That's about where this show sits, on the rails, but with a little journey ahead to get from captain to rear admiral.

The show is ugly and fixated on death and violence. There's lots of lurid sex, too, reflected in other title images. There's also creativity and flat-out breathtaking acting to instill a voyeuristic fascination and perhaps inspire a fanatic.

Part soap opera, part horror movie, all whodunit, Harper's is diverting, and only infrequently frightening, fantasy soap opera.

In its first week, the show has acquired a more expansive, scattershot tone. It feels less rehearsed than Leno's regime, but at times, out of control.

These medical shows aren't brain surgery, but most of them are dead on arrival anyway. Three Rivers shows up at least with a healthy pulse.

The mystery makes Pretty Little Liars more entertaining than the tedium of Gossip Girls, and many parents might actually enjoy watching along with their young adults, who can explain why this sort of thing is so alluring to them.

The whole thing perks along like a Honda Civic and is just about as exciting.

If musical theater gives you goose bumps, congratulations. You just got a front-row seat. If it doesn't enthrall you, Smash will strike you as almost unbearably tedious and pretentious.

The result is distinctly forced, but a standout cast manages to put a breezy top spin on some leaden material.

The show needs some tonal and content adjustments....But Urie and Krumholtz alone make this a half hour worth watching.

Revolution had better worry about generating some voltage of its own. The pilot was excellent, but where does it go from here?

Vegas has a lot of things going for it: star power, period ambience, and a compelling Vegas central conflict. But despite all that, the show doesn't feel like it's hit the jackpot.

It's a terrific idea. But it doesn't quite measure up to its potential.

Cold Case doesn't know Philly. Too often the few authentic exteriors - Boathouse Row, for instance - give way to some generic Los Angeles location. The show itself is full of references to nonexistent places and situations. [28 Sept 2003, p.H01]

Just about everybody in this cast is superb. Maybe the production team, headed by Gary David Goldberg, who did Fox's "Family Ties" and the cuddly "Brooklyn Bridge", will fix all the first episode's flaws. Too many halfhearted gay and orgasm jokes bring to mind too many of last year's tired Friends imitators.[17 Sept 1996, p.D01]

It's a show-off show, the most impressive new series of the season, of many seasons, but it has one big deficit. Like the Tin Man, it has no heart. Maybe it will grow one, and it will certainly bear watching for a few weeks to see if it does. [22 Sept 1999, p.C01]

The supporting cast, especially Jenna Fischer as the pretty but timid receptionist ("I don't think it's many girls' dream to be a receptionist") and Rainn Wilson as an obsessive, humorless drone, helps keep the pencils sharp when boss Scott gets too unfunny in his attempts to create an easygoing office atmosphere. [24 Mar 2005, p.D01]

All this foolishness is encased in an intriguing concept.

It could use a little more dramatic meat on its predictable framework.

Partially because of its more cursory treatment of the Pope's life, the show seems less preachy and more emotional than the CBS effort, and more appropriate.

For all the predictability of its tomboy-loves-horse plotting, "Felicity" does at least serve up a WB heroine who's not about to have her head turned by some boy.

The Book of Daniel is different and ambitious enough to bear watching at least for a little while.

Without these two, 20 Good Years would be 22 bad minutes of television, but they bring so much skill to their roles, and seem to be having so much fun, you can see the comedy running, if not for 20 years, maybe four or five.

The show often goes to annoying extremes.

Nothing really wrong with Raines, but not much reason to watch, either.

The big mysteries behind the trees in Hidden Palms are also way more fun than the mud in the murky waters of Dawson's Creek. That's not a lot, but pondering the extent of evil in the bad boy, and the cause of the craziness in the gorgeous girl, not to mention why the dead kid died, is considerably more stimulating than it was years ago to put the TV on mute and gawk when Katie Holmes came on the screen.

Life Is Wild, is serenely benign considering its title, but some families should find fun in this foolishness from far away.

Samantha will battle against past unremembered sins, as the writers battle to bring their scripts up to Applegate's talents.

Lipstick Jungle isn't that bad. It's more like "awww."; Not as in "Awww, isn't it cute?" but "Awww, little Candy didn't do as well this time as everybody hoped."

Potential pours from the screen, but the premiere has plenty of problems. People seem to be uncomfortable and trying too hard, just as they do on their first day in school or on the job.

For about three hours and 40 minutes, the mini-series rockets along, an exciting pile of preposterousness with conspiratorial overtones. Then it fizzles, with stuff you've seen 1,000 times before, and irritating loose ends.

