All in all, the stories about the town feel somewhat contrived, and the lead characters' arcs feel predictable, despite the texture the actors are occasionally able to give the material.

The rather sunny ending of New Girl doesn't feel earned, and your enjoyment level may depend on how much you can tolerate Zooey Deschanel's doofy charisma.

There are times when the enterprise lacks a certain heft and when the fantasy realm seems a little generic. Also, some characters, especially Lana Parrilla's Evil Queen (who is also the mayor of Storybrooke), are one-dimensional in kind of maddening ways, though Robert Carlyle makes up for that with his charismatic turn as both Rumplestiltskin and a Storybrooke resident named Mr. Gold.

If Person of Interest can calibrate the relationship between the leads in a way that makes their interactions more compelling, and if the show finds ways to answer Nolan's questions in creative and unexpected ways, it could be CBS' next addictive drama. If it ends up being a post-9/11 version of 'The Equalizer,' then this person will quickly lose interest.

The characters are thinner than cardboard cutouts, and I could see every “twist” coming from a mile away.

A pleasingly executed diversion featuring capable and textured performances from actors in key roles.

The Defenders which, like those other shows, is a pretty straightforward legal procedural, has a surprising amount of fun with its familiar building blocks.

All in all, the terrific Enlisted is one of the most pleasing network comedies to come along in quite some time.

The River isn't terrible, and it actually has some effective elements, but it's fairly indicative of ABC's post-"Lost" flailing.

Alexander and Stapleton, both appealing enough in their own right, to execute some basic action-adventure moves, though their characters have no discernible chemistry as yet. The Blindspot pilot is more or less efficient enough, even though few aspects of the premise make any real sense.

Gretchen and Jimmy's story, which acquires surprising emotional weight as the season progresses, is highly addictive on its own merits.

It isn’t afraid to spend time in critical and somewhat obscure areas. It also enlivens the drama with sharply drawn non-musical characters.

Frankly, it's avant-garde to the point of feeling overwrought and pretentious.

Again and again, the show takes what should be subtext and turned it into stilted dialogue that grows repetitive very quickly.

The Leftovers is interesting television, even if, in the early going, it's not quite sure of what it wants to be or where it wants to go.

Political Animals hews fairly closely to the USA tone and smartly employs any number of light-drama conventions, thus it can likely be enjoyed simply as an entertainment

It's to the credit of Asylum's writers, directors and cast that the emotional pain of the characters often feels as real as their uncertainty and terror.

Calling Blood Drive a rom-com would be stretching things, but it is refreshing to see that love can still bloom in a world where, if you softly whispered, “I would die for you,” most of the population would take you up on the offer.

This Cougar Town vintage may be a bit brasher and brighter, but never fear: It's still quite potent and drinkable.

The idea that in the long-ago past there were differing versions of how to reinvent humanity's future could make for compelling drama, and those kind of story lines are more likely to be more intriguing than what will transpire among the Shannons, unless this bland family's character development takes a great leap forward very quickly.

Applegate and Will Arnett, who plays her husband, Chris, are very good, which is no surprise. It's nice to see Arnett playing something other than an emotionally stunted man-child, and if the pilot for Up All Night didn't make me guffaw all that much, it passed by pleasantly and it was good to see that creator Emily Spivey was able to wring comedy from the new-parent situation without using the same dozen baby jokes we've all seen 200 times before.

It's a strained, generic affair.

Having a character and her family deal with a potentially fatal illness is such a rich arena for both drama and black comedy, but so far, The Big C hasn't been able to mine that topic with consistent freshness and depth.

All in all, the new season of Falling Skies gets the basics right.

There is awkwardness and idiocy on display in Life's Too Short, which stars actor Warwick Davis as a hopefully inaccurate version of himself, but almost none of it is funny, much of it is off-putting and all of it is pointless.

Trophy Wife is charming and buoyant, and it has fun with tasks that feel like homework on many other new shows: It creates specific characters, establishes a consistent tone and sets up a host of relationships that are full of potential.

