Conviction is an awkward show.

This isn't to say Are You There, Chelsea? is completely hopeless. There are bright spots. The brightest, predictably, is Handler.

Some of this talent is visible in the premiere episode's poetic counterbalancing of empty landscapes and claustrophobic casino back-offices, and actors' convincing performances.... When it comes to plotting and scripting, though, Vegas is far less sure-footed.

The connections are sudden, relationships shallow, and dialogue glib.

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

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

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

The series proceeds to follow Jenny’s remarkably bland course of revelation.

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.

While you want to love the mere existence of Octavia Spencer on TV every week, the show works awfully hard to make this hard.

The standard pieces are all here, just fit into the hour in a different order.

The individual performers, enthusiastic as they seem to be, are hardly helped by this approach. Shannon and John Michael Higgins (who plays Kath’s new boyfriend, Phil Knight) are both used to playing lovable buffoons. But their time is largely wasted here.

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

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

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

The show is, in various ways, just such a trick, not quite convincing viewers that its shtick is authentic, but granting that those viewers get the joke (and will forgive, and even enjoy, the cheesy results).

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.

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

The two-hour Season Four premiere sends FBI Special Agent Seely Booth (David Boreanaz) and forensic anthropologist Bones Brennan to England, and the result is disappointing, lacking the series’ usual wit and cool science-y stuff.

What's ultimately frustrating about The Event is not the lack of answers (though the pilot does conclude with Sophie telling President Martinez, "I haven't told you everything") or the dreadfully lazy characterizations. It's the insistence that the plot somehow taps into something that's happening right now in the United States.

Unfortunately, clumsy writing gets in the way of potential insight.

For starters, they need to offer intriguing characters and meticulous plotting. The first episode of Chase provides neither.

The first episode offers little to recommend. However, if the show can keep up with the boys as they undergo their own awakenings, then it might eventually offer something fresh to the campus comedy canon. If not, the series will become a comedy of last resort.

Had Keenan and Lloyd devoted more time to providing their characters with depth and less to flinging insults, viewers might have developed empathy for them and better understood why they feel such aggression toward one another.

If you strip away the designer shoes and drinks, the show is left with all the hallmarks of a typical teen melodrama.

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.

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.

The navel-gazing tenor doesn’t always obscure Parenthood‘s thought-provoking moments, which often also showcase clipped, witty scripting, and lucid acting.

It’s as if quarterlife comes with a prefab drinking game: take one shot when the waterworks start, another if the word “scared” follows.

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.

Unsupervised appears content to amble along, reiterating what we've seen before.

Anyone who learned politics from The West Wing will feel adrift in Commander in Chief's vacuum. Where are the polls, the clamoring press? We get little proof that the nation President Allen governs even exists.

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.

We cheered for Jack McCoy to convict the scumbag criminal on Law & Order and for Ally McBeal to speak out for the wrongly accused. Here, there are no easy answers, but the difficulty doesn't tax viewers' intellectual curiosity so much as their patience.

The performance and the script's stretches (stick around for Peterson's climactic strip search) are less convincing than campy.

At once schematic and preachy, it never indicates the stakes--either for its “diverse” players or for you.

Despite some promising moments in the first few episodes, the show seems destined for the same fate as Ellie.

Hopper [is] so misfitted for this role that he seems perversely perfect.

Better With You might try to be a straight-up joke/punchline/laughtrack sitcom. But that dooms it to comparisons with the other ABC shows such as Modern Family and The Middle that bookend it on Wednesday night. Those shows both have more distinct attitudes toward institutions like families and, particularly, marriage, than Better With You seems likely to find.

It is to say that this mimicking is just that, as if the creators here have watched those shows ["24" and "Homeland"], but have no original inspiration, and instead think that plot twists in and of themselves make a drama bracing.

Unfortunately, the rest of the episode follows Dexter's descent into a routine guilt spiral, blaming himself for Rita's death (he should have "been there" to "protect her"), rather than ruminating on how it feels to be on this receiving end of a serial killing. How a series this smart could overlook the far more interesting angle is as much of a wasted opportunity as it is a disappointment.

With so much going on, one would expect Swingtown to be exciting, but it’s not. Behavior that was scandalous in the ‘70s isn’t today.

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.

It isn't just the concept that's unoriginal, but also the scripting. The show has an abundance of jokes, but few elicit more than a grin.

Even the flashy action is of a piece with all this conventional structuring, as Chance regularly takes a few minutes to run and jump or punch and shoot. Such predictability does Human Target no favors.

[Perception is an] inept, and sometimes offensive, drivel, turning serious mental illness into a chic tic and woefully underestimating the intelligence of its audience.

By the end of The Breakfast Club, the kids have learned that each of them is not solely a Brain, a Princess, a Criminal, a Basket Case, or an Athlete, but individuals who defy categorization. If only the characters in My Generation--and its dwindling viewers--were afforded the same opportunity.

Even with all its CGI trappings and somber Washington, D.C. setting, Threshold feels minor, an amalgam of The Abyss and maybe Dark Skies.

A befuddled retirement party for King's clichés. From start to finish, the show dodders about like an Alzheimer's patient on a scavenger hunt.

Unfortunately, Criminal Minds confuses critical thinking with supernatural abilities.

Ironside is an exercise in cynicism, a safety-first raid on the vaults with not a shred of respect for either the its prospective audience.

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.

