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

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

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.

"Arrested Development" this ain't.

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.

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

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.

More or less a soggy misfire.

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

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.

The show's few interesting actors get little to do and the new characters aren't that compelling. Pass.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

"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 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.

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.

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