The very special scheduling is one of several ways the network has been signaling that it means serious business with this light and passably witty supernatural drama.

Alphas proceeds with a relative sobriety that will prove attractive to some and simply unintoxicating to others. If there are any grown-up fanboys left in America--people who can bring themselves to admit that this summer's blockbusters-in-tights are meager gruel--then Alphas may have enough beta charm to see them through the season.

Not content to exploit their subject's inherent themes, the series' fraternal creators, Joe and Tony Gayton, have adhered them promiscuously, pasting neon Post-it indications of symbolic import in a way that obscures moments of straightforward drama.

The show, warm and cheesy, fits right in as another nacho plate on the network's menu of comfort food, another new sitcom that plays like a re-enactment of an old one.

This HBO original [is] clean and smart and dull.

When the show talks about crime literature, it's quite dull, but when it shows instead of tells, it's something to see.

Diggs has considerable magnetism, but it would take the charisma of a cult leader to disguise the fact that this show sometimes reads like a '70s conspiracy thriller as interpreted by the makers of Bad Boys II.

In a time span shorter than a T.G.I. Friday's commercial, we saw a pungent contrast between two sets of cultural values. This was all very funny and more than a bit embarrassing.

"Six Feet Under's" Peter Krause plays the role with a sense of detachment that represents either the artistic choice of an actor playing it straight amid interminable clowning or the weary resignation of a dude who didn't know what he was getting into.

The show rises to mediocrity on the strength of the occasional snappiness of the dialogue.

It plays like it's been built for antisocial boys--mchair heroes in love with guns and in search of demented adventure.

Eleventh Hour is ambitiously shameless in patterning its counterintuitive crank of an ill-socialized hero on the Hugh Laurie character. We sent it down after nine minutes as yet another generic detective drama.

The show's success may depend on whether the public's fascination with Slater trumps its collective attention-deficit disorders.

Indeed, if the show is to have the symbolic import that we expect from a science-fiction story, this is the only possible way to read V as a coherent text. The only problem with this analysis lies in its generous presupposition that the text is, in fact, coherent.

A tolerably flavorsome ball of crimson bubblegum.

With the drama so thin, it must be the richness of Alicia's situation that makes 13 million people a week want to enjoy her company.

Naturally, Happy Town is excessively sudsy in its soap-opera aspect, just as its atmosphere is a bit too atmospheric.

Once you get past the fact of the producers' milking more than the usual volume of pathos from scenes of pre-elimination anxiety and post-dismissal distress, More To Love is much the same as its slimmer sisters.

Better Off Ted, which feels more devoted to establishing its cool than earning some laughs, is hardly so bad to deserve a bleh from halfway-discerning viewers. Eh or meh would be closer to the mark.

Each of them rolls the creative process, the finished work, and her public performance as an artist into an eager consumer package. They're all operators with soundbites on line one.

Though the seeming intent of Lock 'N Load is to glorify firearms--in one scene, a pastor takes target practice to the tune of "Amazing Grace"--it's sometimes tough to tell which consumers are motivated by valid concerns and which are unreasonable fruitcakes. Consequently, the show is something an ink-blot test.

The prosecutors on this new show--led by actor Peter Coyote, who hauls loads of Adam Schiff gravel in his voice--are given to putting whole systems on trial, metaphorically and otherwise....Though [Detectives] Rex and T.J. do, in fact, dig for clues, it somehow feels that they're just watching them erupt.

A typical episode of Terriers jolts abruptly from cutesy escapades to head-cracking fights, from loud escapism to misty tenderness, from easygoing comedy to strained seriousness. The tonal unevenness feels less like the conscious product of an ambitious design than the unplanned consequence of an exceedingly ambitious one.

The show--a sporadically excellent adaption of a British teen drama--is superlative teensploitation, enabling youth to rejoice in the fantasy of their corruption, among other things.

This Countdown isn't terribly televisual and might gain in force and intimacy if it were transferred straight to radio, though it would suffer from the loss of light-hearted video clips that serve to cleanse the palate of bile.

Ambiently amusing but generally inert, the show is badly in need of a hard-edged producer to tell the series' creators that they cannot get by on charm, no matter how much of that precious quality is imported by such guest stars as Lily Tomlin, Rashida Jones, and Bob Balaban.

A middling documentary about a major actor-director-buffoon.

The illustrated title sequence of Comic Book Men depicts these guys as musclemen in tights, but the scenes that follow are strictly mild-mannered.

