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.

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.

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

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.

Once you know that Future Man is written and produced by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter, and Ariel Shaffir, the team behind the epically uncouth cartoon Sausage Party, further explanation becomes almost totally unnecessary. It's a comic onslaught against video-gamers and their culture of the past 30 years or so, with the occasional random shot at baby boomers so they won't be left out of the fun.

Considered for what it really is—a sharply observed soap opera about a wholly debauched and dysfunctional group of friends preying upon their mutual insecurities—I'm Dying Up Here offers considerable viewing pleasure.

The Hunt is more of a high-stakes chess match, albeit one featuring spectacularly photographed athletic grace. Its preternaturally omniscient cameras document the shifting strategies employed by both predators and prey.

Search Party is kind of weirdly endearing, in a misanthropic, foul-mouthed sort of way. If you've ever wondered why all your friends are self-important sociopaths, Search Party may be the show you've been waiting for all your life.

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.

Actually, Ghosted isn't all that bad, even if satirizing The X-Files feels a little bit wet-noodley at this point.

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.

As is often the case with buddy-cop shows, the quality of the mysteries on Houdini & Doyle varies considerably week to week—some not bad, some so strained that even the Gerber baby would spit them out in disgust. What keeps matters interesting is the byplay among the characters, so philosophically at odds that they're often working against one another.

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.

The Bastard Executioner's opacity is simply a matter of trying to cram too much into a pilot episode, a not uncommon problem in television.

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

The Grinder has its amusing moments, particularly in the way the celebrity-smitten townspeople unquestioningly accept TV stardom as a juridical credential, to the point that the judge allows Lowe to cite episodes of his shows as legal precedents.

Despite your understandable and probably entirely justified fear that the success of a show about a time-traveling ham radio will lead to a painful rash of sequels about time-traveling toaster-ovens and Waring blenders, Frequency is not so bad. The paradoxes of time-travel, though familiar to anybody with even a passing acquaintance with sci fi, are artfully woven in, and List is quite appealing as a daughter remaking her long-held image of a father she hardly knew.

But basically, shorn of a few four-letter words and an occasional arm thrust up the cervix of a cow, there's nothing about The Ranch that wouldn't fit in just fine on network television, and that goes for both sides of the camera: The veteran, bankable cast. The workmanlike producers (Don Reo and Jim Patterson, lately of Two and a Half Men, as is Kutcher). The cookie-cutter sets. The three-camera photography and editing. The laugh track.

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.

Its combination of black humor and gross-out jokes is a little bit on the hit-or-miss side.

It doesn't require an overdeveloped sense of empathy to see that, for anybody under 40, the show is going to feel less like a comedic experience than the receiving end of a gang-bang.

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

It's too loud and dumb to be really called good, but any fan of vampires, were-tigers or gaseously bloated corpses is going to have a fine time with it.

Seems less a sitcom than a character study inflected by melancholy humor and hip-hop idioms. It sometimes tries a bit too hard to flash its street credentials (the episodes all have titles like "Messy as Fuck" and "Thirsty as Fuck"), but that's more than compensated for by its obdurate refusal to bill itself as the master narrative of black women. It's content to be the piquant story of two confused friends trying to navigate the uncertainties of the young-adult world.

Like Grey's Anatomy when it started out, the Quantico cast is mostly young and relatively unheralded, the latter condition likely to remain unless this show's metabolism can be significantly slowed.

The show arguably has the worst potty-mouth in the history of basic cable, and its humor often meanders the line between penile and puerile. A race driver named Clown Dick is funny, kinda; a female police sergeant screaming "Suck my dick!" kinda less.

It's a ghoulishly brutal, stunningly creative, and utterly Pyrrhic send-up of blue-collar domestic sitcoms, way too effective to be entertaining.

It's a show that's sometimes funny, sometimes, touching, often disturbing, and almost always hard to look away from except in horror.

In some ways it's not about poverty, but rather a tale about reassembling a shattered family.

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.

Merely dazed: stylistically, narratively, theologically. Part soap opera, part jeremiad, and part dark comedy, its various incarnations don't always mesh very well. It strives for epic magnificence and falls well short of coherence...And yet it's kind of entertaining.

Faintly charming and landing an occasional punchline like that one, The Mayor is somewhat more amusing than open-mic night at a college pub, but that's about as extravagant as the praise is going to get.

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

I can't help but feel a certain scruffy affection for a show in which the hero is learning to read by perusing Paradise Lost and where the political economy is summed up in a single line of dialogue: "Power is not inherited...It's taken." Take that, Frank Capra.

Startlingly, it's not bad; or, as Darren McGarvin said of the bottle of wine he found under the tree in A Christmas Story, "This wine isn't bad. It's not good, but it's not bad."

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

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.

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.

Even at its most interesting, The Making of the Mob has the flat taste of warmed-up leftovers. That’s because this story has already been told, and much better, during the five-year run of HBO’s Mob creation drama Boardwalk Empire.

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

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.

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.

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.

This is all well and good, and might have made a good episode of Showtime's barbarous Wall Street drama Billions. But, having expressed every cogent thought in its head in the first 50 minutes, Wizard drags along for another tortuously repetitive hour and half, a long day's journey into utter banality.

For all Covenant's effectiveness at depicting the insane frustration of black life in America in 1950, it still has multiple failings as a drama, particularly on the supernatural side of story.

If The Crossing has too much ambiguity to be an effective political polemic, it's perhaps a bit overstuffed to make good television.

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.

