Sarah Jessica Parker has an in-your-face face. In her new HBO comedy series, Sex and the City, she always seems to be thrusting it forward. She's in love with the camera. Unfortunately, it's unrequited...Parker, with her scraggly hair and jutty jaw, is certainly not the worst thing about this smirky-jerky sexcom, but she usually seems so light and funny that it's dismaying to see her in bad form, looking like a walking flea market and coming across about as subtly as a tsunami. [6 June 1998, p.C01]

Navy NCIS may not be ghastly, but it's a mutation, gratuitous and clunky. We don't need another criminal investigation show and we don't need another military justice show, and this series is those two, two, two shows in one.

The characters' lives just aren't fascinating, and by reverting to a more traditional way of telling crime stories, Wolf simply reminds us how superior his other version is.

One view of the skyline against Lake Michigan is breathtaking. It's kind of a bad sign when you wish there were more scenery in a show and fewer scenes with characters and dialogue and stuff like that.

It's an imitation of something already being imitated here, there and everywhere.

Actually, the calamities and catastrophes occur with such frequency and ferocity that, yes, indeed, "Apocalypse 10.5" suffers the curse of being unintentionally funny -- even hilarious -- no matter how guilty one might feel about laughing even as hordes of extras are being turned into Kentucky Fried People.

It might sound callous to say that "Jericho" has managed to make nuclear war look boring, but there you have it.

It's nearly a certainty that someone will call Lipstick Jungle, NBC's new drama series about sensual and successful women, a "guilty pleasure," but it's really more of a guilty horror.

It's not so much a narrative as a collection of character studies, and the characters aren't particularly fascinating.

If the prospect of accompanying comedians on a comedy bus does have a certain allure, don't get too excited.

The two Samanthas are simply irritating and hyper in different ways, and don't add up to one complete, compelling kook.

The facetious drama series--not quite a comedy, not quite not one--gathers together an annoying collection of eccentrics and misfits, all of them rich and greedy, few of them worth knowing.

Although Winfrey might imagine she's doing something fresh and innovative, the trite staples of competitive reality pop up predictably.

There's not "a lot" of heart in the unhilarious Unhitched--in fact, barely any.

It's not so much an exercise in socialization as the indoctrination of children into a consumer culture.

Regardless, what made it to the screen is something that is no stranger to television--whether it's aired or wired, blogged or beamed, uploaded or downlinked--and that something, sad to say, is mediocrity, with a portion of sheer annoyance thrown in.

Just about everything in Privileged has popped up before, and what hasn't popped up before should never be permitted to pop up at all.

If Dollhouse, a pretentious and risible jumble premiering tonight on that most quixotic of national networks, were a piece of music, it would have to be some sort of funky-junky, hip-hop, rinky-tinky, ragtime madrigal.

Throughout the show, his behavior is quirky and smug in cloying and annoying ways, which seems a self-destructive miscalculation.

None of this is really funny, most of it is excruciating, and the half-hour would be entirely abominable if Craig weren't such an unruffled good sport.

Fox is plopping the series into its Sunday-night animation pit starting this weekend, with executives presumably hoping the audience won't notice that it isn't any good and will numbly sit through it.

The premiere is filled with flaws that may well be endemic to the series, one of them being that the characters behave so stupidly that one loses sympathy for them.

My Own Worst Enemy can be recommended only to people who can imagine themselves saying, "I'm in the mood for a mediocre version of a fairly good spy movie."

Swayze seems to be taking Charlie Barker seriously, and Charlie's not worth it; he's just another in TV's increasingly populous community of bellicose antiheroes, supposedly macho loners who throw away the book and operate according to their own primal codes of behavior.

It's the end of the hour, and we're still waiting for the real show to begin, too.

Trust Me shares another characteristic of those series("Nip/Tuck" and "Mad Men": dumb, numbing soullessness. It has the emotional intricacy of a Ritz cracker.

Viewers who stumble into this misbegotten "Moonlighting" imitation will likely be bored, too, but not because of too much success.

Instead of opting for the trite title, Higginbotham should have looked harder for something more novel. He could have found one suitable title right there in his own dialogue: We're thinking, of course, of "Don't Let This Happen to You."

