An intriguing crime drama.

If not exactly compelling, the pilot episode is engaging and often quirkily funny.

The Loop's constant jokes about hot bodies and alcoholic excess would doubtless wear thin very quickly if not for a lunatic cast of young unknowns and gifted veteran character actors.

Surface has no complex or cynical subtexts; it's straight-ahead sci fi.

To say that Love Monkey is derivative and predictable is not quite the same as saying it's bad.

There was a lot more to Sex and the City than menage a trois jokes, and whether Hot Properties can move beyond smutty snickers to develop real characters and story lines remains to be seen.

Cooper and Somerville... keep things moving.

However badly you thought American race relations were going, Black. White. will make you feel worse.

A lot of this is pretty funny, but for 24 episodes?

Lovably silly.

If none of this quite rises to the level of Jon Stewart's intellectual hopscotch or Amy Poehler's inspired lunacy, it's nonetheless agreeably funny.

Longford is never less than gripping. But it unconsciously apes the moral myopia that afflicts its protagonist.

What it isn't is very dramatic. If watching attorneys haggle like rug traders was all that interesting, Feige probably would still be doing it. Nonetheless, there are worse ways to spend an hour than watching Raising the Bar, especially since the cast members are all quite pretty.

The result is compulsively watchable pulp, provided you have a high threshold for decapitations and copulations, sometimes simultaneous.

If Ozzie and Harriet, the original sitcom mom and dad, might have some trouble recognizing themselves in any of this, surely Houlihan, the bullied boy-toy nurse of M*A*S*H, will raise a clenched fist of solidarity with the hardbitten Iraq war veteran Veronica Callahan of Mercy.

As assembly-line products go, Three Rivers isn't half bad.

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

Watching Logan hand small children assault rifles for inspection will no doubt amuse gun nuts and enrage anti-gun nuts. And both camps are likely to blink at one of the (surprisingly numerous) female customers who--jokingly asked if she's carrying a weapon--whips out three concealed knives.

Every case is wrapped up in precisely 42 terse minutes, with no dangling threads to trouble consciences or make syndication sales tough. If you liked any of the other L&Os, you'll probably like this one. If you didn't, well....

Fox's beguiling but unconventional drama Lone Star will have a similar problem [programmers with quick trigger fingers] if viewers demand a quick payoff.

Blond toughie Kelli Giddish (Past Life) is fun to watch as the lead marshal, provided you don't have an excessively ACLUish temperament.

Secret Circle is competently performed and produced and liable to entertain anybody not old enough to remember Alyssa Milano and Shannen Doherty doing pretty much the same stuff in Charmed back in the 20th-century day.

The show is kind of amusing, at least in a summer-TV sort of way.

As a kind of CSI: Sleaze City, the show is quite watchable.

The hardball banter over coolness quotient is coupled with some pretty amusing generation-gap comedy.

The truth is that Rob is a rather funny sitcom about the cultural collisions that occur every day in an increasingly blended America.

Some of the bits are awfully predictable, like tough-guy Sands mellowing into a big-brother type for a young street punk who (amazing coincidence alert) has a hottie older sister. Others are more interesting, particularly a debate between Goldberg and Marte over whether warring on drugs makes any sense.

Far from a complete accounting of how the United States government tracked down and killed its Public Enemy No. 1--even the SEAL raid that ended with his death is hardly mentioned, much less described--this film might be better titled The Spooks Strike Back.