The drama is engaging, but fans of the book should prepare for a wildly different story.

The idea of different chronological variants of the same character wandering the same timeline would be a forbidden paradox in most time-travel tales. But The Time Traveler's Wife embraces it. Because highly emotional moments in his life act as a kind of magnet for Henry's temporal tumbles, there are certain moments—the awful ones, mostly, like the death of his mother—where there are as many as 20 versions of him looking on, all as dumbstruck with horror as they were the first time they witnessed it.

It's more of a generational collision over the meaning of sex and relationships, disquieting and discouraging regardless of which side of its generation gap you're from, but surprisingly engrossing.

As a critic, I get paid to watch TV shows, which is a lucky thing for Apple TV's new series Shining Girls, because for its first two and a half hours, it's nearly unwatchable, even though it starts with a reasonably enticing premise: a couple of reporters trying to track down a serial killer. Slooooow, confusing and riddled with what-the-hell moments, it moves at the pace of a snail on Quaaludes. And then, the snail gets a shot of crystal meth. Shining Girls is an immensely entertaining show, if you have the time and patience to wait it out.

Explosive and appalling, 61st Street tears off its mundane outer wrappings to reveal foundation garments of pure steel.

Always weird, sometimes annoying, but frequently fascinating, Outer Range has Yellowstone's same sense of a cowboy family unaware that it has lived out its time—but in this case, the encroachment is not being done by modernity, but something antediluvian that's returned for a possession it left behind.

It should also be noted that Minx is almost certainly the most penis-friendly show in television history, though HBO's teen-boinkfest Euphoria is providing some stiff (heh heh) competition.

In the long run, it's a good bet that NBC's new crime drama The Endgame is going to prove infuriatingly terrible. But for now, it's electrifying. It's the crack of television, except you don't need a pipe, just a remote.

Even if you've never watched Dateline NBC—but more especially if you have—NBC's miniseries The Thing About Pam is irresistibly entertaining.

What's for sure is that if you like the Reacher books, you'll like the Reacher TV show. The blend that marks the books—of brute force and dry wit, of rootlessness and personal loyalty, of animal savagery and human decency—is present and accounted for.

Like Gasteyer, the rest of American Auto's cast—including Harriet Dyer (The Invisible Man) as a promiscuous publicist, Jon Barinholtz (Superstore) as a corporate heirhead and Tye White (NCIS: Los Angeles) as a bemused assembly-line worker yanked up into management so there will be at least one person there who knows something about cars—is uniformly hilarious.

It has an underbelly sufficiently dark that grown-up Kirsten's hands sport a generous number of the tattoo equivalents of gun-stock notches, keepsakes of her capable work with knives. There's also a pervasive feeling that someone—or something—is watching. And what's that mysterious comic book to which Kirsten keeps consulting as if it's a training manual?

Like the history from which it springs, Glória is taut, tight and terrifying.

What makes New Blood worth watching is the return of a couple of grisly old friends. Hall and Carpenter may be playing their characters the same old way, but that's as memorable as ever.

Queens is undeniably a soap opera—a highly entertaining one—but it's also a wry and often endearing commentary on both the wisdom and the decrepitude of advancing age.

It's very funny, rather charming and … well, GOOD.

To my amazement, it's funny, slightly daft, and wonderfully contemptuous of not only the reality genre but the entirety of television. Where else would you ever see brother-and-sister twins dry-hump one another during a dance tryout while a producer screams to his assistant, "Call research and see how incest plays in the Midwest!"

In short, you've seen American Rust so many times you can recite most of the lines before they're spoken. And yet… and yet… there's just too much talent stacked up in the cast of American Rust to turn away from it.

Gomez gets a lot of good dialogue and nails it every time.

Carganilla's blasé exposition of juvenile sociopathology may even be the finest performance of the whole cast, which is saying something: Oh, Duplass, Taylor and Balaban all are outstanding as they bounce from pratfalls to Chaucer jokes to poignant meditations on adult diapers and other detritus of old age. College, when I was there, wasn't nearly this funny.

The second season is still well-plotted and satisfyingly mysterious as long as you're new to all this. On the other hand, the first season is better written and has Plummer.

Bouncing unpredictably between somber dejection and daffy dark humor, Back to Life shouldn't work at all. Yet it does, wonderfully.

The End, an Australian-made series that aired last year elsewhere in the English-speaking world, is sometimes grimly funny, but often just grim.

If you can't find something in here to enjoy, you're just not trying very hard.

