[Wayans] shouldn’t have to work this hard, but that’s the funny thing about comedy. When the material’s this light, somebody has to do some heavy lifting.

Baker exudes a stoic charm. As his demanding father, Dabney Coleman is a disquieting presence. [25 Sept 2001, p.48]

You have to wonder if Morgan and Wong learned anything from Chris Carter. With no semblance of an ongoing secondary story line, such as the government conspiracy of "The X-Files, The Others" boils down to a gaggle of flaky mystics who flit about applying their brand of drippy New Age closure. [5 Feb 2000]

Locked up in cliches, tedium and barely believable bipeds. ... As far as extinction events go, Zoo is lame and tame.

Manifest moves fast, but it plays like a ticket to nowhere.

Fox’s creaky re-imagining of the cult classic “Rocky Horror Picture Show” misses the point about what makes the original so beloved.

NBC's The Cape aspires to be "The Dark Knight" but unfurls more like the campy 1960s "Batman" TV series.

The Brave’s patriotism and its approach to dealing with threats to Americans is cathartic. Plausible? You’ll have to find another series for that.

Fam is exhausting.

Director Philip Kaufman's clumsy, bloated project--clocking in at a miserable two hours and 40 minutes--stars Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman in potentially career-mangling performances.

Forever comes off like a show a couple of drunks scribbled out on a cocktail napkin.

Mattfeld delivers a nuanced performance as a woman who has chosen to meet the world with hostility as a calculated defense. No matter how middling the story, she’s always worth watching.

The show runs rampant with rapid-fire dialogue and sly pop-culture references. The cast is strong.

It’s a little “Mad Max,” a little “Mortal Kombat,” a little “Gone with the Wind,” a lot head-scratchingly dumb.

In the first three episodes at least, the series features some surprisingly tense adult moments and some language that was bleeped out. Along the way, there are some cutting observations about the pageant scene.

There are larger-than-life characters and then there are impossible-to-believe roles, and “Yellowstone” runs deep with the latter. ... There’s a much easier way of summing up “Yellowstone”: Horsepucky.

As a man struggling to find where he misplaced his heart, Perry makes angst seem easy. His sense of timing isn't rusty. The sitcom has a few clouds: Alonzo needs an edge and the show should make Jorge Garcia's ("Lost") facilities manager a permanent regular. But Mr. Sunshine could be midseason's brightest ray of mirth.

Tyrant is the most engrossing new show of the summer.... Gordon’s razor-sharp timing, a skill honed on “24,” serves Tyrant well.

While White Famous proves he [Jay Pharoah] can lead a series, it doesn’t give him many opportunities to show how funny he is. It does make a great argument that everyone in Hollywood is criminally unhinged.

Average acting and troubled storytelling can be forgiven in a film about music if the music is transcendent. But Lifetime couldn’t secure the rights to any Brown or Houston hits. So we get actors lip-syncing to imitators. Often the lip-syncing isn’t even synched.

The bromance is over before it starts.

Seal Team Six won't sway undecided voters; it also won't entertain many, either.

Bob's Burgers arrives cold, with a touch of E. coli. Beware.

If you’re doing the math at home, add shocking violence to a side of soap opera and you’re left with Six. At the end of the night, that may not be enough for you.

Bonnie & Clyde? More like Hokum and Bunk.

Fashion Star is a skimpy little show. You might buy something in the evening, but beware those morning-after regrets.

Like King’s last TV series, “Under the Dome,” The Mist would seem to have a short shelf life. One hour with these people and you’ll be rooting for the critters.

It's a drama. ... The Resident turns out to be hilarious in so many ways, but first you must get through the horror.

This is a series with no redemptive value. It barely qualifies as entertainment, but sexy summer trash will always find an audience. That's the inescapable truth at the heart of Pretty Little Liars.

With the suspenseful Eye Candy, we have a pretty good show, especially for teens who get a thrill out of being creeped out.

Reign is a big stick of stupid wrapped in gauzy costumes and tramping around a sumptuous estate.

Just when you thought the teen melodrama was completely played out, along comes another trite "Dawson's Creek" clone to cause cringes of annoyance and pangs of distress. [12 Jul 2000]

Who knew the dumbed-down domestic sitcom could be fun again? ... OK. It's not "Seinfeld." But "Eight Simple Rules" does just what it's supposed to - amuse, entertain, disperse a few laughs and warm fuzzies. [17 Sep 2002]

If you’ve seen one shark fall from the sky, you’ve seen them all. To its credit, in its last five minutes, Oh Hell No! amps up the craziness to a level that should have dominated the entire film.

