As assembly-line products go, Three Rivers isn't half bad.

Watching Logan hand small children assault rifles for inspection will no doubt amuse gun nuts and enrage anti-gun nuts. And both camps are likely to blink at one of the (surprisingly numerous) female customers who--jokingly asked if she's carrying a weapon--whips out three concealed knives.

The result is compulsively watchable pulp, provided you have a high threshold for decapitations and copulations, sometimes simultaneous.

Rather than suspense, Happy Town appears to be going for the goofball irony of its ABC ancestor Twin Peaks.

Fox's beguiling but unconventional drama Lone Star will have a similar problem [programmers with quick trigger fingers] if viewers demand a quick payoff.

Blond toughie Kelli Giddish (Past Life) is fun to watch as the lead marshal, provided you don't have an excessively ACLUish temperament.

Every case is wrapped up in precisely 42 terse minutes, with no dangling threads to trouble consciences or make syndication sales tough. If you liked any of the other L&Os, you'll probably like this one. If you didn't, well....

The show is kind of amusing, at least in a summer-TV sort of way.

Secret Circle is competently performed and produced and liable to entertain anybody not old enough to remember Alyssa Milano and Shannen Doherty doing pretty much the same stuff in Charmed back in the 20th-century day.

As a kind of CSI: Sleaze City, the show is quite watchable.

It's really one lonnnnng sex joke. That said, some of the punch lines are pretty funny.

The hardball banter over coolness quotient is coupled with some pretty amusing generation-gap comedy.

The truth is that Rob is a rather funny sitcom about the cultural collisions that occur every day in an increasingly blended America.

Some of the bits are awfully predictable, like tough-guy Sands mellowing into a big-brother type for a young street punk who (amazing coincidence alert) has a hottie older sister. Others are more interesting, particularly a debate between Goldberg and Marte over whether warring on drugs makes any sense.

Far from a complete accounting of how the United States government tracked down and killed its Public Enemy No. 1--even the SEAL raid that ended with his death is hardly mentioned, much less described--this film might be better titled The Spooks Strike Back.

A strong cast... breathes life into what might otherwise be just one more tepid medical drama.

Nobody is quite what they seem in this show, and watching the layers of deception and falsity peel away is its main attraction. Of course, at some point, there better turn out to be something underneath.

What would otherwise be a tedious collection of working-mom and lawyer-show clichés is saved by an excellent cast.

Freddie is a series of collisions -- between generations, sexes, ethnicities and perhaps most of all between youthful Latin macho and imperious Latin matriarchy in the struggle to rule the house.

It also helps that Heather Graham as Emily is so appealing that it often distracts from the fanciful idiocy of what she's saying or doing.

A dumb but powerful serialized mystery that has an equal shot at being the season's biggest cult hit and its most mind-boggling flop.

Calling it ''good'' might be a bit of a stretch, but Ugly Betty's comic-melodrama formula is so cannily executed that audiences may find it irresistible.

If you can ignore stuff like the impossibly clean subways and the fact that the cops call one another ''constable'' with straight faces, Flashpoint is actually rather formulaic.

The Principal's Office, a supposed documentary series from TruTV (the reality-show ghost of the cable channel once known as Court TV), is pure canine despite delivering neither the bark nor the bite you might expect from a show that follows high school principals dealing with disciplinary problems.

Jason O'Mara is enormously appealing as the determined but befuddled Tyler....Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Life on Mars' writers, who seem to have been knocked considerably deeper into history than their character.

Equal parts sly and stupid, rousing and ridiculous.

As drama, unfortunately, it's often punchless, with a meandering narrative which, it's obvious from the first moments, cannot be contained within a single two-hour show.

Watching Better Off Ted is a bit like reading old Dilbert comic strips--amusing, but the punch lines seem awfully familiar.

No, it's not Twilight--but it's not bad, either. The Vampire Diaries, The CW's new fang-gang drama, successfully hitches the sanguinary sexuality of the vampire ethos to the in-group/out-group dynamic of the teen soap.

