It plays like it's been built for antisocial boys--mchair heroes in love with guns and in search of demented adventure.

Eleventh Hour is ambitiously shameless in patterning its counterintuitive crank of an ill-socialized hero on the Hugh Laurie character. We sent it down after nine minutes as yet another generic detective drama.

The show's success may depend on whether the public's fascination with Slater trumps its collective attention-deficit disorders.

The show rises to mediocrity on the strength of the occasional snappiness of the dialogue.

In a time span shorter than a T.G.I. Friday's commercial, we saw a pungent contrast between two sets of cultural values. This was all very funny and more than a bit embarrassing.

Better Off Ted, which feels more devoted to establishing its cool than earning some laughs, is hardly so bad to deserve a bleh from halfway-discerning viewers. Eh or meh would be closer to the mark.

Once you get past the fact of the producers' milking more than the usual volume of pathos from scenes of pre-elimination anxiety and post-dismissal distress, More To Love is much the same as its slimmer sisters.

A tolerably flavorsome ball of crimson bubblegum.

With the drama so thin, it must be the richness of Alicia's situation that makes 13 million people a week want to enjoy her company.

Though the seeming intent of Lock 'N Load is to glorify firearms--in one scene, a pastor takes target practice to the tune of "Amazing Grace"--it's sometimes tough to tell which consumers are motivated by valid concerns and which are unreasonable fruitcakes. Consequently, the show is something an ink-blot test.

Indeed, if the show is to have the symbolic import that we expect from a science-fiction story, this is the only possible way to read V as a coherent text. The only problem with this analysis lies in its generous presupposition that the text is, in fact, coherent.

Naturally, Happy Town is excessively sudsy in its soap-opera aspect, just as its atmosphere is a bit too atmospheric.

Each of them rolls the creative process, the finished work, and her public performance as an artist into an eager consumer package. They're all operators with soundbites on line one.

A typical episode of Terriers jolts abruptly from cutesy escapades to head-cracking fights, from loud escapism to misty tenderness, from easygoing comedy to strained seriousness. The tonal unevenness feels less like the conscious product of an ambitious design than the unplanned consequence of an exceedingly ambitious one.

The prosecutors on this new show--led by actor Peter Coyote, who hauls loads of Adam Schiff gravel in his voice--are given to putting whole systems on trial, metaphorically and otherwise....Though [Detectives] Rex and T.J. do, in fact, dig for clues, it somehow feels that they're just watching them erupt.

The show--a sporadically excellent adaption of a British teen drama--is superlative teensploitation, enabling youth to rejoice in the fantasy of their corruption, among other things.

This Countdown isn't terribly televisual and might gain in force and intimacy if it were transferred straight to radio, though it would suffer from the loss of light-hearted video clips that serve to cleanse the palate of bile.

Ambiently amusing but generally inert, the show is badly in need of a hard-edged producer to tell the series' creators that they cannot get by on charm, no matter how much of that precious quality is imported by such guest stars as Lily Tomlin, Rashida Jones, and Bob Balaban.

A middling documentary about a major actor-director-buffoon.

The illustrated title sequence of Comic Book Men depicts these guys as musclemen in tights, but the scenes that follow are strictly mild-mannered.

This is a goofy docu-reality show about the sex lives of settled married couples.

Common Law, with its storylines moving forward in broad strokes and an airiness in its exposition, does not demand too much of you or of anyone, beyond its own efficient technicians and unshowily inventive actors.

Hit & Miss has so many ups and downs that it cannot dodge the critical judgment any hack might deliver by quoting its title.

Reunion doesn't seem to get how important character is to carrying a show.

The show's focus remains frustratingly narrow.

The next four episodes are nowhere near as patient and controlled as that cinematic pilot, but, man, are they Irish: the wakes, the neon shamrock, the epigraphs from W.B. Yeats and D.P. Moynihan. And the show keeps this magnificent blarney up even as it swipes half its ideas from the playbooks of Scorsese and The Godfather.

Occasionally sharp as an epidural needle, often dumb as a pea pod, sometimes half decent.

Farmer Wants a Wife moseyed onto the air last week bearing the best title of any pop-culture commodity of the year to date and, given its standard-issue inanity, a surprising subtextual richness.