Warburton's expressionlessly ironic delivery turns repetitious; the situations unfunny and even creepy (do daughters really announce their alternative sexual proclivities by making out with a girlfriend in front of dad?) By the end of the second episode, you may even find yourself longing for a good Bill Cosby rape joke.

"Bloated," "derivative," and "self-important" all seem fair, as does "scandalously overpriced." If producer-director Baz Luhrmann really, as has been reported, spent $120 million and 10 years to develop this thing, Netflix's accountants should be taken out and shot, and I don't mean with a camera.

That's Lovecraft Country: A mélange of spectacular special effects, nerdy obsession, and crippling racial animus, all wrapped up in a tumbling free-form narrative that doesn't make much sense.

That's Hunters: the waste of a heavyweight cast on a smarmy, smart-assed and sportively sadistic wallow in 1970s anti-Nazi paranoia. As violent and tasteless as any Quentin Tarantino project (and yes, Inglorious Basterds is definitely a point of reference) but without the underlying talent, Hunters' only likely achievement is triggering a wave of common prayers across religions and cultures for the continued good health of Pacino so that this mess isn't remembered as his last project.

The laughs in AMC's Dietland are about as frequent as vestal virgins napping on Harvey Weinstein's casting couch.

The ham-handedness of Roswell, New Mexico, cannot be overstated.

Truth Be Told is more of a "look at me, I'm not PC!" shout of self-regard.

This CSI is indistinguishable from all the rest: The same spectacular camera zoom and splashy skyline photography. The same disturbing obsession with corpse porn.

Marcia Clark, the failed O.J. Simpson prosecutor, is one of the writers and executive producers behind ABC's new legal drama The Fix, and she clearly believes revenge is a dish best served as a TV dinner: stale, overcooked, and tasting like cardboard.

But mostly the problem with Our Kind of People is its silly parlor-game sensibility.

A mumbly and mindless sci-fi drama that would never have made it on the air if NBC weren't so desperately scrambling for new pilots as the COVID production lockdown virus slouched toward Hollywood last spring.

This version of Taken is rather more showily cynical than the films, with CIA bosses sitting around listening as hidden microphones relay the approach of armed-to-the-fang drug hitmen who plan to torture and kill Mills. "Shouldn't we, like, warn him?" wonders one: "Don't we have a moral duty?" Retorts Jennifer Beals, the Flashdance babe now graduated to a role as hardboiled spook-in-chief: "Okay, now you're boring me." No duh.

View Ailes' life as an exercise in personal and political villainy, if you will; but it's a fascinating one. The Loudest Voice is merely repellent.

The show's motto seems to be, anything you can do, we can do worse.

Jeong, however, is still too much of a standup comedian, belting out punchlines and pratfalls like a machine-gun to drown out the heckler in the back, to sustain Dr. Ken beyond sketch-level comedy. And he's too manic (a self-proclaimed "five-foot-five inches of fury") to allow for much help from the rest of the cast.

Mysteriously, [Bryan Cranston] chose to help produce this stop-animation cartoon about aging superheroes that's about as tired as its protagonists.

As the hour progresses and it flaunts its comic-book side (naturally, some supervillains have followed her to Earth, and even more naturally, there's a secret anti-extraterrestrial police force that wants to shut her up, because "nothing says 'covert operation' like a flying woman in a red skirty"), its essential nerdiness—the preferred PC synonym for "juvenile stupidity"—becomes overwhelming.

The Gifted is driven by action, not character development, and it soon settles into a humdrum series of cheapjack versions of set pieces from Carrie. Don't get too excited; whether through budget shortfalls or fears of rousing the FCC programming police from their deathbed, there are no exploding heads or even a pig-blood shower. Such a pity.

In short, Chelsea Clinton's evil twin from a parallel and even more dysfunctional universe! Any way we can beam back to the days of Amy Carter?

Quibble over the categorization all you like, but that won't make Kevin any less of a chore to watch. A variant of the tasked-by-an-angel genre that stretches back to It's a Wonderful Life and perhaps beyond, the show is theologically unglued and emotionally dopey.

Little more than a Borat clone.

When it isn't irritatingly imitative, [it's] hopelessly stupid.

Unfortunately, the sabotage of the novel's truly enthralling story-telling leaves its ideology as its strongest element.

Mostly it's just an even more egregiously boring version of all the other CBS police procedurals with their cookie-cutter characters and plots.

