Entourage continues to coast in the same zone of amiable purposelessness in which it's spent the last few seasons.

In the pilot I saw no emotion, so much as situations recognizable as "scenarios you set up when you want to generate emotion": e.g., the interminable cruise vacation Sean and his fiancee take to get you invested in them before her disappearance. The debut delivers the "high-octane" much better.

The message, overall--insofar as you can take a message from one episode of a talk show, which you can't--is that Conan the show is not so much about a reinvention of the talk show form as a restoration of Conan.

The Palin's in Sarah Palin's Alaska is a possessive. But you could be forgiven for suspecting it's really a contraction--Sarah Palin Is Alaska--or for wondering if someone is hoping for a spin-off: Sarah Palin's America.

The show still has the moments of off-the-cuff comedy and guilelessness that made the first season fun to watch, if not exactly a parade of role models.

It simply too often feels like an unconvincing portrait of poverty and the Gallaghers, like an English council-estate family plopped in the Midwest. The next two episodes depart more from the original, and suggest the series may find its own voice; on the other hand, they're not nearly as well written.

With writing and directing by Neil Jordan and Irons in the lead, it has pedigree and promise. And yet The Borgias, besides the glaring Tudors parallels, is one of those shows that seems like it might actually be better if it were worse.

It was half appealing, with strong chemistry between Kat Dennings​ and Beth Behrs, and half awful, with some egregiously clunky one-liners and borderline (or over the border) offensive ethnic caricatures.

Alcatraz's early crime stories are competent enough, in a moody, achey, men-gone-wrong kind of way. But there's a coldness to the show, and no sense that these are characters I want to invest in and spend time getting to know.

It still remains to be seen what it looks like as a series; with some stronger writing and deeper character work, it could build on its math-superpower idea to make something intriguing and emotional.

Life's Too Short can be uncomfortably funny in a familiar way, and if you're OK with the familiarity, you might like it well enough. But the problem with the humor of discomfort, which Gervais pioneered with distinction, is that it doesn't last long when it becomes a comfort zone.

The problem for GCB is that it hasn't yet figured out a way to be a soap that spoofs superficiality without being superficial itself.

It's sometimes broadly funny and sometimes broadly bad.

While I was creeped out by the way Honey Boo Boo was framing the family and presenting them to us, I couldn't help loving the Thompsons themselves.

There are some funny set pieces in the pilot, and enough fruitful interactions with the patients and their troublesome owners that I could see this show developing into a kind of Scrubs with rabies shots, if the characters can develop beyond the familiar menagerie we start out with.

while the opening episodes set up this material, they don't do much with it, getting bogged down in a sensationalistic, but not especially well-plotted, child-prostitution story.

Katie may not be as successful as Oprah, but she does, whatever you think of this format, seem immediately comfortable in it, cracking unguarded jokes but also owning her celebrity.

Banshee's not a terrible show. At times it can be entertaining. But at best it's terribly, entertainingly superfluous.

Da Vinci’s Demons [is] not a terrible show, nor a terribly good one, but a peculiar hybrid invention whose parts don’t match and that never quite takes flight.

True Blood makes little effort to rethink genre conventions.

If you expect it to be good--then yes, it's as disappointing as the summer movie it follows. If you think of it as a kid-oriented spin-off product--well, it still suffers from characters with all the vibrancy and pizazz of a PowerPoint marketing plan.

It was back to what could largely have been a Leno monologue from before The Jay Leno Show, right down to a set of jokes about the previous Presidential administration.

As with any knockoff, the onus is on The Fashion Show to offer something different and better, and so far it does neither.

NBC has been telling us all summer, was "comedy at 10," not simply a second Tonight Show. Instead, what we got was a monologue, a couple taped comedy bits, an interview, a musical act, another interview and Headlines.

This Prisoner is visually stunning and risk-taking but not a satisfying rethinking.

In the end, both [CBS' and ABC's Pope] movies stick to what viewers can agree on (commies and Nazis, bad; love, good), while skipping much of the Pope's sometimes polarizing tenure as a leader.

The problem is, where Hugh Laurie's Gregory House is a hilarious character study, Stark--while played with ebullient aggression by Woods--is just another tool in a suit, and neither the characters, the stories nor the writing rise near House's level.

Its visuals are gorgeous and its mystical glimpses tantalizing, but its transcendence is more asserted than earned. We sinful mortals still want prosaic things like a story.