The reshot pilot episode that will be broadcast Tuesday is no longer irritating, but neither is it distinctive, just one more humdrum cop drama, notable only for wasting a high-powered cast that includes Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos) and Aisha Hinds (True Blood).

There's nothing really wrong with the show, at least nothing you can easily put your finger on. It just lacks that elusive but absolutely necessary spark of life that turns a stack of script pages and publicity stills into something that will stop you from clicking the remote.

Ultimately, Person Of Interest is built on too cockamamie of a premise to be taken seriously.

Anger Management is kind of a mirror image of Sheen: scabrously, outrageously funny at times and monotonously one-note at others.

In short, The Neighbors closely resembles the old Conehead sketches from the early days of Saturday Night Live.

As funny as 1600 Penn can be, after a while the laughs grow fewer and further between. And the misfires are more frequent and painful.

Legit--and I say this with a certain amount of admiration, coupled with trepidation that some new program on the spring schedule will soon prove me wrong--is the most degraded, debauched and degenerate show on TV.

Do No Harm isn't so bad. It isn't so good, either.

Wildly uneven. [22 Sept 1994]

Vikings is at least fun to watch, in a sword-swinging, head-chopping, maiden-despoiling sort of way.

Missing here is the complexity that makes shows like "L.A. Law" or "Hill Street Blues" fun to watch. Executive producer Dick Wolf has said Law & Order is not an ensemble show. What it is is a show about police and legal procedures -- and they're recounted in almost documentary fashion. Of course, as with so much TV law, time is collapsed and these complicated procedures are neatly wrapped up by the show's conclusion. [9 Sept 1990, p.H1]

You can pretty much watch this show any night of the week under its other titles, CSI and Law & Order.

It's an interesting approach, but despite well-drawn characters and the strong cast, there's a sense that the show is trapped in amber, a perfectly preserved relic from another age.

Carpoolers, are at least amusing even if equally socially maladroit. Carpoolers is a genially oddball comedy.

Worst Week certainly has some genuine laughs, but they run out well before the pratfalls and pee-pee jokes do.

The smirky cynicism, savage mockery of New Age verities and prickly atheism of its lead character could have made The Mentalist fascinating (if not altogether pleasant) viewing. Instead, it turns down the same formulaic path as CBS' other police procedurals, a sort of CSI-with-a-fake-crystal-ball.

A little old-fashioned police brutality may seem downright appealing compared to the pseudointellectual runamok of CBS' cop drama Eleventh Hour, in which British actor Rufus Sewell plays a scientist who has regrettably turned his genius to fighting crime

Drugs. Pratfalls. Bodily excretions. Sexual crudity. Shock-jock ethnic humor. Four-letter words flying like lead in a matineee Western. Character development and story? Not so much.

Fans of Grey's Anatomy femme fatale Addison Montgomery may find her a little dull now that she doesn't have a husband or boyfriend or intern to cheat on or with in ABC's spin-off Private Practice.

This is sporadically funny, but Tim is too slight -- the back-to-back episodes are only 10 to 12 minutes long -- and relies way too much on the supposed shock value of cartoon characters uttering four-letter words to be consistently entertaining.

What might have otherwise been a worthy effort seems pallid and wheezing compared to the acid-etched Nurse Jackie.

The CW, having exhausted every bit of its creative energy on The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll, is now simply remaking Fox's old prime-time soap lineup one by one. And the garden apartment complex at No. 4616, though filled with a new collection of 20-something drama queens, is the same vortex of hyperkinetic hormones, ambition and criminality that it always was.

Community's party animals tend to get their kicks less from bongs, grain-alcohol projectile vomiting and peeping into sorority windows than from irregular Spanish verbs and lengthy recitations of the script of The Breakfast Club, which, for the most part, is even less amusing than it sounds.

It's a drab third-generation clone (a spinoff of the original NCIS, which in turn was a spinoff of JAG) of a show from the shallow end of the TV gene pool.

