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.