At once more modest and more ambitious than its predecessor; more focused on detail and yet more expansive. It is also excruciatingly funny, with an emphasis on excruciating.

The domestic version... is every bit as good as the original.

In its emphasis on character over plot it reminds me of movies from the pre-Spielberg '70s, and is in so many ways what I want from television that I feel almost like phoning each of you personally to deliver the news.

What is remarkable about "Life Support" is how it avoids every pitfall of the standard issue-based TV film and, indeed, of most TV films, period.

It is big, beautiful, beautifully acted and romantic, its passions expressed with that particular British reserve that serves only to make them burn brighter.

Enlightened is to my mind the most interesting and ambitious series of the fall season.

This may be the better work [than "No Direction Home"], for its depth of feeling and its relatively more forthcoming and knowable subject.

Notwithstanding a certain stylistic chilliness and my sense of it having been pitched on the back of "Inception," it promised to be one of the year's best and most interesting new series. Having seen four episodes now, I'd say the promise has been largely kept.

By rooting Top of the Lake in the real, Campion gives her more fanciful inspirations legs, and the mystery--which is, needless to say, not merely or even mostly the mystery of a missing girl--room to breathe. I have no idea where any of it's headed. But I am going along.

The already evident lesson is that a moldy premise need not stand in the way of a good time. [22 Sept 2003, p.E1]

A continually surprising thriller that maintains an air of imminent danger through its five or so hours (in six episodes), State of Play is a grander, more romantic creation [than Prime Suspect 6].

"Rome" is smart, dirty fun.

"Surface" is steeped in Spielberg, and is better Spielberg than Spielberg has managed in quite some time.

All in all, it's a rich work, full of detail and small moments, and grounded in reality by an utterly believable supporting cast partly drawn from the school where the series was shot.

While this sort of thing has been done before -- "Curb Your Enthusiasm" on the high end of Hollywood self-referentiality, and the nasty, brutish and short-lived "Fat Actress" with Kirstie Alley on the low -- it has been done here exceedingly well.

A considerably above-average Generation Y sitcom that manages to be both sharp and sentimental, like "Seinfeld" with feeling.

It takes no time at all for the new team to establish its authority; the new "Who" feels at once traditional and fresh, and completely right.

A "heightened reality" show, one might call it, but one which makes its subject palpable and which, because it is made with care, lets you care too. It's the more artful portrait, paradoxically, that paints the truer picture.

A dark and splendid "Dr. Who" spinoff with overtones of "Men in Black" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

It's a conclusion that seemed to me both contrived and honest, if that makes any sense, and it left me disturbed, though not, as Doctor Who often has, a sobbing wreck.

Cop show, fantasy, mystery, comedy, romance, puzzle -- there are a lot of ways to approach "Life on Mars," which begins its second and final season tonight on BBC America, and they all pay off.

That the funniest straight-ahead sitcom of the American fall television season is a 2-year-old British import airing on a basic-cable network is because of a few things: a dearth of new American sitcoms, the availability of road-tested foreign product, and the ongoing expansion of the vast tracts of basic cable into the kind of programming that has traditionally defined broadcast television.

Hotel Babylon is willfully bright and sexy--like the Parker's décor, it updates a '70s sensibility--but also has a nice eye for detail, good minor characters and well-flowing dialogue.

It's a work whose immense vitality and a persuasive naturalism overcome its occasional paroxysms of style or hammered-home points.

It's smart without either condescending to or patronizing the viewer.

One of the season's best new shows.

A smart, amiable, colorful new cartoon series.

It's a little movie that feels big, without being self-consciously cinematic.

The strength of the series lies not in the whodunit elements--it isn't hard to work out who's behind it, even if it isn't immediately apparent why--but in its eye for local details and small human gestures.

Samantha Who? is as perfectly realized a comedy as the fall has to offer.

It is all very beautiful.

That the two men are in their 30s makes their perseverance more poignant--to somewhat overstate the case--and that they have no money places them in a long and honorable line of comedians who cannot put two cents together to buy a glass of seltzer.

