The bulk of Gunpowder is a reasonably exciting costume drama combining history and suspense, with fine performances by Sherlock’s Mark Gatiss as the King’s vindictive secretary of state and Peter Mullan (Top of the Lake, Ozark) as Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest sympathetic to Catesby’s efforts.

At its best, the show does a good job of portraying each slave as an individual with his or her own strengths and flaws, while, on the other side, the whites are also placed in the social context of the times.... There are some jarring touches in Underground. One of them is good: the use of contemporary music by artists such as Kanye West to underscore bristling discontent. But another contemporary trope occasionally takes a viewer out of the drama, as when one character or another sometimes uses phrases that no 19th-century person would have uttered.

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.

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.

I could moan about how the History Channel is betraying scholarship, but you really ought not to turn to TV for history lessons anyway. What you get with Sons of Liberty is rowdy fun that ends with us Americans overthrowing foreign oppression.

The damn thing is irritating, intelligent, well-acted, infuriating, self-righteous, curious, inadvertently funny, and pretentious, and Holly Hunter is in it. ... So why is Here and Now so watchable? Because the performances are terrific, and Ball, for all his miserablism, knows how to write scenes that exert an emotional pull. Hunter and Robbins are superb as the parents, and in the four episodes I watched, Lee’s Duc and Zovatto’s Ramon were standout players.

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.

The plots of Sense8 dovetail and separate with a fluidity that’s a characteristic of good storytelling and editing. Some of the subplots are more interesting than others.

Any show that refers to the bad guy as “the worst man in the world” may not be terribly subtle, but the brisk pacing and Hiddleston’s regular displays of sly spy trickery and vigorous punches to the soft guts of decadent baddies will really get a viewer’s pulse quickening.

If you’re willing to go along with the show’s carefully conceived aimlessness, it has the pull of a book of inter-connected short stories.

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?

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.

If Time Traveling Bong isn’t as laugh-out-loud funny as Broad City, it has its own, more whimsical and laid-back charms. It’s a nice way to end a few evenings, by sitting back and watching two likable people light up for adventure.

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.

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.

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.

Only Shannon’s Gary, as a calm-voiced negotiator, seems sensible or particularly intelligent. When you add in Kitsch’s charismatic performance, Waco comes out an oddity: A show that’s more or less on the side of a violent, exploitative cult.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

House of Cards has opted to diminish its central figure to allow others to emerge, even if that is done strategically, in the hope of consolidating his personal power. Whether that’s a winning strategy remains to be seen when all of the episodes are available to be binged.

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

It’s like an extremely well-acted power-point presentation on what to do, and what not to do, when a sexual assault occurs.

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.

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.

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.

A Christmas Story Live! was solid, but it lacked the kind of emotional resonance that makes people want to see the movie over and over.

Ill Behaviour has some thoughtful things to say about right-to-life issues and alcoholism, and if you can buy into the kidnapping-to-save-his-life development, you might stick around for the series’ full six episodes.

Sucks! doesn’t hit the highs of a Netflix comedy such as BoJack Horseman, neither does it take the emotional risks of Netflix’s sorely underrated Love, which begins its final season on March 9. Sucks! has charm and will probably do what it exists to do in a context such as Netflix, which is to provide you with an easy, snackable show that can be binged without making you think too much about what you’re watching.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

There are definitely elements of hocus-pocus and holy cow in Castle Rock, as well as scenes of nicely disturbing violence. In other words, just what you both expect and want from a King-based product. What there isn’t, alas, is a lot of forward momentum. The storytelling is pretty logy, taking a long time to make a few points. ... The show has a strong cast. Spacek is superb as Henry’s stepmom. ... Handsomely gloomy, 10-episode project.

Hernandez is fine as Magnum: He pulls off the character’s essential charm as a man of action who’d prefer to come across as a good-natured beach bum. Assiduous fans of the original will note other careful details carried over here. ... The new Magnum P.I. is perfectly fine, but in an era when so much television is first-rate, is “perfectly fine” enough to keep a show on the air?

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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

If I’ve left the impression that Happyish isn’t a laugh-fest, I’ve done my job. But the show is not without its pleasures. As I said, Coogan and Hahn have good chemistry, and there are some genuinely funny moments (none of which I can recall now). Ellen Barkin is exceedingly welcome any time she pops up briefly as Thom’s profane pal.

If you love Orange Is The New Black, you’re going to be pleased with the way the new season unfolds. If you’re more skeptical of its ongoing strength, you may feel, as I did, that some of the show’s irritating habits have increased.

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.

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.

Throughout everything, Lopez gives a solid performance — perhaps the best dramatic work she’s done since her first-rate film, Out of Sight (1998). Liotta is excellent as well.... But Shades of Blue’s biggeset problem is this: beyond Lopez and Liotta, the rest of the cops are bland clichés (de Matteo’s marital-woes subplot is particularly trite), and as the series proceeds, Harlee’s efforts to keep her FBI-informant status a secret from her co-workers becomes very strained.

