At times the pop-culture references threaten to turn into a Dennis Miller routine, grabbing everything from the Rolling Stones to the Menendez brothers.

Like TV teachers back to the time of "Room 222" and beyond, Mr. Rhodes is depicted as the one teacher in the school who really knows what kids need and want, who will constantly have to buck an unfeeling, insensitive bureaucracy and a staff of stodgy, disapproving older teachers. [23 Sep 1996, p.E1]

Eminently predictable, monumentally derivative. [09 Sep 1996]

Mr. Rhodes has many problems, starting with language and taste. [22 Sep 1996, p.F1]

The most annoying presence yet in a fall season full of saddle burrs, Mr. Rhodes is classroom claptrap of the lowest order. [23 Sep 1996]

They have loaded up the show with plenty of sexual innuendo and slapstick humor, all of it second-rate and instantly tiresome. Rhodes himself has a style of delivery about half a beat behind the action that on TV comes across like a soundtrack always out of synch.

Whoever came up with "Mr. Rhodes" should be sent to detention. [23 Sep 1996, p.C9]