The mix of appealing nerds and lack of truly grating nerds is calculated for viewers' comfort, but the first episode is decidedly bland, too. Viewers looking for a new take on the reality competition genre won't find it here.

The problem is that the story in between the songs is still inconsistent and muddled.

If Community has been an underappreciated gem for the past three years, its fourth season premiere is sadly lackluster. But if the Dean’s episode-ending prediction isn’t entirely convincing, it could be that Guarascio and Port just need more time.

Zero Hour‘s first episode ends on one hell of a promising cliffhanger, including a shock that comes out of nowhere but still makes sense. If director Pierre Morel can ask for a few more takes (occasional scenes feel like actors are still rehearsing) and if the script turns as strange as that episode-ending shock suggests it might, Zero Hour may actually be more new than recycled.

It is often funny, but it could be funnier if it were wed to more coherent storytelling.

Bates Motel isn’t Hitchcock, and doesn’t try to be. But the show does make intelligent use of what you already know about Norma and Norman in their efforts to “start over.”

If the plot is thin, the show does offer other pleasures, including the actors’ improv skills, revealed in subtle and hilarious flashes of genius.

Instead of wink-winking at the audience about its own cleverness, The Goodwin Games mostly keeps things moving along at a snappy pace, with jokes as well. When the show gets too pleased with its own eccentricity, though, it becomes grating.

For every step forward (intricate plotting, Wentworth's engaging lead performance), the show also manages to stumble back (rote subplots, incessant lame dialogue as exposition).

If the first offering, "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road," is any indication, the hoped-for resurrection of in-your-face frights is still a couple of corpses away.

Tell Me You Love Me begins within confines, its white, middle class, straight couples all dealing with versions of the same problem. That this focus might be "real" is not the question. More troubling, for a series banking on its newness, is that the focus is so familiar.

Kid Nation does not mean to find out whether kids can do what adults could not. It means instead to demonstrate that these kids really would die without the intervention of adults.

Once freed from the scaffolding and backstory constraints of a series premiere, Journeyman may find itself.

With a winning lead player and supporting cast, plus an interesting premise, Moonlight has potential.

The series has laid groundwork for minor and mostly predictable complications.

This is dicey subject matter (especially for those viewers who have struggled to become pregnant or know someone who has), and at times the tone seems blasé, even offensive.

A little tedious for the rest of us, who have seen such exploration before.

Flashpoint works through the distress and damage it lays out here, it gets points for beginning with the difficulty, not with the triumph. Now, if it can just figure a way beyond the scary perp clichés.

While the particulars of these cases are not uninteresting, they are mostly lost amid the swirl of Jerry and Michelle’s careening between romance and competition, betrayal and “crossing the line.”

For the most part, 90210 seems unsure what to do with the Gen-X demographic, fitting in an awkward assortment of teachers, guidance counselors, and big sisters alongside the kid stars.

That the pilot fails to provide a foundation for the show’s future direction does not bode well. The only thing that is clear is how much the Claytons dislike Sam.

Patrick dramatizes his sense of superiority, intimidating and irritating just about anyone who comes in contact with him....The Mentalist does offer its own charms, chief among them Baker’s low-key, apparently complicated sarcasm.

Hood’s methods are unconventional, Eleventh Hour insists, but still, he’s strangely bland.

For its part, House of Saddam provides little insight into Saddam Hussein. Instead, it repeats truisms about well-reported events, many of them best remembered as TV images.

Cavanagh and McCormack bring what you know they will--an effective mix of fast talk and easy delivery to pitch the partners’ situations, which range from silly to predictable.

This sort of banter takes up a good portion of the Castle premiere episode, each instance of it reinforcing the always-already familiar premise.

The series doesn’t mean to dig deeply into contemporary African social problems or politics, instead, it offers up middlebrow mysteries that can be solved in an episode’s time, a heroine who is keenly observant and positively feminine, a vague sort of half-step forward from Nancy Drew or Jessica Fletcher.

All this tightly plotted baby nonsense doesn’t feel at all urgent, because, true to form, Nancy’s playing several angles at once, each with its own possibly lethal consequences.

This commentary on the emptiness of all-consuming family life might fare better were it not brimming with one suburban cliche after another. These cliches don’t indicate Dexter’s discomfort with the banality of his new environment. Instead, they’re just boring.

Despite these obvious missteps and in between the blatant attempts to appease original fans, Night Stalker shows promise.

Lie to Me offers well-designed (and repeatedly, very white) interiors, utterly formulaic scripting, and familiar characters.

