A warm, inviting atmosphere and a group of characters that we enjoy spending time with. The mysteries themselves are hit and miss, but that tends to be the SOP for cozy mysteries like these.

The show doesn’t try to go for cheap gags but instead roots all of its comedy in the characters and the found family that populates Happy’s Place (the bar as well as the series). That continues in the second season, with a couple of twists that will make the season a little more interesting.

Emergency: NYC shows compelling cases and healthcare providers who understand the gravity of their jobs. We just wish it took more of a critical look at the healthcare system.

Little Fires Everywhere has issues, but it’s a very watchable show that should be buoyed by Witherspoon’s and Washington’s performances.

Crime Scene Kitchen is enjoyable because of Joel McHale, full stop. Everything else on the show is fungible, except for the guessing game you will have once you see the evidence left in that crime scene. Either way, it’ll make you hungry, which is always a good sign of a cooking show.

As with most docuseries of this type, your enjoyment of Trial By Media will vary from episode to episode, but will also vary with how much you know and remember about a particular episode’s case. But what Toobin and Brill are trying to accomplish is noble.

Bad Mistakes works mostly because we like watching Levy and Ortega’s chemistry as siblings, and we’ll always be there to see Laurie Metcalf do her thing. We’re just wondering how silly things are going to get during this show’s first season.

We’ll give Echo 3 the benefit of the doubt because it’s taking a more thoughtful and deliberate tack than most military shows. But boy, do things go pretty slowly to start.

Led by strong work from Evan Rachel Wood, Thandiwe Newton, and Aaron Paul, the sleek visual aesthetic Westworld works with allows it to coast on its own cool weirdness whenever the plotting starts to chase its own tail.

Indian Matchmaking isn’t too much different than other matchmaking and dating shows, except it brings thousands of years of tradition into the mix, and there’s a much better chance that the matches that are made at the end of the season will last.

I thoroughly enjoyed WWE: Unreal, but your mileage may vary based on your expectations.

While we wish Clean Slate was funnier and took a bit longer to have Harry accept that Desiree is now a woman, it feels like it’s going to be a warm show about rebuilding relationships and Southern small town life. Given the presence of Cox, Wallace and Hopkins, we’re on board for this one.

The ghost hunting part is sometimes played up for camp and at tother times taken very seriously by members of the team. Listen, those parts are going to either be wildly entertaining or come off as complete horseshit, depending on what you believe about the presence of spirits. But the emotions expressed by the team and the bond they’re forging with each other and the people they help is real.

If you approach Echo like the five-episode movie that it is, you’ll be a lot more satisfied with the pace of the limited series’ storytelling. It’s certainly darker than much of the MCU fare we’ve been seeing, but it’s also one of the MCU series that’s most grounded in reality and family, which is refreshing to see.

No Man’s Land presents an intriguing story of a man getting sucked into the fight against ISIS, joining forces with the little-known (at least in the West) YBJ.

Tension arrives quickly in the series, as they realize it won’t be like making and hustling their own content. They have to build reality show-like alliances, and factor in the opposite, a mutual agreement to oust more powerful players. It’s a different skill set, and it will be interesting to see who can best blend what made them social media influencers in the first place with the age-old concept of real life human interaction.

The Faithful: Women Of The Bible spins a compelling view of the book of Genesis that hasn’t been explored to this point, with performances that humanize the figures being featured, overcoming some clumsy writing.

Live to 100 leans away from woo-woo and self-promotion, and gives us a reasonably compelling investigation into longevity.

Yet for all that is so clearly wonderful about this show, it’s a series that can never escape its roots. The Last of Us is hands-down one of the greatest and most inspired video game adaptations brought to screen. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? No matter how sharp the writing, how inspired the visuals, how awards-worthy the performances, this will always be an interactive story forced into a passive medium.

Waco: American Apocalypse sticks mostly to the nuts and bolts of the Waco siege, making for an effective narrative about an incident that was one of 1993’s top stories.

Despite a squinchy mystery at the center of the first episode, the overarching story of Signora Volpe, with a good performance from Emilia Fox, is enough to keep us watching.

There is potential for Kindred to go awry if she show’s writers end up concentrating on the wrong side of Dana’s time travel adventure. But it’s definitely an intriguing premise that brings up so many questions that we’ll keep watching to see if they’re answered.

This version of One Piece is off the wall without being over the top, a highly necessary distinction illustrating that it’s far more watchable than not.

There are good parts to Halo, and scenes and characters that should interest to new and old fans. But at least in its first two episodes, there is also room to grow. Halo has the potential to be the big-budget, hugely-watched space epic it wants to be. It just needs to take a breath and focus on its story — instead of its backstory — to do that.

While it could be a touch funnier, Mo is very watchable because of Mo Amer as well as its cross-cultural focus.

Yes, Chef! may just be a bigger-budget version of Top Chef, but the show has gotten together a group of 12 excellent chefs and two cooking show experts as hosts/judges. It may not break new ground, but the season should be entertaining.

Anger toward the financial industry that just keeps churning, and how it broke so many regular folks in the wake of the 2008 crash and resulting twenty-nine-trillion-dollar mistake, gives some solid ground to Gaming Wall Street. It gives root to the narrative, a narrative that can occasionally feel like a printout of a particularly hyperactive online comment field.

The producers of Our Living World take a novel approach to the nature docuseries, showing different ways living beings on this planet are connected. Sometimes those connections are a bit strained, but the footage that is being used outweighs a lot of those flaws.