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.

Julie and Billy are enthusiastically mean, sarcastic, and lovable--all at once.

As it is, writer-showrunner David Hollander has certainly crafted, last season and this one, an absorbing melodrama, aided a great deal by directors including John Dahl, who does terrific work in the second and third episodes.

Is the show funny? Sort of. It’s certainly charming, in a frequently vulgar sort of way, and well performed by the cast and guest stars.

The Sinner is at once intriguing and frustrating.

Showrunner-director Greg Yaitanes (Banshee, Quarry) does a frequently fine job of shooting these evidence-gathering sessions with lots of intensity and suspense--this despite the fact that Worthington isn’t really that compelling as Fitz.

Room 104 is extremely uneven.

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

The show has an occasionally suspenseful twist. (Electrocution in the water: Watch out!) But as it proceeds, Ozark takes way too long to make a few good points and to showcase a few good performances, most prominently Jason Bateman’s.

Issa Rae’s very funny, great-looking HBO sitcom Insecure is back for a second season on Sunday night, and it’s even better--more assured and finely detailed--than its excellent first season.

The show’s regular flashbacks to the Nailer’s time in Afghanistan slow the pace and seem rather war-movie generic. The show is much better when we’re in contemporary times, such as the season premiere’s deftly choreographed shootout in a Frankfurt, Germany, ballroom.

Loaded succeeds as a likable show, even if it’s one that takes a bit too much self-congratulatory pride in having the boys fail.

The season premiere had a lot of table-setting storytelling--at once self-recapping the saga and pointing it toward its future--but it did so with a satisfying forthrightness.

All the stars are as likable and watchable as you might think they’d be, yet the show that they’re in is nearly bereft of humor or poignance. It’s as though everyone signed on without reading a script and, good sports all, just forged ahead anyway.

In truth, the bi-ped hamsters of Big Brother offer a more realistic view of humanity than this unbelievable new disaster-drama series.

For all its frenetic pacing, Will seems wheezily old-fashioned, the umpteenth attempt to attract a young audience to great art by modernizing it--except that Will’s ideas of modernity are a half-century old.

The Defiant Ones works on almost every level: as a primer on the music industry, as gossip, as biography, as a time capsule of the 1980s, the 1990s, and the beginning of the 21st century. Neither Iovine nor Dre is particularly eloquent about their own achievements, but The Defiant Ones does that work for them, excitingly.

There are times when Snowfall tries too hard for poignant irony, such as setting the scene of a vicious beat-down endured by young Franklin to the breezy beauty of Bill Withers’s song “Lovely Day.” But if you’re in the mood for a dark but sunny, meticulously detailed TV-show-as-novel narrative, Snowfall may draw you in.

The first episode of Gypsy is a tough slog, what with a dallying pace and Jean making silly voice-over pronouncements . ... Allow yourself to be taken in by Watts’s wily strategy, and Gypsy may, at its best, be viewed as an interesting character study.

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.

For the most part, this is the Playing House you’ve either come to love or ought to be catching up with as soon as possible.

The new Gong Show, even with the unfunny Tommy Maitland, is a bit more fun than those other attempts [such as The Match Game and To Tell The Truth] at revival.

The GLOW team--that are walking clichés who gradually become somewhat filled-in creations. The weakest parts of GLOW occur when the action stops to trace the backstory of this fighter or that one--in other words, when GLOW is most like OITNB. It’s best when the show is exploring the complex friendship between Ruth and Debbie, or whenever anyone is bouncing off of Maron’s director Sam Sylvia.

A solid reimagining of the Stephen King novella of the same name, The Mist is an intriguing new example of scary TV.

I found the crimes too similar to a dozen recent TV whodunits, and Campbell’s solemn croak an irritating affectation.

The whole party-scene setting, complete with sneering guys with chains and women in brightly-colored wigs, is apparently intended to make you gawp at its carnal adventurousness. Instead, like the rest of Blood Drive, it’s as painfully boring as watching someone hit his fingers repeatedly with a hammer in an attempt to shock you.

