Though many small things are executed well, some big parts of this show just don’t work, at least in the first couple of episodes.

Most painful are the scenes of Steve and Anne with their daughter, Courtney (G Hannelius). They’re overacted, unfunny and, like much of the rest of the show, full of annoying cliches.

At least these comedies are upfront about what they are: Cheerfully raunchy shows that lean heavily on adolescent obsessions with bodily functions. If that’s your thing, you may enjoy the deadpan Testees.

Lee and co-star Alfre Woodard deserve better than Memphis Beat, which can't quite overcome the cliches that frequently bog it down.

Like so many other new shows this summer, the uninspired Covert Affairs is assembled from spare parts and elements that have been used better elsewhere.

Employing the kind of overly clever, self-consciously "witty" dialogue that unfailingly announces a lack of real ideas on the part of the writers, "Heist" is by far the least compelling of these new crime-life series.

Genre fans used to the emotional depth and extraordinary storytelling of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel" will find that this show is not even remotely in "Buffy's" or "Angel's" league.

More or less a soggy misfire.

"Windfall's" interlocking plots are mostly predictable and bland.

“Smith” is so thinly written, and the characters so generic, that it’s hard to feel much for this series except admiration for its cinematography.

"Standoff" isn't a terrible show, it's just an unnecessary one.

Its writers are clearly addicted to the tired conceit of giving us three jokes per script page, no matter how played-out the jokes, no matter how predictable the pratfalls.

A plodding series that really just proves life was unrelentingly hard and pretty monotonous in the not-so-wild West.

Cox and the shallow “Dirt” scripts fail to bring this woman to life.

"The Sarah Silverman Program" is full of scenes that sound funny on paper... but in execution pass by without eliciting even a small chuckle.

The jokes that spring from that laborious setup aren’t all that funny.

The direction is flat-out awful (there are many choppy shots from bizarre, if not inexplicable, angles). Much of the dialogue is groan-inducing, the acting by some of the guest actors is jaw-droppingly wooden, and I guessed who the villain was way before the halfway mark.

Sadly, although Jezebel is packed with Sherman-Palladino’s trademark snappy banter, it’s a cold, brittle misfire.

The whole enterprise is very shoddy and predictable, and I can’t imagine that anyone involved did this for anything but a paycheck.

Most of its jokes and plots feel flat and predictable and it’s hard to get invested in a comedy that relies on the fact that its only minority character, a doctor of Indian descent, can’t get certain American slang terms right. Har har.

Leave it to Fox to take something the Brits did pretty well and muck it up.

There are a few funny moments, I guess, but the show is certainly nothing to plan your evening around.

But it's not just that the Gossip Girl cast lacks chemistry. Among these characters and threaded through these predictable, thin stories, there's precious little of anything that approaches sweetness, kindness, altruism or heart.

Everything about this time-traveling drama seems rote and stale. The show is a pallid, uninspired execution of ideas we've seen done better elsewhere.

As played by Johnson, this 21st Century Flash is likable enough, and the plot occasionally achieves a tick-tock level of efficiency, but there’s little else to recommend this series.

Bochco has made the most cutting-edge drama--of 1994. These thinly drawn characters aren't compelling, and the entire production feels dated and stagey.

Most “celebreality” shows are probably staged to some degree, but Cho’s show seems more contrived than most.

Ed Begley Jr shows a light touch as the ex-couple’s counselor, and not every joke on Gary Unmarried falls flat. But this show hinges on one’s ability to ignore its misogyny and on the limited appeal of Mohr.

This Prisoner remake contains some striking visuals and intermittently effective performances, especially from the typically magnetic McKellan, but it’s also frequently too choppy and elliptical to build up much suspense or dramatic impact.

The animation is rudimentary and the jokes aren’t much better.

The attempt to shoehorn the Shat into the strained story of a father and an adult son, Henry, getting to know each other for the first time seems false. And when there are glimmers that it might work, Shatner's character, Ed, is visited by his grating other son, Vince, and his even more grating wife, Bonnie. They're awful.

The show treats this central culture clash with a great deal of tentativeness, a quality that never makes for good comedy, yet despite its scaredy-cat caution, Outsourced still manages to be vaguely insulting and condescending.

Good comedies take a lot of work, but that strain shouldn't show up on the screen. It pains me to say that, despite all the obvious effort, I can't see how Running Wilde could get significantly better.

The tacked-on attempt to give the show some heart ("See, they're just crazy, mixed-up regular folks with good intentions!") was so disappointingly cynical and contrived. It was a transparent attempt to give depth to something that had so vociferously lacked it.

Perfect Couples is so screechy, predictable and lame that I kind of despised these characters within minutes of being introduced to them.

Chelsea doesn't do anything to make the TV version of Chelsea interesting, likable or winning.

It's good at being tedious.

There is awkwardness and idiocy on display in Life's Too Short, which stars actor Warwick Davis as a hopefully inaccurate version of himself, but almost none of it is funny, much of it is off-putting and all of it is pointless.

At least Lewis appeared to be having fun, which can't be said of anyone else in this rather grim production.

[The actors] are cramped by obvious, unsubtle writing and a show that doesn't seem to have much of an idea of where to take these sardonic characters.

A tedious array of shrieky moments, dumb stereotypes and unearned sentiment.

This is a case of a show just not working on both a structural and emotional level.