Oh, by the way, the Devil keeps an autographed photo of Justin Bieber in his office. Go ahead, tell me you're surprised.

The show's concept—that in a mobile America where nobody stays long in the same ZIP code, particularly in their 20s, your family is your friends—still resonates.

Watching McGregor spew this exquisite venom like a deranged rattlesnake is entertaining enough, and he gets great support from the rest of the cast—particularly the amazing Krysta Rodriguez (Smash), who captures the manic energy of early Halston advocate Liza Minnelli as if she were born into it. But most of the credit has to producer Murphy, who has an unparalleled ability to carve compelling narratives out of tangled, throbbing messes of characters and subplots.

The Kings simply seem incapable of writing anything unintelligent, and The Bite is no exception. When it's not scaring you—and it uses the empty spaces and telephone confinement of pandemic America to spectacular advantage in doing that—it's crippling you with laughter.

There are plenty of intriguing subplots and red herrings in Too Close, but what drives the engine is the full-speed collision of two cracked psyches, expertly played.

Though the Via Mala allusion is clever, the better stylistic reference for Spy City would be the early novels of John le Carré and the films based on the themes: bitter, cynical accounts of how intelligence agencies go off the rails and wage private little wars among themselves, fraught with collateral damage, using the Cold War as an excuse to settle old scores even if they scuttle the supposed larger issues.

Overall, the show—or at least its pilot episode, the only one The CW made available—manages the extraordinary feat of appealing to young genre fans as well striking a chord with their parents, even those still wondering if modern technology can't produce a pair of X-Ray Spex that really work.

Cloaking hardboiled fiction, cynical characters, and somber existential heroes not just in midnight-blurred alleys but in the very climate implied a darkness without escape, a perpetual state of moral ambiguity.

It's diverting in an Agatha Christie sort of way, but ultimately beside the point. Whoever Q is, he clearly didn't really have access to secret White House dope. And as the Trump administration fades further into the background, so does the importance of Q's identity. Paranoia may strike deep, but then it moves on.

With a talented cast and writing staff and a truly original premise, it might really turn into something exceptional—if the American Taliban doesn't put it to death first.

The women of Flack are relentlessly savage: in their disdain for their wayward clients; in their open contempt for the stupid and greedy journalists they use as pawns in their schemes; and in their off-handed manipulation of their husbands and boyfriends. This is all very entertaining. Flack will undoubtedly win the Emmys for Bitchiest Dialogue and Best Puking Sound Effects.

The characters are so isolated and, often, alienated, from one another that the early hours of the show have an almost surreal sense of aimlessness, like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. But as they start to fill in, and the story starts to reach backwards, Possessions turns from weirdly fascinating to just plain fascinating.

Aiding Clarice considerably is the performance of Australian actress Rebecca Breeds (Pretty Little Liars) as Starling. Breeds wisely patterns her diffident, even shy, Clarice after that of Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs, cloaking her intellectual capacity in bashful humility toward authority that sometimes cracks open to reveal repressed rage.

Young Rock's amiable goofiness draws heavily, and successfully, on the personality of its pleasantly flaky star and subject.

The only surprise in Coyote is the quality: It's very good.

NBC's Mr. Mayor, which reworks 30 Rock as a cluster bomb directed against politics instead of TV itself, is gourmet recycling.

And like slumber parties, The Wilds bounces around from silly to interesting and back. It's helped by some very good performances, particularly that of Sarah Pidgeon (Gotham) as Leah, the kid who embraces literature literally. I was also heartened by a few scenes in which the Gen Zs don't seem to come from a galaxy quite so far, far away.

It's a blackly hilarious comedy, a grim character study, a slow unraveling of a troubling past, a dazzling coming-out party for comedienne Kaley Cuoco as a lead actress and, yeah, a vexatiously fascinating murder mystery. You won't be able to take your eyes off of it.

Like most Chuck Lorre-branded shows, B Positive starts out as a barrage of one-liners, most of them admittedly funny, but not necessarily suggesting a solid structure for a continuing show. Yet somehow during all the raucous punchlines, some engaging characters start to show up.

A murder story so full of plot twists and turns, so many characters shedding snakish skins, that it's nearly impossible to write about with scattering spoilers around like confetti. Yet in no way does it turn on plot gimmickry. It's about trust and relationships, authenticity and appearances, verisimilitude and veneers.

While Swamp Thing is determinedly derivative—or rip-off-ish, if you prefer—its extraordinary execution makes it a lot of spooky fun to watch.

