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.