Charmless and predictable, Scoundrels seems like a tepid rehash of The Riches, a lively and thoughtful FX show about a family of gypsy thieves trying to go straight that was done in by the 2008 television strike.

Even Ramsay's most barbarous fans are likely to find this formula so thin by now that, by comparison, Louise Roe looks like a blimp.

Mike & Molly unquestionably has a lot of funny moments. But realizing you've just been laughing at 22 consecutive minutes of socially unredeemed fat jokes may leave you feeling as if you've just eaten a 36-inch anchovy-and-pineapple pizza: bloated and yucky.

It's ABC's attempt to replicate last season's wildly successful intergenerational comedy Modern Family, and, like many genetic experiments, it ends in mutant disaster.

America's Next Great Restaurant is quickly undone by the same mean-spiritedness that makes Survivor, American Idol and the rest of this genre such an unpleasant viewing experience. Winning depends at least as much (and probably much more) on impressing the producers with television skills as it does on winning over the judges with culinary expertise or business savvy. So taunting and backbiting among the contestants is a dreary constant.

More often, though, the laughs range from tepid to nonexistent.

At least Azaria and Hahn do have an uncertain chemistry that might have developed into something watchable had the producers not decided to provide it with a Greek chorus of locker-room cracks by loutish co-workers.

OK, OK, A Gifted Man, is not as bad as all that [Friendly-ghost mothers-in-law? Friendly-ghost proctologists? Friendly-ghost telephone solicitors?]. But it's not good, either.

Everything seems hacky and incomplete.

If you were reduced to hysterical laughter by the concept of herbal breast-enlargement cream in the film, you will likely be so again by the superpower-conveying acne medicine in the TV show. If not, well, welcome to Normal Town.

Like its ancestor, the new Dallas is self-consciously a trashfest, an endless cycle of betrayals, confrontations, reconciliations and re-betrayals.

Made in Jersey is only sporadically engaging.

Beauty and the Beast is a little hacky at times, with the characters leaping dozens of plot points in a single bound. But Kreuk and Ryan keep their faces straight and their bodies hard, which is what CW shows are mostly about, and all in all, it could be a lot dumber than it is.

It does have a lot of characters and a hopelessly confusing plot.... But the show is not without its strengths, particularly the scenes in which the magazine editor (Anthony Edwards, ER) argues with young staffers disappointed by his refusal to run a story about werewolves running amok in Romania.

The most interesting thing about Killing Lincoln, in fact, is how it can be so tepidly uninteresting.

No surprises here, unless Shannen Doherty oozes out of one of the petri dishes. [23 Sept 2003, p.4E]

The unarguable truth of E-Ring's central premise -- that America's national-security bureaucracy probably spends as much time in intramural squabbles as it does fighting terrorism or rogue states -- does not make it any better drama.

The Unit hits more false notes than an American Idol tryout.

Psych is a one-trick pony that quickly deteriorates into a rather humdrum mystery once the novelty of watching Spencer fake his psychic revelations wears off.

[It] often sounds less like a television drama than a Criminal Procedures 101 lecture delivered at an offshore law school.

The jibes quickly wear thin and predictable, and there's simply not much to Help Me Help You.

Watching seven characters sit around week after week in endless discussions of the ramifications of the fact that two of them have kissed may have been fun in the seventh grade. But, like the spinning teacups at Disney World or throwing up after drinking a jug of Ripple, it's an experience that doesn't wear well with time.

Where The Class is warm and charming, Emergency is crude and overdrawn.

This can be dryly funny in small doses, but Conchords really feels less like a sitcom than a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched out to about six times its shelf-life.

The show's boorishness is exceeded only by its dissimulation; not one frame of this thing--from the diners who seem not to notice that their table is surrounded by camera crews to the melodramatically villainous managers--is remotely believable.

