Gleeson does a first-rate job with a character we’ve seen before, the tormented cop who plunges into a battle where he’s seemingly outflanked and outgunned. Treadaway is suitably troubling as a kid who represses such waves of rage and frustration that we don’t doubt it could explode somewhere. That the causes of his rage play as clichés doesn’t make him less menacing, though it makes the larger story less than subtle. Call it a solid campfire yarn.

Thought-provoking and melancholy, like all good F. Scott Fitzgerald stories, The Last Tycoon delivers a good summer watch. ... All this said, The Last Tycoon has taken some critical heat, and not without cause. It has several unsparkling passages and weak spots.

It feels less bold than familiar, and thus, in its own way, perhaps too quickly comfortable.

The Defiant Ones sends you away admiring the two guys who made the big score.

It’s not a dealbreaker of an idea to take a famous historical figure and put him or her into a world that makes his or her life more relatable to young folks who come along several centuries later. It works better, though, if the modern trappings flavor the historic character, rather than the other way around.

Happily, in spite of the plot labyrinth that any conspiracy theory naturally creates, Salvation keeps its story understandable and makes us keep wanting to know what happens next.

Power has turned into a stronger show as it’s gone along because it knows how to accelerate the action and keep the characters compelling without taking the seductive path of becoming a lavish soap. ... Besides Sikura, Naughton and Loren also shine in the opener.

GLOW is not to be confused with a lecture on sociology and female empowerment in the workplace. It’s sprinkled with soap and isn’t above focusing on some of those body parts itself. But even if professional wrestling bores you to tears, GLOW spins some stories that ring true.

Created by John Singleton with Eric Amadio and Dave Andron, Snowfall is a good-looking production. It gets its music from turntables and boomboxes and it reminds us that South Central Los Angeles, for all its notoriety, has a lot of tree-lined streets and perfectly decent houses with front yards. It also reminds us that crack cocaine was not so much a brand new problem as the consequence of several larger and longer-simmering problems.

Calling Blood Drive a rom-com would be stretching things, but it is refreshing to see that love can still bloom in a world where, if you softly whispered, “I would die for you,” most of the population would take you up on the offer.

The good news is that it can be better understood even by raw rookies. More to the point, it’s worth the effort, because Tatiana Maslany gives one of the finest performances on contemporary television.

It’s amusing at times, provocative at times, because I Love Dick often explores the practice of contemporary navel-gazing by satirizing it.

The series doesn’t go too deeply into several issues raised about Playboy over the years, like exploitation, objectification, and elitism. Instead, when it comes to controversy, American Playboy seems to focus primarily on the accusation that because it flaunted naked women, Playboy was obscene.

It’s hard to assess much of the acting here because most of the actors are confined by a script that swings between harsh judgments and moments of deep sentimentality that almost feel as if they were included to be compensatory.

There’s still plenty of humor, always bending toward the absurd, and Archer’s time travel has not stripped him of his signature phrases, attitude or fondness for bourbon and wordplay.

Even more in the second season than the first, Home Fires is an ensemble piece. ... It’s precisely this approach, telling lots of little stories whose war connections differ widely, that gives Home Fires a ring of truth.

There’s a fair amount of darkness in this story, because the lives it chronicles were not easy. There’s also a fair amount of humor. Mostly there’s admiration for three women who in a very short time accomplished things their world saw no reason to think they could.

Hap and Leonard is also a case where six episodes feels just about right. There’s time to have fun, meet some people, tell a story and leave while everyone’s still enjoying the party. As they should.

It’s not feel-good television. In the first two seasons it was very good television, and the third season has the elements to become just as compelling.

It’s not quick or easy to watch. It’s also not easy to forget.

When We Rise doesn’t pick up a story at its beginning and doesn’t leave a story with an ending. What it delivers is a game-changing saga from the middle.

Blacklist: Redemption is a sturdy show built on a smart premise.

Full of fast-paced banter and pop culture lines, Riverdale starts this road trip as a fine ride.

One of the best shows on television. Just as long as you realize it has moments that will make you feel really really sad.

