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.

MacGyver (played by Lucas Till, X-Men: Apocalypse) is soooo much smarter than us, his producers have helpfully slapped big bold chyron labels on all the household goods with which he builds Klingon battlecruisers and time-traveling Waring blenders. So yes, that black ashy substance is indeed "SOOT." And that tangle of wires? You guessed it: "ELECTRONICS." Then there are the moments—a lot of them—when MacGyver is boinking one of his chick assistants while whipping up a laser death ray with his free hand. You'll know when the MacGyver audience has reach its target IQ when you see a chyron reading "ORIFICE."

The most interesting thing of all about The Exorcist is that it shares the hardball theology of Fox's Lucifer, AMC's Preacher and Cinemax's exorcism show Outcast. One renegade priest in The Exorcist even resolves his doctrinal disputes with Rome not with an encyclical but a .38. It seems television's era of amiable pseudo-Unitarian clergymen of the Touched by an Angel and Highway to Heaven stripe is officially dead.

Designated Survivor has a terrific pilot episode. Yet it could go off the rails at any moment.

Neither didactic nor smirky, it's a compelling study not only in character but the frenetic nature of celebrity media culture.

Speechless deftly blazes trails between irreverence and crudity, topicality and political correctness.

The exuberant and universal cynicism of Notorious makes it a lot of fun to watch, even as your concept of morality shrivels up like a vampire in the sun. Not that the show won't force you to ask some searching questions.

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.

It's a wretched mess and arguably an offense against human intelligence.

This Is Us is what TV people refer to (usually more in delusional wishfulness than real belief) as "relatable," meaning that you'll recognize the characters and their quandaries and triumphs from your own life.

The punchlines fly thick, fast and pointed in Kevin Can Wait, and enough of them land to make it a diverting, if unenlightening, experience.

A gem of subversive mockery, trashing everything from New Age cosmic-muffin deism to central planning with gleeful comic bloodlust.

An oddly absorbing new Cinemax series about alienation, amorality and blowing people's heads off, not necessarily in that order.

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

Better Things is a faithful female-themed re-creation of Louis C.K.'s other shows: witless and angry, mistaking contempt for satire, self-important in its clueless disregard for plot, characterization or other niceties of the performing arts.

Elvis Lives! creates a black hole of sheer awfulness that threatens to suck in the entire universe and spit it back out as wayward atoms of desiccated goat feces.

"Bloated," "derivative," and "self-important" all seem fair, as does "scandalously overpriced." If producer-director Baz Luhrmann really, as has been reported, spent $120 million and 10 years to develop this thing, Netflix's accountants should be taken out and shot, and I don't mean with a camera.

The real star is Brown, who brings the enigmatic and ill-used Eleven to heart-wrenching life almost without benefit of dialogue. Her face flickers with wonder, woe and menace, often in the same scene, in a way that even cynics who make a point of rooting for horror-movie monsters will not be able to resist.

A stunning fusion of style and story. The Night Of is noir to its very soul.

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.

Whether you grew up with the Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen or the Foo Fighters, Roadies and its lovably immature collection of flakes will summon the pure giddy fun of rock and roll. As they used to say on another great rockin' TV show, I'd give it an 85—it's got a good beat and you can dance to it.

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.

It is a chillingly enjoyable whodunnit for a lazy summer evening. The biggest danger is that the ratings are good and CBS tries to extend it past the 13 episodes scheduled for this summer. There's a reason Agatha Christie never tried to turn Murder on the Orient Express into a TV series.

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.

Feed the Beast is ultimately a study of characters caught up in not-so-quiet desperation, struggling for survival in an irrationally and implacably hostile universe, and it's the bobbing, weaving mutual orbit of Schwimmer and Sturgess that make the show an absorbing experience.

Roots' greatest service may be in reminding us that, as we blunder through the ugly turmoil of present-day American race relations, we've survived worse.

Unfortunately, there are also a lot of epically failed moments as well, almost all of them related to Schenkkan’s script, which paradoxically tries to cover too much while delivering too little. Instead of focusing exclusively on the battle over the civil rights bill, he tries to fold in the entire year of 1964, which included everything from the Gulf of Tonkin naval incident that launched full-scale American intervention in Vietnam to the arrest of a key Johnson aide caught performing a homosexual act in a public restroom weeks before the election that threatened (or so the president feared, anyway) to destroy his campaign.

Alas, Banshee's geometrically progressing body count is bringing it to an end this weekend. The good news is I may have found a replacement. AMC's Preacher, a preposterous goulash of drunken vampires, exploding clergymen, and small town psychosexual kink, seems to share the same cheerily bedlamite DNA that made Banshee such a hallucinatory good time.

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.

However derivative Containment may be, it attains a certain creepy power as it rolls along its yuckily apocalyptic way.

Game of Silence is a killer whale of a show.

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.

Homicidally irritating.

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.

Warburton's expressionlessly ironic delivery turns repetitious; the situations unfunny and even creepy (do daughters really announce their alternative sexual proclivities by making out with a girlfriend in front of dad?) By the end of the second episode, you may even find yourself longing for a good Bill Cosby rape joke.

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.

Most of all, there's the road-not-taken poignance that underlies 11.22.63. Whether you buy the Camelot version of history or not, 11.22.63 channels our collective longing for a moment when everything could have been changed for the better, a sense that so much wrong and hurt could be erased if we could just alter the flow of time for a split second.

