Just about perfect in its way--always fun, well-paced--and much, much better than UPN's failed models drama South Beach. [1 May 2006, p.39]

Outsourced really needs to move beyond this sort of broad stupidity because its cast, notably Sacha Dhawan, is actually quite good. [27 Sep 2010, p.56]

It's tacky, da--or should we say duh?--but likable. [22 Aug 2011, p.45]

Playboy Club makes the mistake of aping Mad Men's Stern social seriousness. [26 Sep 2011, p.54]

The acting is good, especially Bill Skarsgard and Landon Liboiron.... I like the show's languid, dreamlike beauty, but horror fans may be less patient. [22 Apr 2013, p.47]

The show... is partly improvised, a stunt used to richer effect on ABC's upcoming Sons & Daughters. [6 Mar 2006, p.41]

While obnoxious luxury is always watchable, the show is lazily cookie-cutter. [19 Mar 2012, p.42]

If even a few good performances lock into your vision, you perk up. In this new comedy about friends in various stages of relationship envy and regret, there are two: James Van Der Beek and Zoe Lister-Jones. [7 Apr 2014, p.45]

This is like dramatizing War and peace without commenting on war or peace. [11 Mar 2013, p.46]

It gets an unexpected freshness from a young cast. [5 Mar 2007, p.37]

Shift is competent but useful mostly as a reminder to stay healthy at all costs and avoid this sort of place. [9 Jun 2014, p.34]

It's a gauge of how much reality programming has changed TV that I kept thinking that Mark Burnett could come in, push some situational hot buttons and produce a better show. [12 Jun 2006, p.39]

It's more shoofly than pie, but amusing. [17 Dec 2012, p.39]

It just doesn't work. [30 Jan 2006, p.38]

The procedural elements of the medical drama hum along nicely, but it's Reilly's performance outside the operating room that makes this show worth watching. [28 Apr 2014]

Is this show in danger of being too nice? Somebody must have thought so, because George has been given a harridan for a mother.

It's like watching a marionette with one set of strings operated by John Lithgow and the other by Pee-wee Herman. [12 Mar 2007, p.39]

For now, it's a mess. [2 Jul 2012, p.37]

Love Hewitt goes for soft, cozy sentiment. [16 Apr 2012, p.53]

It's well cast but conceptually unadventurous. [31 Jan 2011, p.39]

The show has a sheen that's distinctive from Law [& Order]--young, exfoliated skin reflects light better from waxed court floors--and promises to be more fun than In Justice. [6 Mar 2006, p.41]

The inspiration can be heavy-handed, but how can you not feel for the couple?

It's [Bobi Kristins's] aunt Pat Houston who gives the show--and, one hopes, Bobbi Kristina--some backbone. [5 Nov 2012, p.43]

Contrasting the then-and-now lives of a group of high school students, class of 2000, the show is drearily familiar. [27 Sep 2010, p.56]

It's meaningful that a gay dad with a teen daughter can be conventional--it's a just not great comedy. [14 Oct 2013, p.44]

It's Court TV's first original scripted drama, and it's bad. [16 Apr 2007, p.43]

Consider it dead on arrival. [27 May 2013, p.40]

[Forest Whitaker as Sam Cooper is] an arresting, oblique performance, and it works well amid all the procedural muck. [21 Feb 2011, p.42]

It's not clear how seriously Patinkin takes the whole thing--it's the same actorly mystery that makes David Caruso's whispery bitterness such a kick on CSI: Miami. [31 Oct 2005, p.39]

It's standard murder-of-the-week type stuff with just a hint of pseudo spirituality. Trouble is, characters who speak in cliches don't deserve to be in your living room.

The declining but not yet flatlining EKG of their relationship is captured very nicely by Williams and Matchett, both giving strong, stoic performances. Everything else is too quiet, though. [25 Jun 2007, p.41]

The show itself is standard construction, a framework of planks that will need more work. [6 May 2013, p.48]

[A] disappointingly thin, damp new series. [10 Jun 2013, p.47]

This Miami trauma-hospital drama is marginally better than "Three Rivers."

