This is a Tim Burton production, so it looks great. But looks wouldn't matter if Jenna Ortega's deadpan wasn’t just as elastic as it needed to be — she consistently pushes outside the caricature enough to keep things lively.

As gritty, dysfunctional family, crime-fueled dramas go, Animal Kingdom roars with dark promise.

Is GGR the best show on television? No, but it’s pretty solid.

Kirby's nobody's girlfriend and even if she is constantly on the verge, she perseveres. Good stuff.

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]

For now, though, The Leftovers is properly mesmerizing.

As the show flies by, the nightly scare stories work more effectively than the lumbering haunted house stuff, and of course all of this is housed in a Young Adult world that may be a bit gory but is essentially wholesome.

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.

It’s all very silly, but there’s bite beneath some of the yuks.

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.

“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.

At first, it seems like your typical show from the CW, overstuffed with bushy-haired teens in a sci-fi situation. But after a while the series, based on a book by Kass Morgan, reveals influences ranging from “Lord of the Flies” to “Battlestar Galactica,” with more than a few hints of “The Hunger Games,” “Lost” and “1984” tossed in.

The nice thing is it pretty much works. Oh, there’s a great deal of silliness and some false notes — it is a ghost story, after all and some explanations add up while others just drift away. But in the end “Bly Manor” dares to make at least some sense (which is likely blasphemy to Henry James fanatics).

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

Gervais mostly finds a balance between humor and deep darkness, though he sometimes falters (far too much time is spent on an obnoxious therapist). And, like many comic actors, he seamlessly transitions to drama; even better, he poignantly walks the tightrope between despair and laughter.

Surprisingly, it pretty much all works. The dark secrets (there are many) balance with the apparent fluff, making for an engaging, never-dull series. Maybe the Gilmore Girls should have had guns.

“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.

The production values are high, the acting efficient, the story teems with twists and turns.

Kinnear, as always, is a likable presence, and he and Summers seem like they’ll have good chemistry if the show ever calms down.

“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.

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

The tone here is David Lynch meets David Cronenberg meets Quentin Tarantino, moody and heightened in the early episodes, then ever more weird and gory. It all hinges on Salazar and treatises may be written on her huge, expressive eyes, which jump between angered, exhausted, erotic and (repeatedly) horrified.

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.

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.

The first episode is shaky, but the series stabilizes as it progresses. Nothing’s all that startling or original, but it all flows along until you realize you’ve watched four shows in a row and you’re wondering whether life has any meaning.

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.

Turn becomes more tense with each episode, at least through the first three, and that’s a very good sign.

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.