For 914 reviews, this publication has graded:
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44% higher than the average critic
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4% same as the average critic
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52% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 5.2 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average TV Show review score: 59
| Highest review score: |
Critic Score
100
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| Lowest review score: |
Critic Score
0
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 406 out of 406
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Mixed: 0 out of 406
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Negative: 0 out of 406
406
tv reviews
- By critic score
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 50
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.- Posted Jul 9, 2012
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 50
Anger Management is at heart a simple, old-fashioned sitcom, with raucous recorded laughter and predictable one-liners.- Posted Jun 27, 2012
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 50
The comedy in the show is a grab bag, sometimes subtle, sometimes self-consciously outlandish.- Posted Sep 10, 2012
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 50
[Stars Earn Stripes] drenches a promising premise in a distracting amount of troop-thanking.- Posted Aug 13, 2012
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 50
Some of the jokes are amusing, but the show is a traditional sitcom that looks slightly dated.- Posted Sep 10, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 50
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.- Posted Aug 16, 2012
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 50
[Coma] is sometimes entertaining, sometimes infuriating.- Posted Sep 4, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 50
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.- Posted Oct 15, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 50
[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.- Posted Mar 28, 2013
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 50
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."- Posted Oct 25, 2012
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 50
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.- Posted Oct 18, 2012
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 50
A serviceable, nonthreatening family comedy that embraces the illusion that time stopped when Chachi married Joanie.- Posted Oct 15, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 50
"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.- Posted Nov 12, 2012
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 50
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.- Posted Nov 9, 2012
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 50
[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."- Posted Nov 12, 2012
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 50
Mr. Stone brings a more stentorian absolutism, leaving no room for doubt or nuance.- Posted Nov 12, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 50
What looks like a flat noir thriller could still make for a pretty entertaining police procedural.- Posted Jan 10, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 50
The occasional half-decent joke aside, the pilot episode of (the real) Cult is largely derivative, with a style and atmosphere reminiscent of better CW shows like “Supernatural” and “The Vampire Diaries,” and a mildly interesting, at best, metaphysical-mystery component that feels borrowed from “Lost.”- Posted Feb 19, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 50
It’s reasonably smart, reasonably interesting and reasonably well acted without being particularly good.- Posted May 20, 2013
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 50
Freakshow is kind of drab compared with “Immortalized,” especially for anyone who has ever lived within driving distance of Coney Island.- Posted Feb 13, 2013
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 50
Immortalized is the better of the two ["Freakshow" being the other] because it revels in its own absurdity.- Posted Feb 13, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 50
Golden Boy is a smoothly made but entirely generic show that rides the squad-room-as-family metaphor hard.- Posted Feb 25, 2013
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Reviewed by
Jon Caramanica 50
These interactions have none of the dark drama found on "Teen Mom" or "16 and Pregnant"--at least not yet.- Posted Mar 11, 2013
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 50
All of that good early work by the cast explodes in a ball of predictability.- Posted Mar 11, 2013
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 50
The World According to Dick Cheney has interesting insights and revealing moments, but for critics who long to confront Mr. Cheney it may prove dissatisfying, because it allows him to make astonishing assertions without direct contradiction or follow-up questions.- Posted Mar 14, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 50
Most of the elaborately introduced plotlines fizzle out (or simply vanish), and the final surprise is the worst kind of twist ending, arrived at arbitrarily and seemingly presented for its shock value.- Posted Mar 18, 2013
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 50
The malaria story, it seems to say, is filmable only if the central figures are white and it is larded up with the kind of button-pushing that television dramas thrive on.... But the scenes in which the two actresses are together have some real power.- Posted Apr 19, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 50
As to whether the show will get back on track, the early signals are mixed.- Posted Jun 14, 2013
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 50
