Stick with it through the second episode: it gets moving quickly in the subsequent episodes, and turns into a grim frontier revenge saga, with intriguing personalities and interconnecting storylines.

The writers need to differentiate how Allen Gregory relates to Jeremy from how he relates to Julie. If the show had Allen Gregory treat Jeremy and Julie differently, there'd be more opportunity for a wider variety of jokes, including some that don't involve yelling.

Filmed and set in a soggy, green-washed Portland, Oregon, its procedural plotting and visual flair carry it along when it occasionally lapses into something like camp.

Even if it slips into generic tropes here and there, Whitechapel's own veneer of nicely crafted entertainment remains intact.

In its premiere episode, Once Upon a Time offers a mix of hope and cynicism, coupled with familiar television and film allusions (not unlike the Shreks).

Despite its gratuitous nudity, double-crossing gunplay, and growing pile of corpses, Bored to Death is a remarkably gentle show and its characters surprisingly lovable.

In many ways, it was where the series ought to have begun.

Like so many crime novel adaptations, Case Histories leaves the audience with a faint echo of a delightful original, oozing with talent, budget, and location shooting, and almost bereft of compelling content.

While it returns Allen to a Mr. Fix-it style of parenting and some broad he-man comedy, the show offers fewer grunts and more shrieking female voices.

Each episode moves her closer to some sort of insight, demonstrating that enlightenment is a moving spot on the horizon.

One needs to hone in on the performers to find reasons to stay engaged, because the plots and premises of Criminal Minds are worn thin as filaments by this point.

So much of the outright horror is recycled from films-The Shining, Don't Look Now, Poltergeist-but the plotting and pacing feel vaguely original, sometimes complicated and sometimes satirical, like American Beauty.

The Oedipal quagmire only enhances the political treachery.

Unlike their previous show [24], Homeland takes its time: it doesn't make clear right away who's trustworthy and who's a traitor. Based on the first episode's strong script and performances, it looks as though the reveal will be worth the wait.

It's as though the show imagines that if can just cut from one event to another fast enough, no one will notice how shallow it all is.

We are afforded perspectives on staff and patients alike. But, this ER runs almost too smoothly.

The Amazing Race is at its best when it anticipates our assumptions about other people, overturns them, and then invites all new judgments.

We never know how fully such a mix might develop, and in this episode, it seemed undercooked by the end.

As ordinary as this plot sounds, How To Be a Gentleman has a couple of things going for it, namely, Hornsby and Dillon.

Even if it makes for far less gripping viewing in its sophomore iteration, Luther remains notable in the police drama pantheon for this stark perspective.

The result is a show that's more ABC Family than Tina Fey.

Hart of Dixie doesn't look to be much more than what you'd unfortunately expect.

There's a lot of clunky setup, a lot of piece-moving to send the main characters back to Terra Nova, and a lot of explaining of rules once they get there.

Set in 1963, Pan Am's production is highly stylized, neat, and dreamy, perfectly suited to the nostalgia it is eager to evoke.

The general integrity of the first episode offers some hope that it won't become a Procedure of the Week melodrama.

With its stilted scenes, canned laughter, and handwringing about marriage, Whitney feels more like a step backward.

Here everyone, even Bosley, seems interchangeable.

Parts of the show seem archaic, more Life on Mars than life in a 21st century police department. Other parts seem careless bricolage.

From a storytelling standpoint, though, the real juice of the show is going to lie in its long-form arcs. It's a delicate balance to maintain, and it will be interesting to see if Person of Interest is up to the challenge.

The X Factor is one reality competition show that delivers that experience to its home audience also. At least on this show, when Paula's moved to tears, so are you.

The story is silly, but not trashy enough to make it your latest guilty pleasure.

Unforgettable is a show cobbled together from the once good bits of once good shows.

The promos for New Girl suggest that it's something new or at least mildly unusual. But its first episode looks like more of the same.

It seems a missed opportunity: the premise of the spoiled rich kid and the sassy poor kid forced to team up is an old story that often works. But both Caroline and Max come across as prep school students who are slumming.

While options during the era were surely limited, the show's broad strokes don't do justice to the choices women were making, or their self-awareness while making them.

It's the rock-solid basic format that makes the show feel vital even 11 years and 22 seasons in.

Unfortunately, The Secret Circle's first episode doesn't offer much beyond all this plotty set-up. Specifically, it's missing what made other supernatural shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Supernatural successful: funny, quirky, and layered characters.

This is not a show that wants to be analyzed. Rather, it demands that you enjoy it. And there is plenty of humor to mine in the premise.

These initial 23 minutes offer a promising mix of rapid banter, smart cultural references, and delightful absurdity.

Ringer is at times cleverly handled, suggesting numerous plot avenues for the future. Unfortunately, Gellar's wooden performance in the premiere episode doesn't bode well.

