Putting aside Deputy's peculiar politics and red-meat aesthetic, though, it has undeniable appeal. The intricately staged shootouts and car chases are gleefully frequent, the dialogue crackling.

It's a serious piece of work, with talented writers like Richard Price and Dennis Lehane doing the adaptation. But the result is curiously—and annoyingly—uneven, as if different production crews took over on alternate days undoing one another's work.

There's nobody to love or even like much in Briarpatch. Even Allegra is flat and withdrawn; her insistence on staying to pursue the case is driven by intellect rather than emotion.

This is all well and good, and might have made a good episode of Showtime's barbarous Wall Street drama Billions. But, having expressed every cogent thought in its head in the first 50 minutes, Wizard drags along for another tortuously repetitive hour and half, a long day's journey into utter banality.

For all Covenant's effectiveness at depicting the insane frustration of black life in America in 1950, it still has multiple failings as a drama, particularly on the supernatural side of story.

If The Crossing has too much ambiguity to be an effective political polemic, it's perhaps a bit overstuffed to make good television.

Slow and stupid more often than it shows signs of genuine noir craft, and yet will probably hook you if you watch very much of it. Its ample supply of celebrity kink, cold-case magnetism, and twilight menace will easily (okay, not easily, but adequately) distract you from its corpse-like pace, its blockhead dialogue, and, well, everything else.

The newbie, Jay Hernandez (Scandal) comes across more like Tom Berenger in The Big Chill, playing a wimpy actor in a Magnum-like show.

New Amsterdam...is not based on one show but every medical drama in TV history going right back to 1954's Medic.

ABC's Time After Time is a lock for this year's Emmy in the "Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Idiocy" category, being not only part of an insanely overworked genre but a remake of the 1979 film of the same name.

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

An endless parade of political soap opera.

It's rarely funny (at least intentionally), never affecting, and has the narrative cohesion of a Dick and Jane reader minus the cute drawings of Puff the Cat. It is, however, weirdly interesting.

None of them has ever carried a series before, and as good as they were in The Conners debut, the glue that held the show together was the unseen ghost of Roseanne, as aggravating and amusing as ever, invisible but never absent. I'll believe she's replaceable when I see it.

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.

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.

Harriet the Spy is probably better described as cute, though the kids' novel on which it's based was strange and arguably a little disturbing back in the day.

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 shark-jumping occurred in Happy Days' fifth season. But a critic who waits five years to declare a shark jumped these days probably won't have a show left to declare dead; three and a half seasons is now considered a healthy lifespan for a TV series. So let's give mad props to NBC's La Brea, which vaults the Selachimorpha in precisely nine minutes when it debuts next week.

Timeless is quite funny, sometimes intentionally.

Superior Donuts is far from unwatchable. The snappy repartee between the crusty old white owner and his hustling young black employee may not quite draw the blood that the thematically similar "Chico and the Man" did, but it's not without its chuckles. And Fowler brings a madly exuberant charm to his role that marks him for future stardom.

The problem, a large one, is that there are long dry stretches between the laughs. Too many of the punchlines land weakly or not at all. This may be the product of an abrupt and extensive makeover of the show at the last minute—Emily Locke was originally written as an insurance adjuster frustrated by the big payouts her company was making to innocent bystanders at superhero dust-ups. The vast horizon of insurance humor, alas, will remain unexplored.

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.

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.

Watching it will definitely give you some painful 1960s and 1970s whiplash.

It benefits from the sort of deadpan, off-the-wall humor that powered 30 Rock.

It's sometimes soggy and silly, sometimes sharply insightful; sometimes a politically correct sledgehammer, sometimes waspishly funny. One thing that seems certain is that it's far more ideologically attuned than its predecessor. The original version certainly had a political bent, but only in a broad, traditionally sci-fi way: ruthless totalitarians bad, smiley-faced anti-totalitarians good. The new show is far more specifically tethered to the woke politics of 2021.