Fun, light, colorful and original.

It aims for epic, and sometimes hits epic--but it's a bit shallow.

What's best about Time is its ambition; it glows with a near-theatrical shine, challenging viewers to think about TV drama as something other than boilerplate.

Fans will love the sixth season opener. Prepare to be shocked. This is Scandal, after all.

The characters, scripts and performances are surprisingly smart--almost, dare I say, deep. And you still get the comic humiliations, nasty rivalries and teeny bikinis.

The characters hold promise, the show looks swell, the stories reflect rich history and the makers have earned our trust.

Approach Victoria for what it is--a lavish production with impeccable period details and some impeccable entertainment ones--and you will be pleased. Coleman, who’s wonderful here, assures that anyway.

Hardy and cast are first-rate, but the story lumbers.

The cast throws this curveball that catches the plate for a strike.

A ninth season. Wow. In fact, a change of scenery has done Scrubs a world of good. The new students are funny. McGinley is great as always--so, too, is Turk (Donald Faison).

Nix knows how to dig deeper holes for his folks, while he broadens their motivations, sometimes recognized only along the way. Nix isn't bad at keeping the plot pot percolating, either.

Akerman has to be everything. Good thing she's a nimble actress.... Whitford is always winning, and even the poor exes find wiggle room inside their cliches.

Still good, still not for everyone, and almost gone for good.

[An] entertaining, engaging start.

This is an excellent remake featuring two actors--Caan and O'Loughlin--who almost seem made for each other.

These actors are serious sitcom pros, and their show is actually about something genuine--sibling bonding/rivalry, parental button-pushing, relationship-building. It's nice to see some emotional meat in a live-audience staging again, feeding off the energy and reactions of real people.

Looks like a summer winner.

JUNKies follows a familiar formula, but adds a buoyant burst of adrenaline when the guys spontaneously react to the inventions and their makers.

Engaging docudrama with lots of interesting detail. Worth watching.

Lots of first-rate performances--including by a dog--but some of the stories are a little bloated or unfocused.

As always, a welcome summer visitor.

Whom to vote for--Dot or Bette? Or will Paulson end up splitting the vote? The special effects are so seamless and Paulson's performance so memorable that it's not a completely incidental question. Then, of course, there's Lange.

Method makes a solid case for Lewis as underappreciated auteur.

The show is an old-fashioned courtroom procedural, but the pilot has enough sharp writing and well-greased plot twists to suggest future promise.

There’s a sense that we’ve traveled down this road paved with silicon once or twice before, but the ride is still smart, engaging and highly informative.

As a viewing experience, Greenleaf is absorbing, hardly pulse-quickening.

Entourage is clarifying a moral message--drugs will kill you, terrible behavior is terrible, and real friends are forever. It feels like a reassuring final season.

What's special is something a bit harder to define, notably the chemistry, which Montgomery and Walsh have in abundance. The supporting cast is excellent, too.

A sharply written, acted and directed start that will hook fans immediately.

Nothing scary here, but Hollow is fun enough, and promising enough, too.

Initial impression: It fits. Fans of Chalke will remain fans, and everyone who long ago realized that Elizabeth Perkins was the best thing about "Weeds" will as well.

Who is the real Issa? Neither... or more likely both. That’s the series, and also the wellspring of the humor, which tends to be fleeting, subtle or, in a few instances, flat-out funny.

Because this is an all-for-one, one-for-all musical act, these groups are tight and have to be. As a result, the six finalists are very good--which largely makes for good TV.

The pace has slowed, the ride less wild, the story refocused on Ray's "fixer" skills.... McShane and Holmes are welcome additions.

Genius can be gimmicky, while those eternal questions about time travel and alien life forms are ultimately beyond the power of TV (or sand piles) to answer. But the value of this series lies in the attempt, which is ambitious and edifying.

A great ensemble cast and characters who grow in complexity, and humanity, episode by episode. If you didn't know them after the second season, you will get to know them well in the third.

