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.

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

It's not funny, it's not engaging, it's not in any way, shape or form a good match with "Party Down," and I would advise those of you watching that show tonight to change the channel abruptly as soon as the end credits are done rolling.

Painful, pointless, obnoxious... I would almost rather have The Jay Leno Show back.

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.

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

The real problem with the new Knight Rider, though, isn't that it's stupid (again, it's a show about a guy and his talking car) or that Bruening's terrible (the Hoff would be the first to say he's no master thespian). It's that it's a show whose time has long passed.

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

Larry, Henry and virtually every person to walk through "Happy Hour" are broad, obnoxious, lame caricatures, even by the standards of Fox's laughtracked sitcoms.

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.

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