The cast is too appealing to make Californication as genuinely distasteful as it tries to be. And at the same time the writing is too broad to make it genuinely good.

Hollander... has pared the medical drama down to its barest notions of life and death and sliced away the acronyms, arguably just when they needed some cutting.

After the first few episodes it remains unclear who, or what, is behind the mayhem, so points, as cringe making as it is to acknowledge, for suspense. The show has missing cash, stolen cash, a freaky black sheep and a menacing brother-in-law.

We pay close attention to Sit Down, Shut Up, an occasionally quite funny but largely anodyne animated comedy beginning Sunday on Fox, because it comes from the pen of Mitchell Hurwitz, creator of “Arrested Development."

This is the world of “Weeds” a few tax brackets lower, and the sense of emptiness is as aggressively conveyed.

Like everything else in the MacFarlane arsenal, The Cleveland Show relies heavily on pop-cultural references (and many of them are pretty funny), but the rhythm and pacing can feel like a slow-dripping faucet.

The class divide is ugly and pronounced, much more so than on “Nurse Jackie,” where Jackie’s best friend is a surgeon happiest in the proximity of $600 pumps. Quickly, Sonia’s aspirations are shown to be untenable.

The Gates is a satire--a cheaply enjoyable one--of suburban lust and maternal anxiety, psycho-social forces that delivered previous generations of women to the pages of Betty Friedan (or Redbook) but that today send a certain kind of young matron to the perverse romance of vampire media.

This is a treatise on personalities rather than systems, its bantering sensibility recalling something more along the lines of "Ocean's Eleven" than "Law & Order: Criminal Intent."

Though it has moments of sublime satire and a typically memorable performance from Mr. Cross's "Arrested Development" colleague Will Arnett, it still has the feel of a dish that has been sitting on the table well past the point of cooling.

The Event is bright and showy and too in thrall to its own hysteria to feel unsettling. It doesn't quiet down enough to disturb, and as a result its claims to relevance seem merely perfunctory

Yes, boys and girls, Teen Wolf has more to say than "Jersey Shore."

The paradox of The Tudors is that it takes on one of the most powerful and protested institutions in human history--the Catholic Church during the Renaissance--and provides little sense of what the English people have to gain or lose by breaking with it.

It aspires to distill the news from an African-American perspective, and in two weeks on the air its comedy has been variously anachronistic and plodding, and timely and sharp.

Eastbound & Down feels static.

Fear Itself, which is directed by a platoon of horror film veterans (including the Hong Kong auteur Ronny Yu), delivers a lot of ripped flesh and spilled blood--terrible things happen, in particular, to lips and teeth--in the service of very little terror or discomfort.

Flashpoint lingers when it ought to speed up. It is a show about crisis that refuses to make you anxious.

The show feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s, when it was possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed.

You see Mr. Bratt with his goatee and expressions of martyrdom, but you hear the voice of Nancy Reagan.

What is obvious to viewers after only a few minutes is not obvious to the supposedly crack investigators dispatched to untangle the conspiracy, whose Ludlumesque layers they fail to see.

The series may want to say something about the inequities of the medical care system or it may just want an excuse to produce panning shots of the velvet lawns and iron gates of Gin Lane. It seems safer to bet on the second and to remain grateful for the “House” reruns that are shown more or less continually on USA.

No one appearing on Melrose Place 2.0 is nearly that dreadful, and the one-liners that remind us that we are not watching the television of a historic golden age retain the zesty camp of the series’s first iteration.

Too often The Real L Word feels like sitting in a restaurant and hearing about some incredible specials that happen to be sold out. Anything genuinely interesting seems to have already taken place.

In the absence of an arcing narrative, the series wants us to accept as its mission of suspense the mystery of this crypto drag-king-meets-shopaholic friendship.

The banter between the Blooms is so full of cloying sugar substitutes and so devoid of any real tension that there is no voyeuristic thrill to be had even from their--I'm just going to say it, because the show does--"sexpionage."

Each warrior is given equal time and the evidence is piled up on both sides to maximize the suspense around the weekly suspect's guilt or innocence. But the personality cost is too high for the payoff.

The result is a production even more fantastically soapy than the first, visually elevated by an apocalyptic video-game look in which the orgiastic sex and violence are presented with a studied, syncopated choreography.

The show's jarring shift in tone suggests a touch of the film "Syriana," as well, all of which leaves us with a hard-to-digest influence soup. It's as if a novelist were telling you that she wrote while under the spell of both Salinger and Nancy Drew.