"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." I never came close to sharing that bloodthirsty sentiment from Shakespeare's Henry VI until I watched the early episodes of the fourth series to carry the Law & Order brand.

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]

There are bright spots here, including Pompeo's skillful performance and the surprisingly touching relationship between Meredith and her mother, a renowned surgeon. But to be worthy of study, Grey's Anatomy needs more of a brain.

This is well-produced, but it could just as well be Mission:Colonial. [1 Oct 2012, p.38]

The show feels weighed down by its own clout. [25 Sep 2006, p.43]

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

Every time he flaps into view in his baggy hoodedness, he looks like Batman in need of a tailor. [17 Jan 2011, p.40]

It's like watching a manor house sink beneath the waves with loud, hissing pomp. [16 Apr 2012, p.50]

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

True Blood is neglecting the potent subtext of vampire myth--forbidden sex and romance--in favor of political allegory. [24 Jun 2013, p.39]

The case seems more like a good crusade for Nancy Grace than the starting point for a series. [28 Aug 2006, p.35]

Thorne has the right bristling, combative energy for all this commotion, but the pilot is hard to swallow. [4 Jul 2011, p.38]

Like most programs involving clairvoyance or time travel, this idea gets tired fast.

The writers' apparent priority is to place the adults in trite situations with sexual overtones.

The premiere us well-shot, humidly atmospheric, but a little more urgency would be appreciated.

It's only fun, though, when the would-be mates turn on each other and the bat guano flies: Romancing the Stone morph into The War of the roses. [25 Jul 2011, p.40]

Miller is believably blonde, and that's about it. [22 Oct 3012, p.42]

Most of Mornings is stock melodrama, and apart from Molina, not all that well acted. [18 Feb 2013, p.43]

An old-fashioned sitcom.

They're just bland. [2 Apr 2012, p.44]

The main problem is Amy's fluctuating competency level. In the pilot she floundered as if she'd never been inside a courtroom. She starts strong the next time, then yields to feelings of inadequacy before her mother gives her a jolt of tough love. Come on, get a grip on that gavel.

Cases piddle away as everyone hashes out deals at a conference table. Realistic, perhaps, but quite the buzzkill. [20 Aug 2012, p.41]

It's an awful story, and it deserves a better production than this. [31 Oct 2005, p.39]

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]

Big Sexy could have used less glamour and more Mike & Molly star Melissa McCarthy's salt-of-the-earth power. [Sep 2011, p.46]

It's a hallucinatory riff on an old noir tradition (is Raines being played for a sap by his own daydreams?), but the gimmick doesn't click. [19 Mar 2007, p.39]

It's still a great cast, but there's a whiff of baffled frustration. [26 Nov 2012, p.44]

This feels like an assembly line for the soul. [6 Feb 2012, p.40]

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

It's very well-done, but the opener doesn't resolve a viewer's doubts. [9 Apr 2012, p.42]

Whether the show can figure out what to do with Madsen's semi-reformed brood is the challenge. Right now the show feels less like FX's recent, underrated The Riches than Brothers & Sisters set among the criminal element.

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

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

Shake It Up doesn't shake up the kid-com formula one bit, but it's something more than the usual shiny-sparkly cuteness. [20 Dec 2010, p.44]

Beyond the pilot, though, it appears to be a blandly generic precinct drama. [5 Mar 2013]

Daniels is great, biting clean through clotted dialogue that's twinkly yet sanctimonious. [2 Jul 2012, p.40]

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

Arli$$ is like a high draft choice who becomes an established starter but never fulfills his superstar potential.

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

I want to root for a reality series that uplifts, but for this one to work, it either needs to be more fun or more real. [15 Feb 2010, p.43]

Even this adventuresome idiosyncratic actor [Malkovich] doesn't seem to be having much fun. [2 Jun 2014, p.46]

It's like Lisa Kudrow's Comeback without the satiric contempt. [10 Apr 2006, p.35]

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

The series goes overboard on cutesy domestic details but as a Bret Bulletin, it should gratify and reassure his fans. [1 Nov 2010, p.42]

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.

Weeds feels like a stoned Desperate Housewives: The pupils are dilated wide, as if able to pick out in sharp relief every detail of this suburban America, yet nothing really seems in focus at all.

