Despite the excellent cast, there were lines and situations that were so clunky and predictable that we shook our heads that they made it to the final cut. But there is an interesting twist at the end of the episode that leads us to believe that some of the clunkiness will eventually be ironed out.

We’re hopeful that Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans will provide some juicy scenes among its amazing cast, and that will be enough to keep us watching. But the story itself is so low-stakes that it just leaves us cold.

The new series is incredibly watchable, but flails when it comes to knowing what to focus on.

Bryan Cranston puts in a typically compelling Bryan Cranston performance. It’s really the only thing saving the show from being clichéd and dull.

There are nuggets of information in there that are enlightening. ... For the most part, though, it feels like we’re going to see four hours of mostly praise and maybe some good-natured ribbing from associates who think Branson tells his own story in a more grandiose way than how it actually happened. Your enjoyment of that will depend on how you feel about Branson.

We’re recommending Franklin because we were pleasantly surprised with how well Michael Douglas slipped into the role of Benjamin Franklin. But the rest of the show left us mostly bored.

Does Motorheads sound like a very mid show? Sure. But it’s a well-done mid show, which is all we’re asking for as far as teen shows are concerned.

The main reasons to watch DI Ray are Parminda Nagra’s lead performance and the theme of her fighting against bias in her department. We just wish the case being investigated, and some of the characters surrounding Ray, were more compelling.

We’re a bit wary that all the stories the first episode of The Crow Girl introduces won’t come together, and it’s a tonally inconsistent episode. But we’re also going to keep watching, mainly because of the potential twists and turns involved with those stories merging at some point.

The second season of Outer Range certainly isn’t boring, but we just wonder if all the time jumping is going to either get confusing or just make for a bunch of jumbled mysteries without answers.

We like the cast of The Inheritance enough to keep watching, but it feels that the show is too distracted by lots of side stories to really concentrate on the mystery at its center.

STREAM IT, but with reservations. The second season of Cross still has a lot of charm, especially in the relationship between Cross and Sampson, but feels like it’s going to take some time to really find what its primary story is going to be.

There’s still plenty of shooting and other action in the second season of Lioness, but at least now Sheridan understands that his stellar cast can do a whole lot more than grimace and hold a gun.

We’ll watch Have I Got News For You because of Wood, Ruffin and Black. But the format is certainly can use some improvement.

The friendship at the center of Everything I Know About Love is what is going to fuel the show and keep it flying off into just showing hipster nonsense. But the first episode felt much longer than its 43-minute runtime because of all that hipster nonsense.

The Letter for the King will scratch an itch or three for fantasy mavens although The Witcher seems prime to scratch harder.

The first couple of episodes of The Ark are rough, because the characters take time to settle in. But the first episode brings up enough intrigue to make those episode worth watching until everyone finds their place in the story.

When these situations are clearly forced for comedy reasons, we start to turn away from a show. However, Ryan has created a show for herself that fits her quite well, so as things go along her character might ease up into someone we’ll actually like.

Season 3 of School Spirits feels like the show is struggling to figure out where to take its story after two pretty well-defined arcs in the first two seasons.

Like most modern game shows, Are You Smarter Than A Celebrity would be better if either the episodes were shorter or more than one contestant was brought on per episode. If that were the case, we can forgive the relative uselessness of the celebrities as a trade-off for the entertainment factor they bring. And Travis Kelce definitely has a Michael Strahan-esque future in media, given how much fun he is as host.

We don’t love Swimming With Sharks, because of its trashy-for-trashiness’ sake nature and the fact that the story feels fairly predictable. But Shipka’s performance keeps the show from getting really campy.

OG fans of The Bear know its capacity for greatness, so when scenes become too self-indulgent and overextended bits read like forced comedic relief (cc: the Faks), the series feels tonally uneven. Even if The Bear still isn’t cooking like it once was, to ignore the show’s positive attributes would be disingenuous.

You are absolutely not going to come away from Who Is Ghislaine Maxwell? with any sympathy for the woman, who was just sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in Epstein’s sex trafficking circle. In fact, you may come away from the show with a little bit of pity for her, inasmuch you can pity her for the conditions that led her to this point in her life, not for the actions for which she’s about to be locked away. ... One thing we don’t really get an insight on, at least in the first episode, is Maxwell’s inner life.

There’s a lot about Eric we didn’t love. But, boy, we loved Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as the troubled, grieving father of a missing child. It’s so good it might actually paper over most of the show’s flaws.

