Nonlinear storytelling, with so many flashbacks and flash-forwards and dream sequences that pretty soon you can't even remember the last time you saw a naked chick bobbing around the cabin. My advice: Rent Barbarella instead.

Turgid and plodding, Rubicon has the pace of an industrial-training film and the lucidity of a Czech art movie with the subtitles turned off. It would have to triple its pulse to rise to the level of lethargy.

The new version, with Jonathan Sadowski as Shatner's estranged son seeking to establish a relationship, feels less like a Twitter feed and more like an actual television show--but not a good television show.

Rigidly formulaic drama is almost always a bad idea, and in this case it's, well, criminal. Neither Maura Tierney as the prosecutor nor Rob Morrow as the defense attorney get enough screen time to develop their characters past the cardboard stage.

Ken Kwapis, who developed Outsourced for TV, had nothing to do with the movie. And in his hands, the film's charm has curdled into caricature. All the Indians are dysfunctional weirdos, incapable of even simple social interactions.

Mostly I winced: at the irritatingly arch dialogue; at the hoochielicious every-other-scene dance routines; at Michalka's acting range, which seems to have just two settings--smug and self-righteous.

What Fox programmers failed to notice was that their new show was peopled entirely with unpleasant characters working from a 100-percent laugh-free script. Watching Running Wilde, you can actually feel your eyes and ears disconnecting as they go off in search of some way to amuse themselves.

The aggressive fakery of School Pride makes it unfortunately difficult to believe when the show throws some unexpected punches.

The show's pea-brain sociology is eclipsed only by its Dadaesque conception of courtroom drama.

Syfy's show relies a lot more on dripping fangs and never speaks in a whisper when a bellow will do--even the simplest conversations are conducted with the neurotic intensity of a bad soap opera. Simply put, this Being Human lacks any human warmth.

Every attempt at treating a Big Idea seems sophomoric and irritating. Even in its look, the show lacks the elemental rawness necessary to throw its intellectual conflicts into sharp relief.

By the end of a couple of episodes, most viewers will be wishing Spielberg and his henchmen had spent more time on scripts and less on special effects, even if it meant splicing old outtakes of Barney and Friends into the action sequences.

It's supposedly a wry look at the perils and pressures of parenthood. But really it's just a collection of tired cliches, reworked with weird grimaces and funny accents a la a really bad Saturday Night Live skit.

With tepid performances and a lifeless script, Bag of Bones feels like more of a chore than a television viewing experience.

Even if you buy the premise that 2012 Nashville is a redneck hellhole barely familiar with indoor plumbing (big laugh in episode one: Reba meets her first gay person!), the show's performances and punchlines mostly fall flat.

Where Modern Family is sweet and funny, The New Normal is cheap and hectoring.

None of them is very interesting, and it's actually kind of hard to tell them apart.

It is relentless and ultimately meretricious in skewing history to its conceit that the United States is a murderous war machine destroying everything in its path to empire.

Carrie's antics in New York are a kind of chick version of Matthew Broderick's madcap adventures in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. But Schwartz can't cut the umbilical cord--perhaps fallopian tube is a more apt metaphor--to his original source material, and that's where The Carrie Diaries goes off the rails.

Watching Cult is like trying to read a Kafka novel in Sanskrit. When you’re blind. And drunk.

Conceptually, this isn’t half-bad. The writing, unfortunately, is all-bad.

An absurd fairy tale.

A mess.

Stuffed with incomprehensible medical jargon and grisly shots of exposed brains, 3 Lbs. would be a major annoyance even if it had an original thought in its seriously underweight head.

Humdrum.

Maybe the best way to explain UPN's new drama South Beach is to tell you that when Vanessa Williams warns a young model that ''South Beach will eat you alive,'' I fully expected the next scene to be a horde of zombie parking attendants chewing the entrails of half-naked girls in the lobby of the Delano. Cannibalism is about the only thing missing from this delirious new trashfest of hard bodies and soft brains.

No matter how horrible the clichés or gorgeous the gowns, they can't distract from the androphobic virulence at the heart of Lipstick Jungle.

Somebody on The Wedding Bells is always saying ''We need to talk about it,'' to which the reply is invariably something like "I'm not big on dating men I've slept with.''