Designated Survivor has a terrific pilot episode. Yet it could go off the rails at any moment.

This is big-time entertainment.

The Grinder has its amusing moments, particularly in the way the celebrity-smitten townspeople unquestioningly accept TV stardom as a juridical credential, to the point that the judge allows Lowe to cite episodes of his shows as legal precedents.

Grown-ish is a cell-by-cell clone of The Breakfast Club and its celebration of sophomoric melodrama, where cynical wisecracks inevitably give way to mock profundities, shouting matches to hyperemotive tears, and clichés to stereotypes. (Or maybe that one is the other way around.) The wholesale piracy is so blatant that Grown-ish even tries to make a joke or two about it. But the admission that you're stealing somebody else's work doesn't make it any less larcenous.

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.

Mixing melancholy and humor—even black humor—requires a delicate touch that’s lacking in You, Me and the Apocalypse. Not to mention that too many of the jokes don’t quite rise to the level of black humor. More like beige.

Katy Keene lasciviously rolls around in every threadbare cliché of showbiz melodrama and then some.

The Nichols film still gleams with the diamond-hard fury of the book and echoes with its mad laughter. The tepid Hulu series has neither. Next to the movie, the Hulu series looks like a pallid corpse drained by a vampire.

Mixed-ish has a much fresher feel than the other shows.

There's not much here you haven't seen on another Fox cartoon, King of the Hill, except it's done with Southern accents. The pilot does feature a couple of interesting guest appearances—one by an anarchist cat working to destroy zoning laws, and another by Colin Powell doing the macarena. Call me if they get their own shows.

There are moments of touching transformation among the characters in Saints & Sinners, none more so than that of the bluff Hopkins, who starts with a purely sanguinary view of the Indians he calls savages.

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

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

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.

Once you know that Future Man is written and produced by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter, and Ariel Shaffir, the team behind the epically uncouth cartoon Sausage Party, further explanation becomes almost totally unnecessary. It's a comic onslaught against video-gamers and their culture of the past 30 years or so, with the occasional random shot at baby boomers so they won't be left out of the fun.

Like Grey's Anatomy when it started out, the Quantico cast is mostly young and relatively unheralded, the latter condition likely to remain unless this show's metabolism can be significantly slowed.

This is a story about not Wall Street but what happens when powerful, amoral men go after one another in a fight without rules or restraints. It might not be pretty, but it's always fascinating.

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.

With Bruce Helford (The Drew Carey Show) and Whitney Cummings (2 Broke Girls) overseeing the writing, the punchlines come fast and furious.

A detailed and utterly compelling examination of the motives and morality of collaboration—like a Casablanca in which the protagonist is not Humphrey Bogart’s heroic Rick but Peter Lorre’s oily Ugarte. If that sounds dramatically counterintuitive and even confounding, get used to it; Colony is mostly about upsetting apple carts.

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.

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

It's the seamy, violent and enticing world of TNT's utterly riveting new 1960s cop drama Public Morals, a world so different than the one Hollywood usually shows you...that you almost expect Rod Serling to step out from behind a bush, warning that "you're traveling through another dimension..."

No Tomorrow nonetheless has some quirky laughs, and Anderson is an appealingly inept protagonist. You could do worse with your time.

Emergence's pilot is a pleasantly spooky hour, with some not-all-that-faint echoes of Netflix's Stranger Things. It's aided immeasurably by the casting of Tolman as a size-16 protagonist who is neither a vixen or a superhero, just a good cop with decent human instincts.

"Bloated," "derivative," and "self-important" all seem fair, as does "scandalously overpriced." If producer-director Baz Luhrmann really, as has been reported, spent $120 million and 10 years to develop this thing, Netflix's accountants should be taken out and shot, and I don't mean with a camera.

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

Most of all, there's the road-not-taken poignance that underlies 11.22.63. Whether you buy the Camelot version of history or not, 11.22.63 channels our collective longing for a moment when everything could have been changed for the better, a sense that so much wrong and hurt could be erased if we could just alter the flow of time for a split second.