The creators take a fresh start, but cling to the sepulchral atmospherics that too often take the place of narrative. The series is still suspenseful, but the dread that once again follows Sarah through damp forests, deserted tenements and shadowy, rain-washed streets diminishes with overuse.- Posted May 31, 2013
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 50
The good bits are hilarious; the others often kind of just lie there.- Posted Apr 29, 2013
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 50
The series needs to work more on the writing and less on the lighting to make these particular characters welcome week after week.- Posted Jun 5, 2013
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 50
Peter Sagal begins Constitution USA, his four-part exploration of the founding American document, with look-at-me gimmicks that are more annoying than enlightening, but the series grows more substantive as it goes along.- Posted May 9, 2013
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 50
It might not even be around long enough to develop a consistent tone or viewpoint, both of which are lacking in the pilot. But it has a pretty good actress, Anne Heche ("Hung"), at the head of the cast, and it at least tries to add a touch of levity to what has always been a ponderously serious genre.- Posted May 22, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 50
While Mr. Douglas glides through the film--demonstrating that his talent for portraying carnivorous lechery and polished duplicity works regardless of sexual orientation--and Mr. Damon is earnest and committed, the love, or whatever it was, between Thorson and Liberace never comes into emotional focus.- Posted May 24, 2013
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 50
It looks like a zillion other workplace reality shows.- Posted May 28, 2013
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Reviewed by
Caryn James 40
While The Fugitive is the most high-profile of the CBS crime series, it is also the most lackluster, mostly because Tim Daly is a lightweight Kimble. [6 Oct 2000, p.E1]Posted Jun 14, 2013 -
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Reviewed by
Caryn James 40
The District will either have to ignore race and lapse into television fantasyland or embrace its realism and become more sophisticated. (A tiresome political correctness would be worst of all. ) Either way, it's halfway there. [6 Oct 2000, p.E1]Posted Jun 14, 2013 -
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Reviewed by
Caryn James 40
That still makes the series more daring than most of what's on television; the problem is, its creators know that and the show's self-satisfaction becomes annoying. The floundering first episode (the only one available for preview) is sometimes smart, sometimes stupid, eventually gooey and, despite its sharp cast, not often entertaining. One of the season's most hyped and anticipated series, The West Wing is by far its biggest disappointment.- Posted Apr 21, 2013
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Critic Score 40
It's never quite clear whether Mr. Kelley wants us to laugh or cry. Leaving us merely puzzled is not a solution. Jimmy and Jill can be patronizingly smug.- Posted Jun 19, 2013
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Reviewed by
Anita Gates 40
Both actresses are charming, and the first episode has some smart dialogue, but it's sabotaged by a glut of physical comedy, most of which doesn't work. [19 Sept 2002]Posted Feb 24, 2013 -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
The show's characters are flat and so is the writing, but there is something universally appealing about blood, guts and a rushing gurney. There is no Dr. Feelgood in House, but the patients' symptoms provide a little consolation.- Posted Mar 11, 2013
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
Weeds no longer seems propelled by the will to subvert all of our cultural images of maternal perfection; it seems insistent on celebrating Nancy’s parental fecklessness and narcissism, asking us to refrain from judgments when all we want to do now is throw stones. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
The show's main characters are all too familiar. -
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
It’s easy to admire Mr. Lilley’s writing and performing talent, and some jokes work anywhere. But if he’s interested in really connecting with audiences here--something HBO probably has in mind for the future--he needs to do some more research. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
NBC's teasers for The Apprentice: Martha Stewart had hinted that she would make heads roll and grown men cry. But the premiere episode was a gauzy tribute to her life's work, an evening-wear version of frilly, fun-loving "Martha," Ms. Stewart's new daytime talk show. -
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Reviewed by
Ned Martel 40
The problem with "Criminal Minds" is its many confusing maladies, applied to too many characters. As a result, the cast seems like a spilled trunk of broken toys, with which the audience - and perhaps the creators - may quickly become bored. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
There are some funny moments on "Hot Properties," but few surprises. It's a very conventional, even sedate sitcom about sex. -
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Reviewed by
Virginia Heffernan 40
Still, if it's not funny, why give "Crumbs" any attention at all? Because it's an unusual experiment: not only is the show set among a fraction of the American gentry that few would consider relatable, but it also exhibits more gravitas than any sitcom in television history. -
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Reviewed by
Anita Gates 40
"Mayday" is a run-of-the-mill television movie, but it does make its point: a lot of people in positions of authority these days are very bad guys. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
