In tonight's premiere, Cox plays Jules, a recently-divorced Florida real estate agent who lives with her teenage son Travis (Dan Byrd). Jules criticizes her recently separated neighbor Grayson (Josh Hopkins) for hooking up with an endless parade of younger women and he bets her that she couldn't get a younger guy to go home with her. After discussing her sex life (or lack thereof) with her best friend, Ellie (Christa Miller), her trashy assistant Laurie (Busy Philipps), and most disturbingly, Travis, she takes her neighbor's advice to "go for it" and brings home a guy who isn't much older than her son.

Cougar Town was created by the same people behind Scrubs, Bill Lawrence and Kevin Biegel, but Cougar Town lacks the charm of their previous effort. Most critics say the problem with the show isn't Courteney Cox's acting, but the fact that she's forced to deliver absurd lines like, "I was 19, I started thinking with my coochie-cooch, and then, bam, I had a kid,'' and is too hot to be a cougar. Reviewers note that even though some women in Hollywood have adopted "cougar" as a positive term, (according to critics) there's still something desperate about a woman dating a younger man. They argue that Courteney Cox just doesn't fit in the role: She's still attractive, and thus bears no resemblance to real women over 40. We've already gone over the five reasons we think Cougar Town looks awful, and below, we take a look at what the pop culture pundits are saying.

USA Today

Your first thought is that Cox is too gorgeous to have such concerns, but from her opening scene (as she's unhappily studying her bare body in the mirror), Cox is not only convincing but touching - and unfailingly funny. Her insecurities seem as natural and ingrained as her loving if sometimes tortured relationship with her teenage son, wonderfully played by Dan Byrd of Aliens in America...There's a fragility to Cox that in the wrong show can come across as brittle, but is used here to increase her vulnerability and appeal.

The New York Times

The dialogue, timing and jokes have the madcap pace and anarchic spirit of Scrubs, and it takes a while for Ms. Cox to recalibrate her Monica persona from Friends. To her credit, Ms. Cox is game for anything, and the humor is raunchy and Seth Rogenish. But in the pilot she tends to overact, flattening arch slapstick and sharp-edged dialogue with clownish overkill. It also takes awhile to accept this actress as a lonely divorcee sidelined by middle age. Ms. Cox is supposed to be a 40-year-old Everywoman who is appalled by what society - and the Florida man shortage - has done to her cohort. "I know I'm one of them," Jules says to Laurie as the camera pans Botoxed matrons in leather and low-cut leopard-print bustiers. "I just don't feel like one of them." Ms. Cox's face is so tight and unlined, and her figure so taut, that it's hard to really see the distinction. But as the pilot gets funnier, so does Jules. She is of course the butt of most of the jokes, but she is doughty and not without a sense of humor..."

Hollywood Reporter

The recently divorced Jules, who goes completely mental one morning after noting a few elbow wrinkles and tummy jiggles — is shrill, unappealing (except for the whole looking like Courteney Cox thing), self-obsessed and has no filter between what she thinks and what she says. Things she says: "All the single guys our age are broken, gay or chasing younger girls." And, "I started thinking with my coochie cooch." And don't forget the discussion with her teenage son, Travis, about penis-holding. At least the boy has the grace to be mortified by his mother's sudden need to find the G-spot. To sum up: This is a one-note premise, with a lead character no one could want to spend five minutes with, based on a passing fad.

The Los Angeles Times

This is a real show whose main conceit is that having sex with a younger man is fun and exciting for women over 40. Crude stuff for a family newspaper, but despite the warm-and-fuzzy-celebrity cred that star Courteney Cox brings to it, some funny lines and good acting all around, Cougar Town is a crude show, built on jokes about oral sex and droopy breasts, a show in which words like "coochie" are used with regrettable abandon... Clearly, creators Bill Lawrence and Kevin Biegel (both previously of Scrubs) are trying to take on some legitimate issues, and no doubt there is pathos and insight to be gleaned from a divorced woman staring down her mid-40s as her child prepares to leave the nest, wondering if this is as good as it is ever going to get. But that is no excuse, and I mean whatsoever, for having that woman look at a shirtless young man and say, "I want to lick him."

