C.S.I.: Miami is very slick, very clever, and very eager to please.

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.

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

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.

Royal Pains is a pleasant excursion, with some great one-liners and a chance to tweak its well-worn formula.

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.

Even as this plot pattern bodes ill, Margulies and Panjabi make a formidable team.

All that said, 666 Park Avenue is diverting enough, if hardly original.

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

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.

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

The series doesn’t mean to dig deeply into contemporary African social problems or politics, instead, it offers up middlebrow mysteries that can be solved in an episode’s time, a heroine who is keenly observant and positively feminine, a vague sort of half-step forward from Nancy Drew or Jessica Fletcher.

All this tightly plotted baby nonsense doesn’t feel at all urgent, because, true to form, Nancy’s playing several angles at once, each with its own possibly lethal consequences.

Unlike crime dramas, when the body is usually cleanly dead, by its very nature Three Rivers lingers on the processes of death and near-death at both ends of the story. Just how many poignant farewells can an audience take?

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.

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.

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.

Napoleon Dynamite the series forms its comedic syntax in the vernacular of those established shows [The Simpsons, Family Guy] instead of retaining the singular phrasing of Napoleon Dynamite the movie, and suffers as a result.

Based on the first two episodes, Alcatraz is a middling show.

Cavanagh and McCormack bring what you know they will--an effective mix of fast talk and easy delivery to pitch the partners’ situations, which range from silly to predictable.

The reason we might stick around is Audrey Parker. She also provides an alternative to the usual dark mystery associated with Stephen King's work.

How interested will viewers be in its fictional scandals when real life offers much more sensational examples of bad behavior?

It just needs sharper writing, and the supporting cast needs to be developed. While Kaling and Messina are charming and work well together, the rest of the show needs to catch up.

This commentary on the emptiness of all-consuming family life might fare better were it not brimming with one suburban cliche after another. These cliches don’t indicate Dexter’s discomfort with the banality of his new environment. Instead, they’re just boring.

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.”

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.

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.

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.