What's certain is that Condor, though perhaps a little too conspiracy-laden for its own good and more than a bit heavy-handed in the portrayals of its villains, is a beguiling trip through the wilderness of mirrors that's modern intelligence work. You don't have to believe it; just enjoy it.

Succession shares a lot of the corporate hard-ball sensibilities of Showtime's Billions, as well as its uncanny ability to make a thoroughly dislikeable set of perfidious and bloodthirsty characters completely entrancing.

Unless you have a mysterious fascination with ravaged children or junkies coming apart at the seams, this show is best avoided.

There are a lot of reasons to love The Searcher, and that tape fragment (from the night Elvis and a pickup band turned a stately bluegrass waltz called "Blue Moon Of Kentucky" into a balls-to-the-wall jam) is a big one. Director Thom Zimny, who has made several well-regarded Bruce Springsteen documentaries, got access to everything in the Graceland archives, from home movies to ancient recordings of radio interviews.

Alternating effortlessly between weirdly funny and chillingly tense, Killing Eve is the utterly endearing love child of oddball British novelist Luke Jennings and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who writes and stars in the eccentric Brit television comedy Fleabag.

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

With Bruce Helford (The Drew Carey Show) and Whitney Cummings (2 Broke Girls) overseeing the writing, the punchlines come fast and furious.

A slow-burning horror-genre delight.

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

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."

It's scary, a little sickening, and entirely spellbinding.

It's funny, if not clamorously so; superbly acted, by a bunch of people you never heard of; and good-hearted, without being Hallmark-ish.

An unnervingly close-up study of the conflict. Given an astonishing level of access to both Mexican drug lords and American junkies, he's intercut their stories with a narrative about an Ohio police narcotics squad, which though far more ordinary, is still revealing.

Wormwood, ultimately, is a wildly overblown embarrassment to Morris' reputation.

This one gains momentum as it moves along, and ultimately is an absorbing exploration of the complexity and incertitude of human relations.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace is a formidable piece of work, brilliant in its characterizations and harrowing in its depictions of the amorality of American culture's dark underside.

At the center of The Chi's large and immensely talented ensemble class is Jason Mitchell (Mudbound) playing Brandon, a chef who daydreams about opening a restaurant of his own with girlfriend Jerrika (Tiffany Boone, The Following) while trying to slow the steady slide of his mother Laverne (Sonja Sohn, The Wire) in alcoholism.

Grown-ish is a cell-by-cell clone of The Breakfast Club and its celebration of sophomoric melodrama, where cynical wisecracks inevitably give way to mock profundities, shouting matches to hyperemotive tears, and clichés to stereotypes. (Or maybe that one is the other way around.) The wholesale piracy is so blatant that Grown-ish even tries to make a joke or two about it. But the admission that you're stealing somebody else's work doesn't make it any less larcenous.

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 result is a series that feels both traditional and new, with the big-screen qualities of a film and the story and character nuance of the best serialized television. This last is exploited to best advantage by Frank's cast.

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.

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

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

What might have been a rather talky script is enlivened by the peerless performances of Sarah Gadon (who played the romantically doomed librarian in the Hulu miniseries production of 11.22.63) as the wan but flinty Grace and Canadian TV regular Paul Gross as the bewildered Dr. Jordan.

A scathingly funny cocktail of hardball racial humor, caustic Hollywood self-lampoon and general filthy talk.

Valor in no way resembles the generic bang-bang of CBS' SEAL Team or NBC's The Brave. It's an intriguing conspiracy thriller with some painful observations on modern warfare that may take much of the The CW's youthful audience by surprise.

The camp elements have given away to a gloriously lurid trashiness.

Quibble over the categorization all you like, but that won't make Kevin any less of a chore to watch. A variant of the tasked-by-an-angel genre that stretches back to It's a Wonderful Life and perhaps beyond, the show is theologically unglued and emotionally dopey.

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.

The Gifted is driven by action, not character development, and it soon settles into a humdrum series of cheapjack versions of set pieces from Carrie. Don't get too excited; whether through budget shortfalls or fears of rousing the FCC programming police from their deathbed, there are no exploding heads or even a pig-blood shower. Such a pity.

On the show, family hijinx ensue; out in the audience, it's more like self-lobotomies with machetes.