"Rollergirls" takes heroic steps to go beyond the silliness and try to understand and ennoble players, but the subject is just not worth so much effort. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
It has the feeling of pizza with pineapple on it — which is to say, not actually for grown-ups. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
The IT Crowd packages feeble stereotypes and then hits the send button. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
The creators of “Jericho” deserve some credit for beginning where most thrillers end. But they rely too much on melancholy pop music to paper over weaknesses in the writing and characters. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
It’s not a groundbreaking new series by any means, but it has some redeeming virtues. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
Chemistry is supposed to be the binding element of “Standoff,” and the two leads, while appealing in their own right, seem neither well matched nor sufficiently mismatched. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
"Men in Trees" wants to be a "Sex and the Tundra" but is closer to "Northern Overexposure." -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
Inventive one minute and ploddingly formulaic the next. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
Manichaean characters work on soap operas as long as they come with plenty of machinations. Unfortunately, there are no J. R.’s in sight on Cane, and the one Samuels with Alexis Carrington potential, Ellis, is played by a surprisingly subdued Polly Walker. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
Life Is Wild, which is based on a BBC series, simply cannot be given the preapproved seal of inspection for adults, either. Why? Well, there are many reasons, but in no small part because its efforts at exposition are of the kind that would make even a young wildebeest scream: "Rewrite! Rewrite! Rewrite!" -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
Californication tries to poke fun at the hypocrisy and delusions of Hollywood, but it doesn’t have enough wit or sense of place to be very convincing. Mostly the series comes off as male payback for "Sex and the City," a series that often belittled men and treated them as sex objects. -
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Reviewed by
Virginia Heffernan 40
Those who don’t like a rogue's progress, preferring to cluck from a distance over the skeevy habits of today’s rich bachelors, should skip "Sons of Hollywood." -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
The series follows the supernaturally themed "Heroes," but it is to its predecessor what a cookie made with Splenda might be to a mille-feuille. Journeyman just feels squeamish. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
A little of this kind of excitement goes a long way. One crashed wedding can be entertaining, but a steady stream could wear thin. -
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Critic Score 40
The show, approximately the zillionth attempt to put Flash and his friends on the big or small screen, isn’t bad, particularly; it’s just not very, excuse me, flashy. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
It’s an impressive cast and a perfectly good premise, but for some reason, Thursday’s pilot episode is not very funny. -
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Reviewed by
Virginia Heffernan 40
As a self-aware show, perhaps too self-aware, Nashville attends closely to the money-country nexus, mindful that it’s not your daddy’s, nor Robert Altman’s, "Nashville." -
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 40
The movie has some bright spots, but so much of it revolves around the resident diva of the title camp that it’s hard to focus on the good stuff; you’re too annoyed at having this lazily imagined character shoved down your throat for the zillionth time. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
Secret Diary has amusing touches, but not enough to sustain an entire series. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
What follows is a neutralization of assets--sure, there’s a story line, but one that only convinces us what a dull doorknob Belle really is. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
Part of what makes Raising the Bar so loopy is its commitment to this peculiar politics of personal responsibility and to a sappy liberalism that means none of the accused represented by Jerry Kellerman (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and his compatriots in the public defender’s office are ever all that bad. They are just mentally ill, or poor and struggling, or innocent. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
Kath & Kim should be funnier, and could yet be, but the pilot disappoints. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
Dollhouse has an amusing premise, but the universe it inhabits in the early episodes is thin and bland. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
This, insidiously, is science fiction as extreme midlife crisis. As Lattimer puts it, “I’m trained to take a bullet if necessary, but I’m not sure how to stop a dead Italian cougar.” Or, he might have added, deeply stupid plots. -
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Critic Score 40
A co-production with the Canadian network CTV that is a ponderous exercise in the paranormal. Yes, here the science fiction is intentional, but The Listener is plagued by the same gloomy lack of urgency that afflicts “Flashpoint.” -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
The mood of dark comedy isn’t sustained. Factory quickly devolves into a meaningless slapstick of goofy faces and a forced awkwardness that suggests the vision of someone who has watched “Curb Your Enthusiasm” over and over but has still not figured out what makes it so funny. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
Homeland Security USA is a powerful ego boost for insecure civil servants, but it doesn’t reveal much about the homeland’s actual security. -