Feisty is one thing, rude is another. But all of that is of a piece with the show's generally lazy approach to storytelling: A couple of supporting characters are cardboard villains, and a subplot about a minor's surgical procedure doesn't make a ton of sense if you know the first thing about medical privacy laws.

Given that this show was created by "Scream" writer Kevin Williamson, there's the usual showy deconstruction of scary-story cliches, but that deconstruction just draws attention to how hollow this project is. ... Ultimately, my dislike for The Following has less to do with its gore factor than with its essential laziness, silliness and pretentiousness.

It's the sloppy approach to context and the tabloid-y aspects of Vice that are ultimately harder to take than the self-aggrandizing bro-ness of it all.

As remakes go, Crusoe is at least a couple of cuts above NBC's brainless "Knight Rider," but let's face it, the bar couldn't be set any lower.

I expected more sparky wordplay from a Williamson show, but the Vampire Diaries pilot is pretty limp and lifeless in that department. The attractive cast is... attractive. Let's be kind and say that they are not all blessed with the same level of competence in the acting department.

Grammer's so much better than the unfunny show that has been built around him.

The main thing you've got to remember is, the scripts for this show have to beat the audience over the head with exposition.

The cop's cockiness soon becomes tedious, then grating, then actively annoying (and guess what? He's a former Chicago detective, a la the cop on "The Gates." Stop maligning our police force, TV!). The rest of the show is bland and the banter-y dialogue is not as amusing as the show thinks it is.

Not much about this show rang true to me, except the moment when the league commissioner begged players to get their fees in on time.

"Twenty Good Years" is based on the premise these two comedy warhorses can make just about anything work, but this tired vehicle proves too much -- or rather, too little -- for even them.

The show is a particularly awkward attempt at a "dramedy": It tries to make you care about Dennis' quest to become a news anchor and meet the right guy, yet it makes light of the fact that Dennis is shrill, superficial and a bit promiscuous.

Pretty pointless.

Even if the jokes on this show weren’t tired and mean-spirited, it would be hard to care about any comedy that hates its own lead characters so much.

Both shows ["Happy Hour" and "'Til Death"] bill themselves as comedies, but really, it's hard to find two less funny half hours on the network schedule.

"Arrested Development" this ain't.

A clichéd, cloying show.

I wouldn’t rush to clear space on the old DVR for this muddled marital mess.

If you're after a compelling drama set amid the wild beauty of Africa, don't bother with the new CW show Life Is Wild. You're better off with "Meerkat Manor" or a well-made nature documentary.

It all seems painfully staged and contrived.

NBC's new Jimmy Smits vehicle is called Outlaw. I guess the title 'Contrived, Irritating Star Vehicle' just wasn't as catchy.

Everything about Magic City shows a lack of depth, and the pacing is almost glacial.

When The Newsroom isn't obvious and self-congratulatory, it's manipulative and shrieky.

The women here are shrewish, the vibe is both manic and tired, and overall, the decent cast (which includes the wonderful Anthony Anderson) is given nothing funny to do.

CBS programs generally display a level of basic competence that this "comedy" falls woefully short of.

This just doesn't work on any level and creates very little suspense, even in life-or-death situations.

I feel sorry for Shannon, who nicely underplays her role, but she’s trapped in show that does not work, and, with Blair as her co-star, will never work.

Pinkett Smith is an engaging actress, but even her formidable energy can't liven up this sodden drama.

Mercy manages to stumble across a few not-awful moments here and there, but the bad moments are so cringe-inducing that the show ought to come with a warning label telling consumers this derivative melodrama is potentially toxic.

Nothing about the slipshod writing or frenetic direction makes these people compelling, and some of them come across as downright cartoonish.

You could watch the first few episodes of “Heroes,” or you could repeatedly hit yourself on the head with a brick. The effect is surprisingly similar.

“Big Love” is a waste of time, and an excruciating waste of these actors’ talents.

A grating comedy.

This pretentious mishmash is a paint-by-numbers Irish-American "Sopranos" ripoff.

What do women want? Well, they don’t want another migraine-inducing soap opera about the lives of high-strung, whiny female executives in New York. I’m pretty sure of that.

No cliché is unexplored, no supporting character is allowed to resemble an actual person.

It's just awful.

The humor is so predictable and so stale that it fails to produce any laughs.

It’s easy to see why preview DVDs weren’t distributed–the show just isn’t funny.

A program so bad that it's not only unpleasant to watch, but it makes you fear for the future of network television.

It doesn't work as a character drama and it's tiresome more often than it's freakily scary.

Women are as capable of writing a misogynist, soul-killing TV comedy as anyone else. Exhibit A: I Hate My Teenage Daughter, a shrieky nightmare.

Liz and Dick is badly paced, cheap-looking and encrusted with a tinkly, preposterous soundtrack that is designed to make viewers go insane.

Nothing could really prepare anyone for a show so wantonly grisly as this worthless, exploitative program.

What’s most mind-boggling about this show is how it manages to get every single thing wrong.

The worst unscripted outing to hit the airwaves in many a moon.

This wretched show not only features a lead character who is an unredeemable nitwit but dialogue that manages to be leaden, preposterous and pretentious all at once.

Anchorwoman isn’t much of a reality show, because most of the conflict is contrived.

Not only is Hemingway and Gellhorn wretched, it is bathed in pretentiousness and pseudo-intellectual delusions of grandeur. It's not just crap, it's expensive, painfully "artistic" crap starring a lot of actors who should have known better once they took a look at the script, which is hilariously awful.