A quest romance in which Middle Earth is essentially Route 66, that national treasure, and some of its burned-out byways.

The premiere episode is almost willfully strange and unlikable. But that doesn’t mean that the series is bad, just peculiar, a solemn mythologization — and mystification — of surfing as unearthly pleasure and life-sapping addiction.

"Broken Trail" is not as well written or compelling as "Lonesome Dove," but Mr. Duvall brings an earthy believability to even the most plodding lines.

In this version, Mrs. Harris, at times appealing, at other times brittle and censorious, is hard to fathom.

This latest hardboiled-but-dedicated babe with a badge follows all the clichés of the genre but knows it and will find ways to twist the formula in novel, interesting ways.

One of television’s rare examples of successful farce.

The Captain has a great facade, but it’s filled with people who will make you keep checking the real estate listings.

Swingtown has ’70s mystique, but not much mystery.

This first episode doesn’t offer enough payoff for those first scenes: far too much Hauser and running, and too little Boulet and talking. But the opening scenes give proof of intelligence, and the series might yet display that intelligence more effectively, and give Mr. Anderson room to play.

The cast is too appealing to make Californication as genuinely distasteful as it tries to be. And at the same time the writing is too broad to make it genuinely good.

Enjoyable but not exhilarating, engaging but not hypnotic.

When this complex question about memory, identity, reality and generations of women supplies the suspense of the film, “Life Support” really gets good.

The film is bereft of feel-good scenes and drug-movie clichés.

NBC’s show, which is more about fembot martial arts and slick “Matrix”-ish special effects than about character development, is oriented toward young male viewers.

Hollander... has pared the medical drama down to its barest notions of life and death and sliced away the acronyms, arguably just when they needed some cutting.

If “This American Life” is all like this [opening] segment, it will be an immaculate and historic documentary series, with or without the storytelling pretext.

CBS, which had promoted the show as almost exactly that ["Lord of the Flies" for voyeurs], backed down, explaining that Kid Nation was really more of a 40-day character-building exercise, like Outward Bound, but with camera crews and off-camera supervisors. And of course, it turned out to be a little of both, but mostly neither.

Unfortunately for Ms. Collette, the roles of Tara’s children are so deftly written and skillfully played that they undermine her own star turn--Tara has four personalities and is one-dimensional in all of them.

John Adams is the weakest part of John Adams.

After the first few episodes it remains unclear who, or what, is behind the mayhem, so points, as cringe making as it is to acknowledge, for suspense. The show has missing cash, stolen cash, a freaky black sheep and a menacing brother-in-law.

We pay close attention to Sit Down, Shut Up, an occasionally quite funny but largely anodyne animated comedy beginning Sunday on Fox, because it comes from the pen of Mitchell Hurwitz, creator of “Arrested Development."

The Unusuals, which begins on Wednesday, isn’t nearly as thrilling [as "Southland"]. But it isn’t bad, just more predictable.

This is the world of “Weeds” a few tax brackets lower, and the sense of emptiness is as aggressively conveyed.

Robert Carlyle has a gravity that allows him to sell the most implausible science-fiction hokum, making you realize that performance as much as writing makes this kind of thing work.

The revisiting of Ripper lore, though, is relatively painless, especially since the most interesting character in this series is Edward Buchan (Steve Pemberton), the Ripperologist who tips Chandler to the similarities between the then and the now.

The movie’s premise--a secretary who feigns pregnancy to avoid being fired--isn’t terrible and neither is Ms. Lohan. Mostly because of how her part was written, it takes too long for Ms. Lohan to shed her Hollywood reputation and wan, stilted demeanor and get into the role.

Like everything else in the MacFarlane arsenal, The Cleveland Show relies heavily on pop-cultural references (and many of them are pretty funny), but the rhythm and pacing can feel like a slow-dripping faucet.

There is plenty to enjoy, but not much to applaud. At its best fashion celebrates originality; The Fashion Show feeds on imitation.

The writing is a bit stilted and predictable, but the show is not unbearable--are some amusing supporting actors and the occasional engrossing medical crisis. As a character study, however, HawthoRNe is weighed down in the pursuit of worthIness.

The movie has such cult status that it seems almost sacrilege to tamper with it for television, but as a series 10 Things is not terrible; it is even at times fun. It’s just not very inventive.

The dialogue, timing and jokes have the madcap pace and anarchic spirit of "Scrubs," and it takes a while for Ms. Cox to recalibrate her Monica persona from "Friends."

