SDRR places itself in the awkward position of having created--when you fold in John Corbett’s Flash--some likable characters (well, maybe not Johnny, but that’s the way Leary likes it; he’s a preening antihero to the end) who remain in search of the right vehicle to take them to another level of excellence.

All the stars are as likable and watchable as you might think they’d be, yet the show that they’re in is nearly bereft of humor or poignance. It’s as though everyone signed on without reading a script and, good sports all, just forged ahead anyway.

Containment has a reasonably suspenseful pilot as directed by David Nutter (Game of Thrones, The X-Files). But as the series proceeds, it just becomes more repetitive and tedious.

It’s fitfully interesting to see Zellner mount her new defense, but the fact that both Avery and Dassey are still in prison doesn’t exactly make you want to race through the series to witness a triumphant conclusion.

Repetitious (okay, we get it: Sam Phillips had an unhappy marriage and made out with Marion as frequently as possible) and clumsy in its lurch from one disparate subplot to another, Sun Records is such a slow burn, it’s kind of a fizzle.

American Grit is sluggishly paced, and plays like one of those weeks on Survivor when everyone is just waiting for the visit from their “loved ones” so they can cry and hug a little before the next test of strength.

The two lead actors do their best to feign exasperation with each other, and with Liddiard’s cop Adelaide. But the dialogue isn’t clever--it’s more on the level of strenuous declarations.

There is a lot of clunky, melodramatic dialogue, like, “You have to find the Fortress; you have to save Superman!” There is a glowering supervillain in the form of veteran DC Comics bad guy Brainiac. Last month, I ventured a guess that, sight unseen, Krypton would be lousy. Now, sight seen, I confirm this is so.

This star showcase does [Melissa George] no favors.... Dr. Alex doesn’t invite favorable comparisons to any doctor with dignity, and I would guess this series will not have a very long life.

Writer Ron McGee treats Full House as though it was a sacred icon whose pop-culture history must be maintained at all costs--in this case, the costs being believability and narrative momentum.

Cringy dialogue. ... The premiere features cameos by Grey’s stars Ellen Pompeo and Chandra Wilson, both of whom look as though someone is holding a pistol at their heads just off-camera.

Slapdash and one-joke-silly, The President Show would not seem to have much of a future as an ongoing enterprise.

The latest movie-to-TV adaptation is an exceptionally useless prequel to the Taken franchise.

Created by writer Ben Watkins, Hand of God has the pace of a pulp novel anxious to keep an audience watching, heedless of believability or motivation.

We don’t even get away from those awful homages to Edgar Allen Poe that used to stud the show’s Joe Carroll scripts--the new season contains murderous rhymes with terrible scansion such as, “While you lie/More die.” Written in blood, of course.

From Batman (’60s camp classic became morose Dark Knight movies) to Battlestar Galactica (bad utopian ’70s sci-fi became good dystopian sci-fi), the idea is to complicate the original premise and go for a realism signified by a somber tone and a cynical, knowing air. Knowing this, the new version of Lost in Space seems to be trying to have it both ways, and loses in the process. ... After checking out the first few episodes of the Netflix series, I found myself wishing [Matt] LeBlanc would rocket-ship in for a cameo.

The new project’s creation is credited to Corinne Brinkerhoff (The Good Wife; Jane the Virgin), whose previous work seems too smart for what’s going on in American Gothic. I will prefer to think that, like the people in another CBS show created by her former employers, her brain has been momentarily invaded by BrainDead’s alien ants.

It wants to evoke that sense of non-stop crisis, and it’s willing to sacrifice believability and good writing in the service of frantic pacing.

Getting any mileage out of Miley and her Bernardine Dohrn-with-a-husky-voice character proves unrewarding. Most of Crisis is spent listening to Sidney and Kay dither about hearing aids, Freudian analyses, and one-liners that sound dusted off from Allen’s decades-old standup act.

Epps is deprived of the sort of good writing that would showcase his talent well.

The jokes are difficult to locate.

I liked that Best Time Ever was big and loud and frenetic and ambitious. I just wish I could have suspended my disbelief for even one segment.

A sub-Mad Men piece, filled with trite characters and anachronistic dialogue.

The whole party-scene setting, complete with sneering guys with chains and women in brightly-colored wigs, is apparently intended to make you gawp at its carnal adventurousness. Instead, like the rest of Blood Drive, it’s as painfully boring as watching someone hit his fingers repeatedly with a hammer in an attempt to shock you.

After two hours of Agent Carter this week, you're left with lots of mumbo-jumbo that doesn't add up to much more than an excuse for Peggy Carter to strain her nylons while jumping off moving cars.

After a mildly amusing opening taped piece featuring Tom Hanks as a duplicitous astronaut, the hour went downhill fast.

Galavant feels like a slapped-together production that will only confirm the suspicions of heathen TV-watchers who think most musicals consist of flimsy stories padded out with tunes that repeat the plot developments.

Kelly, making her debut as an NBC host, marshaled her trademark steeliness, but it was no match for the insults (“Do you even understand what you’re asking?”) and the weaselly tactics of the KGB master spy. ... The fact that Sunday Night spent as much time rolling in the African mud with elephants (in a report about elephant poaching) as it did with Putin suggests how slim the pickings were in the editing room. Kelly filled up the rest of her debut by turning it over to other correspondents.

