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.