The class divide is ugly and pronounced, much more so than on “Nurse Jackie,” where Jackie’s best friend is a surgeon happiest in the proximity of $600 pumps. Quickly, Sonia’s aspirations are shown to be untenable.

The series is in the "NYPD Blue" and "Southland" vein, trying for realism. It isn't in those shows' league, but it's a welcome change from the glossy triviality of other summer filler like "Rookie Blue" or "The Good Guys."

Ms. Heaton is less acerbic than she was on "Everybody Loves Raymond," but just as comical playing an overwhelmed Midwesterner who works at Orson's only surviving car dealership.

The Pillars of the Earth will go down painlessly for the fan of this sort of epic; while it's predictable and never exactly sweeping, it's certainly eventful, and the production values are above average.

Haven not only resembles its Syfy stablemates, but it's also just about as good, which means that if you like a cozy, lived-in mystery with some quirky characters in a pleasant setting--and you don't mind spotty writing and perfunctory camerawork--you may enjoy it.

Most of the screen time goes to Ms. Madsen, and she works hard to pump some life into the script's mild zingers.

If Mr. Passmore is a little too self-conscious to pull off his character, some of the supporting players fare better, especially Kiele Sanchez as Callie, a nurse who seems poised to become Longworth's love interest, and Carlos Gomez as a forensic medical examiner and Longworth's golf buddy. And though it's virtually impossible to come up with a new spin on dead-body television these days, the premiere of The Glades does end with a tasty twist that makes you want to come back for Episode 2.

The Gates is a satire--a cheaply enjoyable one--of suburban lust and maternal anxiety, psycho-social forces that delivered previous generations of women to the pages of Betty Friedan (or Redbook) but that today send a certain kind of young matron to the perverse romance of vampire media.

This is a treatise on personalities rather than systems, its bantering sensibility recalling something more along the lines of "Ocean's Eleven" than "Law & Order: Criminal Intent."

CW shows tend to walk a thin line between escapism and soap opera, and after its witty pilot the show spends Episodes 2 and 3 massaging the tear ducts, hard. But there is the potential for something at least as good as “Gilmore Girls."

Defying Gravity, about four men and four women sent into orbit with entangled romantic pasts and removable libido-suppressing devices, has high-tech props and a spooky sci-fi mystery, but it is layered in feminine concerns and the mawkishly sentimental pop music that frames plot points on “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice.”

It's harder to tell from this preview whether the atmospherics add up to a solid and complex mystery. The pilot isn't groundbreaking, but it is promising enough to justify waiting for the full two-hour premiere on Aug. 1.

They each have a glorious, fearsome secret, and can truly confide only in one another. But it's not clear whether this series--a hybrid of family drama and graphic novel--can sustain interest once the premise is fully established.

Though it has moments of sublime satire and a typically memorable performance from Mr. Cross's "Arrested Development" colleague Will Arnett, it still has the feel of a dish that has been sitting on the table well past the point of cooling.

The good side of the kabuki-like formalism of the Bruckheimer approach is that the story moves like a bullet toward the inevitable apprehension of the fugitive, flying past leaden dialogue and plot holes so quickly that if you enjoy the crime-drama formulas that are in play, you can enjoy the show.

The executive producers, Shana Goldberg-Meehan and Greg Malins, both worked on "Friends," and the jokes in Better With You have the polish and the off-center, sneakily funny quality that marked that show. But the single-family multigeneration setup seems to have facilitated an undertone of nastiness and desperation in the humor, most clearly expressed in the condescending portrayal of the youngest couple.

It's the "Sabrina" story mixed with "Arthur," and it strains to make the tycoon's son endearingly weak and childish

The Event is bright and showy and too in thrall to its own hysteria to feel unsettling. It doesn't quiet down enough to disturb, and as a result its claims to relevance seem merely perfunctory

These highlight reels can be enjoyed for their own sakes. Mr. Burns and Ms. Novick try to construct a larger story around the career of Barry Bonds, who set the single-season and career home run records while becoming embroiled in the steroid scandals, but it never really coheres into something that can give shape to the entire four-hour documentary.

It's well made and enjoyable enough, but it follows convention so closely that it doesn't give Ms. Delany, an actress with range and great presence, a chance to riff on the genre.

It is a credit to the casting scouts of Bravo that they managed to sign up a crew of women every bit as uninhibited and ostentatious as their predecessors.

