Powers gives you the slam-bang super-hero action you want, as well as the hard-boiled tone many cop shows aim for and seldom attain.

Kelley has made Janey Patterson, as played by Mary-Louise Parker, into a romantic interest for Hodges. This fix is not only needless--that’s one reason Taylor’s Ida exists, as she did in King’s novel: to provide Hodges with some intimate comfort--but it seems both less believable. ... Putting that aside, Mr. Mercedes is awfully good.

Fortunately, Broadchurch, created and written by Chris Chibnall, still excels most frequently as a character study--to a notable degree, of all its major characters, who are sketched with vividness and, in almost every case, sympathy and poignance.

All the acting is equally good, something you can’t say about most ensemble-cast shows. Basically, This Is Us is a well-designed emotion machine that, by the end (for the record, I freely admit I didn’t see the end-twist coming--you might, because you’re smarter than me), had me eager to see how this is all going to shake down in Episode 2.

A superbly subtle yet exciting new series, gives us Charlie-in-the-making.

If you aren’t watching Banshee, I’d say now’s the time to climb aboard. It’s a show that’s just hitting its stride, and that stride averages about 100 miles an hour.

Okay, I’ll buy into it for the sake of the wonderful acting being done here. Then too, Jeffrey Reiner’s direction is superb, the rhythm of his framing and the cameras’ points of view underscoring without intruding upon the drama.

Overall, this seems as though it will be one of Syfy’s most engaging new series as the channel continues to get back into the hardcore sci-fi and fantasy genres.

There’s not much suspense or any thrill of discovery as we watch Holden and Bill slowly tumble to the patterns in serial-killer methodology. ... That said, Mindhunter is engrossing, and the central performances by Groff and McCallany are highly distinctive and complementary. The whole production has an assurance that’s comforting in the midst of all the unsettling time we spend with depraved law-breakers.

Key and Peele returns to Comedy Central on Wednesday night with an exceedingly strong half-hour that once again demonstrates the range of not only the duo’s performance skills, but their ideas as well.

There is both a unity and a contrast between their two comic personas that is sharp here.

Jacobs has found a way to play that character in such a way that Mickey is endlessly surprising rather than easily irritating. ... Gus has always been just as deeply screwed up as Mickey is. In this final season of the show, there’s a reckoning with his own neurotic behavior, and Rust shows himself fully up to this challenge as an actor. Love also delves more deeply into its supporting cast.

It’s both binge-able yet also easy to consume one bite at a time. How involved you become in the show depends on how much you’re beguiled by Wise’s charming performance and her character’s informative dialogue.

There’s a lot of speechifying, some of it is moving and fascinating, some of it sounding like penny-ante Eugene O’Neill. It’s also completely fascinating, and full of really wonderful performances.

The challenge for Valley in its fourth season was to somehow parallel the nonstop innovation that occurs in the real-life Silicon Valley while retaining the elements that have made this comedy a success--primarily, the constant, abrasive interactions between brilliant losers Dinesh, Richard, Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), Jared (Zach Woods), and Erlich (T.J. Miller). Based on the three episodes made available for review, Silicon Valley has innovated to just the right degree.

A funny sitcom with the good-posture backbone of truth.

Anyone with an interest in music will want to see this portrait of the artist as a young man pursued by demons into the pit of heck.

Its refusal to reduce any of the crimes it portrayed to standard TV gestures, as well as the vividness of its two lead characters, give it an afterlife: I’d guess that many people will watch the series over again, even knowing how it turns out, just to spend time in the bleak town of Broadchurch.

Young Sheldon has a certain Wonder Years glow to it. The challenge for the show going forward is to keep young Sheldon a believable, likable kid while also emphasizing the eccentric qualities that make him an effective comic creation. From this first episode, it really feels as though that’s not going to be a problem.

Mr. Robot and creator Esmail have earned this quirky, almost mild and studious, way to commence the second season; for fans, trust in the show has been established.

Beautifully crafted and excellently acted, Casual is well worth checking out, to see if its mood and rhythms fall in sync with yours.

This film is about the culture of complicity that grew up around Sandusky’s crimes, primarily because no one wanted to tarnish or slow down the awe-inspiring triumphs that Paterno was scoring as the winningest coach in college football. It’s an unusual way to tell this story, but Pacino and director Barry Levinson pull it off, scoring their own, more low-key, triumph. ... It’s a very good performance in a very good film that avoids sensationalizing the crimes in order to explore pain on many levels.

Falk and company--they really go for it, whatever “it” it is they intend.

Oaks remains assiduously small-scale, and that only works toward its charm. (Compared with ABC’s blasting ’80s sitcom The Goldbergs, Red Oaks is a masterpiece of low-key discretion.) The pacing is sometimes tediously slow, but for the most part, Oaks is cozily welcoming.

