Crossbones doesn’t offer compelling enough drama to complement its banal brutality.

Fans of “CSI” shows will likely warm up to this latest franchise extension and viewers of more character-driven, less preposterous drama will ignore it like they have past “CSI” shows.

Partners is your basic odd couple comedy with Mr. Grammer attacking his part with his trademark zeal and Mr. Lawrence wandering through the motions in somnambulant fashion. It’s a stark energy contrast but a secondary problem for Partners, which mostly stumbles on predictable plotting that flows from pedestrian writing.

It's all cheesy and silly with minimally adequate performances but, eh, what do you expect from a show in this genre.

If April’s work world is silly, her home life is uninvolving because it’s barely sketched out and seems like an afterthought.

Granted, the genre is horror and horrific stuff is expected but so far “Two Sentence Horror Stories” is pretty one note and a discordant note in this #MeToo era.

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.

History’s Knightfall is pretty much just a “Vikings” knockoff set in a different, but still bloody, historical period. ... The show’s limited character development is entirely predictable.

This paint-by-numbers series has everything you expect in a lousy ’90s comedy but don’t want.

Blood & Oil offers only musty melodrama befitting its already dated premise.

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

It's another one of those dismissable, disposable, oh-so-slight comedies.

Do No Harm is a ridiculous show with plenty of lines of groaner dialogue.

A disappointingly sex-obsessed sitcom.

It’s got a worthy premise that’s larded up with unfunny, over-the-top characterizations.

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]

There's little that's magical about the cold, poorly paced Magicians pilot. It takes 16 minutes until Quentin arrives at Brakebills and feels longer. The pilot is rife with drab colors and while the story has potential, it made me want to go find the book rather than watch more of the TV series.

The relationships are paint-by-numbers predictable as are the plots and Alex's I-know-better-than-everyone-else reactions. Heartbeat has a pulse but just barely.

It appears Freddie Prinze Jr. studied at the Matt LeBlanc School of Acting given his mumbling performance and nice-guy-cum-neanderthal portrayal of Freddie Moreno.

The Easy Money production values are low all-around but they wouldn't be as noticeable if the characters and tedious story sparked to life. They don't, and it doesn't.

It's less of a flash mob and more of (one hopes) a flash in the pan, the one-and-done special it deserves to be.

When it comes to both character and story, there's really not much in "Conviction" viewers haven't seen before.

We can suspend disbelief when watching “Jurassic World” because it’s dinosaurs, but when the predators are zoo animals, it’s a greater challenge to take seriously.

It's a silly time-waster with terrible commentary by hosts Jamie Kennedy and Jessi Cruickshank.

Merlin looks, well, typically British with shoddy production values. Worse, it tells dull stories.

The lead actors are slightly improved -- although Erik von Detten's hair is more expressive than his face -- but the story plods like one of the less graceful dinosaurs on screen.

Showing the evidence really adds nothing as the story twists, turns and contorts itself in an attempt to keep viewers from tuning out before the hour is up.

At first glance... it comes off as silly sci-fi, a not-so-intriguing series that wades into all-too-similar waters as two other fall shows. The difference in this one is that the water is noticeably more shallow.

"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.

A show that's more boring than funny, an investment of entertainment time that's not worth making.

Zero Hour is a terrible show. But for viewers who long to mock or hate-watch and for "Da Vinci Code" fans who like to be dragged along on a crazy ride to Crazytown, Zero Hour is a hoot.

By the end of the third episode of the second season there have been multiple hookups and breakups, enough to make your head spin or bore you to tears. Alas, I found myself experiencing more of the latter.

The show squanders any high-mindedness with ridiculous shoot-'em-up scenes reminiscent of any cop show circa 1979.

It's difficult to imagine many "Dancing" viewers will be suckered into watching this unimaginative, predictable comedy series for more than the first couple of minutes.

Other than re-living some of Napoleon's favorite catchphrases from the 2004 movie, there's not much enjoyment to be gleaned from this obvious, unfunny episode.

It's all a bunch of mush, but I suspect it's mush that will find a receptive audience.