The hacky writing is interchangeable with any of CBS' police procedurals, and the boy-band good looks of Alex O'Loughlin as the detective, Mick St. John, inspire neither fear nor dark sexual longings

A hacky remake of a mediocre 1971 film of a pulp-science 1969 novel, this miniseries (it concludes Tuesday, if you must waste two nights of your life) is a poster child for generational decline: Whatever few IQ points were present in the original have long since leached away.

JoAnna Garcia's overcaffeinated cuteness--the sort of thing that made otherwise decent people want to run Sally Field through with a pitchfork back in her Gidget and Flying Nun days--as a Palm Beach governess to trust-fund teen trash is nigh unbearable.

Do Not Disturb is apparently trying for an upstairs/downstairs feel, but it comes across more as above-the-waist/below-the-waist.

It's hard to enjoy characters in such dire need of a hard slapping.

If you think "SpongeBob Squarepants" would be funnier if it added a couple of hookers and a cross-dressing junkie, this is the show for you. Everybody else should take a pass.

CBS' new comedy-drama The Ex List is a descent to the most profound levels of Chick Flick Hell, where the damned and those with Y chromosomes cry out in agony through all eternity.

Kath & Kim originated in Australia, which shares the British affection for slobby class humor, but here it falls about as flat as food-court champagne.

Its essential shallowness is on display from the very start, when 11 contestants for a junior editor's job at the fashion magazine Elle are issued their first challenge: Bring the boss breakfast.

Just about everybody is having sex with everybody else: Kings is one giant raging id of a show.

On Tuesday night, we're going to see if you can get it from television, with three shows that--intentionally or otherwise--document seriously disturbed minds, with results ranging from riveting to revolting. Tending toward the latter is Mental.

Virtually everything in Accidentally on Purpose is some kind of cheap sexual crack or double entendre. The essential sweetness Elfman showed in Dharma & Greg and the later, unfortunately little-watched Courting Alex curdles into mean self-parody as she scorns her new boy-toy as an intellectual and economic inferior even as she grovels before his bedroom skills.

Sadly truncated.

Nonlinear storytelling, with so many flashbacks and flash-forwards and dream sequences that pretty soon you can't even remember the last time you saw a naked chick bobbing around the cabin. My advice: Rent Barbarella instead.

There's an unfortunate whiff of Marie Antoinette about Grammer's breezily ungrounded Hank.

Dismal and disoriented, under-plotted and over-allegorized, the six-hour Prisoner miniseries that debuts on AMC Sunday night is an exercise in full-tilt dramatic tedium that will appall anybody who remembers the original and bewilder anyone who doesn't: What was the big deal about that?

Watching this dismal intragenerational cluster of families is sort of like seeing a Roots for the cannibal gangs in The Road.

Mostly lost in the Technicolor goo of the fabulously exotic mutilations and lacerations is Miami Medical's purported dramatic theme, the psychological toll taken on doctors whose professional diet consists solely of grotesquely lethal cases.

New Zealand, however, cannot be blamed for The Gates, approximately the 1,712th American television show about vampires.

As drama, Memphis Beat is a dreary failure, a formulaic cop show distinguished only by its poor execution.

Louie is so low-key that it has no discernible pulse. To say it's unfunny is accurate (profoundly so) but also beside the point: It's un-anything.

What it does have is a sleek but shallow cast that cannot lend any weight to the lighter-than-air writing.

Turgid and plodding, Rubicon has the pace of an industrial-training film and the lucidity of a Czech art movie with the subtitles turned off. It would have to triple its pulse to rise to the level of lethargy.

Plain Jane, The CW's counterfeit ugly-duckling show, is too triflingly stupid to reach Breakthrough's profound depth of awfulness, but give it points for its abject phoniness.

Mostly I winced: at the irritatingly arch dialogue; at the hoochielicious every-other-scene dance routines; at Michalka's acting range, which seems to have just two settings--smug and self-righteous.

What Fox programmers failed to notice was that their new show was peopled entirely with unpleasant characters working from a 100-percent laugh-free script. Watching Running Wilde, you can actually feel your eyes and ears disconnecting as they go off in search of some way to amuse themselves.

