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.