To ensure you understand the magnitude of all this emotional mayhem, Maddux helpfully narrates in generically navel-gazing voiceover.

How interested will viewers be in its fictional scandals when real life offers much more sensational examples of bad behavior?

Even as this plot pattern bodes ill, Margulies and Panjabi make a formidable team.

Unlike crime dramas, when the body is usually cleanly dead, by its very nature Three Rivers lingers on the processes of death and near-death at both ends of the story. Just how many poignant farewells can an audience take?

The bar is set reasonably low for police procedurals and there is no reason to think that Memphis Beat can't clear it eventually. However, to "save" Memphis, maybe what the show needs is to let loose and have a little bit of fun.

While Hung has its stage set to see some of these types of stories play out, scene after scene positions Ray as a cipher for other characters.

The reason we might stick around is Audrey Parker. She also provides an alternative to the usual dark mystery associated with Stephen King's work.

More often, the show is a show: the camera cranes out to show Cathy's loneliness, the half-hour closes with a bittersweet pop song or the point is made too obviously ("Cancer's not a passport to a better life, cancer's the reason I'm not gonna have a life"). Still, the show does illustrate a useful idea, that what you think is "normal" is only that, what you think.

Like so many plot turns in Outlaw, this one is too convenient, too silly, and not a little audacious. It helps that the show knows it.

Unfortunately, the best bits of the premiere were the flashbacks to the finale, though their impact was watered down considerably in the context of an action-less storyline, filled with Grey's usual rambling pontifications.

The show has been notoriously slow in setting up the plot everyone knows already. While the pokey details have included the protracted not-quite-romance between Erica and Father Jack (Joel Gretsch) and the precise loyalties of black-ops and terrorism expert Hobbes (Charles Mesure), the new year brings at least a veneer of urgency.

As much as they have at stake, neither Vince nor Dana is as much fun to watch as Max. Master of the arched eyebrow and the sly grin, Max is better than a circus act.

A joint effort between Showtime and the BBC, it features British humor and American humor. These don't always play nice together, and Episodes appears unsure of how to make them merge or which to privilege.

They've done very funny work in other shows and movies, from Scrubs to Saving Silverman to 13 Going on 30. If the show would deemphasize its already tired premise, it might be another decent comedy about four quirky friends in the city

You might be thankful that Sam has explained his job, with so many un-blocked metaphors, if you've never seen a show like Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior before. But because you've seen too many shows like this and too many teams like his, you're unimpressed. You're already too many steps ahead.

As of one episode, it's decently entertaining, though its sharp writing suggests potential. It's earned my interest for at least a couple of more episodes.

The only thing connecting how Franklin and Bash act inside and outside the courtroom is a general willingness to wing it and hope for the best. But they're not as charming as the show thinks they are, and their triumphs don't seem so great.

At times Outcasts degenerates into space melodrama, complete with teens regularly pissed off at their parents. The human community works through corruption, lust for power, and betrayal, but also shows love, dedication, and sacrifice.

As her professional relationship with Little develops, he clearly becomes the kind father she's been missing. And then there's that fiance at the premiere, never mentioned by name or appearing at any other point in the film, as if to suggest that with a proper male partner, Rowling's success is really complete.

Despite some obvious faults, Strike Back is a decent enough action yarn with slick production values. At the same time, though, the series is more concerned with gratuitous nudity--this is Cinemax, after all, so each episode includes a lifetime's worth of breasts and butt cheeks-than creating a story with any substance, character, or emotional weight.

Freddie's stereotypically hard-hitting reporter's persona is soon tiring and irksome. Still, Freddie isn't so tedious as the show's "villains."

When one cuts through its mix of slight pleasures and leaden annoyances, it's apparent that Dinosaur Revolution is not revolutionary in form or content, and moreover, that its melding of entertainment with science ends up disfiguring both.

Unfortunately, The Secret Circle's first episode doesn't offer much beyond all this plotty set-up. Specifically, it's missing what made other supernatural shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Supernatural successful: funny, quirky, and layered characters.

It seems a missed opportunity: the premise of the spoiled rich kid and the sassy poor kid forced to team up is an old story that often works. But both Caroline and Max come across as prep school students who are slumming.

Parts of the show seem archaic, more Life on Mars than life in a 21st century police department. Other parts seem careless bricolage.

Here everyone, even Bosley, seems interchangeable.

Like so many crime novel adaptations, Case Histories leaves the audience with a faint echo of a delightful original, oozing with talent, budget, and location shooting, and almost bereft of compelling content.