Travis (Dan Byrd of Aliens in America) is Jules' teenage son, whose actual adolescence is being preempted by his mother's second go-round. Jules seems to take pride in her lack of boundaries, giving their relationship an ick factor that even Byrd's quietly hilarious performance cannot overcome. He does his very best, though, stealing every scene he's in. "Why don't you laugh at my jokes?" his mother asks after she cracks one about the fact that, in an attempt to prove her attractiveness, she flashed a neighbor kid. "Because they make me sad," Travis says, giving voice to us all.

New York Daily News

Jules also chats about her sex life with her teenage son, Travis, which may be the truest indication of what a shallow humor pool the show is drawing from. And that's even before Travis walks in one evening to discover his mother has not only snagged a kid who isn't much older than he is, but who is performing a sex act on that fellow in the living room. Now we all know sitcoms face an ever-tougher challenge to offer a sex scene that hasn't been done by, say, Two And A Half Men." But a whole lot of viewers, if they wanted this kind of humor, would simply have gone to Spike in the first place. It's a waste of Cox's comic talents to have her spend the whole show trapped in lines like, "We had sex three times without you needing a nap or a pill or anything."

The Boston Globe

Cox is a funny TV presence with self-deprecating charm, but she's not an everywoman, and she's certainly not a stand-in for a population of women that is experiencing the aging process in real time. And so a show that's meant to be a meditation on gender, age, and insecurity is, instead, a vehicle for marveling at the amazing sculpting power of the Hollywood workout routine.... As a pop culture concept, [cougars are] already feeling stale. Besides, it's unclear that Jules even fits in the category; the lustful older women mocked in American Pie and on Saturday Night Live are well into their 40s and beyond, but by my math, Jules is in her mid-30s. I know this because she tells a potential date in a bar that "I was 19, I started thinking with my coochie-cooch, and then, bam, I had a kid.'' There's plenty of dialogue like that in tonight's premiere, and while it's meant to represent women talking frankly about sex, it comes off as women talking awkwardly about anatomy. When Jules stops her car short in one scene, Busy Philipps, as her younger, hard-partying co-worker, shouts, "Give a girl a warning. My uterus almost shot out!''

The Chicago Tribune

Cougar Town creator Bill Lawrence got a lot right about male friendship in his most notable creation, Scrubs, but this sitcom doesn't really capture much that feels true about female friendships. Women on this show tend to shout at each other, browbeat each other or simply announce, "Wow, you look like a whore." All of that claws-out humor is of a piece with the show's vaguely hostile attitude toward its female characters and their middle-aged dilemmas.

Newsday

We can all perhaps agree that Cox is a good actress. She was good in Scrubs, good in Dirt, good in Ace Ventura, good in Scream - and Friends without Monica Geller would be just about unthinkable. So why, then, is Cougar Town such a painful belly flop? Easy answer: The glaring mismatch between material and starring actress. As the woebegone divorcee with an antic streak and a full-blown need to get down, Cox is not believable. In the opening scene, attempting to forge a winking comradeship with millions of other 40-year-old women in the viewing audience, she pinches rolls of fat, flops bat wings and compares herself to a farm animal. Then, a couple of scenes later, those viewers get a full-body view, and there's not a fat molecule out of place. Cougar Town will get a big number Wednesday, but do not be fooled. It doesn't deserve one.

Cougar Town premieres tonight on ABC at 9:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 8:30, Central time.

Earlier: 5 Reasons Why Courteney Cox's Cougar Town Looks Awful

The new Melrose Place is both a reboot and a sequel to the original series, which ran from 1992-1999. The new group of people living in the Los Angeles apartment complex are similar to the previous residents, yet some members of the original cast appear on the show along with their doppelgangers. Laura Leighton reprises her role of Sydney Andrews in the premiere, but is found dead in the complex's swimming pool by Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, whose character closely resembles the corpse, by the end of the episode. Flashbacks will reveal in upcoming episodes that everyone in the new cast had a reason to murder Andrews, including Jonah (Michael Rady), an aspiring filmmaker; his fiance Riley (Jessica Lucas) who is a first-grade teacher; Lauren (Stephanie Jacobsen), a poor med-school student who turns to prostitution to pay her bills; chef/alcoholic Auggie (Colin Egglesfield); and publicist Ella (Katie Cassidy). Reviewers said the new Melrose Place may be marginally better than its predecessor, but in the '90s guilty-pleasure prime-time soaps were a bit harder to come by. The new series is decent, but may not be good (or rather bad) enough to make viewers switch over from the dozens of sleazy reality dramas they're already watching.

