The new season has a few moments, mostly involving the return from the dead of Jack's old CTU colleague Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard), who now seems to be working for the bad guys. But all the attempts by Jack and his writers to justify every past decision often brings the action to a crawl.

Maybe McBride has more pitches in his arsenal than he's shown so far, but the repertoire on display in Eastbound & Down feels too limited for a long stint on HBO's mound.

The disappointing new project from "Arrested Development" creator Mitchell Hurwitz is mainly a reminder of how much the "Arrested" cast--several of whom provide voice work here--added to that show.

Mental was produced on a relative shoestring by Fox Telecolombia, and there's a flatness not only to the sets (which look not unlike what you might see on a Univision show), but the dialogue and characterizations.

Addison isn't very strong or decisive in her professional capacity either, spending most of the pilot waffling on whether she should have left Seattle Grace.

Melrose does a better job integrating its two casts, and it embraces what it is: a trashy remake of one of the most memorably trashy hits in primetime history. It's still not good, mind you, but it's more honest and enthusiastic about its badness, you know?

The one moment people will talk about, and remember, from The Jay Leno Show debut was one of the least comic of Jay's career. It's going to get NBC some water cooler talk, and a lot of website hits, but it's not going to work as a signature "This is why Jay is awesome" clip like I think they were hoping.

Most of the humor feels like a show that’s trying too hard, except when we’re watching the great-yet-tiny character actress Linda Hunt as the boss of NCIS’s Los Angeles field office.

The material is so inherently dramatic that there are occasional moments where Three Rivers is affecting despite itself. But it's also a danger sign that one of the premiere episode's story lines has absolutely nothing to do with a patient in need of an organ.

McKellen, and the production design, and some smart use of Brian Wilson songs on the soundtrack (The Beach Boys' "I Know There's an Answer" is the miniseries' cheeky final tune) weren't enough to overcome my need for coherence.

Basically, The Deep End is "Grey's Anatomy" with lawyers, and the execution is as cynical and flat as that premise sounds.

The show is so self-conscious of everything it’s doing that nothing has quite the effect its creators want it to have.

Basically, [the lead character is] a collection of every stereotypical romantic comedy and chick-lit trait, made especially annoying by Heche.

A gimmick in search of a show.

"Runaway" is like a Frankenstein's monster stitched together from pieces of dead shows from both networks.

Who wants to watch a less funny, vaguely cuddlier House impersonator?

Having two nearly identical, equally mediocre sitcoms on the air at the same time isn't exactly a crime, but it seems an awful waste of someone's time and energy.

It abandons all of Kelley's strengths, like the legal setting and male bonding, and drowns itself in his weaknesses: women discussing their feelings, women flirting with men, women acting body-conscious... basically, anything involving the female gender.

The hallucinatory gimmick can only do so much for the same old stories.

It is every organ transplant storyline you've ever seen before on "ER" or "Chicago Hope" or elsewhere, told in the most unimaginative fashion possible, acted out by a competent group of actors not given much to play.

They've assembled a cast suffering a major charisma deficit and given them wooden, cliche-riddled dialogue to deliver.

It at times seems like a pornographic parody of "The X-Files."

All the gunplay, pedal-to-the-metal action and cartoon villains cheapen any serious talk of what's going on in the city.

Journeyman doesn't do anything especially interesting with its time-twisting premise. It's competently produced, but unless you have a tremendous amount of affection for McKidd left over from his work as the insane Lucius Vorenus on HBO's "Rome," it's skippable.

A lame new sitcom.

Jamie is our heroine, the one we're supposed to like and care about, but as played by British actress Ryan ("EastEnders," "Jekyll"), she's a mopey blank, badly upstaged every time Sackhoff makes one of her all-too-brief appearances as Corvus.

The show inspires nothing but my apathy.

What the obnoxious "Cashmere Mafia" and now the dull Lipstick Jungle suggest is that it's not as easy to recreate the "Sex and the City" phenomenon as assembling three or four attractive actresses of a certain age and pairing them with a name producer from the HBO show.

It's a very special, frustrating kind of bad, one with the power to actually change history.