If you've seen the many hours of "The Blue Planet" and "Planet Earth," or are a regular watcher of the nature documentaries constantly available on cable, then you've already seen most of what Great Migrations has to offer, or some version of it.

The show is called Conan, but it felt at times as if it should have been labeled "I'm Not Jay."

The result--for the person with a casual interest in cars, anyway--is a show that at this point lacks the character of the British original but is, particularly in its second and third episodes, reasonably entertaining by American reality-TV standards.

Some viewers won't find much of anything in Bob's Burgers funny, but in fairness it's at least partly a question of style--of whether you respond to the show's minimalist, conversational, antijoke aesthetic.

The question is what they'll be given to do going forward, beyond generic relationship material, domestic comedy and the occasional action set piece.

Ms. Rivers is, even in this silly imposture, very funny, making jokes and playing the role of doting grandmother and interfering mother self-mockingly.

Friday Night Dinner, which had its first season on the British Channel 4 this spring, is a rowdier, sweatier, more profane show that will probably seem more typically British to American fans of "Fawlty Towers" or "The Royle Family."

Moving forward, less time should be devoted to planning and logistics--this is suspenseless television--and more to motivations. There's a "Hoarders" in here, dying to be redeemed.

Sure, it all makes for pretty filmmaking, but isn't not having to risk your life for a simple meal one of the benefits of civilization? There's something unsettling about glorifying subsistence living for the sake of our high-definition televisions.

Cinema Verite is a clever, beautifully made but somehow underwhelming re-enactment of the breakup of the Loud marriage, on camera and off.

Yes, boys and girls, Teen Wolf has more to say than "Jersey Shore."

Happily Divorced is less a sitcom than a showcase for Ms. Drescher's delightful, if somewhat time-worn, brand of schtick.

Finding Sarah isn't really all that helpful as an inspirational story or even as a cautionary tale. [...] But the series provides an invaluable lesson in celebrity self-help.

Watching the pilot again, though, it became harder to ignore the soap opera underpinnings and the twee sentimentality.

Strike Back won't make anyone forget "24" or "MI-5" or even "The Unit," but it has its pleasures for the aficionado of guns and flesh in exotic locales.

It's decent popcorn TV, if you've got nothing better to do.

Ringer is nearly all melodramatics, but the pilot has a throwback, B-movie vibe that's entertaining--empty calories, but with a little kick.

It may turn into one of those crime shows that are competent enough but, well, forgettable, despite Ms. Montgomery's charms.

A smart look at political power brokers that gets silly on the subjects of sex and violence.

In a way it's as paradoxical as its subject: a big, lusty but surprisingly timid look at the bold pioneers and profiteers who ravaged nature to build a nation.

The storytelling in The Fades can be convoluted and creaky, but there's some wit to the writing, and the horror and battle scenes are legitimately frightening, by TV standards.

It's the right cast in the right setting but with a wrongfully righteous script.

The 11-year-old boy at the center of the story has never spoken and is also the show's narrator. It's a perfectly acceptable device, if not a particularly interesting one in this case.

If the various kinks work themselves out, The Finder will at the least be a medium-strength entry in the increasingly crowded field of comedy-dramas featuring eccentric characters.

The new film, despite the astounding story it tells, is the most conventional, least urgent and, cinematically, the least interesting of the three.

While there are moments of snappy dialogue, it's sometimes snappier than the characters themselves.

Hatfields & McCoys is a perfectly respectable piece of work, and probably better than we could have expected for a History mini-series....The mini-series's main problem is that six-hour running time.

However, beyond its stars (and a welcome guest appearance in the pilot by Dallas Roberts), Elementary is a mixed bag. Mr. Doherty, whose primary credit is a long stint on the voluptuously melodramatic "Medium," is good on atmosphere and character but not so strong on plot mechanics.

It's all just window dressing on a standard crime drama, however, and while the pilot sets up running story lines involving the gangster and the officials he controls, they feel squeezed and a little perfunctory.

The story ends with a final, not quite believable, flourish on John's part, but Mr. Mackintosh carries it off, riding comfortably above his middling material.

There are interesting tidbits about the history of fashion photography--the racism, the drugs--but not much serious discussion about the cultural consequences of the evolution of the business.

Ms. Kreuk and Nina Lisandrello, as her police force partner, are unconvincing as detectives. But the pilot's hint of a connection between the beast's condition and the murder of Catherine's mother offers the promise of future depth.