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

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

ABC's Time After Time is a lock for this year's Emmy in the "Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Idiocy" category, being not only part of an insanely overworked genre but a remake of the 1979 film of the same name.

Fox's Making History at least has the decency to be a spoof.

An endless parade of political soap opera.

It's rarely funny (at least intentionally), never affecting, and has the narrative cohesion of a Dick and Jane reader minus the cute drawings of Puff the Cat. It is, however, weirdly interesting.

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.

Ghosts is more cute than funny. Though it must be given credit (if that's the right word) for breaking the broadcast-TV barrier on a particular euphemism for fellatio, which the ghosts use frequently without any awareness of its modern American significance. Now, on to the rusty trombone.

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.

Harriet the Spy is probably better described as cute, though the kids' novel on which it's based was strange and arguably a little disturbing back in the day.

Mixing melancholy and humor—even black humor—requires a delicate touch that’s lacking in You, Me and the Apocalypse. Not to mention that too many of the jokes don’t quite rise to the level of black humor. More like beige.

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

The shark-jumping occurred in Happy Days' fifth season. But a critic who waits five years to declare a shark jumped these days probably won't have a show left to declare dead; three and a half seasons is now considered a healthy lifespan for a TV series. So let's give mad props to NBC's La Brea, which vaults the Selachimorpha in precisely nine minutes when it debuts next week.

Timeless is quite funny, sometimes intentionally.

Superior Donuts is far from unwatchable. The snappy repartee between the crusty old white owner and his hustling young black employee may not quite draw the blood that the thematically similar "Chico and the Man" did, but it's not without its chuckles. And Fowler brings a madly exuberant charm to his role that marks him for future stardom.

The problem, a large one, is that there are long dry stretches between the laughs. Too many of the punchlines land weakly or not at all. This may be the product of an abrupt and extensive makeover of the show at the last minute—Emily Locke was originally written as an insurance adjuster frustrated by the big payouts her company was making to innocent bystanders at superhero dust-ups. The vast horizon of insurance humor, alas, will remain unexplored.

That's an apt summation of Coroner, which aside from those bullet wounds on Jenny's naked back is the very essence of Canadian tepidity.

The humor is darker than a witch's heart, most of it consisting of pranks played on people who are about to have their brains blown out.

Watching it will definitely give you some painful 1960s and 1970s whiplash.

It benefits from the sort of deadpan, off-the-wall humor that powered 30 Rock.

It's sometimes soggy and silly, sometimes sharply insightful; sometimes a politically correct sledgehammer, sometimes waspishly funny. One thing that seems certain is that it's far more ideologically attuned than its predecessor. The original version certainly had a political bent, but only in a broad, traditionally sci-fi way: ruthless totalitarians bad, smiley-faced anti-totalitarians good. The new show is far more specifically tethered to the woke politics of 2021.

Mostly Marlon is a lot of mugging and shouting by the star, with the rest of the cast reduced to a collective straight man. As somebody once said, a hundred times in half an hour, oh, hell no.

Give them credit for trying a different take on cop shows, but S.W.A.T. simply falls flat in every conceivable way.

There's no story or character development, just an endless chorus of set-up, punch line, repeat. And the punch lines aren't nearly cutting enough to carry all that indolently dead weight.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Brave guys—err, persons; gender integration of combat units is a lot further along on television than it is in the Pentagon—are all but impervious to bullets and bombs.

If the superpowers of the soldiers in The Brave are predictable, those of Shaun Murphy, the young, brilliant and autistic surgeon who's the title character of ABC's The Good Doctor, are depressing—because they reflect the collective judgment broadcast television bosses that their viewers are bigoted halfwits.

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?

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?

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.

As the financial and emotional dominoes keep tumbling, there are only so many chuckles to be wrung from financial ruin and emotional defenestration. The show goes from morbidly funny to morbid to jagged and depressing at record speed. There are a lot of jokes in Life Sentence about patients watching "sappy cancer movies."

There are a few amusing exchanges across this cultural divide, but they get old quick.

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.

Much of the time, the show plays as an As the World Turns remake in which the cast has been issued Spanish accents and AK-47s.

Where Stranger Things is deft, Dark is heavy-handed; where Stranger Things is well-paced, Dark moves at the speed of a dump truck lost in a bog; where Stranger Things' kids are likeable and funny, Dark's are sullen and sour.

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.

Imagine Elon Musk, in a fit of boredom, buys the Chicago police department and you've got the idea of this odd little show.

Virile but vulnerable team leader? Check. Young, talented but wild team member? Check. Prim civilian female supervisor concealing a smokin' hot body under her power pants suit, possibly to be deployed at any moment? Check. Team-wide ability to shoot 12,000 Muslim hordes with seven bullets? Check.

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.

Her plot is a Byzantine mish-mash, her characters complex but uninterestingly so, and her attention to detail frequently unpleasant.

It's not the worst of the genre, but that's light-years away from calling it good.

Trickster does achieve a certain underlying creepiness, but it's often hard to distinguish that from the general desolation of the landscape.

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

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.

This is all less enthralling than it sounds.

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.

In other words, all the same stuff you've seen on every TV medical drama back to the days of Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare, from which Pure Genius is indistinguishable except for the color photography.

LeBlanc is a talented comedian—his Episodes, which will wind up a five-season run on Showtime early next year, is the most scabrously funny Hollywood self-examination ever—but there's no way he could have saved this generic, mailed-in show, in which the tepidity of the jokes is exceeded only by the depth to which they're driven into the ground.