No question, "Big Brother 2" makes for better TV than its boring predecessor, but it's still no "Survivor." [7 Jul 2001]

Mostly the show, as these reality series are wont to do, follows the dysfunction within the family.

Its ratio of energetic, entertaining segments to time-wasting, self-indulgent filler (on the part of Harris) just doesn't pencil out in the audience's favor.

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.

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.

David Alan Grier, star of the new Chocolate News gets points for moxie, but the series fails on too many other counts.

Most of the young, relatively untested actors in Ground Floor are not nearly as talented at creating endearing characters; in the first two episodes the characters are mostly just ciphers.

"Meadowlands" demands too much of a slog for too little in return.

Networks want their shows to look like movies these days, but the Intelligence pilot makes the border of Pakistan and Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C., both look like Vancouver, where the pilot was filmed. It's a minor but telling detail in this unimaginative rehash.

The mystery has largely been replaced by a dystopian soap opera that disrespects one first-season character in particular by having the character take an action that doesn’t reflect the character’s first season strength and resolve.

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.

Allegiance is not terrible, although its characters are paper-thin, and, beyond feeling derivative, the show isn’t all that credible.

George Lopez’s Saint George [is], another mediocre, three-camera sitcom with nothing new to say.

Surviving Jack allows for a smidgen of heartfelt earnestness now and again, but it’s less heartwarming than the steadily-improving “The Goldbergs” because at heart Surviving Jack is the one-joke premise of its title: My dad’s a jerk.

The same old thing.

Elf offers some slight, warmed over charms.

The problem with Sense8 is that it’s glacially paced and not nearly as riveting as it thinks it is.

Sheen's obvious, minimally funny new sitcom.

When a wannabe TV thriller doesn’t work, the show devolves into a morass of characters making repeated bad decisions, like “Groundhog Day” but without the intentional comedy.

The characters can better be distinguished from one another than the ciphers in "Three Rivers" but they still need time to develop and become something approaching realistic.

It's an (occasionally) frothy mix -- comedic moments tumble into serious scenes of forensic examination -- that's not altogether terrible, but neither does it beg to be watched on a regular basis.

She's not a Ewing, but grandma Ryland (Judith Light) is far more entertaining than any of the young hunks fighting around the pool at Southfork.

Though there are surprises and crosses and double-crosses in the show's waning minutes, Alias fails to make me care much about its characters, their future or understanding who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. "La Femme Nikita" kept these mysteries beguiling in its early seasons; Alias can't manage to do that in its first episode. [30 Sept 2001, p.TV-5]

They're a largely unlikable lot of crooked cops, adulterers and Hopper's long-winded, nutso music mogul. It's one thing to spend a movie with these characters, but it's quite another to tune in for 13 weeks.

Killjoys tries to build a mythology, but both the low-rent look--a red filter for this scene! a green filter for this scene!--and the emphasis on fights over character development dooms the show to medocrity.

The writing in "Old Christine" is occasionally funny in a low-key way, but too often the show is a bore.

Too many NBC dramas are now all about conspiracies and secret societies. That’s getting tiresome. Case in point, NBC’s The Player.

A pedestrian procedural, "Ransom" follows the team at Crisis Resolution as they resolve kidnappings and hostage situations in the most rote, CBS fashion you can imagine.