The details of those bargains and interrelationships among the inhabitants of the Drake will no doubt be fleshed out in subsequent episodes. But the premiere, at least, hasn't found a way to make this odd mix of high-end real estate and B-movie occultism compelling enough that you're eager for more.

The strained '40s-speak starts to recede in the third episode (four were sent to critics), and, not coincidentally, the performances begin to improve--what looked like community theater acting in the pilot suddenly seems more natural.

It's a drama that takes the wretched New Jersey caricature created by trashy shows like "Jersey Shore" and uses it as a force for good, or at least for reasonably good courtroom tales.

Hunted ends up being a competent addition to the high-stakes-snooping genre but not a very surprising one.

The competitors may not be all that amusing, but some of the show's gimmicks are.

It's a delicious immorality play with an excellent cast, but the tempo is slow and oddly ponderous--a romp slowed down to a dirge.

1600 Penn has charm and some funny riffs, but it's a 2013 sitcom that at times seems like it was written in 1983.

Unfortunately, the three hours of the show, while they include chases, sexual entrapment, grisly murders and lots of spycraft, never exceed the tension in those quiet opening scenes.

The question is whether it has any depth or insight to offer once it [raises your eyebrows]. The evidence provided by the first three episodes is inconclusive.

Do No Harm is a resolutely lightweight entertainment whose silliness isn't necessarily a deal breaker--if you turn off the right parts of your brain, you might enjoy it.

Bates Motel has a talented cast and a memorable back story that guides, but doesn’t limit, the narrative, and at its best it’s intriguing and enjoyably grim. But even more than Norman, the series itself has a split personality, a Hitchcock classic grafted onto a much more mundane brand of suspense. Each new twist moves it further from “Psycho” and closer to Nancy Drew.

[A] glossy, silly, intermittently entertaining new series.

The directionless but well-shot archival footage dates to 2011, when Kesha led her first headlining tour, and was filmed by her brother Lagan, among others, which explains the access, the duration of filming and the intimacy.

It has lots of stunning images, but if there’s a unifying concept, it is apparently going to emerge more gradually than a single episode allows.

After watching the rest of what is a very promising pilot, we are left with the unpleasant aftertaste of saccharin. A passing miscalulation, or a harbinger of episodes to come? Bring on the series. [15 Sept 1986, p.C14]

The new jokes mostly feel slow and hands-off, less disdainful than uninterested.

The novelty of the hour-by-hour conceit wore off long ago, and the various plot devices and characters are all familiar. The fun, at least at the beginning of a new season, is in seeing how the creators will rejigger the pieces this time around.

It’s not an embarrassment for the channel, but it doesn’t raise the stakes either.

Surprisingly inoffensive.

The stars are appealing WB veterans, but it is hard to believe that subsequent episodes will carry the same edge as the premiere. "Supernatural" is not "The Sixth Sense," it's "Ghostbusters' Creek."

Clings to proven formulas.

"The Unit" becomes distinctive only when the action shifts back to the wives left behind on the base.

[Cooper's] presence [is] almost engaging enough to redeem an overstuffed, overbaked first episode.

Mr. Dean is appealing as Nate and Mr. Sheridan is amusing as Dove, but the tone of the series is uneven.

It may be too much a celebration of Rev Run's normalcy to be all that intriguing.

"Miracle Workers" has its share of the tears and phony drama we've come to expect in television-as-savior programs, but at its best it's more documentary than reality show.

The hallucination conceit is strange but not necessarily horrible.... The problem with “Raines” is that it tries too hard to be too many things at once.

Those jokes are supposed to establish Liz’s geek cred, but they mostly serve as speed bumps in the show’s otherwise fast and clever banter.

It’s pretty easy to loathe this stuff if you like your comedy more ragged, drug-addled and confrontational. But there’s an easygoing red-state pleasantness to it too, a celebration of timeless and consoling suburban inertia.

Mr. Danson has some funny moments, but he is not as comfortable in a comic genre where deadpan takes the place of punch line.

"In Case of Emergency" is uneven, more antic than witty.

It would be nice if Angela’s persona were truly distinctive, but, played by Ms. Spencer, she may turn out to be just another very pretty face.

Prime-time game shows like “1 vs 100,” which begins tonight on NBC, are not a test of a contestant’s erudition or nerve; they are aspirational reality shows that allow ordinary Joes to go for it all in the hope of transforming their lives.

