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.