The most engrossing new drama of the fall season.

It's a breath of fresh air even for those of us who find our allergies stimulated by the countless particles of whimsy suspended in its thick atmosphere.

At the outset, this show aimed for hilarity and hit the mark, consistently and cathartically, while also trafficking in provocative sidewalk philosophy, achieving moral seriousness amid masturbation jokes.

Using new audio-only interviews with the Stones as invisible tape, [director Brett Morgen] splices 50 years of footage into a 110-minute education, remixing the work of earlier filmmakers with splendid editing and a critical eye.

Their new show has both the nerve to link up twentysomething malaise and 21st-century terror-angst and the good nature to make the proposition look endearing.

The show is sometimes sweet and wry, sometimes crass and vicious, and, though often subtle, it embraces that embarrassing title and flings itself boisterously into a hacky premise

Back to You doesn't have a mandate to be inventive--to try new comedic beats or to attempt daring flights of absurdity. It just needs to be uninventive in a snappy way, a feat readily accomplished.

Sarah Corvus has arrived to haunt and to taunt, to give our plucky heroine a sinister contrast that the show can't do without.

The tempo, thus far, is notably deliberate; the show's got mortality on its mind.

The writing is as crisp as Brooks' perfect raincoat, and the partners share a father-son chemistry unseen elsewhere in the franchise, and anyone exhibiting the faintest traces of Anglophilia will delight to see the crown prosecutor and the defense counsel talking trash in the changing room while donning and doffing their barristers' wigs.

Costello, unlike public television, asks viewers like you for nothing but your attention, which he rewards with intimate assessments of songcraft and the underappreciated architects of modern pop.

Now comes Grey Gardens, largely enjoyable in spite of being almost entirely superfluous.

At its best, Glee is not just entertaining but elating, dramatizing Breakfast Club-quality teen angst with the aid of tight production numbers covering new and classic popular songs.

Falco has the strength to sell the overwrought cliches and to force each important moment to its crisis.

The show gets under the skin, somehow, with its loose Web-clip vibe and looser philosophy of life.

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.

The pacing of the show's jokes, which heralds a welcome respect for the quickness of the audience, helps all the humor pop. Of course, good-old dumb physical juxtapositions don't hurt, either.

Steadfastly crass in content, The League is generally subtle in execution.

In the suspenseful early hours of The Killing, Rosie's family goes about its bereavement in muted tones, and a subplot about a mayoral candidate drawn into the crime's eccentric orbit flashes with potential, and, primarily, our expectations for cop shows are teased, gratified, and artfully upended.

Appropriate to the pace and the space of series television, it welcomes you into its intrigues at a walking pace.

Pan Am's easy whirl fits the bill, when its chatter is snappy and also when it's not.

What Surburgatory lacks in novelty, it compensates for with a steady stream of gags, splashes of nuance (and nuance's vivid opposite), the comedic flow of Ana Gasteyer and Chris Parnell as the Altmans' neighbors, and an undercurrent of sweetness.

Boss is electric with self-importance, and that is in itself is a hoot, given its particular combination of thematic pomp and expressionistic pulp.

Over three nights and five and half hours, Prohibition provides a very fine analytic survey of the noble experiment, and most criticisms of it are quibbles.

Doors are opening. Mind the gap.

Clever with its gaudiness, the new soap opera proceeds as if that invitation is gilt-edged, tackily engraved, and sealed inside an oversized envelope with a kiss of frosted-pink lipstick.

A brisk film extracted from the campaign-trail saga of that title--has delivered to Julianne Moore the meatiest role of her career.

Nashville feels fresh because it catches a different tone. The few ironic winks it makes do not disfigure its straight face for quality pulp, nor does the sincerity harden into hokum.

It offers memorable looks at rehearsals, auditions, ballet-company competitions, and dreams of names in lights.

When Boardwalk Empire is dealing with the consequences of the 18th Amendment, it plays like a sound and steady drama. When addressing the energy around the 19th, it begins to jazz things up.

Too jaded to lament the backroom maneuvering of politicians, the creators of House of Cards instead take that state of affairs as a given, tart it up, and fashion a wry piece of escapism--a backstabbing procedural delivered in a sophisticated style.