I only made it through the first hour and then I gave up.

“Bluff City Law” is to legal dramas as last season’s “New Amsterdam” is to medical dramas: emotionally manipulative and meh.

What began as a sublimely ridiculous pop culture sensation devolved over its first five films into just a junky exercise in bloated storytelling and C-list celebrity-spotting. No. 6 is more of the same with an often nonsensical time travel story.

There's nothing wrong with TV Land trying to revive the old-school, multi-camera sitcom but the pilot for this show wouldn't have cut it in the 1980s.

A bigger problem is that Super Fun Night still isn’t all that funny.

All the trappings of “The Wizard of Oz” without any of the charms.

H8R feels contrived whether there's a happy ending or not, so there's not much point in watching except perhaps for the initial confrontation between the hater and the object of his/her scorn if that's the kind of uncomfortable drama you crave.

Here comes "Trouble," big, bad, ugly ratings trouble. [6 Oct 2000, p.44]

Like so many of these relationship reality shows, The Bachelor is cheesy and the whiff of desperation wafting off the contestants is strong. A preview for future episodes promises jealousy, back stabbing and cat fights as the bachelorettes vie for the main man...What do you want to bet this one won't make the National Organization for Women's Top 10? [22 Mar 2002, p.36]

[A] silly, unnecessary reboot.

I suppose sadomasochists or anyone craving abuse will enjoy "Hell's Kitchen," but I won't be tuning in again. [29 May 2005]

Few of the jokes land and although the show gets mild props for its series premiere cliffhanger (and to a lesser degree the out-of-left field resolution in episode two), Still the King looks shoddy and fails to produce many laughs.

Love in the Wild is undeniably a waste of time and brain cells.

Dresden's investigations amount to a lot of ho-hum hokum... and his relationships are largely paint-by-number bland.

Kath & Kim is based on an Australian hit series of the same name but this Americanized version is an unpleasant way to pass a half-hour.

Lousy writing and stale characters rule in Malibu Country.

Subtlety is not this show's strong suit. That lack of tonal balance dooms the show.

It gets bogged down by so many procedural elements that all the character moments get squished and forced out around the edges, resulting in an uninteresting blob of an overly familiar TV show.

Mostly it's the story of a sex-starved, immature, lazy guy who flings dog poop into his neighbor's yard. NBC has done something similar by inflicting this show on the viewing public. [24 Sept 2002, p.C-6]

It feels both orchestrated and dated, like a show whose time came and went around the same TV era that "Home Improvement" aired in.

Romijin... [is] too cold and aloof to play the lead.

The pilot is not that funny as it trades in predictable gags about a woman who's competent at the office but a mess in her personal life.

The show’s one-joke premise--parents can be such buttinskis!--wears thin fast despite the likability of Ms. Lavin and Mr. Gould. A few jokes manage to land, but mostly it’s predictable dialogue about what a smothering mother Ms. Lavin’s character is. There’s also way too much information about the state of Mr. Gould’s testicles.

With Gigolos, Showtime takes a topic that should be provocative and turns it into nothing more than "The Real Man Whores of Las Vegas."

Hey, with a name like Charlie's Angels, at least viewers have a pretty good idea of what they're going to get: action, attractive women and gorgeous locations--but not much else.

The show is inoffensive, tedious pabulum with forced postal humor.

Tucker will be lucky if viewers don't run screaming from the room. [2 Oct 2000, p.B-10]

Twists begin to pile up like they're falling out of a How To Write Noir handbook. And that may be the show's biggest problem: It feels contrived, which makes the audience feel manipulated.

The Eastwick characters are fairly generic types who are too bland and predictable to be involving.

To be blunt, Starz’s Blunt Talk is spectacularly unfunny.

"Just Legal" is just tedious.

Uncle Buck isn't the worst thing ever, but it is predictable and pat, going down all the expected avenues. It's entirely skippable.

The primary problem with all this bragging is that it takes time away from seeing the designs, which would seem to be the show's purported raison d'etre.... Million Dollar Decorators also suffers from feeling completely constructed.

