Equal parts stupid and sweet, The Goodwin Games does not appear to be built for the long haul.

Instead of giving NCIS a playful touch, which could have distinguished it from "JAG," the writers repeatedly make every word and every situation as predictable as possible. Even the attempts to be hip and humorous -- Gibbs gets some shut-eye on a gurney alongside a corpse, the tattooed Sciuto loves to party into the wee hours -- seem as fresh and innovative as an "Adam-12" marathon.

A more than usually steamy "Jane Eyre," it seems to have been made especially to appeal to viewers whose week peaks with "Grey's Anatomy." ... And yet, despite these passages, the production overall comes off as a little dry and dutiful.

The devices are in place, and there's intelligent writing, but here the approach feels a bit tired, like a better version of those commercials set in offices, where the drabness of corporate life is mocked to sell some shiny new gadget, or to make you feel superior to it all. [23 Mar 2005, p.E1]

There are good things in it, some well-written scenes and dynamic exchanges and excellent acting... But, ultimately, it doesn't cohere or quite convince.

For all its putative complexity, then, its passing examination of radical Islam versus peaceable Islam, its allusions to Guantanamo Bay and the Iraq insurgency, "Sleeper Cell" feels more like "The Shield," the L.A.-based cop drama on FX, the characters talking in overly stylized, expository quips, the L.A. cityscape whipping past in convincing fashion.

A production that tends to make everything look artificial, that freezes the air between the characters and keeps them distant.

The problem with "Modern Men" is that the scenes between the guys and the life coach don't play.

Graft a "Big Chill"-like premise onto a stiff yet sudsy soap opera and you still have a stiff yet sudsy soap opera.

While it's quite watchable if you don't expect much from it, and while even though the cast is good company... the show is not vivid or daring enough to overcome one's sense of having seen it all before.

Romijn is quite fetching here, both in looks and performance.

The notion of Graham as a TV star is an enticing one, but she's starring in a show that's not big enough for her.

The film goes along quite well, with the usual grabs and gotchas no less effective for being so familiar, as long as no one is talking.

Like a Hallmark card, it is a thing of prefabricated sentiment.

The episode galumphs loudly across a checkerboard of scenes -- Stark at work, Stark at home, Stark at work at home -- that achieve neither the convincing quality of detailed realism nor the dumb fun of untethered melodrama.

Peter Berg... seems to have decided that the show would only work if storytelling were pared down to quick-cutting iconography set to guitars.

For all its apparent technical accuracy and some real-world name-dropping, "Justice" feels no more lifelike than "Perry Mason."

The standoffs... are less than exhilarating thrill rides.

It's "Entourage" on the cheap, without the fun stuff.

Unfortunately, though, not only must the actors out-act one another, they must also best their wardrobes--Platt's hair is a slick helmet, Sunjata's Afro and mustache are disorienting, and Turturro's ears demand their own show. In this way, and others--clumsy editing, continuity and so on--Bronx consistently undermines itself.

Stale.

Something got lost between concept and execution, and instead of suspense we get silliness

All in all, it is pretty thin and flat; there are jokes that work, and the cast is able, but not in the service of anything substantial.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to stay interested in what happens to any of these characters because most of them are so absurdly unlikable.

Most of the actors, who admittedly don't have much to work with, seem to be visiting rather than inhabiting their parts....All in all, a trip to the zoo will serve you better.

Though it starts out with a fair bit of energy, in spite of regular paroxysms of royal lust and pique, it becomes less engaging as it goes on and grows finally rather dull.

It certainly looked good on paper. Alas, like some seductive Internet suitor, Journeyman seems perfect until he actually shows up, weedy and uncertain, at your door. In an effort to keep things grounded in "real life," as opposed to groovy sci-fi counterculture, writer-producer Kevin Falls relies on an earnestness that grows irritating.

In the Motherhood worked as a Web series based on real-life stories but not, it would seem, as a television series based on overused stereotypes.

Call Girl's greatest flaw is not that it's exploitative but that it's surprisingly dull.

Knight Rider is something for 12-year-old boys (and 12-year-old-boys at heart), undemanding, unsophisticated, no deeper than the thickness of a comic-book page.

Kath & Kim needs to decide if it wants to satirize American parenting or popular culture. Because if the first two episodes are any indication, it certainly cannot do both.

What they do have in common is wintry Canadian weather, a general lack of humor without having much serious to say and the fact that they are not particularly scary.