The drama is swamped by the saccharine cliches.

Tonight's mystery ultimately doesn't hang together, but it does establish the show's light mythos in an easy-to-digest way.

The show needs to work on building the urgency to its stories and cutting away the treacle.

There are a number of bad wigs and beards on display here, but much of the cast surmounts the costuming problems. The pace and the depth of the story might have been helped by extending this film into a two-night event.

Although the show is reminiscent of the kid-friendly TGIF lineup, some of the jokes are for the PG-13 crowd.

The latest comic book adaptation to hit TV, NBC’s Constantine is a nifty spookfest with dark humor and some genuine chills.

Where Ties unravels is in its other half, as it desperately tries to be a gritty police procedural.

Bergen still rattles off her lines as if she’s in a hurry to get to lunch, but the cast has chemistry to spare.

The glimmers of truthfulness in the family nucleus offset the chilly crime elements. ... The office environment is less compelling as the coterie of feds... perform their unpleasant tasks with little personality. [23 Jan 2005]

Sunday's premiere episode is one of the most cleverly outrageous half-hours of TV I've seen in a while. [28 Jan 1999]

If only Instinct had a little more going for itself, it might be worth making room on your DVR.

Less silly than it sounds, Atlantis accomplishes the basic task of rejuvenating the Stargate action-adventure premise. ... Most importantly, it's Stargate without obnoxious SG-1 star Richard Dean Anderson, which instantly makes it twice as good. [16 July 2004]

Take Two is honest advertising. It’s the second grab at a winning premise, for the same network, no less. You deserve more.

Why is she The Protector? Why didn't Lifetime call this series "The Protectors" and give Campbell-Martin and her character equal footing? As this show proves, some mysteries aren't worth solving.

Creator/executive producer Kring hasn’t learned anything from seasons two through four. Heroes Reborn suffers from the same excesses that alienated viewers--too many characters, too many plot threads, too many snippets of scenes that serve to advance little but the time to a commercial break. Finally, the show seems old-fashioned.

Unfortunately, the pilot doesn't flesh out the premise, making the episode little more than an average "Outer Limits." With all the special-effects possibilities of a virtual realm, "Santiago City" looks like the set of "Combat" with a high-tech fence around it. [8 Oct 1999, p.S34]

Vivian's secrets are predictable. Judging from the first two episodes, Joanna is not much of a sleuth. Scene set-ups go nowhere. Minor characters are brought in, disposed of, and the show bumps along to another complication.

Nothing feels authentic about this show.

Turturro, who is credited not only as an executive producer but one of the miniseries’ four writers, gives one of the most restrained performances of his career. His cleric is soft-spoken, always watchful of every detail in a room. His efforts seem to give other performers license to overact.

Rookie Blue is set in a nondescript big city, which also serves to make the series generic. The cast, however, is spunky and promising.

Perception is a head trip not worth the journey.

Mitch just might be the stupidest attorney ever depicted on TV.

You’ll be able to spot the front-runner and eventual winner probably 10 minutes into the show.

Given the continuity gap between the cliffhanger at the end of the first episode and its resolution in the second, it’s as if the producers aren’t watching their own show. That’s understandable. Frontier proves some places aren’t worth the visit.

The pilot shot extensively in Italy and takes great advantage of the gorgeous, historic locations, including the Roman Forum and Appian Way. The dialogue, however, is often distracting and grating.

More accessible than “V” or “FlashForward,” “Happy Town” shows a sure hand with pacing and knows how to end an hour with a powerful cliffhanger.

The Gates is ultimately just another literary mashup with the undead, like Jane Austen's "Pride & Prejudice" tweaked with zombies, only here it's a stifling John Cheever story with bloodsuckers.

Spartacus fetishizes violence even more than it depicts sex and nudity, which is often. There’s a whole lot of B.C. banging going on here.

Garlin and McLendon-­Covey are believable as variations of “That ’70s Show’s” parents, and Gentile’s Jan Brady-style meltdowns are amusing. But Adam’s obsession with female breasts, encouraged by his grandfather “Pops” (George Segal), is creepy, considering the actor looks about 9.

At 60 minutes, these episodes will test even loyal fans, although some viewers will discover a new respect for Melissa, who displays patience not unlike Job in her trials. Still, Joan is her mother. Everyone else can skip the guilt trip.

What’s odd here is that even with the influx of injured, Chicago Med never builds any dramatic heat.