This is all nicely produced with mild offbeat tweaks along the way... But none of this is original either. [24 Apr 2006, p.39]

The show can be wonderfully mean... but it's too spotty. [24 Oct 2005, p.41]

The pilot aspires to outrageousness, but the humor needs to get a whole lot smarter.

The Nashville-meets-California jokes are pretty weak. [12 Nov 2012, p.46]

Here, with no force of personality, the format is just a congress of faux-fabulous. [28 Feb 2011, p.39]

[Viewers] may get a kick out of the mix of adrenaline and murk. [26 Jun 2006, p.41]

The scale is wrong. This is an overelaborate piffle, a crate-size bon-bon. The best thinge is Papa.

Sort of a Real Housewives with saddles. [16 Dec 2013]

Cox... doesn't have the right vulgar relish to hold the show together. [8 Jan 2007, p.35]

This is one kid who should not stay in the picture. [7 Nov 2011, p.45]

There are small funny moments along the way. [4 Dec 2006, p.39]

Innocently goofy. [30 Apr 2007, p.37]

Gilbert seems like the one you'd most like the one you'd like to have in your actual mom's group. The others, not so much. [15 Nov 2010, p.43]

The "nuttiness" is contrived, but Johnny Argent, Roseanne's boyfriend of eight years, is amusingly droll. [1 Aug 2011, p.41]

Anyone who saw Team America, the movie send-up of all things Bruckheimerian, will find E-Ring hard to take too seriously. [24 Oct 2005, p.41]

Three Wishes is about sowing seeds of kindness that blossom into a garden of good feeling, but it can feel like a flower show dusted with endless sprayings of industrial fertilizer. [31 Oct 2005, p.39]

The show is cornball, but I'm willing to grant him this small, soft lob toward career rehab.

It hyperventilates when it means to be breathless. [18 Feb 2013, p.44]

Silly. [7 Nov 2005, p.41]

This new four-hour version... trims back the pageantry and tries for a degree of modern psychological realism. [17 Apr 2006, p.43]

The acting in the kickoff episode is awfully anemic, and that's no lie. [24 Jul 2006, p.33]

The cast has an ordinariness that's a little too believable. [16 Apr 2007, p.43]

The premiere delivers a show that's more winkingly cute than it really needs ro be. [25 Jan 2010, p.42]

Some of it's funny, but revelatory? Not too. [6 Dec 2010, p.52]

Reiser, a precise, nimble comic, doesn't have the gut-level energy to bully life into this contraption. It's stalled. [25 Apr 2011, p.46]

The show might work if Steven Pasquale had a script that allowed for bolder contrasts. [2 Feb 2013, p.40]

The opening gag of this new series is not just contrived but also uncomfortable.... But the show improves from there. [17 Sep 2012, p.40]

The show is just as bad as several other recent WB shows (Modern Men, The Bedford Diaries), neither cartoonish enough nor realistic enough to register as anything more than a conceptual shell with a handful of dried peas rattling inside. [24 Apr 2006, p.39]

The only thing more uneven than the quality of the videos is host Bob Saget's comic commentary.

The show is flat. [7 Nov 2005, p.41]

An abysmal new series, but Tony winner Katie Finneran is a great comic talent. [5 Dec 2011, p.48]

The only thing that might make them come to their senses would be a violent but salutary shock. Like Cancellation. [7 Nov 2011, p.45]

Smits is breezily bold, but the show feels fussy--flushed out with "interesting" details and characters. [20 Sep 2010l p.54]

Dreyfus... seems to be laboring to turn a so-so show into the I Love Lucy of the 21st century.

[Laura Prepon] doesn't have any of the original's bone-tired, hard-earned scorn. [19 Jan 2012, p.42]

Unless several characters get more interesting in a hurry, hungry tyrannosaurs will have to provide all the excitement.