Like "Alias" or "The X-Files," Jericho has enough wheel-within-wheels, double agents, and ad hoc alliances to draw in viewers who love a long-playing puzzle.

Even the most ardent fans of 30 Rock will concede that it doesn't look its sharpest as its third season opens. Only the most churlish will be much put out by this, though. A relatively flat episode of Tina Fey's backstage farce is still the fizziest thing in prime-time comedy.

In all, Oprah's Big Give is a triumph of virtue, which leaves only the question of who would want to watch it.

The relative tameness of Swingtown makes the unease it provokes more inviting: You tune in to see the bodies and stick around for the minds.

Because the show is sidling up to its premise very gently, it looks more like a sweet-natured high-school comedy than the risky riff on tolerance it teases us with.

We like to fantasize, every now and then, about rich people looking good while behaving badly. That kind of escapism will never go out of business, and Gossip Girl delivers it in of-the-moment fashion.

It's an ambitious if occasionally pushy effort.

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.

In the 3-D digital animation of this series, [Yoda's] skin glows a healthy shade of moss, and his sprightliness helps this latest George Lucas diversion achieve some commendable action-adventure zip.

Some us also go in for TV shows that have the potential to ripen into astringent Billy Wilder-style examinations of what lust can do to the white-collar soul.

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.

Ben Franklin (Tom Wilkinson ) enlivens the painterly prettiness and dutiful solemnity of John Adams with a healthy sense of the vulgar, as in the vernacular, as in the native voice of America.

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.

Though the show is quick and exciting in its particulars, slick and captivating in its details, it is unfolding slowly as a whole, with perhaps one too many investigations, conspiracies, return-of-the-repressed traumas, and busy backstories curling leisurely into view.

This show makes a virtue of vice in its own way. Co-imagined by Alexander Payne, who directed the pilot, Hung is a purposeful lark about emasculation.

Viewers of a particular sensibility--that is, mine--will find themselves unwholesomely engaged by the tone Stylista brings to scenes about laying out sidebars and rethinking silly hats.

The success or failure of Little Britain USA will depend on the prevalence of a particular strain of Anglophilia.

After watching the first four episodes, I'm content to settle on the euphemism deliberate and to note that the performances-centrally that of James Badge Dale as an intelligence analyst named Will Travers-have so far been sharp enough to ward off outright drowsiness.

Though she isn't quite a credible character, she's a thoroughly fun one, for which much credit is due to the actress's steady subtlety and elastic wit.

It's funny and cute.

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.

It borrows indiscriminately from hazy magic realism, sketch-show Dada, and underground-comics allegory according to alternating whim. If you don't give a hoot about such logistical issues--and if you're willing to forgive the half-hearted crudity that fills the space between good crude jokes and the bizarro non-jokes-then you have come to the right place.

Perhaps it's best to consider The Hour as a kind of retro Broadcast News that is most alive when Freddie and Bel banter like Beatrice and Benedick and especially when getting inside of Hector's talking head.

Its greasy-spoon spunk is regularly palatable, good for a cheap chuckle.

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

So far, American Horror Story isn't the great American horror story but rather a pretty good fright night.

A black comedy working many shades of gray, Enlightened is about dark mornings of the soul and the fool's-golden glow of the new convert, and it measures the weight of the world with an eccentric scale.

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.

The Pitch is like an all-you-can-eat buffet of salesmanship.

Dallas may not always compel your attention, but it does a good job of telling you what you missed.

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.

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.

Despite and because of its many points of disconnection from the reality of the industry it purports to illuminate, I liked it and quite enjoyed biting my thumb at its cast (like a Capulet servant) while watching the pilot.

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.

Like Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, the paranoid screenplays of Andrew Niccol, and the absurdist horror of Black Sheep (an ovine analog of The Birds), it gets beneath the skin by examining the state of isolation at the bottom of the world.

The show would probably be too ponderous to enjoy if Braugher weren't an actor of tremendous restraint.

This is up-to-the-minute celebrity kitsch--zippy, knowing, and joyfully hollow.

It's pretty decent hokum--fast, corny, genial, honest in its schlock.

[Scott's] playfulness is essential to making this show a pleasurable trifle instead of a sodden one.

