The longer you watch the show (I've seen all eight episodes of its first season), the emptier and more frustrating it becomes, to the point where even the brief running time begins to feel too long.

It's a watered-down, TV version of the familiar tale, as bland and inoffensive as possible.

Melrose does a better job integrating its two casts, and it embraces what it is: a trashy remake of one of the most memorably trashy hits in primetime history. It's still not good, mind you, but it's more honest and enthusiastic about its badness, you know?

Valentine is more what I was anticipating when I heard about the MRC-on-CW deal: low-budget, disposable and artery-clogging in its levels of cheese.

Heroes may be better this year than it was last year, but it's still a very dumb show that just wants you to think it's smart.

The three episodes of the new season that I've seen are almost entirely flat. [29 Jun 2006]

Despite two fine leading performances by Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver and a premise that's not like anything else on television, there's something missing in the execution.

Most of the humor feels like a show that’s trying too hard, except when we’re watching the great-yet-tiny character actress Linda Hunt as the boss of NCIS’s Los Angeles field office.

Basically, The Deep End is "Grey's Anatomy" with lawyers, and the execution is as cynical and flat as that premise sounds.

"Vanished" is already lacking in the kind of star performances that make "Prison Break" or "24" worthwhile even when they're foot-dragging.

Samantha Who? isn't remotely as bad as the worst of this season's rookie class ("Cavemen," "Big Shots," CBS' upcoming "Viva Laughlin"), but it's ultimately forgettable in a way that a show about an amnesiac would probably want to avoid.

"Weeds" isn't nearly as shocking or hilarious as it clearly thinks it is. [5 Aug 2005]

Unfortunately, the idea's a little too thin to support a weekly sitcom.

Maybe McBride has more pitches in his arsenal than he's shown so far, but the repertoire on display in Eastbound & Down feels too limited for a long stint on HBO's mound.

None of those jokes serve any purpose except to be jokes, and they suffer for the fact that real people don't talk, think or act this way.

The one moment people will talk about, and remember, from The Jay Leno Show debut was one of the least comic of Jay's career. It's going to get NBC some water cooler talk, and a lot of website hits, but it's not going to work as a signature "This is why Jay is awesome" clip like I think they were hoping.

Unlike "Life on Mars," the concept seems elastic enough that the show could run for a long time, but first its American producers would need to work on storytelling basics like pacing and developing interesting characters.

On paper, the idea of building a new democracy from the ruins of war while government contractors run amok--in other words, showing what would happen if the reconstruction of Iraq took place in our heartland--is just as strong as the original premise of Jericho. But the execution remains mediocre.

There's potentially a good show here; the pilot's just a miss.

True Blood looks terrific, especially whenever it has to depict a vampire in action, as they can move almost too fast for the naked eye (but not the high-def camera) to see. But unless the thought of vampire/human love makes your pulse quicken--or, even better, makes you wish you didn't have a pulse to quicken--most of it is not really worth seeing.

The show plays like bad imitation noir where the private eye can occasionally sink his teeth into the villain.

It's not a great sitcom, not even really a good one, and the strain of trying to sell such mediocre material will no doubt get to Garrett in a few weeks, but it's still vastly better than its companion show.

The new season has a few moments, mostly involving the return from the dead of Jack's old CTU colleague Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard), who now seems to be working for the bad guys. But all the attempts by Jack and his writers to justify every past decision often brings the action to a crawl.

Any show that's willing to go to such a silly place, to have its main character utter a line of dialogue that's like a parody of a parody of stuff these guys were writing two decades ago on "thirtysomething," is not a show I have time for, even if other shows won't be back until April.

McKellen, and the production design, and some smart use of Brian Wilson songs on the soundtrack (The Beach Boys' "I Know There's an Answer" is the miniseries' cheeky final tune) weren't enough to overcome my need for coherence.

Whatley’s quick conversion to the cause takes away what little tension there is in the partnership, and is emblematic of a larger problem. McGinn needs the people that she meets to buy into the idea of reincarnation, or else she can’t get anything done.

Unfortunately, too much of the show is taken up by the usual Kelley stupidity. [1 Oct 2004]

The disappointing new project from "Arrested Development" creator Mitchell Hurwitz is mainly a reminder of how much the "Arrested" cast--several of whom provide voice work here--added to that show.

It's an hour of unpleasant yet bland people occasionally bumping into each other and saying racially provocative things.

If "Donnellys" wants a shot at doing better than "Studio 60" in its timeslot, it needs at least a hint of a larger-than-life figure.

A work in progress.

Californication doesn't have the courage of those movies' ["Shampoo" and "Blume in Love"] convictions. It acts like it wants to tell the story of Hank's comeuppance, his growth from obnoxious man-child to real man, but it can't bear the thought of the audience not liking Hank (and, by extension, Duchovny) right out of the gate.

Addison isn't very strong or decisive in her professional capacity either, spending most of the pilot waffling on whether she should have left Seattle Grace.

