The slowdown of the show's pace is one thing, but the real issue here is that the family element often feels inauthentic and just isn't up to the quality of the CGI-fueled action sequences.

The only differences between Last Man Standing and the old "Home Improvement" are that Allen's name is Mike this time, his job is working for a sporting goods company as opposed to a hardware manufacturer, and his three kids are teenage daughters.

Isaacs makes an attractively moody hero, and both the supporting and guest casts are superb. That said, the episodes tend to meander slowly from plot point to plot point.

Chasing and catching boars may be all well and good, but is it enough to keep us coming back for more every week? Well, if people can watch people fight over storage bins and seeing their cars towed away in South Beach, anything is possible.

The show is moderately entertaining, albeit somewhat predictable.

It's hard to think of anyone likable among the main characters, except for Jeremy. And that's the sly point of the show.

The Gaytons have created declamatory cartoons. What they needed was a lot more John Ford and a lot less Cotton Mather.

The show is passable when its writers remember it is an ensemble piece.

Nothing terribly inventive here, but it's fairly easy to like the three guys, especially Faison.

The focus of Weed Wars is sometimes frustratingly narrow.

It makes for a mildly enjoyable story and it's probably best not to overthink things.

As the silly questions, the sillier answers and Norton's ever-burbling laughter continue, we raise the white flag and start laughing.

The humor in Rob is broad, occasionally rollicking, not very clever or sophisticated, but some of it works well enough to keep the show going.

The show's just not as funny as Chelsea Handler is when she's playing Chelsea Handler.

The show has promise, but the one thing it doesn't yet have that has made "Bones" such a survivor is chemistry.

Obviously, it's necessary to give viewers the backstory on the returning thug of the week, but let's hope that if the show finds its legs, it won't need quite as many reminders of its fundamental concept.

It's not clear from one episode whether the show's warm and fuzzy message can successfully counterbalance implausibility.

No matter the casting changes, Spartacus remains good, dirty fun.

The performances are adequate, but in many cases, the cast deserves credit for having to enliven trite, stock situations.

Oddly enough, many viewers may not need to know DC Comics' Issue No. 1 chapter, verse and thought bubble to find Comic Book Men mildly amusing.

There are some funny lines here and there, but overall, the show lacks satirical teeth.

Maybe Fairly Legal will become a kind of "Good Wife-Lite," with Kate and Lauren doing a whole Alicia and Diane thing, but that's not necessarily bad.

Oddly enough, the business of making duck calls becomes more interesting than you might think.

To enjoy the show, though, you really have to suspend disbelief at many points, just as you do with "Grey's." There are moments when the frenetic drive for cleverness prompts some rather silly decisions about plot points.

NYC 22 (for the 22nd Precinct in Harlem) is pretty average, which is to say: Nothing to write home about and probably nothing that you'll stick with very long.

It makes sex seem boring.

The production details and Stewart Harcourt's script are quite effective, but the film's pacing is too drawn out.

The writing is light and somewhat predictable, without quite hitting the level of sassy repartee of the "grand old men" of the USA stable, Dulé Hill and James Rodale of the deservedly long-running "Psych."

Bunheads will take some work and it could just as easily become either annoying or likable.

Except for Hagman, the performances are adequate without ever standing out, which may be one of the reasons it does take so long to care much about the younger Ewings.

Both shows [Bunheads and Baby Daddy] are agreeable additions to the ABC Family stable, even if they don't really break any new ground.

The series is not very interesting, and you probably wouldn't watch if she wasn't who she is.

The series is kind of a mess, but one you can't really look away from.

This is all fairly predictable stuff and makes for a show that you'd watch because of the cast but would never put in the top tier of TV shows or talk about the next day at the office.

Sullivan & Son doesn't break any new ground, and you'll probably have a sense of deja vu all over again as it evokes "Cheers" and, more subtly, "Everybody Loves Raymond."

Raydor is cut from different cloth that her predecessor and that's going to take some getting used to.

The bigger mistake is seeing the story as just a gussied-up whodunit. That may make Coma passably enjoyable, but it doesn't make it very scary.

Future episodes may exploit the whole hick-in-the-big-city thing, but one hopes that doesn't happen to the point where we forget the courage these young men and women demonstrate to spread their wings.

