But while it shows Heche at an advantage, the series itself is, to tap into the script's car-driving metaphors, just a rusty old vehicle.

"Million Dollar Listing" is a pretty collection of vignettes about people with money making more money, and it's a little obscene.

A slight but appealing mix of old-school Saturday morning cartoons from the early 1970s along with happy hip-hop tunes.

It succeeds as a charming, silly, and idealistic piece of whimsy along the lines of "In and Out."

We've seen all these characters countless times before in movie and TV westerns, but the actors give them distinction here.

Television dramas rarely get therapy right, and State of Mind only adds to that reputation.

You won't be bored, as you strain to keep track of everything, and Isaacs, with his piercing eyes and reserve, is a great lead.

The new show from "Sex and the City" producer Darren Star, is a strained attempt to build another hit about four peacocky New York women who sip martinis and use the word "penis" as often as possible.

Is it strange to make good will and charity into a win-lose proposition? Is it peculiar to judge the givers on their manner of giving, to quantify their largesse? To me, yes, it is, and the show makes for awkward viewing as a result.

It's a plot-driven, multi-generational melodrama, which feels particularly shallow at a time when shows such as "Friday Night Lights," "Mad Men," "Dexter," and "Nip/Tuck" are pushing their narrative reach.

The couples are ordinary, and so are their issues. That’s part of the goal of the show--to dissect the mundanity of love and anger. But making a developing story out of these tangles and skirmishes is extremely difficult, and Tell Me You Love Me doesn’t quite pull it off.

The show... is juvenile, vulgar, and crude, and yet, I still think it contains more sparks of originality than TV's top-rated comedy, "Two and a Half Men."

Entertaining, stylish, and, most of all, slight.

With its pleasing San Francisco locales and McKidd's sympathetic performance, "Journeyman" is entertaining enough.

Invitingly bizarre... [but] despite all the promise of its premise about the changeability of self, "Meadowlands" never quite rises to excellence.

You won't be drawn to True Blood if you don't like a heightened, almost cartoonish atmosphere. Paquin, giggly but calmly assertive, is something of an acquired taste as Sookie.

You can feel creator Vince Gilligan (of "The X-Files") straining to build an emblematic American fable and forgetting to fill in his story with particularities and believable motivations.

The dog-and-owner interplay ranges from the awesome and comic to the cringe-worthy.

It won't insult your intelligence, and it has a completely likable lead actor in Kyle Bornheimer; but Worst Week is nevertheless completely predictable and unambitious.

Barker is written as the stereotypical rogue cop who crosses the line into illegality, but Swayze's presence is complex enough to add mystery and weight that aren't in the script....[but] take Swayze and his gravitas out of the picture, and The Beast is a mediocre series that would probably lurk on the cable TV lineup without much notice.

The different elements hang together as a nicely faceted whole--until the final minutes, that is. Ultimately neither movie nor series, neither beginning nor end, Virtuality is a flight with no destiny.

Walters makes the movie seem like more than it is. She gives us a fully dimensional woman--an art teacher--who is idealistic, self-righteous, humorless, God-fearing, affectionate toward her students, driven, and not any one of those qualities to a great extreme.

The two-part miniseries makes missteps aplenty, with tone and plot changes from the novel that will likely offend purists. But it nonetheless has a warm spirit and an original vision, which is more than I can say for Roman Polanski's rote 2005 version.

Human Target is perfectly adequate action fluff. It’s fast-paced, chock full of fight choreography, and filled with gimmicks including an out-of-control train and an upside-down airplane.

Parenthood is a fairly promising ensemble dramedy that shows TV expanding beyond an emphasis on nuclear families to look at broader family systems reaching from ages 5 to 75.

The pop allusions (to Carson Daly, Alfred Hitchcock) and the fog-machine-based production design are flat and unambitious. But “The Vampire Diaries’’ nonetheless satisfactorily opens up yet another TV world of heightened youth, where blood-sucking is a metaphor for a whole range of fears and desires.

Margulies and Noth--both of whom have a similarly dark appeal--are well-matched onscreen. Alas, if you feel a “but’’ or two coming, you would be correct. The problem I have with The Good Wife is something that mars too much TV: telegraphing.

It's hard to know where The Middle will go after tonight's decent pilot. And that's part of the sitcom's promise, that it has the potential to blossom into a sweet if small celebration of a family of oddballs living distinctly unhip lives.