The conversations are conducted via a Russian translator, and you have to be in the mood to read a lot of subtitles to engage with Putin and Stone’s policy discussions, but that small effort is well worth it. There are light moments here and there.

I liked Claws’s sun-baked Florida setting, and the way the cameras capture the difference between the inside warmth of the nail salon versus the harsh ugliness of store-front life outside. And Nash is really excellent, rendering Desna in all her tough, vulnerable, shrewd complexity. The writing of the show needs to become as complex as that character.

Kelly, making her debut as an NBC host, marshaled her trademark steeliness, but it was no match for the insults (“Do you even understand what you’re asking?”) and the weaselly tactics of the KGB master spy. ... The fact that Sunday Night spent as much time rolling in the African mud with elephants (in a report about elephant poaching) as it did with Putin suggests how slim the pickings were in the editing room. Kelly filled up the rest of her debut by turning it over to other correspondents.

As drama, the show is inert. After watching four episodes, I realized I’d been watching constant variations of the same narrative arc: Comedian campaigns to get stage time at Goldie’s. Pause for subplots about other comics’ personal lives. Back to Goldie’s for a performance, during which the comedian either “kills” or bombs, after which he or she is just as miserable as when the episode began.

In the three new episodes I’ve see, the show too often makes the laughs secondary to its progressive messaging.

The atmosphere feels looser, more wild and daring. ... [Michael] Kelly’s performance [as White House Chief of Staff Doug Stamper] continues to be subtle in the midst of a show that doesn’t much care about subtlety. That’s certainly true of Spacey’s ever-more-broad performance, and Wright’s near self-parody of a woman who wears her power like a suffocating mask.

There are a few coincidences in the final hours that make the plotting strain credulity, and the second-to-the-last episode feels as though a big chunk of it was cut and pasted from previous seasons and leftover editing-room footage in order to reach the assigned 10 hours. Lumbering along, dragging family history along in a way that slows down its thriller storytelling, Bloodline contains too many instances of a character saying some variation on the line, “When’s it going to end?” or “How did we get here?”

Beautiful and puzzling, funny and exciting.

Three seasons in, Kemper’s performance has become remarkably nuanced for such a slapsticky, cartoonish creation, and Kimmy Schmidt herself is starting to look like the indomitable figure that the title’s “unbreakable” was always meant to signify.

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.

Although it’s nicely scruffy around the edges, it’s essentially a gimmick show with not enough funny lines to make Martin’s sonorous narration appealing after you listen to him for more than 15 minutes. Tolman is very good, but you walk away from the show thinking she really could have done better than this as her post-Fargo project.

The performances of Hahn and Dunne are strikingly good, all the more so given the emptiness of so much of their dialogue. Their rowdy domestic fights achieve effectiveness almost entirely through this duo’s energetic and witty delivery, not the actual content of what they’re saying to each other. As the series proceeds, it becomes more predictable.

Ansari clearly wants to explore a wider bandwidth of emotion in the new season of Master of None. His far-reaching efforts to achieve this are admirable, if not always effective.

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.

Slapdash and one-joke-silly, The President Show would not seem to have much of a future as an ongoing enterprise.

Many individual scenes are excellent, but the whole thing, based on the half-season Starz made available for review, doesn’t knit together.

Back for a third season, Catastrophe continues to be one of the most incisive and funny portraits of a marriage on television. Or streaming services.

Moss’s performance is perfect: at once contained and open, withdrawn and bristlingly aware. ... The Handmaid’s Tale can stand on its own as a gripping drama; you don’t need to apply overlays about Trump-era conservatism or, say, parallels to the Duggar family to find its portrait of a women under duress moving.

A delightful surprise, Great News immediately becomes one of network television’s best sitcoms.

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.

This TV series tries to capture some of the adventure in venture capitalism, but it suffers from an excess of aggressive cutesiness. ... The whole thing is alternately tedious and tiring.