There are rivalries and feuds and dangerous situations, as well as a complete lack of personality. [29 Oct 2012, p.38]

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]

This is a well-constructed, old-school sex farce. [15 Nov 2011, p.43]

Average.

The odd-couple act is funny at times, but one episode is plenty for all but confirmed Buseyphiles.

A wiry, tired jitteriness has crept in. [24 Oct 2011, p.48]

Oh, what a tangled web Carnivále weaves–maybe too tangled for its own good.

There isn't much of a story, though. The best thing is the terrific song in the opening credits: Aloe Blacc's "I Need a Dollar." It has the sort of itchy desperation that should have driven the whole show.

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

If Caan grabs more screen time and the writers build on the hints of sexual chemistry between Danny and Nessa, I might place a small bet on this superslick series-provided Danny learns the virtue of occasional silence.

This is a formulaic but fairly competent series with delusions of grandeur.

This show needs to make the supernatural seem less ordinary.

Sometimes compelling and sometimes too lurid to take.

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

The group dynamics are worth observing for a while, but when the women go into catfight mode, the show slides into reality-TV routine.

John Ritter's death last September left a huge hole at the center of this sitcom. ABC chose to prop it up rather than shut it down, a decision that's looking increasingly unfortunate.

There are enough positive signs in the two-hour premiere that I'll probably take a look ... when the series moves to its regular time period.

The stunts are a confusing mix of bullets and blowups: Apocalypse Now on the scale of Wipeout. [3 Sep 2012, p.40]

This adaptation of the hit 1989 movie is emotionally ample, as any decent family drama should be, but the premiere feels like a dowdier cousin of shows already out there.

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]

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]

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

Just call it Molly.... Trouble, is, Melissa McCarthy's brash persona in films is too big for the small screen. [11 Nov 2013, p.40]

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

It has some good jokes, but this overly familiar spoof lacks the strength to push the envelope. [2 Sep 2013]

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

Something like Entourage without the manic, kick-start fury of Ari Gold. [2 Apr 2007, p.37]

Comes off as edgy and derivative at the same time.

If anything, it moves so tentatively through the baffling investigation and trial that Hayden Panettiere seems to play a dozen Amandas: cheerful, furtive, erratic--and at times literally clueless. [28 Feb 2011, p.40]

It's a temperature-controlled How I Met Your Mother. [27 Sep 2010, p.56]

Speaking of Probst, please send this plastic man back to Rock & Roll Jeopardy! Only James Earl Jones himself could intone "The tribe has spoken" without provoking giggles.

The March 4 pilot of this X-Files spinoff is what you'd call a comedy-drama, with a pratfall and some jokey dialogue balanced by the threat of catastrophe and sober talk of lost ideals. But the show turns into a clumsy comedy-comedy on March 11.

Bachelor Pad ups the ante this season with a cheesy gimmick that turns out to be ingenious. [6 Aug 2012, p.37]

It is nice but overly familiar in its reliance on pop-culture signposts and snuggly sentimentality. [30 Sep 2013, p.53]

If the musical element seems this strained in the pilot, when the vastly talented Randy Newman is the composer of all of the songs, one dreads to think how bad it will be after the show has settled in for a few weeks and is struggling for viable melodies.

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

Not a bad concept, but the casting is out of whack. [21 Mar 2011, p.46]

I kept wishing for a rose ceremony to perk things up. [8 May 2006, p.39]

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

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

The show is overworked and overthought. [25 Mar 2013, p.43]

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]

Feels like a retread.

Her mind has repressed the clues [to her sister's murder]. Clever paradox, but as a result the show is an unsatisfying mix of razor-sharp thinking and befogged gloom. [10 Oct 2011, p.44]

The series makes a weak slab at the Hill Street Blues mix of humor and pathos. But Chiklis is a marvel of believability, vividly creating a character who is disarming, droll, clever and compassionate.

The redeeming feature here is [Sallly] Wheeler, who makes her free-spirited character genuinely appealing.

Belushi's gusto is all this show has going for it.

To make new fans, show more enterprise.

If this weak, artificial and strained sitcom tickles your funny bone, you might be a redneck.

Kanakaredes is appealing, but the series is too fond of flaunting its eccentricity (Mom inhabits Syd's dreams), too short on authentic Providence atmosphere (despite some location filming) and too eager to remind us that the title also refers to God's will.