There are some funny lines in the pilot, but it takes until the second episode for some promising chemistry to emerge between Urie and Krumholtz.

The show, co-created by Shawn Ryan of "The Shield," is weirdly watchable, the way a hamster spinning a treadmill is watchable.

The performances are all fine, as far as they go, but the script is filled with heavily telegraphed developments, inept character development and direction so scattershot, you're advised to have a supply of Dramamine at the ready to quell the motion sickness brought on by all the quick cuts.3907328.php#ixzz284ZLgzlk

It has some winning moments, and clearly the cast members are having fun with their roles. In the end, though, it just doesn't connect the way it really should have.

The rest of the cast is fine, but without Gummer, they couldn't begin to rescue the series from its enormous burden of predictability and cliche.

Fuller needs to sharpen the writing by throwing even more double entendres in for the grown-ups. All the parts are here- they just need to be put together correctly.

The comedy--anything but edgy--is one cee-ment pond and half a fancy eatin' table away from "The Beverly Hillbillies," and is rooted in the inevitable culture clash of a Tennessee family adjusting to life in Southern California.

Ably abetted by the superb editing work by Alex Marquez, Untold Story shows how the nation's international policies were shaped, refracted and, at times, undermined by internal politics. That said, Stone's predictably narrow intensity sometimes works against him, frequently throwing the overall balance of each film off by leaving us with unanswered questions on some topics, and, in a way, too much information on others.

It's in dire need of tighter editing, most of all. Yes, the images from the '30s are powerful, but after a while, their power is diminished by repetition.

It's possible that Washington Heights will devolve into "Jersey Shore-North," and become unwatchable. But it's hard to imagine young people like JP, Frankie and Ludwin going off the rails to that extent. As long as they don't, Washington Heights may be an exception to the apparent rule for this kind of show by keeping it legitimately real.

Writer Amy B. Harris has crafted a clever, credible script, carefully adding a few veiled life lessons within the witty dialogue: One of the girls will learn that hooking up with a boy you think you love may not always end in happily ever after.

Ripper Street is a decent but not especially remarkable thriller about crime solving in Whitechapel immediately following Jack's reign of terror.

Even within the fantasy context of the show, there are a few elements that don't ring completely true, but it's easy to overlook them, if only because you're not given much time to think about things before Scheuring hurls another engaging plot twist in your direction.

Life Is But a Dream, co-directed by Ed Burke and billed by HBO as "an intimate, revealing documentary," isn't really, but there are enough moments that pass for authenticity to make it a benignly informative glimpse into a rarefied existence.

Nothing new is revealed in the National Geographic Channel's first scripted special, Killing Lincoln. But that doesn't mean the decently written and adequately performed docudrama is unwelcome.

Beyond the gimmick, will there be enough to maintain our interest? If not, Cult could easily wind up as one TV show in search of an audience.

Ultimately, there's nothing new about the bones of Grey's Anatomy. Somebody needs to reinvent the hospital drama, stat.

Despite some funny moments and undercurrents of real potential, Greetings From Tucson has nothing special going for it other than being part of an emerging trend. For it to survive, the writing will have to be snappier and the situations more original.

Golden Boy is a passable new cop show from CBS that relies on a flash-forward gimmick to set it apart from other TV cop shows.

Mostly, though, Vikings is disappointing because so much of the component parts are good but are ill served by flabby direction and a gassy script.

House had enough going against it, but if you strip it of its boldness in favor of rote (and predictable) drama, then you might as well bring in the priest.

The strength of the documentary is that although it is grounded in an extensive interview with its subject, it is not hagiography. Writers like Woodward and Gellman weigh in with considered and not always flattering opinions about Cheney. That said, noticeable by their absence as interview subjects in the film are Rice and, in particular, Bush.

The problem is the lovely-to-look-at pilot, which unfortunately has a heavy dose of saccharine and corn mixed in. There's a voice-over that makes you think you're about to watch some heartwarming Christmas special, and there's dialogue that strains so much to be moving that it falls flat and stiff.