Year Of The Rabbit has Berry hitting the right comedic notes, helped by a funny supporting cast and a setting that’s always ripe for comedy.

The scenery, Morgan’s charm, and the good casting will keep you watching Destination X, even though the gameplay is too complicated and frustrating.

FUBAR continues to be a stupid good time, and we love it when Arnold doesn’t take himself seriously in a role. But with the addition of Moss as Greta, we wonder if the second season story will be more about generic spycraft and less about Luke’s family strife.

We’re not completely sure that The Hunt will get any deeper than what we saw in the first episode. But there are signs that, at the very least, it will be a tense thriller, even if it’s not a very character-driven one.

If the new Gossip Girl can loosen its grip enough to let its Upper East Siders become the actual bullies they not-so-secretly are, there’s a chance it may capture something great once again. If not, Gossip Girl may need to sign off, for good.

It’s decidedly unclear from this first episode what the three newest cast members will add to the mix. Just like SNL.

Ultimately, the performances in Smoke will help carry the story as fills in during subsequent episodes. But we do wonder how much patience people will have for the atmospheric nature of the show as the story ramps up.

Will the six episodes of Steal be full of tension-filled twists and turns or just spiral out into silliness? We’re certainly interested enough in the story after the first episode to find out, but given that the running time is only about five or so hours, we’re hoping things will stay tight and tense.

The pieces are there for a really fun dark comedy. But things just may need time to come together.

Tracker‘s appeal [lies] mostly in Justin Hartley’s empathetic performance, a carryover from his This Is Us days. Otherwise, it’s a fairly standard procedural whose weekly cases are rarely compelling.

We wish Harlan Coben’s Shelter gave us a bit more of a cohesive story in its early going instead of what feels like taking all of its mysteries and putting them in a storytelling blender. But the charm of the leads and the fact that the mystery has multiple layers give us hope that as things are revealed, the storytelling will become a bit less frenzied.

Mysteries abound and the audience is left to guess and try to keep things straight. The execution here, though, isn’t as cohesive as we would want and it frustrated us at every turn.

It’s frustrating to know that Savile never got his comeuppance while he was alive. At the same time, even documenting his horrors posthumously can serve some honesty to his true legacy. STREAM IT if you’re not worried about being triggered by it. Otherwise, quite obviously, SKIP IT.

Trigger Point has lots of tension, and a fair amount of action. What it doesn’t really have is much character development or an intriguing central plot. But you try to look away as Lana tries to defuse bomb after bomb after bomb.

While The Playlist doesn’t give audiences the satisfying dose of schadenfreude that other tech bioseries have provided, it does effectively show just how many perspectives there are to the start of a massive success like Spotify.

The jury is still out for us whether The Veil will be worth the time investment; on first glance there doesn’t seem to be enough story there, but Moss, Charles and Knight give us hope that things will pick up.

Ted is definitely more watchable in Season 2, more interested in character and story than it was in Season 1. But we just wish that, while Ted himself is pretty irredeemable, we got more growth out of John rather than just a series of gross shennanigans.

We’re not sure the second season of Beef is going to be as satisfying as the first season was, but the story has a lot of places it can go, so we’re hopeful we can connect to it as the season goes along.

Black Bird has enough interesting performances and just enough of an intriguing story to smooth over some its more generic and cliched parts. Lets hope the rough patches smooth out as the story goes along.

Shantaram doesn’t really dig too deep into the issues facing India in the 1980s, or how an expat like Hunnam’s character fits in given those issues. It’s a slow-moving thriller that we hope picks up some momentum as the series goes along.

Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson is one of TV’s most beloved characters and as long as she’s there, the show is worth watching. But, boy, they couldn’t have come up with a more generic season premiere if they tried.

Viewers will be drawn into the main story in The Control Room. We hope, however, they’re not distracted by the piecemeal flashbacks that build the characters’ backstories.

One of the most interesting points in How Music Got Free, which is the egalitarian nature of an industry-wide disruption which came from below. .... What’s less interesting here is Eminem and Timbaland and 50 Cent and others restating their late 90s grips about file sharing stealing a chunk of their profits.

All in all, Selena: The Series is pleasantly diverting, but it feels like a missed opportunity.

It looks like PG:ANG will start lukewarm and only get hotter as things progress.

