What The Beast most clearly has going for it is its main ingredient: Swayze....[Because] it's as though the writers don't trust their audience to understand what's going on or they don't trust their own ability to convey it. In either case, it's sloppy.

The series is set in a world that praises the lie, and if the creators can mine that vein for inspiration and avoid falling for the conventional TV drama traps, they could have a better show to sell to their advertisers.

When a TV show is going to run the length of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, these people have to be more than expendable, and this "All-Non-Star Cast" doesn't have the instant audience identification required to fill in the blanks.

Lacking the poetic and poignant touch that might help make the ridiculous sublime or the sublime ridiculous, HBO, under cover of a dangerous and racy premise, has created a middlebrow comedy that, like its main character, looks good but has little to say.

It's now little more than a puppet act bouncing through history to get to its end.

With an abundance of pre-taped video segments and satellite interviews, Jay Leno wraps a very old-fashioned sensibility within a modern package. It's an interesting presentation.

In its current attempt to capture the meandering lifestyle and mindset of thirtysomething losers, Bored squanders its noir framework and aesthetic prospects, consequently inducing yawns.

The Middle is just a show about a quirky family, and their quirks simply aren't that interesting.

With such a talented writer on board, Parenthood deserves a few more episodes to iron out some of its more trite, movie-of-the-week storylines, allowing its multifaceted characters, and all their routine tribulations, to organically manifest as life consequently unravels.

The show's dry humor, mixed with a rather troubling visual style where everything is stiff and vaguely deformed, mostly just makes you feel uneasy.

Despite occasional moments of solid acting on the part of Peregrym and Okuma, Rookie Blue sinks under the weight of its cheesy montages, references to the rookies as "fresh paint," and the lack of chemistry between the main characters.

With all of the main characters and supporting players involved in more and more peripheral pursuits, there is little time for the four friends to get together to shoot the breeze, meet some babes, or just have some fun.

The result is both good and bad: On the one hand, Weeds feels fresh again. On the other, the writers still don't know what sort of show they're making, and the supporting cast keeps getting shoehorned into new roles.

Hopefully the hyperactive series will mellow into a slightly less frenetic version of itself--out of budget necessity, if nothing else.

The characters are gently sarcastic with one another, clearly in love, and exhibit great respect for their unique skills. What's missing is a stronger supporting cast and the right narrative vehicle for their adventures.

To reduce talents as large as Gervais and Merchant to caricatures seems absurd. The vitality and enthusiasm that passes between them, and the unfettered joy implicit in that, demands a human face, and without that, HBO is missing the point, creating a show that's easy to listen to, but actually hard to watch.

Skins is, alas, many types of teen drama to many types of teens--a raunchy good time and an Afterschool Special on The Way Youth Live Now rolled into one. It's a viewing experience akin to going to a coke party only to be given a lecture. Where's the fun in that?

The Borgias is merely the network's most recent, shallow exploration into precisely how murderous, horny, and fabulously costumed the wealthy were at the turn of the 16th century.

It's not easy, with all the silly one-liners, oddball plot twists, and frat-party ambience, to get terribly invested in who will win the power struggle that Camelot dramatizes. But if Fiennes and Green could stage a coup, wresting control of the show from its tawdrier impulses, then that might just be something worth watching.

United States of Tara smothers its characters and situations in layers of quirk and sarcasm, like an expensive steak drenched in Velveeta.

We're ostensibly supposed to see Eaton Place as a warm haven holding out against the cold wind of history, but a show built around the humanity of strangers would be more convincing if the characters displayed more humanness.

The chilling threat of Miracle Day involves a power strong enough to "force people into life," and one can only hope that in future installments, Davies and company are smart enough to realize that they shouldn't try to force square actors into circular plots.

Some of last season's morose attention to addiction has crept into the new episodes, signaling, possibly, that our band of brothers is on the road to disillusionment or even disaster. But the occasional insertion of a bitter pill in with all the uppers, more often than not, comes off as disingenuous.

The show largely treads disappointingly familiar territory.

The show's extravagant, aggressive joy about the friendly skies sometimes makes even that pinnacle of historical romance seem like a Lars Von Trier film in comparison.

It's no mystery how the overproduced Terra Nova managed to turn out so drastically underwhelming.

That Living in the Material World shines scant illuminating light on Harrison's story is all the more frustrating for its immense length.

Grimm is neither a very strong police procedural nor a supernatural drama, as it sacrifices the intelligence required to construct smart, puzzling crimes in order to spend more time attempting to enunciate its fantastical elements, which aren't all that fantastical, with amateurish CGI.