Sad as the coda to Bright Lights became, it’s a story with a whole lot of heart.

Stylish, charming and thoroughly engaging.

The best reason to watch, however, is the music and the group’s on-stage performance. Whether or not you were a boy band fan in the 1980s, this is top-quality stuff.

While Ricci and Hoflin play well together, the intensity of that primal force, particularly from Scott’s side, doesn’t always come across. He needs a simmering intensity.

There are few soft landings in Christie stories, and in Witness for the Prosecution several are exceptionally hard. The whole shadowy, troubling tale also feels more powerful because the cast plays it at a deliberate, ominous pace.

Smoothing off some of the rogue cop’s edges, ironically, makes Paxton’s acting job more difficult. He has keep reminding us that he’s contemptuous of many law enforcement standards while at the same time throwing out hints he still harbors some deep and real humanity.Roarke sometimes lurches a little from this balancing act, at least in the early going, and that can throw off other characters as well.

Hawkins does a solid job filling Jack’s familiar shoes.

While this is hardly the first complicated sibling relationship in a TV series, this one has the overlay of unspoken things both men apparently felt extraordinary circumstances had forced them to do.

It isn’t afraid to spend time in critical and somewhat obscure areas. It also enlivens the drama with sharply drawn non-musical characters.

While a tale of restless discontent in a rich California coastal town offers an intriguing ride, it’s also a deliberate one. Think of it as a Sunday drive, at a leisurely pace that enables the passengers to absorb every detail of the scenery.

The Good Fight, a spinoff from CBS’s acclaimed The Good Wife, turns out to be a really good show.

In its second season, Empire’s stilettos are sharper, its gloss is glossier and its enjoyably soapy turns are even larger than life, if that’s possible.

There are some solid jokes and gags scattered throughout the first two episodes. But as I watched them, it was difficult not to feel a sense of deflation that strayed into disappointment. It became more and more clear over the course of those episodes that The Muppets had been jammed into a format that doesn’t quite suit them.

Unless the show improves from this more or less adequate premiere and shows consistent flair and originality, I can’t in good conscience recommend Heroes Reborn over the sterling comic books, new and old, the property continues to imitate.

Aside from Don Johnson’s canny oil baron, and as we found with the “Dallas” revival, one savvy old dude can’t always carry an entire show on his back, especially when the rest of it is so mechanical.

There are some bumps in the road as the show lays out its premise, but Supergirl has a number of things going for it: Melissa Benoist is convincing and charming in the lead role; the supporting cast, which features the likes of Calista Flockhart, Chyler Leigh, Mehcad Brooks and David Harewood, is very good; and the leaders of the writing team behind it.

One of the most narrow and timid fall seasons in memory. This premise is particularly tired.

As rendered here, none of its medical crises or characters are terribly compelling.

The end result is ... merely OK.

I might have tried harder to get past the bad taste that situation left in my mouth, had the rest of the show not been fairly paint-by-numbers and generic, but as escapist hours go, there's not a lot of meat on the bone here.

This show knows what it wants to do and it churns through its story with efficiency and the gloss that comes from executing the ABC house style with energy and a bit of flair.

Rosewood brings nothing distinctive or memorable to the formula, aside from the welcome diversity of its cast.

Alexander and Stapleton, both appealing enough in their own right, to execute some basic action-adventure moves, though their characters have no discernible chemistry as yet. The Blindspot pilot is more or less efficient enough, even though few aspects of the premise make any real sense.

Aside from the moments in which Stephen Moyer and a few supporting actors are on the screen, however, the show fails to ignite in any sustainable and meaningful way.

The action sequences and fights are briskly shot and edited, the supporting cast is acerbically great.... The worst element of Strike Back’s final go-round looms pretty large in the first half of the season. It’s a contrived story line involving Scott’s son, who turns up in Bangkok wanting to get to know his dad.

It’s by no means the deepest thing you’ll watch this year, but you’d have to search far and wide to find a program that hits its chosen target with such concentrated glee.

Though Between doesn’t belong among the most ambitious shows on that roster, it knows what it wants to do and sets about doing it efficiently, effectively and with a minimum of fuss.

