One hesitates to say that [Rhys Meyers] phones his performance in. It's more like he dictates it to an assistant who then submits it via fax. You too might lack an appropriate sense of conviction if delivered this script.

The adaptation of Mahler's book deals with this material in a fashion not so much dumbed-down as lobotomized.

By far the dumber and hammier of the two shows ["Saving Grace" is the other].

Guide to Style is too glazed and slick for its own good, too clinical and forensic to be any fun.

Why didn't HBO just go ahead and cut each episode of the hour-long Tell Me You Love Me to 50 minutes? The trims would have gone some way toward relieving the boredom inspired by the show's inchworm pace, and the shrink's-hour format would have made an exact fit for the spirit of the exercise.

As confected by ABC, the gayest and girliest of the big networks, Cashmere Mafia is the brighter of two ["Lipstick Jungle" is the other], with an "Ugly Betty" flair for color and a "Desperate Housewives" air of camp.

Paul Weston's (Byrne) nonadventures straddle the realms of the scarcely credible and the incredibly boring.

The one redeeming factor here is Laura Dern, who puts that elastic jolie laide mug of hers to memorable use as Katherine Harris. The performance makes you wish that Recount--which does contain a few fine moments of wild farce--had instead been created as a seven-episode sitcom playing out from her point of view.

Secret Diary of a Call Girl is a series of sketches, and its eight episodes do not trace an arc or advance a narrative.

Knight Rider arrives tricked out with just enough eccentricity to avoid utterly craven stupidity.

This doesn't feel mindless, just unmindful, and the best way to honor its late creators is to look away from it.

When I say that The RH of NJ is the most synthetic installment of the show yet produced.

It seems a statement of the obvious to call the new Melrose trash, but a reviewer must observe certain formalities--and at least it is trash we can dig into and learn something from,

Too superficial to be insincere, the show never even pretends to care about her interests or her character.

MTV is milking the culture clash to the emptiest.

Where the two leads are fledgling performers at the start of the careers, the actors playing their older relations have no such excuses for appearing herein.

If you caught a snippet of Whitney unawares, you would be forgiven for assuming that it's one of those shows-within-a-show that exists to caricature bad television.

There is--beneath the stale crust of the new Beavis and Butt-head, baked in with the program's existential outlook--a special grimness.

At points, Bag of Bones plays less like a horror story than a fond parody of one.

They [the producers] have failed to uphold their usual high standards, having not mastered the calculus of delivering the boorishness for which Sheen loyalists thirst while simultaneously tinkering with themes of redemption.

Will need defibrillator paddles applied to its thorax, stat, if it hopes to survive the season.

Phil Spector--potentially a camp classic about self-aggrandizement and megalomania--is simply a self-satisfied vanity project.

Memo to network execs planning an all-forensics programming slate for fall: Watching attractive people poke at skull fragments is not inherently interesting.

Despite an abundance of painfully suggestive one-liners, Hot Properties feels tepid and static. What's worse for a show designed to appeal to female audiences, it feels misogynistic.

If there exists a device called a Procedural-O-Matic, then it created this show.

Consider it proof of Corddry's superb resourcefulness that he somehow manages to wring the occasional drop of comedy from these dreary situations.

It's all the same stuff--magazine parties, feckless husbands, tempting male bimbos...but without "Cashmere Mafia's" redeeming air of farce.

The Cougar defeated my efforts to pay attention to it. I made four honest efforts to contemplate, or even to notice, what was happening in the pilot, and the show kept sliding right off my cerebral cortex.