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).

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

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.

My Own Worst Enemy looks like it’s been assembled from the leftovers of other pop-culture heavyweights.

This idea--that Sam is experiencing his coma as an “alternate reality” via a TV show--is wickedly clever. It’s a question as to whether Life on Mars can sustain and develop this idea, which is really an investigation of limits.

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.

Hood’s methods are unconventional, Eleventh Hour insists, but still, he’s strangely bland.

The supernatural premise underlying Bella’s quest may be fantastic, but the urgent desire to find a husband “before it’s too late” is unfortunately all too common.

Dani of the Perfectly Tousled Locks watches Charlie for the rest of us, her responses shaping ours.

The perversity of this connection cannot be overstated (Smits makes Miguel both charismatic and creepy, often in the same breath). Dexter sees it, though he also yearns for the friendship, the brotherhood, even.

Drawing parallels between the city’s decadence and that of its inhabitants is a fairly obvious point to make, so using it for more than just establishing shots is overkill, specifically pulling the viewer out of emotional moments. It’s a small quibble, though, and thankfully, the only complaint about this new season so far.

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.

Patrick dramatizes his sense of superiority, intimidating and irritating just about anyone who comes in contact with him....The Mentalist does offer its own charms, chief among them Baker’s low-key, apparently complicated sarcasm.

That the pilot fails to provide a foundation for the show’s future direction does not bode well. The only thing that is clear is how much the Claytons dislike Sam.

In their certitude, the villains are more compelling than their wishy-washy heroic counterparts. The real excitement of “Villains” is its promise to expand the series’ assortment of baddies: their unabashed queerness and freakery make for more fun.

The actor’s embodiment of seemingly counterintuitive emotions is riveting, as House’s placidity demonstrates sorrow, while anger represents a kind of giddy id. Even if House isn’t offering new stories or themes, it remains a terrific showcase for a terrific performer.

The formula set in motion by the Fringe pilot is familiar. That’s not to say it’s not also devious and often delightful.

While the show doesn’t (yet) expand on its opening diagnosis of the “New Gilded Age,” it just might offer more careful consideration of other possibilities of self-interest.

As the series continues to complicate the relations among past, present, and future, Ellison’s part in any of them is increasingly difficult to frame.

When Tara and Sookie speak truth to each other (or seem to), True Blood is almost shrewd.

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.

For the most part, 90210 seems unsure what to do with the Gen-X demographic, fitting in an awkward assortment of teachers, guidance counselors, and big sisters alongside the kid stars.

While the particulars of these cases are not uninteresting, they are mostly lost amid the swirl of Jerry and Michelle’s careening between romance and competition, betrayal and “crossing the line.”

True, the episode threatened to jump the shark when it was revealed that James (Patrick Heusinger), the unsuspecting man Blair corralled to play of the part of her wonderful new boyfriend, had his own secret, ludicrous even by Gossip Girl standards. But in the coming episodes, Blair and Chuck retain their place as the series’ most exciting kids in turmoil, its salacious center.

It’s especially good when the mission is as preposterous as this one. True to Prison Break form, the new season is laid out as a series of tasks, the retrieval of The Company’s most vital information, stored on what is essentially a digital black book (as opposed to hole).

For its part, House of Saddam provides little insight into Saddam Hussein. Instead, it repeats truisms about well-reported events, many of them best remembered as TV images.

As before, the “big picture” plotlines are often the least convincing, mostly because the trippy angel talk is tough to pull off.

Like Wright’s book, the series is disjointed and disturbing, a story of youthful workers who are underprepared, underequipped, and underinformed.

Flashpoint works through the distress and damage it lays out here, it gets points for beginning with the difficulty, not with the triumph. Now, if it can just figure a way beyond the scary perp clichés.

Celia is facing some judgment of her own this season. Her not-entirely separate saga makes up the other half of Weeds‘ new start, such that the show is cleaved down its center, cutting awkwardly back and forth between Celia now imprisoned and Nancy fancy-free.

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.

A little tedious for the rest of us, who have seen such exploration before.

With this shaded tone and careful plotting going for it, In Plain Sight is a welcome addition to USA’s line-up of detective shows. Especially when it keeps focused on the new places and new identities, rather than the old memories.

Assuming that you share its sense of outrage at what Jim Baker and Supremes wrought (in a decision they declared a one-off, not applicable to any future rulings), the movie offers easy targets and conclusions. But to intimate there was a way to “win” if only everyone had played fair, Recount has to back off the entrenched problems and the more horrific conclusion, that the system is rigged and no matter who plays it, the end is the same.

This is dicey subject matter (especially for those viewers who have struggled to become pregnant or know someone who has), and at times the tone seems blasé, even offensive.

Forceful but also vulnerable, flawed and brilliant, Liz is plagued by her self-righteousness and, judging by a couple of episodes, the show is plagued by her rightness.

