"Book Club" is one of those "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" series. You know, the kind that promote themselves as giving unvarnished looks into real-life issues facing women in a variety of situations but that mostly exist to exploit them.

It is obvious in just the first few minutes who the real winners are -- members of the NBC sales department. Collectively, they have taken product placement to new and annoying heights.

That's a lot of story potential, but most of it is squandered in trite and predictable ways.

At times, things veer so far off center that running from the feds seems like a distraction from the more important story of teen romance and angst, just another annoyance like a sudden zit or a dropped call.

Despite the lethargic story and jokes that rarely elicit more than polite chuckles from the studio audience, "Game" is not without potential.

Although several characters are refugees from central casting, there is too much of an earnest streak running through "Dirt" to dismiss it as a breathless soap.

"Bells" needs to be about more than pacifying that week's psycho bride (or her demanding mother), or it risks being an updated version of "The Love Boat."

Unfortunately, this flick is far more interested in hot bods than an arresting story.

It isn't that "Death" is terrible. It's just too broad to be taken seriously.

There are clever moments in NBC's new improv series "Thank God You're Here," but you can get awfully restless waiting for them.

You have to suspend an awful lot of disbelief to buy into this premise, and even at that the protagonists aren't nearly compelling enough to care a lot about.

When all is said and done, the series feels less like Wisteria Lane than "Stand By Me" channeled through Danielle Steel.

The show itself is so poorly conceived that you can only pity the viewer who gets lost in this Jungle.

This new ABC Family effort from Brenda Hampton (“7th Heaven”) works feverishly to make an educational institution look like the equivalent of a Nevada brothel but succeeds mostly in transforming high school to high camp. Were these stereotypes any more simplistic, they’d need to come with their own parental warning label.

In fact, the entire show consists almost entirely of spills, tumbles and falls, most of which fell short of being breathtaking, spectacular or catastrophic.

It’s rather like a “Saturday Night Live” skit that should have stayed a skit and not wound up on the big screen.

Without more skillful dialogue and lively stories, this won't help A&E kick the reality habit.

You've got to figure that it doesn't bode well for Knight Rider given the fact its human stars--which also include Sydney Tamilia Poitier, Paul Campbell, Bruce Davison and Yancy Arias--are eclipsed by computerized graphics and an emotionless hunk of sleek metal.

It lacks the charm of the original. Worse, the characters in the NBC show are so exaggerated that the whole thing feels like a skit.

The racial fire is oddly muted, the characters disturbingly undefined, the interaction frustratingly nondescript. The truth is, I'm not really sure what this show is supposed to be other than chaotic and boorish

Crusoe, based loosely on the classic adventure tale by Daniel Defoe, is an international co-production that champions swashbuckling and scenery without grasping the significance of credibility and character development.

After about an hour of jumbled storytelling and bizarre juxtapositions between the 13th century Latin Kingdom and 21st century New York, the prediction is you'll be less intrigued by the legend of the medieval Knights Templar than you will the prospect of catching up on your reading.

Pretentious and far too taken with its own sense of menace, the show casts every line of dialogue as a pronouncement, every action as an uppercut to the chops.

A conventional, by-the-book alleged laugh-fest that proves just how inert and lifeless the format can be.

Ultimately, the series commits the greatest sin of the thriller genre: It's boring.

Every joke is telegraphed a mile off or just plain flat, especially the attempts to break the fourth wall.

Ultimately, the problem is that while someone's used considerable brain power to put all these pieces together, they clearly just haven't thought things through.

But ignore the stilted jokes, the limp characterization, the complete lack of "re-imagining" of anything. Just understand this: Martin is an animated show with a laugh track.

Where is that Buffy chick when you need her?

Cougar is a mess of a place no one would want to visit, even for a half-hour.

perhaps a segment of CBS' audience will enjoy the sedative-like effects of Three Rivers, which injects sincerity and competence back into the profession with such unabashed ease that it's possible to overlook that this is utter drivel.

So, one gets an episode about Spartacus' lessons at gladiator school and another episode about his fights in "the pit," a place brutal enough to make professional wrestling look like ballet. With such thin stories each week, it's small wonder that sex and violence are used to take up the slack.

This show still feels emotionally manipulative and at times even uncomfortably invasive.

