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.

It's too dour and it takes itself too seriously, but it has potential.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

There are fitful moments that work, but the show also manages to shoot itself in the foot regularly.

The end result is ... merely OK.

Lights Out isn't a bad show, but it's frustratingly uneven. It has its moments, but at this stage, it doesn't offer the kind of deeply fascinating and addictive portrait of human nature that we've come to expect from the top tier of cable dramas.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

There are some promising ideas and story lines here, but the pilot far outshone subsequent episodes in terms of quality and efficiency.

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.

To its credit, American Crime puts race on the table as a topic that the characters confront and talk about with refreshing frankness, but the show as a whole is so predictable and lacking in depth that there's little else to recommend it.

Given how wonderful its first season was, the fact that Broadchurch has turned into such a muddle is the bigger disappointment. Despite the usual array of finely calibrated performances, the second season simply doesn't work, in large part because it consciously and deliberately undoes much of what was powerful about the shattering conclusion to the first season.

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.

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.

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.

It's a strained, generic affair.

The main problem is, Man Seeking Woman tries for the kind of weird, imaginative wit you find on "Archer" or "Louie" but the new show doesn't have the craft, ideas or skills to back it up.

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).

It's almost a shot-for-shot remake of the original, but that's not what makes this version a derivative TV zombie. It's the lack of atmosphere and the near-complete absence of a mournful, mysterious tone that makes the new version feel empty and hollow.

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