In the three episodes I’ve seen, the literalization of Josh’s subconscious fears, hopes, and dreams works pretty well. The show is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s always engrossing and smart.

Maybe you’ll find this carefully crafted wackiness more amusing than I did.

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.

There are subplots about Plum’s job in a Brooklyn coffee shop and a police detective investigating the militant group’s crimes that, two episodes in, don’t seem particularly promising. But Nash’s performance is awfully good, and Margulies manages to bring her own stamp to a role that seems inspired by Meryl Streep’s in The Devil Wears Prada.

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

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.

It’s off to a very good start. Dickens and Curtis and the actors playing their kids (Dillane, Alycia Debnam-Carey, and Lorenzo James Henric) are terrific.... Fear The Walking Dead has art on its addled mind, and is all the better for it.

The show bursts with clever casting and concepts. ... After a few episodes, however, much of the characterization in Cult starts to seem cartoonish and over-drawn. ... In other words, this is the usual AHS/Ryan Murphy pop-culture potpourri.

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.

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

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.

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.

Having watched three episodes, I’m hooked on its mix of laughs and seriousness.

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

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.

Repetitious (okay, we get it: Sam Phillips had an unhappy marriage and made out with Marion as frequently as possible) and clumsy in its lurch from one disparate subplot to another, Sun Records is such a slow burn, it’s kind of a fizzle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Room 104 is extremely uneven.

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 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.

The whole party-scene setting, complete with sneering guys with chains and women in brightly-colored wigs, is apparently intended to make you gawp at its carnal adventurousness. Instead, like the rest of Blood Drive, it’s as painfully boring as watching someone hit his fingers repeatedly with a hammer in an attempt to shock you.

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 stories are all awful. They leave you feeling angry, depressed, and hopeless that anything can be done about gun violence in America. But Requiem for the Dead also feels manipulative in a reality TV sort of way.

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

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 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 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.

A lot of Altered Carbon is very silly, mostly whenever any of the principals converse. Trite dialogue prevails. ... If you like your sci-fi good-lookin’ and tough talkin’, I heartily recommend Altered Carbon. Me, if I want a dose of steely speculative fiction, I’ll reread my old paperbacks of novels by Pat Cadigan and Lewis Shiner.

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).

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.

Descriptions cannot convey the crispness of the writing, and the surprising chemistry that’s already in place among a group of actors with widely differing styles of comedy. Credit writer Justin Adler and director Jason Winer for coming up with an atmosphere and look for Life In Pieces that unifies, rather than fractures, the show.

No one is going to say The Carmichael Show is a groundbreaking sitcom, but it’s certainly a likable and, with some regularity, a funny one.

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

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

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.

Young Sheldon has a certain Wonder Years glow to it. The challenge for the show going forward is to keep young Sheldon a believable, likable kid while also emphasizing the eccentric qualities that make him an effective comic creation. From this first episode, it really feels as though that’s not going to be a problem.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

For all its frenetic pacing, Will seems wheezily old-fashioned, the umpteenth attempt to attract a young audience to great art by modernizing it--except that Will’s ideas of modernity are a half-century old.

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.

Likable but not especially funny.

The puppetry and however the heck they film these creations display excellent technical artistry. Alas, The Muppets arrives with two flaws: rather less funny, and with too much Miss Piggy.

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.

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.

Robin Wright is many things, but possessed of a light touch she is not. Her grim addresses--to the camera, and to anyone within camera range--are steely and unceasing, with very little variation in tone or emotion. It doesn’t help that the dialogue--for nearly every character, but especially for Claire--is stilted. ... The show has gotten rid of its biggest troublemaker without replacing him with new trouble that would be more entertaining.

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.

As drama, the show is inert. After watching four episodes, I realized I’d been watching constant variations of the same narrative arc: Comedian campaigns to get stage time at Goldie’s. Pause for subplots about other comics’ personal lives. Back to Goldie’s for a performance, during which the comedian either “kills” or bombs, after which he or she is just as miserable as when the episode began.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Galavant feels like a slapped-together production that will only confirm the suspicions of heathen TV-watchers who think most musicals consist of flimsy stories padded out with tunes that repeat the plot developments.

[Nic Pizzolatto's] chosen the hardboiled-detective genre as his main menu, and given us three eggs so overdone, you couldn’t even stick a fork in them.... Each of the lead actors is doing superb work: Farrell, McAdams, and Kitsch find distinctive ways of expressing their troubled pasts and difficult present-day situations.

White People turns out to be a well-meaning but toothless exploration of its topic.

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.

The non-stop grimness of Dark strains both credulity and interest. Over the course of the three episodes I watched, Dark became both more complex and more easy to disengage from.

All the good acting here, and all the lush Gilded Age costuming, can’t distract us from the tedium of the storytelling.

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.

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.

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 story lacks much in the way of momentum other than the downward spiral of too much booze, too little creation of art. Z: The Beginning of Everything is a spiffy soap opera, but not much more than that.

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.

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.

Despite its quaint picturesque town backdrop, The Casual Vacancy is an ugly little piece of work, filled with bitterness, sniping, selfishness, and cruelty. There is no character other than Barry who seems remotely appealing or interesting.

The reason 9-1-1 seems even worse than it is, is that it has such good actors performing such awful material. How awful?: Somebody flushes a baby down a toilet!

A warm family sitcom Sex&Drugs is not. Neither is it a very funny sitcom.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

The Astronaut Wives Club frequently doesn’t seem to know what it wants to do.

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.

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 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.

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 jokes are difficult to locate.

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.

Ultimately, with its ceaseless meanness and barrage of put-downs, Scream Queens is more exhausting than exhilarating.

[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.

It’s not a pleasant show to watch. ... Kids would usually be shown to be thrilled that their rule-breaking teacher was showing them how to, you know, really enjoy life! But in practice, A. P. Bio ends up ridiculing the students.

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.

This hour-long dramedy relies heavily on Ritter’s ability to sell its outlandish, at times confusing, premise, and to the degree that it succeeds, it’s almost entirely due to the star’s powers of persuasion over any objective standard.

A superbly subtle yet exciting new series, gives us Charlie-in-the-making.

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.

This show is guided by sitcom pros, but it doesn’t feel like an old-pro show at all. It doesn’t go for easy or cheap laughs, and most of its scenes don’t follow the usual sitcom trajectory--instead, they take odd twists and turns.

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.