Common Law, with its storylines moving forward in broad strokes and an airiness in its exposition, does not demand too much of you or of anyone, beyond its own efficient technicians and unshowily inventive actors.

This is a goofy docu-reality show about the sex lives of settled married couples.

Hit & Miss has so many ups and downs that it cannot dodge the critical judgment any hack might deliver by quoting its title.

The next four episodes are nowhere near as patient and controlled as that cinematic pilot, but, man, are they Irish: the wakes, the neon shamrock, the epigraphs from W.B. Yeats and D.P. Moynihan. And the show keeps this magnificent blarney up even as it swipes half its ideas from the playbooks of Scorsese and The Godfather.

Occasionally sharp as an epidural needle, often dumb as a pea pod, sometimes half decent.

Farmer Wants a Wife moseyed onto the air last week bearing the best title of any pop-culture commodity of the year to date and, given its standard-issue inanity, a surprising subtextual richness.

The way things turned out, it was no worse than rather bad, and Fallon, if he can quit squirming long enough, should take a modest bow.

The jokes never got any better than that, not even when the girl-moppet later waxed ecstatic about Zac Efron in High School Musical.

Rolling the wars on terror, drugs, and illegal immigration into one rhetorical package, Homeland Security USA plays partly like a pumped-up recruiting film, partly like a public-affairs outreach video for hard-core video gamers.

It is both an active agent of moral depravation and a total hoot.

I don't exactly know what to say to [a quote from the Updike book], nor did the 1987 film adaptation starring Jack Nicholson, nor does the predictably bland and totally adequate Eastwick.

Fantasy plots require fantastic details, but the show, rolling steadily downhill from a compelling premise, is utterly casual about the particulars of its speculative time-tripping and post-catastrophe atmospherics.

The series' approach to violence against woman is the only complex thing about it. Otherwise, you cannot even call Rizzoli & Isles run of the mill, it being that mills usually run more smoothly.

While no one beyond the show's target audience--teens in need of something to squeal over until Gossip Girl returns next season--would claim that Pretty Little Liars has a voluminous body, I must concede that it has a lustrous shine.

The Jay Leno Show is of course not the "brand-new hour of comedy" its promos claim; it is brand-old to the bone. But the notion of Leno running some combination of pop-culture confessional booth and prime-time torture chamber has some real appeal.

Though No Ordinary Family bears many hallmarks of an interesting failure, it falls slightly short of the distinction on account of its resistance to being consistently interesting.

Glory Daze is a frathouse-of-mirth comedy and so generic in its particulars that it is barely even necessary to describe its characters and their situation.

Instead, The Kennedys is blandly admiring when paying due respect, mildly cheesy when hauling out the trash, and understaged at every turn, the better for viewers to project their own fantasies onto it.

Depicting their triumphs and setbacks with imperfect sincerity, smooshing together various reality-show formulae with an awkwardness that is at times touching, the series sheds light on a corner of the psyche where the princess-y obsessions of the wedding culture meets a mutation of the great American tradition of self-improvement.

It offers a vision of dinner as a special effect, and its appeal is akin to that of the freeze-dried ice cream available at finer space-museum gift shops. It's a novelty item that makes no claim to please discerning palates.

It should be evident that Same Name is as warm and mindless as an idyllic Sunday in idlest July.

The series, fueling itself with folklore, proceeds as if no characterization is required.

Grimm is most alive in the scenes where Nick teams up with Monroe (Silas Weir Mitchell), a monster who is trying hard to walk the straight path. These moments introduce some much-needed levity to a drama where every echoing slam of a file-cabinet drawer amounts to a portentous groan.

Soto helps the mood of the show with his wry attitude and occasional gee-whiz-ardry, and he helps to move the plot along by stating facts that Rebecca would otherwise have to pause and look up.

The way things are going, I would pay $100 if the purchase exempted me from having to watch any more of the show itself.

This is ultra-soft porn--softer than Charmin, softer than lingerie ads.

Hemingway & Gellhorn's daft romanticization of its subjects proves central to its overwrought sense of self.

The Newsroom's focus is on putting on a show, and because its weak points are howlers and it will be a hoot to laugh not with but at them.

On the bright side, no one is in danger of having to watch this inert action show.

A document of cruel self-delusions, an index of unusual realities, virtually a postscript to the body of Western literature about romantic love, and an extraordinarily fine opportunity to exult in the suffering of your fellow human beings, Catfish is a TV show.

There is--beneath the stale crust of the new Beavis and Butt-head, baked in with the program's existential outlook--a special grimness.

