The drama is engaging, but fans of the book should prepare for a wildly different story.

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.

It's more of a generational collision over the meaning of sex and relationships, disquieting and discouraging regardless of which side of its generation gap you're from, but surprisingly engrossing.

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.

Explosive and appalling, 61st Street tears off its mundane outer wrappings to reveal foundation garments of pure steel.

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.

It should also be noted that Minx is almost certainly the most penis-friendly show in television history, though HBO's teen-boinkfest Euphoria is providing some stiff (heh heh) competition.

With the storyline frequently repetitious and almost entirely incomprehensible, it seems that only headhunters and professional sadists will likely manage to maintain long-term interest in That Dirty Black Bag.

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.

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.

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

What's for sure is that if you like the Reacher books, you'll like the Reacher TV show. The blend that marks the books—of brute force and dry wit, of rootlessness and personal loyalty, of animal savagery and human decency—is present and accounted for.

Quite the opposite of American Auto's sheer looniness, Grand Crew seems intent on redefining the word "tepid."

Like Gasteyer, the rest of American Auto's cast—including Harriet Dyer (The Invisible Man) as a promiscuous publicist, Jon Barinholtz (Superstore) as a corporate heirhead and Tye White (NCIS: Los Angeles) as a bemused assembly-line worker yanked up into management so there will be at least one person there who knows something about cars—is uniformly hilarious.

It has an underbelly sufficiently dark that grown-up Kirsten's hands sport a generous number of the tattoo equivalents of gun-stock notches, keepsakes of her capable work with knives. There's also a pervasive feeling that someone—or something—is watching. And what's that mysterious comic book to which Kirsten keeps consulting as if it's a training manual?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Queens is undeniably a soap opera—a highly entertaining one—but it's also a wry and often endearing commentary on both the wisdom and the decrepitude of advancing age.

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

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.

This CSI is indistinguishable from all the rest: The same spectacular camera zoom and splashy skyline photography. The same disturbing obsession with corpse porn.

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.

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

It's very funny, rather charming and … well, GOOD.

To my amazement, it's funny, slightly daft, and wonderfully contemptuous of not only the reality genre but the entirety of television. Where else would you ever see brother-and-sister twins dry-hump one another during a dance tryout while a producer screams to his assistant, "Call research and see how incest plays in the Midwest!"

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.

The concept is clearly drawn from NBC's massive five-season hit This Is Us, in which the story of a single troubled family is traced through constant flashbacks. Unfortunately, NBC's clueless programming execs failed to notice what any viewer could have told them: The success of This Is Us is due not to gimmicky chronology but an outstanding cast and piquant screenwriting, none of which Ordinary Joe has.

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.

Gomez gets a lot of good dialogue and nails it every time.

Carganilla's blasé exposition of juvenile sociopathology may even be the finest performance of the whole cast, which is saying something: Oh, Duplass, Taylor and Balaban all are outstanding as they bounce from pratfalls to Chaucer jokes to poignant meditations on adult diapers and other detritus of old age. College, when I was there, wasn't nearly this funny.

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.

Bouncing unpredictably between somber dejection and daffy dark humor, Back to Life shouldn't work at all. Yet it does, wonderfully.

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

If you can't find something in here to enjoy, you're just not trying very hard.

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

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

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.

The show's concept—that in a mobile America where nobody stays long in the same ZIP code, particularly in their 20s, your family is your friends—still resonates.

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.

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 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.

Awful...A sci-fi fantasy vision of slavery and race relations, the TV version of The Underground Railroad is an incoherent mess of artistic pretension, full of scenes that are not under-lit but un-lit, nonsensical soliloquys with neither symbolic nor literal value (why would a slave recite lines from Gulliver's Travels to a young woman just beaten nearly to death by the plantation owner?) and surreal flashbacks that only further trash what is a very tentative narrative.

There are plenty of intriguing subplots and red herrings in Too Close, but what drives the engine is the full-speed collision of two cracked psyches, expertly played.

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.

