PopMatters' Scores

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For 500 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 34% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 61% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 9.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average TV Show review score: 58
Highest review score: 100 The Flag
Lowest review score: 0 Get This Party Started: Season 1
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 187 out of 187
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 187
  3. Negative: 0 out of 187
187 tv reviews
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  1. Resurrection: Season 1
    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.
  2. Fairly Legal : Season 1
    In another series on another network, Kate might have stood out. Stuck on USA, though, she's an extraordinary woman on an ordinary show.
  3. Against The Wall: Season 1
    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.
  4. La La Land: Season 1
    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.
  5. How to Make It in America: Season 1
    How To Make It delivers a conventional story with uncommon panache. It’s fun, especially for guys, but it’s aiming for boutique liquor and only tastes like high-end latte.
  6. Ringer: Season 1
    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.
  7. Aquarius: Season 1
    Aquarius isn’t quite history, but it also isn’t precisely now, or even accurate.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Weird Loners: Season 1
    Weird Loners is not so fresh as its title might presume. Its protagonists are more familiar than strange, and their stories are clichéd.
  9. NCIS: Los Angeles: Season 1
    One could watch NCIS: Los Angeles. But one could also watch paint dry with far less pain and no less gain.
  10. Mitt
    The film offers a version of the real Mitt, performative and authentic, charming and awkward, occasionally at the same time.
  11. Tell Me You Love Me: Season 1
    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.
  12. The Carrie Diaries: Season 1
    The rest of the show goes on to prize sweetness over superficiality.
  13. Red Band Society: Season 1
    While you want to love the mere existence of Octavia Spencer on TV every week, the show works awfully hard to make this hard.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Privileged: Season 1
    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.
  15. The Finder: Season 1
    Once it gets past the cumbersome background exposition, The Finder begins to find its specific groove.
  16. Kings: Season 1
    Combing broad strokes and detailed color on an extensive canvas, Kings makes the rewards and costs of ambition plain for all to see.
  17. Dinosaur Revolution: Season 1
    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.
  18. Happy Endings: Season 1
    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.
  19. Unforgettable: Season 1
    Unforgettable is a show cobbled together from the once good bits of once good shows.
  20. NYC 22: Season 1
    The first episode is not a courageous start, despite good acting from the ensemble cast, generous location shooting, and a quirkily realized context.
  21. Dollhouse: Season 1
    Even as Dollhouse sounds like other TV shows and movies, it is also utterly strange, its premise literally ridiculous and intriguingly metaphorical.
  22. Selfie: Season 1
    Maybe ABC’s social media strategy should include posting only the last scene of this episode and pretend the rest of it never happened. That, and changing the title.
  23. Memphis Beat: Season 1
    The bar is set reasonably low for police procedurals and there is no reason to think that Memphis Beat can't clear it eventually. However, to "save" Memphis, maybe what the show needs is to let loose and have a little bit of fun.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Big Bang Theory: Season 1
    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.
  25. The Goodwin Games: Season 1
    Instead of wink-winking at the audience about its own cleverness, The Goodwin Games mostly keeps things moving along at a snappy pace, with jokes as well. When the show gets too pleased with its own eccentricity, though, it becomes grating.
  26. Cane: Season 1
    The soap operatic set-up is both efficient and florid, laying out both familial continuity and class distinctions.
  27. Bionic Woman: Season 1
    The girls, though, look promising. Granted, the initial Sarah-Jamie fight scene occasions the series’ first spectacular special-effectsy scene.
  28. Intelligence (2013): Season 1
    Intelligence might probe these questions more, and so become richer than the latest show about a tortured male genius outsmarting the bad guys. Or it might just settle for flashy graphics, great action scenes, and underused actors looking good.
  29. The Whole Truth: Season 1
    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.
  30. Franklin & Bash : Season 1
    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.
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