“The Commuter” benefits from having Timothy Spall as its bedrock; his performance as railway employee Ed Jacobson, a man with a chance to undo some of his life choices, is classic Twilight Zone stuff. ... It’s downhill from there.

Like Murray’s endearing real-life antics, the show was probably loads of fun for the people involved, but the feeling doesn’t necessarily carry over to the viewing audience.

It’s often too straight-faced to be satirical, and the hodge-podge of accents sometimes undercuts the dramatic intensity.

Sometimes the sheer number of characters gets a bit unwieldy, and the interpersonal drama is less thrilling than the prospect of colorful superhero action (which goes mostly unfulfilled in the first four episodes). But the teen characters are likable and grounded, and worth watching even when they aren’t tapping into their superpowers.

References are not enough to build a compelling narrative, and the show’s central mysteries become less intriguing over the course of the four episodes available for review.

Corden is inoffensive and upbeat, so it’s hard to hate him, but it’s hard to imagine him building a dedicated following, either. Unlike Ferguson, who made his little corner of late night into something unique, Corden is just marking time until viewers fall asleep.

Hardy and his collaborators have tapped into some of the atmosphere of Dickens, but at this point they fall short of his characterization and storytelling abilities.

As a tool for outreach, the show is admirable, but as drama, it falls short of its ambitions.

A mildly amusing pastiche.

While the movie spends comparatively little time on the thousands of people Madoff defrauded (acknowledging them in a couple of brief but intense montages), it conveys the severity of his crimes in the devastation of his immediate family, showing how he did lasting damage to the people he loved most, and none of them ever understood why.

Their charming, flirty interaction--Barrymore reaping bloody chaos, Olyphant doing his best to put a sunny face on it--makes Santa Clarita Diet worthwhile. Otherwise, its taste is all too familiar.

The producers have come up with a somber, plodding, almost entirely humorless mix of Breaking Bad and Justified, when they should have made a show about this spitfire of a character, the only one in the ensemble who isn’t bringing everything down.

Shots Fired drags as the story progresses, and the detours into its main characters’ personal lives are mostly distracting. The result is an uneven but sporadically engaging drama that tries to titillate its audience while also making it think.

Unfortunately, the first episode is workmanlike to a fault: It sets up its characters, throwing in some forgettable, tedious character moments so we can care about them. Fear the Walking Dead doesn’t really kick into gear until Travis and Madison realize that the world has gone wrong.

All the creepy set pieces and engaging performances are no match for the increasingly absurd exposition.

The Expanse manages to take familiar sci-fi elements and synthesize them into something that looks and feels distinctive.

Beneath its loud insistence on its own urgency, Blindspot is a complete blank.

Letty might actually be a better protagonist for an old-school TNT show, taking on another caper and identity in each episode. Forced into a dark, gritty ongoing storyline, she ends up a chore to watch.

Happy! has a cartoonish sensibility more suited to drawings than live action. The more it strains to be edgy and shocking, the more laughable it becomes.

Some of Room 104’s episodes do have a sort of half-formed quality to them, built around character relationships that seem like they are just getting started once the episode ends. But for the most part, the series is an intriguing experiment, allowing the Duplasses and their collaborators the chance to explore multiple genres and approaches.

His version of the show doesn’t differ much from the one Stewart hosted at the end of his tenure. The correspondents are a mix of newcomers and holdovers, and the tone remains mostly bemused outrage at the state of the world.... In his first four shows, his personality didn’t shine through often enough. He was awkward in his interviews, failing to give Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie much of a challenge, and bumbling through more superficial celebrity chats.

It’s a worldwide story that manages to look and feel completely mundane, with boring visuals and inconsistent performances.

Since it’s set up to promote Major League teams and Ferrell’s charity efforts, the show can’t take any serious satirical jabs, so instead Ferrell makes a few blandly humorous comments, and the rest of the running time is filled with some slick game-play footage and lots of high fives.

It’s often hokey and overstated, with Winfrey giving a broad, showy performance. By the end, you get the idea that Henrietta Lacks was very important, but as a person, she remains distant.

[The Defenders] is a plodding, clumsy and unlikable dud. It takes too much time ramping up, wastes its resources on unnecessary characters and subplots and lacks the visual appeal of Marvel’s previous Netflix outings.

The problem with Will is not necessarily that it fictionalizes Shakespeare’s life, but that it does so in such a dull, haphazard way, with little connection to what makes Shakespeare’s work endure or what makes his time period fascinating.

The acting is mediocre all around, and the direction is slick but anonymous, with the look of any number of B-movie crime thrillers. That would be okay for a show with B-movie ambitions, but Snowfall seems to be aiming higher, only to fall back on the kind of overused devices it should be subverting.

TV audiences may not have known they needed a small-screen equivalent of Spamalot--and the network may not really know what to do with it--but Galavant turns out to be completely winning in all its cheesy glory.