You’d expect the back story of how humanity nearly brings about its own destruction (in only 58 years!) to be serious, but through the three episodes sent to critics Caprica stays on that one note; it hasn’t yet developed enough humor or authentic domestic drama to move beyond the “Galactica” fan base.

As with “Laguna Beach,” however, MTV seems to have deployed every camera at Viacom just following the cast members around town in case something exciting -- a cellphone call! - happens.

Women’s Murder Club is all right, but not good enough.

The paradox of The Tudors is that it takes on one of the most powerful and protested institutions in human history--the Catholic Church during the Renaissance--and provides little sense of what the English people have to gain or lose by breaking with it.

It aspires to distill the news from an African-American perspective, and in two weeks on the air its comedy has been variously anachronistic and plodding, and timely and sharp.

It’s creepy, steamy and funny at times, and it’s also a muddle, a comic murder mystery that is a little too enthralled with its own exoticism.

Mr. Branagh has teased out every manly rivalry and preserved every hey-nonny-nonny of the kooks in the Forest of Arden, but slashed passages of the repartee that defines Rosalind.

Eastbound & Down feels static.

Fear Itself, which is directed by a platoon of horror film veterans (including the Hong Kong auteur Ronny Yu), delivers a lot of ripped flesh and spilled blood--terrible things happen, in particular, to lips and teeth--in the service of very little terror or discomfort.

Flashpoint lingers when it ought to speed up. It is a show about crisis that refuses to make you anxious.

The show feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s, when it was possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed.

It needs a lot more moments like the one when the samurai girl bursts through a door to find her chauffeur on the verge of disemboweling himself. “Seriously?” she asks, eyeing the knife in his hands. “Seppuku?”

Pizazz is what’s missing from CBS’s new drama, Eleventh Hour, in which Rufus Sewell plays Dr. Jacob Hood.

The series itself seems divided: at times a supersize fable told with portentous, and even turgid, simplicity, while at others, a sophisticated spoof that uses ancient legend to send up modern politics. And when a series cannot be both, it ends up being neither.

You see Mr. Bratt with his goatee and expressions of martyrdom, but you hear the voice of Nancy Reagan.

Leverage winds up seeming merely anachronistic, wrapping up with a cute resolution each week, the swine in handcuffs, not torn from the private hockey rinks of their Aspen vacation homes.

What is obvious to viewers after only a few minutes is not obvious to the supposedly crack investigators dispatched to untangle the conspiracy, whose Ludlumesque layers they fail to see.

The show’s value, if any, is in demonstrating the different styles used by the principals: tough, tender and so on. The show’s drawback is that it suggests that all principals do is administer discipline. For that, the show’s creators need a spanking.

The semi-improvised Z Rock has its moments, none of which can be described adequately here.

Suspect Behavior is not boring, but it is familiar.

Accidentally on Purpose, with its matching sets of friends for Billie and Zack, its bland jokes, its lack of any sort of topicality, its Jenna Elfman, feels as if it could have been on any time in the last two decades.

The series may want to say something about the inequities of the medical care system or it may just want an excuse to produce panning shots of the velvet lawns and iron gates of Gin Lane. It seems safer to bet on the second and to remain grateful for the “House” reruns that are shown more or less continually on USA.

If you’re old enough to remember “The Partridge Family” and young enough to remember it fondly--which means you’re in your mid-40s and can recite the Echo Valley phone number--then you might enjoy Tuesday night’s pilot episode of Ruby & the Rockits on ABC Family.

There’s too much hinting around about Chance’s troubled past--reflecting the solemn pretensions of the comic book-- and the writing, in terms of both humor and plotting, isn’t at the level of the show’s role models.

Undercover Boss, a CBS reality show that turns the tables on management, seems tailor-made for the anticorporate rancor of the times, but if anything, it paints too rosy a picture of white-collar benevolence.

Predictable characters haven’t hurt the “CSI” crime shows, but this is Mr. Bruckheimer’s first hospital drama, and viewers accustomed to layered dramas like “ER” and “House” expect more.

At this point, everything about it feels generic.

The comedy pivots on Hank’s painful adjustment to middle-class living, but that joke is undercut with syrupy life lessons about parental responsibility and quality time.

No one appearing on Melrose Place 2.0 is nearly that dreadful, and the one-liners that remind us that we are not watching the television of a historic golden age retain the zesty camp of the series’s first iteration.

