More work needs to be done on all the characters; so far they're just types, and the first episode, perhaps because of its manic tone, didn't make me laugh much. But I can see Breaking In growing into a pleasant, mildly goofy comedy that offers the light-adventure qualities of a USA or TNT show and the silly diversions of a half-decent 'Chuck' episode.

Mr. Sunshine isn't particularly hilarious or endearing, and the comedy doesn't surround Perry with a balanced ensemble of characters who get to be funny as well.

It's surprising to me that this ever got past the development stage, because nothing about Tyrant truly works. It's a halting, strained hodgepodge that ends up being an awkward mixture of bland and offensive.

Common Law, like "Fairly Legal" before it, isn't just formulaic--it's lazy.

It's mildly amusing, but it comes off as an extended appetizer, not a meal.

The problem is, like "Sean Saves the World" and "The Michael J. Fox Show," this show is formulaic, slightly frantic and relies too much on unearned sentiment.

As rendered here, none of its medical crises or characters are terribly compelling.

It'll likely be a typical CBS sitcom going forward: full of broad characters and predictable moments but reasonably amusing and well made.

Unless the show improves from this more or less adequate premiere and shows consistent flair and originality, I can’t in good conscience recommend Heroes Reborn over the sterling comic books, new and old, the property continues to imitate.

While it's no "Closer," the Eric McCormack vehicle Perception is perfectly adequate "Eccentric Consulting Genius" fare.

At least Lewis appeared to be having fun, which can't be said of anyone else in this rather grim production.

The Goldbergs has a solid adult cast, but the whole thing leans heavily on broad humor and cartoonish moments--and did I mention that it's LOUD.

The end result is ... merely OK.

It's hard to find much in Backstrom that feels fresh or original.

For all its formulaic predictability, though, this show has an acerbic self-awareness that may defuse the cynicism you may bring to it.

I found Free Agents more than tolerable, and there's potential in the office ensemble that surrounds these two characters (though I wouldn't mind if the super-sass of Natasha Leggero's assistant character was toned down a bit).

This is a case of a show just not working on both a structural and emotional level.

The actors have no chemistry together and their characters lack the kind of depth and texture that a well-crafted TV project would have been able to give them. Various actors frequently have to deliver painful exposition dumps, the storytelling is often incoherent.

There's a tentative blandness to 'Star-Crossed' that hindered my ability to care about any of its broadly sketched characters.

The only thing I can think about when I watch the Millers is that Margo Martindale deserves so much better than this, and I wish she was free of this show's hackneyed, overly broad "humor."

The show takes the time to give a few realistic dimensions to the characters' emotional lives, and each actor in the core trio has sharp comic timing.

Undateable, a show that does not set out to reinvent the multi-camera hangout comedy but execute that format reasonably well, turned out to be a generally pleasant surprise.

V needs to either camp it up completely or go in the other direction and model itself after propulsive dramas such as '24.' The show's attempts meld those two very different tones together just makes for an awkward mismatch.

I found little to object to in the pilot for Chaos, a mostly male action-adventure hour that is energetic and mildly amusing from time to time.

No matter how many times the show piles on another complication for the patients of the week, everything about the characters and the cases has a been-there, done-that feeling, and that rote quality is not mitigated by the occasional acknowledgement of the show's jungle setting.

Hawkins does a solid job filling Jack’s familiar shoes.

This just doesn't work on any level and creates very little suspense, even in life-or-death situations.

Good comedies take a lot of work, but that strain shouldn't show up on the screen. It pains me to say that, despite all the obvious effort, I can't see how Running Wilde could get significantly better.

Not only are Whitney's jokes a little musty, the multi-camera format seems like the wrong choice for this comedy.

Aside from Don Johnson’s canny oil baron, and as we found with the “Dallas” revival, one savvy old dude can’t always carry an entire show on his back, especially when the rest of it is so mechanical.

Animal Practice might devolve into a lot of jokes about mammalian reproduction and/or defecation, or it might evolve into a goofy workplace drama with reasonably sparky leads and occasionally frisky pythons. Given the quality of the core cast and the mildly pleasing (if broad) nature of the pilot, I've got my paws crossed and I'm hoping for the latter.

