At times the somewhat corny diversions distract from the slow-moving main attraction. Still, true-believer horror fans will likely bite into The Strain, even if nonconverts find themselves able to resist.

If you make it through the messy early episodes, “League” turns out to be a sweet show and downright wholesome in its own way.

The pitch here can be shrill. The warden makes Satan look like a nice guy, and Gil has a temper that can be wearying. But the essential tension--who will finally tell the truth? everybody is lying to somebody--makes for compelling, if exhausting, drama.

The Last Ship would be better off developing its own new society tensions, medical nightmares and primal-survival adventures than leaning on black-hat stereotypes. Maybe it will end up heading in that direction, maybe it will succumb to more common cliches and become lost at sea. It could float either way.

Pitch has a simple enough premise: It follows the first female player in major league baseball. Interesting. But what do you do with it? That’s the question that lingers over this new Fox show, which is undoubtedly timely but also seems somewhat dramatically limited. ... The series wisely looks at the isolation that’s resulted from Ginny’s single-minded pursuit of baseball.

Just about everything that made the first season of True Detective entrancing is missing from the second, wholly re-imagined second season. In truth, only the worst, most clichéd parts remain. And yet.... If you make it to the third episode, chances are you'll keep going.

All these characters manage to work, at least in a broadcast-show way. This is mostly because of Mixon’s constant narration and commentary; she’s offering a sarcastic-neurotic voiceover on her own absurd life.

So, basically, this is a drug-fueled Sherlock Holmes situation, although Brian does something so monumentally stupid while supposedly in his smart state at the show’s beginning that it comes close to undermining the show’s premise. Luckily McDorman, who appeared in “American Sniper” with Cooper, has an easygoing charm that helps right the boat.

“Foundation” jumps back and forth in time and from one world to another as it breaks into myriad storylines. It does initially seem a bit too enthralled with bloated world-building but things pick up as they splinter.

Baranski is a goddess of acerbic condescension, but that can only go so far, and Coon’s quest to become as big a snob as her neighbors doesn’t exactly qualify as inspirational. Still, it sparkles and is highly watchable.

Things go bad quickly, which is to be expected. The challenge with this show will be to keep it appropriately Crazy Town without letting it get Loony Bin bad.

Stars Rose Leslie and Theo James have an easygoing bicker-banter chemistry that lets this fantasy rom-com slide past its many ridiculous and overtly sentimental moments. No, it’s not a show for the ages, but it works as a ray of empty-headed spring-summer sunny optimism.

Creator Harriet Warner obviously has no lack of imagination, though she does exhibit a serious lack of restraint. The show does have its own mad energy and if you like crazy content measured by the pound it may be for you. If not, you could end up feeling battered by it all.

While still elaborate, feels a bit slight, tepid and drawn-out compared to the first season. For many it won’t matter — look at those gowns! But let’s be frank: Next season, turn up the heat.

Obviously "Shantaram" is your basic sprawling story set in an exotic location with an internationally diverse cast. It repeats itself, occasionally flies in the face of plausibility, and has a tendency to stagger instead of sprint. But Hunnam charges through it all, determined to bring the essentially flawed Lin to life. Ultimately he succeeds.

This four-part documentary about the theft of 13 works of art from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 is a rambling if entertaining search for the possible culprits in a major real-world whodunit.

[A] somewhat overheated but still fairly effective new thriller.

The Americans has potential. The way it uses recent history as a reflector of modern deceits while bouncing the concept of patriotism around mixes nicely with the hang-by-your-fingertips story turns.

Fincher's unemotional style comes through in the first two episodes, and the show could use more heat. But Spacey makes it worth watching.

Maybe this will all become coherent. But then maybe it shouldn't. Sometimes messy is better.

Truth is, Johnny's predicament has a mix of emotional trauma, supernatural hoodoo and old-fashioned conniving that just might work. Or not, depending on how often the writers beat the same drum -- saving a small kid every week will get old quick. For now, let's give the show the benefit of the doubt. [14 June 2002]

The infectious nature of evil is an underlying theme here. This is one case where an infection doesn’t move quickly enough. Is it watchable? Sure. Is it memorable? Nah.

It knows it’s walking familiar ground — spooky but never scary, occasionally violent but never gory, magical but hardly wondrous. Watchable but nowhere near fascinating.