There's some amusing material on the margins of the show--the guys use OnStar to settle a debate about the lyrics to a song on the radio, Dougie admits his marriage isn't perfect and his wife "sometimes she gets up in the middle of the night and bakes in her sleep"--but outside of Jerry Minor's winning performance as the overextended but always cheerful Aubrey, it's completely forgettable.

New Amsterdam is essentially three shows in one: Amsterdam flashing back on all the exciting things he's done in the last 366 years; Amsterdam trying to find The One, and Amsterdam and partner Eva Marquez (Zuleikha Robinson) solving murders like the leads on some kind of supernaturally-charged "Law & Order" spin- off. But only the first of those shows is remotely interesting.

Mental was produced on a relative shoestring by Fox Telecolombia, and there's a flatness not only to the sets (which look not unlike what you might see on a Univision show), but the dialogue and characterizations.

[Of the two new soaps,] only "Fashion House" seems to understand that it's supposed to be a guilty pleasure.

The show is so self-conscious of everything it’s doing that nothing has quite the effect its creators want it to have.

The new show doesn't feel like a clone, but it also seems to be missing the spirit of what made the original such a success. [23 Sep 2002]

In an ideal world, Katims and Nutter would have taken the best elements from their previous series: the keen insight into teen behavior of "My So-Called Life" and the inventive storytelling of "The X-Files." Unfortunately, Roswell gets it backwards, using both the self-importance of the former and the paper-thin characterization of the latter. [6 Oct 1999, p.73]

TThe writing is stilted, with every other sentence from Rourke's mouth a ready-made movie poster tagline.

They're all likeable enough, but the set-ups are straight out of a dog-eared playbook.

It at times seems like a pornographic parody of "The X-Files."

Jenna Elfman (who plays a newspaper movie critic who gets pregnant after a one-night stand with the young guy on the left, played by Jon Foster) seemed like a loose, natural comedienne, but she's trying way too hard to sell the jokes here-possibly because she knows no one's going to buy them without a whole lot of help.

It abandons all of Kelley's strengths, like the legal setting and male bonding, and drowns itself in his weaknesses: women discussing their feelings, women flirting with men, women acting body-conscious... basically, anything involving the female gender.

It's a cheesy-looking, indifferently plotted, repetitious piece of work. ... The creature effects don't pass muster in the Spielberg era, the pacing is slack, the dialogue is dull, and the whole thing looks washed out and feels rushed and poorly thought out. [28 Nov 2002]

Who wants to watch a less funny, vaguely cuddlier House impersonator?

If FX's other signature drama "The Shield" is a fine example of how cable's relaxed content restrictions can lead to more compelling drama, Nip/Tuck is a symbol of that freedom run amok. "The Shield" is heavy on shock value, but those shocks are there to serve some kind of larger purpose. When the Nip/Tuck writers throw in something raunchy or disgusting, it's simply because they can. [21 June 2004, p.27]

If you want a show with engaging characters and drama, and not just a public service announcement about the very real value of our country's nurses, then Hawthorne fails to deliver.

It's not just familiar, but lazy.

The show inspires nothing but my apathy.

Jamie is our heroine, the one we're supposed to like and care about, but as played by British actress Ryan ("EastEnders," "Jekyll"), she's a mopey blank, badly upstaged every time Sackhoff makes one of her all-too-brief appearances as Corvus.

It's a very special, frustrating kind of bad, one with the power to actually change history.

For a show that's so scornful of our national obsession with beauty, Nip/Tuck seems awfully comfortable staying skin deep. Its wild collage of sexual and surgical plot twists creates the appearance of meaning, but very rarely does the show hold up to close scrutiny. In the moment, it's dazzling, but when you step away from the set, it's oddly forgettable. [20 Sept 2005, p.33]

This show does nothing interesting with the premise, relying almost entirely, it seems, on the brand to break out.

All the gunplay, pedal-to-the-metal action and cartoon villains cheapen any serious talk of what's going on in the city.

Kath & Kim writers, meanwhile, seem to have nothing but contempt for their heroines. Kim is willfully ignorant, rude and obnoxious in a fashion that has no redeeming qualities, and Kath is mainly an unhappy blank who lets her daughter walk all over her.

This is sledgehammer writing, and not very interesting writing at that. [13 Jun 2005]

"Hell's Kitchen" cribs both the format of "The Apprentice" and that show's major problems. As with the two "Apprentice" sequels, the cast is filled with people who appear to have no clue what they're doing - or, at least, are placed in positions in which they'll inevitably fail so Ramsay can cuss them out. [30 Sep 2005]

"Ellie" has gone from being an avant-garde failure to a very average failure. [15 Apr 2003]

If you're a teenage boy who loved "300"--or any other demographic who loved "300"--you may well dig all the digitized, slow-motion blood splurts, the abundant nudity (albeit with some of the full frontal coming from male characters as well as female) and the stylized, computer-generated backgrounds. But stay far away if none of those things make you say "Hells yeah!"