Well, this is a pile of nonsense, but at least it's more or less inoffensive nonsense.

Happily, in spite of the plot labyrinth that any conspiracy theory naturally creates, Salvation keeps its story understandable and makes us keep wanting to know what happens next.

I can't see this comedy having long-term appeal, given the thinness of the premise and the boring character at its center.

ABC is advertising that the show's creators wrote "The Hangover," but imagine that movie with the heart and charm removed, and you're left with these skeevy remains.

It doesn't seem to know who it wants to focus on or what it wants to do (the security missions, such as they are, are unexceptional afterthoughts).

Unfortunately, heaping helpings of atmosphere do not make up for the lack of a strong narrative thread or the fact that the characters are so thinly drawn that it's hard to care about anything they do.

Though Between doesn’t belong among the most ambitious shows on that roster, it knows what it wants to do and sets about doing it efficiently, effectively and with a minimum of fuss.

The bigger problem is, this show clearly has designs on being the next "Modern Family" and yet it isn't charming in the slightest. To hook viewers, the pilot needs to make them care about at least one person in this ensemble, and it can't manage that.

It's be one thing if the show employed thinly drawn, cliched characters in service of solid comedy, but very little of Glory Daze is actually funny.

Super Fun Night isn't just bad, it's infuriatingly bad, given Wilson's likability, game energy and overall potential as a TV personality.

The show treats this central culture clash with a great deal of tentativeness, a quality that never makes for good comedy, yet despite its scaredy-cat caution, Outsourced still manages to be vaguely insulting and condescending.

This middling-to-mediocre Reelz production is at least a few notches above a Syfy Saturday night movie. The special effects in "Ring" are sometimes passable and sometimes fairly terrible, but there is an actual story on display and manages to be somewhat timely.

Despite the careful attention to image enhancement possibilities, the core ugliness and toxic narcissism of Anger Management are impossible to ignore.

Perfect Couples is so screechy, predictable and lame that I kind of despised these characters within minutes of being introduced to them.

I might have tried harder to get past the bad taste that situation left in my mouth, had the rest of the show not been fairly paint-by-numbers and generic, but as escapist hours go, there's not a lot of meat on the bone here.

The series doesn’t go too deeply into several issues raised about Playboy over the years, like exploitation, objectification, and elitism. Instead, when it comes to controversy, American Playboy seems to focus primarily on the accusation that because it flaunted naked women, Playboy was obscene.

State of Affairs is not quite a pulpy thrill ride, not quite an addictive melodrama and not quite a serious, searching drama.

The show has some ponderous moments and its characters are sometimes guilty of not asking and answering direct questions that would give them valuable information. But eight episodes isn't too much of a commitment, and Outcasts at least has thematic and character-driven ambitions, as well as a gorgeously weird setting.

The rhythms, the "jokes" and the pace are all stiff and overwrought, and priority seems to be giving Sean Hayes a huge number of opportunities to mug for the camera.

For all its predictable moments, however, Made in Jersey is still more or less watchable, thanks to Montgomery, who is an effortlessly appealing actress.

[Whitaker's] charisma gives Suspect a strong center and his line delivery is consistently interesting. If the original 'Minds' is one of your favorite shows, there's no reason not to give this drama a shot.

Feisty is one thing, rude is another. But all of that is of a piece with the show's generally lazy approach to storytelling: A couple of supporting characters are cardboard villains, and a subplot about a minor's surgical procedure doesn't make a ton of sense if you know the first thing about medical privacy laws.

This annoying show is not quite as drenched in dumb and/or sexist assumptions as "Mixology," but that is the lowest possible bar to clear.

Perhaps Allen Gregory's arrogance is meant to be entertaining, but I just found it mostly insufferable, despite his occasional flashes of self-awareness.

CBS programs generally display a level of basic competence that this "comedy" falls woefully short of.

Despite solid work from the show's supporting cast, none of the elements of this show really work. So far, the only thing it has going for it is that it kicked "Perfect Couples" off the air.

