These actors deserve better material.

A charmless sitcom with absolutely nothing original in it.

The more the script pushes its stock questions of faith, the more cerebral the movie becomes. And cerebral isn't a good thing when you're talking about horror.

What makes a cloney-baloney reality show such as the new ''Skating With Celebrities" bearable? For me, it's the constant awareness of how ''Saturday Night Live" might milk its silliness.

Relies so heavily on... amateurish re-creations that it undermines its otherwise mind-blowing survival stories.

The production doesn't engage the ears, the eyes, or the laugh muscles. It engages only the snooze button.

It's kind of boring.

"Jericho" turns nuclear catastrophe into an excuse for a series of suspenseful "24"-like set pieces, and the result is a ham-fisted concoction overcrowded with incident and rigged thrills.

No, "Drive" isn't awful... But the show still lacks the charisma that a serialized story requires to keep viewers coming back for more.

The tonal dissonance in "Standoff" is deafening, like pairing up, say, Jewel and Meat Loaf for a duet.

With its population of must-love oddballs, the series drowns its cool sci-fi concept in a flood of "Northern Exposure" quaintness.

It's thoroughly artificial and proud of it. The four women are a little too attractive, their comments and voiceovers feel a little too semi-scripted, and everyone is a little too willing to ignore the camera crew on the dates.

Too much like a dull season of MTV's "Road Rules," without the women.

Feresten's not awful, and the show he has built around himself with video segments has a few laugh-out-loud moments. But he clearly needs to find his identity behind the desk.

"The Path to 9/11" never quite arrives at narrative coherence and depth.

Pointless and inert.

MTV's latest invitation to watch dislikable people do unattractive things.

Everything other than Harmon, who has thrown her "Law & Order" reserve out the window, feels unnatural and contrived.

Halfway through the premiere, the basis for the entire show is already worn thin.

Let's hope Welcome, as forced as "Christine" is relaxed, runs itself into cancellation sooner rather than later.

Much of Moonlight is amateurish, but nothing is more amateurish than the artificial chemistry between O'Loughlin and Myles.

A very hit-or-miss improvisational exercise, with miles of miss for every inch of hit.

It's a dour retelling of the L. Frank Baum story, and it just keeps sinking further and further into pointless thematic complexity and visual density.

The wacky situations and jokes on The Bill Engvall Show seem almost willfully dated.

" 'Til Death Do Us Part"... almost contains enough comically clumsy filming and overacting to achieve camp. Almost, but not quite enough, even with Waters doing his twisted Rod Serling bit.

"Heartland" doesn't use its talent in service of anything other than predictable, inoffensive stories and a contrived relationship between the two leads.

But even if you pushed those questions about production ethics out of your mind last night, the Kid Nation premiere was still an uncomfortable, irritating, and narratively subpar hour of TV. It was a disorganized mess that milked its young cast for cacophonous psychodrama.

It's entirely paint-by-numbers, a formulaic dating contest colored in with all the too-familiar characters, from the butch Matt to each of the ladies, city gals looking for a real man who doesn't bother with all that metrosexual nonsense. This is reality by rote.

Jones plays her clichéd role to the hilt, which is clear early on, when she paints her toenails pink while driving her car.

HBO's new series Eastbound & Down falls into the grating category of totally obnoxious dude comedies.

These are some of the most lackluster, unimaginative trials brought to TV in years, as every defendant's guilt or innocence is written all over his or her face from the get-go.

Oh big sigh indeed. Quarterlife, is just plain creepy.... Rather than developing a clique of layered individuals, as they've done before, Herskovitz and Zwick deliver a small culture of flat, irritating generational emblems.

NBC's new anthology horror series is, like far too many TV horror anthologies before it, just not scary enough.

This new CBS series is just too silly, as it tries to mix up science and crime-solving like a sloppy kid with a chemistry set.

After July 2, you won't need to worry about stumbling across this enervating, vapid, and obscenely over-promoted thriller when you're channel surfing.

The series, premiering tomorrow night, is completely hackneyed, a dull dropout from the Adult Swim school of looney 'toons.

The show tries to get by on charm, hoping that we'll enjoy Fillion as a bad boy enough to overlook the half-baked plots and thin characters.

At four hours, you are left with far too much time to ponder the feebleness of the endeavor. If you decide to get on this ride, prepare to be dazzled by little more than the glorious scenery.

90210, the CW remake that premiered last night, is pretty bad.

This is the kind of dull-witted, over-laugh-tracked, artificial sitcom that makes you wonder if the Hollywood honchos ever got the memo about the 21st century and all.

The show strained to create oh-so-legendary moments. Alas, most of the efforts were as unsteady as Chris Martin's voice.

This attempt to milk the success of the 2008 movie “300’’ is a major dud, from the C-level production values and shoddy green-screen technology to the horrible makeup that turns star Lucy Lawless into a Raggedy Ann doll.

