New NBC drama is an obvious rip-off of This Is Us, but without any real heart.

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

That's Hunters: the waste of a heavyweight cast on a smarmy, smart-assed and sportively sadistic wallow in 1970s anti-Nazi paranoia. As violent and tasteless as any Quentin Tarantino project (and yes, Inglorious Basterds is definitely a point of reference) but without the underlying talent, Hunters' only likely achievement is triggering a wave of common prayers across religions and cultures for the continued good health of Pacino so that this mess isn't remembered as his last project.

Imagine, as I suppose you have many times, Footloose set in a Stalinist work camp. Or a Hunger Games in which the weapons are not bows and arrows but manuals of Canadian Choreography for the Big-Butted. Or that you suddenly and unaccountably found yourself with a fatally compelling urge to thrust red-hot pokers into your eyes and ears while praying for a quick descent into the fiery embrace of Hell. This last one, I must dutifully report, is no longer just an amusing fantasy but a genuine likelihood should you decide to watch an episode of Hulu's dizzying post-apocalyptic rap drama (I am pretty sure I'm the first person ever to type that phrase) Utopia Falls.

For a show that really ought to be horsewhipped, have a look at NBC's alleged sitcom Indebted, which stars the animated corpses of Fran Drescher and Steven Weber as broke Baby Boomers who have to move back in with their son and his wife (Adam Pally, The Mindy Project, and Abby Elliott, Saturday Night Live). My only question after watching the pilot was, are they joking? And the answer was, no, not even once.

Katy Keene lasciviously rolls around in every threadbare cliché of showbiz melodrama and then some.

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.

There's nobody to love or even like much in Briarpatch. Even Allegra is flat and withdrawn; her insistence on staying to pursue the case is driven by intellect rather than emotion.

Outmatched is abominable, repulsive claptrap, not just anti-intellectual but actually anti-intellect, a rousing call for the stupification of America.

It's like the miscegenated offspring of a quickie three-way between Lost in Space, Love Boat and Veep: sometimes funny, often inane, and usually obsessed with conjugation of fornicational verbs.

It's a serious piece of work, with talented writers like Richard Price and Dennis Lehane doing the adaptation. But the result is curiously—and annoyingly—uneven, as if different production crews took over on alternate days undoing one another's work.

Putting aside Deputy's peculiar politics and red-meat aesthetic, though, it has undeniable appeal. The intricately staged shootouts and car chases are gleefully frequent, the dialogue crackling.

Dare Me is long on atmosphere, short on plot, and distressingly overburdened with anachronistic dialogue.

Identity politics are the newest member of the cast, and a most unwelcome one.

The publicists for Hulu's new revenge drama Reprisal's describe it as "hyper-noir." Actually, it's more an object lesson in how those two terms can't be used together. Film noir is darkly underlit, a creature of the shadows. Its dialogue is cynical but clever. Though its sexuality may be frenzied, it's about seduction, not rape. "Hyper" implies the opposite: Garish. Extreme. Grating. Which is actually a fairly good description of Reprisal. Throw in "charmless" and "crude" and you've pretty much painted the whole picture.

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.

Mad About You cultists will be enthralled—well, pleased—about the presence of some of the old friends, relatives and sidekicks, including John Pankow and Richard Kind. Not present, alas, is the spacey and inept waitress Ursula, so popular in first go-round that she elevated Lisa Kudrow into a co-starring role on Friends. How long do we have to wait for a reboot of that?

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.

To the extent that Limetown has a point (other than whatever corporate perfidy ultimately turns out to be responsible for what happened), it seems to be that the 24-hour news cycle has so scrambled Americans' brains and scarred their souls that even the most profound tragedies have been forgotten by the weekend.

In short, there's a zesty story to be told here. But it mostly isn't in this miniseries.

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.

Producer-host Tiffany Haddish (Girls Trip) tries hard, but these children brim with a smarmy precocity that makes me long for a TV version of another candid-kiddie work, National Lampoon's old "Children's Letters To The Gestapo."

Everything in Batwoman—the plots, the dialogue, the characterizations—is very comic-booky, in the worst sense of the term.

Newcomer Kennedy McMahon, who plays the title role in The CW's new version of Nancy Drew, certainly passes the cuteness test. But her Nancy falls short in every other respect.