At the very least the rather admirable cast should be allowed a do-over with a script that doesn't confuse petulance with wit or meanness with misdirection.

The show that premieres Sunday night, between "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy" in the space formerly occupied by "King of the Hill," is weak--not hopeless, but given the pedigree, heavily disappointing.

Swayze, his face worn craggy by age and his battle with pancreatic cancer, remains a noble figure despite the ridiculousness that surrounds him. With the bearing and the mien of a man who is fighting for the survival of his own humanity, he clearly could have done much more with less.

It feels thin, mechanical and confused.

Apart from the Oedipal twist, it seems to be pretty much your standard "Bachelor"-style hookup show, the women all bunged up together in a fancy dormitory.

Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior has the same rapid pace of the original, a narrative tool that both amps up the action and keeps the viewer from dwelling too much on the gargantuan leaps of imagination that pass for police work. It also works against the show, preventing it from fully making the insightful points it does have.

A little whitewashing is forgivable in a biopic, but to make a movie about the most influential figure in fashion history in which she spends more time moping around about her boyfriends than she does designing clothes is infuriating.

As is so often the case with "reality television," there's nothing TV producers hate so much as actual reality (bo-ring!), and so everything is tarted up with superfluous soundtracks and staging, with breathless voice-overs, mood lighting and lots of half-baked psychology.

With a host of performers skilled in delivering Big Effects, the evening regularly delivered top-grade professional pop music, though it was rarely thrilling in a way that made you reconsider an act or decide to change your life.

This Prisoner is as much about Two as it is about Six and that the actor seems to be enjoying himself makes his scenes pleasant to watch even when they don't add up to much; there is a music to his readings even when the lines are obscure.

Parrilla is a compelling presence, and it's marvelous to see Northam all modern and un-martyred after his terrific turn as Thomas More in "The Tudors." But there is a strange lack of chemistry among the cast, perhaps because they are continually forced to deliver monologues on how difficult their jobs are and say things such as: "Life, so bloody beautiful."

If only it were possible to care, even the least little bit, who did what and why and what will happen next. But as of the end of Episode 2, it just isn't.

More often it is labored and belaboring, from the eccentric station-house staff--including Abraham Benrubi, wearing Willie Nelson's old pigtails, as a Chickasaw desk sergeant, and DJ Qualls as a slack-jawed Cletus of a patrol officer--to the Elvis imitators on the street and Dwight's constant promotion of Memphis as "sacred ground" to people who, after all, live there too.

Sunday night I mostly felt I was watching funny people being less funny than they are in their day jobs. What should have appeared spontaneous came off, even when it clearly was spontaneous, as worked-over, the fun seemed insisted upon.

[This] is why this strange, shallow puddle of comedy is so difficult to accept. With all eyes on Leno, this is the best he, and his writers, and the struggling network could come up with?

Notwithstanding a few apparently real tears and a bleeped expletive spoken in possibly real anger, the show is made of clearly concocted crises nearly from takeoff to landing, with little to offer beyond a long, though not penetrating, look at its attractive leads.

Housewives D.C. offers neither a portrait of Washington insider society, to which its stars have no access, or even an unvarnished look at any person's real life. People are more complicated than this, and (for much of the day) more normal--what in this context would be called "boring."

19 male and female losers of "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette" are brought together, "Big Brother" style, to do what they do best: plot and flirt and cry, manufacture drama, do a little armchair psychoanalysis and hook up. In other words, high school without, you know, the learning part.

From "thinking aloud" scenes in which the team tosses around a Nerf football to a most unfortunate series of conversations between Garza and his law clerk, the only thing that makes Outlaw unique in a swollen genre is its ability to trip over its own feet so early on.

Running Wilde, is another fractured fairy tale, though without the nuance or humor of its predecessor.

Murphey and the writers will have to do a lot of heavy lifting for Body of Proof to transcend its immediate predictability. There's only so much Delany can do with a cardboard show.

If only the actual action in The Hasselhoffs weren't so stagy, that tension between delusion and self-awareness might be interesting.

Alas, it all plays just as sappy as it sounds, even with the gorgeous and ridiculous distractions of make-do medicine.

These folks are misfit colonists on a planet that, as they keep telling us, they have only begun to understand; surely they have something better to do all day than chat about all the things that have happened, could happen and should happen. I know I do.

Shedding for the Wedding is a plate-load of empty calories, a lot of huffing and puffing we're meant to take as compelling even though there's little compelling in the presentation; it is just speedy.