In Plain Sight may not offer the newest characters on the block, but they're diverting, and at least they can spell.

Fringe has the feel of a chemistry-lab concoction, the forced amalgam of preexisting elements. It may not be hydrogen sulfide, which gives rotten eggs their smell, but it's mediocre science.

Smart guys from the outskirts of society have been solving tough cases entertainingly at least as long as Sherlock Holmes. The Mentalist simply presents another, along with no compelling reason either to tune in or turn off.

Days after announcing the cancellation of the brilliant "Life on Mars," ABC premieres Castle, dumping an original concept, beautifully achieved, with genius casting, and picking up the most averagely entertaining series in a long time.

Sadly, as so often happens, the grandeur and surprise settle toward soapiness when the show moves into future episodes, as various high-level evildoers battle each other for power, money, and hot sex partners, while the good-hearted folk fret and risk their lives for more noble causes.

Ed and Tom may be similar, but Ed was plenty more satisfying than this Monkey business

It's slightly less entertaining than the moderately entertaining original, with a far-fetched connection that these undercover wonders somehow have something to do with the Navy, which is the "N" in NCIS, and who really cares what the "CIS" is?

Our gals will turn out to be witches, and while they are innocuously enjoyable (as well as hot), it's hard to imagine them generating enough magic to keep this show around very long.

The Cleveland Show is full of pubic-hair jokes, and if you don't think that's a laugh riot, you still might want to tune in--once--to see what the cool kids are digging these days.

This series, perhaps because there are some standards, even though it's on late and on FX, is gentler and has potential. But somebody needs to step in and tell Louis to round up a few friends and save his stand-up for the comedy specials.

As remakes usually are, Five-0 is too contrived.

After all those promos, people have the feeling they've seen the whole first episode, which they probably have.

Give ABC credit for an interesting format and a drama that isn't about doctors, lawyers, or cops, but it's hard to imagine enough viewers going for this one that any of these folks will ever make it to 30.

Maybe they'll be back for more. Maybe they'll be canceled. It's hard to imagine anyone getting mad if that happened or loving the show enough to do much about it. Maybe they should have called it Sort of Annoying Like.

There's not a current star among them, but this wacky lineup could provide the biggest and brightest series of Celeb Appren train wrecks ever. Alas, as usual, the episodes of the show, are flabbier than Meat Loaf ever was, two long hours long.

The emotional elements are a little overbaked, the spiritual aspects decidedly undercooked. But as short-term entertainment, this could fit the bill quite nicely.

An otherwise run-of-the-mill mystery with a big twist.

There isn't much suspense in the script, nor are there surprising revelations about what happened.

The opening episode is wildly uneven, at times downright irritating. But it's equally intriguing, compelling, and full of potential.

Bynes, whose career on Nickelodeon, culminating with The Amanda Show, gives her instant recognition with the desired audience, is about as established a comedian as any 16-year-old can be. [20 Sept 2002, p.D13]

Yet, for all its exciting twists, Red Widow recycles too many gangster-movie cliches.

Strangely theatrical and disappointingly hollow. [29 Sept 2002, p.H03]

Confidential is a comedy hash - lots of heat, little taste.

If Wolf can keep his randy prosecutors focused on their work, he might have another modest success, but it doesn't look promising.

In the pilot tonight, one of the clues has nothing to do with the murder, and that hardly seems fair, though "fair" in another sense might be the best way to describe The Evidence. Unless you want to go for "poor."

There's tons of trouble in Jericho, and that starts with T and that rhymes with D and that stands for dumb. Not flat-footedly, spectacularly dumb, just a little bit too dumb to live up to its premise.

We've seen this before. TBS even goes to great lengths to demonstrate how much it resembles Sex and the City. Except not nearly enough.

Only two members of the core cast appear even slightly interesting.

The twist ending of the first episode just might persuade remaining viewers to stick around for hour No. 2.

You have to admire Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton for holding up their end of the bargain, even if the material in their show, Back to You, is such a drop from "Frasier" and "Everybody Loves Raymond"

It seems more a collection of cliches than the revered semiautobiographical work of the first black woman playwright to land on Broadway, a woman whose father fought a restrictive racial covenant all the way to the Supreme Court to keep his family's home in a white Chicago neighborhood in the '30s.

All the characters appear to have emerged from the stockroom.