That's the key to Next: the vastness and invisibility of an enemy that's woven itself into our world with insidious intent, not unlike Joe McCarthy's communists or Don Siegel's pods.

FX's Fargo returns after an absence of three years, with no discernible diminution of bloodlust, contempt for its fellow man, or general weirdness.

The stupidly-titled Manhunt: Deadly Games is a crisp, absorbing recounting of the search for the bomber who killed two people and injured 150 others at the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta.

The bang-bang in L.A.'s Finest is long and loud—two car chases and two shootouts in the first 12 minutes—but it's too well-staged to complain about. And the lurid back stories of the detectives—even their secrets have secrets—keep things interesting even in the infrequent moments when nobody is being tortured or killed.

Van der Valk is a pure, hard-boiled throwback to the days of Mickey Spillane and Jim Thompson.

In a dreary age in which we're battered on one side by authentic police mayhem and on the other by puerile PC paladins, Hulu's new comedy series Woke is little short of a miracle. It manages to carefully and very funnily thread a needle through a political and social straitjacket.

It's twice as gory, twice as creepy, and twice as much fun as anything else you've seen this summer.

But the veteran Williamson—who's masterminded everything from the maniacal Scream franchise, to the terrifying murder-cult drama The Following, to more teenage vampire claptrap than can be listed on cyberspace—can really rattle your bones even when he's not necessarily engaging your intellect.

The six-part Helter Skelter: An American Myth is the most comprehensive documentary on Charles Manson and his pathological family, the most thorough, and the most fascinating. It's excellent journalism and great television.

Stateless is a good reminder that neither the politics nor the human tragedy of immigration has gone away, and that in the United States, the conflation of immigration with hatred for or love of Trump has almost completely obscured the real issue, the immigrants themselves.

A skillful editor probably could have trimmed 90 minutes out of I'll Be Gone in the Dark that wouldn't be missed.

Perry Mason is the ugliest fun-to-watch show (or perhaps the funnest-to-watch ugly show, I don't know) since Showtime's cuddly serial-killer-next-door series Dexter left the air nearly a decade ago, and the cracked side of America's national psyche will be the better for it.

That's just one of the many delicious, hilarious, fascinating, and sometimes poignant anecdotes in Epix's two-part Laurel Canyon, one of the great rock 'n' roll documentaries of all time.

Watching The Plot Against America often feels like being locked in a closet with a fanatical #NeverTrumper: It'll give you a headache even if you agree with him.

Practically every damn word of this review gives away some whopping twist or turn in Epix's new costume-drama-soap-opera Belgravia.

HBO's production is relentlessly grim, a smothering tapestry of insanity, nutballery, and emotional and physical brutality.

Could the show be launching a slyly subversive attack on planned economies? I thought about that for a moment, then went back to wondering what they do with all the poop. But with a smile.

Historically bonkers.

Amazon Prime's ZeroZeroZero might be the most extensive collection of narcotrafficker aphorisms ever, sort of a Red Book of the cocaine trade.

A funny, horrifying, and generally thrilling account of a female Los Angeles police chief's rocky relations with the city's scummy, thieving (and, of course, male) power brokers.

The Morning Show is high-voltage drama and big-time entertainment, a savage, scorching portrait of the TV news industry as a modern court of the Medicis where corporate genocide is coffee-break sport, where subordinates exist to be crushed and superiors to be sabotaged. It may not be exactly news that the most trusted men (and, these days, women) in America are anything but, but it's never been so convincingly demonstrated.

Intended as a modern comic spin on Ibsen's A Doll's House, Dollface is funny enough, though it mostly misses the feminist boat. It more closely resembles a little-watched FXX surrealist comedy of sexual manners called Man Seeking Woman, in which clueless characters conversed regularly with their own ids as they plotted blundering romantic strategy.

The audience, tentatively, clapped, and Fitzgerald's dancing career was over. Forty million records later, it seems the Apollo audience got it right.

A rollicking meditation on fakes, frauds, and phonies, where anything from a spouse to a case of cancer can turn out to be counterfeit—and probably will.

Easily the most promising series of the fall broadcast season: funny, poignant, and drenched in the chemistry between three charismatic actresses playing women who suddenly learn they're sisters.

Mixed-ish has a much fresher feel than the other shows.

Though Evil manages some truly unnerving moments, particularly the scenes with the lascivious demon, it's more about ideas than the pea-soup-vomiting stuff audiences usually expect from stories about demons and exorcism. In post-Kardashian America, it may be too late to convince viewers that evil is more than a matter of table manners.

