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.