The confusion of this multi-genre series and its far-fetched ending is only justified by Bell and her imminent watchability, which works no matter who she is portraying or how shabby the material she’s working with is. ... An empty calorie binge.

The Bastard Executioner suffers from inconsistent pacing. At times meandering or sluggish, it then changes gears, rapidly springing a gory, adrenaline-infused battle seemingly out of nowhere.

Brown does a decent job with what she’s given. But when her character’s name is the title, it’s around Queenie that everything revolves and with a weak central figure, that’s too much time is spent on her.

Parish should be off to the races, but, sadly, too often it stalls out.

Amanda Seyfried gamely does her best, and at times she succeeds in capturing Holmes’ mannerisms and deranged energy.

More risk-taking with the jokes and stepping up to the comedy from the rest of the cast and the show might eventually become something--and that's only if they can come up with enough stories for what is essentially a thin, workplace/home life crossover sitcom.

There’s a lot of squandered potential here. The lack of focus on the customers is an easy win missed. And while the lack of a “big bad” may be refreshing but means the show lacks any sense of real peril or urgency. By the halfway mark we lose sight of the driving force of the show and slip into soapy silliness.

The set-up sounds promising except the overwhelming apologetic tone that blankets every single exchange stops Ten Percent from developing any kind of edge.

The premise provides an interesting hook for a period drama, but the show straddles too many lines, as far as tone and genre go. If it committed more fully to any one direction, it would be exponentially stronger. As it is, it feels too concerned with casting as wide a net as possible and could fail to catch many return viewers.

Down Cemetery Road’s first season starts off as a pulse-pounding journey that sadly hits a dead end.

With all these elements working in its favor, scale back on the titular character and give Missy and the mom some more individual airtime and you might have something worth its timeslot.

Feldman and Milioti are inherently likeable actors, though as Andrew and Zelda, even their allures wane, stretched too thin by underwhelming writing and a disappointing lack of both humor and creativity.

Meadows was the one minor bright spot as the self-emasculating and self-deprecating therapist. Hines' allusions to a wild, coked-up past, Zorn's workplace woes, Pemberton's teen angst-these were all well-treaded tropes, and likely a missed opportunity for something more clever.

The Goldbergs banks on nostalgia for its charm, but needs to build on something more for us to really care about this family.

It works in measures, but the tragedy here is that Samberg's leash is too short.

Nothing groundbreaking, but every so often a sports-themed show is de rigueur

An entire season of no conflicts and Shrill’s series finale ends with a mess of loose ends, that makes it feel like all Annie’s and Fran’s personal accomplishments have amounted to nothing and leaves viewers with no resolution.

The efficiency and charisma of these two, enhanced by the haute couture and clichéd exotic locales, makes watching Undercovers really fun-but not very believable as a spy drama. It is all a little too casual and humorous to be convincing.

The show tries (too) hard for laughs ... Walsh does what she can with the material, but by the twelfth time she utters the word "dude," her efforts fall flat.

A show that offers few laughs and just as much entertainment.

The past is suddenly malleable. This removes all the stakes, but also downgrades 12 Monkeys from fatalistic sci-fi dystopia to a predictable genre piece. Not horrible by SyFy, or even cable thriller standards, but still disappointing.

As it stands now, the case-of-the-week approach is as hackneyed a take on Minority Report as FOX could have come up with.

The acting lacks conviction, but with a script this predictably sudsy, acting chops aren't at the top of the required list.

Charlotte and Jonah don't get enough screen time, which is the shame as they are the main reasons to tune into Ozark, which is otherwise not worth the commitment.

Limp and gratuitous dialogue often borders on melodrama, and none of the characters are particularly compelling or interesting. [Sep/Oct 2014, p.83]

Overall, it took Once Upon a Time a season to fall flat; Penny Dreadful does that immediately.

If you can tolerate the overly histrionic pilot and are curious enough to find out what "the event" actually is, of which there is no mention in the pilot, then NBC has a Lost-esque show on its hands. Count me out.

