HBO's drama Cinema Verite is a searing and irresistible look at the making of An American Family and an incisive dissection of the mendacity of what we so absurdly call reality TV.

Miller and Liu, simultaneously irritating and charming each other, make Elementary far more watchable than anybody could have expected.

Arrow has a rather stylish neo-Goth look, and Stephen Amell (who played a dim-bulb gigolo in Hung) neatly balances his portrayal of Arrow between camp and Saturday-matinee ingenuousness.

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

It's only when the action (and the torrential cross-cutting) slows that you start getting to know some of the capable cast....And it's only when the characters begin revealing what they saw while unconscious that FlashForward turns interesting as it examines the interconnectivity of the human experience.

Hit & Miss, once you get past the successive bombshells of its opening minutes, is a painful yet endearing drama about trying to build a family in a landscape blighted by loneliness and rejection.

Invasion is an excellent show, the new season's best drama.

Fox's return to prime-time TV finds him hitting his mark...What's more, the actor is surrounded by a likable cast. [17 Sept 1996, p.1C]

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.

Until watching The Middle, I would have said it was time the sitcom concept of the madcap mom trying to balance kiddies and career got a decent burial, complete with a stake through the heart. But Heaton and producers Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline give the idea new life.

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

In Californication, [Duchovny] gets to take full advantage of his low-key comic approach, and the result is irresistible. The rest of the cast matches him riff for riff, especially British actress Natascha McElhone as the disenchanted Karen and young Madeleine Martin as their 12-year-old daughter Becca.

A potent brew of family melodrama, crime-thriller tension and conspiratorial intrigue, Blue Bloods may actually bring some viewers back onto the sinking ship of Friday-night television.

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.

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.

This unsettling documentary series on the cable WE network, which follows a dozen Kansas City girls through four years in their suburban high school, suggests we've come a long, hard way from "Grease."

If the genre is no longer groundbreaking, it's still compelling in skilled hands.

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.

Torchwood: Miracle Day is smashing entertainment.

Funny and intriguing.

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.

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

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.

Lovably silly.

The scenes of the guys driving golf balls onto the roofs of Hollywood mansions or scamming stereo dealers are funny and even sweet in a post-adolescent Porky's sort of way. [18 July 2004, p.5M]

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

Sons of Anarchy is bloody, disturbing and maniacally addictive.

No fictional conceit can possibly match the darkness of the Manson family. But Durham County, a series about a cop's growing realization that his bland suburban neighborhood may house a serial killer, is genuinely creepy.