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

Its detective plots are cozily formulaic, its defining twist cheerfully preposterous. As cop-show comfort food, it's a kind of California fusion cooked up to appeal to people fed up with techno-beat lab scenes.

There are just enough witty lines and interesting choices, such as in the editing of the bulimia scene, to create fleeting sensations that all is not dross.

This being Disney product, these issues are dealt with in primary colors, uplifting tones, and production levels that aim for exact competence—a workaday professionalism that's never too slick to alienate anyone.

Aided by snappy editing, these people express feelings of tedium, frustration, and contempt in a generally amusing fashion, and the series succeeds as light comedy.

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

At various points, Bored to Death seems nicely restrained, curiously deadpan, and just flat. It is moderate, and it is middling.

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.

We bailed after the first of these dudes entered the frame, jolted by his frankly cheesy display of torso--"infomercial abs" was the damning phrase. But, until that moment, The Ex List had commanded our full attention in a way that the previous shows hadn't.

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

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.

Comfort food to its core, the show is a retro casserole tapping into a popular appetite for leftovers.

Less scary than freaky, it's deliberately unhinged-light horror about low camp, a showcase for scenery chewing and giddy blasphemy, an exploitation chamber piece.

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

Though the Up All Night pilot falls short of great hilarity, the series demonstrates considerable potential.

Indeed, it is hard to knock Terra Nova overall, such does it succeed on its own terms, which involve working over the pituitary brain and the sympathetic soul.

The details of the play between Hunter and her co-stars are engrossing enough that you're glad to let the big arc sail over your head.

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

Rhimes hustles the audience into episodes in the middle of things. Pope and her colleagues speak at a clip suggesting years of study at the West Wing School of Elocution and Composition. In the rush, I scarcely had time to scoff at the over-the-top content of the pilot.

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.

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.

Covert Affairs is a zippy character study, and it puts Perabo's features to playful use in the earliest moments of the pilot, filling the screen with them in a context where they're begging to be studied.

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

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

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

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.

A fine summer show is launched, slick but with feeling, and all the orange-and-red football-season foliage on-screen contributes to a diverting brisk breeziness.

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.