"The Woman in the House..." suffers from pacing issues and is stretched painfully thin at eight episodes (some as brief as 22 minutes), although it might have worked better as a movie, with the absurdity heightened, the fat trimmed and a more clear comic tone.

Van Helsing obviously wants to be “The Walking Dead” with vampires, but it lacks that show’s production values, cast and over-the-top imagination.

There’s no sense of depth or attachment here, all is obvious and shallow and ultimately contrived. Again: Forgettable.

Backstrom is dicey indeed. Every time he makes a move, it's got to be part of an intricate puzzle that will be solved. More often, it's just an obnoxious guy staggering off in a direction that turns out to be conveniently right.

Cliches bounce off one another in a slick combination of gallows humor, inspirational bonding, deep thoughts and maudlin moments.

It’s consistently inconsistent, purposely tacky and piles cliché upon cliché. It is trash TV. It could be a huge hit. ... The term guilty pleasure seems appropriate here. More guilt than pleasure, though.

To be sure, there are some fine performances, notably by Olivia Wilde as Richie’s former Warhol girl wife; Juno Temple as an ambitious gofer who wants to work her way up; and Ray Romano as Richie’s beleaguered right-hand man. But they’re mostly drowned in the confusion as the show veers from drama to farce to mostly poor musical interludes.

Man with a Plan just makes you wish he’d take his sincere befuddlement elsewhere, someplace that mattered. Simply put, Matt LeBlanc is too good to be this irrelevant.

You end up identifying more with the people from outside the group, looking on as these people force friendships with folks from their past they’ve clearly outgrown. As viewers, we know how they feel.

As a six-episode project, you’d expect precision, compactness and speed; instead it basically, at least for the first four episodes, wanders toward the inevitable.

The young skeptical priest and older exorcist priest will team up to do battle with the devil while Davis looks on wide-eyed, apparently, and this will be dragged out on a weekly basis. Heaven help us.

It doesn’t help that any dramatic tension is undercut by the first episode, which essentially gives away the entire plot. “The Shrink Next Door” is the dramatic equivalent of watching someone pull the wings off a fly.

Wooden self-serious streaming content at its most mediocre.

For the most part, Lee Daniels traffics in tawdry messes. With Star, his latest TV project for Fox, he is at his tawdriest and messiest.

“Hunters” works in black-and-white and stereotypes, hiding in the bygone, but today anti-Semitism is on the rise and American Nazis apparently include “very fine people” according to one prominent source. Perhaps now wasn’t the time for a wildly uneven, superficial, comic book-type treatment of this particularly sick and unfortunately still-relevant dynamic.

Stephen King should get out more. This latest miniseries offering from the too prolific schlock horrormeister may be the week's big TV event, running Sunday, Monday and Thursday, but it plays like a greatest hits collection: Stephen's Best Spooks . Except, like so many such collections, once you get all the songs next to one another, you realize they sound alarmingly similar. [26 Jan 2002]

But Nicky Fallin is about as unlikable and uncomfortable a character as television audiences have ever been asked to care for. Maybe he would unfold splendidly over time. But it's doubtful he'll get that time. [25 Sept 2001, p.5B]

Watching dad fend off guys while the girls strut around in thongs is going to get old fast. [17 Sep 2002]

This series reflects the way wealthy, neurotic, overly busy and sex-obsessed TV executives and producers think America lives, in other words, the way they live. They're wrong. Most of us are not TV executives. Please let Hidden Hills be hidden for good as soon as possible. [24 Sept 2002]

Marienthal is an appealing kid and it's nice to see Sagal back at work, but this show is just a little too sex crazy and far too predictable. [2 Oct 2000, p.5F]

What next? An unholy alliance between Aquaman's niece and the Thing's second cousin? "Birds of Prey" is for the birds. [9 Oct 2002, p.1D]

“Outer Range” is a complete mess: Senseless, pretentious, purposely obscure and wasteful.

A soppy, radically inconsistent, corny and downright embarrassing soap opera.

The warm and goofy and topical camaraderie of that show [“Sex and the City”] is nowhere apparent here. Nor are any laughs. There are no actual laugh lines here, just lines that let you know they were supposed to be funny. It is, in essence, a romantic picture postcard comedy show without any comedy (or much romance for that matter).

Only trouble is--aside from the torture porn nature of the show--the story itself is a series of question marks that takes a plunge into the ridiculous in its climactic scene.

This show was originally called "American Wreck", until somebody at CBS realized that could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not a wreck, really, it just never gets rolling in any direction that looks interesting enough to follow.

This show is so far-fetched it makes "24" look like political reporting and "Lost" seem like a nature documentary.

Lopez probably has a sitcom in him, but this isn't it. And it has nothing to do with the Latino bent. "My Wife & Kids" is funny because Damon Wayans is funny and it's about a funny family. It has nothing to do with race. Same with George Lopez. It's bad because it's bad, and bad knows no color. [27 Mar 2002]