Even if Extras never accedes to The Office's heights of comic sublimity, it's still a rare find on American TV: a series that combines the ascendant genre of cringe comedy with Gervais' rich comic gifts, and his trademark humanism.

Unexpectedly sweet-spirited.

It's less a vision of what a real female presidency might be like than an extended allegory about gender politics in the workplace. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

It's neither wildly innovative nor sidesplittingly funny, but it has a warm, cozy group vibe and no flagrant casting mishaps.

By its very nature, the position Colbert occupies—the butt of his own show's joke—seems more difficult to sustain than Stewart's role as the eternal observer.

It's a silly, sweet-natured waste of time, and (unlike the tortured caterwauling of the American Idol contestants) it's utterly irresistible.

Sure, the re-enactment technique is cheesy by its very nature, but at the heart of this show is the ancient art of storytelling. The verbal accounts of the survivors are so vibrant, their evocation of extreme experience so precise, that the viewer huddles before the TV like a child listening to ghost stories around a campfire, undistracted even by the indignity of commercial interruptions.

Celebrities interviewing celebrities is a promising concept, in that it upsets the power balance of the typical suck-up interview. But the downside is that once people get past a certain level of fame, they seem to lose the internal monitor that reminds them that not everything they do and say is worth recording.

Related has some strengths, particularly the understated performance of Kiele Sanchez.

Abrams and his co-creator Damon Lindelof ("Crossing Jordan") do a terrific job of piling on the plot twists, but they neglect to provide a believably textured world, or any time for the characters to interact between crises. As a result, Lost is at once heart-stopping and strangely dull.

Reunion doesn't seem to get how important character is to carrying a show.

The show's focus remains frustratingly narrow.

Will need defibrillator paddles applied to its thorax, stat, if it hopes to survive the season.

It zips through 60-plus years of Wojtyla's life at a pace that manages to be both breakneck and boring.

Memo to network execs planning an all-forensics programming slate for fall: Watching attractive people poke at skull fragments is not inherently interesting.

Despite an abundance of painfully suggestive one-liners, Hot Properties feels tepid and static. What's worse for a show designed to appeal to female audiences, it feels misogynistic.