Practically all this ill-conceived series has going for it is spotting the mutations in plot and characters brought on by the conversion from fairytale to cheerless sword-and-sorcery epic.

Unfortunately, there are also a lot of epically failed moments as well, almost all of them related to Schenkkan’s script, which paradoxically tries to cover too much while delivering too little. Instead of focusing exclusively on the battle over the civil rights bill, he tries to fold in the entire year of 1964, which included everything from the Gulf of Tonkin naval incident that launched full-scale American intervention in Vietnam to the arrest of a key Johnson aide caught performing a homosexual act in a public restroom weeks before the election that threatened (or so the president feared, anyway) to destroy his campaign.

Warmed-over hash.

This three-hour miniseries from Will Farrell and some of his Saturday Night Live buddies is a send-up of 1950s film-noir that more closely resembles another classic Hollywood product: an overinflated boob job.

The show is mostly useful as a vengeful reverse prank on greedy legions of trick-or-treaters. Make sure your tube is prominently visible as you open the door to the kids, and give them a compulsive need for years of therapy along with their Butterfingers.

By the way, if you insist on watching NCIS: Hawai'i in order to dispose of those excess brain cells clogging your neural pathways, never ever miss the first 10 seconds because that's when stuff blows up. The show may not have any money for acting or dialogue, but the TNT budget never seems to go low.

Quite the opposite of American Auto's sheer looniness, Grand Crew seems intent on redefining the word "tepid."

The Republic of Sarah is the most deliriously goofy TV political mashup since a soon-to-be-vanished Brit satellite channel aired a sitcom called Heil, Honey, I'm Home! about you-know-who.

Then there's World's Funniest Animals, The CW's attempt to elevate surfing cat videos on the internet into the status of an actual TV show. Dogs skateboard! Ostriches dance! A Canadian cat tries to fiercely pounce on his own butthole, which seems metaphoric! A lemur eats a banana, which, God help us, is even less interesting than it sounds.

None of this plays as interesting or funny as it sounds on the printed page. Carrey's Mr. Pickles is tortuously unappealing, a smiley-faced drip in need of a hard slapping. And Mr. Pickles' Puppet Time itself is on the screen, it's light years past unbearable.

The acting is overcooked, the writing homicide-inducingly arch; and making the narrative dirtier, I am sad to report, is not the same thing as making it more sophisticated.

Eventually Killer Robots dissolves into pure silliness.

That women like Emet exist is beyond question, but most people would rather hang themselves from a hat rack in their office cubicle than engage with them. I Feel Bad's title will seem like profound prophecy to anybody who watches.

Wormwood, ultimately, is a wildly overblown embarrassment to Morris' reputation.

The publicists for Hulu's new revenge drama Reprisal's describe it as "hyper-noir." Actually, it's more an object lesson in how those two terms can't be used together. Film noir is darkly underlit, a creature of the shadows. Its dialogue is cynical but clever. Though its sexuality may be frenzied, it's about seduction, not rape. "Hyper" implies the opposite: Garish. Extreme. Grating. Which is actually a fairly good description of Reprisal. Throw in "charmless" and "crude" and you've pretty much painted the whole picture.

Send back the cosmos and break out the crack pipes; this is industrial-strength despair.

With the storyline frequently repetitious and almost entirely incomprehensible, it seems that only headhunters and professional sadists will likely manage to maintain long-term interest in That Dirty Black Bag.

Grown-ish is a cell-by-cell clone of The Breakfast Club and its celebration of sophomoric melodrama, where cynical wisecracks inevitably give way to mock profundities, shouting matches to hyperemotive tears, and clichés to stereotypes. (Or maybe that one is the other way around.) The wholesale piracy is so blatant that Grown-ish even tries to make a joke or two about it. But the admission that you're stealing somebody else's work doesn't make it any less larcenous.

Adapted exclusively by King from his own 2006 novel, Lisey's Story is a mess in almost every conceivable way. It's drawn from a leaden and forgettable novel, and King's ponderous attempt at a screenplay has done nothing to improve it. Neither has Chilean director Pablo Larrain's painfully arty translation of the written word into video. And while Lisey's Story is loaded with female star power—Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Joan Allen play sisters—King and Larrain have given them little to do except look head-bangingly anguished or (in Allen's case) catatonic.