Rigidly formulaic drama is almost always a bad idea, and in this case it's, well, criminal. Neither Maura Tierney as the prosecutor nor Rob Morrow as the defense attorney get enough screen time to develop their characters past the cardboard stage.

The new version, with Jonathan Sadowski as Shatner's estranged son seeking to establish a relationship, feels less like a Twitter feed and more like an actual television show--but not a good television show.

Ken Kwapis, who developed Outsourced for TV, had nothing to do with the movie. And in his hands, the film's charm has curdled into caricature. All the Indians are dysfunctional weirdos, incapable of even simple social interactions.

The aggressive fakery of School Pride makes it unfortunately difficult to believe when the show throws some unexpected punches.

The show's pea-brain sociology is eclipsed only by its Dadaesque conception of courtroom drama.

Syfy's show relies a lot more on dripping fangs and never speaks in a whisper when a bellow will do--even the simplest conversations are conducted with the neurotic intensity of a bad soap opera. Simply put, this Being Human lacks any human warmth.

Every attempt at treating a Big Idea seems sophomoric and irritating. Even in its look, the show lacks the elemental rawness necessary to throw its intellectual conflicts into sharp relief.

It's supposedly a wry look at the perils and pressures of parenthood. But really it's just a collection of tired cliches, reworked with weird grimaces and funny accents a la a really bad Saturday Night Live skit.

By the end of a couple of episodes, most viewers will be wishing Spielberg and his henchmen had spent more time on scripts and less on special effects, even if it meant splicing old outtakes of Barney and Friends into the action sequences.

With tepid performances and a lifeless script, Bag of Bones feels like more of a chore than a television viewing experience.

Where Modern Family is sweet and funny, The New Normal is cheap and hectoring.

None of them is very interesting, and it's actually kind of hard to tell them apart.

Even if you buy the premise that 2012 Nashville is a redneck hellhole barely familiar with indoor plumbing (big laugh in episode one: Reba meets her first gay person!), the show's performances and punchlines mostly fall flat.

It is relentless and ultimately meretricious in skewing history to its conceit that the United States is a murderous war machine destroying everything in its path to empire.

Carrie's antics in New York are a kind of chick version of Matthew Broderick's madcap adventures in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. But Schwartz can't cut the umbilical cord--perhaps fallopian tube is a more apt metaphor--to his original source material, and that's where The Carrie Diaries goes off the rails.

Watching Cult is like trying to read a Kafka novel in Sanskrit. When you’re blind. And drunk.

Sheen and Cryer breathe some life into this thing, but a mercy killing might have been simpler. [22 Sept 2003, p.4E]

Conceptually, this isn’t half-bad. The writing, unfortunately, is all-bad.

Humdrum.

A mess.

An absurd fairy tale.

Maybe the best way to explain UPN's new drama South Beach is to tell you that when Vanessa Williams warns a young model that ''South Beach will eat you alive,'' I fully expected the next scene to be a horde of zombie parking attendants chewing the entrails of half-naked girls in the lobby of the Delano. Cannibalism is about the only thing missing from this delirious new trashfest of hard bodies and soft brains.

Stuffed with incomprehensible medical jargon and grisly shots of exposed brains, 3 Lbs. would be a major annoyance even if it had an original thought in its seriously underweight head.

Somebody on The Wedding Bells is always saying ''We need to talk about it,'' to which the reply is invariably something like "I'm not big on dating men I've slept with.''

The show's dialogue feels scripted, its frequent hookups and breakups abrupt and phony, and its scenes from the music business out and out fraudulent.

It just substitutes South Africa for "Everwood's" Colorado, trite idiocy for "Everwood's" sharp dialogue, and a game of blind-man's-bluff for "Everwood's" casting director--actress Leah Pipes, who looks 25 and sounds 30, is the least convincing teenager since Stockard Channing staved off menopause in "Grease."

