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

I don't know that there's a long-running series here--even the pilot runs out of steam before the end--but I did laugh several times.

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.

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

It is really, really atrocious. Not so-bad-it's-good. Just bad. Plain bad. Why am I watching this?-level bad.

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

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.

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]

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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]

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.

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

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.

There's plenty of humiliation in I Survived a Japanese Game Show as well, but there it's so varied and strange--and very much in keeping with what I understand of those shows--that it doesn't get repetitive or annoying.

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.

"Desire" will make you ashamed -- of society at large, if not yourself --whether you like it (chances: minimal) or not (chances: off the charts).

"The value of what's in the briefcase might not be in the money." That's what creator Dave Broome, the man behind "The Biggest Loser," clearly wants us to ponder, but The Briefcase also preys upon our judgmental side as we watch the couples attempt to justify keeping all the money.

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

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.

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.

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.