There's not much here you haven't seen on another Fox cartoon, King of the Hill, except it's done with Southern accents. The pilot does feature a couple of interesting guest appearances—one by an anarchist cat working to destroy zoning laws, and another by Colin Powell doing the macarena. Call me if they get their own shows.

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.

There are lots of jokes about the sexual and intellectual traits of white trash, apparently the only remaining socio-economic minority without PC protection, but out of respect for the billions of pixels leaping to their fiery deaths to bring you this review, we will say no more.

Despite Modi's manic presentation, Sunnyside resembles nothing so much as a 30-minute public-service spot for Catholic Legal Services or some other pro-bono law firm.

What follows are some awkward dates in which Walton is very forthright and earnest. That's not the same thing as funny. Not at all the same thing, as you'll realize well before the first commercial wakes you up.

Carol's Second Act could use more punchlines and less impassioned wisdom.

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.

They have zero chemistry. They do not go on a date. They do not say anything funny. Though the laugh track does go bonkers when Olowofoyeku asks Gardell, "Would you like me to insert a catheter in your penis?" At least, I hope it was a laugh track.

This is all less enthralling than it sounds.

Its main conviction seems to be that judges should function not as neutral arbiters of the law but as assistants to defense lawyers and that empathy, rather than evidence, should govern judicial outcomes.

So weirdly stupid that it might actually be good. Or, then again, just weird and stupid.

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.

An endless parade of political soap opera.

Fascinating and often horrifying.

View Ailes' life as an exercise in personal and political villainy, if you will; but it's a fascinating one. The Loudest Voice is merely repellent.

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.

The Nichols film still gleams with the diamond-hard fury of the book and echoes with its mad laughter. The tepid Hulu series has neither. Next to the movie, the Hulu series looks like a pallid corpse drained by a vampire.

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.

Marcia Clark, the failed O.J. Simpson prosecutor, is one of the writers and executive producers behind ABC's new legal drama The Fix, and she clearly believes revenge is a dish best served as a TV dinner: stale, overcooked, and tasting like cardboard.

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.

Slow and stupid more often than it shows signs of genuine noir craft, and yet will probably hook you if you watch very much of it. Its ample supply of celebrity kink, cold-case magnetism, and twilight menace will easily (okay, not easily, but adequately) distract you from its corpse-like pace, its blockhead dialogue, and, well, everything else.

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.

It takes A Discovery Of Witches a long time to show any signs of a pulse, mostly because Palmer is cute as a kitten but also about as threatening. Her frequent exchange of mean looks with the vampires is significantly less scary than her producers seem to believe.

The ham-handedness of Roswell, New Mexico, cannot be overstated.

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.

The constant, clumsy back-and-forth story line is not [Buhler]'s only annoying affectation. He's also larded Nightflyer with references to other, better, works, from Star Trek to The Shining, probably intended in homage but really serving just to remind you how much better all of them were. And the abundant gore, no doubt a confused nod to Martin's original premise that horror and sci-fi can coexist in the same vehicle, serves no purpose at all. [Buhler] may think he's speaking in some advanced new artistic argot, but really, it's just a lot of outer-space jabberwocky.

Eventually Killer Robots dissolves into pure silliness.

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.

Legacies must be given credit for boldly confronting the bigoted myths about lycanthrope/Wiccan miscegenation. And its continuing salute to Our Friend The Mouse (perhaps an allegorical reference to Disney?) is welcome and educational. Who knew rodent entrails could be used in so many spells?

None of them has ever carried a series before, and as good as they were in The Conners debut, the glue that held the show together was the unseen ghost of Roseanne, as aggravating and amusing as ever, invisible but never absent. I'll believe she's replaceable when I see it.

This Charmed has its sights set on the Emmy for "Most PC Cliches Packed Into One Oppressively Long Drama Ever," and I think it might even win the lifetime achievement award the first season.

The kids are a ratty little mob of thieves, snitches, and dissemblers, which can be sporadically amusing. But the plot of the pilot seems likely to be repeated even more often than the money jokes.

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.

All American really fails to engage above the Barbie Dream House level. The cast is more than decent—Ezra will doubtless be the Next Big Thing among the post-Bieber generation—but the writing is pretty mundane. I found myself longing for the luscious Summer Roberts of The O.C., who once defended wistfully insisted, "I'm not that dumb, I'm just shallow." We'll see if All American viewers will settle for half a loaf.

Perceptiveness alone will not carry a sitcom; it's got to have jokes. And The Neighboorhood relies far too much on the novelty of a black character spouting edgy lines that we're more accustomed to hearing from a white mouth.

