Amid such generic plotting, the show serves up an extended action sequence in a hotel that's nicely shot and choreographed, establishing the template for other fight scenes. It appears that Nikita is going to be a down-and-dirty brawling kind of series, where martial arts serve a function besides looking really cool.

Terriers teases out both the pleasures and the perversities.

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.

The conspiracy here is grounded in human activity and ambition, rather than aliens or supernatural forces.

Perabo shows herself capable of playing Walker tough or sweet, clueless or competent. Unfortunately, in the span of a single episode, she's asked to do all of the above.

Yes, Rizzoli & Isles is quick with cliches....[But] for all the stereotyping, it's hard to be mad at Angie Harmon.

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.

Entourage underscores how tenuous hegemonic masculinity is--and how much it depends on everyone playing his part.

While Hung has its stage set to see some of these types of stories play out, scene after scene positions Ray as a cipher for other characters.

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.

For all the politics, though, what True Blood reveals most consistently is that Arlene is right: all of them—vampire, human, and were—are enslaved in one way or another, by appetites, gifts, power, and family (or pack) bonds, intimating an uneasy commonality across races.

The Good Guys, true to its genre, presents an opposition between order and anarchy and asks the audience to embrace the apparently crazy cop who, in the tradition of American pragmatism, cuts through the red tape to get things done.

Summon your patience and settle in for the long haul. By its end, the series' exploration of how ordinary human fallibility is transformed into shocking human depravity is compellingly inventive.

Happy Town‘s rhythm is like that, pitching between the obvious and the obscure. It’s not yet clear where it’s “snap sharp.”

Treme sketches and interweaves stories and desires, hopes and disenchantments.

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.

What has been ramped up in this season are Jackie’s unexpected kindnesses and cruelties. And this is what makes the show so great. She constantly sidesteps all expectations and usually for the worse.

Perhaps the most disturbing possibility--the subtext that makes Breaking Bad both enthralling and often unbearable to watch--is that Walter is becoming who he always was. He hasn’t changed. He’s been purified.

It does tend to love its sublimely self-confident hero, a quick draw and a smartass who nonetheless walks a sort of moral line that baffles his mostly rube-ish opponents. But the show offers other, pleasures that help to make up for what's predictable.

In its insistence on the chaos of battles and the confusion of downtime, the series also offers another “harsh reality,” that these decent men are exploited by their faceless government, again and again. If this story is not explicit in the bloody surface of The Pacific, it is a persistent, distressing undercurrent.

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.

Much like last season, this one already has Adams and Ben standing in for viewers. Their insights, or their reactions, mold yours.

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.

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.

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.

The connections are sudden, relationships shallow, and dialogue glib.

If it’s not an ingenious or very new device (see: Nina, Tony, Curtis, et. al.), the damaged soul who is Jack’s Self Reflected re-raises and continues to complicate the questions that are typically understood as resolved in Jack. Patriotism and heroism, bad choices and hideous torture in the name of a big picture: it’s 24 repeating.

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.