The usual C.K. show--fresh, funny, smart, bleak, offensive, entertaining--with one minor demerit, for an overlong finish.

Yes, this story’s kind of been told before, in various places, and in various forms over various decades--but with not nearly as many vulgar words called into service here.

Linc’s still tough and impulsive. Michael still has that lonely middle-distance stare. Tuesday’s opener suggests there’s plenty of action ahead, some real-world parallels, and a shaggy dog that could lead us to an interesting place. Hopefully that place will finally be closure.

Elfman is good (as usual), but Alice doesn’t give her a whole lot of room to expand either. ... There’s not much more here, other than those standard sitcom garnishments, and that spunky, chatty fuzzball.

Singleton’s first TV series has a nice retro vibe, but otherwise not much action, not much originality, and not much wallop.

Ambitious and intelligent, but also a sprawl that can’t quite master all the big themes and ideas.

With his 2000 show, HBO’s “Killing Them Softly,” as another baseline for the best of Chappelle’s TV standup, this one’s right up there, too--not quite its equal, but close.

A featherweight entertainment with a good cast, some charm, and not nearly enough laughs.

Another brilliant, powerful, moving season of one of TV’s best.

Remarkable film.... Based on a look at the first two episodes, this particularly well-produced film insists that even in death, Kalief Browder can still change a broken system--and must.

Too much of the carnal Amy, not enough of the smart, cultural critic Amy.

The fourth season was great. The fifth at least needs to match it, and the evidence so far establishes that it will.

Full of joy, humor, brilliant writing and performances, and a deep unabiding love for what really makes Hollywood great--the women.

Time after Time is timeworn.

The show spurts onto the air like ketchup spewed from an oversqueezed bottle, plopping frenzied mayhem all over everything.

Important television, but also wildly, maddeningly uneven TV, too.

Taken exercises its thriller muscles effectively, dashing between locations and speed-introducing people as props to help/harm Mills while he races the clock to save the day.

Sure, it’s understandable that CMT wants to make the mini series interesting to non-music fans, but a little more music is what would take Sun Records from good to great.

Prepare to reattach those jaws once again. Spectacular. What else?

Solid opener, compelling premise, good cast and one major hole.

Yes, it can be mean, and yes, superficial, and yes, a little draggy (almost a whole episode about a kids’ party, really?). But the cast is fabulous, and the script by Kelley sparkles. A winner.

Think of this as “Grey’s” in a courtroom, with a good New York cast, two legends (Gould and Bill Irwin, who plays a judge), a TV star and a TV pioneer.

Girls' moment is almost up, but this lovely, gossamer line ["I want to write stories that make people feel less alone than I did, to laugh about the things that are painful in life.”] reminds us why that moment was so special.

Beautifully crafted, occasionally incoherent, often challenging and insistently demanding, but what’s not entirely clear in the early episodes is whether the payoff will be worth all the trouble.

A not nearly as bad (as you feared) cop procedural, plus toys that go boom.

Great cast, and Hawkins is a worthy Jack Bauer successor. But Legacy can be lethargic and loquacious. More action, less talk, will hopefully close out this day.

Reminiscent of “Chico and the Man” (the mid-’70s NBC sitcom about a cranky garage owner and his Chicano employee), but it also aspires to a contemporary relevance--but manages only a weary crustiness.

Bruckheimer assembly-line sausage stuffed with plenty of hooey and violence--but the leads are plenty appealing.

Funny idea that doesn’t quite attain the level of “funny show,” but a good cast along with a few good lines indicate this superhero sendup will eventually get there.

While beautiful to look at--some of this was filmed in Wading River, near Herod Point--Zelda can also feel like that TV biopic we’ve all seen before: The one that trudges dutifully along without adding much depth or subtlety in the process.

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

Well done, but formulaic.

After a shaky start, Pete gets denser, trickier and better.

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

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.

The Young Pope is a fascinating mess with a puckish sense of humor and an outsized goal--to know the mind of God.

The first two episodes promise a contemplative sixth as opposed to a shock-and-awe one.

A little too Lemony, but genial, well-produced and presumably faithful to the Lemony Snicket vision.

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

A beauty that will mostly make you laugh and, of course, cry.

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

A grim grind of a trip down that emblematic yellow road.

The material’s the problem. "The Mick" lumbers along instead of flies. Scenes grope for punchlines that — when or if they come — lack punch or just belly-flop. "The Mick" wants to be outrageous, but instead settles for excessive.

A warm, welcome and even moving return. Best of all, a reflective one.

A prime-time soap that wants to be harder-edged than “Empire,” but instead manages to be less fun.

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.

Hairspray Live! is forgettable.

There’s a fascinating sideshow here--Carey’s tough manager--otherwise this is a by-the-book celebrity reality series that just happens to star one of the world’s biggest celebrities.

Nothing much new here (based on the first hour), but Remini appears resolute, tough-talking and potentially formidable.

A Year in the Life is a triumph. ... A sweet, sad, sentimental and (above all) joyous return to Stars Hollow.

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

Dark and thrilling, The Affair returns with a huge wallop--and glorious French star Irène Jacob is in the house.

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.