The pilot is an especially persuasive hour of action-adventure, but subsequent lower-budget episodes preserve the esprit and suspense.

The show is consistently clever and lively, well played and directed, its corners filled with nice throwaway lines and small visual jokes.

Tyler Labine makes a most excellent wacky bearded sidekick, and Rick Gonzalez and Valarie Rae Miller round out the Scooby Gang. Auteur of slackerdom Kevin Smith ("Clerks") directed the pilot, which maintains a nice fairy tale tone even as it stresses the banality of the infernal.

The dialogue is always to the point, yet it gives even the bit players enough room to create something memorable.

There is little in the way of "action"--it is possibly the slowest, most deliberative show on television, which is one of the things that makes it so lovely and mysterious.

There are no heroes or villains here, only people working out or being carried toward their individual destinies. And in who we root for and in what we root for them to choose, we also define ourselves.

It's very good, although as sad and disturbing as the mustache implies.

The show moves fast without seeming to rush you. The timing, on the part of actors and editors alike, is excellent--both Bornheimer and Smith are good physical comedians--so that even while you can set your watch by the Next Bad Thing About to Happen, tension is created, suspense maintained.

As directed by Peter Berg, this is smart, handsome TV, a witty, measured mix of sci-fi, soap and satire that offers new twists on old tropes.

The contest consists of family members answering questions about one another to win money and prizes, which is straightforward enough and entertaining on its own. But what makes it work so well, I am surprised to say, is the Big Gimmick: the fact that the show is staged on the contestants' front lawn.

Sweet, lyrical and a little cracked, it's worth seeking out.

I'll say now, before I get down to picking its nits--it has a few, and most might be predicted from the Spielberg oeuvre--that it's a splendid production, absolutely worth watching in its 10-hour entirety.

Costello (who has subbed for David Letterman) makes a fine host--a bit reverential at times, but never as pious as, say, James Lipton can become over at the similarly configured "Inside the Actors Studio."

Despite its equivocal title, Almost the Truth beats any Python documentary yet made for comprehensiveness and depth.

It is a bit like Martin Scorsese's "After Hours," filtered through the sensibility of a Whit Stillman and sprinkled with "Flight of the Conchords"--and yet it feels new, because it is so completely itself, consistently itself, a mix of romance, adventure and stoner comedy (there is a lot of pot about) that never abandons the world the rest of us can recognize.

Project Runway is a hard act to follow. Still, if you like watching people make (sometimes) beautiful clothes from nothing in no time--the first challenge is to make a little black dress from a little black T-shirt--The Fashion Show has that too.

Even with its problems--we'll get to those presently--it's one of the best shows of the fall season.

Creator Ian Edelman keeps his characters on the right side of caricature and avoids the kind of melodramatic confrontations their relations might typically suggest.

It is a smart, affable, mostly unpredictable ensemble comedy that reminds us that in the 500-channel universe, fine things can happen in unlikely places, as long as you are clever about budget, commit to a sensible number of episodes--in this case 10--write well and cast right, and that what matters ultimately to heaven is not the eminence of the venue but the quality of the work.

It is cinematic in the sense that nothing in it looks quite real. But it works: This is not the London known as jolly and old, but the new chilly city of glass, a place of missed connections, of aliens and alienation. And the smart dialogue and warm performances--even Holmes has a discernible beating heart, or perhaps two--keep ice from forming on the production.

The current series has fresh air to breathe and new names to drop--Chin Chin, Caltech, Hillcrest, the Edison--and apparently plans to make a meal out of Hollywood. But it hits the traditional notes square on, moving fast in brief scenes and bursts of exposition, and splitting the difference between melodrama and naturalism.

It's not the greatest thing since sliced bread but rather a well-made sort of sliced bread, a thing you have had before but prepared with quality ingredients by bakers who know their business.

Terriers is a wonderfully well-conceived, well-made and well-played series about a pair of soft-boiled downmarket private detectives in over their heads in San Diego.