It has the air of something two teenage pals concocted while goofing around on the Internet, but the result of that would probably be fresher and bolder than Surviving Suburbia is.

13: Fear Is Real is cruel in its premise, drably inevitable in its concept and supremely dull in execution. No one risks being scared to death, but being bored to death seems a credible threat.

Spun clumsily and greedily off "Grey's Anatomy," the new series seems shallow and smirky.

The film is overwrought and wearying, salvaged mainly by its occasional gory details and a few enjoyably hammy performances.

A clumsily obvious rip-off of the Barbara Walters sensation "The View."

Encumbered by a script that is nearly breathtaking in its imbecilic banality, The O.C. makes one long for the cold comforts of a sleazy-minded "reality" show. Fox is trying to pass off this moody, moon-faced trifle, a drama about rich young brats in Orange County, Calif., as the first series of the new fall season (in August?). But if there's any justice left in television, "O.C. will be canceled by the time the actual fall shows premiere. [5 Aug 2003, p.C01]

A largely dreary dirge.

The script by Shonda Rhimes, nimbly directed by Peter Horton (once an actor on "thirtysomething"), is nothing but a casserole made of equal parts ham and corn.

A dreary thing it is, and depressing, too.

Hanson might be enough to fill a few paragraphs in an old Reader's Digest "Most Unforgettable Character" featurette, but the thought of spending an hour with him every week is about as attractive as having (place name of your least favorite medical procedure here) with the same frequency.

"Four Kings" isn't just tediously sitcommy, it's painfully sitcrummy.

The student characters seem weak and inauthentic, and many of the actors look as though they're going through college for the third or fourth time.

The heroine, unlikely in every detail including her name, Temperance Brennan, goes about reassembling corpses and then divining how they got to be that way. It's precise, tedious work and so is watching this show.

Bluntly put, neither the writers nor the actors are good enough at what they're trying to do to justify trying to do it. They'd all be better off making "10 Items" a traditional scripted show, because then it would stand a better chance of making sense.

If you're looking for the deep emotional truths that the creators of ABC's would-be heart-tugger imagine they're after, well, pro wrestling might be a good choice.

It's lame and it's limp, and as deployed for "Six Degrees," the conceit would seem to owe quite a bit to the movie "Crash," among such other more antique inspirations as "The Bridge of San Luis Rey."

What's potentially scary about "Twenty Four Seven" is that the empty, vacuous lives onscreen are apparently supposed to come across as glamorous and enviable.

One of those slack, campy throwbacks that really ought to be thrown out, Cane, premiering on CBS tonight at 10, tries to bring grand-opera soap opera back to prime time and ignominiously fails.

The premise is weak and leaky, the star is dull and dreary, and the only trip Journeyman ought to take is right back to the shop for repairs--or off to the dump for a decent burial.

Russo tries to pick up the gaping chasm of slack and get a little energy going, but she just looks embarrassed to be yelling at a car, arguing with a car, flirting with a car, whatever.

Among the many irritating things about today's Exhibit A--Breakthrough With Tony Robbins, yet more trash television from NBC--is that it's another daytime-caliber show that somehow crashed the prime-time schedule.

At first glance, Alias appears to be unadulterated garbage. But then you start noticing all the adulterations...Nothing is as it seems except for the fact that this seems like a lousy show and it is one. [29 Sept 2001, p.C01]

"Heist" seems derivative of an imitation of a copy of a clone -- so plastic-coated and phony that it's hard to tell what it's ripping off.

The characters aren't dimensional, or very involving, and Freddie has a drab sort of haplessness that makes him seem at best a chump, at worst a chimp.

Pitifully awful.

Amounts to a character study of a character not worth studying.

It's hard to imagine that viewers will be dying to learn which graduate kicks the bucket on "Reunion," mainly because none of them gives the appearance of being, or ever having been, alive.

This sitcom isn't wacky in an amusing way. It's wacky in a way that makes you want to see it whacked.

A preposterous and pretentious drama series.... Fortunately, there is a way out: your channel-changing remote, wondrous transport to that blessed refuge known as Anywhere Else.