Welcome to The Captain is less a TV show than a grim ransom note from the striking Hollywood writers.

No matter how horrible the clichés or gorgeous the gowns, they can't distract from the androphobic virulence at the heart of Lipstick Jungle.

The Cho Show is the television equivalent of anti-matter: no scripts, no punch lines, just Cho hanging out with her self-consciously weird entourage. What a waste of one of the most scandalously funny comedians in America!

Testees probably shouldn't be considered part of the fall season, but let's be fair--it's as lousy as anything the broadcast nets have come up with.

Chemistry is just one of the ingredients lacking in the Canadian-made The Listener, NBC's new drama about a psychic paramedic. Others include but are not limited to plot, dialogue and acting skill.

After a few minutes in front of ABC's bewildering sorcery drama Eastwick, you may wish that Bewitched's Samantha would twitch her nose and make the whole thing disappear.

In the case of ABC's turgid legal melodrama The Deep End, you might not want to show up at all.

Basically, Suburgatory is a random collection of clichés drawn from such suburb-bashing works as Valley Girls, Stepford Wives, Clueless and Cougar Town, assembled without a scintilla of wit or human empathy.

With the pace of a music video, the characterizations of a comic book and the political-correctness quotient of a Berkeley vegetarian commune this production makes Cecil B. DeMille look like a sober theologian.

Having started with a bad premise, producers Carlton Cuse and Kerry Ehrin then made it infinitely worse by rejecting the loneliness and isolation that were the nucleus of Hitchcock’s film.

The network thinks this is razor's-edge television because the characters turn to address the audience during cut-ins. But all the bellowing is straight from The Honeymooners, the jokes from Mandingo and the dialogue... from about sixth grade.

A purported sitcom, it draws no laughs... but does manage the impressive achievement of making Stockard Channing and Henry Winkler, playing Gorham's parents, thoroughly unlikable.

CBS' crummiest imitation of CSI yet.

Tr[ies] to distract you from [its] essential awfulness by manipulating the daylights out of you.

This kind of comedy only stands a dim ghost of a chance if it has a lot of gratuitous nudity and substance abuse, along with the words ''National Lampoon'' in the title.

An exercise in moronity.

With the debut of Julia Louis-Dreyfus' show tonight, [Seinfeld] has now spawned five relentlessly unfunny and compulsively unwatchable sitcoms.

A live-action version of Beavis & Butthead, except with a cast that's considerably less life-like, Modern Men is from the Guys Are Loathsome Pigs And Chicks Must Civilize Them genre that produced Men Behaving Badly, Champs and a bunch of other unwatched and unremembered shows, of which this will soon be one.

A hollow imitation of a sitcom.

This show just isn't funny. At all. Ever. Under any circumstances.

Yet another doomed and dreadful attempt to bring improv comedy to television.

A giant bore.

As for the lack of laughs, you're just going to have to take my word for it, unless you want to risk serious brain damage.

Kelley's compulsive fascination with erratic eroticism turns everything in Swingtown into hypersexualized sleaze.

The Beast is singularly unimaginative, a collection of set-pieces barely bound together by a narrative thread, substituting attitude for substance and coyness for coherence.

To the extent this sounds interesting, it isn't: Half the dialogue seems to have been written for barking dogs, the other half for mewling kittens, and the cast performs accordingly.

The tedium and unoriginality of this new ABC sitcom, the latest entry in the vastly overworked motherhood-as-martyrdom genre, has to be seen to be believed, though my strong and sincere suggestion is that you just take my word for it.

Why anybody is paying the writers and cast of Surviving Suburbia for what is essentially an amateur-hour production is just one more of those eternal television mysteries.

Pointless, charmless and bound to be viewerless after the first half-hour or so, The Philanthropist recalls such epochal television bombs as Manimal (a scientist who could turn into a crime-fighting dolphin) or It's About Time (astronauts break the time barrier and frolick happily with cavemen) in its conceptual imbecility.