The premiere episode of Why? With Hannibal Buress on Wednesday night was an amiable half-hour.... The Schumer segment had a few laughs; the others were pretty flat.

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

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.

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 result could easily have been a messy botch, but Scream is a little better than that.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Casual proceeds from a place of diffidence, of setting up the mildest of jokes and seeing how softly the show can make them land.

If you’re in the market for a nighttime soap with beautiful people behaving badly, Dynasty--an update of the 1980s camp classic--will serve your needs. But as cleverly reimagined as the original has been by producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage (both vets of The O.C. and Gossip Girl), I couldn’t escape the feeling that the Kardashians and the Real Housewives franchise has made a Dynasty reboot irrelevant.

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.

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.

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.

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

The structure of most OITNB episodes--in which one character is brought to the fore and we see flashbacks to that person’s past history, details about how that woman or man was shaped and became the person she or he is--has by now, in the new season, become predictable, either comfortingly or tediously so, depending on your degree of engagement with the series.... It’s all pretty pleasant, even if the jokes are often corny.

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.

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.

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

The first night of Madoff is both entertaining and instructive.... But the first night ends on a breathless cliffhanger, and Thursday’s concluding night resolves that cliffhanger in a way that made me feel cheated of drama. And the TV movie only proceeds to slide further.

The Sinner is at once intriguing and frustrating.

Animals is intriguing, and if you’re in the right mood, its leisurely pace and slacker rhythms can pull you in for a while.

Brewster classes up the proceedings considerably with comic timing the rest of the cast ought to study.... Grandfathered doesn’t have too many solid punchlines--it gets by on charm, which Stamos possesses in abundance.

The tone of the show veers back and forth between comedy and suspense. The name that pops out in the credits is Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files, The Man in the High Castle), who’s listed as co-creator and co-writer on every episode. There’s little of Spotnitz’s talent for dramatizing tension here. ... Indian Detective plays out like a tidy little PBS Sunday-night cozy-mystery show.

Fresh Off The Boat, when it has flashes of energy and well-written jokes, easily transcends ethnic stereotypes, but it’s these sitcom stereotypes that are the ones the show needs to defeat if it wants to be both long-running and distinctive.

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.

Well-acted and ponderously paced, The Haunting of Hill House would have benefited from less straining for the artistic and more of a desire to jolt its viewers.

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.

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

The tropical backdrop looks great--it’s like watching an episode of Survivor with a bunch of hyped-up macho actors (in other words, exactly like an episode of Survivor, minus Jeff Probst). But you have to put up with a lot of macho bluster and silliness, with dialogue that sometimes shades over into Three Stooges territory. (“Why were you running?” “I was running because you were running!”) If your tolerance for tough-guy bravado with flashes of violence is high, you might enjoy running with these mad dogs.

The whole concept--fleshed out by producers Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg, and Marc Guggenheim--has the potential for amusement, especially in its mix of motivations.... [But] There are elements that weaken the show. The dialogue is stilted (“Grant me the permission to change the timeline just this once!”), the acting, with the exception of the fluid Garber and the amusingly tough slouching of Lotz, tends to be stiff

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

The new S.W.A.T. has become something other than a cops-versus-bad-guys drama. Now it’s an hour spent in awe of its star, Shemar Moore.

Tone is everything for a show like Good Girls--it needs a strong, sure narrative pulse. It needs its own variation on the comic-thriller, its own new take on successful serious/humorous TV shows like Nurse Jackie or Weeds or (they wish) Breaking Bad. Note that all those shows were on cable and you’ve got the reason Good Girls ultimately fails: As a network show, it can’t go far enough, deep enough, into these women’s lives to make us root for them with anything like intensity. Good Girls needs to break bad much more badly than it’s allowed to as part of NBC’s lineup.

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

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.

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 AHS is, alas, mostly an exercise in style. Its flimsy plot, at least this early in its game, is something left over from a bad Ross Macdonald novel.

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.

About four hours into this six-episode series I just wanted to know how it all turned out so that I could be free of these mostly-unpleasant people. That I stayed to the end is a measure of the Williams brothers’ skill as plot-creators, I guess, but it’s also not a huge recommendation.

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.

They [Duchovny and Anderson] slip back into their roles with a gratifying conviction, if not quite enough to make you forget their recent prominence in Californication or The Fall or Aquarius or Hannibal.... The new X-Files hour is fine for what it is, but it lacks the kick of minty-freshness, in favor of the musty tang of mythology.

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.

Chicago Justice is just Law & Order in a windbreaker.

The whole international-spy thing gets repetitive fast. Kat Foster is awfully appealing as her own sort of intelligence agent whose cover is that she’s Van Damme’s hairdresser--it’s easy to see why the action hero still pines for her. That on-again, off-again romance isn’t very sustaining, however. The show is likable--no more, no less.

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).

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.