David Duchovny is good in all of his scenes in the two-hour Aquarius pilot (which is all I could get through), but the rest of the cast for the period drama is unimpressive.

ABC has a house style, and this workmanlike execution of that style pretty much derails this drama. Many interior scenes are over-lit and thus not spooky, and there’s just a blandness in the casting and the production design that does nothing to help The Whispers build up the kind of mysterious atmosphere it needs to work.

The characters are thinner than cardboard cutouts, and I could see every “twist” coming from a mile away.

The achievement of Penny Dreadful is that within its highly stylized, delightfully elaborate and occasionally batsh-t world, it has created complex, fascinating characters--or rather, it has begun to.

The good news is, Sarah, Cosima and the other clones retain most of the real estate in this gorgeously grimy biothriller, and watching the established characters relate to each other is still a lot of fun.

The fantastic Wolf Hall is ultra-English is so many ways.... This may be a restrained, morally complex drama, but it is far from inert and stodgy in its execution.

The good news is that this show's building blocks are very strong. The dialogue, the world and the cast are all enjoyable, and the show simply exudes potential.

The actors have no chemistry together and their characters lack the kind of depth and texture that a well-crafted TV project would have been able to give them. Various actors frequently have to deliver painful exposition dumps, the storytelling is often incoherent.

It's almost a shot-for-shot remake of the original, but that's not what makes this version a derivative TV zombie. It's the lack of atmosphere and the near-complete absence of a mournful, mysterious tone that makes the new version feel empty and hollow.

Given how wonderful its first season was, the fact that Broadchurch has turned into such a muddle is the bigger disappointment. Despite the usual array of finely calibrated performances, the second season simply doesn't work, in large part because it consciously and deliberately undoes much of what was powerful about the shattering conclusion to the first season.

To its credit, American Crime puts race on the table as a topic that the characters confront and talk about with refreshing frankness, but the show as a whole is so predictable and lacking in depth that there's little else to recommend it.

There's no getting around it: There are just big problems in the execution of this engaging premise, and I doubt I'll be able to get beyond what I've already seen, given how regularly the show turned me off in the early going.

Once Duhamel and Winters settle into a rhythm and begin showing more nuanced aspects of their characters, I began to enjoy "Battle Creek" for the light, reasonably well-constructed crime drama that it is, and as the season develops, Shore is able to do a few interesting things with the question of whether people can truly change.

This is a show that knows exactly what viewers expect of it, and over the course of its three seasons, the saga of reticent raider Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel) has shown increasing assuredness and has unpretentiously and reliably supplied exciting and bloody adventures.

The unsettled, rule-breaking personality of the central character, his affair with an underdeveloped female character, a murderer who's too clever by half--these things aren't hard to find on TV. And though Bosch is credible, the episodes I saw weren't at such a fantastic level of execution that I have to see more of it and feel the need to shout from the rooftops about it.

Zachary Quinto, Peter Sarsgaard, Uma Thurman, Thandie Newton and Melissa George all try their best, but this is not a legal drama or a cop show, where a near-miss can more or less work. You either nail this kind of challenging material or you don't, and The Slap ultimately fails to live up to the potential implied in its attention-getting title.

Fresh Off the Boat is good--at times, very good. Without question, it's one of the best new shows of the broadcast network season: funny, well-acted and promising on a number of levels.

Fortitude reminds me of "Borgen" because neither show is loud; nothing about this kind of drama is bombastic or outsized. Fortitude takes its time as it builds up its icy, workaday world and depicts the day to day lives of its residents.

The first four episodes of Season 3 are every bit as taut and finely crafted as the stellar prior season of the show.

I'll keep watching, of course. But there are times, truth be told, when Saul seems a little too much like its lead character: Slick, smart, desperate, driven to please and a little bit afflicted by flop sweat.

The first few episodes of the final season of Justified are about as pleasurable as TV gets.

It's hard to find much in Backstrom that feels fresh or original.

12 Monkeys hums along at a reasonable pace; its pilot is pleasingly energetic and efficient.... The problem is, 12 Monkeys tends to prioritize a series of MacGuffins over attempts to deepen its characters and their relationships.

