Past Life

With her Texas twang and feisty demeanor, Giddish is instantly engaging, and she and Bishop share a nice on-screen chemistry that make them worth our time. As for the Past Life cases, they are adequately compelling.

Me, I struggled with the whole reincarnation thing--and kept rooting for someone to turn out to be Napoleon. It's hooey. But it's fairly well done hooey.

This lukewarm hybrid should have been much better than it is.

Star Kelli Giddish is so distractingly pretty and charming, even to other characters, that it adds a layer of deconstructive interest to a silly series.

Past Life is a straight-down-the-middle cop procedural--"Cold Case" with a gimmick--when quirkiness, humor and even some bogus science or crackpot theology would have given it some heft or at least a sense of fun.

It's standard murder-of-the-week type stuff with just a hint of pseudo spirituality. Trouble is, characters who speak in cliches don't deserve to be in your living room.

It all begins to feel like forced gobbledygook--like "Without A Trace" had a bad date with "Ghost Whisperer."

Reincarnation, recycling, rip-off. On network TV, it’s all the same. Whatever you did in a past life, you don’t deserve this drivel.

The bottom line is that while the show tackles its spooky subject matter earnestly enough, for those expecting to enjoy a mere single life, time's simply too precious to squander on this.

Past Life feels overly formulaic from the first moments of the first episode. It’s the kind of procedural that’s stuffed with lightning-bolt revelations and convulsive tears by guest-of-the-week actors and yet still seems bland.

There is some undeniable chemistry between McGinn and Whatley, but it isn't enough to rescue Past Life. Not in this life.

Whatley’s quick conversion to the cause takes away what little tension there is in the partnership, and is emblematic of a larger problem. McGinn needs the people that she meets to buy into the idea of reincarnation, or else she can’t get anything done.

Past Life has neither [heart nor energy] and leaves us only with hope that it will reincarnate next season into something better.

A crime drama doesn’t need soft edges if it has crisp plotting and interesting characters, but the first two stories on Past Life are startlingly generic, and Kate, in lieu of a personality, is given a dog and a wacky mother.

It's bad writing. It's lazy storytelling. It's ridiculous.

Past Life is created by David Hudgins ("Friday Night Lights"), who certainly knows his way around a script, so it is literally shocking how bad the writing is, with Whately grinding out such illuminations as "You can't get DNA from a memory" or "It's like all your life you've been playing this game and then someone changes the rules" until you want to scream.

Past Life begins with a fairly ridiculous premise, and the show's bland leads don't make it anymore watchable.

Past Life is so glum, lugubrious and blandly cast I felt I had temporarily regressed into someone who in a past life hated television.

Even as you’re hoping that she won’t have to conjure up variations on this explication theme every week, she does it a few more times in this episode alone.

The weakness of the plot might matter less if the regular characters had something special to offer, but Past Life's are standard-issue blanks.