In her enjoyably ridiculous reality show, she's self-consciously restrained, perhaps trying to project old-fashioned noblesse oblige-even while goosing her Google profile with this project in self-exposure. She just ends up neutralizing herself. The show is dominated instead by a supporting group of rich kids who take the reverse tactic of whole-hog shamelessness.

It's like watching The Hills with all the shallow fun, glamor and Lauren Conrad edited out. [25 Jun 2012, p.47]

There's no erotic pull between him (Jay Ryan) and the detective (Kristin Kreuk). [15 Oct 2012, p.49]

Allen and Travis, who are both better than you r average comic actor, seem aware that they're trapped in a particular cookie-cutter sitcom hell, forced to laugh their way through stale gags about kids while other new TV comedies explore family life with clever, contemporary touches. [17 Oct 2011, p.39]

As an ensemble they are, like their teacher, attractive but not very exciting. [10 Apr 2006, p.35]

This isn't much different from the studied vapidity of an earlier E! star, Paris Hilton, except that Lochte seems awfully nice. [29 Apr 2013, p.40]

Maybe Prinze should just clear the soundstage of all these people, stand there alone and start over. [24 Oct 2005, p.41]

New executive producer Arnold Shapiro has made Big Brother 2 less tedious than last summer's ... But the show still has too many blah periods in which the players simply sit around and scheme.

The singles scene must be pretty bleak if women would rather mass for a prime-time cattle call than go out on a blind date.

Does it deliver excitement? So far, no. [3 Oct 2005, p.39]

Hard to leg-warm up to.

The show isn't all that different from Bravo's recent Real Housewives of Orange County, although the production values are much higher--everything has an expensive, carefully lit feminine gloss that perfectly matches the homemakers. [19 Jun 2006, p.37]

Hot Properties has a loose, engaging silliness. [31 Oct 2005, p.39]

It's always good to see dancing that's dancing and not a montage of repositioned limbs.

It's dumb, yes, but that miracle of reality TV named Cat Deeley hosts. [2 Jul 2012, p.38]

Done without any of the smart silliness that made Drew Barrymore's 2000 movie reboot so much fun, the show is just vixen nostalgia. [17 Oct 2011, p.42]

So far, it's of interest only for watching Lithgow--who likes to shout his lines with quivering urgency, as if he'd just seen a UFO--as he goes over the top to get a laugh. [16 Oct 2006, p.39]

Actually watching Big Brother five nights a week (total air time: 3½ hours) seems like the entertainment equivalent of enduring gavel-to-gavel convention coverage on C-SPAN.

[A] dull new sitcom. [23 Jan 2012, p.40]

Ghost Whisperer can be surprisingly moving. [24 Oct 2005, p.41]

The only good thing is Anita Barone. [19 Sep 2005, p.48]

Philip Marlowe meets Moonlighting—with a passing nod to The Odd Couple—In this delightfully inventive new detective show.

Everything has the familiar mechanical deadness of a sitcom assembled from old ideas. [12 Feb 2007, p.39]

The experience is like having the velvet rope lifted, then wishing you could use it to hogtie the charmed circle behind it. [22 Aug 2011, p.48]

CBS prounouces $#*! as "bleep," although the Twitter account that inspired the show uses an actual profanity. Either works as a short critique. [4 Oct 2010, p.38]

It's a good cast, and Arquette's peculiar charm is always welcome. But I'm tired of comedies about the desperate infantilism of panicked adults. [8 Jan 2007, p.35]

Lohan attacks the part with a relentless, huffing-and-puffing determination that rivets attention.... While Bowler is a flawless Burton, Lohan's single-minded fierceness obliterates him. [3 Dec 2012, p.43]

It's pleasant, but not promising enough to care about beyond a one-episode stand. [19 Jun 2006, p.37]