Welcome to ABC's V, the final, the most fascinating and bound to be the most controversial new show of the fall television season.

The Company is a gripping requiem for the Cold War and the men who fought it.

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

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

No television series has been built around a less likable character, or rendered itself so strangely, compulsively watchable as a result.

Original in concept, intelligent in execution, it's a scruffily Steinbeckian chronicle of life at the social and economic margins.

Neatly staged, with one surprise after another in a geometric progression of suspense, The Event's pilot episode leaves a lot of tantalizingly unanswered questions.

There's nothing at all subtle about the gloriously absurdist Wilfred.

If not exactly compelling, the pilot episode is engaging and often quirkily funny.

Murder and sexual predation sure look fun when they're done by pretty people in luscious gowns. Jeremy Irons is splendidly depraved as Rodrigo, and Holliday Grainger (Robin Hood) so sunnily sweet as Lucrezia that it's damn near impossible to hold a little arsenic against her.

Putting aside for a moment questions about whether it signifies the imminent collapse of Western civilization and even the human reproductive impulse, this version of Nikita can still provide a rollicking, if slightly psychotic, good time.

It flickers with longing and resentment, vulnerability and rejection, temptation and moral erosion. It is totally absorbing television. [5 Aug 2003, p.1E]

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.

Cathy's modest conception of throwing caution to the winds mirrors the strengths of The Big C, which is affecting precisely because of its refusal to assume epic proportions.

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.

Thomas Jane exudes a convincing odor of despair as Ray. So does Jane Adams as Tanya, one of his former one-night-stands who abandons her abysmally failed career as a poet to become his pimpette. If anything, they're too convincing; the humor in Hung tends to get blotted out by the melancholia.

It's a stylish, elegantly plotted tale of a young woman's sociopathic thirst for vengeance.

Beneath its estimable comic trappings, Go On is something larger: a meditation on what makes life worth living.

The show is a rampage of frequently inappropriate and always cuttingly funny jokes about sex, drugs, money and most of all the penthouse/flophouse culture clash between the two characters.

The excellent cast keeps drawing you back--especially Donald Sutherland as family patriarch Tripp Darling, whose evil glint makes even as benign a phrase as ''good morning'' sound like ''I'm going to put an ice pick through your eye.'' Even better is Krause's portrayal of Nick, layers of exasperation upon fascination upon temptation.

Bello's performance as the weather-beaten Timoney, swabbing her emotional scars with alcohol, nicotine and invective, is easily the highlight of the fall television season.

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.

This remake keeps the scenery and action--exploding cars and AK-47 gunfights appear to be to Honolulu what thieving politicians and senile I-95 motorists are to Miami--but adds some compelling post-9/11 wrinkles.

Whether Belushi is using the firm's private detectives to follow his estranged wife, or O'Connell is sleeping with the prosecutor who's trying to put his client in jail ("You really don't like me much, do you?" she asks while taking off her blouse), the show has an irresistible outlaw quality.

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.

Political Animals can be slightly murky when it comes to invoking issues and ideologies. But when it comes to the microlevel of politics, the misdirection and machinations politicians employ to satisfy their own ambitions and thwart those of others, Political Animals is peerless.

If the imitation is pale, it's also competent. And Schwartzman's wistful but inept romanticism is hard to resist.

No Ordinary Family is no comic-book kiddie show but a perceptive and engaging comedy-drama about domestic dysfunction.

Durst’s books all offer the same engaging elements that the BBC makes such excellent use of in this two-part miniseries: The claustrophobic lifeboat atmosphere of a society teetering toward its doom.

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

This peculiar comedy-drama has some cockeyed wrinkles that make it interesting.

Roth makes for a tartly witty hero, the mysteries are intricately plotted, and the show makes the most of the weird dynamics of an office where the boss can ferret out everybody's secrets.

The Bridge is pure melodrama, its villainous commanders and politicians practically twirling their mustaches as they plot their evil deeds. But if The Bridge won't expand your knowledge of urban-management science, it will keep you glued to the set.

Its raffish ethnic and class humor takes no prisoners.

The cynical and cerebral Threshold is the darkest of the three new space-alien shows, so much so that the producers seem to be wondering if the human race is even worth saving.

O'Dowd and Garai are fascinating as they make their characters grow in opposite directions--he more steely, she more compassionate--over the course of the show.