This sometimes thought-provoking drama may be too familiar and slack for all but the most spy-struck.

The ideas in The Goode Family are promising, and the era of green consciousness and Hope and Change would seem to provide a target-rich environment. The problem is that the family seems missing from this family comedy: the satire is so pointed and obvious that it gets in the way of developing the Goodes as people--when it doesn't sabotage the characters altogether.

As with many other instances of men sharing their feelings, Love is better in theory than in practice.

Secret Girlfriend is just too clumsy, and not funny enough. Part of the problem is the format.

Hot in Cleveland, in other words, is like an artificially created rerun, as if someone discovered the masters of a sitcom that had been locked up in a vault since 1987. And I don't mean that in a good way.

It could work with better writing and a more grounded characterization, but instead the show just lurches between tones, and the lead performance, between Smits having a lark as a rascally rebel and Smits in high-dudgeon mode

The show seems sympathetic to them as far as it goes, but the fat humor is just predictable and lame.

Sadowski, recast in the role of Henry, has better delivery and chemistry with Shatner. And the show may well please fans of throwback insult comedies, longing for the days of The Ropers and C.P.O. Sharkey. But why anyone needed to buy the rights to a Twitter feed to base a sitcom on the concept "Cranky Old Man Makes Wisecracks" is beyond me.

V may be giving us more aliens, but I'm still looking for the people.

In practice, Off the Map plays like a rote example of "It's _____, but set in _______!" school of programming, in which the background is much more interesting than the foreground.

Her character, a hard-drinking, pistol-packing liberal with a lot to say about how the legal system is stacked against the average guy, is as outsized a figure as you'd expect, but Bates manages to ground her in reality. But she's surrounded by thinner-than-thin supporting characters: loopy coworkers, arrogant legal adversaries and clients who are the kind of caricatures of Troubled Urban Street Youth that, I guess, are supposed to not be offensive as long as your legal drama is taking their side.

Even on the level of it's-just-entertainment, Camelot is exceedingly silly.

You might watch Teen Wolf and find a diverting if familiar, brooding teen drama, and that's fine. I found myself watching it and thinking: I want my MTV.

If the story-through-backstory becomes more compelling, and in the process Bridget and Siobhan become well-enough developed to give Gellar something to do, Ringer might turn around. So far, though, it's just twice as much of a disappointing thing.

What we lose in the US Free Agents pilot is the sense of emotional commitment to the situations of the characters.

It also has hints--just hints--of a fascinating show about the implications of technology and the limits of knowledge. But I don't know if it really wants to, or will be allowed to, become that more interesting show.

The movie seems to want to make a larger point about modern politics from the way Palin's nomination was used by the flagging McCain campaign--as a shiny object to "change the narrative" and shift the buzz from Barack Obama--but the movie itself gets distracted by its own shiny object, Palin.

If you can say that Bristol Palin: Life's a Tripp is about anything, it's about being on the reality show Bristol Palin: Life's a Tripp.

Overall, the first installment was yet another overbloated, two-hour NBC reality marathon, The Biggest Loser with live ammo and C-list celebrities.

For now this show is much more normal--read: mediocre--than it seems to think it is.

In essence, SEAL Team Six plays like a slightly longer, much cheesier version of a Homeland episode.

Almost none of [the characters] shows signs of becoming an actual person rather than a high-concept joke.

It's the sort of talky tedious drama that is far less intelligent than it clearly thinks it is.

Lil' Bush is too lame to be taken seriously, or, more important, taken humorously.

It's a weird, tone-deaf mismatch of talents, styles and genre.

Campily depicting high school as a den of sluts and predators, Secret achieves the noble goal of making sex thoroughly unsexy.

Even the contestants seemed to be trying too hard, screaming and making wisecracks for the camera, as if coaxed by the producers or, more likely, their agents.

I Survived a Japanese Game Show took a simple enough concept—importing Americans to compete on a bizarre game show in Tokyo—and turned it into a boring, American-style reality show, complete with confessional segments and backstage scenes.

While I know the show has avid fans, this version leaves me cold much like the original does.

Simultaneously gross and sanctimonious, this histrionic science procedural is mainly a warning against the cloning of TV concepts.

Hellcats, set at a Tennessee college, can do nothing more with the material than a stale story.

The original pilot had funny moments, but also some pacing problems and dead spots-which the final version, unfortunately, if anything made worse. And a second episode that Fox just sent out is no more encouraging.