The story is told in reverse chronological order, jumping back and forth, here and there, across the trail of Cunanan’s various crimes--can sometimes seem gratuitously confusing, but once you get used to its rhythm, this American Crime Story has an irresistible pull.

TV Flash continues to be the most satisfying of all the broadcast network adaptations of comic-book superheroes.

Westworld, with its florid dialogue and languid self-seriousness, isn’t as much fun as Twin Peaks was. But it’s also easy to see why Westworld is the much more popular show. It’s tapping in to currents in our culture, our feelings that the world has become a far more confusing place, with power struggles that threaten any possible unity or peace. We can’t saddle up and shoot-’em-up, but we can escape and watch others do it for us on Sunday nights.

Dowd’s performance is absolutely essential to keeping this show from tipping over into excessive self-seriousness. You’ll notice that whenever Handmaid’s Tale shifts away from Lydia and Offred, and back to the Canadian border and the subplot involving Offred’s husband, Luke (O.T. Fagbenle), and Moira (Samira Wiley), the show becomes deadly drab and dull.

Even--or especially--if you don’t get the humor in that last one, the country-music knowledge being arrayed before you in Tales From the Tour Bus is sure to both enlighten and entertain you.

It’s fascinating to watch the ways these men--and most of the principals were men--gathered information, formed theories and conclusions, and butted heads with one another over plans of action. It’s dismaying to absorb one of this miniseries’ most timely subtexts: that during the most intense time leading up to the 9/11 attack, the American media was distracted by President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Fun and clever, with serious things to say about sexism and ageism.

Dreadful creator John Logan has firm control over the series’ mordantly witty, dry tone. He has me hooked again.

This hour-long dramedy relies heavily on Ritter’s ability to sell its outlandish, at times confusing, premise, and to the degree that it succeeds, it’s almost entirely due to the star’s powers of persuasion over any objective standard.

Herskovitz and Zwick are not damp-eyed sentimentalists. They’re wickedly good at building up characters you love to hate. ... When you combine this bubbly soap opera material with amusingly lively scenes of Will (Chris Carmack), Avery, and Gunnar getting together to form the band you didn’t know you’d always wanted, Nashville seems to be going out with an enjoyable blast.

Horgan and showrunner Paul Simms, clearly working closely with Parker, who’s one of the show’s executive producers, have constructed Divorce so that it feels at once inevitable and surprising.

A charming and even, yes, inspiring new series.

The Quad features some strong performances and isn’t afraid to plunge enthusiastically into the genre of nighttime soap opera.

He’s very good at making jokes that are carefully constructed and timed down to the syllable sound like ordinary conversation. He adds to his growing catalogue of acute observations about marriage and raising children, and articulates some differences between middle-aged Louis and his more youthful self.

Here is a series for an American audience that grants us the intelligence to be able to read subtitles, which are deployed to help convey the tart flavor of the various tongues spoken in the show. Combine this with the show’s frequently lovely visuals, and Vikings remains the kind of burly soap opera that appeals to an ever-wider audience.

The Missing is one compelling piece of work, full of what the anguish of having an abducted child does to a family over the years. It’s also a prickly mystery story that occasionally relies on a few too-neat coincidences to pull off its startling conclusion. The performance that ties everything together is Karyo’s.

It’s almost cartoonish in its approach to the sitcom, to an extreme that sometimes pushes it into avant-garde territory: Not only would Daffy Duck understand what Kimmy is up to--so would turn-of-the-20th-century Dada and Surrealist artists. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is Fey and Carlock’s PhD project in comedy.

It’s off to a very good start. Dickens and Curtis and the actors playing their kids (Dillane, Alycia Debnam-Carey, and Lorenzo James Henric) are terrific.... Fear The Walking Dead has art on its addled mind, and is all the better for it.

Even the third episode, which is loaded with a lot of backstory origin material about Quinlan’s past, doesn’t get bogged down. When it’s good, The Strain moves as quickly as those long, creepy tongues that burst out of the strigoi’s mouths to suck your blood.

Descriptions cannot convey the crispness of the writing, and the surprising chemistry that’s already in place among a group of actors with widely differing styles of comedy. Credit writer Justin Adler and director Jason Winer for coming up with an atmosphere and look for Life In Pieces that unifies, rather than fractures, the show.

It’s completely engrossing to witness Norman’s blossoming psychosis, which is frightening in a non-horror-story manner, even as Norma’s prickly personality provides Bates with regular, welcome moments of unexpected funniness.

A rare new sitcom with as much heart and soul as jokes and wackiness, Detroiters is a welcome surprise premiering on Comedy Central Tuesday night.

