Much of the soap-opera storytelling apparatus that frequently made the series a guilty pleasure rather than a pure pleasure--has been jettisoned. In its place is a more leisurely pace and, at its best, a soulfulness that Nashville has long struggled to achieve.

We soon begin to see the method behind this show’s storytelling: If there’s a way to pump more pretentious gas into the story, Emerald City will find it.

It’s warm, it’s goodhearted, it sends out positive messages. What it isn’t is funny.

The problem with Schwarzenegger is that, unlike Trump, there’s no relish in his malice, no delusion in his self-importance. Trump was fun to watch because he took his own fame and authority seriously at a time when he could be dismissed as a pufferfish in a three-piece suit. Schwarzenegger tries for some of that bluffness--reaching for a thick cigar after “terminating” someone--but it comes off a little desperate.

It’s just an okay sitcom with a frequently charming performance by Olson, which may be enough for a while, wedged in between New Girl and Bones. But it also seems like the kind of project that could leave Olson feeling trapped.

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.

I have to give Marling and Batmanglij credit: I don’t usually have much patience for humorless, convoluted hooey like this, but their narrative pacing, and some of the performances ... are enthusiastically committed and effective.

It lacks any character as vital and vivid as Taraji P. Henson’s Cookie. The dialogue is overwrought, and frequently tells us the very things we’re seeing on screen. The trio of aspiring stars are plucky, but they’re not very interesting, and neither is the music they sing.

When Shut Eye focuses on the often separate-but-equal storylines of Linda and Charlie, it’s intriguing; the more it peels off into a tedious storyline about their son’s high school life or the illegal doings of Rossellini’s gangster empire or the strong-arm tactics of the gangster (you’ll wince at a death-by-boiling-oil in a doughnut shop), the more diffuse the series becomes.

Scenes of cage-match violence are regularly inserted to break up the boring office scenes of people sitting across from each other at desks, jawboning about corporate strategies. The result makes the future seem like a more extreme version of the present, which, in turn, is simply depressing.

Toward the end of the premiere, Remini is shown saying she’s hearing the same stories “over and over”--that the abuse and harassment former members are subjected to have similar traits. Unfortunately, that’s not much of an incentive to keep watching her series, which even during the first hour becomes a little repetitive. Nevertheless, Remini comes across as a sincere crusader.

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.

Overall, the pacing of the new Anne is rather slow, but not so much that it ruins the underlying heartfelt emotions that make just about every variation on Anne of Green Gables irresistible.

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.

A tremendously moving documentary.

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.

Some of the best aspects of A Year In The Life are the ways the four episodes continue, and deepen, the show’s richest themes.

In general, the further Shooter strays from Phillippe’s character, the weaker the show becomes.

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.

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.

[A] brutally crude dramatization of the crime and its aftermath.

Morgan and director-producer Stephen Daldry make the show engrossing both as history and as a drama about family ties.

As good as Anderson is throughout, her Stella suffers from a Season 3 lack of development--we learn nothing about her in this new season that we did not know from the previous two (apart from a couple of small autobiographical details dropped in the final hour). And some characters who had been important to the series--I’m thinking particularly of John Lynch’s cop Burns--recede or fall away in disappointing ways.

A sub-Mad Men piece, filled with trite characters and anachronistic dialogue.

I found Bell to be one of the least likable protagonists in a prime time series in a while, which is really saying something in a season that has given us Notorious and Bull. ... Mulroney, not one of the liveliest of TV leading men, doesn’t just bring gravity to his role, he weighs it down with cement blocks.

It’s aimed at millennials yet making fun of them constantly, and aimed at McHale fans while putting the star in his least-flattering light.

None of these characters is particularly happy or remotely satisfied with his or her station in life, and in a lesser show, they’d be depressing downers. But thanks to the writing of show creator Ray McKinnon, these are people who strike you as folks you know, or whom you may be yourself.

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

The show is well-staged; it’s just that there’s not much of a show.

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.

All in all, it’s a season of Black Mirror you’ll enjoy if you like your sci-fi/fantasy/horror laced heavily with social commentary. Me, I wish the messages were ladled on with a lighter hand.

There isn’t much to laugh at in this production, which has taken its arch irony and presented it with an earnestness that works against the nature of the material.

At its best, the TV show has a bit of a Hitchcock feel (the doomed romance of Vertigo) and an even stronger pull toward Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock homage Obsession (1976). At its weakest, Chance is melodramatic.

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.

As Eyewitness proceeds, there are some credibility-stretching coincidences and relationships that are revealed that you might find difficult to accept without rolling your eyes--some of the plot strands tie together rather too neatly. But Nicholson is terrific, and if you’re in the mood for a bleak mystery in the same general area of The Killing or Top of the Lake, Eyewitness is worth a look.

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

Miranda sings badly with great gusto; she is witheringly sarcastic to people even though we know she has misunderstood what they’ve said. It’s a very impressive, thought-through presentation by Ballinger. I admire it, but I also didn’t find it funny.

The problem with Water is that it keeps promising revelations that are constantly withheld, as though we might not keep watching if the show tipped its hand about what all this dream investigation is really about.

Goliath, so far, never comes within spitting distance of any of those productions. It’s David E. Kelley doing variations on his earlier shows, with some very good actors trying to make it fresh.

The jokes are difficult to locate.

Insecure is a show with great confidence--Rae immediately sweeps you up and carries you along on her journey of false starts, little triumphs, and big disappointments.

