"Emergency" is sodden, forbidding, a waste of 22 good minutes.

These folks wouldn't be paranoid if they thought critics loathed their forced and annoying show and widely predicted it would be the season's first to tank. [6 Oct 2000, p.B51]

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

This is pretty tedious viewing.

There's perverse fun to be had in watching "3 lbs." Count the groans as you spot yet another trite piece of formula.

The filming is urgent! The dialogue is obvious! The actors get choked up! It's as if a film school class put together a thriller following all the rules precisely.

Most of the cast stammers its way through sentences as if awaiting a lightning strike of inspiration. When it doesn't come, the actors have to say something anyway, and that meandering search for structure is what winds up filling 30 shapeless minutes.

It's not so stylish or energetic anymore, and it's still not particularly funny. ... The problem isn't just rim-shot jokes, though. It's the whole conception of this comedy's situation, which is riddled with illogic and overstocked with annoying characters. [15 Apr 2003]

If this is comedy, who needs it? [24 Sept 2002, p.B27]

The show seems to have no point, rendering it agony how hard the proceedings work at making one.

A slight, cartoonish, and terribly, terribly obvious dramedy.

Airing five nights a week and featuring 10 strangers - not to mention insufferable hosts Julie Chen and Ian O'Malley - this will fill our screens for the next three months. Unless we happen to leave the set turned off. Which, judging from last night, might be advisable. [6 Jul 2000]

This one isn't David Spade's fault. Really it isn't.

The pairing might have worked, if only they weren't saddled with trite dialogue. ("Am I disturbing you?" someone says to cafe owner Whoopi: "Too late, I'm already disturbed.") And it might have worked if the show had more resembled a "small" production of the kind that some pay-cable services specialize in instead of an assembly-line, go-for-the-cheap-shot sitcom. [30 Mar 1990, p.II-5]

Because so many viewers will have seen this kind of reality show before, their minds may start to wander by the second commercial break.

Nobody seems to be having any fun here, not even lording-it-over-everybody Ming. You'd think next week's second episode might be better, once all that exposition is out of the way, but you'd be wrong. It's even more lifeless.

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

"What About Brian"... wants to be "thirtysomething" for twentysomethings, but it is clichesomething.

It's hard to believe that anybody could make such a ludicrous police drama after "Hill Street Blues." [30 Sep 1991]

Calling Rome a crushing disappointment would be accurate but too forgiving of its sordidly cockamamy fixations. Brutality and nudity rise in direct proportion to unpersuasive storytelling. Finding someone, anyone, to care about amid all this shock-value Sturm und Drang swiftly becomes an enervating chore. [26 Aug 2005, p.B33]

"Donnellys" creaks and sighs, moans and slumps, and ambles along like a world-weary cliche, unable or unwilling to lift its head above the humdrum banality to which it has been consigned.

Maybe the problem with CBS' new Sunday popcorn movie "Mayday" isn't that it could be better. It actually could be worse. Then this would be deliriously mockable trash instead of an occasionally gripping but mostly frustratingly loony piece of hooey.

The only thing deep in tonight's Firefly premiere, though, is the well of cliches into which Whedon dips for what passes for plot and exposition. [20 Sept 2002, p.B02]

"Fashion House" is a bit more coherent, if still ludicrous.

It is so ancient - in approach, tone, style and energy - that you can almost see the dust bunnies tumble across the set.

Sex Box is bad. It's also hackneyed, dull, derivative and surprisingly windy.

A little too raw, especially in this hour.

It's horrible, horrible, horrible, and you will hate yourself for laughing--although I'm afraid you will.