Outsourced seems to me the most deftly realized sitcom of the new season. It is no closer to reality than any of its Thursday night neighbors ( Ken Kwapis, of "The Office" and other good things, developed it and directed the pilot), but it has a top-flight cast, characters who show you who they are rather than telling you, smart writing, sure rhythms and a cheerful attitude.

Apart from a surfeit of split screen effects and some overbearing soundtrack selections, I have no quarrel with this series at all, and wore a lump in my throat through much of it.

The series is a better-heeled, better-paced and, within the bounds of its own Portland-ish modesty, a more ambitious extension of the occasional videos that Armisen and Portland resident Brownstein have posted online over the past few years under the name ThunderAnt.

This air of familiarity notwithstanding, the pilot is splendidly rendered; effective in the expected ways in a way that makes you forget you expected them.

Garbus, director of the Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning "The Farm: Angola, USA," fills in many of the blanks--to an impressive extent, given the obsessively guarded privacy of her subject--in a film that is both meditative and exciting, like the game it concerns, and mercilessly penetrating even as it reserves judgment on a man whose outrageousness practically demands it.

Only Julianna Margulies on "The Good Wife" is carrying a comparable load, and though Roughness is a more fanciful construction than that CBS show, with more obvious emotional victories, it feels just as honest. It worked on me as intended.

By not belaboring the point--Ryan is not crazy, there is nothing supernatural afoot--the show stays fresh, the gimmick fades. The humor is frequently scatological or sexual, but a mitigating sweetness enfolds it all.

What makes it so engaging is not that the series finds anything new to twist, but that it works so well with and within the strictures of the well-thumbed genres it combines in equal parts: spy thriller, murder mystery, backstage drama, triangular romance.

The glamour in Pan Am may indeed be manufactured--doubly manufactured, given the re-created places and planes--but it's not empty: The show says, yes, this is as good as it looks, and it looks very good

The dialogue has a nice snap, the jokes come from just to the left of where you expect them to, and the players are all first-rate.

The show can be, in odd passing moments, unexpectedly, almost nervily touching.

The Fades works.

It works because it's less about who we were then--it's a fantasy of who we were then, really--than about who we are now.

The artfully composed images are both crystal clear and cinematically creamy.

Well made and never boring--the director is Julian Jarrold ("Becoming Jane")--Appropriate Adult is a first-class example of what British filmmakers do well when they are not trying to look like American filmmakers.

It is a suitably complicated and pictorially engaging work of period suburban mystery, with a large cast of characters

[The taped linking] bits feel a little forced compared to the sketches, which are consistently smart and smartly acted and flow easily from ordinary premises to weird conclusions.

Even if you don't particularly feel for Selina--you don't root for her, particularly, or against her--there is continual pleasure in watching the actress make her go.

Every performance here is good--the young actors are remarkable--and though the script sometimes goes just where you would expect it to, the characters seem authentically unpredictable.

[Political Animals is] a high-class, relatively naturalistic, behind-closed-doors soap opera that plays in fairly obvious yet also fairly affecting ways with the space between public face and private pain and is made highly watchable by an excellent cast that finds the human among the hokum.

As before there is a nice balance between social drama and personal business, the tragic and the comic, exaggeration and authenticity.

I like this a lot.

This year, by contrast [to last year], the drama flows more naturally; it cuts closer to home, and nearer the bone, allowing Smith and McGovern, particularly, deeper material than has previously been their portion

Though it has the pokey pace and flat affect of his other films--for Burns, history is elegy--it is also one of his best works: more tightly focused than usual in time and place, with a clear shape, dramatic arcs and a conclusion that is at once cautionary and moving, topical and timeless.

More a sketch than a thorough retelling--though still recommended as such--and as balanced as you can be about the scandal given the facts, the film begins at the end, or just before it, with the remarkable, once much-bootlegged footage of Nixon preparing to resign.

A smart and highly suspenseful miniseries.