Alas, it’s an amateurish take that feels more like a string of failed “Funny or Die’’ sketches than a fully developed series with distinct characters.

Mercy is a bunch of played-out hospital cliches placed together in hopes of being the next “Grey’s.’’

Sure, the show will raise awareness of organ donation; but it is certainly not going to raise the profile of good TV drama. Casting and nuanced writing might have helped, but neither are in evidence here.

A junky sitcom that isn’t old school so much as mold school.

The animated comedy, which premieres on HBO tomorrow at 11 after Little Britain USA, is unnecessarily slow and slack.

The show remains a poorly conceived piece of work that throws a whole mess of relationship and medical cliches at us and hopes for the best.

They don't promise to be more than a collection of types, like the generic figures in TV's "Poseidon Adventure'' remake. And if we don't care about them, then it's hard to care about the possible threats that surround them.

Not a single one of the characters were funny enough, or touching enough, to make me want to see more of them. If the Wests were thrown in jail, I'd be tempted to throw away the key.

The Jerry Seinfeld-produced reality show may just slide backward into the ditch and push NBC farther down into the hole....It was an underwhelming, contrived product that didn’t bode well for the hourlong version of the series.

There's not a hint of logic in the procedural aspect of the show. The development and the resolution of tonight's case, in which a man on death row is trying to prove he isn't a cop killer, represent the sloppiest, most factory-like TV writing there is. And there's not much realism afoot, either.

It's just a flat traditional sitcom built around lazy, repetitive jokes and audience cackles. It's just bad.

He is so relentlessly bitter in Lennon Naked that, ultimately, his bitterness has no emotional weight. The script, by Robert Jones, is remarkably spotty.

Like "The View," The Talk was an hour of plastic blatherers pretending to be a microcosm of American women.

Don't ask me what Retired at 35 has to offer. TV Land's new companion sitcom for "Hot in Cleveland" is a piece of brash nonsense that, with jokes featuring older people talking about "Facialbook" and "texturizing," seems like it was written to target people who died about 30 years ago.

There's nothing dishy, or infuriating, or entertaining about the miniseries. It's enervating and unnecessary.

For the most part, The Pee-wee Herman Show on Broadway is stale sugary shtick on a candy-colored set with no new resonance--no undercurrents about childhood, or innocence, or even Pee-wee Herman.

The show never takes off, and Reiser, best known for "Mad About You," winds up looking like a shoddy replica.

Franklin & Bash is not a guilty pleasure, because there's no pleasure here to regret, just strained, sexist, frat-boy self-love.

[Malibu Country] is a traffic jam of culture-clash cliches, numbing laugh track cackles, and fake stage-set lighting.

The animals can't make a sitcom work unless they're surrounded by good human writing and human originality, both of which are in short supply here.

Loosely based on the 1987-89 series, it's a silly, flat piece of work that is all about posing longingly in the face of impossible love.

It’s an oddly unnecessary piece of work, a vanity production from top to bottom with very little that feels genuinely candid.

On just about every other, deeper level--plotting, acting, dialogue--Hannibal is lousy.

The problem is almost everything around [Sarah Chalke], including the title, which is cutesy on a stick.

What demotes it from a C to a D is some of the laziest plot setups ever, as well as the dumbing down of "Friday Night Lights" alums Porter and Cress Williams.

Allen tries too hard to be cranky and offensive and misogynistic and yet ultimately--aww--a good guy.

The lousy effects that put the twins in the same room are sloppy, and the story line--ripped from a cheesy daytime soap--is worse.

It's one joke ground to dust as the moms abuse their daughters and vice versa, ad infinitum.

It's one of HBO's more fascinating series -- but not because it's good, or funny.

''Freddie" tries to distinguish itself with Puerto Rican dash, and it has been even more ruthlessly built to appeal to TV's most coveted audience, young women, by exploiting Prinze's pinup appeal. Maybe ABC should think about adding a third element to help the show attract viewers: It's called good writing.

A painfully simplistic sitcom that has exactly one thing going for it: Sara Gilbert.

[It] looks like a TV commercial with plots. The people are pretty, their homes are pretty, their problems are pretty, and it's all pretty shallow.

In between all the poolside exhibitionism and dance-floor romantic politics, guns appear and faceless thugs are killed. That means our young cast members get to angst about whether they're truly in danger and some villain is going to force them to eat a loaf of bread at gunpoint.

A boring prison-sentence of a silly biopic.

Sorvino is as wooden as can be throughout. Perhaps she didn't connect with her poorly written role; perhaps she's just straining to understate.

It's only a few shades more adult than, say, playing with blocks.

"Treasure Hunters" is slickly annoying right off the bat.

A peculiar piece of work that's a whole lot creepier than it means to be.

[It] recycles all the comedy cliches of pregnancy.

I kept waiting for the unexpected beat, the surprising plot riff, the inverted cliche , but they never came.

