Tyrant gets a welcome addition, along with more intrigue.

A nutty sprawl that's often amusing, occasionally interesting, sporadically informative and almost completely off the rails. A hoot.

We expect sharp writing from Caron. "Medium" is almost too glib at times. What makes the suspension of disbelief easy is the casting. [3 Jan 2005]

Comey's story in black and white, with not much shading in between.

At first, the pace is slow--make that glacial--but [the] pilot episode (and especially Sunjata) are good-natured enough to make you want to stick around to see if this gels into anything approaching an FX drama (it does not).

This eccentric assemblage truly captures the distinct feel of Vegas-the night, the gallows humor of grisly work and the people who thrive on it. Sure, it's seedy, surreal and supremely specific. That's why we're hooked. [6 Oct 2000, p.B51]

While you're left to wonder why these four stars need a reality show, or why the contestants never truly made it in the first place, "The Voice" should remain a solid performer for NBC--which it so very badly needs.

Think of this as “Grey’s” in a courtroom, with a good New York cast, two legends (Gould and Bill Irwin, who plays a judge), a TV star and a TV pioneer.

Nice looking, but not nearly enough action.

A winner. And for the Hoffmans' sake--plus family and friends along for the ride--let's hope there is gold in that hard, cold ground.

Everything fans loved about the first season--which improved dramatically over its course, by the way--is here. Everyone is not. McIntyre is good, but he's not Whitfield, either.

Legends simply feels too loose, too campy.

It's all very exhausting. This is a terrible show. Avoid it at all costs.

It's daring, disconcerting and/or enlightening.

Slattery is fine in this bland AI thriller.

"Lost Room" is a shaggy dog story that gets shaggier with every scene. It's a tale as tall as the Empire State Building that threatens to topple in the merest breeze but - miraculously - never does.

Good, sharply written (and acted) series that lacks the sizzle, pop and magic of the movie.

Hardly a treasure, but a lively island of adventure.

First-rate actress, compelling idea but neither can escape the clutches of a shopworn formula.

Mostly boilerplate teen soap that lacks the (umm) zest of "Sex and the City"--a good thing, in case you're wondering.

A paint-by-the-numbers biopic with the dramatic vitality of a tree stump.

The Assets isn't flashy, but boy, is it effective. It just grinds away, laying down intriguing details of "asset" care and feeding, made vivid through determined performances and intense crescendos.

The cameos often are amusing, and so is Kudrow, but someone at Showtime evidently forgot to ask whether a one-joke webisode can or should be expanded into a one-joke TV series. This one feels like a strrrretch.

Last Man Standing is that unusual red fish in a sea crowded with blue ones, and it never lets you forget that. As always and as expected, Mike gets the best lines, the easiest put-downs and literally the last word.

An excellent Trump impression, but a little too much of it.

Get past the tough-to-buy setup of the premiere, and Shades improves. The star? Initially tough to buy, too, but also improves.

Sly as "The Larry Sanders Show," keener than "Fat Actress," more sympathetic than "Curb Your Enthusiasm," this new half-hour comedy hits the bull's-eye in every direction. It's funny, sad, smart and immensely appealing. [5 June 2005, p.11]

It becomes a challenge to endure a show that jerks its audience around this much, and cannot decide whether it wants to be tabloid-level trashy television with horror leanings, a serious depiction of human failings, an expose of the dark side of the adoption world, the story of a marriage falling apart, or something else.

While True Blood remains wildly and bloodily inventive--and will certainly remain a huge HBO hit--there's still an overwhelming sense that deja-vu-all-over-again has set in.

Unfortunately, one show's a classic, the other a near knockoff. Nevertheless, Poehler's still got plenty of appeal here.

It's the old school of ridiculous sitcoms at its worst. [10 Sep 1990]

This is an extremely tough balancing act or--back to the musical analogy--this is a show where the notes have to play exactly right. They don't here.

"The Bondsman" is not for everyone. But it knows what it wants to be and has the confidence to see it through.

The setup is stagey, the dialogue slack (or--worse--obvious).... [Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin] effortlessly know how to elevate even average material--and pretty much do so here.

