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.

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.

Epps is deprived of the sort of good writing that would showcase his talent well.

BrainDead is, overall, a smartly put-together piece of work, but it lacks the sharp sting of political criticism it seems so ardently to want to burrow into your brain.

The problem with Animal Kingdom is that we’ve seen so many dark, gritty family noirs on basic and premium cable, much of the air of menace that hovers over the new show seems like musty air rechanneled from other sources. It also doesn’t help to center the show around J--the character is a blank-faced kid whose reactions are minimally interesting.

Superbly edited and paced, Made in America is one of the best rise-and-fall sagas you’ll ever see on TV.

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

UnREAL is as hard-boiled and adventuresome as any male-dominated, gritty, “dark” premium-cable show you’d care to throw an Emmy at. The performances by Zimmer and Appleby are amazingly nuanced and layered, especially for a show whose gimmick, Everlasting, insists upon the superficiality of women’s images of themselves.

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.

It turns out that having your teeth pulled is a better metaphor for what it’s like to watch Feed the Beast than anything to do with fine food.

After a mildly amusing opening taped piece featuring Tom Hanks as a duplicitous astronaut, the hour went downhill fast.

The new Roots excels in the naturalism of its performances to make the horror of slavery vividly painful--and the resistance to it uplifting--in a way that deepens the tale.

Sir resembles the Shakespeare character he’s playing, and that’s the chief flaw in Harwood’s play--a too-easy irony. But Harwood makes up for it with the crackling dialogue that pushes The Dresser along at a terrific pace.

I didn’t laugh very frequently watching Lady Dynamite, but I was never less than absorbed by it.

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.

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

Too much of the show consists of simmering, of waiting for things to happen--kind of like Fear The Walking Dead, come to think of it. Except Preacher is prettier to look at (it’s very well art-directed), and it’s more dry and dusty.

Handler has said she wanted to move away from the jokes she used to make on E!’s Chelsea Lately about banal celebrity culture, and so on Chelsea she makes banal political jokes about politicians.

Grace and Frankie has become, therefore, a show about letting go of grudges, being more accepting, and enjoying life--all very good sentiments that surface rarely in most other current sitcoms. Still, there’s the matter of actually being funny, which the show is, most of the time, not. At its worst, G&F goes for that most obvious of current sitcom clichés.

The two lead actors do their best to feign exasperation with each other, and with Liddiard’s cop Adelaide. But the dialogue isn’t clever--it’s more on the level of strenuous declarations.

Dreadful creator John Logan has firm control over the series’ mordantly witty, dry tone. He has me hooked again.

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.

Valley turns into the story of a young company fighting for a soul its founders never realized it had. As a result, it gives Silicon Valley a bigger heart than it’s ever had before.

Any fears that the departure of series creator Armando Iannucci would result in a diminishment of quality are immediately allayed. New showrunner David Mandel demonstrates a firm command and light touch in keeping the new episodes centered around Louis-Dreyfus and Selina’s bursts of anger, her deflations of despair, and her reactions to both the stupidity and shrewd mendacity of her staff.

The half-hours made available for review contain some clever lines and concepts, but not as many laughs as last season.

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.

Containment has a reasonably suspenseful pilot as directed by David Nutter (Game of Thrones, The X-Files). But as the series proceeds, it just becomes more repetitive and tedious.

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.

It’s almost cartoonish in its approach to the sitcom, to an extreme that sometimes pushes it into avant-garde territory: Not only would Daffy Duck understand what Kimmy is up to--so would turn-of-the-20th-century Dada and Surrealist artists. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is Fey and Carlock’s PhD project in comedy.

American Grit is sluggishly paced, and plays like one of those weeks on Survivor when everyone is just waiting for the visit from their “loved ones” so they can cry and hug a little before the next test of strength.

A grim test of endurance, Game of Silence wants to do honorably by its subject matter while also luring you in with lurid shocks. It’s a combination that cannot hold itself together.

Outlander’s appeal remains focused on the interplay between Claire and Jamie, a union of two very different people joined in mutual attraction, lust, and a meeting of the minds. No matter what country they’re in, they’re the duo that’s the twosome with the mostest.

Grim, humorless, and instantly off-putting.

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

Tucked away on Cinemax and by now almost doggedly proud of both its cult status and its utter unpredictability, Banshee remains a pure pleasure machine, at once vulnerable and sturdy, and determined to go out on its own terms, whatever the hell those may be.

With an hour that spends much of its time focusing on people chatting about what they’re doing now and what they should be doing in upcoming scenes, Fear The Walking Dead is in danger of putting Chris Hardwick out of business: This whole episode of Fear is itself like a slightly soggier version of Talking Dead.

To write out episode-themes like this makes Catastrophe sound potentially dreary about marriage equality and parental strain. Trust me, it’s the exact opposite: so exhilarating, so gaspingly funny, you’ll burn through the episodes as fast as you can.

A vivid character study, a tense law-firm drama, and an educational deep-dive for any viewer who’d like to learn the ins and outs of what we researchers call “transactional sex.”

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.

[The Catch] is so aggressively Shonda-ed--with fast cutting, split-screening, long romantic looks, and pop music competing with the dialogue in an attempt to boost your energy to keep watching--that it very nearly plays like a parody of a Shonda Rhimes show.

This star showcase does [Melissa George] no favors.... Dr. Alex doesn’t invite favorable comparisons to any doctor with dignity, and I would guess this series will not have a very long life.

