Perhaps it's best to consider The Hour as a kind of retro Broadcast News that is most alive when Freddie and Bel banter like Beatrice and Benedick and especially when getting inside of Hector's talking head.

Though the Up All Night pilot falls short of great hilarity, the series demonstrates considerable potential.

Its greasy-spoon spunk is regularly palatable, good for a cheap chuckle.

It's funny and cute.

So far, American Horror Story isn't the great American horror story but rather a pretty good fright night.

A black comedy working many shades of gray, Enlightened is about dark mornings of the soul and the fool's-golden glow of the new convert, and it measures the weight of the world with an eccentric scale.

Rhimes hustles the audience into episodes in the middle of things. Pope and her colleagues speak at a clip suggesting years of study at the West Wing School of Elocution and Composition. In the rush, I scarcely had time to scoff at the over-the-top content of the pilot.

The Pitch is like an all-you-can-eat buffet of salesmanship.

Dallas may not always compel your attention, but it does a good job of telling you what you missed.

There are just enough witty lines and interesting choices, such as in the editing of the bulimia scene, to create fleeting sensations that all is not dross.

Less scary than freaky, it's deliberately unhinged-light horror about low camp, a showcase for scenery chewing and giddy blasphemy, an exploitation chamber piece.

Despite and because of its many points of disconnection from the reality of the industry it purports to illuminate, I liked it and quite enjoyed biting my thumb at its cast (like a Capulet servant) while watching the pilot.

Aided by snappy editing, these people express feelings of tedium, frustration, and contempt in a generally amusing fashion, and the series succeeds as light comedy.

Like Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, the paranoid screenplays of Andrew Niccol, and the absurdist horror of Black Sheep (an ovine analog of The Birds), it gets beneath the skin by examining the state of isolation at the bottom of the world.

Sure, the re-enactment technique is cheesy by its very nature, but at the heart of this show is the ancient art of storytelling. The verbal accounts of the survivors are so vibrant, their evocation of extreme experience so precise, that the viewer huddles before the TV like a child listening to ghost stories around a campfire, undistracted even by the indignity of commercial interruptions.

Celebrities interviewing celebrities is a promising concept, in that it upsets the power balance of the typical suck-up interview. But the downside is that once people get past a certain level of fame, they seem to lose the internal monitor that reminds them that not everything they do and say is worth recording.

It's a silly, sweet-natured waste of time, and (unlike the tortured caterwauling of the American Idol contestants) it's utterly irresistible.

The show's an entertaining provocation, but it's also only skin-deep.

It's pretty decent hokum--fast, corny, genial, honest in its schlock.

The show would probably be too ponderous to enjoy if Braugher weren't an actor of tremendous restraint.

This is up-to-the-minute celebrity kitsch--zippy, knowing, and joyfully hollow.

[Scott's] playfulness is essential to making this show a pleasurable trifle instead of a sodden one.

[A] serviceable heist drama.

The show works only because Woods is a honey-baked ham playing a character who lives to be a showman.

The prep-school soap opera Gossip Girl is not as good--that is, not as bad, not quite so fabulously trashy--as the best-selling series of young-adult novels on which it's based.

Its achievement rarely matches its ambitions, but the effect is still pretty dope.

Failing to realize high ambitions, High School Confidential skims across the lives of 12 teenage girls growing up in placid Kansas.

Appetizingly pulpy and yet not at all crass, the series presents a new angle on the phenomenon of shows-so-bad-that-they're-good: It sucks hard and thus plays very well.