In the wonderful Family Tree, hangdog Chris O'Dowd, finding his life stalled after losing a girlfriend and a job in short order, goes in search of his roots and relatives.

Once you get past the relatively stiff opening episode and everyone relaxes and starts having fun, "Hustle" is an undemanding good time that manages to rack your nerves even when you know better.

"Blade: The Series" is pretty good, really, as these things go.

You can either let this annoy you, or you can try to work out the meaning, or you can just enjoy the flow in a noncommittal way that does not preclude your being stimulated, shocked or held in suspense--like a fun-house ride. I am of the third disposition, and have also been of the first.

It benefits immensely from the presence of Braugher, at long last in a role that, like that of Det. Frank Pembleton on "Homicide: Life on the Street," suits his particular intensity.

It's perhaps appropriate to the subject matter that the show's main appeal is sensual rather than cerebral, grounded in a host of superb performances.

It is so well-assembled and well-played that its contrivances and clichés play like something reasonably close to life.

Without bringing anything radically new to the annals of sitcomedy, Louis-Dreyfus makes Christine feel fresh and real.

There is something satisfying about watching difficult things performed well, especially when the point is to make it look easy, and especially when the performer is a person who might reasonably be expected to fail.

The show is exceptionally well made from top to bottom and pulls you in and pulls you along, owing not least to a host of terrific performances.

I was often moved by the dedication and heart on display.

The personal circus, while given much play, remains secondary to the cooking contest. And as usual, the crop of contestants is claimed to be the most talented yet, and they do seem well-credentialed (James Beard nominees, Michelin-star-winner), competitive and more than usually tattooed.

If anything is liable to make "Smith" above the well-made caper show it already is, it's what might be done with the relationship between Liotta and Madsen.

It's funny, but it doesn't go for big laughs so much as a mood of whimsical parody.

Without making any great claims for the show's depth, I do sense a desire behind the sensation and soap to investigate something significant, if deceptively simple: how life changes in a moment.

"Robin Hood" boasts most of the usual problems with low-budget epics.... But the show has wit and energy.

Whether all, or indeed any, of the subjects here are actually "iconoclasts" is debatable -- "independent" is more like it -- but the title is meant to signal that this is something hipper and smarter and less conventionally angled than a Barbara Walters special and, at least on the basis of the two episodes available for review, it is.

With a little tweaking, the series just as easily could be set in some large corporation, or on a college campus, and engage most of the same interpersonal issues — what women do for men and for one another.

You could resist it, really, as you should be able to resist all television, unless you have been completely assimilated into the matrix. But you'd be missing some sparky fun. Submit.

The plots are a little obvious--you can usually stay a jump or two ahead of the revelations--but the actors keep you well distracted.

The new series, to judge by the two opening hours, is better balanced and plays more to the players' strengths.

It's all elevated by looking really beautiful (though not -- and this is the crucial difference -- stylish). The pictures fill in the blanks, and even as Skins strains credibility, it achieves moments of poetry.

What makes the show worth watching are some old-fashioned character relationships; no single performance tears up the place, but together they make something interesting.

It is loud and manipulative and ugly to behold, but it isn't dull.

Gunn is best when showing us what he knows, reacting critically to the thing in front of him rather than speaking lines meant to jog the narrative or jack up the drama.

I'm not wholly convinced by the American Life on Mars.

The closer you are to living with an addict or an addiction, the more essential you'll find this viewing, obviously, but the less personally involved will still find much of scientific and human interest.

The show's attitudinal mix of the jaded and amazed, the shocked and amused, is supported by the production itself.

The production itself is sunny and conducive to a good mood. Coughlan wears well, as does Jason Priestley in the role of the fiancé she puts on hold.

While it's generally entertaining, there are times when it seems too obviously invented.

Breaking Bad is as good as a show on this subject could possibly get, but the subject has its drawbacks. I like it, I admire it, but I can't say I enjoy it.

It's in that "perhaps" and "possibly" that Ashes to Ashes finds a way forward, and although it's not as good as the original, it pushes many of the same buttons and sews on a few new ones. It's quite enjoyable.