In its pilot, it achieved its modest goals without leaning too far into pompousness (as is the case with "Almost Human") or slicing off too much ham (hello "The Blacklist").

The clash between the callow and the compelling set off an ongoing debate between the hopeful part of my brain, which wants to like a sci-fi-ish show dreamed up by executive producers J.J. Abrams and Eric Kripke, and the scarred part of my brain, which has been burned dozens of times by genre-flavoroed shows that had interesting elements or cast members but also disappointing executions and annoying younger characters.

Even if Scandal isn't quite as instantly addictive as "Grey's Anatomy" was back in the day, this is a well-paced, generally well-acted show with some promising elements (though there is also an occasional tendency to offer contrived redemptions that don't make a ton of sense).

Sure, there were some good bits in there. It wasn't that Conan put on a bad or unprofessional show, just a very conventional one.

Hostages unfolds with the crisp efficiency of a humorless event planner checking tasks off a list.

This West Coast Law & Order works best when it gives its able cast knotty dilemmas to play.

Nothing about these connections feels particularly earned and many of the twists and turns of the pilot feel contrived and obvious, especially toward the end.

The whole point of the show is to display super sexy spies having cool adventures and getting to know each other again as they try to put the spark back into their marriage. There's nothing necessarily objectionable about that, but forgive me if I expect more from a series that J.J. Abrams is involved in. Having said all that, Undercovers is not a chore to watch.

As an origin story, Alphas hits some notes too hard and lacks a certain subtlety, yet there's potential in this tale, especially if it delves into the psychological cost of being extraordinary.

[The actors] are cramped by obvious, unsubtle writing and a show that doesn't seem to have much of an idea of where to take these sardonic characters.

It's rare to come across a comedy that displays such admirable focus and delivers such smartly packaged slices of diverting escapism. More, please.

The good news is this modest show already has a number of things in its favor: Its pace is bracing, the choices are difficult and the danger the characters face is real.

The pilot is high-strung but basically acceptable, and I'll keep watching in the well-founded hopes that it will find consistently entertaining groove and use its fine cast (which includes Tim Meadows and Dan Bucatinsky as Annie's dads) as well as "Happy Endings" used its fab ensemble.

Some of the mystical stuff in The Defenders remains just that: mystical. But after a couple of episodes, and a couple of fights that resemble high-tech barroom brawls, viewers will get the rhythm of the story.

Crisis is efficient without really ever becoming enticing.

It's good at being tedious.

It's oddly disconnected from the idea of art as transformation, the show's characters are thinly drawn and it's usually fairly easy to see where the story is heading.

All things considered, though, this is a show that is pretty firmly fixed on what it does best--serving up soapy, Texas-sized shenanigans and trying to mix in a little seasoning of real emotion along the way.

It’s not a dealbreaker of an idea to take a famous historical figure and put him or her into a world that makes his or her life more relatable to young folks who come along several centuries later. It works better, though, if the modern trappings flavor the historic character, rather than the other way around.

A weird photocopy containing little atmosphere and less emotional resonance.

It doesn't work as a character drama and it's tiresome more often than it's freakily scary.

Alcatraz isn't bad, but it's not exactly brimming with the kind of engaging magic and memorable people that you want from a J.J. Abrams project.

There are some solid jokes and gags scattered throughout the first two episodes. But as I watched them, it was difficult not to feel a sense of deflation that strayed into disappointment. It became more and more clear over the course of those episodes that The Muppets had been jammed into a format that doesn’t quite suit them.

It does what it sets out to do reasonably well without breaking my brain in the process.

"He's a lawyer--but with a twist!" is not a formula that the big networks will ever stop trying to perfect. But the execution of that idea isn't quite up to par in the first episode of Rake.

Zachary Quinto, Peter Sarsgaard, Uma Thurman, Thandie Newton and Melissa George all try their best, but this is not a legal drama or a cop show, where a near-miss can more or less work. You either nail this kind of challenging material or you don't, and The Slap ultimately fails to live up to the potential implied in its attention-getting title.