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.

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

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

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

Timeless works in a lot of timely commentary via the characters of Rufus and Lucy, who in earlier eras, as a black man and woman, are not treated well. Having made such sociopolitical points, the series is also free to become a potboiler adventure, with a lot of frantic searches for both historical figures who need protecting, and for Flynn, who’s out to cause mayhem.

Hopkins and Wright are excellent, as is Ed Harris as a guest who’s grown so comfortable in his role-playing of the Gunslinger that he says he rarely leaves Westworld. Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton--playing an innocent farm girl and a jaded brothel madam, respectively--do very well in the context of Westworld’s inherently problematic sexual element. ... But much of the necessary scene-setting--of happy guests arriving and discovering the joys of shooting and screwing to their hearts’ content--becomes repetitive quickly.

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.

Getting any mileage out of Miley and her Bernardine Dohrn-with-a-husky-voice character proves unrewarding. Most of Crisis is spent listening to Sidney and Kay dither about hearing aids, Freudian analyses, and one-liners that sound dusted off from Allen’s decades-old standup act.

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.

Back and as impressively irritating as ever.

It’s fun but tedious.

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

Featuring unconvincing dialogue. ... Notorious is otherwise instantly forgettable as soon as each scene is completed.

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

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.

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.

Speechless, created by Scott Silveri, wants to avoids mawkishness and pity so much, it goes way overboard in the other direction, making the audience feel like the cop who declines to chase after Driver when she’s speeding: he finds her so hostile and obnoxious, he says it’s just not worth confronting her.

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.

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.

If Making a Murderer, The Jinx, and the first season of the Serial podcast heralded a new era of true-crime stories, this one is tediously told.

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.

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.

Right now, the new series looks both promising (especially good this night: Angela Bassett and Adina Porter sharing the same role as Matt’s sister, a police detective clinging to new sobriety) and limiting: How many times can Roanoke slam a door and make us jump?

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.

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.

Son of Zorn has the feeling of a show that wants to be edgier than it is (which may be one reason creators Reed Agnew and Eli Jorne stepped away from the project once production was underway).

Notaro keeps the show moving along with a lot of low-key funny observations while always allowing for moments of seriousness and even sadness to enter into the mix.

Quarry is a startlingly good, absorbing new show to sink down into, deeply.

Adlon’s performance is so good, you get--and want--her in nearly every scene, just to see how she’s going to react: to this kid’s temper tantrum, to that rude producer’s snarky comment. It’s a star vehicle that feels like it’s introducing you to an entire family--and an entire universe you want to inhabit.

Nick, Ronald and Izzy--she’s the real brains behind GenCoin, although she’s poor and working out of her parents’ garage--are a highly unlikely collaborative trio. I didn’t buy their unity for a second.

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.

Atlanta, the new half-hour FX series from Donald Glover (Community), is satisfying and exciting on every level.

Your engagement with Narcos is going to depend on how much you can become concerned about Escobar and his fate, how much you can look past the series’ easy melodrama to savor its more subtle and moving moments of political intrigue, and the small, vivid subplots about the Escobar gang’s individual lives.

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

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.

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.

Halt and Catch Fire doesn’t seem to trust that the viewer will know what it’s talking about.

George, Luhrmann, and the show’s many collaborators have given us a grand, sometimes overwrought, precise show that captures a specific time in pop history better than it’s ever been shown on television.

If I rarely find Horseman more than mildly amusing, I certainly recognize the careful craft behind it, as well as the excellent vocal performances by regulars including Amy Sedaris, Alison Brie, Paul F. Thompkins, and Aaron Paul.

Things spends too much repetitious time trying to convince us that Mike, Dustin, and Lucas are cute kids, and the show’s sense of foreshadowing when it comes to revealing something that’s supposed to scare the daylights out of us becomes an exercise in tedium.

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

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.

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.

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

Michael Strahan has clearly studied his Dick Clark tapes--he’s smooth and relaxing to watch, very good at reminding players of the no-hand-gesture rules and in settling the nerves of any rattled contestant.

A completely engrossing murder mystery, courtroom drama, and family saga.

The problem with the series isn’t the casting or its philosophical underpinnings, though--its chief flaw remains one of pacing. Long scenes of dialogue and debate become wearisome.

Marcella starts off well, but pretty soon its pace is impeded by a number of subplots and the abrupt introductions of characters whose role in the overall plot is either unclear or irrelevant. The series has a familiar enough cop-show structure, so if you like Friel’s performance, you’ll be carried pretty far along into the season.

The footage here is truly extraordinary and gorgeous, and, for the most part, artfully edited.

SDRR places itself in the awkward position of having created--when you fold in John Corbett’s Flash--some likable characters (well, maybe not Johnny, but that’s the way Leary likes it; he’s a preening antihero to the end) who remain in search of the right vehicle to take them to another level of excellence.

After watching a mere two episodes, I felt as though I’d squandered an entire summer watching Dead of Summer, a supernatural/horror/YA drama/soap opera, which starts moldering on Freeform Tuesday night.

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

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.

It’s better than Vinyl--Crowe has a better, fresher idea in following the earnest people behind the scenes rather than the exploited stars and venal executives. But it still doesn’t feel like a satisfying hit.

His interview style is an effective one--opinionated without being overbearing, with just enough smugness to give some of his questions a provocative edge.

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.