The third season of “Succession” spends an awful lot of time waiting for something to happen and in the seven episodes (out of nine) offered for review nothing much does.

The show certainly has plenty of diverse star power--Chris Rock, Amy Poehler and Michael Cera also appear along the way--but its shaggy approach wears thin until Cyrus shows up. Then again, save the best gift for last.

It’s not necessarily bad, understand, just surprisingly underwhelming considering it’s called Houdini & Doyle. One expects fireworks; instead we get consternation.

"Devil" is one of Netflix’s light-horror excursions, nothing too gory or sexy. ... It’s messy TV but, really, you can’t go too wrong with devil worshipers.

Complications ensue, super powers are wielded, all as you’d expect. Actors keep straight faces despite the silliness (possibly a real superpower) and the show maintains a young adult sheen. It flows by, which is all it intends to do.

Underground lingers on the slave experience, and that experience is appropriately awful and inhumane and certainly dramatic. But it’s also a show that wanders a bit too freely, undercutting its important subject matter and forward momentum by interfering with itself. As a show, it needs to learn how to keep it together.

Summer is traditionally the time to turn off your brain. “Panic” is for those who’ve disengaged.

Mostly this is old news repackaged as a classic sports redemption story. It’s efficient and watchable, but hardly a revelation.

Sharon Stone is a vengeful heiress and that’s all she is; Corey Stoll is an incompetent hitman and that sums him up. This isn’t acting, it’s posing. Happily Judy Davis and Sophie Okonedo — both Oscar nominees — do eventually develop juicy parts. And “Ratched” becomes watchable entertainment. But that style-over-content thing makes you wonder if Ryan Murphy shows would be better off with less Ryan Murphy.

It’s all very breathless, as it should be, and Carter scores points by weaponizing a rather large object at the first episode’s end. But the original “24” was character-driven to a large extent by Keifer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer and elevated even further when Mary Lynn Rajskub’s Chloe O’Brian came along. No such fire or chemistry is evident here.

The new "Fargo" isn’t terrible — it’s loaded with talent, the story rolls along, there’s lots of nice dialogue. But it’s just not near as good or unique as the previous three seasons. Great shows breed great expectations.

Winslet elevates everything, but “Mare of Easttown” needs some serious elevating out of its dreariness and familiarity. It’s certainly watchable but also predictable. Look elsewhere for light.

It’s not bad television, really. It’s just by-the-CBS-book television.

One Child spends too much time running in place--which may reflect China’s inert bureaucracy, but falls short of riveting viewing.

With the tension of its premise and the promise of its family-driven drama, Gang Related may eventually work the stiffness out of its joints and become interesting. Or not. It’s that kind of show.

“The Undoing” is somewhat undone by its dawdling pace. In truth this is a movie’s worth of story dragged out over six slow hours.

Behind the Candelabra doesn't really get behind anything; it just rolls around in tacky history.

None of which is new, all of which is interesting. But looking at any one aspect of his life--his marriages, a single concert, his childhood, one incident--in depth might have provided more insight than this typical overview.

"Nine Perfect Strangers" is a clumsy star-driven project that, scene to scene, is never quite sure what it is. ... Hopefully there's an answer tucked into the final episodes, which were not provided for review. Whether or not you care enough to stick around that long, that's another story.

Unfortunately the pacing here is too slow and many may abandon the train before it gets where it’s going. “Behind Her Eyes” is the perfect example of a six-part series that should have been four. Its stretch marks are unseemly. Less can be more.

“Teenage Bounty Hunters” is pretty much as good and bad as you’d expect it to be. Well, maybe a bit more bad. Which is unfortunate because the show’s young leads — Maddie Phillips and Anjelica Bette Fellini — have wonderful chemistry, batting teen nonsense, emotional eruptions and giddy observations back and forth with crisp timing.

“Avenue 5” seems more likely to just drift off into the void. There are, of course, good people at work here. Hugh Laurie stars as the spaceship’s clueless commander, Josh Gad is the clueless zillionaire funding the spaceship, Suzy Nakamura plays the tycoon’s clueless assistant. You get the drift.

Star-Crossed never really catches fire.