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

Not nearly enough fresh information on the Long Island case, and cluttered with tangents that seem to lead nowhere, The Killing Season still makes its case — a terrifying one.

Sumptuously produced but glacially told, The Crown is the TV equivalent of a long drive through the English countryside. The scenery keeps changing, but remains the same.

From the setup to the incidentals, People of Earth is packed with humor and heart forever revealed in clever ways.

Good Girls gets the journalism part almost laughably wrong, but as an ensemble drama with a good cast, high production values, and much else, even a crusty editor might observe that, “This story has legs.”

Marred by the usual hospital prime-time melodramatics, Pure Genius is still a compelling idea matched to a superior cast.

In the pilot, some of the lines even find their mark--assuming the intended mark are sites like BuzzFeed, Digg, Cracked, Reddit, Upworthy and so on. But the millennial jokes quickly grow stale, along with their “what is it with these kids” setups.

A wan, weary network-sitcom-by-committee--oh, and Matt LeBlanc, too.

Yet, for all its jam-packed insanity, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend can be one of the tube’s most perceptive and moving shows.

Dutiful, reverent, energetic, expertly crafted and yet utterly incapable of escaping the long shadow of its exotic midnight forbear. The capacity to entertain is still here. The capacity to shock is not. Even as good as she is, Cox’s immaculate-- and historic--performance feels tame compared with Curry’s subversive screen one.

One of the best new fall series and--double bonus points--it stars the great Hugh Laurie and Ethan Suplee, who ruthlessly hijacks his scenes.

A lethargic procedural is brightened by a good cast.

The “fat” stuff is way overdone, but Bader and Mixon are good. Otherwise, your watchwords are: too soon to tell.

Parker’s good, but otherwise Divorce is sullen and sodden.

Frank and Raimy are co-authors of their own personal histories. How they write it together, or mess it up together, could make an intriguing cop procedural.

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.

If only I were 12 again. The tween in me would have loved the scruff and the cute and the “wild” antics.

It is merely OK--not quite tricky enough to satisfy the hard-core geeks, not quite mindless enough to satisfy someone who just wants to watch the tube and forget a long day. But it is tricky, with at least one interesting twist.

Conviction is so into overkill, it’s hard to tell what to take seriously.

Talky, tired, tame Crisis is a misfire.

If all this sounds heady, pretentious or derivative, then Westworld may eventually turn out to be guilty as charged. But from at least from the first two episodes sampled, Westworld is also a genuinely different new series that offers something even better than that: It’s genuinely engaging.

At times, Luke Cage feels like a series in search of a story, or a series intent on drawing one out, scene by chatty scene, over 13 episodes. (Six were available for review; I watched the first two, sampled the rest.) A cast this good, especially a Luke Cage this good, should compensate.

Based on the first three episodes, this looks like another finely crafted season. Also intense, uncompromising and demanding.

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

A few of the critical “makeshift” moments defy logic, if not ridicule.

Character likability is actually just one issue. Plausibility is the other.

Overly familiar story beats and cardboard character cutouts in Wednesday’s opener blunt the return of Jack Bauer 2.0. A hint of genuine promise, however, remains.

Driver['s character] is so self-righteous in her advocacy, so insensitive to her impact, that a little of her goes a long way. And there’s more than a little of her here.

Pitch is doggedly inspirational. And despite its hackneyed moments, the pilot introduces enough meaty stuff to warrant a wait-and-see response. It’s a fresh concept amid TV’s sea of cookie-cutter franchises.

Crawford and Wayans display little rapport. That leaves racing cars, speeding bullets and wannabe wit to prop up an essentially superfluous show.

Fun, colorful, lively--but is there a real show here, or just a good joke?

Saccharine by jaded prime-time standards, this show still just might be the kind of sentiment lots of viewers crave at the moment.

Bull is sleek in look, pace and technique--and crafty enough to indulge CBS’ trademark dollop of human feeling amid the flash. But it’s essentially breezy TV junk food, leaving behind a prefab aftertaste.

Kevin Can Wait is neither as bad as you may have feared nor as good as you may have hoped. It’s squarely and innocuously in the middle.

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

This season opener is in fact a true data dump: Everything along with that name is unloaded. Blindspot instantly becomes a new show, which is a good thing. ... Along with some new characters, including Panjabi’s and another played by stage and TV veteran Michelle Hurd, Blindspot suddenly feels fresher, or at least intelligible.

Nicely crafted, and Gambon--as always--is superb, but this “Masterpiece” movie can also be turgid and lugubrious.

At least the opener indicates this remains an intelligent series in search of complex answers to complicated questions.

Either clever idea or one-trick pony, the Son of Zorn pilot can’t entirely decide which it is either.

She’s a terrific and effortlessly funny actress who establishes vivid characters with vivid lives. But Sam Fox obviously required a bigger reach, and Adlon accomplishes that here.

Good newcomer, good cast and star showrunner. What’s missing, at least in the early episodes, is a propulsive story and pace to match.

The TV breakout Glover fans have been waiting for, also unlike anything else on TV.

The series does a competent job of setting mood and character--notably that anything is possible, the sky’s the limit drive of the early 20th century that animated great inventions, and consequently great fortunes.

Halt finally looks like a series going someplace important, and worth viewers going there with it.

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.