The balance between humor and pathos is a hard one, and this show teeters on the edge and occasionally falls flat.

The premiere showcases seven different women, doctors and their patients, in various states of anger, insecurity and neediness. It’s like a Hogarth engraving of the seven stages of womanly despair, “A Surgeon’s Progress.”

Too often The Real L Word feels like sitting in a restaurant and hearing about some incredible specials that happen to be sold out. Anything genuinely interesting seems to have already taken place.

In the absence of an arcing narrative, the series wants us to accept as its mission of suspense the mystery of this crypto drag-king-meets-shopaholic friendship.

Plain Jane is more than shopping spree and vocabulary builder; it betrays a cockamamie respect for the therapeutic process, and it shouldn't be giving too much away to tell you that the snails lose, that the plain Janes blossom, and that no stimulus money has been wasted along the way.

It feels as if the attention that should have gone to the storytelling all went to the atmosphere and the repartee.

The banter between the Blooms is so full of cloying sugar substitutes and so devoid of any real tension that there is no voyeuristic thrill to be had even from their--I'm just going to say it, because the show does--"sexpionage."

Each warrior is given equal time and the evidence is piled up on both sides to maximize the suspense around the weekly suspect's guilt or innocence. But the personality cost is too high for the payoff.

It offers the minor pleasures of formulaic fantasy and weekly puzzle solving, though in a cheaper-looking and less original package than usual.

Some of the stories are touching, but the formula is set and stagy. The viewer has no doubt that the episode will end with a job offer and floods of thankful tears.

The snowcapped mountains, pine forests and shimmering lakes are majestic, the Palin children are adorable, and the series looks like a travelogue--wholesome, visually breathtaking and a little dull.

Off the Map takes few chances with plot or characters.

The result is a production even more fantastically soapy than the first, visually elevated by an apocalyptic video-game look in which the orgiastic sex and violence are presented with a studied, syncopated choreography.

It's well made and also at times unnecessarily cheesy.

It's a five-part drama that is loyally, unwaveringly true to James M. Cain's 1941 novel and somehow not nearly as satisfying as the 1945 film noir that took shameless liberties with plot, characters and settings.

The show's jarring shift in tone suggests a touch of the film "Syriana," as well, all of which leaves us with a hard-to-digest influence soup. It's as if a novelist were telling you that she wrote while under the spell of both Salinger and Nancy Drew.

Happy Endings is both a retro version of "Friends" and a more superficially progressive one.

The show does a creditable job of cataloging the novel's themes, but it has more trouble capturing the story's Victorian-style sweep and texture.

An odd and sympathetic show beginning Sunday that's part episodic biography, part comeback tale and part confrontation therapy.

Franklin & Bash has some of the ingredients of perfectly adequate summer filler: it's handsomely shot; the writing, line by line, is as good as or better than that of most of the cable competition; and there are appealing actors like Malcolm McDowell, Reed Diamond and Ms. Davis in supporting roles. The problem is that Franklin and Bash themselves are resolutely uninteresting.

Current TV turns out to be less serious than one would have predicted, and in some sense 4th and Forever might have benefited from some of the aura of earnestness that used to surround Mr. Gore before he took to making uncannily great guest appearances on enterprises like "30 Rock."

What we get is an unwieldy and mostly humdrum combination of mob tale and backstage musical.

It's neither here nor there: low on sci-fi mystery and intrigue and not yet convincing as ensemble drama. Right now it feels like the beta version.

Ms. Walker is an appealing actress with a strong presence, but in the pilot, at least, her character isn't as well formed or well written as other tough-talking television dames.

Though the series begins amusingly enough, it quickly descends into cloying buddy escapade, in which the full-of-heart slacker seeks to teach his careerist boss how to care, and the careerist boss teaches his moldable young thing about cunning and diligence and clothes that cost a mortgage payment.

If only for the costumes and '60s music, Pan Am is amusing to see at least once, but if it has any instructive benefit at all, it's as a mood indicator for these times, not those.

Quirky, so obsessed with the process of taking an idea to market, overlooks the process of building a successful television narrative.

The pilot begins promisingly with Max unfurling an Aaron Sorkin-like rant at a customer foolish enough to snap his fingers to get her attention. But after that there are too many one-liners about semen stains and orgasms that aren't clever, just pronounced very loudly to carry over the titters of a studio audience.

Up All Night could use more backup players and more imaginative writing. Most of all, the show has to get over its fear of offending.

