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.