This fall has been littered with sitcoms that want to get noticed so badly that they don't realize how badly they're going about it.

As in, yes, you're so incredibly annoying that I notice you and never want to come back.

Part of this is because it's a pilot, but most of this is because the system is broken and people making pilots are trying to pop on that first effort despite the damage that may be done.

Viewers who want to watch the fall's best new broadcast drama will have to do something that, for many of them, will likely be unfamiliar. They will have to find the CW. (On the other hand, plenty of new viewers discovered the channel with The Flash last week.)

As The Walking Dead enters its fifth season, the element that makes it so much more than a zombie series is driven home pretty quickly – this is a show about the living, and what a horrible mess that can be now that the social fabric isn’t just torn but obliterated.

ABC premieres its latest comedy, Cristela, tonight, and there’s a silver lining sticking out of the black cloud. The show isn’t good at all, but its star, stand-up comedian Cristela Alonzo, has a bright future.

Then again, maybe that future is this show. ABC has propped up other duds for a season or two, so Alonzo may be employed longer than it would seem likely.

Sarah Treem's version — and vision — of infidelity is rendered superbly in The Affair, her new Showtime series that combines excellent writing, nuanced acting and an intriguing structural device to hook viewers.

On Tuesday, the CW nails three important elements to its latest comic book adaptation, The Flash. First, the series is completely on point with what the network is doing elsewhere (Arrow, etc.). Second, it's actually very well done. And third, it's wholly entertaining.

That all might sound simple and basic — and it is — but it's surprisingly difficult to pull off, not just at the CW but across the industry.

Normally the reaction one hears when critics say that there's really no need for an American remake of the eight-episode British gem Broadchurch is that only critics watched it and thus the general public might as well watch the Fox version, called Gracepoint, which starts tonight.

Unless you’re going to turn Mr. Chips into Scarface, as Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan did with the character of Walter White, then one of the key tenets of a television show is that you must have a likable lead character.

Hell, even Walter White was likable and sympathetic in the beginning.

But here we are in the midst of the competitive and expansive fall TV season rollout, and NBC is offering two comedies for the general public’s consumption.

In Stalker, there is something called the Threat Assessment Unit of the LAPD. 

Let’s assume for a moment that I am the head of said Threat Assessment Unit. Here is my decree: “Warning — a really disgraceful television series depicting the pornography of terror is on CBS tonight and under no circumstances should anyone watch. This show poses a threat to your capacity to receive and shrug off incoming visual stimuli such as, say, women being doused with gasoline and lit on fire.”

Do you get the message?

Tuesday, ABC premieres two sitcoms that are extremely annoying. But there is one difference among them: I want one of them to survive.

That one is Selfie (8 p.m.) which, despite its cloying introduction to the world, could just be a problematic pilot and will emerge, in another episode or three, as something that realizes its potential.

There's little doubt that Shonda Rhimes fans of Scandal and Grey's Anatomy will also tune in to tonight's premiere of How To Get Away With Murder, starring Viola Davis.

One of the more intriguing shows of the new fall season is ABC's Black-ish, a sitcom that's both funny and about something. Or, in this case, things.

The new CBS drama Scorpion is sometimes referred to as the hourlong, not-funny version of Big Bang Theory, because it employs some of the same super-genius-with-social-issues ideas as the comedy.

While that might help draw a curious crowd, I'm not sure it's going to ultimately help make Scorpion, which is based on a very good idea but executed in the pilot with too much sap and manipulation, a long-standing hit.