This is, of course, the stuff of all serial dramas, but we usually see baby steps in some direction. That Was Then promises only chaos. [27 Sept 2002, p.1C]

A lot of humor ends up left behind and most of it stops short. This is a show that cuts with a butter knife instead of a razor blade. And it cuts every which way instead of one direction. The result is, not surprisingly, a mess.

You’d think “The One” would have all sorts of places to go, and yet it goes to few of them. Instead the show revolves around a murder that’s neither mysterious or terribly plausible.

The system is a mess, no doubt, fully awful, unfair and brutal. And “Stateless” approaches this head-on. It just would have been nice to reflect more on those who are abused than the white folk who cage them in. Again, yeesh.

"Peacemaker" is guilty of taking itself not seriously enough. At least it has a sense of humor, too bad it's limited to the level of limericks scrawled on the inside of bathroom stalls.

The show’s biggest problem, though, is it’s hard to like either of its main characters.

“Okay” suffers from the same bloat as far too many streaming shows; its 140 minutes contain at most 90 minutes worth of material. Which is too bad because Lillis is an oddly arresting actress and the use of super-powers as a metaphor for teen angst and raging hormones is at least time-tested.

If "Dinotopia" doesn't come up with something else for our heroes to do other than rescue gentle folk from mean dinosaurs, the show is going to get repetitious fast. [28 Nov 2002]

“The Afterparty” runs in too many directions at once and as a result never gets anywhere in particular.

The Messengers seems far-fetched, even by [The CW's] standards.

It’s all very efficient, well-made television, but just as it’s lacking in fun it’s lacking in fire.

John Cho deserves a better show. Not that “Cowboy Bebop” is awful. It isn’t. It’s just typical. ... It also doesn’t help that the dialogue is uneven and stilted at times. Smooth talking characters need to talk smoothly.

Murder in the First” isn’t outright bad. It’s just an extremely derivative police procedural.

Big issues of body, mind, identity and technology shuffle around the Altered Carbon universe, but the show often drags its feet in order to fill its individual episodes’ running times.

Cavill remains fine as Geralt, with his absurd physique and long white hair. He has mastered the art of the humorous grunt and it’s still fun to watch him handily slaughter dozens of men at a time or take on some comic-book looking creature. But there was an audacity to this show’s first season that now seems buried beneath plot complications.

Just because it’s well-acted doesn’t mean Big Little Lies is worth enduring.

Maybe all these different storylines are going to meet up, maybe they’re all going to keep wandering around. It will take great patience to find out which.

He's not really stretching here, he's adding to the bank of Pete Davidson characterizations he's already done. It's gotten him this far, sure. But with "Bupkis," the well has run dry.

Unfortunately, the positives are overwhelmed by so many disjointed things going on at once. For the most part it doesn’t matter that these are 20-year-olds playing 14. What matters is there’s simply too much that feels like plot fodder for a show stuffed with too many characters.

As well-engineered, demographically balanced and ethnically diverse as this show is, it’s still pretty daffy how it cuts back and forth between sun and fun and drug wastoids and gangstas.

Despite all the talent, this relentlessly serious endeavor toggles between being dramatically inert and outright silly.

Mostly this is see Halston go up, then see Halston go down, a far too familiar story. Just because it’s real doesn’t make it interesting. “Halston” never bothers to go beyond the obvious.

verybody apparently abandons their jobs without explanation, little irritants that add up, making for a sloppy and fairly obvious story. What’s odd is that so much talent — the fine young actress Jessica Barden plays an earlier version of Laura — is involved in what is basically this week’s content.

For those who crave monsters and gore at any cost, this may do. All others beware.

"The Woman in the House..." suffers from pacing issues and is stretched painfully thin at eight episodes (some as brief as 22 minutes), although it might have worked better as a movie, with the absurdity heightened, the fat trimmed and a more clear comic tone.

Van Helsing obviously wants to be “The Walking Dead” with vampires, but it lacks that show’s production values, cast and over-the-top imagination.

There’s no sense of depth or attachment here, all is obvious and shallow and ultimately contrived. Again: Forgettable.

Backstrom is dicey indeed. Every time he makes a move, it's got to be part of an intricate puzzle that will be solved. More often, it's just an obnoxious guy staggering off in a direction that turns out to be conveniently right.

