By the second episode, Mr. Mayor is already resorting to bad toupee jokes and the aforementioned “PPPORN” debacle. (Really, no one at City Hall raised a red flag about that one?) Even a sure-fire winner like getting Ted Danson stoned on weed gummy bears somehow falls flat. (He ends up fighting a hockey mascot, for some reason.) The actors seem almost resigned here, too.

A disappointingly mediocre follow-up that lacks the unique spark of the original and isn’t interesting enough to justify how convoluted it is.

The ensemble has held together nicely in the two decades since. ... When it comes time to take aim at today’s political landscape, Murphy Brown misses its target. ... The revival’s strongest asset, actually, is Murphy’s relationship with her now-adult son Avery (Jake McDorman).

USA’s The Rainmaker is a tepid, muddled retelling of the classic John Grisham legal thriller that falls short, despite John Slattery’s charms.

Elisabeth Moss’ spy thriller The Veil is effectively tense and provocative, but it gets derailed by unnecessary subplots.

Mostly, any flicker of emotional complexity gets trampled by the plot as it barrels forward in five different directions at once. A whole lot happens in Zero Day, it’s true… but I can’t say I cared much about any of it.

Yes, it gets a little soapy at times, but it's still a satisfying watch because there's an emotional authenticity at its core.

Unfortunately, you won’t need to get past the second commercial break of the pilot episode to realize you’re watching the most banal type of procedural, dressed up in garish period costumes and clogged with faith-versus-science questions that get explored with all the depth and nuance of a political debate on The View.

Tim Allen and Kat Dennings make an entertainingly feisty duo as father and daughter in ABC’s new family sitcom Shifting Gears.

If The Great Indoors can maintain a balance of smart, and not tired, barbs lobbed between “the human version of dial-up” and the “stupid twentysomethings” with whom he must now work, there surely is a show here.

While you shouldn’t look for American Gothic to enter the Emmy conversation in the history of ever, that’s simply not the point of it. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a weird, sometimes eerie distraction that won’t require rewinding if a few lines of dialogue get downed out by the air conditioner, CBS’ newest offering might be a summer series that slays.

It does not improve, and just keeps hammering the same tired joke over and over again. It’s a colossal waste of everyone’s time and talent. Cringe humor without the humor is just cringing.

Perhaps some day Chelsea will inspire a fascinating intellectual discussion about the perils of noisily promising something new on the late-night scene, then delivering the TV equivalent of an ancient burlap grocery sack: a good idea in its infancy, perhaps, but now on the brink of everything imminently falling out of the bottom with a messy splat.

L.A.’s Finest is a loud, dumb mess of a cop drama, loaded up with corny punchlines and incoherent plotting.

A quality cast does its best, but can’t salvage the cringe-worthy dialogue and paper-thin characterizations.

There’s nothing incredibly groundbreaking and innovative about any of this… but there doesn’t really need to be. It’s a cute, lighthearted throwback that goes down easy in an era of tough-to-watch dramas, and like The Mindy Project, it doubles as an affectionate tribute to classic rom-coms. The cast’s quick chemistry is remarkable, too.

Murphy’s productions always tend to favor style over substance — aside from FX’s triumphant Pose, which finds the beating human heart inside its flamboyant characters — but this might be his emptiest effort yet.

An overstuffed, often ridiculous supernatural drama that somehow manages to make a town filled with magical creatures seem crushingly dull.

Peacock’s Roman epic Those About to Die is an overstuffed, underbaked slog that slumps when the action ends.

Hulu’s How I Met Your Father has a strong cast, but lame jokes and an excess of schmaltz make it fall short of the original.

The show’s supporting players--in particular, D.B. Woodside’s Amenadiel, sent down from Heaven to insist Lucifer go back from where he came, Rachael Harris as Lucifer’s shrink, and Lesley-Ann Brandt as Maze, Lucifer’s ass-kicking assistant--hint at the possibility of a more interesting show (as does a closing twist in “Favorite Son”). Until or unless the show’s writing staff digs down and explore those darker instincts, however, Lucifer feels stuck in creative purgatory.

The jokes could use some polishing, and the concept could easily grow old in a hurry, but the trio of Wayans, Stevens West and Mallard nudge this one a solid notch above your average network sitcom.

The whole series feels like Netflix fed Arnold’s old action movies into ChatGPT and filmed whatever came out, unedited.

Those of us who tune in to the other two shows in the franchise have already been here, seen this — and we’ve seen it done with greater artfulness, efficacy and urgency. Adding this third series to the rotation, even temporarily, feels more than a little bit like beating an undead horse.

The end result feels like a hideous pastiche of focus-group testing, procedural clichés and CliffsNotes literary references that got pulled out of the incubator about two seasons too early.

The series does boast a breakout performance from newcomer Ashleigh Cummings. It’s just too bad that nothing else about the show lives up to that performance. Instead, any flickering glimmer of quality gets smothered by a drab visual palette, sluggish plotting and a crushingly dour tone.

Paramount+’s Fatal Attraction takes all the thrills out of the classic thriller, with leaden flash-forwards and stilted dialogue.

While it displays some dazzling visual flair and is plenty ambitious in its scope, like a certain famous Scarecrow, this ponderous revamp doesn’t seem to have much of a brain at all.