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

The opening hour, premiering Wednesday after Survivor and Criminal Minds--and those are exactly the two shows Beyond Borders combines with appalling cynicism--finds Garrett and his team winging off to Thailand, where a couple of young American women, volunteering on a farm, are taken captive by a demented-looking local. (Given that despicable behavior by foreign populations is baked into its premise, Beyond Borders is, you can be sure, going to be charged with xenophobia or worse by some offended viewers very quickly.)

The Americans does an awfully good job of juggling its numerous subplots.... If there’s a weak spot in the series, it’s that the subplot involving Nina (Annet Mahendru), the Russian KGB agent now in a Soviet prison, seems increasingly extraneous to the show.

Really, it’s only Warburton who’s able to muster the rare amusing moment, and that’s not because of his lines, but rather the way he delivers them, with his unique combination of squints and grimaces and slow-drawl responses.

Bosch is a fine piece of TV work, one of the best examples of how to take what works on tightly-formatted network crime shows and supplement it with some of the looser freedoms of pay-cable crime series.

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.

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.

Watching, you feel as though its story is just familiar enough to seem inevitable whenever it’s not tedious, and its earnestness short-circuits any electrical charge of wit or sexiness.

Damien has moments of nicely spooky atmospherics, but it’s neither scary nor fun, and when you’re dealing with this topic and this character, you have to move in one of those two directions, or you’ll just lose the battle to the devil of tedium.

It’s completely engrossing to witness Norman’s blossoming psychosis, which is frightening in a non-horror-story manner, even as Norma’s prickly personality provides Bates with regular, welcome moments of unexpected funniness.

You’re meant to get hooked in the mystery of Danny and the reactions he provokes. Where’s he been? Who really kidnapped him? Was he kidnapped? Is this Adam the original Adam? Why did one member of the family apparently frame Hank? I can’t say I was very intrigued by these provocative questions, mostly because The Family does such a poor job of dramatizing them in a lively, believable manner.

The first couple of episodes were directed by Todd Holland, whose work on Malcolm in the Middle reminds you that he knows how to be clever with broad material, but here, the scripts fail his talent.

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.

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.

No one is ever going to say Fuller House is great TV, but as a nostalgia item, it will probably amuse its original, now grown, audience for an episode or two.

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.

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.

The precision of the details--the way Broad City lets you think it’s meandering while remaining laser-focused on the timing of the gags and hitting a hilarious crescendo--is a wonder to behold.

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.

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.

The performers in Those Who Can’t are probably nice people--they’re clearly smart, even if their show’s concept is woefully derivative.

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

A completely successful attempt to re-position Michael Jackson as a profoundly self-aware artist, as opposed to the freakish and tragic celebrity that he became, Spike Lee’s Michael Jackson’s Journey From Motown To Off The Wall is both thrilling and instructional.

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

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.

There’s a lot of speechifying, some of it is moving and fascinating, some of it sounding like penny-ante Eugene O’Neill. It’s also completely fascinating, and full of really wonderful performances.

This so-called “limited series” takes the facts of the Simpson case and, by bending and shaping the emphases of those facts, turns it into a startlingly stirring critique of racism, sexism, and the judicial system that still resonates today. To be sure, the series also contains its share of laughs and excess.

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

Over the first five episodes made available for review, the show--created by Peter Mattei with producers including Peter Tolan (Rescue Me) and Paul Giamatti--amounts to a hill of beans. Beans with a lot of gassy verbiage.

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.

I found the series irritating because I find Handler funny very rarely. If you’re a fan, you’ll have a great time, because what this series should be called is Chelsea Does Chelsea.

The most obnoxious show of the new year thus far, Lucifer traduces the character created by Neil Gaiman and developed by writer Mike Carey in the Lucifer comic-book series.

Overall, this seems as though it will be one of Syfy’s most engaging new series as the channel continues to get back into the hardcore sci-fi and fantasy genres.

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 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.

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.

[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.

[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 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

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

In the season premiere, the primary story line involves Nina, as a babysitter, trying to get Elmo and Abby to calm down enough to be put to bed. “You’re too excited,” she says. “You need to do something relaxing.” This is already a better premise for a half-hour show than 98 percent of the frenetic sitcoms on the air.... The Sesame Street touchstones remain in place: There is the letter (“B”) and number (“10”) of the day, for example.

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

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.

A funny sitcom with the good-posture backbone of truth.

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.

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

The Shannara Chronicles is a lot of hooey with hotsy young actors.

Bordertown is a good example of how insipid and smug certain kinds of television can be when it tries to address contemporary issues.

While the upcoming season is uneven--there are a few awfully wobbly moments in the saggy middle hours--the series is well on its way to going out in a manner that will have its fans sweetening their cups of tea with salty tears.

It’s a completely hypnotic enterprise--a nightmare you are compelled to remain within, to see what happens.

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

The Expanse has enough well-wrought plot to keep things moving swiftly without confusing those of us who aren’t hardcore sci-fi fans.

The opening night of this three-part miniseries sets up a standard genre premise: Aliens contact Earth.... These productions [The Expanse and Childhood’s End] suggest there’s now more to Syfy than Sharknado sequels, so that’s encouraging.

These scenes [flashbacks to Weimar Germany], which feature Michaela Watkins doing the best with a tritely anxious, angry character, are the weakest elements of the new season, at once too pat and too melodramatic. But the show benefits from terrific casting in its supporting roles this season, with great turns by Cherry Jones, Richard Masur, Anjelica Huston, and the poet Eileen Myles.

The pastoral nostalgia that this TV-movie taps into is powerful, if maudlin, stuff. This is the time of year when sentimentality can be a warming thing, and Parton’s Coat will keep an awful lot of people warm this winter.

Likable but not especially funny.

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.