Despite the interesting twist of overt sibling rivalry, Chibnall seems to be making a blood and gore version of "The Princess Diaries."

Much of the action arises from Reiser's inability to manage his mouth, but where David boldly owns the dark and limitless empire of his self-absorption, Reiser still wants to be the happily married Dad who may say the wrong thing once in a while but whose heart is still in the right place. A guy who's just like you, only much richer with his own show. But you can't have it both ways; just ask Larry David.

As gratifying as it is to see some of the inner workings of a local phenom, 4th and Forever falls far short of its subject matter, proving once again the limits of reality television.

As a Michael Fox-loving member of the demographic it targeted, I most certainly saw the 1985 film "Teen Wolf," but I don't remember much save it was a comedy and not very good. Teen Wolf, which premieres Sunday night on MTV, is also one of those two things and it is not a comedy.

The two things Finding Sarah has going for it--Ferguson's undeniable personal appeal and the value of watching a Very British Person attempt to do a Very American Thing--is buried under sanctimony and the absurd vocabulary of self-help.

The problem is not the supernatural, it's the sanctimony.

When the only real tension is one character telling another to hurry and the most emotionally involving scene lasts 30 seconds and involves the cop who may not engage with the principals again all season, it's difficult to remain an interested person.

The writing is glib (the term "cat fight" is actually used) and the action relies more on gadgetry than "Mission Impossible." However, the women all look great.

Unfortunately, if you name a show Unforgettable you really need to deliver, and the pilot just doesn't.

Whenever Chelsea Handler is on screen in the new NBC comedy Are You There, Chelsea?, in which she plays not the title character but her sister Sloan, we see the hint of the better sitcom it wants to become.

Having come up with an intriguing premise, co-creators Sherry Bilsing-Graham ("The New Adventures of Old Christine," "Friends") and Ellen Kreamer ("The New Adventures of Old Christine,") are either too timid or too hamstrung by network expectations to execute it.

Once in a while, he sounds like a little boy. This much works, but whether it can sustain a series is a fair question.

Too often Life's Too Short feels like two shows stuck together with a bit of chewing gum.

Watching it, you feel as if you have seen it all before, and will again, until eternity ends.

Ironically, given a show that so clearly wants to touch its audience--from that weighty one-word title on down--we have met, apart from Martin, hardly a single character who incorporates more than the hint of an actual person.

Although it is far from the worst King adaptation (would that be "Dreamcatcher"? "Lawnmower Man"?) it feels less like a ghost story than a dashed-together homage to the King oeuvre that's slow where it should be fast and fast where it should be slow.

A potentially funny setup, if the women were not such oddly antiquated sendups.

Though a stray remark of substance here and there escapes into the narrative, the six-part series, which premieres Sunday, has nothing much serious on its mind.

Glazer has built a beautiful edifice here, but he still needs to get some life into the place.

The cast is universally fine, but there's honestly nothing much it can do to avoid being swamped with Fellowes' arrogant attempt to capture the social dimensions of turn-of-the-century Britain, oh, and the sinking of this big boat too.

There is simply no way you can watch Dina engage in what is the undeniably narcissistic enterprise of having cameras follow her around and not think all sorts of worrisome and occasionally uncharitable things about her rationale.

That transcendent mixture of confidence and fear, of humility and clear-eyed self-assessment, evident in so much of Sorkin's other work, is what turns a sermon into a work of art. And that is precisely what is missing here.

Unlike "Awake," however, Saving Hope does not have Jason Isaacs, a nifty crisscrossing police procedural at its heart, or anything interesting to say about the various forms of reality.

Even if you could forgive its lack of creativity, it's difficult to overlook its absurdly clunky execution. Oh, and the fact that it isn't very funny.

The producers are so focused on creating and highlighting conflict that after a while, as with the boy who cried wolf, you would just like everyone to shut up and be eaten.

Dragon lady, cougar and feisty redhead; dutiful son, jealous daughter and henpecked husband are all present and accounted for, with pat and predictable jokes leeching whatever hope might be had from a racially diverse cast and a promising enough setup.

It is all so dreadfully familiar--the lovely, headstrong and feisty heroine, the nice guy who wants her (in this case, the medical examiner played by Max Brown) and the broken bad boy she loves instead. The only point of light is provided by Catherine's partner, Tess.

Modern guys may have all manner of hilarious, disturbing and conflicting feelings about their children and the role of caregiver, but none of them make it into the pilot. Only Gary, exhausted and overwhelmed, seems to be experiencing life with an actual child, which is why he gets all the best lines.

