Aquarius and show creator McNamara take a daring leap and presume that Manson saw Wilson as a judgmental father-figure, and that notion that complicated their relationship. It’s just one example of the psychologically complex show McNamara continues to build with Aquarius.

This first episode is such accomplished, vigorous fun, I highly recommend that you give it a look. I also guarantee you’ll wince a few times at what Nick goes through, and you’ll be glad he’s now got a chipper Happy in his life.

The infernally clever, multiple-Emmy'd producer Bertram van Munster has found a way to make even a dating-game theme interesting.

It’s a show that’s structured like a sitcom but frequently works like a low-stakes drama that just gets more emotionally expensive. After you’ve watched all 10, Love stays with you like a memory you can’t--or don’t want to--shake.

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.

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

The exhilarating thing about Difficult People is that it consists of aggressive insult humor that’s rooted in a friendship that’s all heart.

The pleasant surprise is that this new Exorcist, as conceived by writer Jeremy Slater, is both well-acted and at times quite disturbing.

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

The third season, based on the four episodes I’ve watched, is strong and exciting and moves the narrative along at an invigorating pace.

If Daniels, Strong, and showrunner Ilene Chaiken are feeling pressure to maintain the show’s massive-hit status, it doesn’t show in the enjoyably scattered yet propulsive season premiere.

Familiar faces like Beau Bridges, Fringe’s Michael Cerveris, and Loudon Wainwright III pop up, intriguingly. All of them give themselves over to Soderbergh, who stages the action with an efficiency that is itself frequently beautiful to behold--he makes a murky murder mystery ring with dramatic clarity.

Lively, action-packed, and occasionally quite funny.

The show is very smart.

The new season pushes Adam Driver’s Adam and Jemima Kirke’s Jessa into a fraught relationship from which no good (for them) can come, but is interesting to watch--such a clash of acting styles those two project! And Girls continues its valiant attempt to integrate Zosia Mamet’s Shoshanna into the group in a believable manner. It’s doing this through off-beat ways that may actually end up working.

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.

Playing House is a cheerfully unhip show made by people who are very hip to the sharp edges of comedy.

It’s got the sunny colors and optimistic energy of The Flash, a bright streak of feminism coursing through its storyline, and charming, star-making performance by Melissa Benoist as Kara Jor-El, aka Kara Danvers, aka Supergirl.

The filmmakers grant Durst his humanity, allowing us to see the charm, and occasional flashes of humor, that animate the man when he sometimes emerges from the fog of good fortune. In the two episodes I’ve seen, The Jinx makes good, sparing use of dramatizing some of the moments Durst describes.

American Crime does a good job of using the police-procedural framework to give viewers a structure that’s familiar and compelling. But Ridley makes sure that that structure is also capacious enough to let the actors stretch out, and, at least over the course of the four episodes made available to critics, this yields at least two superb performances.

Cranston carries the movie past its occasional biopic clichés and leaves you feeling appropriately ambivalent about Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Humans is a clever piece of work.

Irritating and fascinating, The Slap is unlike anything else on network TV.

Falk has made us care about the characters in a way that allows them to behave badly, even cruelly, without having the audience lose sympathy for them. You watch this hour premiere and wait eagerly to see what the heck is going to happen to Jimmy and Getchen next week.

If Bee can sustain the tone she presented in this premiere episode, Full Frontal is going to be an exhilarating pleasure.

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.

F Is For Family is an engaging portrait of a suburban family in the 1970s.

There is so much quick-fire dialogue and subtle physical comedy in Togetherness, the four stars sometimes seem like a full-functioning comedy machine.

The pilot episode is pretty much a non-stop pleasure, packed with funny scenes and big, billowy musical numbers.

There is, periodically, a kind of daringly reckless, Lucille Ball-like slapstick physicality that Farmiga brings to the role, and it contributes a welcome lightness to the show’s often grim proceedings. By contrast, Highmore’s exceedingly subtle, adroit work is slowly filling in the portrait of psycho-Norman at a perfect pace for a weekly television series.

Against the odds, Jane the Virgin has managed to sustain the premise that began the show--a variation on a telenovela for The CW network--with an admirable degree of inventiveness. Satire on television just isn’t supposed to last this long, let alone continue to be so resourceful and clever.

Every one of the three episodes made available for review hums along at a swift pace, dropping revelations right and left--no political pun intended.

This frequently jaw-dropping documentary by director Alex Gibney, drawn largely from the book of the same name by Lawrence Wright, demonstrates vividly how a cult can spread among people searching for something greater in their lives, some advantage over others, some grand answer.... At times threatens to get swallowed up in the loony-land it wants to analyze, it helps a great deal to have regular check-ins with Wright.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is super-clever, features a winning performance by The Office’s Ellie Kemper, and moves like a well-oiled joke machine.

Its narrative moves very slowly in the three episodes made available to critics, with a third-episode revelation that anyone who’s seen a thriller before will know is coming way before it registers with the folks on-screen. The show has atmosphere aplenty--that’s one excellent quality it shares with Mickle and Damici’s Cold In July; Hap and Leonard could use more of that film’s tightly-coiled suspense.