As always, however, the pleasures of Fargo derive from the variety of the characters and the clever wordplay they indulge in. ... Coon and Hawley quickly establish the distinctiveness of Gloria’s character: she’s not as polite as Allison Tolman’s Deputy Molly Solverson in season one, nor as tight-lipped serene as Patrick Wilson’s Trooper Lou Solverson in season two.

One of the most difficult things a sitcom can do is to monkey with its basic premise, scattering characters here and there, while retaining its quality (and its audience). This usually happens with shows whose casts are aging--when a series set during high school must graduate its class to college, for example--and the results are frequently dire, or at the least, second-rate. Not so with Veep.

When I say The Leftovers is awesome, this is what I mean: It fills me with awe.

Wicked and shrewd, Better Call Saul has the suspense of a thriller and the emotion of a family saga.

At its best, The Son--both book and TV show--explores ideas such as what it means to be a success in America and how much ruthlessness is required to achieve that definition; how the legacies of fathers place the burden of history on the shoulders of sons who’d like to shrug them off. It’s too bad the TV version is simplified so drastically, the production too often turns into an ordinary shoot-’em-up.

When Brockmire is in the broadcast booth, Azaria’s arias of baseball lore are mesmerizing and witty, but the show also relies too frequently on jokes about Brockmire leaving the microphone open during embarrassing moments.

This season of Archer has a great look: this cartoon version of film noir features richly dark blues, greens, and black, and the pacing has the hypnotic pull of a dream turning into a nightmare. Of course, this being Archer, it’s also loaded with lots of double- and single-entendres, and energetic vulgarity.

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.

The Austin, Texas, special is a little more dated, with material about the Ebola crisis and the infamous Ray Rice tape, and Chappelle seems a little more weighed down by headlines about police shootings.

Two hour-plus stand-up specials premiere on Netflix today, and they’re both very good, one better than the other. ... The Age of Spin is a brilliantly organized concert that’s structured around O.J. Simpson.

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

Lithgow is superb every time he’s on-camera, but Trial & Error has its own trial-and-error growing pains to go through before it either settles into something you want to watch every week, or a novelty that doesn’t sustain itself.

The degree to which you can be moved and involved by American Crime depends on the degree to which the importance of its message and the fine performances of its stars outweigh the show’s often crushing heaviness.

The Judd Apatow-produced comedy-with-drama is even stronger this time around, featuring a great, complex performance by Gillian Jacobs.

I’m happy to report that this cartoon created by Genndy Tartakovsky is as exciting, beautiful, and multilayered as it ever was.

Every time the show switches to an Oleg moment--watching him trudge through dirty slush to the gloomy home of his parents--I find my mind wandering. More invigorating is the season’s further development of Paige as a possible future spy.

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

Chicago Justice is just Law & Order in a windbreaker.

A marvelously acted piece. If the subject matter sounds grim, it is, but the production is exciting: well-acted, suspenseful, and moving.

The latest movie-to-TV adaptation is an exceptionally useless prequel to the Taken franchise.

It would have helped, perhaps, if the production wasn’t so drawn out, but rather condensed to a tightly assembled, one-night TV-movie. But at its best, When We Rise achieves the inspirational status it desires, and goes beyond that, to portray the romanticism of rebellion as an exhilarating, desirable goal.

Repetitious (okay, we get it: Sam Phillips had an unhappy marriage and made out with Marion as frequently as possible) and clumsy in its lurch from one disparate subplot to another, Sun Records is such a slow burn, it’s kind of a fizzle.

Rare is the movie adaptation that is not just excellent, but which becomes its own radiant achievement. It doesn’t seem too early to bestow that praise upon Bates Motel.

This is the kind of show that’s not going to make the big pop-culture impact of the series that precedes it--Girls--but it’s a worthy dispenser of pleasure.

The Good Fight has been assembled in such a way that you don’t need to have seen so much as one episode of The Good Wife to follow what’s going on. The new chapter in Diane’s life is also a new chapter in the genre of first-rate lawyer shows.