Branagh plays up the dark side of this town-in-the-country pastoral--partly by turning exposition into sometimes violent action, partly by trimming the banter--to deepen the romance. (He likes a pratfall, though.) Mostly it works.

Generation Kill tends to play as a series of discrete events. I suppose an argument might be made that this mirrors the way that the constant threat of extinction, and subject always to a sudden change in (rarely explained) orders, makes one live in the moment. I don't think that was what the producers intended, but it works well enough for watching it.

It is, basically, good-looking fun, and if I say that much of this might have been written by a 12-year-old, you must understand that I mean that as a good thing.

The Goode Family, which is nicely acted and well animated, works best when the cultural potshots give way to the more basic human needs of its characters.

To be sure, this is the sort of engineered reality in which things mostly happen because someone is there to film them, and not the other way around. But that it is only a partial, edited view of its star--she has, for one thing, a husband, artist-provocateur Al Ridenour, who is neither seen nor heard--doesn't mean that real thoughts and feelings don't come through. It's best when they do.

While supercool science may be the hook, the real draw of Eleventh Hour is Sewell.

There are moments that require you not to think too hard, and some of the black humor doesn't overcome its fundamental nastiness. But on the whole, it's a superior package, intelligently constructed and handsomely executed.

Demanding absolute sense or ironclad consistency from a show like this is like wanting a butterfly to fly a straighter line, not only pointless but somehow unnatural.

The show fails only when it wants to make you feel something warm about their mission, rather than just letting you enjoy the icy suspense and snappy dialogue.

The cast is excellent, and there's potential here, even though tonight's opening episode, as pilots will, tries a little too hard.

Clearly flung at the Spike's male demo–-"Get More Action" is the network tagline, which implies a viewership not getting as much as it would like--it has a slightly sour edge that some will just read as The Way Things Are.

It is, like much British comedy, unabashedly vulgar where its American cousins are relatively coy, an attitude that feels alternately trying and refreshingly healthy. You will recall that the Puritans brought their neuroses here. The kids, or rather the young adults playing the kids, are all very good.

There are people in this world who find flatulence mightily entertaining, and they should be happy here.

There are well-written and well-mounted scenes and some good performances. It is not without suspense. But even at four hours, House of Saddam feels incomplete and scattered--a lessened, not a heightened reality.

All in all, this is a dynamic, addictive rendition of a complicated novel that catches the spirit of Dickens' "roaring streets" where "the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar."

I recommend the series, though Sunday's opening film, "Sidetracked," does present a bit of a stumbling block.

Like everything else in the world, the show is faster, louder and busier, which would not necessarily seem to be the best environment for learning.

Important Things is inconsistent--the sketches are on the whole less funny than the stand-up, but they have their moments, and the show is on the whole worthwhile.

It was, on the whole, a very good show that emphasized performances.

Roth is a fine actor and a welcome presence on the small screen, and he manages to integrate a catalog of amazing facts into a character. But the show will be better for giving him more to do than bust liars, then explain how he did it.

The personal business is interesting enough, if here and there inexplicable--like life, I hear you sigh--and does help make sense of why the characters act so needy around the office. But what Southland does best is to portray police work as a job--boring, trying, exciting by turns.

It has a kind of sunny charm, a premise fit for a novel, and is built upon a pair of strong female leads, a rare enough thing in sitcoms. Poehler and Jones have a nice, contrapuntal rhythm. I stamp this show: approved.

Given that Spartacus does not stumble in what it sets out to do, one's objections to the show, if objections one has, will be moral, or simple matters of taste, to the extent that those two concerns can actually be separated.

Hosted by plus-size supermodel Emme, More to Love adds an extra layer of pathos to the genre's usual Harlequin hearts and flowers, its candlelit rooms, poolside chats and painfully drawn out ritual eliminations.