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Their response is a conventional condensation that sticks to the broad outlines of the book while scrambling characters and events in myriad small ways guaranteed to enrage Dickens purists. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
Because it is such a loopy work of hagiography, it is never getting her right. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
Viewers are treated to the spectacle of teenagers who can freely roam New York unsupervised by parents or teachers, tethered, by their own volition, to the strict rules and unyielding cliches of a Bravo reality show. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
There isn’t enough Jack Nicholson in Eastwick, and that is one of the main reasons to avoid this ABC adaptation of the 1987 movie “The Witches of Eastwick." -
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
The ideas in V, about alien encounters and mass delusion and media manipulation, are enticing. It’s too bad that they’re floating around in a show that at this early stage, is so slapdash and formulaic in its storytelling. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
A comedy about the ignominy of life as a member of a catering wait staff, Party Down is a great idea inadequately enlivened by desperation. -
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
The three brothers, played by Matthew Levy, Frank Dolce and Benjamin Stockham, have stolen his accustomed role. They’re the loose cannons, given the best lines and allowed to swear and punch and break things....The talented Mr. Labine is left to play the same pratfalling sitcom father we’ve seen a thousand times before. -
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
There’s no sign yet that “Happy Town” deserves the “Twin Peaks” comparisons that it so badly wants. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
Kell on Earth doesn’t demystify the fashion world so much as try to pump up the mystique. It’s a stretch at times, but it does explain who all those haughty people are who crowd the Breslin Bar. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
This new suspense drama, about a small group of people who wake up as hostages in an empty, creepy hotel, has promise, but it also has familiar and ominous signs of a short life expectancy. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
The set was slightly different, and Mr. Leno spoke with his guests in matching armchairs, not across a desk, but the content and tone of the premiere looked and sounded like any ordinary “Tonight” show. -
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
It's not unwatchable--CBS being the last broadcast network that enforces a certain level of competence and coherence in its shows--but it's irrelevant, a wholly generic sitcom so divorced from its source material that you have to pinch yourself to remember it had anything to do with the Internet, or with the world after 1985. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
An impatience with subtlety is one of the problems with the first episode of Outlaw--the plot points and the performances are overblown, too obvious and too cute. -
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
If you don't have a taste for tears and cheers and group hugs, a lot of time in School Pride is actually spent watching paint dry. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
Nothing in the premiere episode ever gets as creative as that bit of casting.- Posted Nov 15, 2010
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
That's not to say that there aren't laughs in Strange Days; they're just not "Entourage"-level laughs (for those who enjoy Mr. Saget's hilarious appearances as himself on that HBO series).- Posted Dec 10, 2010
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
What was a show about bickering but loving roommates is now a show about, to paraphrase Aidan's narration, living on the dark side. Unfortunately it's not a very interesting place.- Posted Jan 17, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Despite the high stakes of the story and the frequent violence, the tone is placid and slightly monotonous, as if we were watching the Walton family at the end of the world.- Posted Jun 16, 2011
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
Like the relationship the series feels unfinished, not altogether there in its understanding of itself.- Posted Jan 17, 2011
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort. If you are nearly anyone else, you will hunger for HBO to get back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary.- Posted Apr 14, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
The two actors do everything they can to make [it] a tolerable situation, but they can never entirely distract us from the fact that they're trapped in Mr. McCarthy's dorm-room argument masquerading as a drama.- Posted Feb 11, 2011
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
The series is better when it strays from Mr. David's format, but mostly it follows it too closely.- Posted Apr 13, 2011
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
Viewers are supposed to invest in their camaraderie, but there isn't much chemistry or even joie de vivre in the group.- Posted Apr 7, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
It's the entire supernatural teen-soap-opera template, but the execution is rushed and chintzy, without the languorous gloss that makes "The Vampire Diaries" worthwhile.- Posted Sep 12, 2011
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
The series hardly tweaks the formula, though it does so just enough that the more generously inclined might claim that Love in the Wild is an effort at democratizing the reality dating show.- Posted Jun 28, 2011
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 40
