For fans of darker, soapier TV fare, the light-as-a-feather “Take Two” will be a hard pass, but for a light drama it’s entertaining enough, thanks to producers poking fun at TV procedural cliches (while also embracing them) and Ms. Bilson’s likable performance.

The Protector is fairly routine plot-wise but the breezy tone--conveyed through upbeat music and snappy dialogue--and strong, collegial performances make this series a welcome summer diversion.

The unique amalgam of a show that "Huff" has been -- a sort of sampler platter of hyperbolic though realistic, sympathetic but often self-sabotaging characters -- retains its balance and tone quite well this season.

There’s still little reason to think anyone is clamoring for this particular reboot.... The new show is not nearly as convoluted, but it shows signs that it could go down that road.

The tone varies wildly from action-adventure to serious costume drama.

The pilot exudes lots of flash (many things blow up, lots of gunfire) and little heart. The characters lack any spark of life and depth. [8 Oct 1999, p.40]

Given the ubiquity of "Real Housewives" shows, it may be a sign of equality for a show about househusbands, but adding to the lame reality show glut does not feel like societal progress.

'Rock' is loud, raucous, silly, sentimental and, just often enough to keep you watching, flat-out funny. It's not a great show, but it's different and it dares to aim for wild laughter instead of mild amusement. [9 Jan 1996]

It's a strange show and I'm sure some people won't find it funny at all. But if you have just enough of a cracked sense of humor, it's worth giving Jon Benjamin Has a Van a try.

Lizzie Borden Chronicles is basically a cheesey soap with tinges of dark comedy. It's junk but kind of fun junk, if pulpy, bloody melodrama set to anachronistic rock soundtrack is your idea of fun.

For what it is--a small-screen version of a big-screen shoot-’em-up--Gang Related is fine, but it won’t be confused with great TV.

The Originals deserves credit for a mostly clear set-up for newcomers.

If you're easily offended, you will be appalled by The League. If you chuckle at smutty, raunchy humor and profanity, this show offers dirty-minded comedic rewards.

Ultimately, the real question is not "Who Do You Think You Are?" but Why Should Viewers Care? This series does not offer a persuasive response.

Under the Dome won’t be confused with good TV--and often last season it was borderline bad TV--but depending on where the writers take it this year, it might be empty-headed, summer fun.

Rookie Blue is "Grey's Anatomy" in a police station. And that's about as remarkable as this fairly generic Canadian co-production gets.

Sweetbitter certainly presents recognizable characters, situations and reactions that may have an appeal to young people who are living on their own for the first time in a big city, but it has precious little new to add to that familiar experience.

The show is not so much awful as it is a colorless copy of better shows that have come before.

It’s intriguing for its setting and some of its stories--although the fine arts world in New York does call to mind the lighter “Mozart in the Jungle” on Amazon--and yet at the same time it’s often predictable in its premium cable-style plotting and pretentiousness, which is where the irritation comes in.... And yet, Flesh and Bone proved highly addictive, encouraging a binge of all its episodes in just a few days.

The miniseries asks a lot of patience on the part of viewers and gives too little in return.

The Firm tries to marry case-of-the-week stories with a conspiracy plot. It doesn't succeed.

It's not terrible but it is quite MTV-y with a soundtrack that at times feels more like any typical teen angst drama and looks that suggest of-the moment fashions (male elves sport a variation on the manbun hairstyle).

The Brink is just silliness. It takes a while to get used to that, but this broad humor may win over some viewers.

There are some terrifically funny lines and it’s intellectually funny, but not often ha-ha funny and the situations are dark and depressing.

OK-not-great Indiana Jones-inspired series that adds terrorists — who blow up a pyramid in the first five minutes of the premiere. Tonally, it’s very similar to ABC’s “Whiskey Cavalier.”

Great TV always flows from the specificity of a show's characters; "Happy Town" traffics in banal generalities.

It's no "Rome," but at least it appears headed more in that direction.

The show has its amusing moments, though not from an abundance of 1980s nostalgia clips (“The Karate Kid,” “Knight Rider,” “ALF,” “Different Strokes” and “Back to the Future” all whiz by on screen) and music cues. The humor comes from the characters and their relationships.

It's TV for a generation of attention deficit disordered kids.

The composition of the cast and presence of a grandma (Lupe Ontiveros) makes the show structurally and thematically similar to ABC's "George Lopez Show," but Tucson is more entertaining and better written. [20 Sept 2002, p.40]

From the music to the dialogue, Houdini & Doyle seems laughably flashy given the characters involved and time period (London, 1901). But the plot is fairly standard in its procedural trappings.

The heart-tugging medical stories and conflicts all feel familiar, none of them delivered with anything that approaches a fresh twist.

Come for the stupid, sexy young things making bad choices; stay, if you must, for the weird, outta-left-field guilty pleasure of an oddball lawyer who waltzes in.