In most other respects, it is a standard three-camera sitcom, in which two bickering siblings in their mid-30s (Mitchell and Strahan) find themselves back living with their parents (Weathers and Pounder). Which is not to call it run-of-the-mill--it has some charm and personality and keeps its focus unusually tight on the four principals.

Like "Hank," The Middle is no Next New Thing; indeed, both argue for the opposite, the pleasures of the known, of craft and of watching people who know what they're doing do it.

New beginnings can be difficult; there are problems here, though they are not irremediable. By and large the show improves on its pilot.

Like the women in it, the show is solid and professional and holds together well.

I rather enjoyed the pilot. Perhaps it's a Canadian thing, but like "Flashpoint," Rookie Blue doesn't oversell itself. It is modest and plain in a way that makes even its less likely moments feel credible enough.

Things get pretty wacky by the end--actually, they get wacky well before the end--but however unlikely, the proceedings are kept watchable by a cast that notably includes Ian McShane, Donald Sutherland, Rufus Sewell, and Eddie Redmayne.

Viewers sad about the end of "Happy Town" and looking for another creepy municipal drama filmed in Canada may find this a port in the storm, though it is more cheaply appointed and less spectacularly cast. Still, it would be pointless to attack the show for not achieving things that are beyond its ambitions.

Its pleasures are simple and familiar. There is the usual mix of boastful losers and shy winners, of tiresome cutting remarks and delightful delighted approval.

He is kind of irritating.... but Passmore largely pulls it off, in part by making the character a bit daffy; he just can't help himself. And the producers surround him with jerks and dweebs and men less handsome or clever than himself to ensure that he's the person with whom we identify and whose opinions we share; the plot conveniently supports his genius.

Fine character actors abound, playing people on the rural edges, but it's the main character and Olyphant's performance that lift the sometimes labored plot lines and carry them over the finish line.

Just what they'll do with all this newfound mojo is hard to say, so packed is the pilot with varying sorts of business and attitudes, the soundtrack obligingly swinging from comic-bright to melancholy-minor, to action-bold. Developments late in the episode suggest that No Ordinary Family will look a lot more like "Heroes" than it will, say, "The Adventures of Superman," a course we have seen to be fraught with danger.

This is not one of those emotional journeys in which the teller comes finally to forgive herself and the world and we get out our handkerchiefs. Craziness is Fisher's baseline--Wishful Drinking begins and ends before the image of a padded cell--and clarity the thing she buys with comedy. Life will kill you, she seems to say: You might as well laugh.

It's a busy opening, including brief but satisfying guest appearances by Jorge "Hurley" Garcia and an elephant. The show is well played down to the smallest parts.

It is something shy of electrifying and not always convincing, but it pulls you right along and offers too many good moments and fine performances not to recommend it.

Both as twisty mystery and armchair vacation, it's a good way to pass a summer night.

The premiere is nonetheless diverting, if not immediately impressive, and there are nice rhythms and sharp asides and some other things to be said in its favor: It's a show about the working class - or perhaps better put, the barely surviving entrepreneurial class - that is actually about work.

The cartoon show is the least of his series, but it is generally amusing and pretty to watch, and I like the way it rambles.

The pilot works a little hard--not one but two characters get catchphrases, which happily evaporate by the second episode--but plenty of good things come out in the effort, and better things seem likely to come.

Enlightening without feeling quite essential, the sort of PBS package that seems at times designed to warm the hearts and loosen the purse strings of viewers of a certain age and income.

After the introductions were out of the way and Segal got out his banjo and cigar--not a euphemism, and contractually guaranteed, perhaps--I grew relaxed enough to recognize that, yes, these people are professionals, and they do know their stuff.

It doesn't matter, finally, what becomes of them, we watch less in suspense than in wonder: wonder at the cheek and gall of these characters; wondering how true any of it is; and wondering, most profitably, at the performances, the least of which are good and the best of which are good fun.

While the narrative never quite coheres into a compelling whole, there are enough independently arresting, unexpectedly moving moments to carry you through, hopping from one to the next like stones in a river, on the way to a strenuously tidy conclusion.