And so begin the one-night stands, screaming matches, freedom affirmations, back-seat seductions and enraged exits of this largely absurdist but not entirely useless almost-postracial soap.- Posted May 31, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
The pleasant ambience, however, can't entirely obscure the mystery story's inability to deliver.- Posted Oct 17, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Wilfred tries for a coarse sophistication that locates it somewhere between HBO's winsome "Flight of the Conchords" and FX's brutally honest "Louie" (which begins its second season on Thursday night). But it ends up muffled and not very funny.- Posted Jun 22, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
The show has been slowed down this season and stretched out to fill those 10 hours, which means we spend too much time thinking about the story as it develops into a not very interesting allegory involving health care, death lists and big pharma.- Posted Jul 7, 2011
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 40
The new season of this dense medieval fantasy set in a land called Westeros serves up a whole bunch of wartime posturing, a seemingly endless number of would-be rulers and the usual sex and (sometimes in the same scene) violence. But it sure doesn't give viewers much to latch onto.- Posted Mar 29, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
The result is that the twin aspects of the show, fighting each other for screen time, both end up a little vague and underwritten.- Posted Sep 21, 2011
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
They are your grandmother's Angels, throwbacks to an era when there was something contrary and cute about a woman with flowing hair and a lethal karate chop.- Posted Sep 21, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
American Horror Story has the potential to be a lot of fun, if that style and cleverness can be eventually coupled with characters we care about and a narrative that feels less like a haunted house sampler, stitched with threads of Stephen King, Hammer Films and Lars von Trier's TV series "The Kingdom."- Posted Oct 4, 2011
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 40
If you intend to think that hard about this silly show, don't bother watching it. The interesting elements have little to do with the hater-versus-hated matchups, anyway.- Posted Sep 13, 2011
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 40
All this is interesting enough to watch once. The premiere, though, doesn't do much to establish the kind of dynamics--sibling rivalries, simmering romance-- that serve as subplots for these types of shows.- Posted Oct 19, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Conceptual fuzziness isn't the main problem. That would be the writing, a labored attempt to parody certain Manhattan and Malibu attitudes and speech patterns- Posted Oct 28, 2011
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 40
Monster In-Laws seems unlikely to offer any real solutions to people with nightmarish in-laws. Its highest function might be simply to enable them to say, "Well, I'm glad it's not just me."- Posted Oct 25, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Punk'd accomplishes something you might not have thought possible: It makes you miss Ashton Kutcher.- Posted Mar 29, 2012
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
This nine-episode series is maddeningly and needlessly opaque, and so deferential to the rites and rituals of the track that the storytelling is labored and even joyless.- Posted Jan 27, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
It's not very good--hackneyed and medium funny at best. But as sitcom comfort food goes, it's not the worst either.- Posted Nov 28, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Explain it does, at great length but with very little wonder.- Posted Dec 2, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Handsomely shot and deliberately paced, it has a superficially cinematic quality, but it doesn't have the storytelling juice to keep you engaged in Mr. King's convoluted multi-ghost story.- Posted Dec 9, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Over all, though, Sunday night's episodes are neither here nor there, lacking the oddball singularity of the movie while not yet achieving the satirical bite that would make the TV show interesting.- Posted Jan 13, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
In "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" the raunch is often funny, though, while in Unsupervised it's mostly off-putting; the show's concept and its tone seem to be at odds with each other.- Posted Jan 18, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
The mixture of "Lost" storytelling and "Paranormal" style is neither intriguing nor particularly scary, and it doesn't help that there's hardly a glimmer of humor.- Posted Feb 6, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Missing, created by the screenwriter Gregory Poirier, isn't a particularly good show. The dialogue is mostly wooden, and the plot, through two episodes, is standard spy-story stuff.- Posted Mar 14, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
There are not many signs that the show is taking a turn toward anything better--more realism, more audacity, less sentimentality.- Posted Feb 5, 2013
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- Posted May 23, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
The first episode of Mrs. Eastwood & Company has a loose, somewhat rambling quality, as if the producers were still feeling around for characters and story lines, and it goes through dull stretches because no one we see--including Dina --is quite vivid enough to hold our attention on her own.- Posted Jun 6, 2012
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
This version is palely faithful to the original without any of its seditious zest.- Posted Jun 12, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