Mars is interesting, and much more: Quirky, funky, earnest, intelligent, engaging and occasionally melodramatic.

Fun, lively, interesting, but also tends to lose focus at times.

Nightwatch isn't merely well produced, with clean, striking visuals and a sharp clarity in which even shadows seem to come into focus, but it's also alive with the sounds of a beautiful, vital and (most often in the dead of the night) dangerous city.

This is almost too clever, funny and ironic for MTV.

[Rhimes] may still be up to her old tricks, but here they seem fresh and energetic. Best of all, she has a solid young cast that pulls them off well.

Tragedy is hard, comedy harder, while mixing both together seamlessly is just about impossible week after week. That Louie usually succeeds is a minor miracle. That it doesn't always is inevitable. Thursday's opener, "Potluck," has a funny twist but ends up in a strange, bitter place--even by Louie standards.

Guirgis’s language is authentic and raw, and tethers Luhrman’s gauzy-romanticized world of the South Bronx to the ground. Best of all, the cast--mostly young and mostly newcomers--has figured out how to make this visual and stylistic gumbo gel.

Fans will be happy--maybe.

The good Lord created sitcoms like The Soul Man as relaxing, relatable humor with heart, and Cedric's new creation isn't about to mess with His template.

It is amusing in the right places.... It's also reasonably smart without being show-offy. Tuesday's launch, meanwhile, is a nice reminder that nothing--at least that good stuff--has changed.

Exciting newcomer with lots of action, and some guiding intelligence, too. (Demerits for a secondary story that doesn’t work.)

A loving portrait of a lady--but who probably would be just as happy not to have this or any portrait at all.

The film's essential weirdness felt real. The TV series' weirdness is more often just comical (or disgusting. One word: Spiders.)

Mike Tyson Mysteries is highbrow lowbrow lampoon, alternately smart and stupid, dizzy and disgusting.

Uneven, intelligent, weird, sometimes funny (more often not)--and almost consistently engaging.

After the first season's packed finale, Sunday's episode settles down, takes a breath, and slowwwwws down. That's absolutely an auspicious and necessary development.

A lesser known, and unloved Shakespeare play (which, incidentally, had other co-authors) comes to life Sunday, but the better plays air over the next couple weeks.

Fans will love every minute--especially Roman's fate.

Not perfect, but pretty darned good, and Moreno and Machado are a formidable comedy team indeed.

Not consistently funny, perhaps, but when Best and/or Falco are on screen, the angels sing. Both are remarkable.

It gets stranger, or--depending on your definition of justice--it gets better.

Robbins means business, calmly prodding family members--and not just the apparent aggressors--to truly comprehend where others are coming from. She calls people on their bull, eliciting not just tears from stress but tears of realization.

Episodes remains funny.... Mangan and Greig, whose characters remain perfectly, hilariously, beset by that terrible Hollywood contagion: Self-loathing co-mingled with self-preservation.

That the whole pilot doesn't collapse into a pile of rubble is due to Rodriguez--or maybe because Jane is so confoundedly odd you want to see what happens next.

Happy Endings, cast and all, has now officially jelled. The show exists on the same cosmic (and comic) TV plain as "Scrubs," "Arrested Development" and that other late bloomer, "Cougar Town."

Fascinating primer (that occasionally begs for more details and explanation).

The series ambles along at its own congenial pace, lighthearted and largely without a care in the world. Great News can also be something of an Easter egg hunt for lovers of classic TV and classic Broadway.

Apartment 23 was and absolutely remains a huge heaping helping of Acquired Taste.

Good newcomer that can drag, but Hemingway's direction keeps this one on track.

Girls is as Girls always was--sharply observed, intensely self-aware and very funny.

Labine and Greer completely hijack the show, and almost threaten to turn Biggs (you'll remember him from "American Pie") and Chalke ("Scrubs." "Roseanne") into props. A well-made and skillfully executed sitcom. Oh--almost forgot--fun, too.