The pilot episode of this caper series is cheaply derivative, generally condescending, and largely hollow. It is also swank and busy enough to create the occasional illusion that it is entertaining.

A shrewdly silly show offering something lovingly hackneyed for everyone.

By far the dumber and hammier of the two shows ["Saving Grace" is the other].

Dirt is quick-moving but painfully solemn, somehow constituting a plodding romp. At their very best, the first three episodes play like bad Kubrick.

The only problem with 1 vs. 100 is its determined idiocy.

The Sarah Silverman Program isn't about anything but its own supposed daring and the hyperbolic smugness of its star.

The adaptation of Mahler's book deals with this material in a fashion not so much dumbed-down as lobotomized.

As confected by ABC, the gayest and girliest of the big networks, Cashmere Mafia is the brighter of two ["Lipstick Jungle" is the other], with an "Ugly Betty" flair for color and a "Desperate Housewives" air of camp.

Paul Weston's (Byrne) nonadventures straddle the realms of the scarcely credible and the incredibly boring.

Why didn't HBO just go ahead and cut each episode of the hour-long Tell Me You Love Me to 50 minutes? The trims would have gone some way toward relieving the boredom inspired by the show's inchworm pace, and the shrink's-hour format would have made an exact fit for the spirit of the exercise.

One hesitates to say that [Rhys Meyers] phones his performance in. It's more like he dictates it to an assistant who then submits it via fax. You too might lack an appropriate sense of conviction if delivered this script.

Guide to Style is too glazed and slick for its own good, too clinical and forensic to be any fun.

Secret Diary of a Call Girl is a series of sketches, and its eight episodes do not trace an arc or advance a narrative.

Knight Rider arrives tricked out with just enough eccentricity to avoid utterly craven stupidity.

The one redeeming factor here is Laura Dern, who puts that elastic jolie laide mug of hers to memorable use as Katherine Harris. The performance makes you wish that Recount--which does contain a few fine moments of wild farce--had instead been created as a seven-episode sitcom playing out from her point of view.

This doesn't feel mindless, just unmindful, and the best way to honor its late creators is to look away from it.

When I say that The RH of NJ is the most synthetic installment of the show yet produced.

A broadcast marked by an unusual number of glitches, miscues, and deflating juxtapositions.

It seems a statement of the obvious to call the new Melrose trash, but a reviewer must observe certain formalities--and at least it is trash we can dig into and learn something from,

Too superficial to be insincere, the show never even pretends to care about her interests or her character.

MTV is milking the culture clash to the emptiest.

Where the two leads are fledgling performers at the start of the careers, the actors playing their older relations have no such excuses for appearing herein.

If you caught a snippet of Whitney unawares, you would be forgiven for assuming that it's one of those shows-within-a-show that exists to caricature bad television.

At points, Bag of Bones plays less like a horror story than a fond parody of one.

They [the producers] have failed to uphold their usual high standards, having not mastered the calculus of delivering the boorishness for which Sheen loyalists thirst while simultaneously tinkering with themes of redemption.

Phil Spector--potentially a camp classic about self-aggrandizement and megalomania--is simply a self-satisfied vanity project.

If there exists a device called a Procedural-O-Matic, then it created this show.

It's all the same stuff--magazine parties, feckless husbands, tempting male bimbos...but without "Cashmere Mafia's" redeeming air of farce.

Consider it proof of Corddry's superb resourcefulness that he somehow manages to wring the occasional drop of comedy from these dreary situations.

The Cougar defeated my efforts to pay attention to it. I made four honest efforts to contemplate, or even to notice, what was happening in the pilot, and the show kept sliding right off my cerebral cortex.

The show gets by as the vodka of television comedy. It aims to have no taste.

The actors playing the BL:TA duo are healthy and wholesome, if not terribly expressive; perhaps the matter is that both are Australian, and it's all they can do to keep their accents under control. Or maybe it's that both are fluent in English, and it's all they can do to keep from cracking while reading their dialogue.

An oddly tedious affair.

A degraded update of What's My Line?

Let's pretend that the plot's worth recounting.

Wipeout dresses up the usual network idiocy with cable-style snark (think Best Week Ever) and an exuberant lack of decency that's pure Internet--a TMZ-esque disregard for mercy, an anonymous blog commentor's sense of self-restraint.

In the light of summer television, civilization does not seem to have a pulse. It looks quite dead indeed.

For viewers looking for a solid hour long drama, it is one more thing not to watch.

Very probably the worst sitcom on network television, Last Man Standing makes Whitney Cummings look like Noël Coward.