What makes Justin's dad funny is the brevity. Without it, $#*! My Dad Says is not.

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 comedy that does occur in How I Met Your Mother isn't enough to compensate for its inconsistencies.

Not at all intelligent, the show is pretty much immune to any form of legitimate criticism, and further, it will likely be gone within the first few weeks of this television season.

The Taste is a confusing show with humorless banter that does not inspire the audience to become invested in the contestants. It's doubtful that viewers will be coming back for seconds.

The dynamic here is already tired.

It’s a co-production with an outside company, poorly scripted and directed.

Set against Reaper‘s slackers and the largely limited actors who portray them, Wise will having you rooting for the Devil.

Animal Practice seems to know exactly what it wants to do, it just isn't any good at it.

I Hate My Teenage Daughter offers precious few chuckles and lots of angst and argument.

Lacking both comedy and tragedy, Enlisted earns no such commendations.

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.

Even as you’re hoping that she won’t have to conjure up variations on this explication theme every week, she does it a few more times in this episode alone.

The result is disappointing, sensationalistic and silly.

Only Kroll managed to wring any comedy out of this ham-handed premise.

With all these suds in the way, the premiere is muddled, so concerned with leading us by the nose to get the backstory that it never asks us to care about anyone.

This unchallenging adaptation of Chris Bohjalian's bestseller wishes it could be American Beauty. Or maybe Desperate Housewives.

Carpoolers opted to careen straight into a gender war minefield, with stock male characters looking hapless amid a seeming pack of controlling, lazy, and deceitful women.

Jack delivers to every brilliant-offbeat doctor expectation, which means that for all his hyper-performative charms, Jack is also tedious, right down to the zipper in his forehead that marks commercial breaks.

His being stuck there no matter who shows up, in addition to his out-of-joint flashbacks, makes Crusoe seem something like a proto-Survivor contestant or, weirder, a proto-cast member on Lost. None of this bodes especially well for the series, in terms of repetition and limitation.

Even though Parenthood‘s parents are all making completely misguided choices, the series doesn’t consider these as a means to education, through which the adults might reach that kind of self-awareness. That lack of consideration is the series’ most unfortunate waste of a promising storyline, one that could have imbued this second version with something refreshing or even revelatory.

This shying away from meaty storylines typifies the longstanding weakness of Major Crimes and, to a certain extent, The Closer before it.... As the team has little to do on the job, the episode fills out the time with minor whiffs of narrative.

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

On the evidence of the first two episodes, Resurrection seems just one more twist on an American obsession with investigating what lies beneath the surfaces of rural or suburban idylls. As a device to tell the same old stories about illicit love affairs, family estrangement, hidden crimes, and the secrets parents keep from children and visa versa, the arbitrary resurrection of the dead seems pretty extreme, and, frankly, a wasted opportunity.

These stereotypes (the befuddled one, the needy one, the sexist pig) hardly make for the most engaging cast of characters.

Feels strangely empty and hamstrung.... If you like your soaps without novelty, nuance, or bite, Related has four girls for you.

Mob City fails to make connections between now and the repercussions of the ‘40s, say, the marginalization of democratic debate, the pathologizing of women’s agency and autonomy, and the hysterical politics of fear and insecurity in an increasingly global economy. These daunting themes remain off screen here, leaving only a series of monotonous conversations and shoot-outs.

The plots are thin, generally revolving around the idea that dumb is smart and smart is dumb.

Sadly, this program fails to be either compelling or diverting. Instead, it is a bloated and filler-stuffed waste of time.

If it's trying to emulate Sex and the City, Love, Inc. misses the fact that that show presented us with complex characters from the get-go; here the single women are all pretty much one-shtick ponies.

While the show has little going for it, it does have Seth Green.

One could watch NCIS: Los Angeles. But one could also watch paint dry with far less pain and no less gain.

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.

Three Wishes is a veritable showcase for corporate largesse, and oh yes, self-promotion.

The network has risked its own reputation for cutting-edge, genre-busting shows by churning out a sitcom whose main joke is how derivative, unfunny, and unconvincing it is.

Fittingly--and disappointingly--his fame-hungry characters don’t raise questions concerning politics or inhabit any realm of social interest; they are as vapid as their environment.

Despite the many hard bodies on display, South Beach is flabby.

This is the central duality of the show: half fish-out-of-water tale about Todd, half underdogs-come-from-behind-to-triumph story about his staff. The problem is that neither plot has a sound foundation. For the first, it's hard to identify with Todd because he's not very likable.

If the premise intrigues you, watch or rewatch Blade Runner instead, and offer Almost Human the all-too-human body swerve.

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

Bones is a very poor cross between the X-Files and CSI with characters stolen from NCIS, plot devices from Veronica Mars, and topicality from Law & Order.

While Life is Wild is structured as a sort of fishes-out-of-water tale, it is more accurately described as a neocolonial masturbatory fantasy.

There's no bottom to this show's sentimentality.

It will most likely be remembered for years to come, alongside My Mother, the Car and Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, as one of TV's truly bad ideas.

A relentlessly unfunny mid-season replacement comedy from ABC that sucks all the fun out of dysfunction, the show could have been pitched to network execs as "Arrested Development meets Ordinary People." But it shows none of the former's wit or latter's intelligence.

The Cougar is not only oogy and repetitive, but also as behind the curve as TV Land‘s usual rerun fare.