Cooper does a solid job with the title role, and the early installments have an engaging briskness. However, Fleming drags a bit in its second half; given its slender budget, it might have worked better as a three-episode miniseries.

The Necessary Roughness pilot was enjoyable enough, but half the fun may have come from seeing Dani's adjustment to the big money, high-stakes world of professional sports. Can this show go the distance? It isn't clear yet, but at this admittedly early stage, the latest addition to the USA roster appears to be a promising rookie.

Fifteen minutes into A Gifted Man, the performance of Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Ehle and Margo Martindale had completely won me over, and of all the pilots I've screened for fall, this is the one I most want to see more of.

Given that this show was created by "Scream" writer Kevin Williamson, there's the usual showy deconstruction of scary-story cliches, but that deconstruction just draws attention to how hollow this project is. ... Ultimately, my dislike for The Following has less to do with its gore factor than with its essential laziness, silliness and pretentiousness.

Created by John Singleton with Eric Amadio and Dave Andron, Snowfall is a good-looking production. It gets its music from turntables and boomboxes and it reminds us that South Central Los Angeles, for all its notoriety, has a lot of tree-lined streets and perfectly decent houses with front yards. It also reminds us that crack cocaine was not so much a brand new problem as the consequence of several larger and longer-simmering problems.

ABC has a house style, and this workmanlike execution of that style pretty much derails this drama. Many interior scenes are over-lit and thus not spooky, and there’s just a blandness in the casting and the production design that does nothing to help The Whispers build up the kind of mysterious atmosphere it needs to work.

The New Normal needs to work in a more linear and emotionally direct fashion, and there's not much about this NBC pilot, which is fueled by a mixture of cattiness and slick manipulation, that reassures me on that front.

[A] solid and confident show.

In execution, Turn is plodding, predictable and a bit confusing, though I might have tried harder to follow the plot had any of the characters made it worth my while. As it is, the characters are mostly paper-thin and forgettable.

While Ricci and Hoflin play well together, the intensity of that primal force, particularly from Scott’s side, doesn’t always come across. He needs a simmering intensity.

It hasn't yet proven that it can find consistently satisfying things to do with the legal drama (Harvey's "closing" scenes are fun though I can see them becoming a bit of a crutch).

Like dozens of recent network comedies, Mad Love feels as though it was focus-grouped until any edges it might have had were completely worn away.

Unfortunately the new version of Being Human is more repetitive, clunky and melodramatic than the previous one.

The drama, which is an adaptation of a U.K. series of the same name, tries way too hard to be a Serious Cable Drama. The strain almost turns it into a parody of the genre.

The second season of this Western finds it marginally better paced and the characters moderated a bit from the broad archetypes seen in Season 1, but I still find little to compel me in the story of a robber baron and an ex-soldier teaming up to get a transcontinental railroad built.

Shahi makes a valiant attempt to make these stories entertaining, and the fact that she succeeds part of the time is a testament to her energy and skills. But the progression of the plots and the resolutions are so pat that there's almost no suspense in these stories.

While this is hardly the first complicated sibling relationship in a TV series, this one has the overlay of unspoken things both men apparently felt extraordinary circumstances had forced them to do.

Ringer isn't terrible. But it's less than it could be, and it has yet to present viewers with compelling reasons for putting up with its contrivances.

David Duchovny is good in all of his scenes in the two-hour Aquarius pilot (which is all I could get through), but the rest of the cast for the period drama is unimpressive.

When Williams can rein in his hyper qualities, he can be an effective presence. And at least he knows his way around a joke, unlike Gellar, who, post-"Buffy," still hasn't risen above the level of the writing she's given (and the writing for her here is flat and one-dimensional).

The main thing Camelot has going for it is a lively, unpretentious desire to entertain. It doesn't take itself overly seriously--Merlin has a wry sense of humor--and there are some capable action sequences amid scenes of rustic splendor.