It's modestly entertaining, but because Davies and his writers and directors have employed a kind of wink-wink artificiality to the performances and style of Mr. Selfridge, you never quite believe much of it and you may find yourself caring only in passing.

Aside from the performances by Maslany, especially, and Gavaris, who gets some of the show's best lines, it takes until the third and fourth episodes for Orphan Black to start growing on you.

Historical accuracy is only hit-and-miss in Da Vinci's Demons. And that describes how entertaining it is too: More miss than hit, but it does grow on you.

There are only fleeting moments when you feel you're seeing something brand new in Defiance, but in its imitative way, it's fun to watch, thanks to some competent CGI effects and decent performances.

The writing is ham-fisted and occasionally just howlingly bad, and the performances are OK for the most part, but Famke Janssen is godawful. The weird thing is that Hemlock Grove is almost watchable, at least for the three episodes Netflix sent to critics.

The performances are superb and make Bletchley Circle more than the sum of its pedantic parts.

The show is more noisy than funny.

Instead of being a whodunit, Motive is a "whydunit," which, except for the appeal of the show's star, amounts to a "whocares."

All well and good, up to a point, and that point was when the relatively pleasant but not especially revealing interview morphed into an infomercial for Weight Watchers.

One of those series that looks great on paper but ends up less-than-thrilling on the screen.

To its credit, next week's second episode is better than tonight's revamped pilot: tighter, funnier and more expansive to other cast members.

The whole series just misses its mark -- despite that mark being one of the fattest, ripest targets imaginable.

By the time the second hour comes on Monday and tries to give these characters some dimension, you already know that the talent on both sides of the camera simply isn't there to make this a worthwhile trip.

The first episode is moody and violent but not particularly frightening. The second is psychobabble nonsense without much suspense.

The main problem with The Following, isn't that by the second episode, you get the template of Williamson's gotchas--that the most innocent-seeming characters are actually Carroll's minions--it's that the violence is so gratuitous, it actually ruins what could have been a very good psychological thriller.

You won't really want to spend another hour with these people.

"E-Ring" is boring.

A monumental waste of time.

"In Justice" is a mess -- and it will take at least two additional episodes to find out which direction the show is going and whether that direction is an improvement.

The premise is only a small part of the problem in "Four Kings." The writing is labored, adolescent and unfunny.

"Courting Alex" is sadly predictable and unfunny at pretty much every turn.

This is a series that shimmers with potential -- until Dove shows up. Someone at the network must have thought "Free Ride" was too irreverently weird and creatively nuanced, so they made Dove as annoyingly cartoonish as possible.

Bland and rote.

The writing in "Heist" is self-consciously forced, as if the writers are breaking their backs to be quick-witted and clever. It's painful to hear.

Let's present some evidence for you to analyze: A tired premise. Overly familiar characters. Dull writing. An unclear tone. A series that pales in comparison to any of the "CSI" shows and pretty much every new crime and punishment procedural in the last five years.

The best that "The Class" can muster is a kind of cookie-cutter familiarity (also known as lameness) that gets prodded by the laugh track to make everyone at home feel like a good time is being had. It's not.

The jokes in "Twenty" are both predictable and telegraphed.

It becomes clear rather quickly that there's nothing funny going on here and, by the second episode, the show seems out of ideas for its paper-thin premise.

A charming but underwhelming pilot.... The second episode is dismal, sucking all the air out of whatever hopes you might have had for that one.

Luckily, the writing here is so moronic and the situations so forced and mundane, it's easier to dismiss what is, all told, pretty fantastic work on behalf of Galecki and Parsons.

Just dreadful enough to want to shoot yourself and end up in the tender loving arms of the people at "Private Practice."

The worst offense is that it seems to have been pitched as the male version of you-know-what without any real interest in speaking to the notion of what it means to be a man or, if you'd like, what men think, feel and say.

Mainly Carpoolers uses the cheap conceit of four guys sharing time in the car (confiding in each other, getting away from their troubles at home) to distract you from the fact this is merely another unfunny comedy of forced antics, cliched jokes and unbelievable characters.

Unfortunately, most of the rest of the casting (and thus, acting) is a disaster. The writing is weak. And the fish-out-of-water story grows old within minutes. Not even a cute cub can save it.