The writers need to differentiate how Allen Gregory relates to Jeremy from how he relates to Julie. If the show had Allen Gregory treat Jeremy and Julie differently, there'd be more opportunity for a wider variety of jokes, including some that don't involve yelling.

These cases don't come together so much as they suggest a formula.

With the subtlety of a sledgehammer, the show right away telegraphs that there is more to Kaan than meets the eye, that he's not just a con. We're just not inclined to believe him.

Napoleon Dynamite the series forms its comedic syntax in the vernacular of those established shows [The Simpsons, Family Guy] instead of retaining the singular phrasing of Napoleon Dynamite the movie, and suffers as a result.

Based on the first two episodes, Alcatraz is a middling show.

Despite pacy editing, superb action choreography, and location shooting across Europe, the whole turns out to be yet another re-run of that updated Western, 24, which pits an arrogant outlaw protagonist against friend and foe alike.

The show's historical bread-and-butter is accompanied by a thin dramatic gruel, for the most part.

Like The Closer, Major Crimes offers utterly predictable crime-solving.

If Go On isn't breaking new ground, it does manage to find humor, even among the most dour of premises.

Save for Sheila, the parents are likable and their circumstances familiar, but Guys with Kids relies too often on predictable jokes.

It just needs sharper writing, and the supporting cast needs to be developed. While Kaling and Messina are charming and work well together, the rest of the show needs to catch up.

Unfortunately, the pilot doesn't suggest that there is anything more interesting at work here than a weak attempt to wring laughs out of aliens who are buffoons.

All that said, 666 Park Avenue is diverting enough, if hardly original.

Though she performs a heartfelt song about her mixed emotions, the implication being that Bobby's songs are lies and hers tell truth, the episode's ongoing comedy bits don't support this distinction.

Intra-team melodrama doesn't distract from the film's focus so much as it illustrates it: again and again, the boys declare their need for payback.

Cole is good and Price is evil. And neither one of them is remotely interesting.

Had Keenan and Lloyd devoted more time to providing their characters with depth and less to flinging insults, viewers might have developed empathy for them and better understood why they feel such aggression toward one another.

Hopper [is] so misfitted for this role that he seems perversely perfect.

Anyone who learned politics from The West Wing will feel adrift in Commander in Chief's vacuum. Where are the polls, the clamoring press? We get little proof that the nation President Allen governs even exists.

Conviction is an awkward show.

Despite some promising moments in the first few episodes, the show seems destined for the same fate as Ellie.

The series proceeds to follow Jenny’s remarkably bland course of revelation.

If you strip away the designer shoes and drinks, the show is left with all the hallmarks of a typical teen melodrama.

Other shows do complicate and elaborate the geek mystique ("CSI" and "Bones" come to mind), but all we’re likely to get from The Big Bang Theory are missed communications, fumbled opportunities, and general yuckety-yucks.

It’s as if quarterlife comes with a prefab drinking game: take one shot when the waterworks start, another if the word “scared” follows.

With so much going on, one would expect Swingtown to be exciting, but it’s not. Behavior that was scandalous in the ‘70s isn’t today.

The two-hour Season Four premiere sends FBI Special Agent Seely Booth (David Boreanaz) and forensic anthropologist Bones Brennan to England, and the result is disappointing, lacking the series’ usual wit and cool science-y stuff.

The individual performers, enthusiastic as they seem to be, are hardly helped by this approach. Shannon and John Michael Higgins (who plays Kath’s new boyfriend, Phil Knight) are both used to playing lovable buffoons. But their time is largely wasted here.

At once schematic and preachy, it never indicates the stakes--either for its “diverse” players or for you.

Unfortunately, clumsy writing gets in the way of potential insight.

The show is, in various ways, just such a trick, not quite convincing viewers that its shtick is authentic, but granting that those viewers get the joke (and will forgive, and even enjoy, the cheesy results).

The connections are sudden, relationships shallow, and dialogue glib.

What's ultimately frustrating about The Event is not the lack of answers (though the pilot does conclude with Sophie telling President Martinez, "I haven't told you everything") or the dreadfully lazy characterizations. It's the insistence that the plot somehow taps into something that's happening right now in the United States.

For starters, they need to offer intriguing characters and meticulous plotting. The first episode of Chase provides neither.

We cheered for Jack McCoy to convict the scumbag criminal on Law & Order and for Ally McBeal to speak out for the wrongly accused. Here, there are no easy answers, but the difficulty doesn't tax viewers' intellectual curiosity so much as their patience.