It's impossible not to compare the two casts or to find the new version a pale imitation whose characters don't feel fresh in the slightest, because, well, they're not.

It's one thing when a TV show sets up a concrete mystery whose resolution you have faith will come, something like, "Who killed Mr. X?" But it's quite another when the show is so abstract that you aren't even sure what questions it asks. Kevin McKidd ("Rome") is an excellent actor, and it's only his skill that makes Journeyman tolerable.

There's nothing gritty or particularly realistic about ABC's Women's Murder Club, but that's OK. The show is an entertaining, estrogen-powered hour regardless.

It's not atrocious, just sort of bland -- the kind of show we've watched a million times before.

At its heart, beneath all the high-tech whiz-bang CGI, Minority Report is a procedural crime drama with serialized character relationship stories threaded through it.

The soapy drama turns out to be a bit too much, and if that’s what the creators think is necessary to sustain the show, it might hint at structural flaws that a TV series can’t overcome.

Bad Teacher relies on a one-joke premise that's funny enough in the premiere but seems like it will wear poorly over time.

Each episode tells a different story but in the first two, it's clear the stories won't be all that different from those we've seen a million times before.

It's also similar to Fox's "Raising Hope," except that "Raising Hope" offers smart comedy and Baby Daddy is stuck in the realm of TGIF humor.

It doesn't reinvent the genre by any stretch but this lighter tone is noteworthy.

Jennifer Falls offers a slightly more sophisticated style of storytelling with familiar enough trappings to go down easy for recent nostalgia buffs.

It's an entertaining enough diversion if you're not expecting much.

Mr. Wilson does his best to make the character unapologetically snarly, and Backstrom does benefit from a lighter tone thanks to the unpredictable nature of the lead character. But in form and style, Backstrom is exactly what viewers have come to expect from "House" wannabes.

Their scrapes and misadventures in the pilot are quite reminiscent of "The Hangover" and the show got funnier as it went along. But as is often the case, personal taste will dictate whether one feels the need for a lesson from this Guide on a weekly basis.

The Beast, named after Barker's reference to his FBI job, seems like a pretty plain cop drama with added "Road House"-style grit until the end of the first hour, when a new wrinkle adds more intrigue.

This fast-paced Titanic miniseries gets better as it goes along.

The Fix is not sophisticated drama, but it is smarter-than-average melodrama and Ms. Clark’s involvement adds an opportunity for viewers to play armchair psychologist.

Killing Reagan is pretty much the expected, rote bio movie of the assassination attempt on President Reagan by John Hinckley Jr. (Kyle S. More).

In between firefights and car crashes, the clichés pile up quicker than dead bodies.

Demons quickly devolves into a bland mission-of-the-week show about a boy who doesn't want the responsibility of saving the world ("You can't just hijack someone's life. I had plans!") who is aided by an older mentor (sound familiar, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fans?).

Harmon brings a light touch to this schizophrenic show. He's a sensitive cowboy who does his job and then goes home to work on a boat he's building. [23 Sept 2003, p.B1]

While Ms. Leigh’s character is a pastiche of cliched archetypes, Mr. Ido’s taxi-driving scoundrel is a charmer. But it will take more than charm to watch Taxi Brooklyn and not feel like you’re being taken for a ride you’ve been on too many times before.

Good TV you can find almost every night. Titanics on the scale of ''seaQuest'' are few and far between. [11 Sept 1993]

"Vanished" is a show that should leave viewers begging for more, but instead engenders more of a shrug because nothing in the pilot is convincing -- not the characters, not the setting, not the performances.

It moves fast and doesn't wait for viewers to catch all the jokes that are made. Some of the dialogue is clever but it's more savvy than it is hilarious and viewers come to broadcast network comedies for the funny stuff. Making matters worse, the two leads are humorless sad sacks.

Against all odds, this mishmash of stark contrasts emerges as a surprisingly engaging film.

Mystery Girls has some fun with viewer knowledge of rumors of disharmony on the “90210” set (yes, Shannen Doherty gets a shout-out) even if it all plays to cat-fighting women stereotype. Spelling comes off both worse (she’s mistaken for a prostitute twice in the first 10 minutes) and funnier (she gets the best lines; Ms. Garth plays the straight woman).

Powers doesn't get off to the the best start but the concept is strong and the world so detailed and cleverly built out that it's probably a series that bears some monitoring to see if it will improve.

Utterly unpleasant and unfunny, Fox's dispiriting Sons of Tucson may be the worst comedy series of a generally winning 2009-10 TV season.

Somewhere within this bloated six-hour miniseries there's a lean, mean four-hour miniseries trying to escape.

Benders feels similar in its comedy style to all the Leary shows that have come before.

As a single fortysomething mom, star Courteney Cox is in full frantic mode, yelling at and pushing everyone in sight, which makes for an entertaining (if not exhausting) half-hour comedy.

