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.

Disenchantment is pretty to look at--the background illustrations are often lovely--but it’s not very funny. The producers have said the show is filled with a budding mythology and lots of Easter eggs for the fan base it hopes to build, so if you’re into that kind of detail-oriented viewing, this may be a show for you.

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.

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

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

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

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

Stories from the Edge loses its edge once its celebrity writers take over the focus.

The best moments in this show are when Hayes is prepping for combat with his team. ... Where SEAL Team is weakest is when any scene turns away from fighting enemies to a discussion of fighting enemies.

Don Johnson, who’s worth his weight in gold or oil--anchors the show as North Dakota tycoon Hap Briggs.... You can bet the first hour climaxes with some of the main characters rolling around in oil, punchin’ and brawlin’. But the show could develop its own mythology of contemporary wildcatting.

For its combination of silliness revved up to a furious pace, The Player is, as I said at the start, watchable--the kind of visual junk food that you find yourself consuming for an hour before you realize 60 minutes have passed.

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

While we get an origin story, it’s not drawn out, and right from the start, Murdock is fighting crime. The fighting is particularly well-staged.... The dialogue, however, could use some of that snap. The exchanges between Matt, Foggy, and Karen aim for the sort of brisk funniness that was a hallmark of shows these producers have worked on, including Buffy and Angel, but it’s mostly strained stuff. Actually, the purely plot-driven lines are more amusing.

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.

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.

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.

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

Room 104 is extremely uneven.

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.

The new AMC show is packed with rigorously choreographed and slicingly edited action scenes, and it builds a mythology that combines elements of Asian martial-arts movies, American Westerns, film noir, horror, biker flicks, and nighttime soap operas.... One big problem with Badlands is its punishingly dour tone, utterly devoid of humor or any fleeting moments of lightness.... I just wish Into The Badlands was more fun.

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 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.

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

The imagination of the show is all front-loaded, in the conception of the characters, yet what they actually DO when they are met by Renautas Corp is tiresomely predictable: they engage in yet another chase scene.

Alas, it’s the new material here that is the weakest aspect of the show.

A lot of Damnation feels an awful lot like homework or worse: homework you’re forced to do on the sly while sitting in church listening to a sermon.

[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.

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.

Hannibal is the most radical enterprise on network television right now.... Hannibal is also one of the most hilariously ridiculous shows on TV. The fussy perfectionism of Hannibal Lecter, from his impeccable suits with jaunty pocket squares to his smirking murmurs of polysyllabic nonsense, is screamingly camp while lacking the wit of truly accomplished camp.

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.

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.

Hale is a winning presence, all wide eyes and cute Peter Pan collars. ... The show has a handle on quick jokes and comic reaction shots. ... When the people around Stella start getting real with her about their struggles, Life Sentence struggles at finding the proper tone.

The anti-chemistry between Gad and Crystal, though played for laughs, doesn’t often result in them. Instead, my interest was held by the opportunity The Comedians provides to think about why there’s such a widening gap between Crystal’s kind of big-gestured, boisterous comedy style and Gad’s quieter comedy of sweaty desperation.

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 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.

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

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.

In general, Knock Knock was pleasant, open-hearted, but far too staged to really take full advantage of its hook: being live TV.

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.

It’s all extremely boring. ... The show remains very thin gruel when it comes to nourishing laughter, and it’s considerably worse when it gets preachy.

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.

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.

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

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.

It’s very clear from the dialogue, pacing, and tone that Doubt would really like to remind you of still another CBS show--The Good Wife--but, sorry, it’s nowhere in the same league.

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.

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.

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

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

[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.

Hunted’s premiere wasn’t very suspenseful--it was like an episode of Undercover Boss if the bosses had to keep moving all the time. The voiceover narration is a problem: While it’s a necessary element of the show, needed to introduce the huge cast of “characters” and orient a viewer in the geography of the fugitives, it also lends a cheesy, basic-cable-reality-crime-show air to the proceedings.

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

This TV series tries to capture some of the adventure in venture capitalism, but it suffers from an excess of aggressive cutesiness. ... The whole thing is alternately tedious and tiring.

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.

Superior Donuts feels like the kind of sitcom that would have struck audiences as a cozy place to visit every week if it had premiered in the days before cable and streaming. As it is, it feels at once odd and stale.

