Even in its special effects, Childhood’s End looks chintzy and unimaginative.

It’s far too dreary to be a comedy, and its social commentary is often blunt and ineffective. Worse, the narrative has no momentum, spending three hours on the tedious minutiae of relationships among more than a dozen characters, most of whom are barely fleshed out.

The cases are fine for the genre, and 9-1-1 seems like an acceptable time-passer for procedural fans. From Ryan Murphy, though, that qualifies as an anomaly.

As a music-industry story, Sex & Drugs is confused and outdated, with irritating, one-dimensional characters and self-consciously edgy humor. Like its protagonist, it’s mostly a sad relic straining to appear hip.

The six-episode season gets increasingly outlandish, eventually including time travel, doppelgangers and a machine that controls the weather. It’s not quite enough to transcend the mediocre comedy, thin characters and rote fight scenes, but at least it’s more entertaining than another assembly-line D-level action movie.

Duchovny and Anderson slip easily into their old roles. But character chemistry and nostalgia are not enough to carry a new season, even (or especially) such a short one.

Parker and Church are both solid actors, but there’s never any sense that Frances and Robert ever had any love or passion for each other, even at some point in the past. Every time they reminisce about their former life together, it rings false.

Scream Queens is completely clueless about what’s actually scary, and its comedy is ugly and mean-spirited, full of hateful stereotypes and casual misogyny.

The first episode sets up a storyline with limited long-term potential, but it’s entertaining and stylish enough to be worth following to see where it leads.

Too much about Aquarius is boilerplate cop-drama material; by the second episode, Shafe and Hodiak are investigating other cases while the Manson plot plays out over the long term.

The producers surround [Katherine Heigl] with a strong supporting cast as her fellow lawyers, including Elliott Gould, Psych’s Dulé Hill and Orange Is the New Black’s Laverne Cox. But the cases are dull and formulaic, watering down hot-button issues to fit in the show’s neat, simplistic framework.

The superhero cheesiness that is often endearing on The Flash and Supergirl goes into overdrive here, and while some of the action is impressive, it’s in service of such silly, borderline nonsensical storytelling that even hardcore geeks might find it a bit much.

These cops are not even particularly good at corruption, with Harlee and her colleagues frequently making up clumsy lies that instantly fall apart, in order to cover their tracks from previous, flimsy fabrications. The subplots about the other detectives in the unit (aside from Harlee and Woz) are especially thin, and anything about the characters’ personal lives is a tedious waste of time.

Unlike Amazon’s Transparent, which deals compassionately with a late-in-life revelation about sexuality, Grace and Frankie is mostly content to recycle old jokes in a new context.

The most successful shows of the current true-crime boom do more than just lay out the facts, but there isn’t much indication that True Crime will be more than a competently produced eight-part Law & Order episode.

Without the nuanced characters and slow-building suspense of The Americans, Allegiance is just a preposterous thriller. That puts it right at home on NBC, but still far behind its obvious inspiration.

The plot may or may not come together in the end, but the execution, with unimpressive acting and bland dialogue, is unlikely to improve. Brand name aside, Scream is a generic thriller with more pretty faces than creative ideas.

Even their [the likable cast's] enthusiasm can't give life to the stale workplace humor and the half-hearted comic-book references.

It’s an entertaining genre series with some fun performances, but it doesn’t make the same lasting impression as the works that inspired it.

[The Last Tycoon is] full of awkward, hokey dialogue and clumsy contrivances. Even the production values are mediocre; the occasional clips meant to replicate ’30s-era movies are especially phony and unconvincing. Fitzgerald based Monroe on real-life studio executive Irving Thalberg, but the show has Thalberg appear as a separate character, and the consistently ineffective mix of real and fictional characters highlights how poorly the series captures such a fascinating world.

The deliberately rudimentary animation mixes poorly with the more sophisticated live action, so that any character interacting with Zorn is very obviously an actor talking to an empty space. That’s also part of the joke, but like all of the humor in the show, it gets old before it even comes around the second time.

Crawford and Wayans are likable enough, but they aren’t Riggs and Murtaugh; they’re just the stars of TV’s latest variation on the tired buddy-cop formula.

Vice Principals doesn’t offer much of a twist on the familiar high-school setting, or even on the idea that teachers and administrators are despicable. It’s just a slight variation on McBride’s grating, played-out persona.

Walter’s colleagues are just as depraved as he is, but their issues feel forced, more about crass, envelope-pushing jokes than character development. Stewart dives into his role with admirable gusto, but the show around him isn’t worthy of his talents.

The political machinations, led by True Blood’s Stephen Moyer as a devious chamberlain, are more interesting, especially when they delve into the complex dynamic between the English ruling class and the Welsh peasants. But Sutter seems more interested in severed limbs and mysterious pronouncements (he also gives himself the role of Annora’s disfigured, hooded companion, prone to delivering cryptic dialogue), at least so far.

It’s a slow, monotonous story without a clear antagonist, and Frank is a grim, one-note character who works better as a supporting player than a lead. Amber Rose Revah brings some liveliness as a potentially sympathetic Homeland Security agent, but she barely interacts with Frank in the first six episodes.

Zoo could have been silly, over-the-top fun, but instead it’s plodding and monotonous.

The characters themselves are mostly one-dimensional, and the performances range from stiff to dull. The only exception is Marton Csokas, whose hammy turn as the evil, Southern-accented baron who employs Sonny is a highlight.