The production's appeal is all on the surfaces--in a moment where a killer's image is reflected in a fresh pool of blood, say, or a megalomaniac catches his own eye in the mirror.

Everybody already knows everything there is to know about this maverick make of stock figure and the ready-made tone of cop shows where all the barroom jukeboxes play only electric blues.

Tara doesn't yet show the same emotional depth as Juno--not in its first four episodes, at least--but if you have the fortitude to make it through the tonal assault of its first 10 minutes, then you'll get to see some recognizable human feeling seep up through the wisecracks.

This is a civil servant who has yet to be jaded, and the show is just good enough to keep you turning back in to see her unwarranted optimism curdle.

For a smart take on a dumb summer dating show, join the millions tuning into Dating in the Dark.

At various points, Bored to Death seems nicely restrained, curiously deadpan, and just flat. It is moderate, and it is middling.

Party Down, which is funny, would seem even funnier if it were not so heavily indebted to the funniest TV shows of recent years. It's also problematic that the show is so highly inconsistent.

Comfort food to its core, the show is a retro casserole tapping into a popular appetite for leftovers.

Ms. Q's Nikita is only half so crush-worthy as Bionic Woman's Jaime Sommers or Dollhouse's what's-her-name, but her predicament is no less tasty.

It takes us to the South and to a class-conscious frame of mind and then introduces a web of complicated relationships that the eye recognizes as cross-racial but the dialogue does not. For now, it seems that this is a tale of collegiate self-discovery and hand-spring liberation that just happens to be set in the post-racial America I keep hearing about it.

Watching these post-Lost sci-fi-mytho-mystery series, you also watch yourself watching, and the thrill of alertness passes for decent entertainment even when other pleasures are in short supply. When Sean returned from a day trip to find that his girlfriend had vanished as if redacted from the file of life, I was kind of glad to see her gone. With her murky disappearance out of the way, we were on our way to achieving clarity-or at least toward failing to achieve it.

Judged by the standards of the form, it is totally OK. There is a soothing mundanity to it, and voyeurs will come away gratified. Though this is hardly an intimate portrait.

The Fairy Jobmother, adapted from a British show of the same name, follows the model of Supernanny--that child-rearing-rehab spectacular--with a diligent slavishness.

Storage Wars--trivial and magnetic, sociologically peculiar and elementally creepy-gives the reality-show treatment to a class of merchants slinking beneath the radar of many a solvent citizen.

Preferring to redomesticize Mildred Pierce, Haynes arrives at a film--a five-part, five-hour miniseries--that is merely pretty good.

On average, the viewer must wait through two tossed-off fart jokes in order to savor one lovingly crafted one. Bob's Burgers is done medium well.

It plays, for better and worse, like a slightly elevated version of one of those issue-of-the-week telefilms of the old school, with their teen traumas and kitchen-sink melodramas.

The Voice (NBC) is a horrifically entertaining vocal competition produced by Mark Burnett.

Too Big To Fail adapted by director Curtis Hanson and screenwriter Peter Gould from a book by journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, is a decent movie with a stellar title.

The very special scheduling is one of several ways the network has been signaling that it means serious business with this light and passably witty supernatural drama.

It is a show about a high-school superheroine--a Catwoman without the camp or the S&M gear--and it enables longtime fans of the subgenre to watch with pride as their children digest its venerable tropes for only the fourth or fifth time.

Alphas proceeds with a relative sobriety that will prove attractive to some and simply unintoxicating to others. If there are any grown-up fanboys left in America--people who can bring themselves to admit that this summer's blockbusters-in-tights are meager gruel--then Alphas may have enough beta charm to see them through the season.

Indeed, it is hard to knock Terra Nova overall, such does it succeed on its own terms, which involve working over the pituitary brain and the sympathetic soul.

Not content to exploit their subject's inherent themes, the series' fraternal creators, Joe and Tony Gayton, have adhered them promiscuously, pasting neon Post-it indications of symbolic import in a way that obscures moments of straightforward drama.

The show, warm and cheesy, fits right in as another nacho plate on the network's menu of comfort food, another new sitcom that plays like a re-enactment of an old one.

This HBO original [is] clean and smart and dull.

When the show talks about crime literature, it's quite dull, but when it shows instead of tells, it's something to see.

Related has some strengths, particularly the understated performance of Kiele Sanchez.