Give it credit for consistency: a bad concept, badly written for bad actors.

Fillion and Katic occasionally seem a little too self-conscious--a little smirk goes a long way--but ultimately the characters are too appealing to resist.

Everybody in Brothers is funny, but the unquestioned star of the show is Pounder, a rapturous mix of menace and guile in the struggle to keep her men in line.

As a cop drama, Haven--marred by busy and blurry story lines--is barely competent. But as a narrative of eccentric, slightly damaged yet ultimately warm characters, it's quite successful. The deadpan my-badge-is-bigger-than-yours needling between Rose and Bryant is particularly engaging.

Yet another doomed and dreadful attempt to bring improv comedy to television.

Ellis has used Adams' works to create a wondrously full and nuanced portrait of the man, which is brought fully to life by Paul Giamatti.

Rather than suspense, Happy Town appears to be going for the goofball irony of its ABC ancestor Twin Peaks.

Drugs. Pratfalls. Bodily excretions. Sexual crudity. Shock-jock ethnic humor. Four-letter words flying like lead in a matineee Western. Character development and story? Not so much.

This is an intriguing blend of The Fugitive and The O.C.: half suspense and half intergenerational melodrama.

A purported sitcom, it draws no laughs... but does manage the impressive achievement of making Stockard Channing and Henry Winkler, playing Gorham's parents, thoroughly unlikable.

Plain Jane, The CW's counterfeit ugly-duckling show, is too triflingly stupid to reach Breakthrough's profound depth of awfulness, but give it points for its abject phoniness.

Cupid, like most romantic comedies, can be sappy, sloppy and schemingly manipulative. But the bright writing (no surprise to anyone who watched Thomas' snappy teen-detective drama "Veronica Mars") and affecting performances by Cannavale and Paulson make being manipulated seem a guilty pleasure in this case.

With enough intrigue for a spy thriller and enough careening car chases to satisfy the most deranged Fast and Furious cultists, it's an action series that engages your brain as well as your clutch foot.

McKidd and castmates Gretchen Egolf as his wife Katie; Reed Diamond as his brother Jack, a cop who used to date Katie; and Moon Bloodgood as his spectral fiance, Livia, play this with just the right mix of credulity and dry wit.

New Zealand, however, cannot be blamed for The Gates, approximately the 1,712th American television show about vampires.

No surprises here, unless Shannen Doherty oozes out of one of the petri dishes. [23 Sept 2003, p.4E]

The Beast is singularly unimaginative, a collection of set-pieces barely bound together by a narrative thread, substituting attitude for substance and coyness for coherence.

An abysmally dumb plot peopled with some of the most irritating characters in the history of television.

It's funny and smart, with affably quirky characters who aren't cut from cardboard.

Highly entertaining.

At least Azaria and Hahn do have an uncertain chemistry that might have developed into something watchable had the producers not decided to provide it with a Greek chorus of locker-room cracks by loutish co-workers.

With so many different directors and writers involved, it's always hard to judge where anthology series may be going. But the first two episodes of Fear Itself are good, goosebumpy fun, with the deft set-ups, rousing action and surprise endings of a comic book.

The jibes quickly wear thin and predictable, and there's simply not much to Help Me Help You.

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.

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.

A dumb but powerful serialized mystery that has an equal shot at being the season's biggest cult hit and its most mind-boggling flop.

If you can ignore stuff like the impossibly clean subways and the fact that the cops call one another ''constable'' with straight faces, Flashpoint is actually rather formulaic.

No, it's not Twilight--but it's not bad, either. The Vampire Diaries, The CW's new fang-gang drama, successfully hitches the sanguinary sexuality of the vampire ethos to the in-group/out-group dynamic of the teen soap.