So far, there's no indication that there's enough brewing here to measure up to Season Two, but the show seems to be solidly back on track after the problems of Season Three.

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.

Dark Matters has something for viewers who are easily titillated as well as those interested in history.

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.

Freddie's stereotypically hard-hitting reporter's persona is soon tiring and irksome. Still, Freddie isn't so tedious as the show's "villains."

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.

It seems unfair to complain that Childrens Hospital isn't great. But given that what it used to be, good isn't really good enough.

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.

The film is about effects--about anger and guilt, pain and exasperation. It's about that "wish to remember" and also to know, or even just to be able to live with not knowing.

Ari's misfortunes and an event at the end of this season's third episode hint that Entourage may yet drift back to Season Seven's darker and potentially more cathartic territory, a conclusion for the series that tells us something new about the industry, perhaps. Another possibility is that the show's makers are preparing for a future movie.

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.

As her professional relationship with Little develops, he clearly becomes the kind father she's been missing. And then there's that fiance at the premiere, never mentioned by name or appearing at any other point in the film, as if to suggest that with a proper male partner, Rowling's success is really complete.

One of Gus' thugs (Jeremiah Bitsui) simplifies all of his chemistry class geek-speak in the season opener: "It all comes down to following a recipe. Simple, complicated, it doesn't matter. The steps never change." The same might be said of Breaking Bad: it's a formula made of actions and reactions, choices and consequences.

Despite the pleasures of these performances, the series drags. Inside each of Zen's 90-minute episodes lies, one suspects, a crisp hour.

What follows shows how Johnson exploits and also struggles in this "element," but the problem, as usual in The Closer, is that the cops' experience here is more familiar than believable.

The most effective scenes focus on characters' interactions, the sorts of moments Torchwood always did well.

As the film's "50 state road trip" reveals the multiplicity of these experiences, it shows as well that some "freedoms" have costs.

All this is to say that it's good to see that Season Four starts without any arc in sight. At least until the last minutes of the premiere episode.

This season, as before, True Blood employs its supernatural others to signify cultural anxieties about race and sexuality. Now these anxieties are foregrounded in some of the human protagonists. It's a necessary shift: while the show has always portrayed elements of the vampire community as corrupt, we have been assured that Bill, and maybe a few others, were merely misunderstood. As this story has lost credibility, the vampires as a plausible metaphor for "accepting difference" is falling apart.

Burnett's veteran producers and editors know their way around casting and cutting this type of show, and they've hit upon a good formula here.

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

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.

Drop Dead Diva seems regularly to be patting silly, charming women on their heads and telling them they're cute, as when Jane's new boyfriend (David Denman) tries to soothe her by saying, "When you get mad, you're pretty adorable." Such irritations undermine the show's kicky surrealism.

Falling Skies' mix of compelling individuals helps to make its early use of formula less troublesome than it might have been. Later episodes develop interesting and diverse motives, as the 2nd Mass begins to figure out what the aliens are up to and how to fight them more effectively.

If there aren't a lot of surprises in The Inbetweeners' new season, that in itself is expected by its fans. Conceived as a down-to-earth antidote to the glossy sexcapades of Channel 4's other teen series, Skins, The Inbetweeners displays kids warts and all.

Like other roads in other seasons, those in Manitoba will assuredly begin to look routine over time, leaving show creator and executive producer Thom Beers to rely again on exaggerated danger, overbearing music cues, and personal conflict to provide the drama.

While the interviewees here can look back and put pieces together, fragmentation and lack of focus may be Gettysburg's most authentic effect.

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.