With five characters and about four jokes, Kenan violates even the loosest Hollywood mathematical equations for success.

The concept is clearly drawn from NBC's massive five-season hit This Is Us, in which the story of a single troubled family is traced through constant flashbacks. Unfortunately, NBC's clueless programming execs failed to notice what any viewer could have told them: The success of This Is Us is due not to gimmicky chronology but an outstanding cast and piquant screenwriting, none of which Ordinary Joe has.

If the substance of Disjointed seems straight out of 1972, so does its structure.

Kim Cattrall and a don't-quit-your-day-job supporting cast play members of a wealthy and secretly scandalous televangelist family whose secrets are exposed when the patriarch's plane crashes and three scruffily illegitimate heirs surface. The only thing more hacky than the script is Cattrall's wayward Southern accent.

In the unlikely event that FBI has anything going for it, that would be the still-sexy-in-her-60s Sela Ward as the barking special agent in charge Maggie Bell, and the special effects budget.

Producer-host Tiffany Haddish (Girls Trip) tries hard, but these children brim with a smarmy precocity that makes me long for a TV version of another candid-kiddie work, National Lampoon's old "Children's Letters To The Gestapo."

To the extent that Limetown has a point (other than whatever corporate perfidy ultimately turns out to be responsible for what happened), it seems to be that the 24-hour news cycle has so scrambled Americans' brains and scarred their souls that even the most profound tragedies have been forgotten by the weekend.

Spike's version of The Mist is one dumb piece of work.

This Charmed has its sights set on the Emmy for "Most PC Cliches Packed Into One Oppressively Long Drama Ever," and I think it might even win the lifetime achievement award the first season.

To the extent that there's a coherent thought in Happy Together's empty head, it is that 35 is the new 50. That sedate married couple is played by Daman Wayans Jr. and Amber Dawn Stevens (The Carmichael Show), ages 36 and 32, respectively. As for the pop-idol interloper, he's played by Felix Mallard, a giant soap star in Australia, where charisma is apparently measured much differently.

Fails entirely on its own demerits. It's about three siblings—one boundlessly rich (he just bought Matt Damon's house), one grindingly poor (she can't afford Damon's movie tickets, much less his home) and one going down fast (his last novel sold five copies, one of them to the rich brother). No worry—they're all brought together by mutual peevishness, spite and jealousy. After extensive and determinedly unfunny airing of grievances, they conclude that, as the rich brother declares, that "we're all screwed up." And, he adds: "What a relief!" Speak for yourself, buddy.

Unless you have a mysterious fascination with ravaged children or junkies coming apart at the seams, this show is best avoided.

New NBC drama is an obvious rip-off of This Is Us, but without any real heart.

On the show, family hijinx ensue; out in the audience, it's more like self-lobotomies with machetes.

Homicidally irritating.

In short, Salvation strongly resembles recent congressional budget debates, punctuated by occasional kidnappings, car chases and gunplay by an unidentified gang of thugs that apparently wants the world to end. Finally, the Nihilism Lobby gets its own show.

What follows are some awkward dates in which Walton is very forthright and earnest. That's not the same thing as funny. Not at all the same thing, as you'll realize well before the first commercial wakes you up.

Despite Modi's manic presentation, Sunnyside resembles nothing so much as a 30-minute public-service spot for Catholic Legal Services or some other pro-bono law firm.

There are lots of jokes about the sexual and intellectual traits of white trash, apparently the only remaining socio-economic minority without PC protection, but out of respect for the billions of pixels leaping to their fiery deaths to bring you this review, we will say no more.

In short, Murphy Brown was a lovably fractured mess and nobody's poster child for anything. Turning her into a geriatric Rachel Maddow-style Stalinist (Bergen is 72, around the same age as her character) does lethal damage to the heart of the show.

Billing itself as the story of "how crack began," Snowfall is really just a collection of cliches and set pieces you've already seen in other, much better narcodramas.

MacGyver (played by Lucas Till, X-Men: Apocalypse) is soooo much smarter than us, his producers have helpfully slapped big bold chyron labels on all the household goods with which he builds Klingon battlecruisers and time-traveling Waring blenders. So yes, that black ashy substance is indeed "SOOT." And that tangle of wires? You guessed it: "ELECTRONICS." Then there are the moments—a lot of them—when MacGyver is boinking one of his chick assistants while whipping up a laser death ray with his free hand. You'll know when the MacGyver audience has reach its target IQ when you see a chyron reading "ORIFICE."

