None of which is new, all of which is interesting. But looking at any one aspect of his life--his marriages, a single concert, his childhood, one incident--in depth might have provided more insight than this typical overview.

"Nine Perfect Strangers" is a clumsy star-driven project that, scene to scene, is never quite sure what it is. ... Hopefully there's an answer tucked into the final episodes, which were not provided for review. Whether or not you care enough to stick around that long, that's another story.

Unfortunately the pacing here is too slow and many may abandon the train before it gets where it’s going. “Behind Her Eyes” is the perfect example of a six-part series that should have been four. Its stretch marks are unseemly. Less can be more.

“Teenage Bounty Hunters” is pretty much as good and bad as you’d expect it to be. Well, maybe a bit more bad. Which is unfortunate because the show’s young leads — Maddie Phillips and Anjelica Bette Fellini — have wonderful chemistry, batting teen nonsense, emotional eruptions and giddy observations back and forth with crisp timing.

“Avenue 5” seems more likely to just drift off into the void. There are, of course, good people at work here. Hugh Laurie stars as the spaceship’s clueless commander, Josh Gad is the clueless zillionaire funding the spaceship, Suzy Nakamura plays the tycoon’s clueless assistant. You get the drift.

Star-Crossed never really catches fire.

This is, of course, the stuff of all serial dramas, but we usually see baby steps in some direction. That Was Then promises only chaos. [27 Sept 2002, p.1C]

A lot of humor ends up left behind and most of it stops short. This is a show that cuts with a butter knife instead of a razor blade. And it cuts every which way instead of one direction. The result is, not surprisingly, a mess.

You’d think “The One” would have all sorts of places to go, and yet it goes to few of them. Instead the show revolves around a murder that’s neither mysterious or terribly plausible.

The system is a mess, no doubt, fully awful, unfair and brutal. And “Stateless” approaches this head-on. It just would have been nice to reflect more on those who are abused than the white folk who cage them in. Again, yeesh.

"Peacemaker" is guilty of taking itself not seriously enough. At least it has a sense of humor, too bad it's limited to the level of limericks scrawled on the inside of bathroom stalls.

The show’s biggest problem, though, is it’s hard to like either of its main characters.

“Okay” suffers from the same bloat as far too many streaming shows; its 140 minutes contain at most 90 minutes worth of material. Which is too bad because Lillis is an oddly arresting actress and the use of super-powers as a metaphor for teen angst and raging hormones is at least time-tested.

If "Dinotopia" doesn't come up with something else for our heroes to do other than rescue gentle folk from mean dinosaurs, the show is going to get repetitious fast. [28 Nov 2002]

“The Afterparty” runs in too many directions at once and as a result never gets anywhere in particular.

The Messengers seems far-fetched, even by [The CW's] standards.

It’s all very efficient, well-made television, but just as it’s lacking in fun it’s lacking in fire.

John Cho deserves a better show. Not that “Cowboy Bebop” is awful. It isn’t. It’s just typical. ... It also doesn’t help that the dialogue is uneven and stilted at times. Smooth talking characters need to talk smoothly.

Murder in the First” isn’t outright bad. It’s just an extremely derivative police procedural.

Big issues of body, mind, identity and technology shuffle around the Altered Carbon universe, but the show often drags its feet in order to fill its individual episodes’ running times.

Cavill remains fine as Geralt, with his absurd physique and long white hair. He has mastered the art of the humorous grunt and it’s still fun to watch him handily slaughter dozens of men at a time or take on some comic-book looking creature. But there was an audacity to this show’s first season that now seems buried beneath plot complications.

Just because it’s well-acted doesn’t mean Big Little Lies is worth enduring.

Maybe all these different storylines are going to meet up, maybe they’re all going to keep wandering around. It will take great patience to find out which.

He's not really stretching here, he's adding to the bank of Pete Davidson characterizations he's already done. It's gotten him this far, sure. But with "Bupkis," the well has run dry.

Unfortunately, the positives are overwhelmed by so many disjointed things going on at once. For the most part it doesn’t matter that these are 20-year-olds playing 14. What matters is there’s simply too much that feels like plot fodder for a show stuffed with too many characters.

As well-engineered, demographically balanced and ethnically diverse as this show is, it’s still pretty daffy how it cuts back and forth between sun and fun and drug wastoids and gangstas.

Despite all the talent, this relentlessly serious endeavor toggles between being dramatically inert and outright silly.

Mostly this is see Halston go up, then see Halston go down, a far too familiar story. Just because it’s real doesn’t make it interesting. “Halston” never bothers to go beyond the obvious.