Below, the critics weigh in:

Wall Street Journal

The real entertainment-and there's plenty of that in the new Melrose Place-builds from the endlessly brewing conflicts and rivalries within that band of young hopefuls. The writers extract sturdy drama when they bore in on psychological conundrums-the reasons, for instance, a woman can't bring herself to say "yes" to a marriage proposal from the man she loves. There's the woman who is a prostitute by night, and a doctor by day. A familiar sort of fantasy, that, but one that plays out intriguingly here. The Los Angeles setting here takes a more prominent role than in the original-one more given to reflecting its world of filmmakers and producers, its angst and unbounded ambition. The new Melrose Place may not be the old, but it is, all told, instantly engaging and-from the evidence-likely to remain so.

New York Post

The new Melrose Place is as good and sometimes better than the old Melrose Place. Think of it as a renovation, or in LA terms, a facelift. In fact, the new tenants actually made me forget the old tenants rather quickly. Well, I didn't forget all of them, because two of them are back but in a new format. Now the series is an ongoing whodunit. Remember Sydney Andrews (Laura Leighton) from the original series — the one we loved to hate so much? Well, she's baaaack — or make that back from the dead, as she gets killed in tonight's episode, but not killed off. The show's writers somehow managed to keep all the cheese we love so much, while supplying us with a solid mystery that's fun to try to solve...

Terrific fun, and much classier than the old show, but still with plenty of cheese. If you're wondering how they turned this old package of individually-sliced cheddar into a fresh slab of brie, you'll be interested to know that the new producers are from Smallville, and tonight's pilot was directed by Davis Guggenheim — the Oscar winner for An Inconvenient Truth. Geez. I hope cheese doesn't pollute the environment!

The Boston Globe

I "like'' the new Melrose Place,' in that I think it has the potential to be as addictive, and phony, as a can of Pringles potato crisps. The trashy CW series... has none of the hokey moral quandaries of the show that precedes it, 90210, no lesson-learning unless you're a student of chicanery and double-dealing. The new Melrose Place is just a mess of gossipy plotlines about adultery, murder, and secrets. If it has a moral compass, the arrow is stuck pointing down, to hell.

Variety

"I wish you'd known me when I first moved here," Laura Leighton's Sydney Andrews says wryly near the start of the Melrose Place reboot, which — given the CW's determination to recycle everything Fox did in the early 1990s — is probably better than it ought to be. That's not saying the premiere is particularly good, only that it has assembled a highly attractive cast and rapidly thrust it into tawdry situations, including a convenient murder mystery to get the ball rolling. Success will ultimately depend on ecology - that is, the level of demand for recycled trash.

Time

By the standards of the original, the remake actually comes off fairly well. Where the 90210 spinoff-about twentysomethings in a Los Angeles apartment complex-took a while to find its decadent, over-the-top tone, the new version skips over its forebear's early attempts at earnestness and goes straight for the trashy stuff. (Mostly. There are a couple misplaced stories about career-crises-of-conscience, particularly one involving aspiring filmmaker Jonah, played by Michael Rady of Swingtown, who seems to mistakenly believe he's in a TV show that requires realistic emotion.) The problem isn't that the new version-which dives right into the pool (literally) with a murder mystery and re-introduces several characters from the original-is bad, exactly. It's competent. It also seems a little familiar and unnecessary. The luridly lit nightclub scenes, for instance, by now seem familiar from the CW playbook of Gossip Girl and 90210.