Though the Via Mala allusion is clever, the better stylistic reference for Spy City would be the early novels of John le Carré and the films based on the themes: bitter, cynical accounts of how intelligence agencies go off the rails and wage private little wars among themselves, fraught with collateral damage, using the Cold War as an excuse to settle old scores even if they scuttle the supposed larger issues.

Overall, the show—or at least its pilot episode, the only one The CW made available—manages the extraordinary feat of appealing to young genre fans as well striking a chord with their parents, even those still wondering if modern technology can't produce a pair of X-Ray Spex that really work.

A mumbly and mindless sci-fi drama that would never have made it on the air if NBC weren't so desperately scrambling for new pilots as the COVID production lockdown virus slouched toward Hollywood last spring.

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.

It's diverting in an Agatha Christie sort of way, but ultimately beside the point. Whoever Q is, he clearly didn't really have access to secret White House dope. And as the Trump administration fades further into the background, so does the importance of Q's identity. Paranoia may strike deep, but then it moves on.

Fails entirely on its own demerits. It's about three siblings—one boundlessly rich (he just bought Matt Damon's house), one grindingly poor (she can't afford Damon's movie tickets, much less his home) and one going down fast (his last novel sold five copies, one of them to the rich brother). No worry—they're all brought together by mutual peevishness, spite and jealousy. After extensive and determinedly unfunny airing of grievances, they conclude that, as the rich brother declares, that "we're all screwed up." And, he adds: "What a relief!" Speak for yourself, buddy.

Rebel is merely a boorish bore.

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 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 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.

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.

With five characters and about four jokes, Kenan violates even the loosest Hollywood mathematical equations for success.

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

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

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

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."

The only surprise in Coyote is the quality: It's very good.

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

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

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

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.

It's a blackly hilarious comedy, a grim character study, a slow unraveling of a troubling past, a dazzling coming-out party for comedienne Kaley Cuoco as a lead actress and, yeah, a vexatiously fascinating murder mystery. You won't be able to take your eyes off of it.

Like most Chuck Lorre-branded shows, B Positive starts out as a barrage of one-liners, most of them admittedly funny, but not necessarily suggesting a solid structure for a continuing show. Yet somehow during all the raucous punchlines, some engaging characters start to show up.

A murder story so full of plot twists and turns, so many characters shedding snakish skins, that it's nearly impossible to write about with scattering spoilers around like confetti. Yet in no way does it turn on plot gimmickry. It's about trust and relationships, authenticity and appearances, verisimilitude and veneers.

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.

While Swamp Thing is determinedly derivative—or rip-off-ish, if you prefer—its extraordinary execution makes it a lot of spooky fun to watch.

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.

FX's Fargo returns after an absence of three years, with no discernible diminution of bloodlust, contempt for its fellow man, or general weirdness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Van der Valk is a pure, hard-boiled throwback to the days of Mickey Spillane and Jim Thompson.

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.

That's Lovecraft Country: A mélange of spectacular special effects, nerdy obsession, and crippling racial animus, all wrapped up in a tumbling free-form narrative that doesn't make much sense.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Stateless is a good reminder that neither the politics nor the human tragedy of immigration has gone away, and that in the United States, the conflation of immigration with hatred for or love of Trump has almost completely obscured the real issue, the immigrants themselves.

A skillful editor probably could have trimmed 90 minutes out of I'll Be Gone in the Dark that wouldn't be missed.

Perry Mason is the ugliest fun-to-watch show (or perhaps the funnest-to-watch ugly show, I don't know) since Showtime's cuddly serial-killer-next-door series Dexter left the air nearly a decade ago, and the cracked side of America's national psyche will be the better for it.

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

That's just one of the many delicious, hilarious, fascinating, and sometimes poignant anecdotes in Epix's two-part Laurel Canyon, one of the great rock 'n' roll documentaries of all time.

Watching The Plot Against America often feels like being locked in a closet with a fanatical #NeverTrumper: It'll give you a headache even if you agree with him.

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

Practically every damn word of this review gives away some whopping twist or turn in Epix's new costume-drama-soap-opera Belgravia.

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

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

HBO's production is relentlessly grim, a smothering tapestry of insanity, nutballery, and emotional and physical brutality.