So far, there's no indication that there's enough brewing here to measure up to Season Two, but the show seems to be solidly back on track after the problems of Season Three.

When one cuts through its mix of slight pleasures and leaden annoyances, it's apparent that Dinosaur Revolution is not revolutionary in form or content, and moreover, that its melding of entertainment with science ends up disfiguring both.

Dark Matters has something for viewers who are easily titillated as well as those interested in history.

As George W. Bush describes his thinking on September 11, it's hard not to wonder, well, what he was thinking. It's a mystery that remains unanswered in George W. Bush: The 9/11 Interview.

Freddie's stereotypically hard-hitting reporter's persona is soon tiring and irksome. Still, Freddie isn't so tedious as the show's "villains."

Despite some obvious faults, Strike Back is a decent enough action yarn with slick production values. At the same time, though, the series is more concerned with gratuitous nudity--this is Cinemax, after all, so each episode includes a lifetime's worth of breasts and butt cheeks-than creating a story with any substance, character, or emotional weight.

It seems unfair to complain that Childrens Hospital isn't great. But given that what it used to be, good isn't really good enough.

If the show has the courage to probe this very contemporary evolution, Abby's tenure at IA might provide grown-up drama for women of an age more often served by sexist sitcoms. And if not, Lifetime may be delivering just another old-fashioned family drama with nothing new to say.

The film is about effects--about anger and guilt, pain and exasperation. It's about that "wish to remember" and also to know, or even just to be able to live with not knowing.

Ari's misfortunes and an event at the end of this season's third episode hint that Entourage may yet drift back to Season Seven's darker and potentially more cathartic territory, a conclusion for the series that tells us something new about the industry, perhaps. Another possibility is that the show's makers are preparing for a future movie.

Some celebrities will surely offer better material to edit than Hasselhoff, famous and not. Future episodes promise encounters with Reggie Bush, Kathy Griffin, and Mike Tyson. Tyson in particular may bring just enough crazy to the table to tip the genre scales back to train wreck.

As her professional relationship with Little develops, he clearly becomes the kind father she's been missing. And then there's that fiance at the premiere, never mentioned by name or appearing at any other point in the film, as if to suggest that with a proper male partner, Rowling's success is really complete.

One of Gus' thugs (Jeremiah Bitsui) simplifies all of his chemistry class geek-speak in the season opener: "It all comes down to following a recipe. Simple, complicated, it doesn't matter. The steps never change." The same might be said of Breaking Bad: it's a formula made of actions and reactions, choices and consequences.

Despite the pleasures of these performances, the series drags. Inside each of Zen's 90-minute episodes lies, one suspects, a crisp hour.

What follows shows how Johnson exploits and also struggles in this "element," but the problem, as usual in The Closer, is that the cops' experience here is more familiar than believable.

The most effective scenes focus on characters' interactions, the sorts of moments Torchwood always did well.

As the film's "50 state road trip" reveals the multiplicity of these experiences, it shows as well that some "freedoms" have costs.

All this is to say that it's good to see that Season Four starts without any arc in sight. At least until the last minutes of the premiere episode.

This season, as before, True Blood employs its supernatural others to signify cultural anxieties about race and sexuality. Now these anxieties are foregrounded in some of the human protagonists. It's a necessary shift: while the show has always portrayed elements of the vampire community as corrupt, we have been assured that Bill, and maybe a few others, were merely misunderstood. As this story has lost credibility, the vampires as a plausible metaphor for "accepting difference" is falling apart.

Burnett's veteran producers and editors know their way around casting and cutting this type of show, and they've hit upon a good formula here.

The "medical drama" is far too paltry to sustain the series without ramping up the relevance of the war context.

At times Outcasts degenerates into space melodrama, complete with teens regularly pissed off at their parents. The human community works through corruption, lust for power, and betrayal, but also shows love, dedication, and sacrifice.

Drop Dead Diva seems regularly to be patting silly, charming women on their heads and telling them they're cute, as when Jane's new boyfriend (David Denman) tries to soothe her by saying, "When you get mad, you're pretty adorable." Such irritations undermine the show's kicky surrealism.

Falling Skies' mix of compelling individuals helps to make its early use of formula less troublesome than it might have been. Later episodes develop interesting and diverse motives, as the 2nd Mass begins to figure out what the aliens are up to and how to fight them more effectively.

If there aren't a lot of surprises in The Inbetweeners' new season, that in itself is expected by its fans. Conceived as a down-to-earth antidote to the glossy sexcapades of Channel 4's other teen series, Skins, The Inbetweeners displays kids warts and all.

Like other roads in other seasons, those in Manitoba will assuredly begin to look routine over time, leaving show creator and executive producer Thom Beers to rely again on exaggerated danger, overbearing music cues, and personal conflict to provide the drama.

