The project is also a bit of a mess. It feels like De Felitta never stops moving his camera, even when simply sitting still might do. And Robbins's script is filled with scenes where characters have largely inconsequential conversations... But at the very least, it's worth tuning in to the miniseries for five or 10 minutes to watch a great actor show off what made him so great in the first place.

In some episodes, it's really good, and even when not everything clicks, it's relentlessly addictive, returning the primacy to a story that was ceded to the tabloids long ago. The miniseries digs deeper than you'd expect, poking at the messy intersections of race, gender, and class that so much TV still shies away from, and it will remind you, time and again, of bits and pieces of the trial you'd completely forgotten about.

You, Me and the Apocalypse is a character-driven piece that's awkwardly shoehorned into a plot-driven piece, and that means neither side entirely works.

Legends still has a ton of potential, largely thanks to its talented cast. Before it can realize that potential, however, the show will have to course-correct from some seriously clunky, scattered missteps.

Mad Dogs, in other words, is trying something that's really complicated and ambitious and failing as often as it's succeeding. But in my book, you get at least a few points for effort. It might not be great television, but at least it's not content to do the same thing everybody else is.

Baskets makes itself compelling by refusing to make a total caricature of Chip, or Martha, or Christine. The show genuinely loves these characters, as stunted and confused as they are.

It's not as good as it wants to be, but it's still just propulsive and ridiculous enough to be entertaining. It's good shitty television, and that's something we all need in our lives.

Mozart in the Jungle is at its best when it's being whimsical. It's at its worst when it's trying to force laughs.

The special ... didn't just irritate me; it made me actively angry at how it wasted a great idea in the name of pointless complications and fan service.

With per-episode running times of 25 minutes or longer (around four minutes more than a standard network animated show), there are some pacing issues and general fuzziness here and there. But for the most part, it's a neat little series with potential to be a whole lot more.

It's a sprawling small-town saga that, nonetheless, feels lived-in and intimate. And even as it succumbs to some of true crime's greatest faults, it's always less interested in the gruesomeness of the crime than in the impossibility of finding the truth, something that serves it well. This is grim television, but it's also necessary television.

The show overexplains here and there--especially in the first episode--but after some early jitters, it settles in and simply lets its world be.

Transparent's second season is the best television of the year.... Season two was an improvement in every way, small and lovely and achingly resonant.

The individual sketches themselves are things of beauty, running the gamut from old-school setups with one big joke that's repeated in a variety of ways right on up to those that make fun of current trends and pop culture.

This is full-throttle, blood-soaked television, and even when it's not hitting every mark, it's still a great time.

There are spots where it's too overbuilt for its own good. Some might find that it lacks sophistication and is occasionally unseemly. But for comics fans (like me), who've watched superheroes slowly trade their joy for popularity, there are moments that will leave you with an irrational grin on your face. Supergirl isn't the best show on television right now, but it's one you might love the most.

In season two, it's altogether richer, more daring, and even more fun.

The series is stronger and more fully realized through four episodes of season two than it was at a comparable point in season one.

Casual is more wry than funny, but it has some sharp observations and moments. It's also got a secret weapon in Watkins.... Casual definitely gets better as it goes along.

This is, if anything, a sequel to season one, one that shares some of the same cast members, a bit of the same tone, and a general sense of the world tipping off its axis, ever so slightly. It's a show that wants to provoke a reaction in you, whether it's admiration, hatred, or just bafflement. It's HBO's best drama--and thus must-see TV.

Heroes Reborn is in a curious middle ground where it seems to be giving both too much and too little exposition.

For all its obvious weak spots, the show has turned out pretty well. It's silly but emotionally resonant, and able to call back on Muppets lore without getting lost in it.

What FXX has bet on isn't the usual cheery, good-time sitcom. It's a show that unleashes the dark heart of the romantic comedy.

This is a show that's unnecessarily bleak, far too impressed with its own edginess, and completely predictable to anyone who's watched television before.

In Curtis and Dickens it has two of the best performers the franchise has ever featured, and it knows how to use them. Both are able to balance the sense that they're simultaneously terrified for the state of society and worried they won't be able to save their kids from becoming zombie chow.... Fear probably can't do the slow-pocalypse thing forever, but for a first season of just six episodes, it might be just about right.

Show Me a Hero always feels thrillingly alive and attuned to the way that all politics is personal.... One of the year's very best TV programs.

Netflix's BoJack Horseman has found its footing beautifully in season two, earning the title of not just the streaming service's best show, but of one of television's best shows.