Watching him color in the lines of his own personality is fascinating. [19 Sept 2002]

With enough chemistry between its stars to power a DuPont lab and a wise use of off-the-beaten-path South Florida shooting locations -- it goes for a fetid swamp over South Beach every time -- The Glades is thoroughly enjoyable.

It's a provocative mishmash of future shock and peculiar anachronisms. [19 Sept 2002, p.E1]

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.

To say that Love Monkey is derivative and predictable is not quite the same as saying it's bad.

Cooper and Somerville... keep things moving.

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.

South Riding has everything you could want from a Masterpiece event: perfect period details, a forlornly gray surf, a swelling soundtrack, disputes over crunchy-gravel real estate, whistling trains and black-tie dinners in hotels, a believable and compelling story involving multiple characters and plots and a faithfulness to its original material that allows for a textured, even sorrowful, bleakness.

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.

Revolution is big, bold and brassy adventure, a cowboys-and-Indians story for end times.

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

True Blood is an unlikely but irresistible mixture of pungent political satire, observant pop sociology and lurid drive-in thrills.

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....

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

This tale of a lonely cop left behind by everyone--partners, friends, lovers, even the criminals he pursues--has a piercing melancholy that elevates it way above its fantasy trappings.

With dazzling action scenes and a pair of stars who ooze charm and sensuality, Undercovers easily overcomes its predictability.

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).

Sins of fathers and mothers not only visit each of the characters, but infest them; the show shimmers with an inner core of volcanic anger that makes it far more interesting than your average family soap.

That's a lot of stories to tell, and the sweeping Hell on Wheels does a good job of chopping them into bite-size pieces.

Shraeger is played with breezy, cynical wit by Amber Tamblyn (who may have her own secrets; she's looking rather more bosomy than she did a few years back as God's BFF in in "Joan of Arcadia"). And she gets capable backup from a cast that includes Adam Goldberg and Harold Perrineau.

Happily, Golden Boy not only manages a fairly original take on cop shows but actually turns out to be surprisingly intriguing.

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.

For now, Alcatraz is a sinister bag of sinister pleasures.

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

However badly you thought American race relations were going, Black. White. will make you feel worse.

Surreal and then some.

Repellent and fascinating, a stygian nightmare awash in sick lusts, it seems certain to attract large audiences and huge controversy.

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.

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.

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.

Though it's intended to be a female buddy show in which she plays off Sasha Alexander's coolly uppercrust medical examiner Maura Isles, Harmon definitely gets the upper hand--at least in the pilot episode.

Royal Pains has some moments of genuine wit--a lot more of them after Costanzo shows up.

It's hard to say which is more unlikely: That a corporate legal fang could be God's prophet; or that the Almighty would spread His word through visions of George Michael; or these matters could be blended into a daffily funny and affecting television show.

Though dazzlingly plotted and acted, the show is not easily watched.

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

Crisply written and acted, grafting some Enron-era scandal onto a morality tale that goes back to Faust, 666 Park Avenue gives good goosebump.

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

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

Like True Blood, Banshee can be preposterously entertaining, or perhaps entertainingly preposterous.

My Own Worst Enemy is by far the best drama of the fall season, a bold and brainy spy thriller that practices a sort of armed existentialism.

Welcome to The Goode Family, a scathingly funny report from the front lines of America's culture wars.

That single season will be hellacious fun. Stuffed with visual puns and sly homages to horror movies from Jaws to Poltergeist, Harper's Island relentlessly mocks film grammar with set pieces that take off in unexpected directions.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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

Chronicling the opposite relationships requires Mad Love to bounce from light romantic comedy to murderously hostile wisecracks and back again, which it accomplishes with considerable deftness. The show's quick wit is matched with a talented cast, particularly Labine.

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.

Suits is far more than a whimsical caper show. Beneath its cuttingly funny dialogue lurk complex emotional edges.

Shark works some of the same ground as Fox's new legal drama Justice, but with far more wit and style.

Intense and fascinating.

Cutler’s documentary The World According to Dick Cheney is a rousing piece of work.

At times Smith seems less like a crime drama than a character study of a collection of seriously damaged people. But the show's metabolism is enjoyably unpredictable.

Samantha Who? is not only a sitcom but a pungently funny one about self-discovery, reinvention and the possibility that beauty may be only skin-deep, but bitch goes right down to the bone.

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.

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.

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.

Poignantly funny.

Wildly uneven. [22 Sept 1994]

The CW's tale of an evil twin and an even eviler twin, is devious doppelganger drama at its best.

Padalecki and Ackles are hunky, funny and a joy to watch.