The writing is forced and thin, some of the acting stagey, most of the characters unlikable and - the show-killer quality that HBO execs apparently failed to see--profoundly boring.

Please say this is entertainment--and nothing more. That might not make it all right, but it would restore a whole lot of faith.

New Amsterdam is very average--and in many aspects is well below average. It never feels like much more than a cliche.

Not many women will want to come back after seeing it because the first 30 minutes are a complete and utter mess.

Return you must. Otherwise, you'll miss the full-on descent into pants-wetting, outrageous, sci-fi crackery that makes the final two hours fly by.

It's a complete wince-inducing mess that makes you feel sorry for Shannon and annoyed at NBC and Nader.

Sure, it's got some ethically challenged cops, some overt racism, some faux hot sex and what looks to be a lot of money spent on filming on the streets of Los Angeles, but the writing is surprisingly nondescript, the acting rudimentary and the first hour ends with nothing much in the way of movement.

Hokey and poorly paced with unfathomably lame flashbacks, it's like a relentlessly mediocre movie of the week that still has 11 more hours to go.

It seems like a middling Fox series with a monotonous glut of obscenities and some nudity tossed in to make it pay-cable worthy.

The trouble with Castle is that it's just so completely fluffy - which is annoying.

It's a hackfest of cliches and obvious, unfunny jokes about kids and neighbors and marriage, with multiple cameras, a smothering laugh track, precocious kids and a salty but loving wife.

The series is flat-out tone deaf; a limp drama and a grating, messy misfire as a comedy.

"Pepper Dennis" is so poorly written that the hokey dialogue not only besmirches journalism, but television journalism, which really takes some serious hackery to accomplish.

Private Practice is bad. Not "worse than "Grey's Anatomy bad" in the sense that Rhimes really is good at pulling people's heart strings with melancholy and humor.

It's all soapy nonsense with emotional entanglements underscored by catchy and moving pop songs.

Mercy echoes all the worst efforts of "Nurse Jackie" without the brilliance of Falco to make you forget the shortcomings. Hell, it makes "Hawthorne" seem almost watchable.

The Deep End is stupid. It is obvious and ridiculous and badly acted for the most part.

Had they taken a closer look at how it all meshed together (or didn't), they'd have seen a series that has almost no funny moments, maybe one character the audience may feel affinity for, and any number of scenes where dumb is piled on dumber.

Obviously the CW wanted to milk the popularity of shows like "Glee," which has singing and dancing. And is enormously popular. You can't blame the CW (except maybe for leaving out the creativity, for having a terrible script and for the acting, which hurts to witness).

So it will continue to be ludicrous. And that's without mentioning the predictability, cliches like kryptonite and emotional pandering. Here's hoping next season, Smits gets to play a cop again.

There are a lot of fat jokes in Mike & Molly. Unfortunately, all of them are easy, most of them are stupid and worse than anything is that they are spewed in what is being spun as a sympathetic look at people with eating problems.

It's as rote and unfunny and ridiculous as hundreds of other ambitionless sitcoms to hit the air.

Belushi and O'Connell are two jokers who love the law and practice in Las Vegas and ... oh, forget it. The show is lousy.

My Generation's idea, of a documentary film crew that follows a high school graduating class in 2000 and revisits the cliche-heavy, stereotypical bunch in 2010 won't make you roll your eyes and get sick on your shirt. Everyone else--bibs on!

Face it, $#*! My Dad Says was a bad idea from inception to pilot.

Did you [NBC] get the memo about making fun of other cultures to the point where you bump up against the racism thing? Apparently not. India is a big country. Laughing at their cows and curry--it makes you look as if you've never traveled. (Additional note: Making fun of people is easy and cheap. Write that down.)

LOLA begins so flat, boring and predictable that you have to grudgingly admire Wolf's steadfast commitment to the holiness of the brand, at the expense of any creativity, originality or shock value.

While the actors in Glory Days are attractive and not without talent, they're ill served by the hackneyed writing and desperate plot. These boys have only one thing on their minds and it isn't matriculation.

The groan-worthy dialogue, usually spoken in a monotone by alien and human alike, is rarely credible and lacks the kind of self-aware irony that might make this enjoyable.

