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,