Last Kingdom is imaginative and amusing, and Uhtred makes for a smart, tough, randy central character.

Beautiful and puzzling, funny and exciting.

It makes a smooth transition to pay cable, one that retains all of the original’s charm and distinctiveness while adding some bigger-name stars into the series’ heady mix.

The whole thing comes wrapped in music: a couple of typically clever original numbers, and incidental touches such as a novel use for Scott Joplin’s ragtime touchstone “The Entertainer.” Even the show’s theme song undergoes a re-think; as Rebecca explains, it’s “an emotional thesis statement for myself.” It’s this kind of self-consciousness--tart and pointed, yet not excessively vain--that gives Crazy Ex-Girlfriend its lift.

Chemistry is key to a project like this, and Wayans and Crawford have it. Even in the series’ cartoonish exaggeration of what crime-fighting is about (yelling, screaming, and car-chasing), Lethal Weapon has a comic snap that is entertaining.

It affirms all the reasons you liked the first Stranger Things, and deepens your knowledge and affection for its storytelling and characters.

At his best, as is frequently on display here, Harmon knows how to overload a scene with references to everything from dinosaurs to Lawnmower Man, and still keep the action moving.

The new season of Inside Amy Schumer is very funny, and, just below its surface, very thoughtful.

It was such a pleasure to sink down into these jokes with Seinfeld, such a treat to be carried along by such a confident professional. It’s rare to be treated this way by any piece of current entertainment; enjoy his achievement here.

Outlander’s appeal remains focused on the interplay between Claire and Jamie, a union of two very different people joined in mutual attraction, lust, and a meeting of the minds. No matter what country they’re in, they’re the duo that’s the twosome with the mostest.

Valley turns into the story of a young company fighting for a soul its founders never realized it had. As a result, it gives Silicon Valley a bigger heart than it’s ever had before.

Ultimately, the sheer pleasure of Godless defeats any reservations you may have about it. Daniels is both hilarious and scary, and he’s clearly having a great time pulling on his scraggly beard as this project’s ultimate villain. And there’s a long, well-staged shootout at the end that is both very-traditional-western and something totally new, because more than half the shooters are women, with guns blazing.

If you keep watching, The A Word gathers its own quiet power as a succession of portraits of people under stress (to add to the tension, money is tight for every member of the family) without becoming unbearably morose, thanks to regular bits of dotty British eccentricity and a few comic misunderstandings. The show is at its best, however, when it centers around sweet, solemn little Joe, who’s shutting out the world by singing along to Human League, subconsciously seeking human connection.

Once I accepted Project Greenlight’s cynical choice, I have to admit the show became immediately transfixing: It’s always fascinating to watch people who dislike each other in stressful workplace situations.

Longmire is in fine, tight-lipped-verging-on-surly form.

It’s usually the case that television procedurals that start concentrating on the heroes’ private lives make the rest of the show go soft--sentimentality creeps in. So far, thanks to the crisp, dry performances of Noble, Miller, and Liu, Elementary avoids that danger quite nicely.

Thanks to the presence of star Bruce Campbell, original Evil Dead director Sam Raimi and master producer of enjoyable junk Robert Tapert, Ash Vs. Evil Dead is a blood-squirting, wisecracking success as a half-hour TV series.

Idiotsitter, a smartly crass comedy, plays like a treatment for a wacky buddy-movie, shrunk to a smaller scale for TV.

Iit might sound a bit seen-it-all-before, but it’s what Red Oaks does with this material that makes the series worth watching.

Bosch is a fine piece of TV work, one of the best examples of how to take what works on tightly-formatted network crime shows and supplement it with some of the looser freedoms of pay-cable crime series.

It seems hell-bent on not failing us for one single second.

Younger never stays bogged down in one theme, or with one character, for long. Foster is, as always, glowingly convincing as Liza, and the show never lets us forget that what this character--and by implication, this series--is fighting against is.

Donovan is managing to walk a fine line between hardboiled entertainment and over-cooked melodrama.... it’s sometimes as good as almost anything else out there.

Lightning is distinguished by its instantly distinctive blend of social realism and sense of humor--it is simultaneously the most relevant and the funniest of The CW/DC Comics shows.

In the season premiere, the primary story line involves Nina, as a babysitter, trying to get Elmo and Abby to calm down enough to be put to bed. “You’re too excited,” she says. “You need to do something relaxing.” This is already a better premise for a half-hour show than 98 percent of the frenetic sitcoms on the air.... The Sesame Street touchstones remain in place: There is the letter (“B”) and number (“10”) of the day, for example.

Bloodline is well worth your time.