Featuring unconvincing dialogue. ... Notorious is otherwise instantly forgettable as soon as each scene is completed.

It’s aimed at millennials yet making fun of them constantly, and aimed at McHale fans while putting the star in his least-flattering light.

It lacks any character as vital and vivid as Taraji P. Henson’s Cookie. The dialogue is overwrought, and frequently tells us the very things we’re seeing on screen. The trio of aspiring stars are plucky, but they’re not very interesting, and neither is the music they sing.

McHale’s place in the culture has been taken up by Twitter. ... On his new show, McHale sorts through some very meager pickings.

Handler has said she wanted to move away from the jokes she used to make on E!’s Chelsea Lately about banal celebrity culture, and so on Chelsea she makes banal political jokes about politicians.

Rosenbaum is charming, and so is Sara Rue, as his assistant at the church. But pretty soon, the dumbness begins to settle in.

Except for Norm Macdonald as the voice of an alien made of what looked like quivering gelatin, I didn’t find much that was amusing about The Orville’s space odyssey. ... From its opening scene with Victor Garber assigning Ed his ship to the final, unsuspenseful shootout with alien enemies, The Orville moved from one lull to another.

The deluge of empowerment is relentless, repetitive, and boring. The supernatural elements of the plot seem borrowed from old episodes of Supernatural and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The special effects are super-cheesy, not much better than an old episode of Bewitched.

I hope [Arquette’s] getting paid a heckuva lot for striding through this new hour of televisual malware.

If Making a Murderer, The Jinx, and the first season of the Serial podcast heralded a new era of true-crime stories, this one is tediously told.

I found Bell to be one of the least likable protagonists in a prime time series in a while, which is really saying something in a season that has given us Notorious and Bull. ... Mulroney, not one of the liveliest of TV leading men, doesn’t just bring gravity to his role, he weighs it down with cement blocks.

We soon begin to see the method behind this show’s storytelling: If there’s a way to pump more pretentious gas into the story, Emerald City will find it.

The most obnoxious show of the new year thus far, Lucifer traduces the character created by Neil Gaiman and developed by writer Mike Carey in the Lucifer comic-book series.

The Shannara Chronicles is a lot of hooey with hotsy young actors.

This is the sort of show that could just as easily have premiered in 1997, or 1987, or 1977. ... [The] waste of talent that is most irritating about 9JKL.

Grim, humorless, and instantly off-putting.

One Big Happy is a loud, frantic sitcom so eager to please, you may want to avert your eyes.

Bordertown is a good example of how insipid and smug certain kinds of television can be when it tries to address contemporary issues.

It turns out that having your teeth pulled is a better metaphor for what it’s like to watch Feed the Beast than anything to do with fine food.

The reason 9-1-1 seems even worse than it is, is that it has such good actors performing such awful material. How awful?: Somebody flushes a baby down a toilet!

Paxton is hemmed in by lousy dialogue and broadcast-network-predictable plot lines.

In truth, the bi-ped hamsters of Big Brother offer a more realistic view of humanity than this unbelievable new disaster-drama series.

At one point, a character scribbles "Donny Douche" on a pad for no reason other than, perhaps, an attempt by the producers to forestall some critic from using that phrase in a review.

Alternately bad and laughably bad, Minority Report is one of the few new fall shows that can probably be fairly judged on the basis of its pilot alone: There are so many things working against it, it’s hard to imagine how the show could be better, even if Fox had sent out more than just its first episode to critics.

After watching a mere two episodes, I felt as though I’d squandered an entire summer watching Dead of Summer, a supernatural/horror/YA drama/soap opera, which starts moldering on Freeform Tuesday night.

The opening hour, premiering Wednesday after Survivor and Criminal Minds--and those are exactly the two shows Beyond Borders combines with appalling cynicism--finds Garrett and his team winging off to Thailand, where a couple of young American women, volunteering on a farm, are taken captive by a demented-looking local. (Given that despicable behavior by foreign populations is baked into its premise, Beyond Borders is, you can be sure, going to be charged with xenophobia or worse by some offended viewers very quickly.)

Truth Be Told, is one of the lamest of the year, making bad jokes about current issues ranging from racially-charged language to whether John Mayer appeals only to white people.

One of the more cynical and repulsive of new reality shows--and that’s saying something, I know--The Briefcase is all the more reprehensible for passing off its exploitation of people in beleaguered financial straits as uplifting, inspirational TV.

This new Jeremy Piven series is proving to be one of the more naive and ludicrous shows of the fall season.

[A] brutally crude dramatization of the crime and its aftermath.

[A] sordid enterprise.

The Leisure Class is every bit as pinched and humorless its director.... It’s a piece of predictable hackwork.

I’d like to say that Marvel’s Inhumans is so spectacularly awful, it’s worth tuning in just to witness the superhero train-wreck. But alas, Inhumans does not even yield sarcastic pleasures--it’s just bad. Bad in a dull way, bad in an irritating way. ... Marvel’s Inhumans is just inhumane.