The premiere winds up misfiring more often than it connects with various jabs, hooks, sucker punches and haymakers, too often going in for outlandish spoof at the expense of cleverness and irony.

There's something a little bit annoying at the core of this reality travelogue that surrounds the means by which the ends are achieved.

You have to suspend an awful lot of disbelief to buy into this premise, and even at that the protagonists aren't nearly compelling enough to care a lot about.

So it turns out that being cowboys isn't so romantic after all. It's also mighty slow-moving from an entertainment standpoint.

Unfortunately, this flick is far more interested in hot bods than an arresting story.

It isn't that "Death" is terrible. It's just too broad to be taken seriously.

You've got to figure that it doesn't bode well for Knight Rider given the fact its human stars--which also include Sydney Tamilia Poitier, Paul Campbell, Bruce Davison and Yancy Arias--are eclipsed by computerized graphics and an emotionless hunk of sleek metal.

Pretentious and far too taken with its own sense of menace, the show casts every line of dialogue as a pronouncement, every action as an uppercut to the chops.

After about an hour of jumbled storytelling and bizarre juxtapositions between the 13th century Latin Kingdom and 21st century New York, the prediction is you'll be less intrigued by the legend of the medieval Knights Templar than you will the prospect of catching up on your reading.

This new ABC Family effort from Brenda Hampton (“7th Heaven”) works feverishly to make an educational institution look like the equivalent of a Nevada brothel but succeeds mostly in transforming high school to high camp. Were these stereotypes any more simplistic, they’d need to come with their own parental warning label.

"Painkiller Jane" has been reincarnated as a far lamer show than it was on first view more than a year ago.

It's an artificial conceit for a superficial show.

Pretty much everything gets tossed against the wall and precious little of it sticks, or even actually makes it as far as the wall.

It's so consumed with its of-the-moment zeitgeist embodiment that it forgets to give its characters any depth beyond their reshaped noses.

Fear Is Real is the dripping-with-irony title of a CW-staged unscripted venture that scarcely could be more fake, a collection of preposterous snapshots of 13 young people trying their best to scream rather than laugh.

What this show does prove is that you can be racy and still somehow tediously tame.

The visual effects from coordinator Laird McMurray and his team in the wake of the missile strike are solid enough, though it's never explained why some people get sucked out of the hole and others don't and why, after the plane levels off, the sucking pretty much stops even as the movie itself continues to suck.

[It] panders in a fashion that's akin to a neon sign flashing, "Yoo hoo! Young demographics! Over here!"

Shallow as a birdbath, the program would appear to exist less as a true philanthropic exercise than yet another self-aggrandizing vehicle in Oprah's divine quest to become synonymous with all that is virtuous and good on Earth.

What few laughs were once there [in the orginal pilot] have now been effectively removed.

[It] implodes on pretty much every level.

Seacrest and his cohorts do everything they can to ratchet up the artificial tension and drama, following in the footsteps of so many primetime abominations that have preceded Momma's. Here's the good news: Come fall 2009, 10 o'clock shows like this will be obsolete on NBC, replaced by five nights a week of "A Man Named Jay" (or whatever they choose to call it).

It feels far closer to genre self-parody than it does the genuine article: wildly overproduced and characteristically overbearing, with a concept that plays as utterly insipid.