As a TV show, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is mildly entertaining, and genre fans who aren’t familiar with the book might find parts of it enjoyable. But for all its flash, it’s missing an essential ingredient--magic.

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

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.

It’s not a particularly convincing storyline, nor does it offer much insight into Kelly as a person outside of this limited time period. Kidman’s aloof demeanor has a regal quality, but she fails to capture Kelly’s humanity (Dahan’s reliance on extreme close-ups is poor compensation).

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

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.

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.

As it is, Coogan and the rest of the accomplished cast (which also includes Kathryn Hahn and Bradley Whitford) can’t overcome the smug, overwritten material from creator Shalom Auslander.

The series gets off to a slow start, parceling out bits of the title character’s origin story over flashbacks in the first two episodes, and taking its time to introduce the supporting cast. But once Vincent D’Onofrio appears onscreen as Wilson Fisk, the dapper crime-boss villain known in the Marvel comic books as Kingpin, things pick up considerably, and Fisk turns out to be an even more fascinating and complex character than the protagonist.

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.

The case may not necessarily be new or groundbreaking, but it is worth presenting, and Going Clear gets it out there in a direct, engaging way that will leave viewers eager to learn more.

From a plot standpoint, Bloodline is completely flat, using its shifting timelines as a trick to make mundane developments seem more ominous than they really are.

While it doesn’t have much in common with its source material (in which the main character was part of a larger monster cosmology and ended up having to save the universe), iZombie seems to be building a distinctive little world of its own.

One Big Happy is a generic, low-rent sitcom with only one thing setting it apart--and that one thing, thankfully, is no longer all that remarkable.

There are plenty of typical sitcom misunderstandings and miscommunications, and some of the humor is disappointingly tame coming from Fey and Carlock. But the looming darkness is what makes Unbreakable worth watching.

The humor in Last Man is often more disturbing than laugh-out-loud funny, and some of it can be off-putting. But the show is more ambitious than any other current network comedy, and in just two episodes it pushes forward in bold, even reckless ways.

Battle Creek is unlikely to inspire the same kind of praise and devotion as Breaking Bad, but it’s an entertaining exercise in typical TV crime-solving.

The result is tiresome and forgettable, which makes it perfect filler for CBS’ Thursday-night lineup of popular but moronic sitcoms.

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.

Better Call Saul isn’t to ascend to Breaking Bad’s place in pop-culture history, but as a guilty pleasure for those who miss Heisenberg and the gang, it succeeds on just about every level.

Like Stewart, Wilmore is good at using jokes to cut down overblown public figures, and he isn’t afraid to be self-deprecating. His opening monologue is typically the best part of the show.... The shakiest part of the show during its first week has been the middle panel-discussion segment, which features a mix of comedians and political commentators talking about the episode’s topic.

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 acting is strong, but the show strains for deeper meaning when its best modes are relaxed and observational.

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.

Having a prominent gay character on a hip-hop drama is still a step in the right direction, though, and Empire’s characters might develop greater nuance as the show progresses. For now, it’s a trashy soap with one entertaining performance.