As directed by Roland Joffe (The Killing Fields), Rising has some entertaining shoot-‘em-ups and showdowns, but Joffe is hobbled by the script, which forces him to cut away from Houston to give equal weight to Olivier Martinez’s Santa Anna, the leader of the Mexican army and president of the country, and the subject of some of Rising’s most tedious storytelling.

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.

The acting is good as far as the scripts will allow. Fonda and Tomlin don’t have much chemistry but they can certainly spin their lines into something better than they are, and Sheen (as Robert) and Waterston (as Sol) have an easy rapport. But the show plays like an overreaching network sitcom that wandered online.

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

The show is ultimately exhausting rather than what a game show needs to be, which is mildly exhilarating.

Everything surrounding the colorfully bloody bastard-execution-ing is grungy soap opera.

Rosewood still seems like something you’ve watched before. It’s like Burn Notice meets Royal Pains interrupted by Cops.

The current Couple seems listless compared to the '70s model, so far lacking the sharp tension that made Klugman and Randall so interesting to watch together.

Reeves is trying to do something about the state of law enforcement in America, but APB, with its alternation of tedious command-center computer-gazing and routine cops-chasing-bad-guys action, doesn’t seem like a concept that will keep viewers intrigued week after week.

Kelly is now trying to show her softer side, but it manifests itself as intense squishiness. ... The entire cast of the network’s revived sitcom Will & Grace trotted out to submit to a long but skimpy interview. (By contrast, the interview the cast did with Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb in the very next hour was far more relaxed and funny.) ... First-day jitters are understandable, and perhaps by the end of the week, Kelly won’t be contorting her face into a rictus grin. Perhaps she will allow for exchanges with the studio audience and with guests that don’t sound scripted.

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.

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

Padded with kids including an unborn child in medical danger, its corridors filled to capacity with the most attractive doctors this side of an afternoon soap opera, Chicago Med is not a subtle enterprise.

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 Punisher isn’t nearly as pretentious as Hannibal was, but it’s certainly as deliberately paced. The violence of the show is up-close and brutal. ... The show would be too dull without its action scenes, but when those arrive, your first instinct may be to cover your eyes.

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.

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.

Stewart gives a terrific performance, gliding through a song-and-dance fantasy in the second episode, and, throughout, delivering his lines with astutely timed gusto. It’s too bad the lines aren’t funny.

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 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.

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.

With Seinfeld, Baldwin has an immediate rapport. ... The sophistication of their white-guy discussion of the #TimesUp movement can be summed up in Seinfeld’s sincere, icky, and clueless comment, “Doesn’t this seem like a necessary bowel movement that the culture has to have?” By contrast, the interview with McKinnon was more awkward, and not very successful if you measure it by normal talk-show standards. ... Baldwin has to do all the heavy lifting of moving the chatter along. But when they get to discussing their most famous Saturday Night Live impersonations, the conversation takes off--it yields something new and honest.

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

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.

The comedy here consists primarily of jokes that would not have been out of place on one of those old Cheech and Chong comedy records. ... The rest of the time, it’s strictly sitcom writing at its most rote.

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.

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.

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.

We get a lot of variations on other reality shows--when a barber is eliminated here, Cedric intones, in the manner of Jeff Probst on Survivor, “Sorry, you’ve been clipped” --and a lot of dull observations from the judges about technique. Trips to my own barber are more entertaining than this.

Allegiance, set in the present-day, is at attempt to be a thoughtful drama about the differences between loyalty to family and loyalty to country, but its atmosphere is as drab as an early John LeCarre novel, without the prickly dialogue or tricky plotting.... And: We lost Parenthood to this?

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

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

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.

[The Brink] uses Black’s panicky jabber-talk style to set the pace for a frantic show that only occasionally slows down enough to be actually funny.

The new show has permission from DC Comics to poke fun at DC superheroes, but what comes across more forcefully is a weariness with the superhero-overload in TV and movies right now.

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

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.

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

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.

It’s fun but tedious.

There’s a lot of body-wrenching time-travel, lots of running across blasted urban landscapes, many predictable betrayals, and entirely too many melodramatic lines such as “You are going to help me change the world, Mr. Cole.”