The shaman contrivance is surely tedious, but it appears that New Amsterdam uses the immortal design not as a way to Forrest-Gump its protagonist into a set of trite historical situations, but more cleverly, to ask questions about those situations.

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

The series has laid groundwork for minor and mostly predictable complications.

This effort to bring Sarah’s Chronicles both back and forward to our current moment is both awkward and smart.

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

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.

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

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.

While I expected the obvious jihadist jokes and Muslim stereotypes, the good news is that Aliens in America doesn’t just fall into such jingoistic scapegoating. Instead, it shows and complicates the process.

With a winning lead player and supporting cast, plus an interesting premise, Moonlight has potential.

The girls, though, look promising. Granted, the initial Sarah-Jamie fight scene occasions the series’ first spectacular special-effectsy scene.

Details of color and composition do the work usually handled by too much expository dialogue, granting access to Dani and Charlie’s thinking.

The series is essentially light-hearted: Sam is a sweet-natured superhero with a dust-buster. He may be working for the source of all evil, but one can’t help but cheer him on.

The soap operatic set-up is both efficient and florid, laying out both familial continuity and class distinctions.

Once freed from the scaffolding and backstory constraints of a series premiere, Journeyman may find itself.

A good-natured show with a convincing sense of fun and a likeable cast, Chuck also has the wit, confidence, and grasp of the cultural climate to turn a running joke about a celebrity porn site into a major plot device.

Other shows do complicate and elaborate the geek mystique ("CSI" and "Bones" come to mind), but all we’re likely to get from The Big Bang Theory are missed communications, fumbled opportunities, and general yuckety-yucks.

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

Kid Nation does not mean to find out whether kids can do what adults could not. It means instead to demonstrate that these kids really would die without the intervention of adults.

Tell Me You Love Me begins within confines, its white, middle class, straight couples all dealing with versions of the same problem. That this focus might be "real" is not the question. More troubling, for a series banking on its newness, is that the focus is so familiar.

The writer-director makes some inspired, insightful cinematic choices. However, the play’s untidiness--it’s one of Shakespeare’s most mischievous--virtually guarantees a final product distinguished by individual performances rather than dramatic consistency.

Although Brown repeatedly manipulates behavior, Mind Control ultimately comes across as a refreshingly honest endeavor. The tricks are entertaining, and the explanations revelatory.

Interactions are rendered in smart, layered compositions, with elements that crowd and obscure, colors that distract and focus your attention. Such plot intricacies might appear contrived, but twisting even in the first episode suggests otherwise.

Smart-ass, angry girls’ solidarity characterizes State of Mind.

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

Though the show occasionally lapses into the “cringe comedy” mode, made popular by "The Office" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Flight of the Conchords" is also quite sweet.

Molly and her friends spend so much time name-dropping and worrying about reputations, we never feel connected to their pain or joy. The show’s foundational preoccupation with Hollywood does produce some humor, most often in film-based fantasy sequences.

Funny but inconsequential.

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

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

Those who enjoy Sons & Daughters enjoyed Arrested Development more, and the same viewers put off by the latter's off-the-wall humor will also be put off the new show.

Conviction is an awkward show.

UPN's new series has a shot -- in the sweepstakes for the worst reality show of all time.

Love Monkey is an anomaly, an intelligent, well-written dramedy for adults about adults, even if some of the chords it hits are in a minor key.

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.

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

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

Sleeper Cell is compelling television primarily for its excellent performances and chilling premises, rather than its plots. Alarming as these may be, they are rendered here with predictable rising and falling action, a bit of romance, and some tidily resolved conflicts.

If the first offering, "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road," is any indication, the hoped-for resurrection of in-your-face frights is still a couple of corpses away.

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

[The show has] married the procedural to melodrama, with occasionally intriguing results.

Despite these obvious missteps and in between the blatant attempts to appease original fans, Night Stalker shows promise.

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.

We don't expect nighttime relationship dramas to be thrilling, but we have the right to expect an interesting character or two.

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

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

The networks have been wondering how to compete with the no-holds barred nature of cable programming. This is it.

Unfortunately, Criminal Minds confuses critical thinking with supernatural abilities.

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.

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

Perhaps the most satisfying element in the series is its patience.

What's so wonderful about My Name Is Earl is that it's a comedy with its heart in the right place and everything else gleefully in the gutter.

It helps that Bell is able to suggest complexity, emotional and moral, even when the dialogue fails her.

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

So no, the jokes aren't as haute as the cuisine. But presentation, on the plate or on television, goes a long way, and Confidential has the look of a winner.

Sure, this has all been done before, but familiarity doesn't make Just Legal any less fun.

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.

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

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

The Practice should have been this much fun.

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.

For every step forward (intricate plotting, Wentworth's engaging lead performance), the show also manages to stumble back (rote subplots, incessant lame dialogue as exposition).