Their recently divorced characters have all the stereotypical sitcom tsuris, plus she's engaged to their marriage counselor--ho, ho--who turns out to be Ed Begley Jr., who actually is a little funny. As is Ryan Malgarini, who plays Gary's son, who at 14 is more confused about females than his dad. He's the best part of the show.

There is a twinge of fun every now and then in Kath & Kim, even if most critics are so apoplectic at its crass stupidity they can barely write a sentence.

My Own Worst Enemy's worst enemy is all the murky mumbo-jumbo mechanics the writers have introduced to support their stupid split-personality thesis.

Hip TV heads may see strains of "Andy Richter Controls the Universe," a 2002-03 workplace quirk-a-thon that was seriously more amusing because its absurdity sprang from its central character's vivid fantasy life, not from a reviled institution.

On Parenthood, a top-notch cast of veteran actors struggles to wrestle a mountain of cliches into submission.

In the early going, it's tough to tell what, if anything, motivates the main character in Rubicon. There may be fine rewards as the journey progresses, but it will take a special sort of viewer to stick with Rubicon's amblings and get to them.

It delivers only a couple of brown bears and virtually no entertainment, but plenty of Palin, Palin, and more Palin.

CBS's new spy spoof, CHAOS, which premieres Friday at 8 p.m., starts out in the hole by knocking the amiable and amusing "The Defenders" off the schedule, and it never crawls out all the way. At least, it's something different, unless you count a show that was on 47 years ago, or a lot of the ones on USA.

Except for Tom Wilkinson, who's extraordinary as Joe, most of the actors, especially poor Katie Holmes, even if she at least looks like Jackie Kennedy, seem like furniture, too.

I'm not saying the copycat comedy of The Paul Reiser Show isn't funny, but it doesn't compare favorably to the cracked originality of Community or 30 Rock.

The show lacks important elements that have been available to storytellers for 2,000 years, most notably compelling character development.

Pauly comes across as a genuinely nice guy--open, loyal and genial. The question is why would you want to take time out of your life to watch his?

It would have been better served by focusing on the first word in its title, not the second.

The most disappointing new show of the TV season...SVU helps you appreciate the "order" part of Law & Order. Though it will have the same crazy-quilt plot twists, this one's straight police work and seems a little drawn-out, not nearly as richly satisfying as a puzzler as its progenitor.

Greetings From Tucson tones things down a lot between its first episode, which airs tonight, and its second episode next Friday. Tonight, everybody just screams jokes at each other, but next week we learn that the people in the family - Mexican American, Irish American and half-and-half - might actually have some real emotions. [20 Sept 2002, p.D13]

Don't get this show mixed up with anything important on TV, though you may find it enjoyably diverting, if you can forgive the immorality of its premiere episode. I can't. [23 Sept 2003, p.C09]

It suffers from hyperbole-exhaustion. Piven's performance is too broad. One wishes Ira would show up and give Harry a slap.

Just about everything that you would expect - money squandering, dope smoking, cruising, partying, practical jokes, petty jealousies, dim-bulb decisions, and talent-agent ire - is played out flatly in Entourage...There are few jokes and little action, but the show looks rich.[17 July 2004, p.E01]

The writing is clever and crisp at times, but there's little chemistry among the actors. And the premise is contrived and confining.

Without being paid to watch, this mean old critic wouldn't have left it on five minutes, but, in the confessional spirit that permeates this show, has to admit to an occasional welling of the tear ducts.

It's worth the effort, at least for a little while, to watch Burnett, at 72, fume and foam in her fantastic Bob Mackie costumes. But Ullman has almost no panache in the princess role, and Smothers, silenced by a curse for 99 percent of the program, doesn't rise above a cute cartoon.

A genius idea so diluted by imitation that it becomes hard to watch.

[Its] intolerable length helps to illuminate the cynicism of these competition shows.

[A] silly new soap.

The better of the first pair [of soaps].

Maybe they'll play up all the complicated marital undercurrents in future episodes, but given the emptiness of Bobby's character, it's hard to imagine that anybody would care.

Standard high school sports soap opera.

Germann [is] the only good thing in the show.

I'm already committed to Prison Break. One cockamamy chase show is all my unaddled brain can handle.

All Greek offers is a predictable teenage soap opera set amongst the pretty people of fraternity row.

There's no intrigue, no entertainment, and the show's motion, when there is any, is so s-l-o-w, it's virtually undetectable.

Filmed in New Orleans, the show does have an authentic look, but as a cop drama, it's so hackneyed and ham-handed, it's not even funny.