The Los Angeles Times

If only it were possible to care, even the least little bit, who did what and why and what will happen next. But as of the end of Episode 2, it just isn't. Like action figure collectibles, each character is so carefully encased in his or her protective wrapping of clever plot possibilities — Auggie's a recovering alcoholic! David steals things! Lauren may have to become a high-price call girl to pay for med school! — that it's virtually impossible to connect with them emotionally.

The New York Times

The current version is slicker-looking than the old; the lighting is sultrier, and the stunned reaction shots are fewer. Much of the acting is marginally improved since the days when Andrew Shue, playing the doltish writer Billy Campbell, approached each scene as if the script demanded that he look like a 6-year-old told that he wasn't getting a puppy for his birthday. No one appearing on Melrose Place 2.0 is nearly that dreadful, and the one-liners that remind us that we are not watching the television of a historic golden age retain the zesty camp of the series's first iteration. "If it wasn't for me," Sydney Andrews tells the young protégé she has schooled in her lunatic brand of venality, "you'd still be wearing Juicy sweatsuits, French tips and a bad dye job."

The New Yorker

The old Melrose Place was on Fox, and the new one is on the CW (as is 90210, which precedes the new Melrose Place on the Tuesday-night schedule as of this week), and is a cross between a sequel and a remake-a requel-in that the story includes a couple of the old characters but isn't really about them, and yet the new characters almost completely mirror the old ones. In other words, it's as fresh as yesterday's daisy... Over all, the show has a little something, but it doesn't have outstanding curb appeal, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a foreclosure notice in the window sooner rather than later.

More To Love, which premieres tonight at 9 p.m./8 Central, was created by Mike Fleiss, the producer behind many of the most popular dating reality shows including The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, The Cougar, and Who Wants To Marry A Multimillionaire. The new show doesn't deviate much from his usual formula, except that this time all the contestants are between 180 and 280 pounds and bachelor Luke Conley, a 330-pound, 26-year-old real estate investor, gives each of the women a diamond promise ring (symbolizing his vow to get to know them) at the beginning of the show that they must return when they're eliminated.

As we've already mentioned there are pros and cons to More To Love. Some critics say it's the most authentic of the Bachelor-type shows because the contestants are actually there to find love (the reasoning being, heavier women obviously can't find love under normal circumstances, and they're too unattractive to be trying to launch a reality TV career). This, of course, leads to tears, which makes the women more relatable to some reviewers, while others find them too pathetic to watch. One critic even complains that many of the women seem ashamed and don't love their bodies, which isn't so shocking considering that people they've never met are writing headlines today with puns about their weight and considering whether they are too fat for love. Below, we check out (but certainly don't weigh) what the critics are saying about More To Love:

The Los Angeles Times

That the series has been made at all testifies to the fact that most dating shows — most TV shows — feature people who fit the latest definition of hotness. We may praise the inner person, but we are nevertheless continually encouraged (and perhaps wired) to worship the conventionally attractive surface. Not that these people aren't pretty. They may be larger than most, but they are young and shiny and dressed to the nines. (And there is nothing homogeneous about them; they come in a variety of shapes and styles.) Conley, who also wears his bulk well, seems like a nice guy, but he is also a bit of a kid in a candy store, finagling kisses right and left. And though he claims to have "no type," it probably isn't fair to say that looks won't matter at all to him. That is just how humans are.

The Washington Post

Obviously, the ingredients are here for another of TV's nasty ridicule shows, and those of a mind to hoot and holler at the contestants will do so no matter how much alleged dignity the producers pump into the proceedings. But there's also plenty of grist here for those who are genuinely sensitive to the plentiful problems of the porker, whether one is intimately acquainted with the syndrome or just observes it from relatively afar.
...Perhaps partly because the producers are determined not to let More to Love turn into a jeer fest, the show almost chokes on its own sensitivity and refinement. One woman does take an impromptu leap into a swimming pool, and a few others come across as engagingly playful and bouncy. But for the most part, a tasteful torpor prevails.