Running Wilde exerts so much energy setting up the jokes that they end up forced. Arnett breaks off a couple of great one-liners, but Running Wilde has a lot of work to do in order to even be a good sitcom, much less a Hall of Famer like Arrested.

Corey Hawkins does a perfectly serviceable job in the thankless role of playing the new Jack, as do the other leads Jimmy Smits and Miranda Otto. But you'll have more fun rewatching your season one DVD.

Welcome to Wrexham is, in a word, boring. The documentary-capturing cameras have been on from before day one and they’re capturing the dullest footage there ever was.

The clichés are too silly and obvious.

Underwood always plays overconfident characters, and Ironside is no exception, but the wheelchair aspect makes it feel like he is trying too hard. None of the other characters are defined enough to balance out anything Underwood is doing. The stories are textbook cop fodder.

O'Quinn doesn't have nearly the command he did on Lost, even if he is in charge. Any scenes with the gang members' families are just plain cringe-worthy.

The original series was nowhere near being the most profound television of its time, but at least it was entertaining. The Gossip Girl reboot’s uninteresting storylines, paper-thin characters, and lack of purpose cannot even claim that praise.

[The actors'] experience and timing makes the writing work better than it is written, but they are working overtime to get that to happen.

Granted, Dollface is a comedy, but it’s not a comedy for tweens, yet that’s how the series plays out.

The big, heartfelt, Dangerous Minds style lines that are geared at squeezing out tears are so cheesy, predictable, and trite, they cause eye-rolls instead.

A wonky framing device, where Moynihan fills in gaps in the storylines directly to the audience, is given no explanation as to why it's even there, or who he's talking to; you're left to suspect that the writers couldn't figure out a more organic way to clue viewers in on why these scenes are being show to them.

The actors frequently sound hokey, and much of the dialogue drags as if it were ripped from a textbook, instead of coming from lived in characters.

To give the second season of The Morning Show something, anything, to propel it forward, there are a variety of soapy dramas, many of them pinned to the new characters. These cobbled together histrionic dramatics are offensive compared to the gravity of the issues of the first season. Even combined, the desperate scrambles of the second season don’t have enough bite, or credibility, for the viewer to invest in.

There are a few new characters that are life preservers in this murky swamp of uninteresting plots.

Every cheap sexual innuedndo, obvious adolscent pun, and cliched puerile situation is exploited here. [Holiday 2009, p.86]

This could have been more appealing with a stylized visual approach or a novel tone but instead it's sci-fi-by-numbers. [Nov-Dec 2015, p.78]

Welcome to the Family's storyline is so predictable, it doesn't warrant watching.

Much of Imperfect Women’s runtime is squandered, wringing these forty-something friends through one plot contrivance to the next.

The Tomorrow People, which is a remake of a 1970s British show, is completely bogged down with rushed exposition, stale acting, and pointless action scenes that leave not much to look forward to.

For a comedy, We Are Men is, in a word, sad.

High Desert is barren of laughs, and its tone is as abrasive as a dusty California valley cactus.

There is absolutely no reason-other than the sheer good-lookingness of My Generation's cast-to tune into the show. Still, we are rooting for creator Noah Hawley (The Unusuals, Bones) to drag this one out of the mire.

The main storyline isn't strong enough and the incongruous peripheral elements just confuse rather than engage the viewer.

The rest of Detroit 1-8-7's cast is fill-in-the-blanks police fodder. The only two characteristics that separate this show is one, it is filmed wholly in Detroit (who cares, a soundstage looks just as convincing) and two, the cameras are handheld (who cares, that shakiness can become very annoying).

For now, it lacks such innovation, to say the least. It's as stale as yesterday's paper.

The characters are cookie-cutter, the dialogue predictable, the jokes stale and flat, completely unexpected from a sitcom veteran.

With such a superior comedy cast, it's deplorable how far this badly written and directed show has dragged them down.

This could be a watershed moment in TV's long and inglorious history of idiocy, a drama that unintentionally almost matches Arrested Development for laughs.