Rock Center is still a work in progress, so it's hard to judge how it will fare.

All those profiled are on their best behavior, and the show is so focused on teaching that it goes for long stretches without entertaining.

The models themselves are incidental on Scouted, merely empty planets around which revolve some fascinating characters and plenty more dull ones.

The writers may work their way out of this corner and Mr. McIntyre, who's a bit lightweight at this point, may grow into the central role. In the meantime there are still touches of the unbridled campiness that made the first season amusing.

By the end of this documentary, yes, you're convinced that Mr. Lewis was a much larger figure than is generally acknowledged. But you still don't feel as if you know him.

It's refreshing, and ultimately unnerving, to see just how naïve Jane Quimby (Erica Dasher) is at the outset of Jane by Design.

The scripts are efficient. The acting is decent. But you're likely to find yourself just waiting for the familiar crises and character complications to come along, and sure enough, they do.

It tries to combine elements of American mob stories and Scandinavian mysteries, seasoned with frequent overt references to "The Sopranos," but the mixture is pretty flat in the first episode.

Resolutely generic.

This glossy tribute is enjoyable; it is just not memorable.

Nothing in the first two episodes of The Pauly D Project is more than mildly diverting, but that's still more than can be said for the reboot of the candid-camera prank show "Punk'd."

The show around them [the actors], at this point, looks too flat and schematically plotted to succeed as the type of lightweight summer fun we've come to expect from USA.

At least in the early stages, the series is quite entertaining. But over all, the mini-series suffers from defensive storytelling; it's a narrative driven in splintered directions less by inspiration than by avoidance.

Hit & Miss is so slow and earnest and teachy--several scenes involve Mia's young son exploring his own sexual identity by donning a dress and headband--that much of the show seems to be performed on tiptoe, and a giggle seems like the appropriate response.

At its best, and that doesn't come into full view until the third and fourth episodes, The Newsroom has a wit, sophistication and manic energy that recalls James L. Brooks's classic movie "Broadcast News." But at its worst, the show chokes on its own sanctimony.

The medical scenes are competent but forgettable, while the scenes of Charlie's peregrinations are sometimes interesting and funny but surprisingly infrequent.

Across the four early episodes provided for review, Pierce's hallucinations are already beginning to feel like stunts covering up for a lack of ideas.

Anger Management is at heart a simple, old-fashioned sitcom, with raucous recorded laughter and predictable one-liners.

The comedy in the show is a grab bag, sometimes subtle, sometimes self-consciously outlandish.

[Stars Earn Stripes] drenches a promising premise in a distracting amount of troop-thanking.

Some of the jokes are amusing, but the show is a traditional sitcom that looks slightly dated.

The show suffers from a failure to commit: resolutely charting a middle course between cheese-ball parody and something darker and more sophisticated, it manages to be both over the top and consistently flat, too silly to take seriously and too dull to care about.

[Coma] is sometimes entertaining, sometimes infuriating.

The problem is more likely to be the generic nature of Emily's misadventures, and the soap opera implausibility of the medical stories, which is extreme, even for the genre.

[Peter Dinklage, Ciaran Hinds, Paul Kaye, and Dianna Rigg are] all fun to watch, even when their characters don’t have anything in particular to do besides relay information that we need to keep up with the story or keep straight the seven (so we’re told) warring families.

The gore is plentiful, the tone is inconsistent, and by the end only one thing is undeniably clear: Mockingbird Lane is a very different creature from "The Munsters."

The music, costumes, lighting and even some camera shots--a shower head, a spiral staircase--all evoke classic Hitchcock movies like "Psycho," "Spellbound" and "Vertigo." But the film loses steam as soon as Hitchcock acts on his passion.

A serviceable, nonthreatening family comedy that embraces the illusion that time stopped when Chachi married Joanie.

"Catfish" was a clever riff on a found-footage thriller, Catfish: The TV Show is a standard reality series mixing elements of the dating and rehab-therapy genres.

The filmmaking is at times derivative and heavy-handed, and the score is unrelenting and unbearable: an electronic thumpa-thumpa pounding that sounds like music to inject blood boosters by.

[The] preposterously grandiose title really needed to be strung out a bit to give an accurate picture of the program. Something like, "Mankind: The Story of All of Us, Delivered Somewhat Superficially by People You Know and Love, Because We Don't Want to Bore You."

Mr. Stone brings a more stentorian absolutism, leaving no room for doubt or nuance.