Cranston's performance alone is enough to keep me watching for a while, but I'd like to see something resembling a completed formula, and soon.

With the start of season two, it looks like the expectations might finally meet the reality--or however real a show with aliens and time travel can get.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles happens to contain that show's most interesting character. It just ain't Sarah Connor.

The fifth and final season may be the most overtly farcical, but only because things in this slightly fictionalized Baltimore have become, if you can imagine, worse than ever.

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

Some of the performances are good, particularly by Deschanel (who gets to sing near the end, good news for anyone who saw "Elf"), McDonough and Cumming, but solid acting and monkeys flying out of, um, someplace aren't enough to justify spending six hours over three nights on a labored attempt to make a classic children's story seem grown-up and cool.

The Christmas special Shrek the Halls is fabulous.

The humor provided by the new setting makes the show a bit more palatable than it was last season, but Nip/Tuck is still Nip/Tuck, for both good and ill.

Samantha Who? isn't remotely as bad as the worst of this season's rookie class ("Cavemen," "Big Shots," CBS' upcoming "Viva Laughlin"), but it's ultimately forgettable in a way that a show about an amnesiac would probably want to avoid.

The show inspires nothing but my apathy.

It's the best-looking pilot of the season--maybe the best new show, period--even though it may not look that good in the future.

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.

Aliens is very much in the vein of previous nerd comedies like "Malcolm in the Middle" and "Freaks and Geeks," though it's not as explosively funny as either one of them.

Because Dexter's victims are always so evil, we're inclined to root for him, but moments like that--or one in where Dexter admits he doesn't really care about saving innocents, just scratching his itch to kill--gives the show more moral complexity than you would expect, and it's the better for that.

The show plays like bad imitation noir where the private eye can occasionally sink his teeth into the villain.

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

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.

Krause could be hard to digest as the self-righteous Nate on "Six Feet Under," but he makes a fine, amusingly flustered straight man to the cast of eccentrics that Wright and producer Greg Berlanti have assembled.

Lewis is a strong enough actor (again, see "Band of Brothers") that there are moments where he pulls together all these tics into a character who could be interesting, but too much time gets wasted on pedestrian mysteries to give him room to work.

Addison isn't very strong or decisive in her professional capacity either, spending most of the pilot waffling on whether she should have left Seattle Grace.

The CW's Reaper and NBC's "Chuck," the two shows featuring the aforementioned Sam and, um, Chuck, are an unusual pairing in that they're not only both good--with ABC's "Pushing Daisies," they're the best new shows of the season.

It's a watered-down, TV version of the familiar tale, as bland and inoffensive as possible.

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.

Chuck starts a step slower, with more exposition in the first two episodes and no larger-than-life character like Satan to smooth over that, but by episode three, it's just as assured and entertaining in its own extremely similar way.

A lame new sitcom.

None of those jokes serve any purpose except to be jokes, and they suffer for the fact that real people don't talk, think or act this way.

It's very well-done teen angst, but at the same time made me feel very old and slightly pervy while watching it.

All the gunplay, pedal-to-the-metal action and cartoon villains cheapen any serious talk of what's going on in the city.