There’s a lot of melodramatic threatening. There are heated parent-teacher conferences so baldly unbelievable, you’ll have a hard time deciding which side deserves to be disciplined more. Still, the damn thing is irresistible. The performances crackle, and each of the lead women forges her own brand of indelible unhappiness.

It’s very clear from the dialogue, pacing, and tone that Doubt would really like to remind you of still another CBS show--The Good Wife--but, sorry, it’s nowhere in the same league.

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.

Most of the time, Girls remains impressive.

If Legion can maintain the balance of thriller-tautness and hallucinatory chaos that is done so well in the show’s opening hours, this will truly be a unique and superb superhero series.

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.

The opening real-time hour is pretty engaging--knottily plotted yet streamlined enough to hold the attention of football fans left burping on sofas across this great land on Sunday. ...But after a few hours of 24: Legacy, I wasn’t very engaged by all the scrambling around, the twists that prove to be double-crosses that will probably turn out to be triple-crosses.

Reeves is trying to do something about the state of law enforcement in America, but APB, with its alternation of tedious command-center computer-gazing and routine cops-chasing-bad-guys action, doesn’t seem like a concept that will keep viewers intrigued week after week.

Maybe you’ll find this carefully crafted wackiness more amusing than I did.

Superior Donuts feels like the kind of sitcom that would have struck audiences as a cozy place to visit every week if it had premiered in the days before cable and streaming. As it is, it feels at once odd and stale.

The new show has permission from DC Comics to poke fun at DC superheroes, but what comes across more forcefully is a weariness with the superhero-overload in TV and movies right now.

Paxton is hemmed in by lousy dialogue and broadcast-network-predictable plot lines.

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

The story lacks much in the way of momentum other than the downward spiral of too much booze, too little creation of art. Z: The Beginning of Everything is a spiffy soap opera, but not much more than that.

It will be easy for Riverdale to lapse into campiness. ... But for now, Riverdale is an intriguing experiment in comic artiness that just might work.

The acting remains first-rate. It’s too bad, therefore, that the show proceeds with its various, intriguing subplots at such a slow pace.

The New Edition Story is an exceptionally well-made, fast-paced, warts-and-all biopic.

Hunted’s premiere wasn’t very suspenseful--it was like an episode of Undercover Boss if the bosses had to keep moving all the time. The voiceover narration is a problem: While it’s a necessary element of the show, needed to introduce the huge cast of “characters” and orient a viewer in the geography of the fugitives, it also lends a cheesy, basic-cable-reality-crime-show air to the proceedings.

The documentary does a good job of filling you in on the Slenderman mythos and how it has spread.

I’ll keep checking it out for its incidental pleasures. A lot of Baskets’s best humor is totally random

The show tries very hard to give us believable female characters in this context, but I’m afraid the best Six can do is achieve a kind of high-class soap opera. ... When the show travels outside of America, it’s still full of macho dialogue that can be wearisome--“We’re gonna fix this because that’s what we do; we’re gonna bring Rip home!”--but it has a blend of action and moral inquisitiveness that makes the show intriguing.

This production seems to strive for a cross between Gossip Girl and Downton Abbey, and is thus an amusing trifle. ... Coleman is very good at portraying both sides of the Victoria depicted here: nervous adolescent romantic, and intelligent, wily influencer of government policy.

Funny and suspenseful, Sneaky Pete is an excellent idea for this weekend’s streaming TV viewing.

How much you enjoy these Series of Unfortunate Events depends on your appetite for the TV equivalent of consuming bowlsful of meringue--there’s a lot of excessively rich, fluffy, eggy humor here. The show is, over the long haul of near-hour-long episodes, rather too precious and campy for my taste, but I can certainly imagine a large audience for such well-written joking.

It really depends on how drawn in you are by the Vatican intrigue crafted by show creator Paolo Sorrentino, and how beguiled you are by Jude Law’s performance.

The first two episodes set up enough surprises and double-crosses to suggest a promising new season.