W/ Bob & David is, pretty much, an of-its-time sketch show following the same format as Mr. Show--one sketch leads into the next, in a funny, often tenuous, manner.

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.

At one point, a character scribbles "Donny Douche" on a pad for no reason other than, perhaps, an attempt by the producers to forestall some critic from using that phrase in a review.

The stories gain richness when Dev moves outside his comfort zone.... There is no level on which Master Of None does not bring pleasure.

It’s usually the case that television procedurals that start concentrating on the heroes’ private lives make the rest of the show go soft--sentimentality creeps in. So far, thanks to the crisp, dry performances of Noble, Miller, and Liu, Elementary avoids that danger quite nicely.

Mom is back for a third season on Thursday night, and the sitcom has really found its comic groove. Also its tragic groove. Because that’s the way Mom works--its present-day laughs are always threatened by fragile futures and haunted pasts.

The Leisure Class is every bit as pinched and humorless its director.... It’s a piece of predictable hackwork.

The achievement of The Returned is that it creates its frights chiefly from an atmosphere of the quietly uncanny. Indeed, the show is at its best when it’s impossible to tell who is more dead: the returned population, or the living whose souls have expired from despair.

Thanks to the presence of star Bruce Campbell, original Evil Dead director Sam Raimi and master producer of enjoyable junk Robert Tapert, Ash Vs. Evil Dead is a blood-squirting, wisecracking success as a half-hour TV series.

[A] sordid enterprise.

It’s got the sunny colors and optimistic energy of The Flash, a bright streak of feminism coursing through its storyline, and charming, star-making performance by Melissa Benoist as Kara Jor-El, aka Kara Danvers, aka Supergirl.

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.

Truth Be Told, is one of the lamest of the year, making bad jokes about current issues ranging from racially-charged language to whether John Mayer appeals only to white people.

It’s frequently witty, vulgarly funny, sexy, and suspenseful. It makes you want to see its next scene the instant a new episode ends.

In a TV world with so many choices, Manhattan is at least worth seeking out, to see if its kind of tense smartness appeals to you.

The pilot episode is pretty much a non-stop pleasure, packed with funny scenes and big, billowy musical numbers.

This Fargo has a different idea of evil, based on something just as insidious as Malvo: The grinding amorality of capitalism, which demands more profit no matter what the human cost. In the new Fargo, this is placed in a context that is frequently witty, and balanced with scenes of great family love. The large cast is superb.

Iit might sound a bit seen-it-all-before, but it’s what Red Oaks does with this material that makes the series worth watching.

Last Kingdom is imaginative and amusing, and Uhtred makes for a smart, tough, randy central character.

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.

Beautifully crafted and excellently acted, Casual is well worth checking out, to see if its mood and rhythms fall in sync with yours.

Okay, I’ll buy into it for the sake of the wonderful acting being done here. Then too, Jeffrey Reiner’s direction is superb, the rhythm of his framing and the cameras’ points of view underscoring without intruding upon the drama.

It’s the way third-episode writers Meredith Stiehm and Alex Gansa set up and execute this latest Carrie psychodrama that gives it the import and narrative propulsion that makes it well worth investing in the Mathison Mental Health Project once again.

The new season of The Leftovers is an exhilarating experience in trying to understand that certain fundamental things cannot be understood.

It wants to evoke that sense of non-stop crisis, and it’s willing to sacrifice believability and good writing in the service of frantic pacing.

The show is very smart.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

If Daniels, Strong, and showrunner Ilene Chaiken are feeling pressure to maintain the show’s massive-hit status, it doesn’t show in the enjoyably scattered yet propulsive season premiere.

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

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.

Alternately bad and laughably bad, Minority Report is one of the few new fall shows that can probably be fairly judged on the basis of its pilot alone: There are so many things working against it, it’s hard to imagine how the show could be better, even if Fox had sent out more than just its first episode to critics.

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.

It’s all very disturbing and creepy. It’s also not new.... The A&E special might therefore be viewed partly as an attempt to get ratings by recycling already-heard allegations. On the other hand, there’s also a sense in which we cannot hear these dreadful tales enough, so that the memory of them can live on in people other than the victims.

I liked that Best Time Ever was big and loud and frenetic and ambitious. I just wish I could have suspended my disbelief for even one segment.

It’s a measure of how confident this underrated-in-every-way show has become that it can confidently separate the two lovers and let Danny carry a completely independent subplot with such comic success.

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

Longmire is in fine, tight-lipped-verging-on-surly form.

Once I accepted Project Greenlight’s cynical choice, I have to admit the show became immediately transfixing: It’s always fascinating to watch people who dislike each other in stressful workplace situations.