Regardless, it doesn't take long to realize that "Miami Medical," written by executive producer Jeffrey Lieber, is long on emotional manipulation and short on compelling characters and insightful storytelling.

At its core, Rookie is a terrible show.

There is "love, hookups, backstabbing, cheating, scandals and crying," though not nearly enough to distract from the show's tedious obeisance to a formula that has become more familiar than the lyrics to "Happy Birthday."

Some things are better than they were in the '60s--including the top tier of television shows. This just isn't one of them.

So give School Pride an A for good intentions, a D for research into what ails public schools and an F for deliberately concealing the fact that it took the network and its sponsors--and not some empowered community--to revitalize a school.

It's a series that looks like a whole bunch of cooks decided to build the most creatively awesome and different kitchen imaginable, forgetting for a moment that none of them can really cook.

The static nature of three talking heads (even in cartoon form) is dull, and the intermittent non-studio interstitials used to illustrate the discussion fail to provide enough of a change. Watching cartoon characters laugh at one another feels recursively silly, and not in a good way.

It's all cheap, easy, predictable and not very clever.

Retired at 35 is all about hitting your mark, spewing out a tired line then waiting for the canned laughter to start. Some people like the comfort of familiarity, but others just feel the contempt. Ahem.

Working is filled with bad jokes you can see coming from a country mile.

If you're at all discerning, it's like getting peanut butter on your steak. You'd rather have that separate. And on different nights.

Nothing in the first two of these trite NBC versions makes you want to continue with the others.

Here it is, back for an eighth season of eight episodes, and the only reason to return to it is the culmination of storylines. Meaning, to come back to find out what happens to Vince and the boys (and their various girls). And that's really the problem.

It has neither the exactitude of the times nor the talent of the writers to get at the issues, ala Mad Men, that illuminate the issues of the day.

With no other likable characters and a thin premise, Allen Gregory seems as one-dimensional as the animation.

The show is so wrapped up in moving the needle of apparently outrageous behavior that it never does anything but repeat itself.

Animating [the movie] doesn't actually make it better (or even funny), even if you bring back the original cast to do the voice work.

Two episodes of Sullivan & Son were like watching caricatures of characters you'd seen before (and were equally unfunny then).

The predictability is out in force on this series, and despite CBS' ability to make a hit out of pretty much anything it films, this one doesn't really stand up and make a case for itself.

What hatches in the first episode is a disappointing, weak strain of comic material, lacking the cunning, subversive quality of, say, "South Park." [10 Jan 2003]

There’s something plodding and portentous about Rogue, as if it were trying especially hard to be taken seriously, to have the ballast needed to compete with other serious cable dramas.

What may be a reasonable, even sexy premise comes out flat, bitter and flaccid...Neither director nor cast can do anything much with Star's awkward script, which is choppy and burdened with impossible dialogue. But worst is that the smarty mood leaps beyond cynical, and his characters are too disagreeable to make funny. [3 June 1998]

A series like this can go in a lot of different directions, and creator-writer-director John Gray takes them there. He goes for the scary, the funny and the overbearingly sentimental, but it is the latter that dominates.

[It] might more accurately be titled "Touched by a Sponsor."

The show feels as scripted as a sitcom.

That it has been a hit in 35 nations... reveals that there are more international threats than terrorism and global warming.

[It] leads the league in overreactions and on-cue hugs, making it seem just too phony to have any real impact.

The characters have the depth of a dollar bill, and their predicaments produce few surprises. It's not that the stories lack potential -- well, some maybe. Mostly it's that the level of drama rarely goes beyond daytime fare.

It's an artificial conceit for a superficial show.

The series premiere suffers from a catalog of problems longer than most demand lists.

Given this straitjacket of a script, it's hard to know how good the cast could be with decent material.

Pretty much everything gets tossed against the wall and precious little of it sticks, or even actually makes it as far as the wall.

If "Twenty" proves anything, it's that even gifted performers can't conceal the flaws of a truly uninspired script, though they can distract from them here and there.

A look at the first episode suggests that, just as A.M. radio is the unassailable province of the right, TV might better be left to the left.

The stories trudge along like a semi on a steep uphill grade. Taken as a whole, the show looks more like something pasted together for potential demographic appeal than anyone's dramatic vision.