For his part, Conley parcels out cliches at such a rate you begin to suspect he's watched nothing but reality shows for 10 years or so. "I'm just an average guy . . . ready to meet the girl of my dreams," he says sportingly, at least twice. At the farewell ceremony — five women have to depart at the end of the premiere — Conley tells the competitors: "You all look beautiful tonight. . . . I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart." He's so sappily bland and eager to appeal that he could make a pretty good game-show host himself. When he declares that he's "the luckiest man alive" because he's been "given the opportunity of a lifetime," you don't have to be a cynic or party pooper to feel like shouting, "Will you please shut up, you big, fat ham?!?"

Variety

As the direct-to-camera confessionals begin, though, the waterworks freely open, with the women shedding plenty of tears as they discuss their dating histories and, in some instances, despair at the prospect of ever meeting anyone. One girl talks about how she's "never had a second date." Another wonders why guys "love the skinny bitches" — you know, the ones that populate every other dating show. Because the women appear more vulnerable, the program feels more emotional, even if there isn't a single original note otherwise, from the mansion setting to the protracted elimination ceremony. Frankly, the only conspicuous difference is that they squeezed fewer would-be Mrs. Conleys into each limo. Nevertheless, these women aren't looking for steady gigs on MTV, and they cry at the drop of a hat. That somehow makes them more real, however contrived the situation might be.

The Hollywood Reporter

All of this could have gone tacky in the wrong hands, and to Fleiss and his experienced gang's credit, it doesn't. Instead, More is half-reality-hookup show, half-Oprahesque tearfest. Only a true sociopath wouldn't empathize with women who say that they've never been in love, never had a second date and have all but given up expecting anything from men. This is a show with at least 25% more tears, 50% more hugging and 100% more long, flowing hair than any other, and it's moving.

The Boston Herald

The 20 women competing for a chance to marry him include a nanny, a motivational speaker and a rocket scientist. All are overweight, but none are Ruby-esque. Many are gorgeous. Many view Luke as their last chance at romance. Sure, a few offer signs of bravado. Kristian gestures to her posterior. "My junk in my trunk - I've got a lot of it and I love it." More typical is Christina, who wipes tears in her on-camera introduction, saying, "I need to see love is possible." It's a painful confession that is repeated all too often throughout the premiere. Despite their personalities, their education and accomplishments, many of these women have never been on a date. They're so desperate they've signed up for a franchise famous for putting women in a harem and then evicting them on commercial television.

Newsday

Honestly, the only controversy here is the controversy of ripping oneself off. Why haven't the legal beagles from Disney issued a cease-and-desist order? This show isn't like The Bachelor. This show is The Bachelor. (Its producer is Mike Fleiss, who also does The Bachelor/Bachelorette.) But here's the kicker: It's better than The Bachelor. There's an added dimension of reality and of simple, relatable human emotion. In a way, this is The Bachelor for the rest of us. The downside is that the rejection element on The Bachelor is ho-hum. Those babes will get instant dates when they leave the cellophane-wrapped mansion. On More to Love, it's a little cruel. These babes might not.

The New York Daily News

To give everybody involved the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the new dating reality show More to Love was designed in part to help humanize plus-size women. Mission unaccomplished... [Conley] says he likes large women, with curves, meat on their bones and all that. The problem comes when we meet the women and discover that many of them do not. Contestant after contestant confesses, in the introductory moment, that they don't like being big. They not only don't like being big, they hate that they have tried to be thin and failed. Gradually, it becomes unavoidable to conclude that for many of the participants here, signing up for this show and this kind of national exposure was motivated by a not-very-thinly-disguised sense of desperation... But their collective unhappiness and frustration remains a bad thing for the viewer because there's no pleasure in watching any show where the leading emotion is sadness.

Newsweek

But just when you're expecting a dignified show about big women who aren't ashamed of it, the show whiplashes you into something totally different. One at a time the women confess, most tearfully, that their size has hampered, if not totally derailed their lovelives. Some say they have never been on a date, or in a relationship, most say they are passed over for their svelte girlfriends. Even more than while watching The Bachelor, the stench of desperation wafts right through the screen. These women are utterly convinced that a reality show is their last, best hope for finding a relationship. Obviously it's not that serious. Big folks get married all the time, and the slender women on The Bachelorcan be just as despondent. But here, being overweight is shown as the ultimate hurdle to romance.