Better With You might try to be a straight-up joke/punchline/laughtrack sitcom. But that dooms it to comparisons with the other ABC shows such as Modern Family and The Middle that bookend it on Wednesday night. Those shows both have more distinct attitudes toward institutions like families and, particularly, marriage, than Better With You seems likely to find.

Unfortunately, the rest of the episode follows Dexter's descent into a routine guilt spiral, blaming himself for Rita's death (he should have "been there" to "protect her"), rather than ruminating on how it feels to be on this receiving end of a serial killing. How a series this smart could overlook the far more interesting angle is as much of a wasted opportunity as it is a disappointment.

It doesn't help that the vehicles reviewed thus far aren't surprising (Lamborghinis, Mustangs, Aston Martins), but the shenanigans the hosts set up for themselves can be thrilling.

The first episode offers little to recommend. However, if the show can keep up with the boys as they undergo their own awakenings, then it might eventually offer something fresh to the campus comedy canon. If not, the series will become a comedy of last resort.

The trouble is, they don't surprise you. Their routes to redemption are laid out early and often.

The show seems aware of the questions raised by this narrative dynamic, but hasn't sorted out a way to do more than note them.

In another series on another network, Kate might have stood out. Stuck on USA, though, she's an extraordinary woman on an ordinary show.

Yet another medical-mystery-forensics drama set in a large American city.

It's like the producers have set up Breaking In to be an action-comedy but nobody involved really cares about the action portion. But if the show is starting as a mild disappointment, it's far from terrible.

While the interviewees here can look back and put pieces together, fragmentation and lack of focus may be Gettysburg's most authentic effect.

Some celebrities will surely offer better material to edit than Hasselhoff, famous and not. Future episodes promise encounters with Reggie Bush, Kathy Griffin, and Mike Tyson. Tyson in particular may bring just enough crazy to the table to tip the genre scales back to train wreck.

As George W. Bush describes his thinking on September 11, it's hard not to wonder, well, what he was thinking. It's a mystery that remains unanswered in George W. Bush: The 9/11 Interview.

The promos for New Girl suggest that it's something new or at least mildly unusual. But its first episode looks like more of the same.

Unforgettable is a show cobbled together from the once good bits of once good shows.

The story is silly, but not trashy enough to make it your latest guilty pleasure.

Hart of Dixie doesn't look to be much more than what you'd unfortunately expect.

It's as though the show imagines that if can just cut from one event to another fast enough, no one will notice how shallow it all is.

Filmed and set in a soggy, green-washed Portland, Oregon, its procedural plotting and visual flair carry it along when it occasionally lapses into something like camp.

This isn't to say Are You There, Chelsea? is completely hopeless. There are bright spots. The brightest, predictably, is Handler.

Unsupervised appears content to amble along, reiterating what we've seen before.

The performance and the script's stretches (stick around for Peterson's climactic strip search) are less convincing than campy.

With more time, this Coma might have provided more thrills and chills, and also explored some of the monumental issues raised by changing technologies, corporate interests, and political frameworks. Unfortunately, it doesn't do any of this.

Some of this talent is visible in the premiere episode's poetic counterbalancing of empty landscapes and claustrophobic casino back-offices, and actors' convincing performances.... When it comes to plotting and scripting, though, Vegas is far less sure-footed.

The standard pieces are all here, just fit into the hour in a different order.

Even with all its CGI trappings and somber Washington, D.C. setting, Threshold feels minor, an amalgam of The Abyss and maybe Dark Skies.

The comedy that does occur in How I Met Your Mother isn't enough to compensate for its inconsistencies.

Unfortunately, Criminal Minds confuses critical thinking with supernatural abilities.

Feels strangely empty and hamstrung.... If you like your soaps without novelty, nuance, or bite, Related has four girls for you.

These stereotypes (the befuddled one, the needy one, the sexist pig) hardly make for the most engaging cast of characters.

Only Kroll managed to wring any comedy out of this ham-handed premise.

Carpoolers opted to careen straight into a gender war minefield, with stock male characters looking hapless amid a seeming pack of controlling, lazy, and deceitful women.

Not at all intelligent, the show is pretty much immune to any form of legitimate criticism, and further, it will likely be gone within the first few weeks of this television season.

His being stuck there no matter who shows up, in addition to his out-of-joint flashbacks, makes Crusoe seem something like a proto-Survivor contestant or, weirder, a proto-cast member on Lost. None of this bodes especially well for the series, in terms of repetition and limitation.

It’s a co-production with an outside company, poorly scripted and directed.