A crime-fighting Miami pathologist who likes to smirkily show up the cops with whom he works as unscientific dumbasses--sort of like Neil deGrasse Tyson with a badge, and in just as much need of having his eyeballs slapped out.

The constant, clumsy back-and-forth story line is not [Buhler]'s only annoying affectation. He's also larded Nightflyer with references to other, better, works, from Star Trek to The Shining, probably intended in homage but really serving just to remind you how much better all of them were. And the abundant gore, no doubt a confused nod to Martin's original premise that horror and sci-fi can coexist in the same vehicle, serves no purpose at all. [Buhler] may think he's speaking in some advanced new artistic argot, but really, it's just a lot of outer-space jabberwocky.

It is difficult to understate the breathtaking and apparently straight-faced derangement of Agent X.

One thing everybody will be able to agree on, though, is that the 9-year-old version of Sheldon in the Big Bang spinoff Young Sheldon is not ready for prime time or even the pre-dawn hours of a public-access channel. This prequel about Sheldon's childhood in rural Texas, surrounded by an uncomprehending family and a hostile town, is hideously misconceived.

A weird attempt to blend documentary and sci-fi, Mars is an exquisite botch of both. Its only real accomplishment is to set back the reputation of executive producer Ron Howard to the days when he was murdering the mommies of adorable little baby birds on The Andy Griffith Show.

In short, they're plotting to turn the world into an episode of Starsky and Hutch.

Awful...A sci-fi fantasy vision of slavery and race relations, the TV version of The Underground Railroad is an incoherent mess of artistic pretension, full of scenes that are not under-lit but un-lit, nonsensical soliloquys with neither symbolic nor literal value (why would a slave recite lines from Gulliver's Travels to a young woman just beaten nearly to death by the plantation owner?) and surreal flashbacks that only further trash what is a very tentative narrative.

From pacing to plotting to smirky hipster pseudowisdom ("Privacy? We gave that up a long time ago so we could watch cat videos on our cellphone"). Wisdom of the Crowd is a stylistic clone of Person of Interest and Bull. In terms of IQ points, it's the lowest yet.

If Still Star-Crossed was taken hostage by a hacker the way the way the new Pirates of the Caribbean film reportedly had been, ABC and Disney would probably break out into delighted giggles and spend the promo budget on a karaoke party for the staff.

Rebel is merely a boorish bore.

Transforms the nerd-comedy masterpiece The Big Bang Theory into—well, garbage.

It's a wretched mess and arguably an offense against human intelligence.

Better Things is a faithful female-themed re-creation of Louis C.K.'s other shows: witless and angry, mistaking contempt for satire, self-important in its clueless disregard for plot, characterization or other niceties of the performing arts.

For a show that really ought to be horsewhipped, have a look at NBC's alleged sitcom Indebted, which stars the animated corpses of Fran Drescher and Steven Weber as broke Baby Boomers who have to move back in with their son and his wife (Adam Pally, The Mindy Project, and Abby Elliott, Saturday Night Live). My only question after watching the pilot was, are they joking? And the answer was, no, not even once.

Imagine, as I suppose you have many times, Footloose set in a Stalinist work camp. Or a Hunger Games in which the weapons are not bows and arrows but manuals of Canadian Choreography for the Big-Butted. Or that you suddenly and unaccountably found yourself with a fatally compelling urge to thrust red-hot pokers into your eyes and ears while praying for a quick descent into the fiery embrace of Hell. This last one, I must dutifully report, is no longer just an amusing fantasy but a genuine likelihood should you decide to watch an episode of Hulu's dizzying post-apocalyptic rap drama (I am pretty sure I'm the first person ever to type that phrase) Utopia Falls.

Outmatched is abominable, repulsive claptrap, not just anti-intellectual but actually anti-intellect, a rousing call for the stupification of America.

The Purge remains essentially a snuff film. Call me crazy, but it just may turn out that 10 hours of gory slaughter unconstrained by even the vaguest intellectual or moral framework is going to be irredeemable crap no matter how many pretty sociopolitical ribbons you put on it. Call it, I dunno, grade-Z nihilism.

If we ever have a Scopes trial on the existence of devolution, Legends of the Hidden Temple is going to be Exhibit A.