The show's an entertaining provocation, but it's also only skin-deep.

The show works only because Woods is a honey-baked ham playing a character who lives to be a showman.

[A] serviceable heist drama.

The prep-school soap opera Gossip Girl is not as good--that is, not as bad, not quite so fabulously trashy--as the best-selling series of young-adult novels on which it's based.

Tara doesn't yet show the same emotional depth as Juno--not in its first four episodes, at least--but if you have the fortitude to make it through the tonal assault of its first 10 minutes, then you'll get to see some recognizable human feeling seep up through the wisecracks.

Appetizingly pulpy and yet not at all crass, the series presents a new angle on the phenomenon of shows-so-bad-that-they're-good: It sucks hard and thus plays very well.

Its achievement rarely matches its ambitions, but the effect is still pretty dope.

Ding ding ding went the bell, and up went an agreeing groan, six minutes in. Perhaps this was less a judgment of Kath & Kim's general quality--it was one of the better shows we screened, or at least one of the not-as-bad.

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.

Failing to realize high ambitions, High School Confidential skims across the lives of 12 teenage girls growing up in placid Kansas.

Everybody already knows everything there is to know about this maverick make of stock figure and the ready-made tone of cop shows where all the barroom jukeboxes play only electric blues.

The production's appeal is all on the surfaces--in a moment where a killer's image is reflected in a fresh pool of blood, say, or a megalomaniac catches his own eye in the mirror.

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

This is a civil servant who has yet to be jaded, and the show is just good enough to keep you turning back in to see her unwarranted optimism curdle.

Party Down, which is funny, would seem even funnier if it were not so heavily indebted to the funniest TV shows of recent years. It's also problematic that the show is so highly inconsistent.

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

For a smart take on a dumb summer dating show, join the millions tuning into Dating in the Dark.

Ms. Q's Nikita is only half so crush-worthy as Bionic Woman's Jaime Sommers or Dollhouse's what's-her-name, but her predicament is no less tasty.

It takes us to the South and to a class-conscious frame of mind and then introduces a web of complicated relationships that the eye recognizes as cross-racial but the dialogue does not. For now, it seems that this is a tale of collegiate self-discovery and hand-spring liberation that just happens to be set in the post-racial America I keep hearing about it.

Watching these post-Lost sci-fi-mytho-mystery series, you also watch yourself watching, and the thrill of alertness passes for decent entertainment even when other pleasures are in short supply. When Sean returned from a day trip to find that his girlfriend had vanished as if redacted from the file of life, I was kind of glad to see her gone. With her murky disappearance out of the way, we were on our way to achieving clarity-or at least toward failing to achieve it.

The Fairy Jobmother, adapted from a British show of the same name, follows the model of Supernanny--that child-rearing-rehab spectacular--with a diligent slavishness.

Judged by the standards of the form, it is totally OK. There is a soothing mundanity to it, and voyeurs will come away gratified. Though this is hardly an intimate portrait.

Storage Wars--trivial and magnetic, sociologically peculiar and elementally creepy-gives the reality-show treatment to a class of merchants slinking beneath the radar of many a solvent citizen.

On average, the viewer must wait through two tossed-off fart jokes in order to savor one lovingly crafted one. Bob's Burgers is done medium well.

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.

Preferring to redomesticize Mildred Pierce, Haynes arrives at a film--a five-part, five-hour miniseries--that is merely pretty good.

It plays, for better and worse, like a slightly elevated version of one of those issue-of-the-week telefilms of the old school, with their teen traumas and kitchen-sink melodramas.

The Voice (NBC) is a horrifically entertaining vocal competition produced by Mark Burnett.

It is a show about a high-school superheroine--a Catwoman without the camp or the S&M gear--and it enables longtime fans of the subgenre to watch with pride as their children digest its venerable tropes for only the fourth or fifth time.

Too Big To Fail adapted by director Curtis Hanson and screenwriter Peter Gould from a book by journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, is a decent movie with a stellar title.

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.

You couldn't skewer a cube of tofu with material this dull.

Roseanne's Nuts, as the thing is called, is so loud, dull, and dumb that it seems to be jackhammering an abyss into existence, but its reign as the most depressing show on air lasted only 60 minutes.