What the obnoxious "Cashmere Mafia" and now the dull Lipstick Jungle suggest is that it's not as easy to recreate the "Sex and the City" phenomenon as assembling three or four attractive actresses of a certain age and pairing them with a name producer from the HBO show.

If you've watched ABC at all this summer, you've essentially seen all Wipeout has to offer: people of various shapes, sizes and ages all falling face-first into the mud while trying to complete an obstacle course that's been designed to be all but impossible to finish unscathed.

The hallucinatory gimmick can only do so much for the same old stories.

The show (which is shot on the old Stars Hollow set from "Gilmore Girls") seems like a WB show circa 2002--not one of the good ones, but a copy of a copy of a copy of one of the good ones.

If you're going to do a show about fantasy football, then do it. Go big, or go home. As constructed, The League will leave no one happy.

Mercy isn't just derivative; it's stridently, obnoxiously derivative.

Having two nearly identical, equally mediocre sitcoms on the air at the same time isn't exactly a crime, but it seems an awful waste of someone's time and energy.

The Newsroom is as insufferable as ever.

Despite its silly trappings, Farmer Wants a Wife is neither appalling nor unintentionally funny enough to merit sitting through yet another contrived dating show where the biggest prize would be for someone, anyone, to escape with a bit of their dignity intact.

Regardless of how promiscuous its obnoxious hero is, Californication remains a smug, unpleasant ego trip to nowhere.

A gimmick in search of a show.

There isn't a series here; just the pitch meeting for a very expensive, very loud, very dopey action movie.

The concept and the characters start to wear thin within an episode or two.

Journeyman doesn't do anything especially interesting with its time-twisting premise. It's competently produced, but unless you have a tremendous amount of affection for McKidd left over from his work as the insane Lucius Vorenus on HBO's "Rome," it's skippable.

Brothers is not anything you might classify as "good."

By the third episode, though, we've gone off the rails with another low-level blackmailer somehow getting over on an employee at the supposedly powerful and secretive CTU, and with Jack getting caught up in a plot-delaying detour that's even dumber than the survivalist who held Kim hostage for a few episodes in season two.

They've assembled a cast suffering a major charisma deficit and given them wooden, cliche-riddled dialogue to deliver.

It is every organ transplant storyline you've ever seen before on "ER" or "Chicago Hope" or elsewhere, told in the most unimaginative fashion possible, acted out by a competent group of actors not given much to play.

It’s lazy, predictable and spectacularly tone-deaf.

Frankly, Da Ali G Show, which begins its second season this week, is a huge embarrassment. [18 July 2004, p.8]

Basically, [the lead character is] a collection of every stereotypical romantic comedy and chick-lit trait, made especially annoying by Heche.

"Runaway" is like a Frankenstein's monster stitched together from pieces of dead shows from both networks.

A lame new sitcom.

There's the usual assortment of quirky neighbors/co-workers, none of whom register as more than caricatures in the pilot, and the social media buzzwords sprinkled with abandon throughout the pilot comes off as hashtag desperate.... Selfie is actively grating.

There's little visual style to Notorious, and the main case of the week is standard fare, a trying-to-be-twisty but quite predictable tale of a tech billionaire accused in a hit-and-run, while the B plot about a political blackmailing is completely forgettable.

While The Royals swings wildly from satire to sentimentality, from romance to raunch, and from camp to, well, crap, and only in the latter does it find its footing.

The mythology comes on hard and heavy in the first hour, but like ABC's blink-and-you-missed-it spring thriller "Zero Hour," it's ponderous yet silly.

NBC's new miniseries The Slap is a heavy-handed, button-pushing, endlessly irritating drama about a family that slowly unravels after a man slaps another's obnoxious child at a family party.

It looks cheap (even though CBS decided to scrap the entire original pilot and make a new one), the action sequences are rote, the dialogue is mostly generic, and the characters are all one-dimensional.

They can sing, but not well enough to make you forget the sub-Lifetime made-for-TV-movie dialogue, whiplash plotting and utterly laughable dramatic moments.

It's a bizarro comedy-cop procedural-mommy drama that does nothing well, and the murder mystery exceptionally badly.

The show comes from Kevin Williamson, who created the more equal-opportunity torture porn "The Following," which at least has a literary sheen and some effective scares. Here there are just trope.

There's a desperation to the whole affair, a sense that if the creators just keep the pace fast and the jokes tasteless, everything will be fine.

It's dull and predictable and makes that old '60s time-travel series Time Tunnel look like the work of Robert Heinlein. [22 Sept 1997, p.33]

Can someone please wake up Charlie Sheen? I know he's tried to build an entire career, Dean Martin-style, on half-lidded apathy, but as one-third of the new CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men, he's practically comatose. [22 Sept 2003, p.T35]

What is surprising is that the network that turned "Small ville" into a soaring hit has crashed so badly with its second flight of Spandex fancy.

All of the characters speak in the same exposition-heavy voice; their individual quirks... are too calculated to be interesting; and the soundtrack is both too on-the-nose... and, for the most part, 10-15 years too old for the characters.