There isn't a single laugh line in the two episodes NBC sent out to critics, and you'd have to be nuts to want to spend five minutes, much less a half hour, with even one of the Perfect Couples, much less all three.

I suppose Sunshine can get by for a time on Perry's familiarity to audiences and because it has the great "Modern Family" as a lead-in. But in the long run, those factors aren't enough to counterbalance how much of a downer the show is.

The conceit of Boyd's book and this mini-epic is provocative, but unfortunately, the reality is something else.

If only Holtby and screenwriter Andrew Davies hadn't larded the story with so many cliches, not to mention people who seem like second-rate versions of characters created by Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte.

Created by Liz Kruger and Craig Shapiro ("Miami Medical"), the writing is amateurish, the premise as thin as watery gruel, the emotions generally inauthentic, and the cast only minimally engaging.

It's virtually impossible to care about the characters, and not only is the show without a single laugh line, its attempts at humor come off as brittle and nasty.

Unless the writing of the show improves exponentially, it may not be around long enough for us to remember the characters' first names, much less learn their last.

It's painful watching an actor as skilled as Wilson trying to force-feed credibility to a horrifically unbelievable moment and sadly failing. Things only get worse from here on.

There may be something salvageable here--this kind of odd couple pairing worked great in, well, "The Odd Couple"--but the pilot is virtually humorless.

Allen's show may be a clone of "Home Improvement," but it's somewhat watchable. Man Up just isn't.

There are a couple of funny lines, mostly from Rebecca Mader, who plays mean-mouthed regional sales leader Grace, but overall, the humor is about as inauthentic as the guys' drag.

The writing is a big problem. It's just not funny.

Unfortunately, no amount of tweaking can save Unsupervised from itself. It's just a sad waste of good intentions and great talent.

The plot is one telegraphed event after another, so that the only enjoyment to be found in sitting through this thing is timing when a blatantly preordained event will actually occur.

If this show was premiering even a decade ago, it might not feel as stale and out of place as it does in today's sitcom world.

Longmire has the look and feel of a show cooked up by a bunch of bored TV industry types while they were waiting for the valet to bring their car to them at the Beverly Hills Chuck E. Cheese.

The sloppy sentimentality is cheap and unearned, greasy camera lenses notwithstanding.

A puffy documentary by Jeffrey Roth about President George H.W. Bush that ends up being a boring and uninformative disservice to the former president.

There's very little that's fun about Perception.

Wanting soap and dirt--a lot of dirt--he [creator Greg Berlanti] has fashioned something that's watchable only if you completely divorce it from the realm of credibility.

For the humans, nothing ensues that can't be predicted by a comatose cockatoo.

It's really sad to see such a great show dumbed down to this extent, and with the apparent cooperation of the original show's creators, Damon Beesley and Iain Morris, who serve as executive producers for the American travesty.

Notwithstanding the unfathomable reaction of the studio audience, the show certainly couldn't survive on the basis of its humor, because there is none.

The show seems to exhaust its small comedic possibilities with the first episode, not to mention viewer interest.

The concept is ridiculous, the murder case not even remotely intriguing, the script for the pilot is amateurish, and the whole Jersey thing is so phonied up, you'd actually welcome a cameo by Snooki just to add some verisimilitude.

Wolf either doesn't know what to do with his characters while they're waiting around for a fire to break out, or thinks their personal stories should be the dominant element in his new series. They could be, if only those stories weren't ripped from the book of overused cliches.

Underemployed is simply and irreparably underwhelming.

It creeps and creeps in a very petty pace until it puts itself out of its misery, and ours.

Start-Ups isn't very good, or very original, neither of which should come as a huge surprise. But what's really too bad is that the show misses a great opportunity to capture the singular mix of ambition and creativity that makes Silicon Valley so special.

The show isn't funny, but worse, it's not interesting. The characters are dull, the performances off the mark at virtually every level, and the writing is flatter than a deflated implant.

The film compartmentalizes the public and presumed private lives of Taylor and Burton with little sense of the whole and little sense of who these people really were.

The writing (Heldens and Peter Elkoff) is atrocious, the direction (Peter Horton and Jonas Pate) slow and flabby, and the performances run the gamut from sad to just adequate, but even proven actors like Garber couldn't make us care about any of this.