The new film lacks the glowing cinematography of Néstor Almendros, who was nominated for an Oscar for "The Blue Lagoon." But under the direction of Mikael Salomon and Jake Newsome, The Awakening offers occasional honest moments of humor and adolescent angst.- Posted Jun 15, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Sullivan & Son has fewer explosive laughs per episode than Mr. Jeong [Chang in "Community,"] provides per minute.- Posted Jul 18, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Here the basic setup is "The Beverly Hillbillies" without Jed.- Posted Nov 1, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Pleasant in its details but hollow at its center, Major Crimes could argue in favor of a much-derided TV practice: the traditional network development process. It could have benefited from a year or two spent working on a pilot.- Posted Aug 13, 2012
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 40
Mr. Hembrough is not engaged in the kind of hunting that makes for good television.- Posted Aug 15, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
It's missing exactly the elements that make you want to watch those British shows on BBC America: energy, irreverence, a sense of humor and, crucially, consistently good performances.- Posted Aug 17, 2012
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 40
Without the underpinning of droll characters who make you feel their pain, this Inbetweeners is mostly predictable and vulgar.- Posted Aug 20, 2012
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 40
The pilot is so packed with generic scenes of medical crises and mob muscle-flexing that it feels as if the creators went to a buffet of past series and desperately piled everything they could reach onto the mob doc's plate.- Posted Sep 17, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
The bad news is that this potentially rich stew of frights and kink has been underspiced: Asylum, so far, doesn't have the energy or the over-the-top inventiveness that Season 1 eventually displayed.- Posted Oct 16, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
The show has been dumbed down, its humor broadened past recognition, and the two episodes provided for review have fewer laughs between them than a single good scene from the old Community.- Posted Feb 6, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
The largely unknown cast is game and not unskilled, but it can't make up for the familiar situations and unremarkable dialogue.- Posted Oct 15, 2012
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Red Widow has an interesting cast, over all, for a midseason replacement series. Unfortunately, the best performance in the premiere is given by Anson Mount as her husband. Enjoy it while you can.- Posted Mar 1, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
It's a typical David E. Kelley creation in all the wrong ways: ensemble drama as a steel-cage match of emoting and moralizing, with lectures and grand gestures given precedence over coherent storytelling. His usual saving graces, sharp characterization and unforced humor, aren't in evidence through three episodes.- Posted Jan 31, 2013
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 40
If your taste runs to old formulas slickly employed, Deception will hold your interest. If you prefer innovation, it probably won't.- Posted Jan 7, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
A so-so, meandering soap opera that reduces its central character to a set of clichés about missing fathers and American energy and egalitarianism.- Posted Mar 29, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Possibly as a result of the hybrid project’s longer-than-usual development process, the show’s fictional world, in which humans struggle to coexist with seven alien races, is satisfyingly coherent and the stories are relatively crisp and well shaped. What Defiance lacks, though, is any shred of originality, or any of the conceptual audacity that could keep you involved in “Battlestar Galactica” or “Stargate Universe” despite their ticky-tackiness.- Posted Apr 15, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
The memory of how that touchstone HBO show, at its best, wrapped heartbreak and satire in high comic style makes the ordinariness of The Carrie Diaries a little more disappointing than it would be otherwise.- Posted Jan 14, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
His new reality show, Pete Rose: Hits & Mrs., tests positive for tedium.- Posted Jan 11, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
You need to have watched them [previous three seasons] to comprehend Season 4--to understand much of its humor or to make sense of its convoluted plot--but if you truly loved them, it’s hard to imagine being anything but disappointed with this new rendition.- Posted May 28, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Zero Hour is entirely dispensable, its silliness matched by its comic-book solemnity.- Posted Feb 13, 2013
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 40
In Phil Spector the facts of the case and the characters are molded to allow viewers to doubt Mr. Spector’s guilt. But even with a Mamet screenplay and actors like Mr. Pacino and Ms. Mirren there is not much anyone can do to make the audience care.- Posted Mar 21, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
Through the 3 (of 13) episodes provided for review, there’s still a lot more suggestion than information, and plotting that’s probably meant to be cleverly elliptical--important characters who appear out of nowhere, story points that are made clear a few beats too late--is just confusing.- Posted Apr 18, 2013
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 40
Throughout, Fall to Grace feels disappointingly safe and formulaic.- Posted Mar 27, 2013
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 40
For about an episode and a quarter, it’s very good television. But over the rest of its six-episode first season it resembles nothing so much as a bad indie film, the kind of slow and tepid bummer that used to fill Sundance’s late nights and afternoons when it was a full-time movie channel.- Posted Apr 22, 2013