"Stephen King's Desperation" is showing on ABC tonight, and Stephen King's desperation is showing, too, even more than it did in "Kingdom Hospital."

Except for a few suspenseful sequences in which women and, occasionally, sympathetic parties try to escape the clutches of the slave traders, the miniseries is muddled, confused and diffuse.

Even though the life of the Polish pope... obviously is loaded with dramatic potential, the film seems listlessly uninterested in exploring it.

An appalling amalgam of humiliating ridicule, primitive humor and heartbreaking pathos, "American Inventor" flies in on wings of sap.

"The Class" has very little. Considerably worse than being classless, however, is being laughless, at least if you happen to be a sitcom, and "The Class" does, albeit one that's about as rib-tickling as a migraine.

No one in the cast is likely to be your new favorite actor.

Muddled and befuddled from the outset, "Drive" represents a new kind of automotive hybrid -- a scripted treasure hunt designed to look like a reality show, well-stocked with the worst elements of both. It's basically "The Un-Amazing Race."

It's hard to imagine a civilized audience of any significant size wanting to sit through these trumped-up conflicts and lazy-daisy crises week after week.

Dreadful... unwatchable... There's nothing unlikable about the rest of the cast [other than Arquette], but their attempts at farce make you just want to get away from them.

A halfhearted, feebleminded attempt at a situation comedy about that eternal and ever-fascinating struggle, the battle of the sexes. The creators of ABC's "Men in Trees," though, do seemingly everything they can think of to quash that fascination and declare the battle null and dull.

The show is as commercial and mechanical as an entry-level Mercedes, but not as emotionally involving.

Almost anything sounds preferable to NBC's "Thank God You're Here."

Howie Do It not only drags contestants, and viewers, through gratuitous mud and muck but it also is haunted by the aura of plagiarism; the set-up of one sequence is highly reminiscent of a bit that David Letterman has done on his late-night talk show.

The film goes beyond mere mediocrity to a gratuitous, mean-spirited ugliness that makes watching it not a campy hoot but a near-sickening ordeal.

One of the strangest things about these MacFarlane shows are the mean-spirited "cultural references," all of them shoehorned in as asides and rarely having anything to do with the plot or characters.

CW's version details the dull, dull doings of the world's clammiest vamps, who may flash fangs and skulk around in dark cemeteries (ever see a bright one?) but who come up fatally flat in terms of mayhem and menace.

Friends comes across like a 30-minute commercial for Dockers or Ikea or light beer, except it's smuttier. One character says he dreamed he had a telephone for a penis and when it rang, "it turns out it's my mother." And this is in the first five minutes...Another ghastly creation from professional panderers Marta Kauffman and David Crane, the witless duo who do "Dream On" for HBO, Friends is more a scripted talk show than a sitcom. You keep waiting for Sally Jessy or some other cluck to interrupt the jabbering. The show is so bad that Sally Jessy would actually come as a relief. [22 Sept 1994, p.D1]

The problem is not just that it's crude and gross, but that its crudeness and grossness are so pathetically forced and contrived.

I cannot recall a series in which a greater number of characters seemed so desperately detestable -- a series with a larger population of loathsome dolts. There ought to be a worse punishment than cancellation for a show that tries this hard to be offensive and, even at that crass task, manages to fail.

Most of the shows now on network television, whether repugnant or tolerable or actually worthwhile, are competently and professionally directed, edited and photographed, but "Head Cases" is a mess even as a piece of storytelling.

The miniseries is about as enjoyable as toenail fungus or that sickening commercial for its cure.

You might think that, considering the technical progress made in the past five decades, at least the special effects in the new version would be good. Oh you would be so wrong.

Sheer, excruciating pain.... "Happy Hour" stands a good chance of being named Worst New Show, or at least feeblest new sitcom.

Probably the most mistitled sitcom of the decade.

You're likely to find more fascinating figures and intriguing dramatis personae in the latest catalogue from J. Peterman, and somehow Peterman comes off as more emotionally authentic.

One's first impression of "Identity" is likely to be that it is a miserably tedious mess, a reaction that probably will grow stronger the further one slogs into the Big Muddy that is the show.

An HD broadcast: Hugely Dumb.