What's really sad about the show is that without the painful Hall of Fame discussion there's not much substance to Hits & Mrs.

The show is laughable, but I suspect the writers are dead serious.

To call Firefly a vast disappointment is an understatement. Whedon has proven he's capable of brilliance, but this is mere folly.

The poor girl [Bynes] flops around so badly in the pilot, trying to mine laughs from physical comedy and sheer crazed movement, that you want to give her a vacation from the next three episodes.

Red Widow staggers into an already listless mid-season Sunday on ABC with a premise borrowed from Dutch TV, a second-tier cast and consistently unconvincing writing throughout.

The performances run the gamut from woeful to out-and-out terrible, but in some cases, you can't blame the actors because no one is sufficiently talented to deliver the lines of creator Matthew Parkhill's script with even minimal credibility.

A mostly appealing cast is wasted in a laugh-starved show about a relentless screw-up of a man-child who has never been able to find a career path, much less make his dad proud of him.

[The] moderately appealing cast is wasted in a show about three children of a recently deceased rich guy who have to compete among themselves to become the sole heir to his $23 million estate.

If "The War at Home" spent more time on good jokes instead of recycling every gimmick ever seen on TV, it might merely be mediocre, but it's worse.

The predictability and triteness of "Head Cases" make it difficult to type even a sentence in favor of any part of this series.

The writing here is trite, the premise flimsy and the acting bad.

Woefully bad.

If you remember nothing about this column, remember this: "Hot Properties" is stupid and annoying.

It's pointless to talk about who "stars" in this bloated music video, but the agents for both Vanessa Williams and Giancarlo Esposito need to be fired, summarily.

We watched a second episode of "Crumbs" just to make sure there wasn't something hilarious for you under a rock, some morsel of humor left over. Um, no.

Bad? It's a leech on your soul. Never have 22 minutes so felt like 44 minutes.

Preposterously unfunny.

"The Game" commits all the sins you can imagine in a poorly conceived sitcom. It goes for laughs and sap, the world's most dangerous and noxious combination. It's also not funny, believable, interesting or... inspired.

It's a coming-of-age story so overwrought and emotionally predictable, it's -- what's the word here? -- unwatchable.

No series in recent memory has put so much attention on a pair of breasts.... Oh, and the show is terrible.

You won't see any worse acting across the broadcast spectrum. The women-in-peril scenes are vile. The writing is atrocious. The series is horrifically bad. And not in a way that would make a good drinking game.

It's awful.

Terrible writing, painful acting, forced comic situations.

As for "The Loop," well, it's just heinous. True, we've said that before. But it can't be said enough. "The Loop": heinous.

It's stupid and annoying and a retread of countless other stupid and annoying, totally unoriginal WB sitcoms.

"The Bedford Diaries" is just woeful -- the most trite, forced and stage-managed piece of empty titillation you're likely to see.

This is probably the worst sitcom of the fall.

Insipid, poorly written and saddled with an onerous laugh track, "The Winner" is lame even by Fox's standards.

It's just heinous. Absurd, laughable, painful to watch--you name it, Moonlight has it all.

45 minutes of bad writing, bad acting and bad storytelling.

A series so bad that it's daring you to watch. Don't.

It's the kind of bad that sells cheese or gets entertainment presidents fired--one or the other, or both.

You will want all the extras who played vamps on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (which was great, by the way, and not to be blamed for this lackluster cousin) to return en masse to eat the cast of "Vampire Diaries," plus any remaining scripts.

Speaking from outside the target demo but from long-suffering experience watching bad television, go with "unwatchable."

A moronic and ghastly effort that suffocates under the cloying and annoying blanket of a laugh track so disturbing it should be destroyed.

Spartacus is an exercise in some of the worst writing, acting and directing you'll ever see (or not).

The two-taste-treats-in-one thing worked for Hostess Ding-Dongs, so maybe Fox figured it would work for this ding-dong of a dud for the masochists in the crowd.

[An] overheated, badly written, wretchedly acted and unconvincing drama, which makes mincemeat out of the traditional beauty and the beast fairy tale.