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.