From pacing to plotting to smirky hipster pseudowisdom ("Privacy? We gave that up a long time ago so we could watch cat videos on our cellphone"). Wisdom of the Crowd is a stylistic clone of Person of Interest and Bull. In terms of IQ points, it's the lowest yet.

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

One of the new season's better ones.

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.

The scripts, mostly written by L&O veteran Rene Balcer, do a nifty job of carving a clean narrative trail through the usual true-crime cloud of ephemera.

A funny, charming, and optimistic tale of rolling with the punches.

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.

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.

One thing everybody will be able to agree on, though, is that the 9-year-old version of Sheldon in the Big Bang spinoff Young Sheldon is not ready for prime time or even the pre-dawn hours of a public-access channel. This prequel about Sheldon's childhood in rural Texas, surrounded by an uncomprehending family and a hostile town, is hideously misconceived.

But for all the documentary's merits, it does its best work in ferreting out the bite-size experiences of the grunts, not just the ones in uniform but the CIA officers, junior diplomats, peasant farmer and family members back home—the people didn't make policy but were whipsawed by it. Their stories are poignant, confusing, heartbreaking, maddening, blackly funny, or cryptic, often all at once.

If the substance of Disjointed seems straight out of 1972, so does its structure.

HBO's The Deuce is the spellbinding story of how flesh became flash, how the sex trade went from back alleys to boardrooms.

Extraordinary.

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.

The result is a kind of Mad magazine parody of tough-guy 1980s cop shows crossed with a Marxist-Leninist version of Woody Allen's hilariously counterfeit Japanese spy thriller What's Up, Tiger Lily?

This is big-time entertainment.

The Sinner quickly morphs into the least forthright crime drama, an opaque and intriguingly inverted tale in which crime and punishment are difficult to tell apart.

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.

The script, when it's going for laughs, is absolutely riotous. The scenes taking place in the frat-boy bullpen at Lisa's new hedge fund office—favorite on-going prank: during conversations with SEC compliance officers, they mute their end of the call, then drop trou and rub their junk on the phone—are pee-your-pants hilarious.

In short, Salvation strongly resembles recent congressional budget debates, punctuated by occasional kidnappings, car chases and gunplay by an unidentified gang of thugs that apparently wants the world to end. Finally, the Nihilism Lobby gets its own show.

Billing itself as the story of "how crack began," Snowfall is really just a collection of cliches and set pieces you've already seen in other, much better narcodramas.

Spike's version of The Mist is one dumb piece of work.

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.

Nash, Preston, and Reyes play their roles with such gusto that your profound, debilitating shame at enjoying Claws will fade quickly.

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.

If Still Star-Crossed was taken hostage by a hacker the way the way the new Pirates of the Caribbean film reportedly had been, ABC and Disney would probably break out into delighted giggles and spend the promo budget on a karaoke party for the staff.

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.

I Love Dick doesn't have a safe bone in its body, salacious allusion definitely intended.

A rambunctious sci-fi/fantasy slice-and-dice of theology, myth, and hot-button sociology, with a generous dollop of pure depravity thrown in just for fun and Nielsen points, American Gods is a dizzying journey through humanity's obsession with theism and dogma. It doesn't always make sense--maybe it never makes sense--and its pace is dreadfully uneven. But a show in which a religious pilgrim trekking through the wilderness of a big-box electronic store is tempted by a goddess disguised as Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy, murmuring from a TV screen, "Hey, you ever wanted to see Lucy's tits?" is not easily dismissed.

Call it 30 Rock Lite, a slightly less subversive television-workplace comedy peopled by loopy eccentrics too goofy to be mean for long.

Strahovski, so strikingly desexualized that she's scarcely recognizable, fascinatingly embodies all the seemingly contradictory impulses of The Handmaid's Tale toward feminism.

A must-see for anybody interested in film, World War II, or great story-telling.

Anyone who was around as the bombast of the 1960s turned into the bombs of the 1970s will not be able to feel a sad nostalgia and a tragic sense of inevitability at this mesmerizing spectacle of naivete, idealism, kiddie bravado and ultimately the sheer stupidity of kids playing with fire. If you can remember the 1960s, goes the cliche, you weren't there. But in Guerrilla, the memories of the 1970s linger, and burn.