While the interviewees here can look back and put pieces together, fragmentation and lack of focus may be Gettysburg's most authentic effect.

The only thing connecting how Franklin and Bash act inside and outside the courtroom is a general willingness to wing it and hope for the best. But they're not as charming as the show thinks they are, and their triumphs don't seem so great.

Still, the plot that sparks this dramatic energy, as happens too frequently with the ageing L&O franchise, is humdrum, trusting too much to fans' loyalty and anticipation of the closing spectacle, when Goren flays the murderer into confession.

Simon's Treme is an equally astute portrait of "an urban people" still struggling to come back from a brink.

Densely plotted and epic in scope, full of graphic violence and lots of sex, it's tremendously entertaining.

As of one episode, it's decently entertaining, though its sharp writing suggests potential. It's earned my interest for at least a couple of more episodes.

It's like the producers have set up Breaking In to be an action-comedy but nobody involved really cares about the action portion. But if the show is starting as a mild disappointment, it's far from terrible.

If the premise is standard--an excellent cop is dragged back in, just when she's headed out, in this case, from the Northwest's renowned rain to California's sunshine--the details are insistently odd and creepy.

The show's acting offers no respite. Scenes unfold very slowly, as characters talk quickly but pause at the end of each speech, often holding a self-satisfied smirk as if listening to an inaudible laugh track.

Yet another medical-mystery-forensics drama set in a large American city.

In HBO's miniseries Mildred Pierce, beginning on 27 March, she embodies the sort of ambition and resilience that might seem ideal during a depression-or even a great recession. That is, she's a function of her time (the one first imagined for her by James M. Cain) as well as ours.

This season is shaping up to be a good one, with strong personalities and savvy players. The Redemption Island twist is making for compelling duels, and no one knows yet how the winner of the Island challenges will integrate back into the tribe.

As preposterous as this sounds, Being Human benefits from being reasonably self-aware as well as intelligent in the questions it asks.

You might be thankful that Sam has explained his job, with so many un-blocked metaphors, if you've never seen a show like Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior before. But because you've seen too many shows like this and too many teams like his, you're unimpressed. You're already too many steps ahead.

They've done very funny work in other shows and movies, from Scrubs to Saving Silverman to 13 Going on 30. If the show would deemphasize its already tired premise, it might be another decent comedy about four quirky friends in the city

The host never seems genuinely interested in the places he visits. Because Larry the Cable Guy is a character and not a real person, his interactions feel calculated.

The Chicago Code appears to be aiming for a heady mix of action and political drama, and it mostly works. But it also takes itself very seriously, offering precious little levity to ease tensions.

Of course, satire doesn't need to rely on realistic or three-dimensional characters. (In fact, it most often relies on two-dimensional types.) But it does need a fresh and consistent point of view. Absent that, ONN is best when it indulges in simple absurdity.

In another series on another network, Kate might have stood out. Stuck on USA, though, she's an extraordinary woman on an ordinary show.

His new foray into television, James Ellroy's LA: City of Demons, delivers more of the same. And his pulp-noir style and fixation on dead women will probably appeal to fans but win no new converts.

The show seems aware of the questions raised by this narrative dynamic, but hasn't sorted out a way to do more than note them.

The trouble is, they don't surprise you. Their routes to redemption are laid out early and often.

A joint effort between Showtime and the BBC, it features British humor and American humor. These don't always play nice together, and Episodes appears unsure of how to make them merge or which to privilege.

All this worries Fiona, of course, and her compassion keeps Shameless--a remake of a hit British show--from being a glib mockery of poverty. She is the yin to Frank's yang, organized, focused, and efficient.

Like King of the Hill, Bob's Burgers makes comedy of daily frustrations, without resorting to cheap gags or surreal asides. With the Belchers, Fox may have found another great family to move in next door to the Simpsons, Hills, and Griffins.

As much as they have at stake, neither Vince nor Dana is as much fun to watch as Max. Master of the arched eyebrow and the sly grin, Max is better than a circus act.

The show has been notoriously slow in setting up the plot everyone knows already. While the pokey details have included the protracted not-quite-romance between Erica and Father Jack (Joel Gretsch) and the precise loyalties of black-ops and terrorism expert Hobbes (Charles Mesure), the new year brings at least a veneer of urgency.

It doesn't help that the vehicles reviewed thus far aren't surprising (Lamborghinis, Mustangs, Aston Martins), but the shenanigans the hosts set up for themselves can be thrilling.

Like the Osbournes, Whitney and Bobby, the Simmons, the Kardashians, and the Hammers, they perform themselves: they talk to the camera, they act out, they make complain and look to score points.

The show, adapted from Robert Kirkman's comic book series, quickly moves past its familiar premise. It's about what happens after the apocalypse, in the struggle to remain human after society's collapse.

Its layered and nuanced analysis of male identity makes Men of a Certain Age worth watching.