Emergence's pilot is a pleasantly spooky hour, with some not-all-that-faint echoes of Netflix's Stranger Things. It's aided immeasurably by the casting of Tolman as a size-16 protagonist who is neither a vixen or a superhero, just a good cop with decent human instincts.

Between the intricately staged violence and Smulders' wonderfully wisecracking, knuckle-busting performance, the Stumptown pilot is an intense experience—so much so that it's hard to believe the rest of the series can hold up to the same standard.

You don't have to like country music at all—in fact, you can despise it—to be swept away by these gloriously eccentric yarns.

If that sounds tedious, it isn't. Unbelievable, the rare crime drama with no bang-bang and scarcely any on-screen violence of any kind (even the rapes, seen only from the eyes of blindfolded, trussed-up victims, are confused and fragmentary), is still a relentlessly compelling binge-watch event.

Veronica is back, as prickly, vengeful and noirish as ever, and television—or at least streaming services—is a more wonderfully crime-ridden place for it.

Fascinating and often horrifying.

As television storytelling, it's little short of brilliant. As history, the verdict is less certain.

Partly concocted from leftover bits of the previous Boston crime movies made by executive producers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (particularly Affleck's 2010 production The Town), and partly from screenwriter Chuck MacLean's fictionalized account of the political cleanup known locally as the Boston Miracle, City on a Hill could reasonably be mistaken for a Bean Town version of The Wire.

Not the least of Big Little Lies' achievements is its relentless mockery of the moneyed class of California progressives from which most of its cast and writers presumably spring. Its characters embrace every crackpot totem of fashionable liberalism with bubblehead enthusiasm that masks a profound lack of sincerity.

Chernobyl really is a horror movie: not just about errant technology, but also a maleficent portrait of an ideology that denies the existence of error.

This is a stylish, spooky piece of work, with some original twists that give it a little more punch than your average flick.

Fosse/Verdon has some things going for it that held my interest even when the basic plot didn't. The scenes in which the two break out the dance steps for their productions, are fascinating, even if—maybe especially if—you don't give a tinker's dam about scissor kicks or jazz hands.

What I do know is that Shadows, the series, is FUNNY —often deadpan, sometimes quietly droll, sometimes howl-at-the-moon hilarious.

First and foremost, this is a show in which dildo injuries are a constant menace (and, possibly, an allusion to the obsessions of earlier generations) and virtually any visit to a friend's home is likely to interrupt sweaty, noisy rutting. (Lest you accuse me of hyperbole: twice in the first three minutes of the pilot.)

Whiskey Cavalier has an appealingly daft streak of sophomoric loopiness.

But it's the eternal internal world of adolesence that's mostly the concern of Pen15, and that's not always a good fit for nostalgia. Erskine and Konkle do not skip past the mindless cruelty of teenagers, and it's possible that for all its rip-roaring daffiness, Pen15 is at its best when it's most lacerating.

A near-perfect mixture of the chess-piece intricacy of The Good Shepherd and the loony bang-bang of the Mission: Impossible movies, Enemy is a classic infinity-of-mirrors counterintelligence drama—and in more ways than one.

This is the first time anybody has unleashed director Seth Rogen, the overlord of Hollywood juvenilia, on the subject, and Black Monday is every bit as madly, sickly funny as you might expect.

To the extent that The Passage is political, it's the age-old horror/sci-fi skepticism about science empowered by government but untempered by moral considerations, the same perspective that's driven everything from the big ants of Them! to the relentless microbes of The Andromeda Strain.

Superior to the film in every way, even if it still has a few shortcomings.

There's more than one escape going on in Dannemora, even if all the routes end in the same place.

The profligate murders are pleasingly imaginative, the plot twists unpredictable enough to stay interesting, and Rittenhouse the cutest sociopath since Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. What's not to like?

An elegant suspense tale in which memory and identity are both the heroes and the villains.

What really makes The Rookie interesting is watching Fillion maneuver among all these sharp elbows while balancing the shortage of adrenaline with the bonus supply of experience that both come with middle age. He does it all with the same let's-have-a-beer amiability he's displayed in shows as diverse as Firefly and Castle. He'll make you forget Kate Jackson is missing.

Created by Charlie Day, one of the producers and stars of the hilariously vulgar and half-witted sitcom It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia , Cool Kids shares its proud tastelessness.

It's a story well-acted and well-told, its cast folding together like fingers in a glove.