Sometime toward the end of the first episode, the show hits critical mass and turns mesmerizing and addictive. With Showtime's Homeland and its bipolar spook Carrie Mathison AWOL until next year, Berlin Station has a temporary corner on the dysfunctional-spy market. Buy in.

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.

This three-hour miniseries from Will Farrell and some of his Saturday Night Live buddies is a send-up of 1950s film-noir that more closely resembles another classic Hollywood product: an overinflated boob job.

Partly concocted from leftover bits of the previous Boston crime movies made by executive producers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (particularly Affleck's 2010 production The Town), and partly from screenwriter Chuck MacLean's fictionalized account of the political cleanup known locally as the Boston Miracle, City on a Hill could reasonably be mistaken for a Bean Town version of The Wire.

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.

Timeless is quite funny, sometimes intentionally.

A fascinating window into the thinking at the top of a compulsively secret agency that has been the spearhead of the war on terror.

The show arguably has the worst potty-mouth in the history of basic cable, and its humor often meanders the line between penile and puerile. A race driver named Clown Dick is funny, kinda; a female police sergeant screaming "Suck my dick!" kinda less.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Nash, Preston, and Reyes play their roles with such gusto that your profound, debilitating shame at enjoying Claws will fade quickly.

First and foremost, this is a show in which dildo injuries are a constant menace (and, possibly, an allusion to the obsessions of earlier generations) and virtually any visit to a friend's home is likely to interrupt sweaty, noisy rutting. (Lest you accuse me of hyperbole: twice in the first three minutes of the pilot.)

The ultimate paradox of Sense8 is that it can give away so little about its ultimate destination in three hours of screen time, and still be seductive enough to make hour four an attractive proposition.

There are a few amusing exchanges across this cultural divide, but they get old quick.

Whiskey Cavalier has an appealingly daft streak of sophomoric loopiness.

What really makes The Rookie interesting is watching Fillion maneuver among all these sharp elbows while balancing the shortage of adrenaline with the bonus supply of experience that both come with middle age. He does it all with the same let's-have-a-beer amiability he's displayed in shows as diverse as Firefly and Castle. He'll make you forget Kate Jackson is missing.

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

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

Fox's Making History at least has the decency to be a spoof.

As end-of-summer video junk food, you could do a lot worse. One Dollar's cast of scruffy characters is an interesting bunch, even when under lethal assault by their own writers. I wound up watching them for four hours, about three more than I planned, and each one was more enjoyable than the last.

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

Despite your understandable and probably entirely justified fear that the success of a show about a time-traveling ham radio will lead to a painful rash of sequels about time-traveling toaster-ovens and Waring blenders, Frequency is not so bad. The paradoxes of time-travel, though familiar to anybody with even a passing acquaintance with sci fi, are artfully woven in, and List is quite appealing as a daughter remaking her long-held image of a father she hardly knew.

It's like the miscegenated offspring of a quickie three-way between Lost in Space, Love Boat and Veep: sometimes funny, often inane, and usually obsessed with conjugation of fornicational verbs.

All American really fails to engage above the Barbie Dream House level. The cast is more than decent—Ezra will doubtless be the Next Big Thing among the post-Bieber generation—but the writing is pretty mundane. I found myself longing for the luscious Summer Roberts of The O.C., who once defended wistfully insisted, "I'm not that dumb, I'm just shallow." We'll see if All American viewers will settle for half a loaf.

One thing everybody will be able to agree on, though, is that the 9-year-old version of Sheldon in the Big Bang spinoff Young Sheldon is not ready for prime time or even the pre-dawn hours of a public-access channel. This prequel about Sheldon's childhood in rural Texas, surrounded by an uncomprehending family and a hostile town, is hideously misconceived.