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.