[Josh Gad's] an adroit actor, and his breathy, singsongy way with Skip feels original, until it feels tiring--as that there's just a lot of him here. He obscures the view, or becomes it, and he can make the rest of the show seem sort of beside the point.

ABC's high-aspiring but poorly executed Red Widow.

Full-fledged human beings are slow to emerge; the characters are long on attitude but short on detail.... The show could use some of the quirkiness that has enlivened Kelley shows such as "Picket Fences" and "Boston Legal."

Deception, in trying for something more "real" and not quite getting there, feels fake. There is little chemistry between the people who are supposed to have it.

None of this ever threatens to break into an interesting character study or story or examination of ideas.

There is really only one reason to watch ABC's Canadian-import place-holder crime drama Motive--Kristin Lehman.

Killing Lincoln wears its historical accuracy like a ball and chain, clunking where it should inspire, dragging where it should pulse with dread.

For fans of "Silence of the Lambs" there is some pleasure in gathering the canonical Easter eggs planted throughout the series, but for the most part Hannibal suffers from the same fatal flaw as its main character: It takes itself so seriously that it's no fun at all.

The Bible according to Burnett and Downey is a handsome and generally expensive-looking production, but it is also flat and often tedious, even when it tends to the hysterical, and as hard as the Hans Zimmer soundtrack strains to keep you on the edge of your sofa.

Almost everything that happens on camera here, outside the therapy sessions, feels uncomfortably contrived.

It is the sort of neither-here-nor-there sitcom that can make me feel faintly sad for the form, and by extension for the health of the nation, and yet it is no worse than so many others that come and go and sometimes, to my surprise, come and stay.

[They] don't begin to capture the period beyond its thin patina, and even worse, they are simply not funny...Some arresting visual techniques here, but the writing is heavy-handed, the humor broad and labored, and some of the acting way over the top. [22 Aug 1998, p.F1]

Insipid. [20 Sept 2002, p.C1]

The pilot episode is so cliched, predictable, obvious, devoid of humanity or even human interest that one would actually like to say nothing definitive about it, in the reasonable assumption that next week's would have to be better.

It isn't a bad gimmick, establishing a certain tension, but the premise is about the only thing that recommends "The Evidence," a show that otherwise seems to be moving you -- rather than moving -- through its procedural paces.

With its soundtrack full of metal and techno and its killers packing imported deadly spiders and home surgery kits, it aims for a Gothic moodiness not unrelated to the season's scary-monster shows.

Despite a fine cast... in the end it works neither as comedy, satire, drama nor soap opera.

"What About Brian" is "Prison Break," except the prison is a man's feelings and escape involves eluding the warden of his doubts, and we're talking maximum-security misgivings.

What can I tell you about "Four Kings" that you won't already know? It premieres tonight at 8:30 on NBC. By 8:46, or thereabouts, you will understand everything.

Patinkin looks especially unnatural in these scenes — just give that man a song to sing, I say, and let him do what he was born to.

The accelerating pace of the movie runs roughshod over the drama.

The lavishing [of gifts] never abates, until what you're witnessing feels less like a party than an icky display of instant wealth meant to leave the rest of us drooling, wondering what about our own lives might get us on a TV show.

Lipstick Jungle wrongheadedly wants to have it both ways--to celebrate and explore the lives and loves of women at the top through protagonists who don't have the drive or the depth to make it there.

"Runaway" begs your interest (who doesn't like a road trip story, even when the Feds aren't on your tail?) before fading for lack of energy, not to mention originality.

Clearly, "Notes" plans to explore the fear, joy and ridiculousness that parenthood inspires in so many of us, relying on the quirks of the characters to infuse this with sass and humor. But none of the characters seems up to the task.

Here, I guess, is a dude's version of an ABC chick show.

Instead of examining the moralizing titillation that fuels the gossip press, "Dirt" just follows its lead.

It just isn't funny.

All evidence to the contrary, the show has the potential of being very funny, but only if the writers can choose subtlety over shtick even a quarter of the time.

Lost in all the plot and character contrivance is any sense of the city--a few gumbo and bourbon references are most certainly not enough.

Canterbury's Law is a Frankenstein's monster of a dozen cop/law shows, a pale, lurching version of the flawed and fascinating women who are taking back television like so many modern Cagneys and Laceys.

