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.

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.

More often, the show is a show: the camera cranes out to show Cathy's loneliness, the half-hour closes with a bittersweet pop song or the point is made too obviously ("Cancer's not a passport to a better life, cancer's the reason I'm not gonna have a life"). Still, the show does illustrate a useful idea, that what you think is "normal" is only that, what you think.

In its first season, Love in the Wild was thoroughly mediocre. But any improvements this year are sadly negated by the presence of McCarthy.

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.

Regardless of historical veracity, though, some of the drama here is shopworn.

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.

Save for Sheila, the parents are likable and their circumstances familiar, but Guys with Kids relies too often on predictable jokes.

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.

Unfortunately, the pilot doesn't suggest that there is anything more interesting at work here than a weak attempt to wring laughs out of aliens who are buffoons.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

As a prestige show, it’s so serious, portentous, and polished, it’s not very much fun at all, so intent on wrapping its package in money and style that it forgets to put anything inside.

These cases don't come together so much as they suggest a formula.

Like The Closer, Major Crimes offers utterly predictable crime-solving.

With the subtlety of a sledgehammer, the show right away telegraphs that there is more to Kaan than meets the eye, that he's not just a con. We're just not inclined to believe him.

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.

When so much of the series depends on psychological nuance, the lurch into Hollywood action thriller confrontations is an outright admission of defeat. Sensationalism trumps subtlety once more. Both Luther and Idris Elba deserve so much more.

Despite pacy editing, superb action choreography, and location shooting across Europe, the whole turns out to be yet another re-run of that updated Western, 24, which pits an arrogant outlaw protagonist against friend and foe alike.

So aggressive is RENO 911!'s low-budget affect (not to mention its inconsistent pace and sometimes flat humor) that Cops looks positively polished by comparison. ... Still, and especially in its improvisational moments, RENO 911! offers occasionally engaging spontaneity.

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.

If Go On isn't breaking new ground, it does manage to find humor, even among the most dour of premises.

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