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.

Succession shares a lot of the corporate hard-ball sensibilities of Showtime's Billions, as well as its uncanny ability to make a thoroughly dislikeable set of perfidious and bloodthirsty characters completely entrancing.

One of the new season's better ones.

The Sinner quickly morphs into the least forthright crime drama, an opaque and intriguingly inverted tale in which crime and punishment are difficult to tell apart.

This one gains momentum as it moves along, and ultimately is an absorbing exploration of the complexity and incertitude of human relations.

Veronica is back, as prickly, vengeful and noirish as ever, and television—or at least streaming services—is a more wonderfully crime-ridden place for it.

But it's the eternal internal world of adolesence that's mostly the concern of Pen15, and that's not always a good fit for nostalgia. Erskine and Konkle do not skip past the mindless cruelty of teenagers, and it's possible that for all its rip-roaring daffiness, Pen15 is at its best when it's most lacerating.

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

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.

Fiercely engrossing.

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.

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

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.

Historically bonkers.

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

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.

The result is a kind of Mad magazine parody of tough-guy 1980s cop shows crossed with a Marxist-Leninist version of Woody Allen's hilariously counterfeit Japanese spy thriller What's Up, Tiger Lily?

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.

What I do know is that Shadows, the series, is FUNNY —often deadpan, sometimes quietly droll, sometimes howl-at-the-moon hilarious.

Castle Rock, especially in the early going, unfurls its tentacles slowly, but their grip is eerily strong; over the three episodes I watched, I was never tempted to look away.

But for all the documentary's merits, it does its best work in ferreting out the bite-size experiences of the grunts, not just the ones in uniform but the CIA officers, junior diplomats, peasant farmer and family members back home—the people didn't make policy but were whipsawed by it. Their stories are poignant, confusing, heartbreaking, maddening, blackly funny, or cryptic, often all at once.

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

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.

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.

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.

Anyone who was around as the bombast of the 1960s turned into the bombs of the 1970s will not be able to feel a sad nostalgia and a tragic sense of inevitability at this mesmerizing spectacle of naivete, idealism, kiddie bravado and ultimately the sheer stupidity of kids playing with fire. If you can remember the 1960s, goes the cliche, you weren't there. But in Guerrilla, the memories of the 1970s linger, and burn.

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.

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!"