You’re the Worst proved to be one of the most amusing and unusual sitcoms to premiere last season, and Wednesday night’s second-season premiere lives up to its promise.

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

Created by writer Ben Watkins, Hand of God has the pace of a pulp novel anxious to keep an audience watching, heedless of believability or motivation.

Show creators Chris Brancato, Carlo Bernard, and Doug Miro want to tell two parallel tales: The DEA investigation and hunt for Escobar, and Escobar’s point of view in his ever-increasing ambition, power, and ruthlessness. Narcos is superb at delineating the latter: You really get an understanding of how a poor, not especially charismatic man rose from the rabble to become one of the richest, most feared men in the world.... In contrast to this, the efforts of Murphy and Pena to defeat Escobar are, of necessity, more hit-or-miss.

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.

Heavy on atmosphere and light on content, Edward Burns’ Public Morals is an intriguing new TNT series about vice cops in the 1960s.... Nevertheless, if you make it past the rather pro forma pilot that spends the hour introducing characters, there’s an enjoyable crime saga being developed in Public Morals that suggests patience will be rewarded.

Writer Ron McGee treats Full House as though it was a sacred icon whose pop-culture history must be maintained at all costs--in this case, the costs being believability and narrative momentum.

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.

The cast here is exceptional.... There are times when the pace of Show Me A Hero becomes predictably metronomic.

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.

[Billy Eichner and Julie Klausner's] collision in this sitcom they’ve created for themselves is a black mushroom cloud that some viewers are going to find too strong to take.... Klausner and Eichner are such intelligent performers in every medium they’ve chosen, you have to root for the success of Difficult People. And I say that while still not entirely convinced that this is the best vehicle for those talents.

Playing House is a cheerfully unhip show made by people who are very hip to the sharp edges of comedy.

Not every episode can reach these heights [of one of the funniest sequences in the first season], but with an ongoing story and no apprehension whatsoever in abusing its main character beyond the limits of humanity, there’s no reason that Review won’t continue to be worthy of five stars.

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

Lively, action-packed, and occasionally quite funny.

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

Raucous and loony and adroit and lewd, 7 Days in Hell is one odd comedy.

A disarming, completely absorbing piece of work.

Rosenbaum is charming, and so is Sara Rue, as his assistant at the church. But pretty soon, the dumbness begins to settle in.

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

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

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.

Donovan is managing to walk a fine line between hardboiled entertainment and over-cooked melodrama.... it’s sometimes as good as almost anything else out there.

The pace is deliberate, and there aren’t the kind of laughs that other dramas employ as comic relief. But there’s real wit and propulsiveness in the storytelling Ray McKinnon does in this show.

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.

Key and Peele returns to Comedy Central on Wednesday night with an exceedingly strong half-hour that once again demonstrates the range of not only the duo’s performance skills, but their ideas as well.

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.

Humans is a clever piece of work.

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

Zoo keeps things moving quickly enough to glide past its more portentous moments.

While retaining the novel’s general tone, characters and plot points have been altered and in some cases invented that have enabled the TV Dome to become its own creation. And that creation is cool, clever escapism that works well in the hot summer months.

For all its cynicism about the elites who run the finances of the country, Mr. Robot is almost genially high-spirited: It excites you to keep following Elliot, Mr. Robot, and their improbable plan of revenge.

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.

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

[The 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.

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

[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.

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

The show manages to juggle suspense with light moments without spoiling either mood.

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.

Carefully crafted and respectful of its source material.

One of the smartest, most charming and funny shows you’re likely to see all year is Catastrophe.

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.

It can often be trite and repetitive. But triteness and repetition characterizes a lot of everyday life, and the debut does an excellent job of giving us a portrait of Ben as a Midwestern teenager whose natural adolescent self-consiousness has been increased to near-paralysis as he comes to terms with his father’s new life.

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

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.

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.

Stitchers is the kind of show that thinks that by having Kirsten make a sarcastically knowing reference to Catwoman, it’s immunized itself from charges of silly sex-objectivism; it hasn’t. I don’t see sci-fi fans putting Stitchers on their radar, or fans of Pretty Little Liars sticking around very long after the PLL premiere.

The sad thing--but also the thing that makes this show so compelling--is that the contestants care so much about winning this hideous, spirit-killing show. It’s that paradox that gives UnREAL its true soul.

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.

Kelli Garner manages to bring a freshness to her interpretation of Monroe that never feels like caricature.

One of the more cynical and repulsive of new reality shows--and that’s saying something, I know--The Briefcase is all the more reprehensible for passing off its exploitation of people in beleaguered financial straits as uplifting, inspirational TV.

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

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.