Still, depending on your perspective on the matter, More to Love represents progress. Unlike The Biggest Loser, Dance Your Ass Off and Ruby, More to Love is a show about overweight people that doesn't relentlessly focus on their efforts to lose the weight. On the one hand, it's nice to see television shows that don't use fat people as the butt of jokes, or offer to put them on television so long as they're efforting to "normalize" themselves through extreme diet and exercise. But at the same time, television is becoming representative of the larger, totally confusing debate about body weight... Depending on which of these shows you watch, obesity is either the public health issue of our lifetime, or a totally valid lifestyle choice.

Salon

Fox's new reality show More to Love might as well be called The Fatchelor: It's an excruciatingly typical dating competition with the single twist that both the catch of the day and the women competing for his attention are all larger than average. With weight as the show's central focus, the editing plays to as many fat stereotypes as possible: In the first episode, which airs Tuesday night, we get women weeping about their dateless pasts, one unironic use of the phrase "big-boned," a debate on the merits of Spanx and, of course, umpteen conversations about food — one of which includes the fatchelor flirtatiously declaring, "I like anything thick and juicy." (And cheesy, apparently.) The show's marketing and promotion campaigns claim a message of empowerment, but for the larger romantics among us, More to Love does little to dispel the myth that fat people's lives are built around dessert and desperation.

Earlier: More To Love: The Pros & Cons

The New York Times:

There is no good reason in the world to watch “Date My Ex,” and yet there is something vaguely redeeming in its economic chemistry. Since the first season of “The Bachelor” reality dating shows have typically put striving women in the position of angling for the attention of heirs and doctors and graduates of the better business schools. These Ambers and Tiffanys and Tristas might get the keys to the hotel room or, if they’re really lucky, receive their own chance to weed out partners on television, but they weren’t going to be taken to the Stanford reunion, even as the shows persisted in the fairly tale that it could be otherwise.

“The Real Housewives of Orange County” implicitly understood the limits of social mobility, recognizing the difference between status and money. Slade is a lot wealthier than Jo, but they were equals in their lack of pedigree and everything they didn’t know. Like the other couples on the show, they looked as if they might have a fighting chance, if only because they seemed to hail from the village.

Los Angeles Times:

The guys who show up for the first round were apparently purchased directly from the Reality Dude catalog — there's a personal trainer, a real estate agent, a talent agent and a nutrition salesman. The names don't really matter since the guys are there simply to provide the venues, a series of dream "dates" designed to woo the de-luscious Jo. To say it is ridiculous gives ridiculousness a bad rap. Ol' Jo may have a smokin' hot bod and an admirable willingness to part with her thong at a moment's notice, but a conversationalist she's not, and frankly, I think anyone seeing her without all that makeup might be in for a shock. So clearly no one's looking for a relationship, or even romance. These guys are in it to win it, whatever it is. Meanwhile, Slade is having second thoughts about the whole thing and looking pained. Will he undercut the competition to make himself look better? Will he and Jo wind up back together?

Who cares. Though it is mildly interesting to watch the reality monster consume its own tail for a few minutes, I'd frankly rather spend an hour blotting my lip gloss.

And I don't even wear lip gloss.

iVillage:

Not surprisingly, the series contains some problematic — and sexist — messages. While Jo says that she enjoys her new, more independent existence, these claims are offset by her willingness to allow her ex-boyfriend to exercise some control over her romantic life. It also prompts some contestants to objectify Jo as s possession that has already "belonged" to Slade (one contestant says that Slade has "peed on the tree and marked his turf," while another claims that Slade is "auctioning her off"). All of this may make for voyeuristically entertaining television for mature audiences, but it's definitely not for kids.

Boston Herald:

Bravo could do a public service by rushing this show to its inevitable conclusion. Jo will realize that since Slade has marked her, she’s his forever. The two should marry, be spayed and shot into a space shuttle that will orbit the planet for eternity. In the heavens, they’ll be the stars they’ve always dreamed of - and they’ll be far enough away from the rest of us that we can forget about them.

'Date My Ex' premieres tonight on Bravo at 10 p.m..