The stories are intricate enough to hold attention, but not too intricate. The action, which always supersedes the chatter, is the thing, and here it's something to see indeed.

Think of Fuller House as “Full House 2.0.” Same premise, same vibe, mostly same cast.... A winner, strictly for fans.

The pursuit of answers feels both rewarding and enjoyable.

Absorbing in parts, tedious in others, but Hahn is great.

The Americans remains a superior American drama and--admittedly, without having a working knowledge on the subject--possibly one of the best Russian TV dramas, too.... These four [episodes] also feel weighted and forlorn, as the chain of lies loop around and around the ankles of Paige and Martha, or those others unlucky enough to know Philip and Elizabeth, with an anchor just waiting to be tossed overboard.

It’s more urgent and visceral, the blood more copious, the agony more intense. This Roots doesn’t flinch, but you almost certainly will. The cast is first-rate, too. ... But this Roots can’t quite escape the faults of the original. Kunta’s story, the Fiddler’s, and later Chicken George’s, are patterns, and also cycles. They seek dignity, but find only indignity--or abject cruelty--over and over.

Slow start Sunday, but the drama's beauty and quality are intact.

Kinnear is solid, but his Keegan is a work in progress--both as human being and TV character.

Move past the word, and images (fortunately fleeting in the pilot), and Supergirl obviously has a major plus: Benoist.

To make Agent Carter work, and work well, Atwell and ABC knew she needed to be a relatable human first, and a subsidiary member of the populous Marvel universe second. Those priorities are straightened out efficiently on Tuesday's episode.

Almost public TV-like by current reality-show standards, this new edition is actually a lot like the original, absent the Velveeta. True-blue fans will rediscover its pleasures.

As always, a sunny, laid-back pleasure.

All those greens and blues--and I'm just talking about the trousers and jackets--make you almost forget how well-written and acted this show is; even the medical jargon seems (ummm) un-jargony and informative. The mini dramas are mostly, however, just a light summer breeze, as befitting unpretentious Pains.

Fascinating, disjointed, moving, tiresome, elegant, tacky, fast, slow. There’s a little something for everyone here.

Whatever it was that made Empire the sensation of the 2014-15 season hasn't gone away for the new season.

Not for the squeamish, but a well-done new medical drama.

Sunday's episode is a necessary decompression episode after last season's intense finale.

Still fun, but the innocent first moments last season were better.

Her shrewd, straightforward perspective and her semisweet, offhand attitude make her reflections fresh and relatable.

Like any competent Bruckheimer, "Miami Medical" speaks TV very well. It spins the A, B and C story lines like plates in a circus act. It has reduced the medical jargon to the requisite bewildering-cum-authentic prattle.

The Jinx does channel that we're-all-on-this-ride-together thrill that hooked so many listeners of last fall's NPR podcast, "Serial," about a murder of a Maryland teen. This may be a high-gloss treatment that utilizes all the tricks of the TV trade, including dramatic re-creations, and a way-over-baked credit sequence, but that sense of unfolding discovery remains.

A well-crafted, well-intentioned documentary series that excels when it offers rare concrete examples of the amorphous role producers play in the musical process, while also shining a spotlight on a who’s who of great producers.

The result is something refreshingly new, and bafflingly different.

Outrageous, eccentric, funny, campy--and too creepy for small kids.

With expectations low, this Exorcist surprises with appealing leads, and--a big bonus point--the return to TV of Geena Davis.

Fun, wild start to the fourth season--and that's just Kalinda's story.

The intrigue continues and The Borgias remains one of TV's more reliable potboilers.

A sober, intelligent, placidly paced drama as only the Canadians can make.

Basic yet beautiful, Cosmos appears to be a winner.

This John Logan creation promises an intriguing summer pastime, for an eight-week run anyway.

Edgier, more sharply drawn, while that Sorkian chatter remains at a very high boil.