The next time McKidd hits the time warp, he should take his producers with him. Maybe they'd bring back a better show.

The whole place could use more lights so you could see what was going on.

It's hardly bloodcurdling adventure, but it doesn't bite.

It's not the worst thing you've ever seen, innocuous entertainment (despite the inoculation controversy) that, like Boston Legal, includes the occasional entertaining musical number.

Viewers should figure out pretty quickly that manure is the main ingredient here, and though it might help the corn crop grow high, it's unlikely to do much to boost ratings at the struggling CW network.

It's ugly and bloated, too, bringing back memories of tawdry times, tasteless fashion and terrible music.

Cupid seeks to lure thirtyish women, prized by advertisers, by reviving a supposedly romantic old show that, besides being poorly scheduled, was sappy and annoying, too. This time around, at least they've got the schedule fixed.

Appalling or phony--one conclusion must be true, and either one underscores the fundamental question about these Real Housewives shows: Why would anyone want to watch them?

Accidentally's supposedly based on somebody's memoir, but it's as smarmy and contrived as the worst of them.

Individually and as a team, Townsend and Union exhibit less chemistry than a third-grade science set.

Parks and Recreation emerges a miscast mess.

Williamson also wrote the "Scream" trilogy, but there's neither humor nor horror here, unless you count some of the acting and casting.

Laughable plot, wooden dialogue, cutout characters; stupid title appendage to make it more textable; usual cynical CW glorification of teen sexuality and substance abuse; mediocre acting.

In a bad sitcom, everybody dies, as the laugh track gets louder and louder, and Hank, though it isn't a horror, has that loud laugh track and the slight, familiar scent of death.

Cable's FX, which has reliably churned out good watching for most of this decade, drives off a cliff tonight with an offensive and shockingly unfunny sitcom, The League.

TV needs a lot of fodder to fill the schedule, but junk like Outlaw should be outlawed, with a special-circumstances punishment for completely wasting as fine a talent as Jimmy Smits.

It seems to have an awful lot in common with a group of shows that never [found themselves], the generic and unfunny fodder that NBC threw up between its popular comedies back when it ruled Thursday nights with Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier, and Will and Grace.

Whether it's the unfunny, raunchy jokes, the acting, the writing, or the awful blocking, nothing in Sullivan & Son seems to jell. And no laugh track can change that.

If you haven't yet put your affairs in order, this would be a propitious time to do so. The world as we know it is about to end. How do I know? Because Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

Malibu Country, because of flabby writing, is decidedly less than the sum of its parts. It plays like a distressingly formulaic Disney Channel comedy.

The film attempts to frame the couple as the harbingers of modern fame, but its ambitions are steamrolled by the impatience of a rushed chronological plot.

The Amish Mafia may sound oxymoronic, but as a TV show, it's strictly moronic.

It could use a trip to the O.R. to remove some formulaic stories, and a visit to the clinic for an injection of originality. [27 March 2005, p.H03]

A disappointingly forced effort from Joss Whedon...the show lacks any trace of the humor and subtlety that makes Buffy so much fun. [20 Sept 2002, p.D13]

An annoying voice constantly explains what he is thinking, things like "What am I?" "Where did I come from?" Surprisingly, he never asks, "What am I doing on this stupid show?" [20 Sept 2002, p.D13]

There's no character work here, no interesting reinterpretations of a classic text, no inspired acting. Just cardboard characters surrounded by CGI frippery.

Not only will reality-show fans be disappointed, so will anybody looking for a little humanity sprinkled in with the enormous overdose of pretentious claptrap. [16 Nov 2004, p.F1]

Felicity is phony. It presents a fantasy world, pretending it's real. A lot of people criticize Ally McBeal for the same thing, but there's a big difference. The people in their 20s who would take life cues from Ally should be old enough to know better. The people, many not even teenagers yet, who will be learning from Felicity may not be...Actually, there are two big differences. Ally McBeal is entertaining. [29 Sept 1998, p.F1]

Farmiga and Highmore give solid performances as Norma and Norman Bates. But they're working with inferior material.

Over-boiled, over-violent, and overly abundant with sex scenes, Rogue is sure to click with hardcore cop-thriller fans who care less about plotting and characterization than the bang . . . bang . . . bang.

Simplistic and shamelessly manipulative.

It's ABC's idea of good, clean fun. Sad that it's the best idea the network could have.

All sorts of things in In Justice... don't make sense.

Elfman and Coleman do their best to inject some fun into the same old stuff.