[Davies and director Tom Harper] reduce, expand, or toss out numerous plot lines and characters, all in the service of heavy-breathing romance and big-spectacle battle scenes in a kind of young-adult-novel depiction of Russian families caught up in 19th-century tumult.... Old pros such as Jim Broadbent, Stephen Rea, and Brian Cox are around to lend the soap opera proceedings some gravity.

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 more scenes there are between Rabe’s agent Claire Bennigan and her new partner, Jessup Rollins (Revolution’s Derek Webster), the better the show is.... It’s best whenever the Drill-chatting kids are onscreen, with young Kylie Rogers particularly skilled at being unnerving.

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.

The series is uneven, but in an intriguing way--it keeps you wanting to see more.

There are times when Luke Cage strains at the confinement of the genres it uses, when its superhero, gangster, and crime fiction subplots seem too familiar, too flimsy, to contain all the drama Coker and his writers want to pour into this show.

The final episode contains clues and answers to mysteries that, when the season ends and you think about it, could easily have been introduced in the first or second episode without any diminishment of suspense--indeed, would probably have resulted in a pleasing increase in suspense. As a languid mood piece, Bloodline is one pleasantly decadent binge. And as I said, Chandler and Cardellini are particularly effective.

It can often be trite and repetitive. But triteness and repetition characterizes a lot of everyday life, and the debut does an excellent job of giving us a portrait of Ben as a Midwestern teenager whose natural adolescent self-consiousness has been increased to near-paralysis as he comes to terms with his father’s new life.

It’s got the makings of a cult following, if not a terribly long run in this country.

The new Roseanne sometimes feels a little stiff--as though it hasn’t quite settled on its tone yet. ... There are numerous laughs in these new episodes (I’ve seen three of them), and Metcalf and Gilbert are very effective in all their scenes. (I’m reserving judgment on Goodman, who thus far seems to be reacquainting himself with the great performances he used to give regularly, as though he feels he still has to work out some of the kinks.)

I’m not completely sold on The Last Man On Earth as an ongoing enterprise, and I wonder how long audiences are going to stick with it. At the same time, I admire Last Man’s spirit of adventurousness, and hope the show can make good on what is a far bigger conceptual challenge than most sitcoms ever attempt.

I can’t say that there are many funny jokes in Schitt’s Creek, but the show is never less than watchable, thanks in particular to Levy Sr. (playing, more or less, the show’s straight-man) and O’Hara (superb as a former soap-star villain and a real-life diva).

Heavy on atmosphere and light on content, Edward Burns’ Public Morals is an intriguing new TNT series about vice cops in the 1960s.... Nevertheless, if you make it past the rather pro forma pilot that spends the hour introducing characters, there’s an enjoyable crime saga being developed in Public Morals that suggests patience will be rewarded.

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

In general, Noah came across polished and so smiley, he seemed nearly jubilant.

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

On Italian television, a second, equally popular season of Gomorrah has aired. Clearly there is meat on these bones that people enjoy picking at. Your appetite for it, however, may vary.

That it took eight episodes to get there [Gyllenhaal’s character finally throws off her Candy image to become Eileen, the director of porn scenes from a woman’s point of view] suggests two things: that The Deuce is rather muddled in its sense of purpose, and that this show really deserves a second season, to show us whether the series can take Eileen and her sisterhood into a more complex realm.

The material about being a black American is Tamborine’s gold mine, which is probably why it leads off the special, to get you hooked. To be sure, it’s heavy-duty stuff. ... When he starts to discuss the divorce, the roaring energy of his performance ebbs and slows.

Falco is good, but Josh Charles is doing the stuff that made me smile. Of course, smiling is not something you’re supposed to be doing while watching a show about a double homicide, but the pleasures of familiar facts presented in a lively, engaging way will not be denied.

The stakes in this show are very low; so is the humor, sometimes delightfully so.

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.

The dialogue is occasionally overripe (“I’ve been ready my whole life”; “You do this for you!”) but for the most part modestly crisp.

Carefully crafted and respectful of its source material.

I’m not sure if Wayward Pines can sustain its mood and outlandish occurrences for the full length of its 10-episode season, but I guess I’m intrigued enough to keep track of what’s going on in that damp, puzzling little town.

Sasse and Anderson are pretty charming, and I’m curious to see if the show can sustain its premise into a second week.

Wednesday night’s pilot is more of a palette-cleanser than a full meal: It sets up the situation without having the time to see how everything will be digested.

The entire enterprise is sentimental and predictable, which goes without saying. What pulls it all together is what pulls together everything Dolly Parton touches: heartfelt emotion, un-ironic portrayals of modest sincerity (Nettles and Schroder are particularly effective), and a gift for turning treacle into musical gold.

The show is no out-of-the-box winner, but it has possibilities to become an intriguing nighttime soap with sparks of electricity.

[The movie] does drag at the beginning and the end. The middle material, however, dramatizing the assassination attempt and its aftermath, is engrossing.

As the series progresses, Loudermilk’s sobriety and his pessimistic attitude toward life are tested, making the character more three-dimensional. He and the show named after him start off interesting and get better as they proceed.