To really hook into this drama, you have to care about the kids and their fates, but to me, they all remained predictable types throughout, and the show did a poor job of showcasing the terrific Octavia Spencer.

It feels less bold than familiar, and thus, in its own way, perhaps too quickly comfortable.

With its mildly irascible lead and its extremely sturdy central premise, it evokes USA's better shows, right down to its blue skies and palm trees.

What's mystifying is why Starz and the creators of Black Sails seem to think that, given the expanding array of options available to consumers, any content creators can get away with peddling fare that can't even manage to be consistently mediocre.

Happy Endings is really no better than any of those other comedies ['Better With You,' 'Traffic Light' and 'Perfect Couples,'], which is to say, it's pretty weak.

Defiance is not just a smart, well-crafted TV show with a good cast and an adventurous flavor, it's also indisputably science fiction, which is a relief.

One of the most narrow and timid fall seasons in memory. This premise is particularly tired.

On paper, it all appears to be functional. In reality, I find myself uninterested in Ryan's minuscule problems and Wilfred's repeated attempts to hector or nag Ryan into taking more chances with his narrow little life.

Karen Gillan is a treasure, and it's only by dint of her presence that this comedy works some of the time. Yet in a larger sense, "Selfie" does not really work, because there are a lot of unpleasant and judgmental elements lurking in its premise.

12 Monkeys hums along at a reasonable pace; its pilot is pleasingly energetic and efficient.... The problem is, 12 Monkeys tends to prioritize a series of MacGuffins over attempts to deepen its characters and their relationships.

Thought-provoking and melancholy, like all good F. Scott Fitzgerald stories, The Last Tycoon delivers a good summer watch. ... All this said, The Last Tycoon has taken some critical heat, and not without cause. It has several unsparkling passages and weak spots.

Every point is hammered home with a complete lack of subtlety; during the closing argument in the pilot, bits of previous scenes were replayed at crucial moments, in case the audience forgot what transpired several minutes ago. It's always a good time when a television network assumes that you're a half-wit.

The problem is that the cases that the lead duo take on aren't offbeat enough, and Gosselaar's appealing qualities aren't enough to make up for Franklin & Bash's other shortcomings.

When The Newsroom isn't obvious and self-congratulatory, it's manipulative and shrieky.

Everything around Malkovich is workmanlike and rather predictable, if competent.

Despite all the show's flaws, she makes some quieter emotional moments work, thanks to her undeniable presence and skills. The by-the-numbers vehicle that has been constructed around her isn't worthy of her talent, however.

The Secret Circle does exactly what you expect it to do, yet that efficiency ends up being refreshing rather than maddening.

Everything about Magic City shows a lack of depth, and the pacing is almost glacial.

Breakout Kings is better than "The Glades," another A&E scripted drama set in the world of law enforcement, but that's not saying a whole lot. Still, if future episodes are as good as the second episode (and better than the clunky pilot), it'll give fans of "White Collar" or "Leverage" something to watch until those shows come back.

A tedious array of shrieky moments, dumb stereotypes and unearned sentiment.

All in all, Skip, an unkempt ball of puppyish energy to whom the writers feed a wealth of good material, is by far the best thing about this show. Jenna Elfman is all right as first lady and the rest of the cast hovers around the edges not making much of an impression.

Believe substitutes mawkish sentiment for character development and thinks mysterious incidents and procedural beats constitute a story.

This iteration of the very successful "NCIS" franchise is, unsurprisingly, as competent as all the others, Bakula is typically good and it's nice that the show actually shot in New Orleans.

Aside from the moments in which Stephen Moyer and a few supporting actors are on the screen, however, the show fails to ignite in any sustainable and meaningful way.

It's a self-aware superhero drama that manages to have some fun amid the righteous butt-kicking, and if it can develop its characters intelligently and keep up the sprightly pace, I'll stick around.