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Reviewed by
Jon Caramanica 40
A reality show set at various small companies, it's part docuseries, part gauche game show.- Posted May 22, 2013
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 40
The stars--Alyssa Milano, Yunjin Kim, Jes Macallan and Rochelle Aytes--do the Four Musketeers thing pretty well, and all of them elevate the material. And it needs occasional elevating.- Posted Jun 3, 2013
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Reviewed by
Caryn James 30
This time the wrenching together of genres is tortured. In its rough first episode on Fox tonight, Firefly is even more of a confusing mess than the description makes it sound. It's a crazy quilt of "Star Wars," "Mad Max" and "Stagecoach," just to mention the most obvious films it calls to mind. [20 Sept 2002, p.E26]Posted Feb 23, 2013 -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 30
"Twins" is supposed to be a light-hearted comedy, but there is something ineffably sad about Ms. Griffith's struggle to cheat time, a real-life version of the HBO satire "The Comeback." -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 30
Offers a ho-hum monster and the kind of stock characters that we've seen too many times before. -
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Reviewed by
Ned Martel 30
The real mark against "The Book of Daniel" is not any antipathy it might show toward the family or sympathy for the devil. The real objection is that it's just not very good. -
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 30
The stories are flat, and the repartee between Jane and her teammates isn’t zippy enough to amuse even the comic-book crowd. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 30
The series is sentimental in a sleek way, and there are surface glints of humor in the script, but mostly, "Brian" is a blander, less distinctive version of "Thirtysomething." -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 30
Ms. Romijn's hourlong show tries to combine the arch satire of "Desperate Housewives" with the chick-lit romance of "Grey's Anatomy," and falls short of both. -
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Reviewed by
Ned Martel 30
Neither Ms. Hewitt nor her series are malevolent forces, and the producers can feel as good as they choose about a cloying job well done. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 30
A tepid knockoff of "Sex and the City." -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 30
It marks a return to the 80's era of "Dallas," "Dynasty" and "Knots Landing," when the prime-time landscape was dotted with lurid, silly soap operas that provided the kind of catty catharsis that regular shows neglect. -
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Reviewed by
Ned Martel 30
The show admirably shakes up these lives and implores people to envision improvements, but much of these benefits could be accomplished without such a benefactor swooping into town. -
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Reviewed by
Virginia Heffernan 30
"Treasure Hunters" is too flimsy a pillar to help structure NBC's reality-television future. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
Torchwood is a world I wouldn’t mind seeing erased. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
Lipstick Jungle is a wooden clog of a melodrama squeezed into a flimsy, satin and marabou mule. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 30
“Identity” is to game shows what a gastric bypass is to dieting: a choice that defies convention and social niceties. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 30
Mr. Kelley is a gifted television producer, and “The Wedding Bells” has funny moments, but this series is not a labor of love. It’s a labored effort to simulate romance. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
The women here aren’t foils for male inferiority; they’re just dragging the boys down further with their alternately lazy, nutty or emasculating ways. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
In almost every way, Moonlight demands that we question the grounds for its existence. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
Everything about Jezebel feels too broad. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
Ms. Margulies never recedes from the scripted egomania; she rams right through it. She remains shrill even in grief. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
Unhitched expends a wrestler’s energy aiming to offend and provoke, but no amount of outrageousness can mask its conformity. -
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Reviewed by
Virginia Heffernan 30
Let’s say it one more time: He’s charmless and unfunny. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
There is a sense throughout that Mr. Engvall is betraying his core audience, and the whole blue-collar comedy ethos in particular, trading in one category of cliché for another. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 30
Sometimes the humor is so heavy-handed that it seems almost like self-parody. -
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 30
Most of the time it doesn’t trust its own premise; the mechanics at this body shop rarely do any real work, instead spending too much time on toilet humor and immigrant jokes. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
Nothing seems to bring it to life — not its obsession with voyeurism, its forays into cross-dressing, its objectification of the obese. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
If you didn’t already know that Ms. Cho has been a great friend to gay men, she makes that point often enough here. Unfortunately she doesn’t make many others. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