Garcia is a major-league cutie and sunny on-screen presence without being cloying. But enough with the filthy-rich-kid dramedies!

Like its net- mates, Birds of Prey boasts sharp casting of little-known performers whose personalities prove as feistily engaging as their exquisite looks. And, of course, they're smart talkers.

I do know something about TV shows, and this one works best when Anne Slowey is on camera (which is not nearly enough) and the program focuses on clothing - that great, exasperating, endlessly complicated art form known as "fashion."

There's just too much shtick and not enough personality, especially when the stars' previous hits found their funny in relatable human behavior.

Old-fashioned and a bit placid, but Stults and Duncan save the day, and maybe the series.

Bloody pirate battles? Check. Graphic sex scenes? Check. Shoreside conniving/intrigue? Intense.

Kings is a worthy enterprise that will deeply puzzle millions of viewers.

Not terrible, not without charm, not a bad cast (in fact, a pretty good cast).... As a consequence, not particularly funny or memorable either.

There's desperation here, and if Happy Endings would slow down long enough to let itself breathe, it might find a footing.

Skins is a bit clunky and even dated at times. Nor does it feel all that grounded in the real world, where it badly wants to be.

The pilot is so busy establishing its new world, performances are afterthought generic. But Defiance gets more distinctive, and dramatic, through its next two hour episodes.

Setting aside a glib and emotionally manipulative launch, of all the "This Is Us" wannabes ("Manifest," "A Million Little Things," "New Amsterdam") in the 2018 fall lineup, "God Friended Me" may stand the best chance of success.

The show could go interesting places, too, even explore provocative ideas--although the pilot pokes at those only halfheartedly. Limitless instead sets up as just another buddy cop show, with a superhero component and a sinister subplot. Those potentially interesting ideas are kicked to the curb.

Any comedy series braided with sunny idealism as this one is needs to decide what's more important: The idealism or the comedy? "Sunnyside's" pilot comes down on the side of idealism, leaving the sitcom part in some sort of listless, half-baked limboland. ... With showrunners from "Brooklyn 911" (Mike Schur) and "Community" (Matt Murray). They should figure this out. They usually do. In the meantime, the pilot has one reason to watch. Hint: It's in the title.

The makers of "Them: Covenant" ask their audience to endure scenes of horrific abuse that are unearned by their broader framework.

If all this sounds hopelessly hokey — and there are stretches in "The Madison" where it irredeemably is — then you'll want to do something else with your Saturday night. Otherwise, there's beauty here, some nice performances and a welcome pivot away from the mayhem of "Yellowstone."

Some amusing bits, but for every one of those, there are 10 misfires.

Tatum seems genuine and almost desperate to forget the past; Ryan affects the pose that he couldn't care less. Over this is draped a weird "only-in-Hollywood" vibe--and a particularly sad one, too.

Falco and her curls steal the show. They’re both are fascinating. The “true crime” part is much less so.

The opening episode--already posted online--is a bit sluggish, but Power gets better in subsequent episodes. Starz, and Fitty, appear to have a winner.

The second half is actually more enlightening, though, as Gibney and Foster do a remarkable job of explaining the challenges that Rolling Stone faces, while still celebrating its significance.

The writing is occasionally sharp and observational, but the first episode relied too often on smarmy, anatomically based humor. [19 Apr 1990, p.9]

Dull and talky, with flashes of promise.

Unforgettable was on no one's list as one of the "buzzier" fall pilots, but that doesn't mean it's not one of the better ones. It is.

A convoluted story that doesn’t seem all that worthwhile to unravel, or peel--or watch..

While neither awful nor even particularly bad, there is an earnest silliness to the whole thing.

They honor the job without trivializing it, or turning it into melodramatic entertainment pap for the masses.

Not bad but not subtle either, this is a broadly told story of overprivileged parents and their wounded offspring. You already know the sorry outcome.

Way too obscure for the average viewer, Comic Book Men is strictly for Smith groupies, and there are probably enough of those to keep this six-parter afloat over its short run.