Though Babylon is pleasant and reasonably well executed, there's not too much to grab on to at the center of the drama; it makes moves toward engagement of knotty issues, only to ultimately skate along their surface. But Nesbitt is typically excellent and the show's depiction of London, its cops and its cynical politics can be diverting.

It's light and diverting yet respectful of its characters and their histories, thus it can serve as a pleasant, earnest counterbalance to some of TV's darker dramas.

The main problem is, Man Seeking Woman tries for the kind of weird, imaginative wit you find on "Archer" or "Louie" but the new show doesn't have the craft, ideas or skills to back it up.

It's worth noting that Looking is one of the sweetest and most romantic shows on television, and one the best at depicting the complexity and curiosity that drives many sexual encounters.

It remains invigoratingly itself and it continues to land in Hannah in a series of situations in which layers of thematic complexity stack up like delayed planes circling a busy airport.

Togetherness can be hard to watch at times, given that it looks unflinchingly at the difficulties of marriage and friendship as middle age approaches, but the show is absolutely worth sticking with, if only for the virtuoso performance from Zissis, whose failed-actor character is one of the finest new creations to arrive on television in some time.

Empire is being marketed as a bold, original show from high-profile artists, but it feels strangely tentative in its first episode.

The drama is every bit as brisk and engaging as its lead character, and I can only list one real objection to the show: its brevity.

State of Affairs is not quite a pulpy thrill ride, not quite an addictive melodrama and not quite a serious, searching drama.

Its somewhat opaque characters never quite moved me on that level [of "Broadchurch," "Happy Valley" or "Top of the Lake"]. Though it's well made and respectful of its subject matter, something about this show keeps it not at the surface but more or less reliably near it.

McDormand is clearly and rightfully the star of the show, but Bill Murray and Richard Jenkins provide additional reasons to tune in; both bring a warmth and dry wit to a drama whose domestic scenes occasionally veer from awkward to (intentionally) taxing.

It's rare to come across a comedy that displays such admirable focus and delivers such smartly packaged slices of diverting escapism. More, please.

A pleasingly executed diversion featuring capable and textured performances from actors in key roles.

The Affair is subtle, smart and an intelligent examination of the way in which we are all the unreliable narrators of our own lives.

It's a delightful comedy-drama about a young woman faced with a completely unexpected dilemma, and it's so inherently endearing that I'm very eager to see how the story of Jane and her fractious but loving family unfolds.

Its sprightly first hour is one of the most solidly entertaining pilots of the fall season, and it did the most important thing that first episodes must do: It made me eager to see what comes next.

There is a flatness to the supporting characters--Saul's wife and Carrie's sister are now garden-variety Prestige Cable nags--and a measured predictability to the overall story that drains too much tension from even the sight of a wig-free Corey Stoll. Yet Mandy Patinkin and F. Murray Abraham are still fantastic, the show still employs top-notch directors and Homeland can still rustle up an atmosphere of tense isolation when it needs to. All in all, many of the tin-eared elements would more or less tolerable if I were still intrigued by Carrie Mathison.

It'll likely be a typical CBS sitcom going forward: full of broad characters and predictable moments but reasonably amusing and well made.

The pilot is high-strung but basically acceptable, and I'll keep watching in the well-founded hopes that it will find consistently entertaining groove and use its fine cast (which includes Tim Meadows and Dan Bucatinsky as Annie's dads) as well as "Happy Endings" used its fab ensemble.

[A] solid and confident show.

This contrived, airless comedy is not a good vehicle for him, nor is there much enjoyment to be found in the show's musty supporting characters.

Ben Feldman and Cristin Milioti are good actors and undeniably adorable together in this competent pilot.... The charm of its cast and, ideally, sharp writing from the NBC show could keep it afloat.

It keeps resorting to broad gags and dopey jokes, and, just to mix things up, every so often it lunges at sincerity. None of it lands, unfortunately.

This annoying show is not quite as drenched in dumb and/or sexist assumptions as "Mixology," but that is the lowest possible bar to clear.