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.

[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.

Beautiful and puzzling, funny and exciting.

Humans is a clever piece of work.

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.

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.

The two tones--Sabrina behaving as though she’s caught in a teen soap opera; the aunts dithering animatedly--are frequently jarring.

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.

A fairly straightforward affair, rejecting subtlety and implication in favor of escape attempts and some body-piercing-by-sword. The hour opted to touch all the Westeros bases, galloping from subplot to subplot in an edition that doubled as a recap of last season.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At its best, Battle Creek reaches for the witty whimsy of another out-of-the-way-location CBS series such as Northern Exposure. But most of the time, Battle Creek just seems like an only slightly jauntier police procedural than the ones that overrun network TV.

London Spy proceeds at a languid pace that will either draw you in, entranced, or repel you with tedium. I was drawn in, yet not quite entranced, but the series gets both better (it always helps anything when Charlotte Rampling shows up) and more flawed as it proceeds.

China Girl takes a few plot twists to keep the murder mystery going, but it becomes obscured by the constant insults and injuries suffered by Robin. ... Moss gives a terrific performance, but it’s not enough to keep this Top of the Lake afloat.

All in all, there was a lot of talent laboring heroically in The Wiz Live! to enliven material that just didn’t come to life very often.

The return of Will & Grace on Thursday after an absence of 11 years is pretty much a success. If you liked it before, you’ll probably be pleased with the new episodes, which are well-executed and excellently performed.

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.

Carefully crafted and respectful of its source material.

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.

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.

The effect of the repetitive, lurchingly-paced first couple of episodes is to frequently reduce the previously excellent performances of Sheen and Caplan to a collection of tics.

The latest version of The Tick is very enjoyable; it’s smart and visually imaginative.

After two hours of Agent Carter this week, you're left with lots of mumbo-jumbo that doesn't add up to much more than an excuse for Peggy Carter to strain her nylons while jumping off moving cars.

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.

The three best Mirrors are “ArkAngel,” “Hang the DJ,” and “Metalhead.”

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

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.

[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.

The degree to which the show succeeds will probably rest on how many viewers tune in and like what they see in Hall’s brash, energetic performance.

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.

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?

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

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

The main subplots of Bosch gather power as they proceed.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The show is very smart.

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 Sinner is at once intriguing and frustrating.

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

Scorsese and Winter and a whole host of talented episode writers and directors including Jonathan Tropper (Banshee), S. J. Clarkson, Debora Cahn, and Adam Rapp labor mightily to bend you to the will of Richie Finestra--to see and hear the music the way he does, as full of endless innovation and possibility--but too often, Vinyl traps you in a familiar cycle of sex and drugs and rock & roll.

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

Once the opening hour catches us up on Jessica’s past and sets the stage for the new season, there are some good things here. We see more of the friendship between Jessica and Trish, and that’s good because female pals are still a TV rarity. ... The best moments of the new season are any scene that features the wonderful Janet McTeer as a mysterious new character.

The show is beautifully shot and well-directed, and the premiere’s opening scene with Jacob is truly jolting. But the series suffers from the context surrounding it: The netherworld is all over TV, in A&E’s just-canceled Damien, on Fox’s Lucifer, and the fall-TV remake of The Exorcist. As a result, Outcast feels overly familiar, something it shakes only in a subplot involving Kyle’s sister, played very well by Wrenn Schmidt (Boardwalk Empire), who has a haunted past of her own.

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.

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.

The show is no masterpiece, despite the PBS rubric it falls under, but it’s dozy fun, and a nice respite from so much of the creepy, “edgy” crime dramas that continue to pop up on network TV like scary clowns.

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.

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

The Path is a winding one--the show has pacing problems, which is to say, it’s awfully slow in many spots. The acting is very good, but too much of the series forces the performers to play one note: grave concern or worry.

There are sufficient twists in the new episodes that keep the action moving while preventing me from revealing too much. The pace is swift, the tension runs high--except, perhaps, for the Alison clone, whose suburban soccer mom is used most frequently for comic relief.

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

The writing is uneven.... But then there are numerous other fine touches.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

The series hits the ground running, letting the viewer fill in the narrative gaps. In other words, Empire is that rare nighttime soap opera that credits its audience with understanding without a lot of tiresome explanation, and whose purpose is to entertain, to surprise, and to confuse.

It gets better with each episode--and it’s not as though Wednesday night’s premiere isn’t very funny.

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

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

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.

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

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 content tends to be heavy on example and light on analysis and interpretation. The show could stand to slow down a bit on the ways--as the often too clever for its own good narration says--“we upload our very selves to the place we call the cloud,” and ponder the implications of all this internet interaction.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

[Chip's mother] is played with Baskets’ one true flash of inspiration by Louie Anderson. Anderson inhabits Christine Baskets with a wonderful, tart delicacy.... Chip Baskets is most often a selfish creep. It’s a brave move for a performer to make, and congratulations to Galifianakis for his commitment. Just don’t ask me to keep watching him in this role.

It’s an excellent comedy idea in theory, linking those two TV exercises in wealth-porn and decadent excess. Alas, Another Period isn’t funny enough to sustain its premise.

The series would certainly benefit from some editorial tightening--reducing its number of episodes to five or six would have made it considerably more exciting. As its stands, Seven Seconds is admirably acted, but it’s a slow grind.

It is uneven in the extreme. ... With this series and Netflix’s Black Mirror, the sci-fi anthology series is now back as a revitalized genre.

Odd Mom Out is uneven but ultimately likable, and Kargman and Buckley have a nice chemistry as husband and wife.

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.

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

I admire the series without being very engaged by it, but I can certainly see why you might get more hooked on it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Corden did a terrific job of showcasing all his talents, including singing a ballad at the end of this first night. He’s well on his way to being a nightly crowd-pleaser whom you may be talking about the next day.

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.

Mulder and Scully remain fixed in their philosophical positions and reactions to various wild events, but Anderson and Duchovny have become more subtle performers who are using the fact of their middle-aging as an opportunity to present themselves as more sly, more self-aware, yet eminently comfortable with each other and appreciative of each other’s deepening skills. I wish I could say the same for Carter’s mythology, but, alas, the paranoid conspiracies that were so absorbing, the mythology that was once so satisfying to ruminate upon, has started to seem like dry, barren ground to be trod across, again and again, out of a sense of weary duty.

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.

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.

It’s fitfully interesting to see Zellner mount her new defense, but the fact that both Avery and Dassey are still in prison doesn’t exactly make you want to race through the series to witness a triumphant conclusion.

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.