The jury’s out on how many episodes Paris Has Fallen can sustain the relative juice imported from the Has Fallen movies. If there is a core HFU fanbase rising up for this small screen continuance, that contingent should be happy. But as action-thriller stuff goes, Paris Has Fallen in general feels kinda basic.

The Nest is twisty enough to keep our interest, but we just wish the first episode didn’t have so many eye-rolling coincidences.

The kind of show you might turn on as a distraction instead of a show that requires close watching. But it’s an entertaining distraction, with just enough story to keep things moving.

This new version of Name That Tune has some clunky aspects to it. But the party vibe in the studio, Krakowski’s strong hosting presence and Jackson’s great band make those clunky aspects less annoying.

We’re giving Étoile a recommendation more on hope and the Palladinos’ reputation than anything we saw in the first episode, which moved slowly and felt a bit too insular for our comfort.

They Call It Late Night With Jason Kelce had a bit of a rough start. What we hope is that Kelce and the show’s producers and writers take this first episode and tweak things so the show is geared more towards comedy — even football-related comedy — and less towards relatively dry sports talk.

Grand Crew, like its fellow freshman sitcom American Auto, has a lot to like but still needs some time to find its way. But at least the show will be entertaining to watch as it finds its comedic footing.

While there’s a lot of messiness in this new version of Queer As Folk, it also introduces an interesting new set of characters and examines how much things have changed and stayed the same for the LGBTQIA community.

It’s worth streaming Hello Tomorrow! for the visuals and for Crudup’s lead performance. But it’s going to need to show us more than what it’s showing in its first episode for us to continue past the first handful of episodes.

Billy Crystal’s lead performance in Before is what is the big attraction to the series, but we also hope that the episodes’ relatively-short runtimes will keep the storytelling focused on Eli finding out why Noah knows about his past.

ZeroZeroZero is surprisingly engaging given just how many locales and characters the viewer needs to keep track of.

While American Murder: Gabby Petito probably won’t tell you much more about the Petito case than what the news media did, some of the context it provides certainly gives the story more depth than the splashy tabloid headlines did.

This season, while it seems that there will be some continuing arcs, the mysteries themselves have room to breathe and become more than just a vehicle for Carrie Preston to do her Elsbeth thing.

Despite our reservations about KAOS, we are riveted by Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, and we hope his performance makes up for a series whose satisfaction over its own cleverness shows in almost every frame.

This performance is so raw, director Jason Orley leaves in not just the parts Davidson says he’d cut from the special, but also the aside the comic makes to him from onstage about a joke he wants left in, too.

Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage is a warm, amiable sitcom with characters that are very familiar to viewers. We just wish it was funnier.

The entire time I was watching the premiere, I was thinking that the show should have been called Avengers: Nazi Hunters.

We were left frustrated that Little became more like a character in Lauren’s story, not knowing much more about the killer at the end of the hour than we knew in the beginning.

We’re a bit concerned that the main characters in Dead Pixels aren’t going to rise above how pathetic they are in the first episode. But the episode was funny enough (despite the bleeps) that we have hope that these people will be shown to have a life beyond just an MMORPG.

STREAM IT, but we’re definitely giving you the head’s up that the gag-heavy first few episodes of Praise Petey may turn you off as you also realize that you haven’t laughed much during a particular episode.

If you go into The Price Of Glee with the right mindset, you’ll get some good information about just how much pressure the stars and crew of Glee were under. You have to basically ignore the producers’ attempts to link two of the stars’ deaths directly to the show itself, and definitely ignore their attempts to get any of the interviewees to call the show cursed.

There’s something about Coyote, created by David Graziano, Michael Carnes and Josh Gilbert that feels a little bit off. It’s not the performance by Chiklis, which is his usual combination of tough but with seeds of doubt.

It’s your typical Coben yarn, with multiple and seemingly unrelated threads going on at once, characters who have dark secrets that are alluded to but not mentioned outright until enough tension is drawn out, and mysteries upon mysteries.

Has the feel of a high-quality procedural to us instead of a super-serialized prestige show.

Before the final scene of Paper Girls, we were going to give this show a big old thumbs down. But that final scene set the stage for a show that has the potential to be a fun ride, or at the very least something that’s a little different than what we’ve seen before.

Between Seyfried’s performance and the bread crumbs we get about Mickey’s past in the first episode, there’s enough to keep us watching Long Bright River. But we can’t shake the feeling that, without Seyfried in the mix, the show would be indistinguishable from other procedurals of its type.

