A denial of our brand new day is reflected even more egregiously in Momma’s Boys (Mondays on NBC), which arrived amid controversy last week when the show turned out to be “The Bachelor” with race baiting.

There is no saving Valentine.

There is no good reason in the world to watch Date My Ex, and yet there is something vaguely redeeming in its economic chemistry.

All of this might be vaguely defensible if “Testees” were trying to satirize the abuses of Big Pharma, or the limited opportunities for dumb white men, or really if it were trying to satirize anything at all. But it just sits there, inert, like a patient on a gurney.

13 Fear Is Real, a fizzled effort at scaremongering, reveals just how badly reality television can go astray when the casting fails to be creative.

“Inside the Mind of Mischa Barton” would have been a much better bet than The Beautiful Life.

While smart comedies have certainly been built on less, there is something so contrived about Nick's obstinacy that you feel as if you were watching a lesson in feminism that would be more sophisticated if it were rendered as children's puppet theater.

Broadly limned, Big Lake works neither as a satire--and it stops trying after the delivery of Josh's back story--nor as an adventure in surrealist comedy, and it is tough to watch the strain for eccentricity.

The "Real Housewives" formula is feeling stale. The louche locations all seem to blend into one another, and every kitchen is the same, with acres of space and double-wide Sub-Zero refrigerators that seem to hold enough food for an Olympic swim team.

Cavemen, set in some version of San Diego where people speak with Southern accents, doesn’t have moments as much as microseconds suspended from any attempt at narrative.

The series... exists as the kind of bad soap opera that quickly allows you to see what makes a good one.