To the extent that there's a coherent thought in Happy Together's empty head, it is that 35 is the new 50. That sedate married couple is played by Daman Wayans Jr. and Amber Dawn Stevens (The Carmichael Show), ages 36 and 32, respectively. As for the pop-idol interloper, he's played by Felix Mallard, a giant soap star in Australia, where charisma is apparently measured much differently.

That women like Emet exist is beyond question, but most people would rather hang themselves from a hat rack in their office cubicle than engage with them. I Feel Bad's title will seem like profound prophecy to anybody who watches.

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.

Warmed-over hash.

In short, Murphy Brown was a lovably fractured mess and nobody's poster child for anything. Turning her into a geriatric Rachel Maddow-style Stalinist (Bergen is 72, around the same age as her character) does lethal damage to the heart of the show.

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

Single Parents...ranges from silly to dumb, and I also don't use that description dismissively. I laughed out loud, a bunch of times, at its jerky, disgruntled moms and dads who love their kids but genuinely want to kill the martinets who run their progressive school like a posse of smiley-faced Nurse Ratcheds.

It's really a window into life inside the inner city, where—contra The Wire—not everybody is out on the corner hustling dime bags.

None of this plays as interesting or funny as it sounds on the printed page. Carrey's Mr. Pickles is tortuously unappealing, a smiley-faced drip in need of a hard slapping. And Mr. Pickles' Puppet Time itself is on the screen, it's light years past unbearable.

It's a big, sometimes over-the-top sitcom like Good Times, The Jeffersons or the other black comedies that dominated the Nielsen ratings for much of the 1970s. But its ambitions to be something more are sadly unfulfilled.

The Purge remains essentially a snuff film. Call me crazy, but it just may turn out that 10 hours of gory slaughter unconstrained by even the vaguest intellectual or moral framework is going to be irredeemable crap no matter how many pretty sociopolitical ribbons you put on it. Call it, I dunno, grade-Z nihilism.

As end-of-summer video junk food, you could do a lot worse. One Dollar's cast of scruffy characters is an interesting bunch, even when under lethal assault by their own writers. I wound up watching them for four hours, about three more than I planned, and each one was more enjoyable than the last.

If The Simpsons and Futurama are PG-13 shows, Disenchantment is maybe PG-14, ever-so-slightly sexier and bloodier. Like the other shows, its jokes are more suggestive than bawdy.

Here's what Insatiable is not: an exercise in fat-shaming or any other teenage caste cruelty. Sure, Patty gets mocked and abused, but the kids who engage in that behavior are unambiguously treated as villains, and they don't fare well. And Patty's acts of vengeance mostly seem heroic, even when they are patently misanthropic. Everybody who ever suffered shunning or scorn at the hands of a high-school social overlord will be raising a fist in solidarity.

In the unlikely event that FBI has anything going for it, that would be the still-sexy-in-her-60s Sela Ward as the barking special agent in charge Maggie Bell, and the special effects budget.

New Amsterdam...is not based on one show but every medical drama in TV history going right back to 1954's Medic.

Fraught with hints of conspiracy both secular and spiritual (Who messed with the plane? God or the CIA? And whatever the answer, what was the motive?), Manifest bounces around like a pinball machine with bumpers marked "sinister," "heartbreak," and "redemption," and scores high whichever one it touches.

The newbie, Jay Hernandez (Scandal) comes across more like Tom Berenger in The Big Chill, playing a wimpy actor in a Magnum-like show.

Little more than a Borat clone.

Castle Rock, especially in the early going, unfurls its tentacles slowly, but their grip is eerily strong; over the three episodes I watched, I was never tempted to look away.

In the #MeToo era, HBO's Sharp Objects will inevitably be proclaimed a work of eloquent female empowerment. It isn't. It's slow, confusing, over-gothed and under-articulated. There's a good story squeaking from underneath all the messy baggage it carries, but it's probably easier to just go to Kmart for another suitcase rather than unpack this thing.

The trouble with Take Two is with neither the concept, retread though it may be, or the stars. It's the dreadful scripts. The crime-of-the-week stories are like little video Rubik cubes; with a lot of time and effort, you could figure them out, but why bother? And the jokes all tend to revolve around genitalia, including a truly startling number of variations on the old Mae West is-that-a-gun-in-your-pocket routine.