Most of Humans' characters are bores, and the story unfolds with the stately pacing of the typical cable drama.

UnREAL is a great many things, including a dark satire of reality TV, a satisfyingly comedic soap opera, and the ultra-rare female antihero drama.

There's nothing revolutionary here, but man, what is here is some of the funniest, most soulful TV of the summer.

When the show focuses on that best version of itself, it feels brilliant and paranoid and, above all, prescient.

The Brink's level of satire never really goes beyond "the most obvious jokes you can think of about every possible group of people on the planet," and its political messages essentially boil down to the idea that the end of humanity wouldn't be that cool.

Ballers isn't bad, per se, but it doesn't really try for anything, either.

It's an okay cop drama, to be sure, but it's definitely a cop drama you have seen many, many times before.

It wasn't as immediately satisfying as season two, but it was, in some ways, even more important to the run of the show as a whole, and it built to a final set of episodes that are as good as anything Orange has attempted so far.

Sense8 is a show forever trapped between two things--its core artistic impulses and its need to over-explain everything that happens within its confines. That makes it at once beautiful and maddening, either a complete travesty or a whacked-out masterpiece--and sometimes both in the same scene.

Where other TV shows avoid the weight of all that death, Hannibal turns the horror into opera--bold and beautiful and over-the-top and opulent.

The Briefcase features a truly terrible idea at its center, but what's almost worse than that is how dull and repetitive it gets almost immediately.

On the whole, however, the show simultaneously feels like it has too much going on--in that there are eight regulars to service, all with their own season-long story arcs--and too little--in that there's rarely any real conflict between the characters.

Happyish, like so many other shows of its ilk, confuses mentioning weighty, philosophical topics with actually discussing or understanding them.... And worst of all, it's so, so derivative.

Everything that was always good about Game of Thrones is still good. The ensemble cast remains one of TV's richest, from top to bottom, and even actors who seemed weak in the past (like Sophie Turner, who plays increasingly embittered Sansa Stark) continue to rise to the level of much better material.

The point is that Gibney and his collaborators have synthesized all of this information, put it in one place, and turned it into an emotional arc that will leave you as seething with fury at the church as any of those interviewed for the film.

Too much of those first nine episodes is taken up with vague hints of something dramatic happening just over the horizon.... Chandler, Mendelsohn, and Spacek all give searing performances. In particular, the final confrontation between Chandler and Mendelsohn is filled with meaty moments that both actors sink their teeth into.

The crime solving sometimes seems perfunctory, and some of the characters feel purely functionary. But the series is still having a ton of fun throwing many ideas at the wall to see what sticks. That so much is sticking already is cause for anticipation of even better things to come.

There are also times when Kemper seems to be playing a thin gloss on 30 Rock's protagonist, Liz Lemon. Yet give Kimmy Schmidt enough time, and it reveals that the real comparison point to make here isn't with 30 Rock. It's with Bewitched.

With American Crime, ABC and Ridley are at least trying something. That they succeed far more often than they fail is worth praise in and of itself.

It's the most unusual new comedy of the year, and it's also one of the best.

In many ways, House of Cards has become an entirely different show between season two and season three, and in ways that seem mostly half-hearted.

A well-done cop show that doesn't reach for too much and mostly accomplishes what it sets out to do is the sort of thing just about anyone can have on in the background.

If Breaking Bad gained dramatic tension from viewers feeling trapped between wanting Walter to redeem himself and wanting him to do even more horrible things, Saul can't really have that tension, because we know Saul's worst impulses will win out.... And yet there's so much about Better Call Saul that clicks, it's hard to hold too much of this against the program.

Fortitude turns out to be an intriguing blend of things a bunch of different nations' television networks do really well.

The Americans is also the best show on television, by a fair amount.... The show now has the best of its first season — when Philip and Elizabeth were often at odds--blended with the best of its remarkable second--when the two found common cause but discovered that made them less effective spies.

It's still a little clunky, particularly in terms of editing, and it feels as if all involved are figuring out the right ratio of jokes to information. Yet there's a lot to recommend here.

Stories the writers have obviously been wanting to tell for years are ramping up, and the actors are in peak form. Even if you tuned out of this show somewhere in the intervening years, it's worth coming back to see how it all ends.

Togetherness is a really, really well-executed version of this particular story [somewhat affluent white married couple in Los Angeles], with the Duplass brothers' inimitable directorial style meshing perfectly with the sorts of comedies HBO often embraces.