Set against Reaper‘s slackers and the largely limited actors who portray them, Wise will having you rooting for the Devil.

Jack delivers to every brilliant-offbeat doctor expectation, which means that for all his hyper-performative charms, Jack is also tedious, right down to the zipper in his forehead that marks commercial breaks.

Even the flashy action is of a piece with all this conventional structuring, as Chance regularly takes a few minutes to run and jump or punch and shoot. Such predictability does Human Target no favors.

Even though Parenthood‘s parents are all making completely misguided choices, the series doesn’t consider these as a means to education, through which the adults might reach that kind of self-awareness. That lack of consideration is the series’ most unfortunate waste of a promising storyline, one that could have imbued this second version with something refreshing or even revelatory.

With all these suds in the way, the premiere is muddled, so concerned with leading us by the nose to get the backstory that it never asks us to care about anyone.

What makes Justin's dad funny is the brevity. Without it, $#*! My Dad Says is not.

By the end of The Breakfast Club, the kids have learned that each of them is not solely a Brain, a Princess, a Criminal, a Basket Case, or an Athlete, but individuals who defy categorization. If only the characters in My Generation--and its dwindling viewers--were afforded the same opportunity.

Like the Osbournes, Whitney and Bobby, the Simmons, the Kardashians, and the Hammers, they perform themselves: they talk to the camera, they act out, they make complain and look to score points.

The "medical drama" is far too paltry to sustain the series without ramping up the relevance of the war context.

While options during the era were surely limited, the show's broad strokes don't do justice to the choices women were making, or their self-awareness while making them.

I Hate My Teenage Daughter offers precious few chuckles and lots of angst and argument.

This unchallenging adaptation of Chris Bohjalian's bestseller wishes it could be American Beauty. Or maybe Desperate Housewives.

[Perception is an] inept, and sometimes offensive, drivel, turning serious mental illness into a chic tic and woefully underestimating the intelligence of its audience.

Animal Practice seems to know exactly what it wants to do, it just isn't any good at it.

It isn't just the concept that's unoriginal, but also the scripting. The show has an abundance of jokes, but few elicit more than a grin.

The Taste is a confusing show with humorless banter that does not inspire the audience to become invested in the contestants. It's doubtful that viewers will be coming back for seconds.

The dynamic here is already tired.

The result is disappointing, sensationalistic and silly.

Bones is a very poor cross between the X-Files and CSI with characters stolen from NCIS, plot devices from Veronica Mars, and topicality from Law & Order.

The plots are thin, generally revolving around the idea that dumb is smart and smart is dumb.

If it's trying to emulate Sex and the City, Love, Inc. misses the fact that that show presented us with complex characters from the get-go; here the single women are all pretty much one-shtick ponies.

Three Wishes is a veritable showcase for corporate largesse, and oh yes, self-promotion.

While the show has little going for it, it does have Seth Green.

Despite the many hard bodies on display, South Beach is flabby.

One could watch NCIS: Los Angeles. But one could also watch paint dry with far less pain and no less gain.

Fittingly--and disappointingly--his fame-hungry characters don’t raise questions concerning politics or inhabit any realm of social interest; they are as vapid as their environment.

This is the central duality of the show: half fish-out-of-water tale about Todd, half underdogs-come-from-behind-to-triumph story about his staff. The problem is that neither plot has a sound foundation. For the first, it's hard to identify with Todd because he's not very likable.

The show's acting offers no respite. Scenes unfold very slowly, as characters talk quickly but pause at the end of each speech, often holding a self-satisfied smirk as if listening to an inaudible laugh track.

With its stilted scenes, canned laughter, and handwringing about marriage, Whitney feels more like a step backward.

The network has risked its own reputation for cutting-edge, genre-busting shows by churning out a sitcom whose main joke is how derivative, unfunny, and unconvincing it is.

There's no bottom to this show's sentimentality.

We don't expect nighttime relationship dramas to be thrilling, but we have the right to expect an interesting character or two.

A relentlessly unfunny mid-season replacement comedy from ABC that sucks all the fun out of dysfunction, the show could have been pitched to network execs as "Arrested Development meets Ordinary People." But it shows none of the former's wit or latter's intelligence.

While Life is Wild is structured as a sort of fishes-out-of-water tale, it is more accurately described as a neocolonial masturbatory fantasy.

The Cougar is not only oogy and repetitive, but also as behind the curve as TV Land‘s usual rerun fare.

It will most likely be remembered for years to come, alongside My Mother, the Car and Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, as one of TV's truly bad ideas.