Neither trainwreck nor masterpiece, the new "90210" was exactly what nobody expected it would be: remarkably faithful in tone and spirit to the original adventures of Brandon, Brenda, Scott Scanlon and company.

It's not just familiar, but lazy.

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.

Perhaps recognizing the professional problem, the show's writers return with an episode where the crime has a painful personal connection for Grace. Some of the scenes still drag, but it's stronger than most of the season one episodes.

If the world that Simon, Burns, Wright and company drop us into can be confusing at first (mirroring, as they intended, the confusion that Wright felt at the time), it's a fully-realized one that's both thousands of miles away (literally and figuratively) from the Baltimore of "The Wire" and one that will feel very familiar to anyone who spent a lot of time watching McNulty and Bunk drink at the train tracks.

The Flashpoint pilot is competent, but very retro (there's an extended sequence of the team driving to a crisis point with their sirens blaring, the sort of thing that went out 15 years ago) and fairly dull.

Nix and company had a very thing going last season, and they've found a way to change the show a little without screwing it up.

If you can get past the blatant attempts to sell an ABC News production to fans of ABC dramas--prepare yourself for a lot of going-into-commercial cliffhangers where the surgical patients don't seem to be waking up--Hopkins is a rewarding, and often surprising, experience.

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.

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.

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.