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.

The Middleman is at once retro and post-modern, the sort of result you'd get if you threw "The Tick" and the '50s black-and-white "Superman" TV show into a blender. And it's quite a lot of fun.

The sex is all implied rather than shown, as is much of the drug use. It's a very PG-13 approach to potentially R-rated subject matter--and that's the problem.

For the most part, they're neither fish nor fowl: not gory enough for the "Saw"/"Hostel" crowd, and not genuinely scary enough for anybody else.

In Plain Sight is a definite for any summer TV To-Watch list; don't cross it off until you've seen at least one.

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.

That balance of viewpoints--positive and negative, tragic and comic--is what makes Carrier such extraordinary viewing.

There's nothing annoying about it, but there's also nothing memorable.

Even though the performances, the writing, directing, etc., are uniformly strong, The Riches is just too unpleasant to make a weekly commitment to.

There are moments when John Adams stirs up the passion its author clearly had for the subject -- Adams firing off a rifle in the middle of a battle at sea with a British warship, the first public reading of the Declaration, George Washington (David Morse, in the second-best piece of casting other than Giamatti) whispering his oath of office at his inauguration -- but too often it's just as muddy and dull as its subject was accused of being.

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

Margulies is a potent enough screen presence that this part of the show could be interesting, but Canterbury's self-destructive streak gets overshadowed by all the Leg Show material and the overheated courtroom theatrics.

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.

The issue I have with the rape-by-orangutan scene in Unhitched is that it's not funny, nor does it even seem to be trying to be funny. It's lazy comedy, substituting shock value for wit and invention, and it typifies everything that follows on this lame excuse for a sitcom.

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.

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.

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.

Eli Stone, lightweight and proudly quirky.

The Lost season three finale was no fluke. The show has got its mojo back, and then some.

You get out what you put into it--even in the episodes that are weaker, I was rarely bored--and it's a consistent scripted oasis in a sea of shows where people take lie detector tests on camera.

Cranston's performance alone is enough to keep me watching for a while, but I'd like to see something resembling a completed formula, and soon.

With the start of season two, it looks like the expectations might finally meet the reality--or however real a show with aliens and time travel can get.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles happens to contain that show's most interesting character. It just ain't Sarah Connor.

The fifth and final season may be the most overtly farcical, but only because things in this slightly fictionalized Baltimore have become, if you can imagine, worse than ever.

Pick your adjective--Predictable. Insufferable. Detestable. Tacky. --and it fits.

Some of the performances are good, particularly by Deschanel (who gets to sing near the end, good news for anyone who saw "Elf"), McDonough and Cumming, but solid acting and monkeys flying out of, um, someplace aren't enough to justify spending six hours over three nights on a labored attempt to make a classic children's story seem grown-up and cool.

The Christmas special Shrek the Halls is fabulous.

The humor provided by the new setting makes the show a bit more palatable than it was last season, but Nip/Tuck is still Nip/Tuck, for both good and ill.

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.

The show inspires nothing but my apathy.

It's the best-looking pilot of the season--maybe the best new show, period--even though it may not look that good in the future.

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.

Aliens is very much in the vein of previous nerd comedies like "Malcolm in the Middle" and "Freaks and Geeks," though it's not as explosively funny as either one of them.

Because Dexter's victims are always so evil, we're inclined to root for him, but moments like that--or one in where Dexter admits he doesn't really care about saving innocents, just scratching his itch to kill--gives the show more moral complexity than you would expect, and it's the better for that.

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

Big Shots, an obnoxious waste of time that's likely the season's worst new show.

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.

Krause could be hard to digest as the self-righteous Nate on "Six Feet Under," but he makes a fine, amusingly flustered straight man to the cast of eccentrics that Wright and producer Greg Berlanti have assembled.

Lewis is a strong enough actor (again, see "Band of Brothers") that there are moments where he pulls together all these tics into a character who could be interesting, but too much time gets wasted on pedestrian mysteries to give him room to work.

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.

The CW's Reaper and NBC's "Chuck," the two shows featuring the aforementioned Sam and, um, Chuck, are an unusual pairing in that they're not only both good--with ABC's "Pushing Daisies," they're the best new shows of the season.

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

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.

Chuck starts a step slower, with more exposition in the first two episodes and no larger-than-life character like Satan to smooth over that, but by episode three, it's just as assured and entertaining in its own extremely similar way.

