The Defenders is yet another Netflix ultra-slow burn. None of the heroes interact at all in the first hour. ... The parts of Defenders that actually, you know, feature all the Defenders are promising enough--if only for the chance to watch Jessica continually insult the others--for me to gladly watch the second half.

The Gifted falls pretty squarely in the middle. Based on tonight’s pilot episode (the only one Fox screened for critics), it gets the basics down and doesn’t try to deliver more than what you might expect, for better or worse.

This fictionalized version has strong moments, and the cast is so deep and the level of incidental detail so rich that it’s an eminently watchable show, but one that hasn’t quite figured out how to properly exploit the setting it knows so well.

Once the first few episodes have established the main story threads — Luke’s pursuit of Kate, a feud between the AV and theater kids that Luke attempts to squelch by teaming up to make a ’50s-style sci-fi movie starring Oliver and Emaline, a character contemplating a step out of the closet — Everything Sucks! manages to calm down and, like Kate, just exist. And it’s much more endearing in that mode: a lovable mix of elements from a lot of Netflix’s other recent YA series like Stranger Things, The End of the F***ing World, Big Mouth, and more, that also manages to feel distinctly like its own thing.

The series, which carries the tagline “How crack began,” has style and a strong lead performance from Idris, but it’s too familiar, especially early on, of other, better drug sagas--more methadone than the real fix.

The book had all kinds of novelty going for it in the mid-’90s. The TV show lacks that same capacity to surprise, so it (based on the two episodes TNT gave critics) has to lean much more on its story and characters, which were on the sketchy side to begin with. ... The actors are all good, Brühl in particular finding the balance between altruism and obsession, but don’t especially elevate the middling material. (The period setting also forgives the hodgepodge of accents.)

It’s weird, and slow, teasing and teasing its way to a payoff that is meant to seem profound and instead plays as utterly ludicrous and at times borders on offensive.

A lot of individual pieces succeed, in part due to the versatility and appeal of the three leads--Whitman’s spent her whole career zipping back and forth between laughs (Arrested Development) and tears (Parenthood), and Hendricks (Mad Men) and Retta (Parks and Recreation) have both on their resumés, too--but too many scenes are at odds with one another.

The heavy emphasis on Lou trying to encourage the students, the other teachers, and even the whole town to live up to the show’s title unfortunately takes away from Rise‘s strengths: namely, the kids themselves. In particular, Moana star Auli’i Cravalho and Damon J. Gillespie are everything the series needs them to be.

There are some nice action sequences, particularly in the opening two episodes, directed by Game of Thrones‘ Neil Marshall, and the series as a whole looks great, convincingly transforming the wilds outside Vancouver into something that feels genuinely alien. But outside of everyone’s complicated relationship with the Robot (and even that’s a very slow burn), there’s just not enough there in the story or characters that feels distinctive or compelling enough to keep going.

They play like an old-school Law & Order episode elongated well past the point of interest, without any of the nuance or larger sociological implications that justified Murphy and friends devoting so much time to the O.J. Simpson trial.

Chicago Justice feels like comfort food in the same way the other Chicago series have when I’ve sampled them, with all the narrative and ethical complexity smoothed out just enough that you won’t miss anything if a sock-sorting problem becomes surprisingly difficult while you watch.

It’s often predictable and to the grimdark end of the Quality Drama tonal spectrum, but the period itself is fairly novel (Carnivale was over a decade ago), and it plays its familiar tunes with brisk competence.

It’s a good cast--Hudgens is energetic and likable in the straight woman role, Tudyk can play this kind of obnoxious bro in his sleep, and Pudi and the others (including Christina Kirk as Van’s beleaguered assistant, Jackie) already have a solid handle on what differentiates each nerdy character from the others--and every now and then comes a scene or joke that lives up to the promise of showing an extraordinary world from the most ordinary point of view.

AMC’s version of The Son (it debuts Saturday night at 9; I’ve seen the first two episodes) is a glum, lifelessly condensed take on the material that in the early going doesn’t even rise to the passable standard of Hell on Wheels.

The suits, hats, gowns, and sets all look smashing, and the actors are strong, particularly Bomer ratcheting up his boyish charm to its most potent in order to convey how justly beloved Monroe is in an otherwise-cutthroat town. But the characters all feel like stock types borrowed from other series, even if many of them were created by Fitzgerald back in his final days, and the whole thing feels a bit dull. I have all the love in the world for tales of pre-WWII Hollywood, but ran out of patience with this one by the end of the fourth episode.

Though Netflix provided critics with the whole first season in advance, I ran out of patience after six episodes; they featured maybe enough material to justify three episodes, and probably two.

Shaun improvising surgical procedures with whatever he can find on a TSA conveyer belt, or flashbacks to Shaun’s very difficult childhood, are effective, and promise a solid, if familiar, show to come. But boy oh boy do the scenes where his colleagues debate Shaun’s fitness for the job labor, while also feeling like artifacts from around when Big Bang Theory debuted, if not earlier.

Yet even with Momoa and McClarnon being more central to the action, it’s middling historical drama at best, like the early days of AMC’s Turn or Hell on Wheels.

There are a lot of moving parts, some of which work quite well (Mel Harris as a wealthy but naive client who thinks the Haverfords are saving her from a short con when they’re really setting her up for a long one), others of which grind the show to a halt (Dylan Schmid as the inevitable troublemaking teenage son).

No story, or joke, goes as far as it needs to in order to really extract the necessary laughs. The FX version of this could be a scream; the Fox version feels watered down and largely forgettable.

This material has seen better days, and 24: Legacy makes clearer than ever how much Kiefer Sutherland was needed to sell it.

With each new revelation, each new flashback that adds additional context to one of last season’s flashbacks, it begins to feel less like a sensitive teen drama than like one of those forgettable Lost rip-offs that thought the key to success was introducing five new questions for every old one that gets answered. ... And each additional reason, each additional season, dilutes the impact of when we first heard [Hannah’s story].

It’s plenty ambitious, but an ambitious failure, where the more you make like Greg and try to think about what the characters are thinking, the more unbearable most of it becomes.

Friends From College is a shrill and unpleasant dramedy about the dangers of maintaining youthful friendships deep into adulthood.

These early episodes have some of the usual growing pains first-year comedies go through as the creative team figures out what’s funny about each actor and character; they’ve already solved McDermott/Dave, so you have to wait to see if the others can catch up.

We got a show that’s so lifeless that I have no interest in finishing out the season.

Virtually every joke in The Orville is out on an island. At times, it’s not even clear what the joke is meant to be, but simply that there is one. And while it’s a relief that Palicki isn’t playing the disapproving woman who rolls her eyes at the naughty dude at the center of the story, none of the writers seem to know what to do with her, either.