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.

The Gifted is driven by action, not character development, and it soon settles into a humdrum series of cheapjack versions of set pieces from Carrie. Don't get too excited; whether through budget shortfalls or fears of rousing the FCC programming police from their deathbed, there are no exploding heads or even a pig-blood shower. Such a pity.

One of the new season's better ones.

Grandfathered is a well-crafted piece of work, with jokes coming in at all angles.... But it's also a quietly touching story of emotional lost-and-found, with a cast of remarkable range.

The concept is clearly drawn from NBC's massive five-season hit This Is Us, in which the story of a single troubled family is traced through constant flashbacks. Unfortunately, NBC's clueless programming execs failed to notice what any viewer could have told them: The success of This Is Us is due not to gimmicky chronology but an outstanding cast and piquant screenwriting, none of which Ordinary Joe has.

Actually, Ghosted isn't all that bad, even if satirizing The X-Files feels a little bit wet-noodley at this point.

A lot of Telenovela's humor will stretch across any cultural divide.... But what distinguishes Telenovela from any other sitcom--its relentless lampooning of every convention of its own genre, from the pistolero mustaches of the villains to the ever-escalating décolletage wars of the heroines--may fall flat with an audience that's largely unfamiliar with real novelas.

Punchy, clever, and entertaining.

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.

Its main conviction seems to be that judges should function not as neutral arbiters of the law but as assistants to defense lawyers and that empathy, rather than evidence, should govern judicial outcomes.

Trickster does achieve a certain underlying creepiness, but it's often hard to distinguish that from the general desolation of the landscape.

Considered for what it really is—a sharply observed soap opera about a wholly debauched and dysfunctional group of friends preying upon their mutual insecurities—I'm Dying Up Here offers considerable viewing pleasure.

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.

To the extent that Limetown has a point (other than whatever corporate perfidy ultimately turns out to be responsible for what happened), it seems to be that the 24-hour news cycle has so scrambled Americans' brains and scarred their souls that even the most profound tragedies have been forgotten by the weekend.

It's funny, if not clamorously so; superbly acted, by a bunch of people you never heard of; and good-hearted, without being Hallmark-ish.

The most interesting thing of all about The Exorcist is that it shares the hardball theology of Fox's Lucifer, AMC's Preacher and Cinemax's exorcism show Outcast. One renegade priest in The Exorcist even resolves his doctrinal disputes with Rome not with an encyclical but a .38. It seems television's era of amiable pseudo-Unitarian clergymen of the Touched by an Angel and Highway to Heaven stripe is officially dead.

Eventually Killer Robots dissolves into pure silliness.

Billing itself as the story of "how crack began," Snowfall is really just a collection of cliches and set pieces you've already seen in other, much better narcodramas.

Pizzolatto's writing is not without its irritations, particularly his dialogue.... Ultimately, the characters are too fascinating to turn loose of–particularly Farrell's explosive Velcoro and his political godfather Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn).

In short, there's a zesty story to be told here. But it mostly isn't in this miniseries.

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.

Carol's Second Act could use more punchlines and less impassioned wisdom.

So weirdly stupid that it might actually be good. Or, then again, just weird and stupid.

Where Stranger Things is deft, Dark is heavy-handed; where Stranger Things is well-paced, Dark moves at the speed of a dump truck lost in a bog; where Stranger Things' kids are likeable and funny, Dark's are sullen and sour.

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.

Not that BrainDead isn't bleakly hilarious, to a pee-your-pants-laughing degree, and drive-in-movie creepy. It sooooo is, and it's the show of the summer and possibly of the year. But not since The Werewolf Of Washington popped up during the 1973 summer of Watergate has Hollywood captured the moment's political gestalt with such deadly accuracy.

The Morning Show is high-voltage drama and big-time entertainment, a savage, scorching portrait of the TV news industry as a modern court of the Medicis where corporate genocide is coffee-break sport, where subordinates exist to be crushed and superiors to be sabotaged. It may not be exactly news that the most trusted men (and, these days, women) in America are anything but, but it's never been so convincingly demonstrated.

To the extent that The Passage is political, it's the age-old horror/sci-fi skepticism about science empowered by government but untempered by moral considerations, the same perspective that's driven everything from the big ants of Them! to the relentless microbes of The Andromeda Strain.