We don't feel anything because nothing is revealed about Moody except that he is depressed, profane and a writer. (We don't even know whether he is a good writer--all sorts of bad writers get upset about how their movies are made too.) And that, I'm afraid, is not enough.

"Sons of Hollywood" is the answer to a question nobody was wondering: What if you did "Entourage" with actual Hollywood layabouts, without the writing and the acting and, you know, all that other work stuff?

Their team of comedy actors has some spunk and talent, but the show more closely resembles a commercial for mystery dinner theater, complete with testimonials by real audience members about how fun it all was in the end.

Fox should send TNT the super fancy bouquet because, once again, "House" never looked so good.

Almost every scene on Nashville feels ploddingly staged. Every conversation is alarmingly, and unconvincingly, topical; no scene is wasted.

The American Farmer is more... American: another intermittently nasty competition dating show, with stunt challenges and a ritualized elimination at the end of every episode.

Overcrowded with plotlines, high-tech gimmicks and ambition yet empty of emotional connection and purpose, Dollhouse tries so hard to be so many things it winds up being nothing much at all.

Watching "Tabatha's Salon Takeover," which is unrated, you can't help but wonder if there shouldn't be a "whip it" show for "whip it" shows--in which an expert would review the tapes and offer advice on how to turn a bad situation around. They could start with this one.

It is most silly at its most serious. It might be better to go the full 007. As it is, and notwithstanding some spectacular location footage, there's scarcely a real moment in it from first shot to last.

I imagine that there is some sort of mathematical correctness to the plot, but as a viewing experience it is vague, confusing and preposterous to the point that by the time all was revealed--or nearly all, since the film ends on an unresolved note--I had long ceased to care.

What begins as a more than slightly fantastic revision of the Templar legend takes an ill-advised turn toward theological theorizing and New Agey spiritual advice.

If Mental sounds a lot like "House" or "The Mentalist" or whatever other foreign-born-actor-playing-a-haunted-man drama you can think of, well, it is. Only nowhere near as good.

The Storm is almost but not quite bad enough to be fun. Although Treat Williams is clearly having a great time, those of us in the audience are left feeling damp and more than a bit moldy.

Poorly conceived, badly written and indifferently acted, The Deep End is a jumble of terrible ideas from start to finish.

It is such an utterly cynical experiment, troublesome on so many levels (there are children involved, watching adults cry because their friends have "banished" them) and no matter how often people say "it's just a game," even without a big chunk of change on the line, family competitions are rarely bloodless.

Take "Lost," mash it up with "The Prisoner," throw in a little "Saw," over-season with badly written and poorly delivered dialogue, glaze with horror-film lighting, dream-scene camerawork and elevators like you haven't seen since "The Shining," and you've got "Persons Unknown."

I'm sure the writers have big plans to examine the hilarious pitfalls everyone encounters after Wolf goes to jail and Cheryl institutes a new "no crime" rule but it's not just difficult to care about what happens next, it's difficult to imagine caring.

There's nothing wrong with a show about lovable losers, but they have to be, you know, lovable. Here, the men seem to be products of their writers' contempt; they're such babies that even their profanity doesn't rise from the potty.

I may just be a cranky old dude, but I am not charmed by this stuff; Spencer Pratt is just a prat to me, and though I wish you well, Tinsley, in your new life, I will be happy to think no more about your friends, starting now.

Oddly, at 79, Shatner comes across as too energetic and youthful even for the 72-year-old he's playing. The bigger problem is that he's given nothing to do or say worth the doing or saying. He gets better mileage from a Priceline commercial.

Jerry Bruckheimer's Chase, which premieres Monday on NBC, delivers just what its name promises, and not much more. It consists mainly of that very thing we are often aphoristically asked to cut to, with just enough banter and back-story to let you know that these are in fact humans we are watching and not just exceptionally well-coordinated robot drones.

Of Bridalplasty itself there is not much to say beyond that it is a creepy mix of things you have seen before.

The show is neither funny nor illuminating. Indeed, if you aren't a bordering-on-psychotically-obsessive Saget fan, there's not much to see except some very nice scenery.

The Playboy Club is nothing but a tarted-up mob drama; the bunnies may be used as the marketing and milieu but the main narrative is about the men, and no one seems aware of the irony.

The jokes and plots have been efficiently constructed, but most have no traction; they slide right off you, and the characters themselves seem disconnected from one another.

A reality show that makes a good point about not judging books by their cover (or their own reality shows), though it is artificial and thin and smeared with the dubious glitter of minor celebrity.