There is no reason Outsourced needs to be bad. Outsourced, however, is bad. It is full of jokes about sacred cows and funny names and how funny certain American things sound when you say them in an Indian accent.

There are also, unfortunately, a stiff performance by star David Lyons, as a cop, on the run for A Crime He Did Not Commit, who becomes the eponymous superhero, and the kind of dialogue that gives comics a bad name ("One man can still make a difference!").

The Kennedys is also--in case anyone cares--pretty bad TV: melodramatic, rote and grim.

The episodes sent to critics relied on so many middle-aged-buddies tropes (the competitiveness, the family obligations, the sudden drop-ins) that watching was just a chore.

Man Up!, to its credit, is the better of the three: it's at least scantly funnier than the retro Last Man Standing, and the upcoming cross-dressing comedy, Work It, will make Last Man Standing look like Mamet.

Bravo's newest attempt at a cooking-competition franchise took some quality original ingredients and made them into a hash.

The West Wing gave us rich characters, a sense of proportionality and an infectious feeling of romance with the country and the people who want to make it better. The Newsroom, after four exhausting, smug episodes, gives us none of that: just Aaron Sorkin writing one argument after another for himself to win.

For a bizarre comedy with the potential for some really pointed wackiness, this alien vehicle doesn't get off the ground.

Sorvino is wholly unconvincing as an Indy Jones type--which might actually work if the story went in a parodic, quasi-farce direction. But the whole production is hobbled by an uneven tone; it's not frightening enough to work as a conspiracy-adventure, not funny enough to work as light romantic comedy.

After nine tepid episodes (and a subpar season of Grey's) last year, there's less reason than ever to care about the dramedies and quirky cases of sexy doctors at a ritzy "wellness center," and the return episode trudges along like a 44-min. chore.

The show is weak, sometimes plain creepy, when it moves from fantasy football to male fantasy.

The series hopscotches to so many locations (the Carolinas, the Antarctic, the ocean trenches) that you briefly forget that it gives you no reason to feel afraid or intrigued or anything else.

The show is a warped copy of CBS' How I Met Your Mother... except that it's cynical, smug and utterly charmless.

The most God-awful mishmash of a comedy-variety show to lead into local news on NBC since immediately before the Olympics.

It's a stale sitcom right out of the early '90s, and like Mike, it seems to believe it can just harangue the world into changing back with it.

It should be called We Hate Every Character on Our Own Sitcom.

It's a cheap, stale, stereotype-addicted sitcom where no one, male or female, comes off especially well or likeable, excepting possibly the babies.

It's a lame premise burdened with even lamer jokes.

This is the same kind of odd-couple pairing that TV has been trying to sell for decades, and, like most every odd-couple concept after the actual Odd Couple, the premise has not even Twenty Good Minutes of humor in it.

Woo, dog, is this miniseries bad--quite possibly worse than "Tin Man."

They truly do not make them like this anymore. And thank God for that.

It's sneering and unwatchably badly written; it shoots at fish in a barrel and still manages to miss.

Momma's Boys is produced by Ryan Seacrest--who also proudly brought us "Keeping Up with the Kardashians"--who is seemingly trying to perpetuate a final stereotype: that reality producers are willing to stoop as low as necessary for a hit. Good work on that one.

Work It is bad dumb, memorably bad dumb, the kind of bad dumb show you will use in years to come as a benchmark for other bad sitcoms.

Rob! is playing at a meta game in which it transmutes lame jokes about Hispanics into clever commentary by putting them in Rob's mouth, but that kind of strategy only works when the sitcom's world outside the lead character is not equally lame.

Lindsay Lohan cannot make a movie this bad by herself. There's an ample assist from the screenwriting, which strings together soap-opera lines ("I won't live without you!" "No more LIES!" "You haven't lost me, I've lost you") into a production you might expect to see Jenna Maroney in on 30 Rock.

We’ve seen this over and over again: a series built around an elaborate concept, dressed up with a spooky mythology, then filled in with characters so poorly conceived, they may as well be called Kidnapped Wife Lady.

As it turns out, Does Someone Have to Go? is exactly bad as you would think.

Bridalplasty, on the other hand, is an example of a reality show that sounds absolutely, soul-killingly awful, and then turns out to be precisely as absolutely, soul-killingly awful as you expected.