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.

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.

Watching McGregor spew this exquisite venom like a deranged rattlesnake is entertaining enough, and he gets great support from the rest of the cast—particularly the amazing Krysta Rodriguez (Smash), who captures the manic energy of early Halston advocate Liza Minnelli as if she were born into it. But most of the credit has to producer Murphy, who has an unparalleled ability to carve compelling narratives out of tangled, throbbing messes of characters and subplots.

The bang-bang in L.A.'s Finest is long and loud—two car chases and two shootouts in the first 12 minutes—but it's too well-staged to complain about. And the lurid back stories of the detectives—even their secrets have secrets—keep things interesting even in the infrequent moments when nobody is being tortured or killed.

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.

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.

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.

Adapted exclusively by King from his own 2006 novel, Lisey's Story is a mess in almost every conceivable way. It's drawn from a leaden and forgettable novel, and King's ponderous attempt at a screenplay has done nothing to improve it. Neither has Chilean director Pablo Larrain's painfully arty translation of the written word into video. And while Lisey's Story is loaded with female star power—Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Joan Allen play sisters—King and Larrain have given them little to do except look head-bangingly anguished or (in Allen's case) catatonic.

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

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."

[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.

The Republic of Sarah is the most deliriously goofy TV political mashup since a soon-to-be-vanished Brit satellite channel aired a sitcom called Heil, Honey, I'm Home! about you-know-who.

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.

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

By the way, if you insist on watching NCIS: Hawai'i in order to dispose of those excess brain cells clogging your neural pathways, never ever miss the first 10 seconds because that's when stuff blows up. The show may not have any money for acting or dialogue, but the TNT budget never seems to go low.

This is a stylish, spooky piece of work, with some original twists that give it a little more punch than your average flick.

In short, you've seen American Rust so many times you can recite most of the lines before they're spoken. And yet… and yet… there's just too much talent stacked up in the cast of American Rust to turn away from it.

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

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.

In the long run, it's a good bet that NBC's new crime drama The Endgame is going to prove infuriatingly terrible. But for now, it's electrifying. It's the crack of television, except you don't need a pipe, just a remote.

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.

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.

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

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.

Hard bodies and blank expressions may mix well in porn, but they don't make for effective melodrama. With Devils, the fall season ends not with a bang but a surly grunt.

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.

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.

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

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.

This is all less enthralling than it sounds.

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

But the veteran Williamson—who's masterminded everything from the maniacal Scream franchise, to the terrifying murder-cult drama The Following, to more teenage vampire claptrap than can be listed on cyberspace—can really rattle your bones even when he's not necessarily engaging your intellect.

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?

The idea of different chronological variants of the same character wandering the same timeline would be a forbidden paradox in most time-travel tales. But The Time Traveler's Wife embraces it. Because highly emotional moments in his life act as a kind of magnet for Henry's temporal tumbles, there are certain moments—the awful ones, mostly, like the death of his mother—where there are as many as 20 versions of him looking on, all as dumbstruck with horror as they were the first time they witnessed it.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Transforms the nerd-comedy masterpiece The Big Bang Theory into—well, garbage.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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

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.

Homicidally irritating.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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."

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.

Then there's World's Funniest Animals, The CW's attempt to elevate surfing cat videos on the internet into the status of an actual TV show. Dogs skateboard! Ostriches dance! A Canadian cat tries to fiercely pounce on his own butthole, which seems metaphoric! A lemur eats a banana, which, God help us, is even less interesting than it sounds.

The stupidly-titled Manhunt: Deadly Games is a crisp, absorbing recounting of the search for the bomber who killed two people and injured 150 others at the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta.

The characters are so isolated and, often, alienated, from one another that the early hours of the show have an almost surreal sense of aimlessness, like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. But as they start to fill in, and the story starts to reach backwards, Possessions turns from weirdly fascinating to just plain fascinating.

Cloaking hardboiled fiction, cynical characters, and somber existential heroes not just in midnight-blurred alleys but in the very climate implied a darkness without escape, a perpetual state of moral ambiguity.

Oh, by the way, the Devil keeps an autographed photo of Justin Bieber in his office. Go ahead, tell me you're surprised.

The second season is still well-plotted and satisfyingly mysterious as long as you're new to all this. On the other hand, the first season is better written and has Plummer.

If we ever have a Scopes trial on the existence of devolution, Legends of the Hidden Temple is going to be Exhibit A.

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.

Like the history from which it springs, Glória is taut, tight and terrifying.