[Episode 2's] Jenna, we learn, has basically been drunk since January, which is probably a pretty good condition for anyone who wants to get real laughs out of The Loop.

So much of the dialogue is just dull explanation, and so much of the action rehashes events that are already known. Worse, sometimes, it repeats itself.

Astute observers may find no coincidence that it mimics the American soap The Bold and the Beautiful.

Despite oodles of cool effects, it lands, splat, in a pile of nonsense and dim dialogue.

There's no laugh track, so maybe it's all supposed to be sophisticated and delightfully risque. But nobody will be mistaking Rushfield and Konner for Noel Coward or Oscar Wilde.

The network may have a new name, but it's presenting the same old desperate, low-budget foolishness.

3 Lbs. is the most boring new show this season.

You can only hope that Blitt, a first-time executive producer, will tire of middle-school humor and move to something a little more satisfying for grown-ups.

Gossip Girl is a bad mix of the popular book series by Cecily von Ziegesar and the production talents of Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, who made "The O.C."

Executive producer Craig Wright sent a second episode out to critics "to give you an idea of where we're going," he said. The wrong direction, sadly, even after a disappointing pilot. I turned it off when the naked guy and girl in the bed started making big-banana jokes.

Well, a lot of thought and money goes into advertising, and basing a show on characters that emerged from that effort and expense is no more bogus on its face than making up ridiculous excuses for human beings out of thin air, like the men in Carpoolers.

The Farrellys finish in second place [of having the dumbest show this Sunday], directing a sitcom, Unhitched (Sunday 9:30 p.m., Fox 29), about four clowns who struggle stupidly with their newly single status.

The show is so bad, it might be gone anyway, quickly canceled as ABC scrambles to recover from an 0-for-2 comedy start on its new spring schedule.

It's amazing there's no orthopedist, since the show's so lame.

Cougar Town, a title that the capable executive producer, Bill Lawrence, acknowledges might turn some people off. He needn't worry. The show itself has more than enough power to do that.

The sooner this kind of programming goes down the drain, the sooner we'll have a chance to see more original, entertaining, and far less disgusting series, like Blue Bloods and The Defenders.

The title could have many meanings, but primarily it refers to the people, all 27 of them, who might find something to like in this misfit buddy-lawyer dramedy.

There's nothing inviting about the ponderous Threshold. Portentous music plays. Scared smart guys, rounded up by the government to figure out what's really happening, say smart-guy stupid stuff.

One of the lead characters is an evolutionary biologist, which makes sense, since there's not a lot of intelligent design here.

Stunningly flat.

Interesting and exciting only when no one's saying anything, which isn't very often.

Dim-bulb junk.

Not only do you get insufferable comedy, but phony drama, too.

Everything's so shrill and flat, it's hard to tell when the writing stops and the improvisation begins.

One of the most flat-footed sitcoms of the year.

Now, you may be saying, "There he goes again, that elitist toad." But believe me, even Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Bill O'Reilly would think this show was stupid.

The 1/2 Hour News Hour is slow torture all by itself.

[It] can pack more cliches into 10 minutes than bad old WB dramas had in an hour.

I could make more fun of Life, but it probably wouldn't be too good for my karma.

There's nothing funny about tonight's Big Shots.

It's pretty easy to qualify as worst series of the year when the year is less than a week old, but ABC's yucky Cashmere Mafia sets the limbo bar so low, only the slackest skeevy show could slither under it before the ball next drops Dec. 31.

It's doubtful that Oprah's Big Give would have ever made it to the air without Oprah, but (Wrong No. 1) don't go expecting the diva of the heartstrings to be hosting this exploitative (Wrong No. 2) jumble (Wrong No. 3). She turns up now and then, to cheerlead and oversell (Wrong No. 4), but the real host (Wrong No. 5) is one of her minions, Nate Berkus. More wrongs to come, but you'll have to keep track for yourself.

The laughless Secret Diary is billed as a comedy, but it is hardly amusing to follow the spoiled, immoral and lazy Belle as she slinks around London doing this and that with and to a lineup of wealthy men.

Knight Rider, a remake that stays true to the awfulness of the original. It's so bad it's good, in a bad way.

There isn't a shred of fun in this tale of a curmudgeonly grandpa and his unappealing adult children. Its only redeeming quality could prove to be that it persuades clueless executives, desperate to "monetize" social-network technology, never to try to marry TV and Twitter again.

A made-for-TV movie that's terrible even by the low standards of Lifetime.