This season the writers have failed to get the most out of some promising situations.

It's just a tad less fabulous than before.

Grows more opaque, tangled and macabre as it goes along.

This hour-long show puts the city's locations to stylish use, and the first episode careens along with slam-bang action, but the whole concept feels-closer to slapdash.

If Carvey were actually funny and not just dead-on, I guess this would be brilliant.

Bland.

It's very easy to resist a show shaped around a joke so sniggeringly juvenile. ... After a while, though, my inner sniggler shoved its way past my adult superego and started to laugh, sometimes a lot.

Fox... retains his wonderful timing and delivery. ... But the political satire that makes up the rest of the show is toothless, corny, passé.

Home Movies meanders, but patient viewers will be amused.

As with all reality shows, the pleasure for viewers is the cruel one of rubbernecking a disaster.

Basically MAD TV has everything SNL has—the virtues and the defects.

Parker's irresistible charm keeps us on Carrie's side even as the character's act grows old.

Spade... can deliver an insult with such grace and precision it's like watching Fred Astaire dance with a prop

Though it seems a product of calculation more than inspiration, Roswell has appeal.

The new series, though well-acted, may be overcrowded with characters.

We can always count on a major-league effort from the key player, Robert Wuhl, who somehow makes us root for his character, the smoke-blowing, ego-stroking sports agent Arliss Michaels. But the show as a whole lacks the consistency of a championship series.

The two-hour premiere is sort of fun, but the plot is nutty even by sci-fi standards.

Still hit-and-miss in quality.

They should have spent less of that budget on computer graphics, scale models and sets—and more on the writing. This is drab melodrama.

The premiere episode is pitiless—more pitiless than funny, actually—as it introduces the soap-within-the-sitcom's vain, stupid, ruthless young stars.

A droll Petersen and dependable Marg Helgenberger head the competent cast, and the opener is offbeat enough to stimulate curiosity. But please don't overdo the camera tricks.

Bravura performance, but Braugher needs support—stat!

A lot of this material may be hackneyed, but Ritter puts it over with energy and a slathering of shtick. It's simple, really: Like him, like the show.

What do you get by combining a fairly traditional family comedy with a less barbed version of The Larry Sanders Show? This interesting, if not wholly successful, hybrid.

But even if the clipped dialogue sometimes suggests cop-show parody, the well-constructed mysteries give Without a Trace a strong foundation.

This septet just has more highly evolved communication skills. They have a problem? They sit down and talk about it. BOR-ING!!! Or maybe the novelty has just worn off this experiment.

It's part underwear ad, part catfight, part Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and part psycho ward. So far it's also pretty stiff and strident, particularly in regard to the acting.

A newsmagazine with a hip attitude is basically a good idea. A newsmagazine with a flip approach is not.