At times "Cold Case" feels like an assembly-line product, slick and shiny but a bit rushed and impersonal. [23 Sep 2003]

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.

If Guggenheim can deepen the personalities and show how the flash forward really impacted them, then they might have a show here. Because right now, there's an interesting idea, some good production values and a cool cliffhanger, and not much else.

As usual, it's all too busy, too tonally inconsistent (the scenes with Bill's parents seem to exist not only on a different series, but a different plane of reality) and too often obscures the terrific work being done by Tripplehorn, Sevigny, Goodwin and Seyfried.

And then, near the end of the premiere, something happened that put a dull ache in the pit of my stomach. I won't spoil it here - henceforth, it'll be referred to as The Bad Thing - but it seemed so tonally wrong, so in violation of everything that made the show and the particular characters involved so great, that I knew - I knew - this had been imposed on the production team by the suits at NBC. [5 Oct 2007, p.55]

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

Sutter's taste for chewy dialogue works well ("Make this a sight for deep memory," instructs Baron Ventris (Brian F. O'Byrne) before a slaughter, and his minions do). But Brattle and his band of rebels are frustratingly one-dimensional; the only character who comes to life is Stephen Moyer's Milus Corbett, the Baron's scheming chamberlain.

The humor in Divorce is so bleak and the characters are so toxic that you may crave a "Silkwood" shower afterward.That's not to say there aren't funny lines or excellent performances by the core cast of Parker, Haden Church, and Molly Shannon and Tracy Letts as the awful friends whose mutual meltdown at a party sparks Parker's Frances to ask for a divorce. Trouble is, they feel like performances from different shows.

Cleveland isn’t an inherently interesting, or, worse, funny, character. His presence allows the writers (many of them white like Henry and Appel) to tell meta jokes about white people in Hollywood producing entertainment for a black audience, and occasionally some of the racial humor lands.

It's not a bad show, but the mechanics of how they're going to abduct their latest target are far less engaging than how the team interacts with each other and how each member fights his or her compulsions.

Defying Gravity--an international production with American actors--feels too slight, or silly, to treat as anything but the cheap, disposable summer programming it is.

The writers try to imbue the narration with a sense of heartfelt nostalgia that came so naturally to a show like "The Wonder Years," but the contemporary setting and banal plotlines works against it.

If Lie to Me wants to elevate itself above all the other shows like it, it not only needs to beef up the quality of its mysteries, but to spend more time focusing on these unexpected downsides of the power to live a life of absolute truths.

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.

While the jokes may be funnier than "King" has been in a long time, the new show also feels more uneven and strained.

"Family Guy" ... consists of almost nothing but pop culture references. ... Now, some of these gags are side-splittingly funny ... but there are way too many of them. [9 Apr 1999]

Yaya DaCosta ably embodies Houston's grace, confidence and teasing good humor--but she isn't given much to work with.... [Whitney's] music remains timeless, though, and that's when Whitney comes to life.

It’s a bland, interchangeable bunch, with most of them having a single identifiable trait.

If you've somehow never seen any of the twelve dozen procedural crime shows that CBS does, it might feel a little new, but too often the scenes with Don and his colleagues feel obligatory, like everyone is doing their best to keep the plot moving until Charlie bursts in with the correct digits. [21 Jan 2005]

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.

The satire is sharp, including a scene in which one sister texts with her killer as he's trying to kill her. But the two-hour premiere does itself no favors, so overstuffed with scares, silliness, intrigues and occasional moments of real horror that it fails to coalesce into something resembling coherence.

It was the usual schtick from Leno--which is probably just what his fans wanted to hear after he'd been out of late night for a year and off TV altogether for weeks--with jokes about the Olympics, Dick Cheney, and, of course, the flagging fortunes of the network he's on.

It's a bit of a jumble and not particularly compelling.

Hoffman was replaced by the talented British comic actor Steve Coogan, and I can't fault his performance. I can fault Auslander for writing Thom as a sanctimonious, pedantic, needling, incessantly outraged man of privilege and then expecting us to care about him.

Any evidence of the source material's wit or grit is MIA. We're left with a show that's as cheesy as it is ridiculously improbable.

This is a conventional crime show draped in period trappings when it should be steeped in the era.

Only intermittently funny but unceasingly crass.

With MTV's Scream, anyone who has enjoyed the original is bound to be disappointed here.