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.

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

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

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.

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.

Not that BrainDead isn't bleakly hilarious, to a pee-your-pants-laughing degree, and drive-in-movie creepy. It sooooo is, and it's the show of the summer and possibly of the year. But not since The Werewolf Of Washington popped up during the 1973 summer of Watergate has Hollywood captured the moment's political gestalt with such deadly accuracy.

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.

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.

Leary, one of the sharpest comic writers in television, has a feast on this stuff, lampooning the infirmities of his geezer characters even as he lashes out at the current rock generation with the fury of a scorned old hippie.

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.

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.

The show's motto seems to be, anything you can do, we can do worse.

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

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

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.

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.

Mysteriously, [Bryan Cranston] chose to help produce this stop-animation cartoon about aging superheroes that's about as tired as its protagonists.

Co-creator Murphy has been wittily mocking adolescent caste systems ever since he produced the cult sitcom Popular in 1999, and he's never been sharper than in Scream Queens, which is studded with affectionate allusions to everything from Animal House to Caligula.

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.

If you prefer your crime dramas from the To Catch a Thief corner of the genre, The Catch has much to recommend it, including clever plotting and an elegant, witty cast. Enos, a long way from the bipolar ragamuffin detective she played in The Killing, shows that she can rock an evening gown.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Little more than a Borat clone.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The epic battles over race, gender, drugs, and the Vietnam war are all on display here, without any phony Let It Be soundtrack muffling the shrieks of the wounded.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Superstore is funny enough to be well worth your while.

Warmed-over hash.

As the show unveils multiple conspiracies, all at cross-purposes, Limitless seems less like an exploitation of its movie namesake and more like a well-made and well-thought-out TV series of its own.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Game of Silence is a killer whale of a show.

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

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.

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.

Rebel is merely a boorish bore.

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.

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.

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.

Angel from Hell, originally penciled into the CBS fall schedule and postponed for reasons too secret to disclose but probably having to do with something one of the network's crack programming experts saw in the entrails of a chicken, also has an emotional core surrounded by multiple layers of beguiling loopiness.

It's pretty damn good: sharply drawn characters, snappy dialogue, and awesome action sequences. I'm not sure that Clayne Crawford (Rectify) and Damon Wayans Sr. are going to make anybody forget Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, but they'll be more than good enough for the large audience that's never seen the four films, the last of which is nearly two decades old.

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.

Unfortunately, the sabotage of the novel's truly enthralling story-telling leaves its ideology as its strongest element.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

As the shows progress and they begin mucking around with their hairstyles, difficult morphs into near-impossible and all the doppelganger gimmickry makes it feel like you're sitting through every scene twice. Which, as any good minimalist can tell you, is about 1.5 times too many.

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.

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.

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.

If there's a breakout star in Zoo, though, it's probably the state of Louisiana, which does an astonishingly good impression of the African veldt that's used to excellent effect. Using little in the way of computer-generated effects, Zoo is a striking example of how much a talented director of photography can achieve with just his cameras.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Fiercely engrossing.

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

An endless parade of political soap opera.

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

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?

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.

Kim Cattrall and a don't-quit-your-day-job supporting cast play members of a wealthy and secretly scandalous televangelist family whose secrets are exposed when the patriarch's plane crashes and three scruffily illegitimate heirs surface. The only thing more hacky than the script is Cattrall's wayward Southern accent.

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

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.

But mostly the problem with Our Kind of People is its silly parlor-game sensibility.

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 show, based on a 2013 documentary about a real Los Angeles ER trauma bay, rings with crisp dialogue and authoritatively shouted medical jargon in sufficient quantities that you'll never be more than halfway through an episode before you're completely immersed in hypochondriac terror of what your miscreant organs are plotting against you.

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.

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.

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.

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 manic Brink can be exhausting and overbroad, but it also has moments that are acutely, if childishly, funny.

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.

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

If Minority Report is a satisfying stew of crime drama and sci-fi adventure, the seasoning is sly wit.

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

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."