It's an uneven show that lacks the finely crafted eccentricity of a "Northern Exposure" and "Twin Peaks" or "Picket Fences" (other strange-small-town shows featuring police officers), but when I say "uneven," I do mean that sometimes it's good.

It's a premise that seems more appropriate to a mid-'90s theatrical romantic comedy -- something with Sandra Bullock or Meg Ryan -- than to a TV series, and indeed, given how much transpires in the pilot, you could bang an extra hour of complications and resolutions onto the end and have a spiffy little chick flick.

New York also offers the gift of its locations, which are used abundantly and give the show a sense of reality its script does not always earn. (The actors take up the rest of the slack.)

Painless at worst, and mostly better than that.

From where I sit, it is something of a mixed bag, but it works more than it doesn't, and an impressive, semi-big-name cast helps keep it upright and lends the project an air of prestige--especially in the context of its modest little network.

A long ride to nowhere but with some nice scenery and exciting turns along the way.

State of Mind is the weaker (and the more strenuous and sour) of the two [new shows on Lifetime], and all the more disappointing for the presence of the reliably interesting Taylor.

"The State Within"... is something less than perfect, but if you have a taste for high-level skulduggery and do not mind being totally confused much of the time, it's an enjoyable enough ride — fun, sometimes exciting, basically intelligent, occasionally preposterous.

Notwithstanding the novelty of the setting, the nice Latin music and good individual work by the cast--Walker is especially notable in a role made to notice--Smits is the engine that drives the ship; he gives Cane at least an illusion of speed and substance and soul.

Whether or not they add up to much, the scenes play well, and there are enough heavy-breathing soap-operatics, random acts of violence and unanswered questions to keep one idly watching.

Lucas could spend the rest of his life filling that hiatus with adventures whose outcomes are basically irrelevant to the larger story he has already finished telling. Many battles make up a war, after all, and each is an episode waiting to be animated. The two I've seen are bagatelles--brief and insubstantial but colorful and fluid.

I can't say the pilot struck me as especially funny, but there are good things and talented people in it, and it looks good.

It has an appealing modesty that survives its bouts of aesthetic overexcitement--the occasionally lurching camera, hammering soundtrack, the sentimental pop song laid over the last couple of minutes as the principals silently end a long, hard day.

It's corny, ponderous, literary, ambitious, obvious and, at the beginning at least, as slow as molasses, but continually re-energized by Ian McShane as King Saul, or, as he's known here, King Silas Benjamin

Except in the decorative details, it is exactly the same as every other gimme-a-job reality show ever made, with the contestants all banged up in a fancy dormitory from which they disappear one by one after themed weekly challenges.

It was an encouraging start.

Their TV show, which might make the band more famous than its music, is lightweight, sometimes flat and sometimes embarrassing, with none of the deadpan brilliance of "Flight of the Conchords" or the sophisticated sitcomedy of the late “The Chris Isaak Show.”

Lacking the subtext, satire and snappy talk that made "Buffy" golden, Demons (on the evidence of its first two episodes) has little on its mind past raising spooks and smiting them, but it does a fair enough job of that.

But even at 10 hours, Carrier feels cursory and incomplete. That's not to say that at most any given moment it's uninteresting--it's quite watchable--just that it doesn't add up to as much as it should.

Everything in the pilot, written by executive producer Claudia Lonow, is a hair or three too strenuous; Billie has been knocked down to a few easy-to-grasp impulses, and almost all the other roles are filled by stereotypes--Jensen's most wastefully--in stereotypical relationships. Nevertheless, the premise is full of interesting possibilities about love and age and unconventional parenting.

The cleverest part of the show is that it makes the judges into contestants; they compete against one another for the right to invest in a business, and they haggle with the entrepreneurs over the terms of their investment.

The series is not so different from, or significantly worse--or better--than the network's other two season premieres, "Melrose Place" and "The Vampire Diaries," which also affix stock characters, played mostly by good-looking young folk, to standard plot lines sexed up with pop songs and different flavors of visual glamour. Because they do not aim particularly high, they pretty much hit what they aim at.

It's a decent but not brilliant beginning.

In spite of some talented actors, it all seems more scripted than lived, referring not the world but a world of things you've seen on TV, handled well enough to make Mercy passable, but never exceptional, television.

There's nothing here you couldn't imagine from the premise, but there's also nothing wrong with what's here: McGraw is a good foil for Grammer, and Grammer is good at what he does.

It is technically proficient--that is, the jokes consistently work, even when they don't add up to much--and its problems may not be unsolvable, if anyone even considers them problems in the first place.

If you're in the mood for some outer space, I wouldn't warn you away. Livingston and Harris work well together, and though it's too soon to know whether this will go anywhere interesting, it's also too soon to say it won't. I do wonder what's coming.

Wootton is a quick-minded, thematically consistent improviser who thoroughly knows his characters, and obviously something of a daredevil: You can get hurt doing this stuff, or arrested. But as in Baron Cohen's comedies, the cleverness of the star is too much the point.