Cliches bounce off one another in a slick combination of gallows humor, inspirational bonding, deep thoughts and maudlin moments.

It’s consistently inconsistent, purposely tacky and piles cliché upon cliché. It is trash TV. It could be a huge hit. ... The term guilty pleasure seems appropriate here. More guilt than pleasure, though.

To be sure, there are some fine performances, notably by Olivia Wilde as Richie’s former Warhol girl wife; Juno Temple as an ambitious gofer who wants to work her way up; and Ray Romano as Richie’s beleaguered right-hand man. But they’re mostly drowned in the confusion as the show veers from drama to farce to mostly poor musical interludes.

Man with a Plan just makes you wish he’d take his sincere befuddlement elsewhere, someplace that mattered. Simply put, Matt LeBlanc is too good to be this irrelevant.

You end up identifying more with the people from outside the group, looking on as these people force friendships with folks from their past they’ve clearly outgrown. As viewers, we know how they feel.

As a six-episode project, you’d expect precision, compactness and speed; instead it basically, at least for the first four episodes, wanders toward the inevitable.

The young skeptical priest and older exorcist priest will team up to do battle with the devil while Davis looks on wide-eyed, apparently, and this will be dragged out on a weekly basis. Heaven help us.

It doesn’t help that any dramatic tension is undercut by the first episode, which essentially gives away the entire plot. “The Shrink Next Door” is the dramatic equivalent of watching someone pull the wings off a fly.

Wooden self-serious streaming content at its most mediocre.

For the most part, Lee Daniels traffics in tawdry messes. With Star, his latest TV project for Fox, he is at his tawdriest and messiest.

“Hunters” works in black-and-white and stereotypes, hiding in the bygone, but today anti-Semitism is on the rise and American Nazis apparently include “very fine people” according to one prominent source. Perhaps now wasn’t the time for a wildly uneven, superficial, comic book-type treatment of this particularly sick and unfortunately still-relevant dynamic.

Stephen King should get out more. This latest miniseries offering from the too prolific schlock horrormeister may be the week's big TV event, running Sunday, Monday and Thursday, but it plays like a greatest hits collection: Stephen's Best Spooks . Except, like so many such collections, once you get all the songs next to one another, you realize they sound alarmingly similar. [26 Jan 2002]

But Nicky Fallin is about as unlikable and uncomfortable a character as television audiences have ever been asked to care for. Maybe he would unfold splendidly over time. But it's doubtful he'll get that time. [25 Sept 2001, p.5B]

Watching dad fend off guys while the girls strut around in thongs is going to get old fast. [17 Sep 2002]

This series reflects the way wealthy, neurotic, overly busy and sex-obsessed TV executives and producers think America lives, in other words, the way they live. They're wrong. Most of us are not TV executives. Please let Hidden Hills be hidden for good as soon as possible. [24 Sept 2002]

Marienthal is an appealing kid and it's nice to see Sagal back at work, but this show is just a little too sex crazy and far too predictable. [2 Oct 2000, p.5F]

What next? An unholy alliance between Aquaman's niece and the Thing's second cousin? "Birds of Prey" is for the birds. [9 Oct 2002, p.1D]

“Outer Range” is a complete mess: Senseless, pretentious, purposely obscure and wasteful.

A soppy, radically inconsistent, corny and downright embarrassing soap opera.

The warm and goofy and topical camaraderie of that show [“Sex and the City”] is nowhere apparent here. Nor are any laughs. There are no actual laugh lines here, just lines that let you know they were supposed to be funny. It is, in essence, a romantic picture postcard comedy show without any comedy (or much romance for that matter).

Only trouble is--aside from the torture porn nature of the show--the story itself is a series of question marks that takes a plunge into the ridiculous in its climactic scene.

This show was originally called "American Wreck", until somebody at CBS realized that could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not a wreck, really, it just never gets rolling in any direction that looks interesting enough to follow.

This show is so far-fetched it makes "24" look like political reporting and "Lost" seem like a nature documentary.

Lopez probably has a sitcom in him, but this isn't it. And it has nothing to do with the Latino bent. "My Wife & Kids" is funny because Damon Wayans is funny and it's about a funny family. It has nothing to do with race. Same with George Lopez. It's bad because it's bad, and bad knows no color. [27 Mar 2002]