The Expanse has enough well-wrought plot to keep things moving swiftly without confusing those of us who aren’t hardcore sci-fi fans.

It’s all very disturbing and creepy. It’s also not new.... The A&E special might therefore be viewed partly as an attempt to get ratings by recycling already-heard allegations. On the other hand, there’s also a sense in which we cannot hear these dreadful tales enough, so that the memory of them can live on in people other than the victims.

It’s a measure of how confident this underrated-in-every-way show has become that it can confidently separate the two lovers and let Danny carry a completely independent subplot with such comic success.

Featuring fine supporting performances by an evil Josh Duhamel, a perverse T. R. Knight, and a sly Cherry Jones in addition to the aforementioned Cooper and Gadon, 11.22.63 is the kind of fantasy realism that any sort of viewer can latch onto and find something to be intrigued and moved by.

The War Room introduced us to the concept of corrupting-the-process campaign consultants as image-makers, and in its comic, half-hour way, Documentary Now!’s The Bunker--written with a pitch-perfect ear for 1990s blather by comic John Mulaney--does a fine job of distilling this feature-film message quite succinctly.

Having watched three episodes, I’m hooked on its mix of laughs and seriousness.

The writing as overseen by veteran Roseanne producer Bruce Helford is sharp--the tone is very similar to the 10 years of the original Roseanne you may have watched and enjoyed.

Deceptively loose and shambling, Big Time is one of those shows--like the show it follows, Workaholics--that’s going to quickly attract a cult following. Get in on it now.

Mom is back for a third season on Thursday night, and the sitcom has really found its comic groove. Also its tragic groove. Because that’s the way Mom works--its present-day laughs are always threatened by fragile futures and haunted pasts.

Show creator Julian Fellowes has defeated jaded skepticism again.

Anne with an E both stands apart from the 1985 Anne and connects to it in its openhearted eagerness. McNulty gives an exceptionally deft, nuanced performance that is the equal of any adult performance I’ve seen on television this year. Beautifully shot, and full of marvelous supporting performances, Anne with an E is a fresh version of Anne of Green Gables that newcomers and cult fans can enjoy equally.

This show is guided by sitcom pros, but it doesn’t feel like an old-pro show at all. It doesn’t go for easy or cheap laughs, and most of its scenes don’t follow the usual sitcom trajectory--instead, they take odd twists and turns.

For a premiere, this Late Show was exceedingly polished yet loose-limbed.

The show works as a comedy, as a satire of the way certain people live now and of the true-crime genre in its search for Chantal. Search Party’s half-hour episodes zip by so quickly, you’ll probably binge on them sometime during the upcoming holiday.

The voice-over commentary that’s most valuable comes from musicians such as Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty, who deeply understand Presley’s music and motivations, and critics who’ve thought long and hard about Elvis, like Nik Cohn and writer turned producer Jon Landau. ... You’ll have your own moments of discovery. Elvis works his way on everyone individually.

Review remains one of the most entertaining, and occasionally quite moving, shows on television.

The show sells us on the idea that pretty, wide-smiling Teresa can become a capable, even vicious, defender of her own hide when threatened, and that Queen of the South might be able to tell a familiar story in a fresh way. The first hour has been beautifully directed by Charlotte Sieling, with lots of lulling silences between action scenes, creating an atmosphere in which anything--any deal, any conversation, any room--can explode at any moment.

I thought I was heartily sick of gloomy, gritty TV shows, but engaging ones can’t help but pull me in. After watching three episodes of Taboo, I think I’m officially in.

Rendered without much embellishment and acted with firmly controlled vigor, Killing Jesus, a TV adaptation of the bestselling book by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, is a fine retelling of the story of Jesus Christ as a historical figure.

Raucous and loony and adroit and lewd, 7 Days in Hell is one odd comedy.

Each of Fleabag’s six episodes is a tightly-composed variation on her character’s wild, bad-girl humor, and her personal (especially sexual) and professional frustration.

The documentary is never less than engaging, but as a piece of filmmaking, it’s rather shapeless. Now the deaths of Fisher and Reynolds give it an unintended shape and purpose. It captures these two extremely vital spirits in the very recent past, and makes you feel the loss of them even more sharply.

In the three episodes I’ve seen, the literalization of Josh’s subconscious fears, hopes, and dreams works pretty well. The show is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s always engrossing and smart.

If you’re looking for a winter-time mystery that will show you people even colder than you may be these days, Fortitude is an absorbing one.

You don’t have to be rich to feel the agony of Madoff’s victims, and Wizard shrewdly transcends the the-rich-are-people-too genre by making Madoff’s family drama seem universal.

Diana, Our Mother is a very touching and forthright hour spent with the sons and other people who knew Diana.