A lame new sitcom.

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.

It's very well-done teen angst, but at the same time made me feel very old and slightly pervy while watching it.

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

Much as I admire Lilley's ability to pull off a sort of one-man Christopher Guest movie, only one of the three Summer Heights High leads is funny on a consistent basis.

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.

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

Damages offers two superb performances by old pros Glenn Close and Ted Danson.... One thing it doesn't have: a compelling main character. It's a doughnut show: lots of sweet, satisfying goodness around the edges, nothing in the middle.

The pieces shouldn't fit together--Earl's celestial presence with Grace's raging sex life, discussions of metaphysics with police procedural plots--but somehow they do.

The show does such an amazing job of evoking a world not that long-gone, and in a way that makes it equal parts alluring and appalling.

As epic as Reggie vs. Billy or Billy vs. George were on the sports pages in the summer of Sam, it doesn't feel like quite enough to fill eight hours of scripted drama.

It wants to be a smart-aleck comedy/thriller hybrid in the spirit of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, but the jokes are rarely clever enough and the thrills rarely exciting enough.

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.

Whether this is all weirdness for weirdness' sake or something more complex isn't clear, not even after the first four episodes.

The guys are so polite and harmless that it's hard to dislike them even when they repeat themselves in such a short span.

The show feels cold, like it's holding the audience at arm's length.

It's an odd little show, often more David Lynch than David Milch, and after three episodes I'm still not sure I understand it all.

Horne and Page have sweet chemistry, but what makes the show work is the cast of eccentrics that Corden and Jones have created around them.

The Sunday premiere has a nice mix of thrills, comedy and pathos, but is there a show here?

There’s nothing especially novel or insightful, let alone funny, about the show’s take on impending parenthood.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I like her a lot, but the shaggy-dog nature of the storytelling... made the comedy miss about as often as it hit for me.

It isn't until the werewolf-themed fourth episode that "Dresden Files" finally gives you a trick worth applauding. Hopefully, there's more of that to come.

So, to sum up: decadent and adult, but too entertaining to be this week's harbinger of the apocalypse.

Last year's body count also makes some of this year's deaths feel routine; I spent a good chunk of the early episodes figuring out which characters had lived just a little too long, if you know what I mean.

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.

One of the better -- if stranger -- comedy debuts the networks have put out this year.

It's the first outright catastrophe of FX's post-"The Shield" era.

The new edition delivers many of the same thrills and intelligent debate that made the original so exceptional. But the mere act of bringing it back creates problems the original never had to deal with.

The larger problem may be whether there's enough material to cover an entire season.

Even when "My Boys" isn't wildly funny (which would be most of the time, frankly), it has a lot of charm.

The thing is, if you can let go of the "Groundhog Taye" problem, it's a decent little thriller with a sci-fi twist.

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

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

"Write what you know" is a cardinal rule of writing, and Fey certainly knows this world better than Sorkin -- even if "The Girlie Show" is lame, I believe it exists in a way I don't with "Studio 60" -- but the history of failed behind-the-scenes sitcoms and dramas is so long and ugly that she would have been better served using a different setting altogether.

If it weren't for [Lithgow's] shameless bellowing, "20 Good Years" would be excruciating, instead of the (very) occasionally amusing hackfest it's turned out to be.

The acting, writing and directing are superb.

The drama is one of the season's best because it makes you care even when you know something big is coming -- and because it finds pleasant little surprises along the way.

Sick, twisted and darkly funny, "Dexter" is easily the best drama in Showtime history.

I have no interest in fashion, little inherent fondness for soap operas, and I'm absolutely not the gender this show is targeting. And based on the two episodes I've seen, I'm going to be watching "Ugly Betty" every week. It's that much fun.

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

A big, colorful, messy, involving, funny explosion of a show. If it's not the best new series of the season, it's definitely the most memorable.

A work in progress.

A gimmick in search of a show.

If the "Shark" writers feel the need to, in the very first episode, soften their hero in a way the "House" writers haven't had to do in two-plus seasons, how warm and fuzzy will the character be by November sweeps, let alone the end of the season?

What you do after surviving the end of the world as you know it is an intriguing premise, and when "Jericho" sticks close to that, it's one of this season's more promising new dramas.

"Kidnapped" plays out like a point-by-point criticism of everything "Vanished" gets wrong.

A schizophrenic pilot that's more interesting in parts than as a whole.