It's the rock-solid basic format that makes the show feel vital even 11 years and 22 seasons in.

The Amazing Race is at its best when it anticipates our assumptions about other people, overturns them, and then invites all new judgments.

We are afforded perspectives on staff and patients alike. But, this ER runs almost too smoothly.

One needs to hone in on the performers to find reasons to stay engaged, because the plots and premises of Criminal Minds are worn thin as filaments by this point.

Despite its gratuitous nudity, double-crossing gunplay, and growing pile of corpses, Bored to Death is a remarkably gentle show and its characters surprisingly lovable.

Like many prophecies, the show overreaches a little and tends to vague details, but it also offers means with which to think about what lies ahead.

There's enough action-packed monster fighting to keep the show exciting, the character development is solid, and the cerebral overarching plot will keep sci-fi fans interested.

If this kind of comedy fails in its airless context, Todd Margaret's illogical universe can still be entertaining, at least for brief moments.

The special effects won't keep you up nights, the transformations and the blood remain un-frightening. Instead of such visceral sensations, the show reveals what's human in monsters and vice versa.

In its first season, Love in the Wild was thoroughly mediocre. But any improvements this year are sadly negated by the presence of McCarthy.

Most of the time, Wipeout is quite wonderfully in touch with its unabashed silliness.

This shying away from meaty storylines typifies the longstanding weakness of Major Crimes and, to a certain extent, The Closer before it.... As the team has little to do on the job, the episode fills out the time with minor whiffs of narrative.

Copper reveals not only the grim living conditions of 19th century New York, but also the implications of unchecked police power.

Despite the new episode’s title, “Ch-Ch-Changes,” not much here is different.

The navel-gazing tenor doesn’t always obscure Parenthood‘s thought-provoking moments, which often also showcase clipped, witty scripting, and lucid acting.

Archer‘s affection for character and craft makes it more likely to be remembered as one of the great TV shows of our time, and not just another dirty cartoon.

Still impressively detailed and masterfully assembled, the show again focuses on the classed relations among employees and employers, relations that can be both supportive and dysfunctional, and, increasingly, affected by external forces.

Even with selective choices of what reality to include in its fiction, Sleepy Hollow is effective, biting like a vampire, infecting with simultaneous thrill and dread.

Perhaps as the interplay between the World War II setting and other Marvelverses continues, we’ll see that the creative team learned from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D,’s early stumbles, so the new show is more mature, and ready to hit the ground with its Enfield No. 4s blazing.