story potential, but most of it is squandered in trite and predictable ways.

The show itself is so poorly conceived that you can only pity the viewer who gets lost in this Jungle.

At times, things veer so far off center that running from the feds seems like a distraction from the more important story of teen romance and angst, just another annoyance like a sudden zit or a dropped call.

"Book Club" is one of those "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" series. You know, the kind that promote themselves as giving unvarnished looks into real-life issues facing women in a variety of situations but that mostly exist to exploit them.

Although several characters are refugees from central casting, there is too much of an earnest streak running through "Dirt" to dismiss it as a breathless soap.

"Bells" needs to be about more than pacifying that week's psycho bride (or her demanding mother), or it risks being an updated version of "The Love Boat."

When all is said and done, the series feels less like Wisteria Lane than "Stand By Me" channeled through Danielle Steel.

There are clever moments in NBC's new improv series "Thank God You're Here," but you can get awfully restless waiting for them.

It lacks the charm of the original. Worse, the characters in the NBC show are so exaggerated that the whole thing feels like a skit.

In fact, the entire show consists almost entirely of spills, tumbles and falls, most of which fell short of being breathtaking, spectacular or catastrophic.

It’s rather like a “Saturday Night Live” skit that should have stayed a skit and not wound up on the big screen.

Crusoe, based loosely on the classic adventure tale by Daniel Defoe, is an international co-production that champions swashbuckling and scenery without grasping the significance of credibility and character development.

Without more skillful dialogue and lively stories, this won't help A&E kick the reality habit.

So, one gets an episode about Spartacus' lessons at gladiator school and another episode about his fights in "the pit," a place brutal enough to make professional wrestling look like ballet. With such thin stories each week, it's small wonder that sex and violence are used to take up the slack.

Regardless, it doesn't take long to realize that "Miami Medical," written by executive producer Jeffrey Lieber, is long on emotional manipulation and short on compelling characters and insightful storytelling.

This show still feels emotionally manipulative and at times even uncomfortably invasive.

There is "love, hookups, backstabbing, cheating, scandals and crying," though not nearly enough to distract from the show's tedious obeisance to a formula that has become more familiar than the lyrics to "Happy Birthday."

So give School Pride an A for good intentions, a D for research into what ails public schools and an F for deliberately concealing the fact that it took the network and its sponsors--and not some empowered community--to revitalize a school.

If "Twenty" proves anything, it's that even gifted performers can't conceal the flaws of a truly uninspired script, though they can distract from them here and there.

The characters have the depth of a dollar bill, and their predicaments produce few surprises. It's not that the stories lack potential -- well, some maybe. Mostly it's that the level of drama rarely goes beyond daytime fare.

A series like this can go in a lot of different directions, and creator-writer-director John Gray takes them there. He goes for the scary, the funny and the overbearingly sentimental, but it is the latter that dominates.

[It] might more accurately be titled "Touched by a Sponsor."

That it has been a hit in 35 nations... reveals that there are more international threats than terrorism and global warming.

Given this straitjacket of a script, it's hard to know how good the cast could be with decent material.

The series premiere suffers from a catalog of problems longer than most demand lists.

A lackluster show about a conflicted mother-to-be and her annoying and oblivious husband that mostly provides ammunition to those who argue that Hollywood is out of touch with the real world.

The stories trudge along like a semi on a steep uphill grade. Taken as a whole, the show looks more like something pasted together for potential demographic appeal than anyone's dramatic vision.

Largely a waste of time.

A look at the first episode suggests that, just as A.M. radio is the unassailable province of the right, TV might better be left to the left.

This formulaic, hard-to-swallow concoction of glib writing and off-putting characters neither enhances the credits of its cast nor the reputation of Jerry Bruckheimer when it comes to TV comedy.

You'd think that someone somewhere down the line... would have lobbied for the rudiments of a story, characters with texture and dialogue more sophisticated than shopping mall conversation.

This is a show that could bury the [sitcom] genre altogether.