Though it is clearly based on research, with dialogue that scavenges the principals' own writing--it is never quite believable, either as history or drama.

It is not a train wreck; it's just a train--chugging along from A to B, carrying the people, delivering the freight.

The deal you make with a series like this is, if it doesn't ask too much of you, you won't ask too much of it.

As a professionally discerning adult, I could not help but notice that the characters are fairly stock, the situations familiar and, some nifty digital backgrounds notwithstanding, the production continually felt more like an elaborate game of let's pretend than it did a window into some real other world. I didn't buy a second of it.

The only experiment actually being done here is the ongoing one of determining just how long people will watch this sort of thing. That is an experiment with no end in sight.

There is a story to be made from this, about aspiration and achievement and what goes on in the gap between them, but that is not a story that television, or any other form of American mass culture, particularly likes to tell. Underemployed flirts with it but more often settles for flattering its audience, reflecting not only its hopes but also its resentments.

Neither the script nor the production is substantial enough to make the story quite stand on its own.

The pilot half aims for the exaggerated, other-worldly tone of "Arrested Development" and misses.... The second episode, by contrast, has a healthy dose of the ordinary mixed in and is actually about something: the invisibility of the working class.

A more than usually steamy "Jane Eyre," it seems to have been made especially to appeal to viewers whose week peaks with "Grey's Anatomy." ... And yet, despite these passages, the production overall comes off as a little dry and dutiful.

There are good things in it, some well-written scenes and dynamic exchanges and excellent acting... But, ultimately, it doesn't cohere or quite convince.

A production that tends to make everything look artificial, that freezes the air between the characters and keeps them distant.

While it's quite watchable if you don't expect much from it, and while even though the cast is good company... the show is not vivid or daring enough to overcome one's sense of having seen it all before.

The film goes along quite well, with the usual grabs and gotchas no less effective for being so familiar, as long as no one is talking.

Like a Hallmark card, it is a thing of prefabricated sentiment.

The episode galumphs loudly across a checkerboard of scenes -- Stark at work, Stark at home, Stark at work at home -- that achieve neither the convincing quality of detailed realism nor the dumb fun of untethered melodrama.

For all its apparent technical accuracy and some real-world name-dropping, "Justice" feels no more lifelike than "Perry Mason."

All in all, it is pretty thin and flat; there are jokes that work, and the cast is able, but not in the service of anything substantial.

Most of the actors, who admittedly don't have much to work with, seem to be visiting rather than inhabiting their parts....All in all, a trip to the zoo will serve you better.

Though it starts out with a fair bit of energy, in spite of regular paroxysms of royal lust and pique, it becomes less engaging as it goes on and grows finally rather dull.

Knight Rider is something for 12-year-old boys (and 12-year-old-boys at heart), undemanding, unsophisticated, no deeper than the thickness of a comic-book page.

What they do have in common is wintry Canadian weather, a general lack of humor without having much serious to say and the fact that they are not particularly scary.

The show that premieres Sunday night, between "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy" in the space formerly occupied by "King of the Hill," is weak--not hopeless, but given the pedigree, heavily disappointing.

It feels thin, mechanical and confused.

Apart from the Oedipal twist, it seems to be pretty much your standard "Bachelor"-style hookup show, the women all bunged up together in a fancy dormitory.

With a host of performers skilled in delivering Big Effects, the evening regularly delivered top-grade professional pop music, though it was rarely thrilling in a way that made you reconsider an act or decide to change your life.

This Prisoner is as much about Two as it is about Six and that the actor seems to be enjoying himself makes his scenes pleasant to watch even when they don't add up to much; there is a music to his readings even when the lines are obscure.

More often it is labored and belaboring, from the eccentric station-house staff--including Abraham Benrubi, wearing Willie Nelson's old pigtails, as a Chickasaw desk sergeant, and DJ Qualls as a slack-jawed Cletus of a patrol officer--to the Elvis imitators on the street and Dwight's constant promotion of Memphis as "sacred ground" to people who, after all, live there too.

Sunday night I mostly felt I was watching funny people being less funny than they are in their day jobs. What should have appeared spontaneous came off, even when it clearly was spontaneous, as worked-over, the fun seemed insisted upon.