Zachary Quinto is a big reason why Brilliant Minds works in its first episode. But for it to continue to work, the rest of the characters need to be developed, and Quinto’s character needs to have his flaws explored in more depth.

Despite the fact that there are some very funny and weirdly satisfying aspects of Fake Famous, it somehow seems incomplete. ... Instead of trying to find new people willing to go with the experiment, he essentially concentrated on Dominique leaning into the experience. Yes, the social experiment still worked, but we would have liked to have seen more examples of it working than just a single person.

The first episode of Freud is a bit confusing, but if you put the real Sigmund Freud out of your mind, you should be able to buckle in and enjoy the ride on this psychological thriller.

If you’re a fan of the usual Bachelor drama, then Listen To Your Heart should satisfy that craving.

HBO’s new spin on the story is so gorgeously acted, though, you can’t stop thinking about the theatrics of it. The very thing that will hook you — Isaac and Chastain’s full-throttle performances — might also take you out of it.

There is enough going on in Young Wallander, especially the immigration storyline, that will keep viewers watching. But we just wish Wallander himself was a more interesting character.

If the first episode is any indication, the cases are still the same brand of Jerry Springer-esque crazy that they’ve always been. ... For them [fans], Judy Justice should be more of what they love, even if it doesn’t really break new ground for Sheindlin or the judge-show genre.

Because the series is so one-sided and speculative, The Man With 1000 Kids has to be seen with a bit of jaundiced eye. But that doesn’t keep us from being fascinated at the results of what happens when one man feels the need to donate his sperm everywhere he can.

1992 isn’t reinventing the wheel when it comes to thriller series. But it’s just audacious enough, especially with its use of a cartoon rooster mascot, to make it watchable.

The presence of the old guard will keep fans interested in CSI: Vegas. But the new crew hasn’t distinguished themselves for the most part just yet, and they’ll need to do that soon before the presence of Petersen, Fox and company overwhelms the show.

The story is what’s going to keep viewers watching, because there aren’t really any compelling characters to latch onto.

Holidazed will make you dazed after the first episode, because of all the stories and characters that are introduced. But then the show should settle into what is basically a series of mini Hallmark-style holiday films, with all the feelgood scenes those films are known for.

Subtlety isn’t really a strong suit of Unchosen, but what we hope is that the show’s rough edges in that category will be smoothed down as the psychological thriller at the core of the series develops.

You may tire of the message Scott Burns is trying to get across by the end of Extrapolations‘ eight episodes, but there are moments in there that will be affecting and effective. You just may have to try your luck to find them.

Mainly because Sophia Bush and Jason Isaacs are compelling to watch — individually and together — Good Sam rises slightly above the run-of-the-mill network medical procedural. But the relationships and characters will have to evolve to keep us tuning in.

The only reason why we’re recommending Irish Blood is that we like Silverstone and the rest of the cast. But the first episode has some tone and story problems that definitely give us pause about the rest of the first season.

There’s enough that we like about The Copenhagen Test to recommend it. It feels mostly like a solid conspiracy drama with a little bit of sci fi mixed in, but we hope the muddled first episode isn’t a bad sign of what the rest of the season will be like.

We’re on board for the thrill of the trip and the stunning visuals we’ll see on Long Way Up, plus seeing McGregor and Boorman renew their friendship will be fun. But the privilege shown on this trip is staggering and detracts from our enjoyment of the show.

As squinchy as we feel about the voyeurism in Gypsy Rose: Life After Lock Up, we’re curious to see an inside look at how Gypsy Rose Blanchard has handled her first few months of true freedom in her adult life.

Nightsleeper has the potential to be a tense six-episode thrill ride or it could be a predictable bore. The first episode makes us think it might be the latter, but there are enough good elements in the first episode to keep us watching.

Ultimately, though, the show will come down to the chemistry between Mariela Garriga as Castillo and Maribel Verdú as Gutiérrez. The first episode doesn’t show the two of them interacting much, so the jury is still out there.

The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live is basically a love story wrapped in the usual TWD post-apocalyptic shell. But what we hope is that the love story breaks through that shell and shows us something we haven’t seen from the franchise before.

There is no need to watch Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal if you already watched The Ashley Madison Affair. But if you haven’t, it’s an entertaining — if cringe-inducing — docuseries about the dating site and how its users got exposed when its weak security was breached.