It's just the sheer bone-idle laziness of the writing, which is a dumbed-way-down "Modern Family" crossed with watered-way-down "Two and a Half Men."

The series--which is to say, the pilot--is just not very good; the jokes creak and wheeze, and there is nothing in the performances to distract from the material.

Like so many reboots, The Firm is a waste of precious resources, especially its cast.

In spite of their occasional expressions of enthusiasm for the "adventure," we're left with a show about two sisters, temporarily billeted in a Beverly Hills mansion, mostly complaining about Los Angeles, each other and their lives.

He gets off a few good lines, but even the fan-based studio audience wasn't much impressed, providing an ocean of silence where the laughter should be, which made the television viewing experience actually uncomfortable at times.

The show is pretty darn terrible, derivative and tired, co-starring a monkey (never, ever a good sign) and chockablock with characters we have seen too many times before.

If Couric was the best and brightest candidate to replace Oprah, things are not looking good, America.

Zero Hour, while initially tantalizing (priests, Nazis, Anthony Edwards, an unholy birth, a secret map--I'm in! I'm in!), is more than a little disappointing (flat-footed dialogue, absurd plot machinations, cardboard main characters, ludicrous historical leaps--I'm out! I'm out!).

There's nothing inherently wrong with the premise... But what's been done with it, on the evidence of the pilot, is weak, and slightly embarrassing to watch.

It's satirical all right, paced roughly like "Arrested Development," but not very funny or believable.

As the mission's race against time ticks down, "E-Ring" thinks it's got you by the throat, and that's true, because you feel like you're being led around on a leash.

Sadly, this show makes a mess of its neighborhood-centric premise.

[The] show is creatively forced, the sisters speaking in a zeitgeist-sounding dialect over "Sex and the City's" ambient xylophone, without ever landing in the kind of zeitgeist-capturing moment that made that show a hit.

[A] warmed-over hip-hop saga.

"Happy Hour," or as I like to call it: "Really, Fox? This?"

Almost as soon as the sitcom begins you can feel where every joke is going to end.

[It] instantly displays a commitment to slapstick in direct proportion to a state of comedic denial.

"The Path" is an irresponsible film, with its factual distortions wrapped in a really terrific package that lulls viewers into complacency, setting them up for the propaganda that is to follow.

It's more like sitting in on an embarrassing portion of an acting class.

To say Valentine, which premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday, is terrible does not do justice to either the show or the word "terrible."

Though it is mildly interesting to watch the reality monster consume its own tail for a few minutes, I'd frankly rather spend an hour blotting my lip gloss.

Sandra Brown's Ricochet, is just awful, despite its fine literary pedigree and a cast that includes John Corbett, Gary Cole and Julie Benz.

A wildly graceless biopic that careens through the decades-long relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton with more petulance than passion, knocking down gin bottles and rumpling silk sheets for no better reason than that's what it says to do in the script.

As a for-profit visual arts experience, Hemlock Grove is terrible in ways that mock the meaning of the word "terrible," with clunky acting, tra-la-la transitions and at least one monster that walks like a bad Frankenstein and appears to be wearing the very same wig/hat we used.

Rogue is pretty terrible, a moody, broody jumble of clichéd characters, pregnant pauses and sex scenes that border on the pornographic.

A light-as-a-feather new sitcom.

We're to believe ABC took a look at all this and said, yes, yes and yes.

"Love, Inc." is as unintentionally unfunny as "Room and Bored" -- the sitcom within a sitcom on HBO's "The Comeback" -- was meant to be bad.

"Big Day" is basically bad community theater with music clearances.

Feldman has created a quartet of rich guys so insufferable, self-centered and whiny that they make the men of feminist masterwork "The Golden Notebook," or even "The Nanny Diaries," look positively heroic.

So here it is, a two-part A&E miniseries that manages, despite a cast culled from some of the best shows on TV, to be both overwrought and dull, a veritable Frankenfilm of sci-fi thrillers, built of debris from sources including "Outbreak," "Sphere," "The Omega Man," "The Birds," "The China Syndrome" and, oh, yes, "The Andromeda Strain."

Work It managed to claim Worst Comedy of the Year, but surely CBS' Rob comes in a close second.

The show is long on concept and short on execution which would actually be OK if the writing and acting were not so simply terrible.

NBC sent out five episodes; I sat through three before throwing the DVD on the Donate to Public Library pile. I would like to apologize in advance to the library.

A show that is no longer offensively not funny, just pointless and not funny.