No, they're not ripping off "Heroes" - "Jane" was there first - but looking at the two shows side by side demonstrates how much execution matters to even the most promising concept.

Maybe it was funnier with "ordinary" Britons?

Raines' conversations with the dead... aren't exactly riveting.

Without the "Raymond" writing team behind him, Garrett's not so much unleashed as he is uninteresting.

Lori Loughlin co-stars as an emergency room doctor who's dragged into their lives in ways so sitcommy they make robbing Mick Jagger look like a halfway decent idea.

Considering how hard people on shows like "Survivor" and "The Amazing Race" work for their prizes, there's something almost unseemly about giving people prizes for not much more than showing up.

This, my friends, is why HBO has writers. Not to mention actors.

Television's a visual medium, but so much of the plot is advanced during dialogue, I actually lost track a few times and ended up rewatching sections of the episode to figure out how they'd figured out whodunit.

Eli/Ally not only isn't the most original character of the season, he's not the most sharply defined, either.

I don't know exactly why Moonlight, which acquired "Veronica Mars'" adorable bad boy, Jason Dohring, as a second-round draft pick, seems so very lifeless.

The ABC sitcom, which runs what seems like an excruciating 21-22 minutes, it's a trio that deserves better.

It's strictly entertainment. Assuming that's what you call it when one guy's ordering 10 aspiring brides through a series of ridiculously staged agricultural challenges to find the one who'll win the right to have her name mentioned in People magazine when they break up.

A show that delivers every ounce of cheese its package promises, if not the recommended daily allowance of calcium.

Despite Shannon and Blair's best efforts, Kath & Kim's main characters feel like a compilation of attitudes (and wardrobes), forced into a sitcom format so tired that you'll see the plot resolution in next week's episode (not to mention most of the jokes) coming from nearly a half-hour away.

Though the abbreviated installments of the online quarterlife had annoyed me with their very brevity, at an hour, NBC's quarterlife seems to drag on forever

Unnecessary, and close to unwatchable, is ABC's The Goode Family, a long-delayed animated entry from "King of the Hill" producer Mike Judge.

Liking Cho, I wanted to like The Cho Show. Liking Cho, I couldn't.

Nash is a force of nature, O'Connell a genial actor in search of something more interesting to do than leering. Together, they might want to think of checking out of Do Not Disturb.

The writing's not there, and neither is anyone who can play at the level of "Christine's" Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Surviving Suburbia starts out weak and declines rapidly.

Thanks to a collection of well-off New York adolescents whose parents really should have known better, the NBC Universal-owned cable network's out to convince us that those kids from "Gossip Girl" are real. As if anyone would want them to be.

I've yet to see proof that "reality" television itself kills anything but brain cells. Which would seem to make the CW's latest entry, 13 - Fear Is Real, pretty pointless.

With all due respect to the young actors playing them, who can only say the words the writers put in their mouth, these are three of the least appealing sitcom kid characters I've seen in a while, and though Labine's made me laugh in the past as a secondary character, as a lead he's leaden.

When it comes to Mercy, they (and we) should probably expect none.

In Hank, pompous comes off as merely pitiful. Or it would, if you could waste even a moment feeling sorry for anyone but the viewers, for whom the laugh track's likely to serve as a bitter reminder that somewhere, someone else is having a good time.

A single-camera sitcom about guys in a fantasy football league whose cluelessness is only matched by their crudeness.

The result? A scripted version of TV Land's cheesy "High School Reunion" that should particularly irk fans of the canceled "FlashForward," which, whatever its faults, only knocked its characters unconscious, not its viewers.

Outlaw is as absurdly plotted as too many movies, providing the basis for some two-hour ride that moves along fast enough to keep viewers from noticing the trucks whizzing through holes in the story. You need more than that for a weekly series. You need characters you can believe in.