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.