Allegiance is a curious duck, indeed. Smart and sophisticated certainly, but -- occasionally--a bit dim-bulbed and hokey, too.

Scream is exactly what you'd expect. It may also be exactly what you want.

Good-hearted, a little too cloying, and the story flow needs polish. Of the three new CBS comedies this fall, this is the most promising.

Violent, jarring, contorted and doesn't fully make the case this was the spinoff "SOA" needed or demanded.

The pilot is, in fact, baffling, and needlessly so.

As a team, they [Billy Crystal and Josh Gad] are better than the shows--both the real one and the fake one--they're in.

Gravity looks like another slow build. Its characters aren't as directly defined, and initial episodes exhibit curious methods to its storytelling madness.

Mostly boilerplate CBS procedural but at least the horses look great.

Funny idea that doesn’t quite attain the level of “funny show,” but a good cast along with a few good lines indicate this superhero sendup will eventually get there.

There's some charm here, but it's as fleeting as a tweet.

A by-the-book cop show without much bite or heft. But it's got Memphis and Lee.

The Son is mostly about a son with two fathers, one white, the other Comanche. He absorbs the soul, spirit and perspective of the latter. It’s a particularly interesting idea and character based on a celebrated book. Here’s hoping the miniseries lives up to the promise. Saturday’s opener suggests that it should.

Intelligent adaptation absent the dark humor, satire--or horror--of the original.

There's humor, there's heart, you'll laugh when you don't expect to.

It feels to me like CBS wanted a military heroism series, and the producers provided one, and here it is.

"Raines" is both thoroughly conventional and thoroughly unconventional; in fact, it often revels in its conventionality.

Cane" is not a bad show, and it's sporadically a good one. Merely, great expectations have not been met.

A 2+2=4 cop show with no surprises but plenty of Wolf touches.

The Last Tycoon is so sumptuous that it’s easy to overlook how pedestrian the story often is. That’s not immediately apparent because what’s onscreen is stunning.

As derivative as it is in many respects, "The Apprentice" could turn out to be one of the more interesting variations on the format. [4 Jan 2004]

100-proof, pure-grade, high-gloss, low-risk formula.

NBC's new Bionic Woman remake is a desolate slab of ice where any resemblance to human beings - alive, dead or cyborgian--is purely coincidental. It's hard to imagine a bigger modernized mess being made

The series does a competent job of setting mood and character--notably that anything is possible, the sky’s the limit drive of the early 20th century that animated great inventions, and consequently great fortunes.

Hardly quaint or entirely redundant, these three are at least good, and the third — written and directed by Oz Perkins — easily the best. But something's still missing and that was the bane of the first season too: Neither sharp-edged nor jagged, they don't stay with you, or haunt you, or vex you in some hard-to-define way.

Producers play this for laughs, though just slightly. (These are high school kids, after all.) Even so, the show's flat and almost stunningly uninformative.

Sure, it's a glossy, well-produced infomercial filled with powerful live performances, but it feels designed to make us want to buy more Beyoncé stuff.

Either clever idea or one-trick pony, the Son of Zorn pilot can’t entirely decide which it is either.

Lots of cartoon violence mixed with--irony alert--not enough intelligence.

Reminiscent of “Chico and the Man” (the mid-’70s NBC sitcom about a cranky garage owner and his Chicano employee), but it also aspires to a contemporary relevance--but manages only a weary crustiness.

The Whole Truth equals " Law & Order: The Next Generation." It's still just a little too overeager and needs to mature.

Sweet, sad, nice, and a tad dull.

Lynch can be as goofy-delightful here as in the ensembles of “Party Down” and “Glee.” But she’s all over everything, all the time, in a show that just won’t let up.

Sometimes, you're not looking for great TV. Sometimes, you're looking for par-tay! And dudes paid "to mess with the zombie culture," while also acing the case, surely fits the bill.

Nice locales (Paris! Rome!), a couple of decent action sequences... but otherwise a tepid potboiler over-seasoned with too many spy tropes and a plot with too many gaping holes.

There's plenty of heart here--and some very sharp writing and acting, too.