Camp has a sweetness that makes it a nice summer diversion but nothing that elevates it above past comedies set at sleepaway camp.

Deception is fairly charming in spite of its blah procedural trappings thanks to Mr. Cutmore-Scott and his character’s bag of tricks and magic team.

[A] silly, unnecessary reboot.

"Brothers & Sisters" may find a way to streamline its storytelling and allow viewers to more easily sort out the huge cast of characters (there are at least 10 series regulars), or it may remain an unwieldy mess. Time will tell.

British comic actor Stephen Fry is the best part of The Great Indoors, playing the company’s top honcho but his presence alone isn’t enough to salvage this stale series. A second episode proves to be no improvement on the lackluster pilot.

There are some intentionally light-hearted, even funny moments squeezed in here and there. The show's concept offers nothing really new for TV but it executes the wealthy, murderous family drama well enough for low-stakes summer programming.

This comedy is just not funny.

It's uplifting, but not hugely entertaining. After a while, I sort of think the show will feel tired; once you've seen one good deed done, you've seen them all.

Mostly it looks down its nose at almost all of its strident-in-their-own-way characters. Juliette Lewis (“Cape Fear”) enlivens the series as a crunchy hippie who clashes with Kathryn, but ultimately she’s as much a caricature as all the others.

It's not terrible, not great, just sort of so-so.

Another single-camera comedy that fails to provide any laughs.

As teen shows go, the pilot is entertaining enough; future episodes will reveal if the show truly has much bite.

With a premise that's at least 20 years past its "fresh until" date, the issues in Star-Crossed get handled with mostly predictable, rote exploration to the point that one has to wonder, does this show matter? Probably not.

The new Wolf Lake... is obvious and lumbers to a start rather than moving in Twin Peaks-like mysterious ways. [12 Sep 2001]

It's not clear to me that viewers who come to Syfy for actual science fiction will appreciate this series--"Face Off" was more on point and a better show, too--but for fans of reality TV cooking shows, MQK does add a new flavor to the prime-time cooking show palette.

Angry Boys will certainly have some appeal to fans of offbeat comedy but it seems unlikely to become a mainstream hit.

L.A. Shrinks is another Bravo guilty pleasure show. When the cast members aren't saying outrageous things, it can get kind of dull, but most of the time the dialogue is crazy enough to keep viewers entertained.

Director Kirk Thatcher is saddled with a fairly dated concept--family in crisis finds salvation off the grid with magical woodland monsters--that might have worked as a one-hour special but feels stretched to fill the film’s two-hour running time.

It's not cutting-edge storytelling, but there are some decent plot threads as the show introduces its characters, including a brash desk sergeant who is either testing a rookie or simply ordering her to do her dirty work.

They’re remaking The Tomorrow People and the results are just kind of “meh.”

Technically, Sharknado 2 is pretty much just as sloppy as the first film, with scenes that supposedly take place during a storm filled with streams of natural sunlight, but the amateurish quality is part of the franchise’s charm.

What the pilot lacks in smooth-flow niceties it makes up for in silly fun.

Three episodes in, I started to buy into the world Milch has created. I don't understand it, I don't think I even really like it (almost all of the characters are damaged and rather unpleasant), but I am intrigued by it.

Clearly this isn’t the comedy of the "Leave It to Beaver" era, but there are some laughs to be found in "The Mick," which is made tolerable thanks to Ms. Olson’s charm in spite of the character she plays.

The Kennedys has the look and feel of a 1980s miniseries, and it's not trying to be anything more exalted. Unlike "The Borgias" and "Camelot," its reach does not exceed its grasp.

The problem with "Reunion" is that beyond the show's gimmick, there's not much to draw viewers in. The characters lack depth and personality and the situations are -- yawn -- overly familiar.

The Millers won’t be confused with highbrow entertainment but taken on its own terms and thanks to a talented trio of cast members, it’s a welcome addition to CBS’s Thursday night comedy block.

It's not as funny as either of those hits ["The Big Bang Theory" and "Two and a Half Men"]--and certainly not as good a show as the superior "Bang"--but it is more enjoyable than "Rules of Engagement," which returns at mid-season (unfortunately).

Mostly the show dutifully doles out a lot of the special effects viewers expect from a supernatural series. But it’s all noise and explosions of light with scant attention to character development or relationship building (beyond the one obvious romance), something “True Blood” got right early on.

The single-camera comedy is not particularly memorable, but it could have been much worse.

As far as medical stories go, there's not much in Saving Hope viewers haven't seen before (and better) elsewhere, including on "Grey's Anatomy."

Undateable probably isn’t a show many sitcom fans will want to make a standing date to watch.

Although most viewers will notice a scale-down in the scope of effects and stunts, the style, the look and the impact are much the same as in the films.