Sticking with Cupid requires a certain attachment to the idea of a Claire-Trevor love connection, one apparent only in moody glances and pronounced opposition rather than in even the faintest semblance of chemistry. In any other series Claire and Trevor would go out for a hot dog once and realize that they were actually much better off with their respective exes. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
When the pranks aren’t gross, they are just inane--or, worse, demeaning to journalists. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
It sedates, and its fabricated sentimentality does not save it. -
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 30
Unfortunately, it also possesses the true Halmi signature: despite the fact that it’s packed like a sausage with banter and jokes both verbal and visual, it doesn’t contain a single genuinely funny moment. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 30
ABC Family means well but could not have done worse. Secret Life doesn’t take the fun out of teenage pregnancy, it takes the fun out of television. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
It never grows quite suspenseful enough, and it rests on the rather un-sci-fi-ish idea that the future is a benign force, like a mentor uncle with something meaningful to teach us about our venality and callous disregard for the Earth. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
A denial of our brand new day is reflected even more egregiously in Momma’s Boys (Mondays on NBC), which arrived amid controversy last week when the show turned out to be “The Bachelor” with race baiting. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 30
The pilot is not very funny or at all surprising. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
There is no good reason in the world to watch Date My Ex, and yet there is something vaguely redeeming in its economic chemistry. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 30
The creators of Mental couldn’t take Gallagher any further up the mean-spirited scale, so instead they went too far in the other direction and ran smack into cliché. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
All of this might be vaguely defensible if “Testees” were trying to satirize the abuses of Big Pharma, or the limited opportunities for dumb white men, or really if it were trying to satirize anything at all. But it just sits there, inert, like a patient on a gurney. -
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 30
This type of show can overcome rote performances and filmmaking if its narrative is sufficiently brisk and surprising. Unfortunately, the conspiracy here is shadowy only in terms of the camerawork. -
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Critic Score 30
At a time when recorded music needs all the commercial help and television exposure it can get, the Grammy Awards broadcast retreated too often into memories. -
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Reviewed by
Alessandra Stanley 30
The Deep End is a pale imitation without smart writing, imaginative casting or even a clever conceit. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
13 Fear Is Real, a fizzled effort at scaremongering, reveals just how badly reality television can go astray when the casting fails to be creative. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
“Inside the Mind of Mischa Barton” would have been a much better bet than The Beautiful Life. -
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 30
Blue Mountain State, a bawdy comedy about a fictional college football powerhouse that had a sneak-peek showing on Monday, is dumb even by frat-boy standards. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
While smart comedies have certainly been built on less, there is something so contrived about Nick's obstinacy that you feel as if you were watching a lesson in feminism that would be more sophisticated if it were rendered as children's puppet theater. -
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 30
The overall concept is so tired and the execution, despite the overlay of gross-out humor, so hackneyed that we could just as well be watching something from Mr. Eisner’s early career as a chief executive. -
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 30
The cues for tenderness and uplift are all over Live for the Moment: the choked-back tears, the crowds of applauding family and friends, the corny speeches, the constant reiterations (essential for this sort of reality show) of how amazing the whole experience has been. -
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
Broadly limned, Big Lake works neither as a satire--and it stops trying after the delivery of Josh's back story--nor as an adventure in surrealist comedy, and it is tough to watch the strain for eccentricity. -
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 30
Retired at 35 will send you to the liquor cabinet, hoping to kill a few memory cells. It starts with the writing, which is bland and cliched, even by old-school-sitcom standards.- Posted Jan 19, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 30
With none of the flair or self-deprecating wit that have defined other British sci-fi imports ("Torchwood," "Primeval"), Outcasts strands a number of talented performers, including Mr. Bamber, Eric Mabius and Liam Cunningham, on a world of wooden dialogue and interplanetary cliches.- Posted Jun 16, 2011
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Reviewed by
Ginia Bellafante 30
The "Real Housewives" formula is feeling stale. The louche locations all seem to blend into one another, and every kitchen is the same, with acres of space and double-wide Sub-Zero refrigerators that seem to hold enough food for an Olympic swim team.- Posted Feb 22, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 30
The expansion emphasizes the sameness of his writing and his performances, and makes the payoffs of the jokes feel small.- Posted Jan 3, 2012
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