The good news is the fashion competition at the heart of “Making the Cut,” as in “Project Runway,” remains strong. The competitors are mostly serious designers. They’re not gimmicky distractions to be laughed off stage (except maybe one). ... Despite episodes with long-ish running times, “Making the Cut” doesn’t show the judges offering post-runway critiques to every designer, just the top two and bottom two.

The pilot for “Future Man,” available Tuesday, takes a little too long to get to the show’s premise — viewers offended by the profane be advised: there are a lot of f-bombs — but “Future Man” is funny enough in its meta commentary on media culture that it’s sure to appeal to the young male audience it targets.

Virtuality is a fascinating, over-stuffed pilot episode, and as intriguing as its concept is, you can see by the end of tonight's two-hour premiere why Fox passed on making it a weekly series.

Structurally, Arrested is in better shape than it was in season four. Fans who temper their expectations for this new batch of episodes--eight are available this week with another eight coming later this year--will be happy to be back with the terrible Bluth family.

The first two episodes deliver a lot of setup as Alex’s world is ripped apart before he’s set on his path to becoming a spy. The plot mechanics are fairly predictable and it takes the show too long to get where it’s clearly going.

It's not a great show but it's not a terrible teen drama, not by a long shot.

The Grey's Anatomy writers acknowledge last season's ratings decline by offering a parallel plot that finds Seattle Grace's ranking as a teaching hospital suffering in tonight's entertaining and ridiculous-in-the-regular-Grey's-ways two-hour season premiere.

What makes “Batwoman” stand apart is that Kate is a lesbian, and by the end of the premiere she’s caught up in an unconventional-for-TV love triangle. Beyond that, this superhero show is admittedly more of the same.

Creatively, the show seems to be in pretty decent shape.

The pilot episode of FX’s new dark comedy “Breeders” will be instantly relatable to anyone who’s ever parented young children. ... Subsequent episodes draw focus away from Paul and Allie and their children and expand to include more attention on Paul’s elderly parents and the addition of actor Michael McKean as Allie’s unambitious American father. None of this is bad per se, just not as funny as what’s established in the premiere.

Episodes improve after the pilot with a shift in focus to the characters and their relationships, but the season finale shifts tones again into a gear that seems like blatant begging for a second season.

Just enough modern references so these new 10-minute episodes don’t feel like reruns.

“Love Life” lacks the HBO edge but it’s still the HBOiest of HBO Max’s early offerings, even as the characterization of Kendrick’s Darby is closer to Ally McBeal than Lena Dunham’s Hannah on “Girls.”

This new “Murphy Brown” is it at its best when the show is most topical, when Murphy is at her most outspoken as Ms. Bergen still delivers a zinger-filled rant flawlessly. ... There’s an obvious fire-in-the-belly for these scenes, but they’re surrounded by a lot of dated sitcom cliches.

A cut above NBC’s ultimately disappointing “Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders” but not quite on par with FX’s “American Crime Story.”

“His Dark Materials” benefits from a mesmerizing Lorne Balfe-composed theme song and early on introduces an intriguing element of travel between dimensions but then bogs down as it moves forward to bring all the requisite characters from the book together.

If you’ve been missing “Desperate Housewives,” the new CBS All Access show “Why Women Kill,” debuting Aug. 15, is the series you’ve been waiting to see. But if you were over “Desperate Housewives” before it finished its eight-season run, well, “Why Women Kill” is kind of more of the same.

Viewers have seen all these elements before, but in “Whiskey Cavalier” they’re deployed in a fun, fast-moving way that the show and the charm of its leads is hard to resist.

“I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” opens some doors and then never fully explores the implications of McNamara walking through them.

A self-consciously strange series can’t quite settle on a tone. Sometimes absurdly funny, other times a little dull and draggy.

“The Politician” is sometimes a fun watch, but tonally it’s all over the place. The premiere offers some genuine emotions while episode two leans much harder into dark comedy.

Entertaining at times, “Dickinson” surely has some appeal to certain segments of the audience but it’s tonally all over the place to a distracting degree.

It’s warm and funny-adjacent but it has too much voiceover narration and doesn’t offer the emotional truths of reigning prime-time family drama champ “This is Us.”

At times, Here and Now is exhausting. And yet, some of the characters, particularly Ramon and the Muslim family, are fascinating enough for the time being, despite how annoying so many other elements of the show turn out to be.

“Council of Dads” is a better show and less blatantly manipulative than last year’s post-“This is Us” NBC series, “The Village,” but “Council” still piles on the dramatic plot turns in ways that are easy to spot a mile away, though occasionally unpredictable (and maybe even confusing for some viewers). It’s a LOT of drama to absorb all the same.

"The Winner" may not be able to go the distance, but it's a fun little show in the here and now.

Whatever the politics of it, The District is a decent drama. Not great, but certainly interesting, especially if it actually deals with issues of race and politics. [7 Oct 2000, p.B-8]

Rescue Me needs rescusing from itself and deliverance will soon come. Until then, fans of the series can enjoy the ride--even if it sometimes feels like a rerun.