Kolchak's ridiculously precious writing is not the only thing that rings false about Night Stalker.

The WB is lying when it boasts that Pepper Dennis signifies a new television life form, the one-hour comedy. Boring, yes; witless, definitely; trashy, oh my God yes. Comedy? Dream on, guys.

Cougar Town (which doesn't debut until Wednesday, but I wanted to give you time to disconnect your TV set) is downright unwatchable, an agonizingly unfunny gutter-ball that will almost certainly be the first of the new season's shows to be canceled.

Easily the worst of the bunch--in fact, there's a good argument to be made that it's one of the most atrocious TV shows of all time--is NBC's Breakthrough with Tony Robbins.

Silly, hackneyed and suffering from a lethal overdose of Hollywood political smugness, it's the biggest lawyer joke of all.

It is uniquely stupid, profoundly stupid, an ecstatic nirvana of stupidity, a stupidity that defies all previous boundaries of time and space.

The Real Housewives Of Miami is even more egregiously fake than the average reality show, so much so that the producers haven't even bothered to remove bloopers in which cast members forget what day it's supposed to be.

Vulgarian avarice, unfortunately, is one of the high points of Shedding For The Wedding. Far more disconcerting is the number of couples who say they want to lose weight because sex between fat people is--well, let's spare the details and just say "yucky."

Stripped of the novelty and the jiggle factor--these Angels are fully equipped with functioning underwear--the remake is reduced to its essential self, which is a comic book for the slow-witted.

Funny and talented, she [Rachel Bilson] tries painfully hard to make the show work and occasionally comes close to overcoming some of the worst writing since Gutenberg invented movable type.

No show in the history of television has more relentlessly defamed the male gender as ABC's Man Up!, an alleged sitcom that debuts Tuesday and with any luck will be dead and buried, along with its producers, by Wednesday.

Allen Gregory is not funny--not even a little bit--and it is not remotely entertaining.

Partners is witless, predictable and much closer to creepy than funny.

Think Gray's Anatomy with unpretty people; then think of something else to watch.

Ben and Kate is sometimes shrill, sometimes belligerent and sometimes (well, a lot of times) merely stupid. It is never funny.

Liz & Dick alternates between imbecile fatuity (particularly in its device of intercutting scenes of a black-clad Taylor and Burton musing on their relationship like characters who've wandered in from an East German experimental film) and stupefying literalness.

It’s an insidious whitewash of a convicted killer and an infamous smear of his victim. It’s a shame on all involved.... The closest thing to fairness in Phil Spector is the blow-you-away performance by Al Pacino in the title role.

Give it credit for consistency: a bad concept, badly written for bad actors.

I'll give the show credit; it did make me think what I would ask if granted three wishes. Interestingly, all three involved the flesh of Amy Grant being devoured by rabid weasels.

An abysmally dumb plot peopled with some of the most irritating characters in the history of television.

You can practically feel the IQ points leaking out your ears as you watch.

Makes a solid bid to win the Most Unpleasant Reality Show of All Time award.

Smutty at its best, downright creepy at its worst, this dreadful attempt to mock the coming-of-age genre could well be the first TV show to get an entire day of the week canceled.

Oprah's Big Give is no mere appallingly bad television show but a refutation of human decency itself.

I'm paying a bounty of $5 per vicious blow administered to the heads of any NBC executive involved in any way with Knight Rider, which cost me an hour of my life and 50 IQ points that I'll never get back.

Staleness, however, ranks as a virtue in Sit Down, Shut Up, for the show's token stabs at topicality are truly appalling.

This truly hideous sitcom offers a postmodernist take on the 1960s comedy That Girl, in which Marlo Thomas starred as an aspiring actress afflicted with insufferable cuteness.

With tediously unfunny scripts and a listless cast that looks as if it can barely wait for the director to shout "Cut!" so it can head en masse to the unemployment office, Last Man Standing is some kind of voracious video parasite that sucks out all intellect, sense of purpose or will to live.