Despite its silly trappings, Farmer Wants a Wife is neither appalling nor unintentionally funny enough to merit sitting through yet another contrived dating show where the biggest prize would be for someone, anyone, to escape with a bit of their dignity intact.

If you've watched ABC at all this summer, you've essentially seen all Wipeout has to offer: people of various shapes, sizes and ages all falling face-first into the mud while trying to complete an obstacle course that's been designed to be all but impossible to finish unscathed.

It's not just familiar, but lazy.

Regardless of how promiscuous its obnoxious hero is, Californication remains a smug, unpleasant ego trip to nowhere.

The concept and the characters start to wear thin within an episode or two.

Kath & Kim writers, meanwhile, seem to have nothing but contempt for their heroines. Kim is willfully ignorant, rude and obnoxious in a fashion that has no redeeming qualities, and Kath is mainly an unhappy blank who lets her daughter walk all over her.

There isn't a series here; just the pitch meeting for a very expensive, very loud, very dopey action movie.

Jenna Elfman (who plays a newspaper movie critic who gets pregnant after a one-night stand with the young guy on the left, played by Jon Foster) seemed like a loose, natural comedienne, but she's trying way too hard to sell the jokes here-possibly because she knows no one's going to buy them without a whole lot of help.

By the third episode, though, we've gone off the rails with another low-level blackmailer somehow getting over on an employee at the supposedly powerful and secretive CTU, and with Jack getting caught up in a plot-delaying detour that's even dumber than the survivalist who held Kim hostage for a few episodes in season two.

If you want a show with engaging characters and drama, and not just a public service announcement about the very real value of our country's nurses, then Hawthorne fails to deliver.

The show (which is shot on the old Stars Hollow set from "Gilmore Girls") seems like a WB show circa 2002--not one of the good ones, but a copy of a copy of a copy of one of the good ones.

Mercy isn't just derivative; it's stridently, obnoxiously derivative.

Brothers is not anything you might classify as "good."

It’s lazy, predictable and spectacularly tone-deaf.

If you're going to do a show about fantasy football, then do it. Go big, or go home. As constructed, The League will leave no one happy.

If you're a teenage boy who loved "300"--or any other demographic who loved "300"--you may well dig all the digitized, slow-motion blood splurts, the abundant nudity (albeit with some of the full frontal coming from male characters as well as female) and the stylized, computer-generated backgrounds. But stay far away if none of those things make you say "Hells yeah!"

If it weren't for [Lithgow's] shameless bellowing, "20 Good Years" would be excruciating, instead of the (very) occasionally amusing hackfest it's turned out to be.

There's a desperation to the whole affair, a sense that if the creators just keep the pace fast and the jokes tasteless, everything will be fine.

All of the characters speak in the same exposition-heavy voice; their individual quirks... are too calculated to be interesting; and the soundtrack is both too on-the-nose... and, for the most part, 10-15 years too old for the characters.

There’s nothing especially novel or insightful, let alone funny, about the show’s take on impending parenthood.

Pick your adjective--Predictable. Insufferable. Detestable. Tacky. --and it fits.

Painful, pointless, obnoxious... I would almost rather have The Jay Leno Show back.

Can someone please wake up Charlie Sheen? I know he's tried to build an entire career, Dean Martin-style, on half-lidded apathy, but as one-third of the new CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men, he's practically comatose. [22 Sept 2003, p.T35]

Larry, Henry and virtually every person to walk through "Happy Hour" are broad, obnoxious, lame caricatures, even by the standards of Fox's laughtracked sitcoms.

"Desire" will make you ashamed -- of society at large, if not yourself --whether you like it (chances: minimal) or not (chances: off the charts).

It's the first outright catastrophe of FX's post-"The Shield" era.

Big Shots, an obnoxious waste of time that's likely the season's worst new show.

The issue I have with the rape-by-orangutan scene in Unhitched is that it's not funny, nor does it even seem to be trying to be funny. It's lazy comedy, substituting shock value for wit and invention, and it typifies everything that follows on this lame excuse for a sitcom.

The real problem with the new Knight Rider, though, isn't that it's stupid (again, it's a show about a guy and his talking car) or that Bruening's terrible (the Hoff would be the first to say he's no master thespian). It's that it's a show whose time has long passed.