Ironside is an exercise in cynicism, a safety-first raid on the vaults with not a shred of respect for either the its prospective audience.

While options during the era were surely limited, the show's broad strokes don't do justice to the choices women were making, or their self-awareness while making them.

What makes Justin's dad funny is the brevity. Without it, $#*! My Dad Says is not.

The host never seems genuinely interested in the places he visits. Because Larry the Cable Guy is a character and not a real person, his interactions feel calculated.

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

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.

The Taste is a confusing show with humorless banter that does not inspire the audience to become invested in the contestants. It's doubtful that viewers will be coming back for seconds.

The dynamic here is already tired.

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

Set against Reaper‘s slackers and the largely limited actors who portray them, Wise will having you rooting for the Devil.

Animal Practice seems to know exactly what it wants to do, it just isn't any good at it.

I Hate My Teenage Daughter offers precious few chuckles and lots of angst and argument.

Lacking both comedy and tragedy, Enlisted earns no such commendations.

Like the Osbournes, Whitney and Bobby, the Simmons, the Kardashians, and the Hammers, they perform themselves: they talk to the camera, they act out, they make complain and look to score points.

Even as you’re hoping that she won’t have to conjure up variations on this explication theme every week, she does it a few more times in this episode alone.

The result is disappointing, sensationalistic and silly.

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

With all these suds in the way, the premiere is muddled, so concerned with leading us by the nose to get the backstory that it never asks us to care about anyone.

This unchallenging adaptation of Chris Bohjalian's bestseller wishes it could be American Beauty. Or maybe Desperate Housewives.

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.

Jack delivers to every brilliant-offbeat doctor expectation, which means that for all his hyper-performative charms, Jack is also tedious, right down to the zipper in his forehead that marks commercial breaks.

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.

Even though Parenthood‘s parents are all making completely misguided choices, the series doesn’t consider these as a means to education, through which the adults might reach that kind of self-awareness. That lack of consideration is the series’ most unfortunate waste of a promising storyline, one that could have imbued this second version with something refreshing or even revelatory.

This shying away from meaty storylines typifies the longstanding weakness of Major Crimes and, to a certain extent, The Closer before it.... As the team has little to do on the job, the episode fills out the time with minor whiffs of narrative.

The "medical drama" is far too paltry to sustain the series without ramping up the relevance of the war context.

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.

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

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