All in all, not a great episode, but a savage and a useful one.

Yes, of course Proof is regularly mawkish (the pilot has a subplot about a very cute little girl patient, who draws pictures of a grandfather she never knew existed) and it’s cluttered with clichés such as “People believe what they want to believe.” But on its own terms--which is as a comforting medical-supernatural drama with a strong female lead designed to follow TNT’s Rizzoli & isles--Proof proves its modest worth.

It looks as though Kruger and Shapiro have a handle on how to make Extant more engaging, and Berry’s performance certainly seems liberated by the new changes.

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.

Cuse and Tucker (the latter also worked on True Blood) do a good job of translating the deeply unsettling miracle at the heart of this show.

One reason the new Match Game was so much fun was that it remained essentially true to the original.

Likable but not especially funny.

There’s not much verbal wit in Trollhunters--the jokes are pitched to a kid audience that has probably heard better ones in DreamWorks feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon and Shrek. But it looks terrific, with sleek animation that moves back and forth between human and troll worlds with fluid skill.

Each individual hour of The Affair holds your attention, and perhaps it’s best to just keep watching before deciding whether the overarching narrative is cohering in a satisfying way.

Kelli Garner manages to bring a freshness to her interpretation of Monroe that never feels like caricature.

It remains to be seen where Runaways will go when the show really establishes what the powers of these teen heroes are--in these early episodes, it’s all the producers can do to simply sketch in the personalities of what is, when you add in the parents, a very large main cast. Right now, there’s a nice tension here between the ways adolescents often tend to isolate versus the ways they’re forced to come together as a team.

[Billy Eichner and Julie Klausner's] collision in this sitcom they’ve created for themselves is a black mushroom cloud that some viewers are going to find too strong to take.... Klausner and Eichner are such intelligent performers in every medium they’ve chosen, you have to root for the success of Difficult People. And I say that while still not entirely convinced that this is the best vehicle for those talents.

Legends of Chamberlain Heights does have an engaging visual palette, a good soundtrack from music supervisor Erykah Badu, and enough cleverness beneath the dirty jokes to make it worth keeping tabs on.

Quantico is slick enough, and well-enough cast, to probably keep a good-sized audience watching.

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.

Dave is late-period-Dave, wry, amused, and relatively relaxed. Here, Obama is very much the same. ... It’s not a great interview, but it’s a cozy one. The conversation has the easy intimacy that can occur when two famous, successful men have reached points in their lives when they can be slightly less guarded.

I like Donovan best when it’s more of a crime show, but I’ll take this version for the intermittent rewards it yields regularly.

Letty may be a hot mess, but she’s an essentially decent person--why, she even listens to self-help tapes to try and psych herself into leading a better life. But if you let the show carry you along--especially into the strong second episode, directed by Carl Franklin--you may find yourself rooting for these antiheroes.

[The trip to Israel] As a change-up intended to place the family in a new, revelatory context, it doesn’t quite work: The Pfeffermans just get on a tour bus and kvetch about the same stuff.

It makes for a funny pilot, but the exact quality that made Parks and Recreation such a novel, engrossing series--its exploration of goodness and decency; its rejection of cynicism--is what weighs down The Good Place somewhat. Its punchlines, after a while, seem based on the same set-up: Eleanor bad, Good Place good.

It’s a great-looking show, and one that doles out its drama at a stately pace that is unusual at a time when Shonda Rhimes and Lee Daniels have amped up the pace of family-strife storytelling in shows such as Scandal and Empire.

He’s got some work to do in the pacing of the table discussions, but Wilmore’s sensibility is immediately relatable: common sense enlivened by a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo.

As always, this episode of Mad Men had entertaining moments.... Weiner wants you to realize that, over time, a wiseguy like Roger inevitably becomes insufferable. The problem is, removing such fun from Mad Men only makes the overall experience of watching Mad Men more joyless.

Get Shorty is an intriguing, curious new show. ... Get Shorty is a little wobbly in the quality of the writing.

The Detour has already been renewed for a second season, so the show has time to develop into something more interestingly amusing.

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.

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.

What keeps the first episode from slipping into absurdity is the commitment to action displayed by star Alexander and creators Martin Gero and Greg Berlanti.... Blindspot could be a good show--nothing revolutionary, but a fun escapade in the weeks ahead.

W/ Bob & David is, pretty much, an of-its-time sketch show following the same format as Mr. Show--one sketch leads into the next, in a funny, often tenuous, manner.

Show creators Chris Brancato, Carlo Bernard, and Doug Miro want to tell two parallel tales: The DEA investigation and hunt for Escobar, and Escobar’s point of view in his ever-increasing ambition, power, and ruthlessness. Narcos is superb at delineating the latter: You really get an understanding of how a poor, not especially charismatic man rose from the rabble to become one of the richest, most feared men in the world.... In contrast to this, the efforts of Murphy and Pena to defeat Escobar are, of necessity, more hit-or-miss.

There are frequently times when the production comes across like an episode of late-period 7th Heaven. But at its best, Recovery Road does a good job of capturing the complex web of both emotions and actions that are taken in the journey to sobriety suggested by the show title.