Adult life may be like high school some of the time, but it isn't all of the time--and a show suggesting that it is becomes just as difficult to endure as some of the worse memories of high school itself.

Ultimately, it's the exact same tedious show they've been making, under one name or another, for years now.

Williamson may have put thought into what this show is about, but what comes across on screen is an empty exercise in fetishizing the charismatic evil of serial killers.

There are just a lot of crazy, crazy ideas hurled out there with no real thought given to pace or tone or how to mesh them all together.

Based on the pilot (which, again, may not represent what the show looked like once Hunt took over), it's an unpleasant series full of hostile caricatures in need of fixing by Beth's heaven-sent advice.

Running Wilde is, simply, not very funny. That's unfortunate, but no unforgivable sin. Funny people occasionally make unfunny things. But it's the way that it isn't funny.

The problem is that Glory Daze itself never stakes a claim to its own identity. It's tonally all over the map--and that inconsistency gets in the way of the few potential laughs.

All the color in the margins doesn't matter if the man at the center of the picture is a bore, which Lyons unfortunately is.

Episodes isn't even as funny as Crane and Klarik's last collaboration, the exceedingly mediocre short-lived CBS comedy "The Class" - and that's even considering that the new show features Crane's old "Friends" star Matt LeBlanc delivering a terrific performance as an exaggerated version of himself.

It's a lead performance that's completely at odds with the tone of the rest of the show, and one that makes all the other goofy things even more uncomfortable than usual.

The three episodes I've seen felt flat and airless, outside of the performance by Sam Huntington as the werewolf.

Surely, there are talented American writers not long out of their teens who could have helped craft a new group of characters and stories that reflected their own experiences - and with enough sex and drugs and mayhem to please MTV's need for extra attention.

Over the three episodes USA sent out for review (the pilot, a mid-season episode, and the first season finale), what Kate does only occasionally matches up with the judge's speech, and none of her cases are interesting enough to distinguish Fairly Legal from the abundance of law shows on TV.

Traffic Light winds up with a negative hat trick, in which I found myself not caring about any of its three male leads, though I did like one of their female co-stars and several of the guests who popped up in the episodes I've seen.

It's formula, and while there's obviously a ton of appetite for that kind of formula in primetime (see the roster of dramas on CBS, FOX, ABC, TNT...), it's not particularly well-executed formula, and it wastes the potential of the one part of the formula that's slightly unique.

Without the overwhelming nostalgia for this particular venue for Pee-wee and these supporting characters, I found The Pee-wee Herman Show on Broadway a long (close to 90 minutes) slog, cute in spots, but mainly just strange--a voyage through the fantasy life of a character I prefer to see fending for himself in a closer approximation of the real world.

You can blame Winslet, or Haynes, or both, but something doesn't fit, and it wrecks everything, above and beyond spending so much time on a story that could have been just as satisfyingly told at half the length.

It's a very straightforward, sincere, dull accounting of all the trouble caused by Rodrigo, son Cesare (Francois Arnaud, frequently nude), daughter Lucrezia (Holliday Grainger) and company cause with their newfound power and station.

It's not painful--there are likable actors and the office setting is loose and fun--but none of the jokes land, at all.

It's all incredibly broad, and lacking in any real point of view.

It tries to coast on banter that's not particularly snappy, and on a snickering dependence on sex-related gags and plots.

The whole thing feels like a gross miscalculation--a failed attempt to update Allen's familiar persona for an angrier, more desperate time.

It could be a problem Allen Gregory solves later on, either by softening its main character (and his dad) or by pushing supporting characters more to the forefront, but the version on display in the pilot is one I have no interest in ever watching again.

With the show so half-hearted about its subject matter, Teenage Daughter has to lean on the hackiest of punchlines.

The fictionalized Chelsea occupies that irritating middle ground where she's not likable enough to be watchable when she's just existing, and yet neutered enough that her bad behavior isn't actually all that funny.

But because Lohan seems to be going to a costume party dressed as Taylor while Bowler's giving a performance, the whole thing is an imbalanced mess.

However you view it--mediocre "House" rip-off, improbable law show or "Like Father, Like Son 2: Judicial Boogaloo"--you have to like Jimmy Smits an awful lot to make Outlaw a Friday appointment. I'm as devoted an "NYPD Blue" fan as they come, and even I'm not willing to make that leap.

Maybe there is some steak to accompany this sizzle, but I wish somebody would bring it to the table already. It seems rude to extend an invitation to so many people without delivering an event.

[A] cheap, lazy, unfunny mess. Just depressing. Nothing to see here--and hopefully not for long.

This one's not working, and it doesn't matter how many fresh coats of paint or new showrunners they try to slap onto it.

I will only say that Suspect Behavior is basically the same show, but other than Whitaker, it's a much less interesting cast and collection of characters, with Garofalo particularly bad.

It's all too frantic, too full of obnoxious people contorting themselves into stupid lies in the service of jokes that never quite land.

Mostly, I came away thinking that Platinum Hit is a pretty lame way to find a talented songwriter and that my chances of liking any of the music produced on the show are low. I won't be returning.

Though the series is based on the friendship Drescher developed with her real-life husband after he realized he was gay, there's not a second of the debut episode that feels like it has any connection to actual human behavior.

It's a much bigger mess than '70s critics ever accused the original of being.

CGB plays more like a bad parody of Desperate Housewives.

The first four episodes of Season 5 find True Blood at its most directionless and meandering.

The show around Louis is filled with a lot of creaky set-up/punchline humor, much of it based around forced double entendres.

An ill-conceived, poorly scripted, woodenly acted mess, Cult is watchably crazy, but that's the highest praise I can give it.

So they can't use the name, can't use most of the jokes and can't keep the tone of the Twitter feed. Remind me again why CBS wanted to make this into a TV show?

Of the three terrible new shows debuting Thursday night, the ABC drama My Generation is the most disappointing....the execution is just awful--leaden and predictable and eyeroll-inducing at nearly every turn.

It has pretensions of depth and ambition, but really all it's about is whatever cool thing Murphy and Falchuk wanted to do next, hurled at the screen with such reckless abandon that none of it works.

Mario Lopez, my name is Daniel Fienberg and your show sucks.

When you strip away the wigs, makeup, padded bras and Ace bandages, there's nothing about Work It that suggests a show that will ever be appealing to either gender.