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.''

Welcome to The Captain is less a TV show than a grim ransom note from the striking Hollywood writers.

It just substitutes South Africa for "Everwood's" Colorado, trite idiocy for "Everwood's" sharp dialogue, and a game of blind-man's-bluff for "Everwood's" casting director--actress Leah Pipes, who looks 25 and sounds 30, is the least convincing teenager since Stockard Channing staved off menopause in "Grease."

The show's dialogue feels scripted, its frequent hookups and breakups abrupt and phony, and its scenes from the music business out and out fraudulent.

The Cho Show is the television equivalent of anti-matter: no scripts, no punch lines, just Cho hanging out with her self-consciously weird entourage. What a waste of one of the most scandalously funny comedians in America!

Chemistry is just one of the ingredients lacking in the Canadian-made The Listener, NBC's new drama about a psychic paramedic. Others include but are not limited to plot, dialogue and acting skill.

Testees probably shouldn't be considered part of the fall season, but let's be fair--it's as lousy as anything the broadcast nets have come up with.

In the case of ABC's turgid legal melodrama The Deep End, you might not want to show up at all.

After a few minutes in front of ABC's bewildering sorcery drama Eastwick, you may wish that Bewitched's Samantha would twitch her nose and make the whole thing disappear.

Basically, Suburgatory is a random collection of clichés drawn from such suburb-bashing works as Valley Girls, Stepford Wives, Clueless and Cougar Town, assembled without a scintilla of wit or human empathy.

Having started with a bad premise, producers Carlton Cuse and Kerry Ehrin then made it infinitely worse by rejecting the loneliness and isolation that were the nucleus of Hitchcock’s film.