It is nothing new, but it is well assembled and expertly played.

If nothing here screams New Dylan or Next Gaga, or bids in any way to rival the best of "Runway" or "Chef," the craft-under-pressure and problem-solving elements work as before. It's amazing what people can do in a day.

[Jason Isaacs] is not the only reason to recommend it, but it is by itself sufficient; indeed, it overwhelms any small arguments in its disfavor.

[USA Network's] shows are for the most part solidly constructed, but where holes exist or the structure is creaky, they are shored up by the charm of their always well-cast players. Two new series bowing this week and next exemplify the house style; both are impressive out of the gate.

There's much here to suggest that, if everyone relaxes a little, good things will come.

Pretty Little Liars managed to find an organic groove, and there's reason to think this close cousin can also find its feet and walk.

I've watched the pilot possibly too many times not to notice how the parts have been glued together and the jokes teed up, but the performances are good.

Free Agents has its moments and fine performances--and also make one wonder about the long run.

Eventually the mood relaxes, even as the slapstick amps up, and what may prove to be a charming comedy begins to emerge.

The show is aspirational and at times genuinely exciting.

Well-crafted and a little--sometimes more than a little--unpleasant.

Made with ingenuity and verve, it substitutes the half-glimpsed and suggestive for the in-your-face and explicit, and concentrates more on the buildup than the payoff, the fear more than the fright.

While the broad strokes tend to remind you that you're watching a fiction, the finer details are well done - the bits and pieces are satisfying, even as you note the rivets and seams that join them.

The Norwegians are the foreigners here, and Norway the foreign land. But that remoteness is part of the show's appeal.

If the characters are not particularly original, neither do they come off as artificial. The dialogue is 75% banter, but it is crisp and tart, and the actors make even the ripostes you can predict sound spontaneous.

Even the most concocted bits play out in a relaxed way, as when a drummer lay back behind the beat, putting new life into an old tune, making the corn convincing, the familiar unpredictable.

It's not a perfect show, but to judge by its pilot, it has good bones and excellent prospects, with a cast that knows just how much fun it can have before it seems as if it is just having fun.

As redeveloped by Cynthia Cidre (the 2007 CBS prime-time soap "Cane"), it is very much its [the original "Dallas"] heir, in spirit and execution.

It's a sweet summer treat.

Copper has come to entertain, not to educate, and it discharges that duty well.

It is smartly written and well played.... This series is also going to be very much a matter of taste.

As schematic and derivative as it is, as invested in piling on the feel-good moments past the point even of suspended disbelief, there is something quite likable about Made in Jersey.

In a world without cable dramas, Chicago Fire would be considered television at its more compelling and realistic. As it is, it walks the line between shameless entertainment--hot guys, hot girls, the fires within, the fires without--and intelligent storytelling.

It is, for all its two and a half hours, a streamlined retelling, organized more around energy and atmosphere than facts and figures.

As these things go, The Job is rather mild-mannered and amiable--everyone is on their best behavior, because there is no advantage in being nasty.

The situations are stock--John Hughes wrote this playbook pretty thoroughly--and the dialogue does not exactly crackle. But it is all well-staged and believably played and at times it becomes quite lyrical and, even, moving.

Jefferies' comedy is by turn smart, obvious, thoughtful and irritating, and quite as much may be said of his series--though his stage demeanor (loud, brash and in control) is softened considerably here by dint of his being a character living among other characters.

After a relatively overstated first episode (relative to what follows, that is, not to cartoons as a whole), it settles down into a gentler, more delicate, behind-the-beat groove.

Director Coky Giedroyc leaves enough dramatic headroom that when forces draw together toward the end, with one last frontier to cross, he can deliver what feels like pulp-fiction thrills without getting loud or fancy.

What Vice offers is not deep or thorough, but it is not without value. The news comes in pieces now; to get the full picture, you have to assemble it yourself.