This contrived, airless comedy is not a good vehicle for him, nor is there much enjoyment to be found in the show's musty supporting characters.

It keeps resorting to broad gags and dopey jokes, and, just to mix things up, every so often it lunges at sincerity. None of it lands, unfortunately.

Smoothing off some of the rogue cop’s edges, ironically, makes Paxton’s acting job more difficult. He has keep reminding us that he’s contemptuous of many law enforcement standards while at the same time throwing out hints he still harbors some deep and real humanity.Roarke sometimes lurches a little from this balancing act, at least in the early going, and that can throw off other characters as well.

Rosewood brings nothing distinctive or memorable to the formula, aside from the welcome diversity of its cast.

The women here are shrewish, the vibe is both manic and tired, and overall, the decent cast (which includes the wonderful Anthony Anderson) is given nothing funny to do.

What a big mess, and what a disappointing waste of Debra Messing.

Women are as capable of writing a misogynist, soul-killing TV comedy as anyone else. Exhibit A: I Hate My Teenage Daughter, a shrieky nightmare.

NBC's new Jimmy Smits vehicle is called Outlaw. I guess the title 'Contrived, Irritating Star Vehicle' just wasn't as catchy.

Chelsea doesn't do anything to make the TV version of Chelsea interesting, likable or winning.

The existence of this comedy, which pretends to be brash but mainly succeeds in being more offensive, unfunny and predictable than Dads, told me that we have angered the gods.

The attempt to shoehorn the Shat into the strained story of a father and an adult son, Henry, getting to know each other for the first time seems false. And when there are glimmers that it might work, Shatner's character, Ed, is visited by his grating other son, Vince, and his even more grating wife, Bonnie. They're awful.

Liz and Dick is badly paced, cheap-looking and encrusted with a tinkly, preposterous soundtrack that is designed to make viewers go insane.

It’s hard to assess much of the acting here because most of the actors are confined by a script that swings between harsh judgments and moments of deep sentimentality that almost feel as if they were included to be compensatory.

This shoddy program is nothing more than exploitative, misogynist trash.

Creatively speaking, Dads comes off as if it were a much-resented homework assignment for all involved.

White steals scenes and mugs for the camera, which is obviously what the producers want her to do. But even though the loud laugh track can be annoying at times, there's no denying that the cast of this endearingly retro sitcom makes the most of what they've been given.

A few notches below that "must-see" category are those "laundry-folders," if you will--programs that occupy some your attention but don't distract you unduly from household chores.

This well-constructed drama is something to treasure on the TV schedule--it's a show that respects our everyday experiences and emotions and yet also manages to entertain.

It's nice to see that in the first three episodes of the eight-episode second season, the plots, such as they are, have a little more discipline and focus than they did in season 1.

It's hard to get behind the dilemmas of a group characters who whine as much as this gloomy bunch.

The good aspects of this show are engaging and Misfits is a damn sight more consistent than the most spectacular fail in this genre, "Heroes."

All in all, the Alphas season premiere is competent and enjoyable when it comes to action and pacing, but this show (especially given its modest budget) will rise and fall on the continuation of the character development begun in Season 1, and the jury's still out on that front.

Happy Endings has so many things going for it that the occasional weak story line or meh scene is not a big deal at all.

One of the best things about "Happy Endings," however, is how the character relationships all work--each combination of characters brings its own pleasures. Suburgatory isn't quite there yet.

This show only occasionally works, and I increasingly think it would have been a better bet as an animated show.

This amiable, entertaining show isn't trying to change the world or strain the boundaries of scripted television, and that's just fine.

A taut, enjoyable second season.

Syfy's Defiance doesn't just cement its place as a well-made and enjoyable show, it continues to serve as a welcome corrective to some recent trends in TV sci-fi.

This British import is weird, slight and lovingly made, and perhaps most importantly, it's smart enough not to overstay its welcome.

Blacklist: Redemption is a sturdy show built on a smart premise.

Even more in the second season than the first, Home Fires is an ensemble piece. ... It’s precisely this approach, telling lots of little stories whose war connections differ widely, that gives Home Fires a ring of truth.