Call me crude, immature, and jejune—editors do, all the time—but I cannot help but feel a certain fondness for a show in which characters have names like Judge Horsedich. And any comedy casting Shepherd deserves special recognition.

Hulu's odd but engrossing new drama about life inside an 18th-century London brothel.

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

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.

Just as he did in his O.J. Simpson miniseries, Murphy has cast his show to perfection. After a few minutes, it's nearly impossible to remember that Jessica Lange (as Crawford) and Susan Sarandon (as Davis) ever had lives apart from the women they're playing.

This version of Taken is rather more showily cynical than the films, with CIA bosses sitting around listening as hidden microphones relay the approach of armed-to-the-fang drug hitmen who plan to torture and kill Mills. "Shouldn't we, like, warn him?" wonders one: "Don't we have a moral duty?" Retorts Jennifer Beals, the Flashdance babe now graduated to a role as hardboiled spook-in-chief: "Okay, now you're boring me." No duh.

There are laughs aplenty in Patriot, but they're delivered at the mellifluous pace of old whiskey rather than the slam-bang of a Belushian beer can crushed against the forehead.

Some viewers—particularly Presley fans, who study their idol's history with the fervid devotion of Biblical scholars—will likely be at least a bit put off by Sun Records' tangential detours from reality. But most will be able to put it aside, because Sun Records is just too damn much fun to watch to get hung up in the details. The stories are magnetic, and so are the performances.

For Baranski, who arrived to her second-banana job on The Good Wife through a career in comedy (notably as Cybill Shepard's drunken socialite sidekick in Cybill), this is the role of a lifetime, and she responds with the performance of a lifetime.

The conflict between idealism and reality runs through Doubt like a bright thread, sometimes restated in explicitly political terms. Sometimes the firm's lawyers seem to be giving their clients short shrift in deference to dubious leftist shibboleths about community. Is "snitching" really the word for testifying against a gang-banger murderer? That piquant political dilemma, coupled with the increasingly jagged story line of Sadie's dubious romance, keep Doubt more watchable than it probably has a right to be.

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

A rollicking psychedelic trip of a show that washes over you like a vat of Ken Kesey Kool Aid. Splashy, free-associative and generally as nuts as its schizophrenic characters, Legion is as delirious and dazzling as television gets.

When it isn't irritatingly imitative, [it's] hopelessly stupid.

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.

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.

It's a serious--and seriously disturbing--piece of work about a pair of 12-year-old Wisconsin girls who, inspired by a creepy internet meme, lured a friend into the woods after a birthday party and stabbed her 19 times.

The acting is overcooked, the writing homicide-inducingly arch; and making the narrative dirtier, I am sad to report, is not the same thing as making it more sophisticated.

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.

Practically all this ill-conceived series has going for it is spotting the mutations in plot and characters brought on by the conversion from fairytale to cheerless sword-and-sorcery epic.

Irresistible.

Mostly it's just an even more egregiously boring version of all the other CBS police procedurals with their cookie-cutter characters and plots.

If you ever longed for the Roadrunner to be turned into Purina Coyote Chow or those little Family Circus kids to be sold to a Honduran sweatshop, The Mick might be for you.

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.

A weird attempt to blend documentary and sci-fi, Mars is an exquisite botch of both. Its only real accomplishment is to set back the reputation of executive producer Ron Howard to the days when he was murdering the mommies of adorable little baby birds on The Andy Griffith Show.

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.

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.

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.

Sometime toward the end of the first episode, the show hits critical mass and turns mesmerizing and addictive. With Showtime's Homeland and its bipolar spook Carrie Mathison AWOL until next year, Berlin Station has a temporary corner on the dysfunctional-spy market. Buy in.

The intrusion of urban mayhem into the pastoral small-town setting gives Eyewitness an unsettlingly claustrophobic sense of a village under siege. You may not want to live there, but I bet you'll want to visit once a week.

American Housewife may be a knockoff rather than a tapestry, but it includes threads of wistfulness, paranoia and willful social deviance that will make you look twice. Or even thrice.

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.

Send back the cosmos and break out the crack pipes; this is industrial-strength despair.

In short, Chelsea Clinton's evil twin from a parallel and even more dysfunctional universe! Any way we can beam back to the days of Amy Carter?

No Tomorrow nonetheless has some quirky laughs, and Anderson is an appealingly inept protagonist. You could do worse with your time.