This disappointing new series operates by one rule alone: When all else fails, refer to genitalia.

A painfully lightweight collection of stock comic wedding situations... that Kelley could have written on his PDA at the gym.

It feels more like a TV gathering of stick figures from an instruction manual.

Wahlberg is winningly sincere and yet sneaky.... But the lazy, simplistic script plays more like an episode of a second-rate crime series.

Cavemen is pretty bad. It's definitely among the stalest pieces of bread in the loaf, which already includes 'Two and a Half Men' and 'According to Jim.' And it's certainly the most tasteless.

Even if you're a shameless lover of "Laguna Beach" and its spinoff, "The Hills," you should probably avoid this country-flavored iteration of the semi-scripted reality soap formula. It's pretty doggone dull.

Everything--the characters, the action--seems stubbornly flat.

Do Not Disturb is a sitcom that bombards you with a whole mess of loud, stupid, obvious, politically incorrect material, hoping it will make you forget about the pervasive pointlessness.

It's sad, really, how unimaginative Howie Do It is. Given all the resources at NBC's disposal, and given the fact that NBC is desperate to regain ratings footing, this is the best the executives could come up with?

Domestic comedy doesn't get more generic, more insipid, or more pointless than "Surviving Suburbia," and no, I haven't forgotten about "Gary Unmarried" or "In the Motherhood."

Watching 13 - Fear Is Real, I was, like, shaking, too, from giggling at the awesome flimsiness of this new horror reality show--when I wasn't bored out of my skull, that is.

Private Practice is just plain McLousy, from its stock cast of whiny healers down to the hokey, gimmicky medical cases of the week.

Bowler and Lohan never approach the kind of magnetism that a movie about Burton and Taylor must conjure in order to be convincing.

It is so mediocre it's almost fascinating to behold, ''almost" being the operative word.

Has absolutely nothing going for it.

[It] isn't very good at all, even for a frothy nighttime serial.

This new CW series cranks out brash jokes that evaporate upon hitting the air, winds them into situations where women submit to their men, and leaves no aftertaste when it's gone. It's on TV, but it's never truly on.

You haven't seen ''Teachers" yet. But in a sense you have, on every other fifth-rate workplace sitcom ever made.

A TV commercial for lips, hair, and clothing products.

It has been given a little more direction and clarity of vision (directly onto Anderson's upper torso), although it's still fully awful.

At times during ''Ghost Whisperer," the sentiment is so thick you might want to go away from the light -- the light from the TV set, that is.

Each character on ''Love, Inc." is a one-joke affair.

It's hard to quibble with such a philanthropic series, even while its motives are, of course, Nielsen-based. But it's easy to quibble with the condescension, fraudulence, and manipulation of ''Three Wishes," as every single scene is ruthlessly choreographed to put a lump in our throats.

Turns the pope into a pious stick figure.

A do-good reality show that makes a big deal about how morally superior it is.

Portrayed by actor Dougray Scott, Moses is so lacking in leader-like charisma and confidence that he seems ready to break into tears at every sand dune.

Not a single note in the premiere of "Brothers & Sisters" rings true.

"The Winner" isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, and it's sad to see Corddry pour his likable comic style -- a form of ironic cluelessness -- into such a feeble and misguided project.

Watching HBO's surfing drama "John From Cincinnati" is like sitting through a bad play at a tiny experimental theater.... In short, if Gary Busey were a TV series, he would be "John From Cincinnati."

Big Shots is an extremely unflattering showcase for these actors, particularly McDermott, whose overacting as the show’s bad boy puts the mug in smug.

The show is a full-fledged Fox flop.

Shannon and Blair have none of the clueless peas-in-a-pod chemistry of the actresses in the Australian original. Shannon is wound too tightly, and Blair is terribly miscast.

The show, executive produced by self-labeled momma's boy Ryan Seacrest, is totally stupid, but you knew that already.

What we see for the entire hour is a vain woman who can only behave like a snarky, self-absorbed 17-year-old, making a mess of her mother's kitchen and her sister's house and mean-girling every non-rich woman who enters her orbit.

ABC's The Neighbors is this season's awful sitcom, the one that defies all kind of sense.

The acting is half-hearted, the characters are paper thin, and the dialogue and plot development are embarrassing. It’s as sophisticated as “Jonny Quest.”

The show is just awful.

[An] intolerable piece of attention-getting TV.

It's the new bottom of the barrel.

While TV comedy is getting good again, the network has decided it's time to resurrect the groan-inducing cliches of stinky sitcoms to remind us of just how truly rancid the genre can get.

Every moment of this repugnant product is absolutely precious, if you have a fetish for counterfeit emotions, Tupperware cheeks, ice-pick fingernails, and "real women" who can cry on cue -- without spoiling their makeup.

Once again, reality TV invites us to marvel at the idiocy, futility, and self-destructive tendencies of the rich and famous. But this petty, home-movie-level material wouldn't even fly on YouTube.