Fans of the original “Dynasty” know Fallon’s nastiness is just a warm-up.

Sharp, slick and brimming with visual tricks, Fox’s Minority Report is a trippy sci-fi crime procedural.

Bad Teacher is like a comedy club on a Sunday morning. No fun.

Fox's "Raising Hope" manages to be both more outrageous and realistic than this flimsy, forgettable time-waster.

Many of his tricks here are explained, and the means of execution may only increase your appreciation for his genius. Less convincing is the miniseries’ speculation that the British intelligence agency MI-5 recruited him to act as a spy in the run-up to World War I.

The climax is predictable, but the epilogue is not anything you’d find on a CBS procedural and suggests how good this show and Wilson could be.

Nothing about this sitcom is clever or amusing.

The real reason why “Mariah’s World” seems stale is that it comes off as a TV remake of “Madonna: Truth or Dare,” and Madge did it better in 1991.

Alas, most of the other characters are so weakly sketched, they don't make a ripple.

The Fix looks like something you’ve seen before.

As the cliche goes, you may think you know the story, but this telling is ­utterly compelling, with some terrific performances and a balanced, compassionate look at not only President Reagan (Tim Matheson, “The West Wing”) and first lady Nancy (Cynthia Nixon, “Sex and the City”) but of the would-be killer, John Hinckley Jr. (Kyle More, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”) and his family.

Tom Welling's picked up all the wrong lessons from behind the screen, from premise to character development. Hellcats is poorly paced and its attempts at comedy and drama stumble.

Thursday’s conclusion drags a bit if only because the miniseries requires Rosemary to be so deeply stupid for so long, and it’s not entertaining watching Saldana being practically sucked dry by her infernal fetus.

We all know the cliche about imitation serving as the sincerest form of flattery, but this dumb show takes sucking up to levels of criminal laziness.

This remake of a tart British sitcom of the same name starts with the moment that has killed many a show: its two main characters in bed, post-booty call. It's anything but romantic.

Sons doesn’t shine yet, but it could if the writers embrace their loony wild childs. Even at its worst, Sons is better than a third Seth MacFarlane cartoon

Griffiths does her best to hold the show together as a scattered woman coming into her own.

McHale, as he proved on “Community,” has great timing, and he’s aided by his office colleagues, especially the delightfully deadpan Ko and Fry, who combines sweet and weird. With its office-as-asylum atmosphere, Great Indoors echoes “NewsRadio,” not a bad influence.

Madsen works hard to deliver an intimidating matriarch, but the dialogue is flat and merely functional.

The cast, it must be noted, is fine; it’s the scripts that seem to be have been drenched in Bug Juice and left to rot in the sun.

The emo-dialogue only sounds good if you’re just watching your first TV show..... The show’s decade-forward future is intriguing but inconsistent.

Wolf Lake attempts to revel within the originality of its otherworldly concept but never does anything remotely original or otherworldly. [12 Sep 2001]

There probably hasn’t been so much talk about sex crammed into one hour since MTV’s “Loveline.” Much of it cannot be repeated here. Instead of being titillating, it’s tedious, the equivalent of three cold showers.

The show is at least meta enough to have the department commander call out the sheer outrageousness of the appointment, but that doesn’t make it any more plausible.

With so many powers, the Tomorrow People seem near invincible, and the measures Ultra uses to thwart them seem flimsy. The idea that a prohibition against killing could be genetically encoded seems both convenient and implausible — and also lessens the stakes.

Sharknado 2 doesn’t need any jokes about jumping the shark. It knows you’re going to make one and it beats you to it, literally.

Witches of East End is the campiest hot mess on TV.

It’s not a good fit [with Lifetime], and there’s not a lot of drama in this biopic about the first U.S. Olympic gymnast and African-­American to triumph in both the all-around and the team competition.

Fox’s new comedy dangles the promise of outrageous high jinks just around the corner, but at its heart, it’s a conventional story, the misfit forced to become the parent to three wayward kids and, of course, become a better person.

If you can accept you're watching the Kennedy saga through the prism of the "Fringe" universe, what you will find is an absorbing, addictive drama, with some authentic performances.

It’s wearying to watch actors of this caliber try to fluff laughs out of this dreariness.

Midnight, Texas could have been called “True Blood: The Next Generation” or even more precisely “True Blood: The Low-Budget Network Reboot.” Either way, it can’t shake a fang at the original.

Don't worry about forming a lasting relationship with Best Friends Forever. It has all the signs of a quick flame-out on the NBC schedule.