Aggressively dumb, sex-obsessed and occasionally misogynistic.

The show is gleefully rude in keeping with Ms. Handler's personal style, but 8:30 p.m. seems way too early for explicit sex jokes.

The show is a manipulative tearjerker that uses this poor guy's real-life death sentence to milk tears out of viewers. And that makes it a little icky to watch. It's great that Childs gets all sorts of adventures but the blatant effort to wring tears out of viewers made me uncomfortable.

A lackluster "Sex and the City" companion.

Unlike "Jackie," nothing in Mercy feels real or believable, particularly the naivete of the recent grad student newbie nurse, who acts as if she's never been in a hospital.

One can’t help but wish all this meta commentary had been grafted onto a better story and a better movie that didn’t feel like such a cheap rush job.

For anyone who's seen the "Spider-Man" films (or even the last, worst season of NBC's "Heroes"), there's little to recommend about this new series that has its bloated, two-hour debut.

Men at Work is mostly an unfunny, uninteresting look at four work buddies.

Everything about it feels TV-fake and contrived and throwing Heigl into the mix just heightens the sense that viewers are watching a high-glam actress pretending to be a top U.S. intelligence analyst.

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.

"Out of Practice" relies on trite misunderstandings and crude dialogue, both go-to gags for uninspired sitcom scribes.

Everything else that's supposed to be a shock is telegraphed well in advance. Everything meant to surprise falls hopelessly flat. [18 June 1999, p.44]

It's a shame that the writing makes Off the Map so unwatchable.

I know "Survivor." I watch "Survivor." You, "Big Brother," are no "Survivor." [7 Jul 2000]

Predictable/preposterous plot elements co-mingle with some terrible dialogue, silly situations (characters enter a room full of dead bodies on hooks but don’t cover their noses in disgust until they see the bodies; wouldn’t the smell be enough for them?) and occasionally poor acting.

Writers Steven Long Mitchell and Craig W. Van Sickle are certainly inventive, if inventive can mean willing-to-crib-from-sci-fi-culture-past, but the Tin Man story doesn't hang together well.

Missing is like a bad Lifetime movie blown up into a weekly series.

"Halfway House" is occasionally amusing but the characters are not well-formed.

The screenplay seems more likely to have been transcribed by those guys with the plot dreamed up by an imaginative child or a drunken fanboy. Visually, the film is poorly directed sometimes to a point of such incoherence that it's not always clear what's going on, who's talking, etc. And the ending is laughably awkward.

By the 8:30 episode, the novelty of Pounder as a funny mother is gone, and it becomes abundantly clear the show has nothing to say and the writers are already spinning their wheels.

Manhattan Love Story is simply an unfunny study in tired male/female stereotypes.

The show's concept is kind of interesting: Two women (one in 1209 France, another in the present day) are connected through time but after giving the miniseries about 40 minutes, I gave up in favor of a new episode of FX's "Fargo."

Now it’s just a tired minor media property and product placement tool for Comcast, which gets name-checked multiple times. At this point, Sharknado deserves to sleep with the fishes.

The conclusion is that a great cast and a singular location can't carry a scattershot script that goes in and out of focus.

The Hero is not all that exciting but the production values are top-notch and the location (Panama) somewhat unique.... Rather than three shows, one show would be best: Make The Rock the host, use the settings of "72 Hours" and the casting of "Race to the Scene" and viewers would be much better off than watching any of these individual new programs.

Rather than three shows, one show would be best: Make The Rock the host, use the settings of 72 Hours and the casting of "Race to the Scene" and viewers would be much better off than watching any of these individual new programs.

Past Life begins with a fairly ridiculous premise, and the show's bland leads don't make it anymore watchable.

The show is so manic, particularly Mr. Hayes’ performance, that it’s clearly trying too hard--and painfully obvious set-up dialogue.

It comes across as a low-rent operation making cheesy effects for the likes of "Hallow Pointe," not a big-budget effects house that works on movies you might have actually heard of.