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

Slapdash and one-joke-silly, The President Show would not seem to have much of a future as an ongoing enterprise.

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.

From Batman (’60s camp classic became morose Dark Knight movies) to Battlestar Galactica (bad utopian ’70s sci-fi became good dystopian sci-fi), the idea is to complicate the original premise and go for a realism signified by a somber tone and a cynical, knowing air. Knowing this, the new version of Lost in Space seems to be trying to have it both ways, and loses in the process. ... After checking out the first few episodes of the Netflix series, I found myself wishing [Matt] LeBlanc would rocket-ship in for a cameo.

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.

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.

Falco is good, but Josh Charles is doing the stuff that made me smile. Of course, smiling is not something you’re supposed to be doing while watching a show about a double homicide, but the pleasures of familiar facts presented in a lively, engaging way will not be denied.

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

Chicago Justice is just Law & Order in a windbreaker.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

At its best, The Son--both book and TV show--explores ideas such as what it means to be a success in America and how much ruthlessness is required to achieve that definition; how the legacies of fathers place the burden of history on the shoulders of sons who’d like to shrug them off. It’s too bad the TV version is simplified so drastically, the production too often turns into an ordinary shoot-’em-up.

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.”

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 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.

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).

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.

Chemistry is key to a project like this, and Wayans and Crawford have it. Even in the series’ cartoonish exaggeration of what crime-fighting is about (yelling, screaming, and car-chasing), Lethal Weapon has a comic snap that is entertaining.

The stakes in this show are very low; so is the humor, sometimes delightfully so.

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.

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.

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.

Cringy dialogue. ... The premiere features cameos by Grey’s stars Ellen Pompeo and Chandra Wilson, both of whom look as though someone is holding a pistol at their heads just off-camera.

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.

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

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.

The deluge of empowerment is relentless, repetitive, and boring. The supernatural elements of the plot seem borrowed from old episodes of Supernatural and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The special effects are super-cheesy, not much better than an old episode of Bewitched.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Lively, action-packed, and occasionally quite funny.

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.

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.

Rendered without much embellishment and acted with firmly controlled vigor, Killing Jesus, a TV adaptation of the bestselling book by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, is a fine retelling of the story of Jesus Christ as a historical figure.

There is a lot of clunky, melodramatic dialogue, like, “You have to find the Fortress; you have to save Superman!” There is a glowering supervillain in the form of veteran DC Comics bad guy Brainiac. Last month, I ventured a guess that, sight unseen, Krypton would be lousy. Now, sight seen, I confirm this is so.

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

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.

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

[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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

[The movie] does drag at the beginning and the end. The middle material, however, dramatizing the assassination attempt and its aftermath, is engrossing.

Powers gives you the slam-bang super-hero action you want, as well as the hard-boiled tone many cop shows aim for and seldom attain.

It’s aimed at millennials yet making fun of them constantly, and aimed at McHale fans while putting the star in his least-flattering light.

The new project’s creation is credited to Corinne Brinkerhoff (The Good Wife; Jane the Virgin), whose previous work seems too smart for what’s going on in American Gothic. I will prefer to think that, like the people in another CBS show created by her former employers, her brain has been momentarily invaded by BrainDead’s alien ants.

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.

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.

The entire enterprise is sentimental and predictable, which goes without saying. What pulls it all together is what pulls together everything Dolly Parton touches: heartfelt emotion, un-ironic portrayals of modest sincerity (Nettles and Schroder are particularly effective), and a gift for turning treacle into musical gold.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

In truth, the bi-ped hamsters of Big Brother offer a more realistic view of humanity than this unbelievable new disaster-drama series.

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.

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.

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.

We soon begin to see the method behind this show’s storytelling: If there’s a way to pump more pretentious gas into the story, Emerald City will find it.

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.

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

The latest movie-to-TV adaptation is an exceptionally useless prequel to the Taken franchise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I hope [Arquette’s] getting paid a heckuva lot for striding through this new hour of televisual malware.

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.

Getting any mileage out of Miley and her Bernardine Dohrn-with-a-husky-voice character proves unrewarding. Most of Crisis is spent listening to Sidney and Kay dither about hearing aids, Freudian analyses, and one-liners that sound dusted off from Allen’s decades-old standup act.

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.

All the stars are as likable and watchable as you might think they’d be, yet the show that they’re in is nearly bereft of humor or poignance. It’s as though everyone signed on without reading a script and, good sports all, just forged ahead anyway.

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.

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.