That he is a difficult character is not lost on Maron, or the collective superego that runs his show. Other characters--the supporting performances are shaded and excellent throughout and help take the edges off--find him difficult as well; they stand in for the audience, criticizing him on its behalf.

There are some hectoring musical passages and the narration, delivered by Tom Selleck, foregrounding the folksy creak in his voice, can run to the precious and dramatically over-personified.... It is gorgeous clean through.

Nevertheless, this is a kind of American classic that goes right against the grain of what cartoons are supposed to be.

It does get a little pretentious at times, especially during the opening and closing narrations, but its pretensions are very much comic-book pretensions, and therefore allowable in what is, fundamentally, a comic book.

As with most things Wolf, it is superbly cast, almost too well... But every small role is well cast too -- the judges, the defendants, the policemen. They help create a lively world that's more believable than it sometimes deserves to be, and it is almost always engaging.

It's an amiable show whose main purpose is to give Prinze a place to be amiable in, and it does that well enough, when it isn't straining for laughs or wandering too far from the path of probability.

It's a comic book, basically, a B-movie, a pulp fiction, and low enough in the cultural reckoning of things to set its own rules with impunity.... Part of the pleasure of the series is that particular pleasure of watching a super-heroic character who can't fail.

It's too schematic by half, the banter rarely ascends to the level and wit, and it contains barely a believable moment... but it is not without a certain energy and cast-based charm.

Perfectly fine and nothing special.

The show's shifts in tone can seem ungainly; the comedy, of which there is more than usual in such shows, sometimes rubs uncomfortably against the premise.... Yet the show is best when it's funniest.

This is news that never quite rises to the level of an event: "David Mamet Came to Television and All We Got Was a Better 'E-Ring.' "

"Casanova" only gets into trouble when it wants to mean something, and the more pointedly emotional moments seem cooked up to the point of hokum, but it's fun when it wants to be, and most of the time it just wants to be fun.

While the performances are first-rate, and the film is never less than enjoyable, it doesn't quite take off.

An ideal summer entertainment for armchair travelers.

It works best at its most intimate, as family drama, and as another variant on "The Real World," in which people who would not ordinarily live together are made to do so.

Despite such bloody activity, it's a long trudge through the desert to the Promised Land.

It's just the same joke endlessly repeated--the everyday translated into geek-speak, and the obscure and difficult treated as if it were common knowledge.... These are perilous times for sitcoms, and Lorre & Co. may want to think up another.

If the Awful Truth of the Global Meltdown is the big carrot "Jericho" dangles before you, it is no more compelling than the question of which of the available good-looking girls Ulrich is going to get close to.

It may be seen as a kinder, gentler, funnier cousin to Fox's bitter " 'Til Death."

While much of it is silly, corny or clichéd and relies more on easy effects — the power ballad, the overwrought sex scene — than on the subtle explorations of people and place that the pilot seems to promise, the series is, on the whole, highly digestible summer fun.

It's funny in its own way, smarter than most TV comedies and has a terrific cast -- all of which makes me wonder why I'm not more moved by it.

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.

Old-chestnut premise notwithstanding, the show wants to be modern, and the humor occasionally pushes further than one might expect from a family comedy.

All their best scenes are with one another and have less to do with whatever case they're contesting than with their shared personal history--the characters are old friends, maybe lovers--and teasingly suggested future. The crimes, by contrast, are not particularly compelling, even when they are sensational, and feel invented merely to let the stars talk.

It isn't until the glimmer of a plot finally emerges, after Todd stumbles into a Middle Eastern market with a can of Thunder Muscle, eliciting sudden mysterious interest--that the series inches past mere mockery to the promise of more muscular misadventure.

Many of those gags are mechanical and flat, although they are delivered as though they were not. But when the leads are focused on each other, size no longer matters and the show flickers to life.

Their [Gethard and Parnell] interplay, once things get moving, is appealing, if not quite compelling, but what sold me on the pilot was the moment when 14-year-old Dylan Blue, as Gethard's beyond-the-law kid brother, revealed his dark side, and his gun; I was a little frightened.