HBO's clear-eyed documentary Homegrown: The Counter-Terror Dilemma, produced in conjunction with CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen's new book, United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists, tries to imbue the discussion with some intelligence and nuance.

A remarkable piece of work that carves muscular narrative lines though the tangled legal thickets of the trial while keeping a delicate touch on the chiaroscuro of its characterizations. If ever there was such a thing as must-see TV, this is it.

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.

An oddly enticing pastiche of rom-com, buddy-cop procedural, and renegade theology.

This is a story about not Wall Street but what happens when powerful, amoral men go after one another in a fight without rules or restraints. It might not be pretty, but it's always fascinating.

Baskets is difficult to categorize but extremely funny.

A detailed and utterly compelling examination of the motives and morality of collaboration—like a Casablanca in which the protagonist is not Humphrey Bogart’s heroic Rick but Peter Lorre’s oily Ugarte. If that sounds dramatically counterintuitive and even confounding, get used to it; Colony is mostly about upsetting apple carts.

Superstore is funny enough to be well worth your while.

A lot of Telenovela's humor will stretch across any cultural divide.... But what distinguishes Telenovela from any other sitcom--its relentless lampooning of every convention of its own genre, from the pistolero mustaches of the villains to the ever-escalating décolletage wars of the heroines--may fall flat with an audience that's largely unfamiliar with real novelas.

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.

A fascinating window into the thinking at the top of a compulsively secret agency that has been the spearhead of the war on terror.

There are moments of touching transformation among the characters in Saints & Sinners, none more so than that of the bluff Hopkins, who starts with a purely sanguinary view of the Indians he calls savages.

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.

It is difficult to understate the breathtaking and apparently straight-faced derangement of Agent X.

The show is mostly useful as a vengeful reverse prank on greedy legions of trick-or-treaters. Make sure your tube is prominently visible as you open the door to the kids, and give them a compulsive need for years of therapy along with their Butterfingers.

The show's intricate plotting and its complex female characters—the desperately ambitious McClaren, the angel-faced, black-hearted Beaumontaine—make it fascinating despite its flaws.

As the hour progresses and it flaunts its comic-book side (naturally, some supervillains have followed her to Earth, and even more naturally, there's a secret anti-extraterrestrial police force that wants to shut her up, because "nothing says 'covert operation' like a flying woman in a red skirty"), its essential nerdiness—the preferred PC synonym for "juvenile stupidity"—becomes overwhelming.

Truth Be Told is more of a "look at me, I'm not PC!" shout of self-regard.

Everything about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is balls-out nutbaggery, including its origin: It started out as a half-hour comedy for premium-cable channel Showtime and somehow wound up on a network devoted mostly to high-school bitchery and boy-band vampires, where it's not always clear if the demographic target of 13 to 34 refers to age or IQ.

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

Jeong, however, is still too much of a standup comedian, belting out punchlines and pratfalls like a machine-gun to drown out the heckler in the back, to sustain Dr. Ken beyond sketch-level comedy. And he's too manic (a self-proclaimed "five-foot-five inches of fury") to allow for much help from the rest of the cast.

Grandfathered is a well-crafted piece of work, with jokes coming in at all angles.... But it's also a quietly touching story of emotional lost-and-found, with a cast of remarkable range.

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.

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.

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.

[Producers Josh Pate and Cynthia Cidre] keep Blood & Oil living large without quite stumbling over the top. They get a lot of help from their skilled cast, particularly Crawford, who has grown some grit since his pretty-boy heir in Gossip Girl. And Johnson gives his best performance in years.

In short, they're plotting to turn the world into an episode of Starsky and Hutch.

A crime-fighting Miami pathologist who likes to smirkily show up the cops with whom he works as unscientific dumbasses--sort of like Neil deGrasse Tyson with a badge, and in just as much need of having his eyeballs slapped out.

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.

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.

Happily, what really carries Life in Pieces is not avant-garde form but the traditional lifeblood of sitcoms, good writing and funny performances.

The whodunit and dunwhat? elements of Blindspot are terse, fast-pitched and intriguing.

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

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.

It's the seamy, violent and enticing world of TNT's utterly riveting new 1960s cop drama Public Morals, a world so different than the one Hollywood usually shows you...that you almost expect Rod Serling to step out from behind a bush, warning that "you're traveling through another dimension..."

An absorbing drama.... To the extent that Show Me a Hero is flawed, the problem lies not in Simon's dramaturgy but his journalistic instincts. Show Me a Hero is but a single snapshot of a lumbering crisis that unfolded over a period of nearly three decades, and while the show's narrative is painstakingly accurate within its timeframe, its wide implications are not.

Briskly paced, it sacrifices nuance for impact, and it makes the most of the trade.

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.

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.

The 2000s does a reasonably good job of weaving a tapestry of the decade's highlights.

This three-hour miniseries from Will Farrell and some of his Saturday Night Live buddies is a send-up of 1950s film-noir that more closely resembles another classic Hollywood product: an overinflated boob job.

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.

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

Pizzolatto's writing is not without its irritations, particularly his dialogue.... Ultimately, the characters are too fascinating to turn loose of–particularly Farrell's explosive Velcoro and his political godfather Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn).

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 ultimate paradox of Sense8 is that it can give away so little about its ultimate destination in three hours of screen time, and still be seductive enough to make hour four an attractive proposition.