A lackluster show about a conflicted mother-to-be and her annoying and oblivious husband that mostly provides ammunition to those who argue that Hollywood is out of touch with the real world.

"Painkiller Jane" has been reincarnated as a far lamer show than it was on first view more than a year ago.

It's so consumed with its of-the-moment zeitgeist embodiment that it forgets to give its characters any depth beyond their reshaped noses.

Largely a waste of time.

Fear Is Real is the dripping-with-irony title of a CW-staged unscripted venture that scarcely could be more fake, a collection of preposterous snapshots of 13 young people trying their best to scream rather than laugh.

Clearly, the only function of the show is to make Tinsley (who runs a handbag company) look like a valuable, upright member of society. So that's where the bar is set these days?

With this much bad acting and writing, this body of water should be declared a Superfund site.

Kennedys is a hamfisted mess, both slothful in its pacing and leaden in whatever underlying message was meant to be given. It's not the Kennedy family or legacy that suffers here, but the people involved in the project.

It's painful to watch so many talented comedic actors, like Darby, Rajskub, and Dave Foley, who plays Andrew's boss at the magazine, suffer with this material.

A hilariously bad remake of the original, substituting the amazingly gorgeous Kristin Kreuk and Jay Ryan in the title roles, which is how The CW rolls.

Deception just seems sloppily constructed and poorly written, wasting some good actors (Victor Garber, Tate Donovan and Meagan Good) in the process and never giving you a reason to care.

No matter how you slice it, you won't find a quality cable series hiding inside.

It's definitely too laughably convoluted to go into.

Weird can be good, but this isn’t intentionally weird so much as it is plain bad.

What this show does prove is that you can be racy and still somehow tediously tame.

The visual effects from coordinator Laird McMurray and his team in the wake of the missile strike are solid enough, though it's never explained why some people get sucked out of the hole and others don't and why, after the plane levels off, the sucking pretty much stops even as the movie itself continues to suck.

You'd think that someone somewhere down the line... would have lobbied for the rudiments of a story, characters with texture and dialogue more sophisticated than shopping mall conversation.

This formulaic, hard-to-swallow concoction of glib writing and off-putting characters neither enhances the credits of its cast nor the reputation of Jerry Bruckheimer when it comes to TV comedy.

[It] panders in a fashion that's akin to a neon sign flashing, "Yoo hoo! Young demographics! Over here!"

[It] implodes on pretty much every level.

What few laughs were once there [in the orginal pilot] have now been effectively removed.

Shallow as a birdbath, the program would appear to exist less as a true philanthropic exercise than yet another self-aggrandizing vehicle in Oprah's divine quest to become synonymous with all that is virtuous and good on Earth.

This is a show that could bury the [sitcom] genre altogether.

Seacrest and his cohorts do everything they can to ratchet up the artificial tension and drama, following in the footsteps of so many primetime abominations that have preceded Momma's. Here's the good news: Come fall 2009, 10 o'clock shows like this will be obsolete on NBC, replaced by five nights a week of "A Man Named Jay" (or whatever they choose to call it).

Let's put it this way: $#*! makes ABC's ill-fated appropriation of the Geico cavemen in 2007 look like sheer genius.

Dull, dimwitted and offensive.

Dallas is terrible....The writing is brutal and obvious, the acting is comical, and none of it is bettered by the directing.

It's a show that should never have been put on paper to begin with.

Partners plays like an idea written on a napkin, if that, and looks like it's from another era (a long past era, if that wasn't clear).

Lohan is woeful as Taylor from start to finish.... The best part is that it gets worse as it goes on, so in the right company with the right beverages, Liz & Dick could be unbearably hilarious toward the tail end of the 90-minute running time.

It feels far closer to genre self-parody than it does the genuine article: wildly overproduced and characteristically overbearing, with a concept that plays as utterly insipid.

The four-hour project was written and directed by John Lafia, who managed to find new and creative ways to turn every scene into a cliche and get a cringe from every line of dialogue.

Here is the equation: privilege + TV cameras x 2 = unwatchability.

ABC's new drama Charlie's Angels seem to want to go back to the '70s to rustle up some girl power, but it fails miserably and offensively.

Work It is not so bad it's good. It's just terrible.

This season, ABC has Neighbors, one of the least funny things to air on television since the last Hitler documentary on History.

There is not one smart or endurable moment in this series.