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.

Anyone with an interest in music will want to see this portrait of the artist as a young man pursued by demons into the pit of heck.

It seems hell-bent on not failing us for one single second.

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.

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.

The new season of Inside Amy Schumer is very funny, and, just below its surface, very thoughtful.

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.

There are sufficient twists in the new episodes that keep the action moving while preventing me from revealing too much. The pace is swift, the tension runs high--except, perhaps, for the Alison clone, whose suburban soccer mom is used most frequently for comic relief.

Season 5 doesn’t feel like more of the same; it feels like a Game of Thrones played at a new, more intense level.

Depending on the situation, Louis-Dreyfus brings various combinations of excessive zeal, profane rage, piteous desperation, and unwarranted arrogance, all of it never less than beguiling.

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.

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.

C.K. doesn’t even seem to be placing much value on eliciting guffaws during the stand-up segments that used to give his show a jolly lift at the beginning and end of each half-hour. Interestingly, over the course of the first four episodes I’ve seen, the warmest vibes emanate from Pamela.

As always, this episode of Mad Men had entertaining moments.... Weiner wants you to realize that, over time, a wiseguy like Roger inevitably becomes insufferable. The problem is, removing such fun from Mad Men only makes the overall experience of watching Mad Men more joyless.

Wolf Hall makes for wonderful television in part by resisting the current trends in wonderful television.... It’s every bit as good as Downton Abbey, and when it comes to moody shrewdness, Wolf has it all over Mad Men.

It’s as though this show wants to set up hurdles for itself to overcome. Happily, it does. Much of this is due to Foster, who radiates so much eager energy, you have no trouble buying the premise of the sitcom.

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.

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.

This frequently jaw-dropping documentary by director Alex Gibney, drawn largely from the book of the same name by Lawrence Wright, demonstrates vividly how a cult can spread among people searching for something greater in their lives, some advantage over others, some grand answer.... At times threatens to get swallowed up in the loony-land it wants to analyze, it helps a great deal to have regular check-ins with Wright.

Deceptively loose and shambling, Big Time is one of those shows--like the show it follows, Workaholics--that’s going to quickly attract a cult following. Get in on it now.

Corden did a terrific job of showcasing all his talents, including singing a ballad at the end of this first night. He’s well on his way to being a nightly crowd-pleaser whom you may be talking about the next day.

Bloodline is well worth your time.

One Big Happy is a loud, frantic sitcom so eager to please, you may want to avert your eyes.

A charming and even, yes, inspiring new series.

At his best, as is frequently on display here, Harmon knows how to overload a scene with references to everything from dinosaurs to Lawnmower Man, and still keep the action moving.

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.

Cuse and Tucker (the latter also worked on True Blood) do a good job of translating the deeply unsettling miracle at the heart of this show.

There is, periodically, a kind of daringly reckless, Lucille Ball-like slapstick physicality that Farmiga brings to the role, and it contributes a welcome lightness to the show’s often grim proceedings. By contrast, Highmore’s exceedingly subtle, adroit work is slowly filling in the portrait of psycho-Norman at a perfect pace for a weekly television series.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is super-clever, features a winning performance by The Office’s Ellie Kemper, and moves like a well-oiled joke machine.

American Crime does a good job of using the police-procedural framework to give viewers a structure that’s familiar and compelling. But Ridley makes sure that that structure is also capacious enough to let the actors stretch out, and, at least over the course of the four episodes made available to critics, this yields at least two superb performances.

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

Fortunately, Broadchurch, created and written by Chris Chibnall, still excels most frequently as a character study--to a notable degree, of all its major characters, who are sketched with vividness and, in almost every case, sympathy and poignance.

We don’t even get away from those awful homages to Edgar Allen Poe that used to stud the show’s Joe Carroll scripts--the new season contains murderous rhymes with terrible scansion such as, “While you lie/More die.” Written in blood, of course.

I’m not completely sold on The Last Man On Earth as an ongoing enterprise, and I wonder how long audiences are going to stick with it. At the same time, I admire Last Man’s spirit of adventurousness, and hope the show can make good on what is a far bigger conceptual challenge than most sitcoms ever attempt.

At its best, Battle Creek reaches for the witty whimsy of another out-of-the-way-location CBS series such as Northern Exposure. But most of the time, Battle Creek just seems like an only slightly jauntier police procedural than the ones that overrun network TV.

The Underwoods--usually robots of ambition, subsisting only on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches--engage in sex at a moment that would not inspire lustful feelings in more ordinary folk. It’s touches like this that keep the viewer of House of Cards off-balance, eager to fire up the next episode in the Netflix queue. The third season of House of Cards comes up with some formidable foes for Frank Underwood.

The infernally clever, multiple-Emmy'd producer Bertram van Munster has found a way to make even a dating-game theme interesting.

Really, if you need a watchdog group to tell you to stay away from a show lets people air their steamy details while moist perspiration clings to silk pajamas left over from Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion closet, you might be gullible enough to enter... the Sex Box!

Here is a series for an American audience that grants us the intelligence to be able to read subtitles, which are deployed to help convey the tart flavor of the various tongues spoken in the show. Combine this with the show’s frequently lovely visuals, and Vikings remains the kind of burly soap opera that appeals to an ever-wider audience.

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.

The main subplots of Bosch gather power as they proceed.

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

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).

Better Call Saul has its own tone--it's a different, unique creation.

The filmmakers grant Durst his humanity, allowing us to see the charm, and occasional flashes of humor, that animate the man when he sometimes emerges from the fog of good fortune. In the two episodes I’ve seen, The Jinx makes good, sparing use of dramatizing some of the moments Durst describes.

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?

Fresh Off The Boat, when it has flashes of energy and well-written jokes, easily transcends ethnic stereotypes, but it’s these sitcom stereotypes that are the ones the show needs to defeat if it wants to be both long-running and distinctive.

[Elizabeth is] coming to terms with her own strict upbringing, her longing for her homeland, and her profoundly ambivalent feelings about American permissiveness on the one hand, and the strict discipline of turning her own daughter over to become a tool of the Soviet state. These are the elements that come together in the fine new season of The Americans, giving it more emotional power than ever.

If you’re looking for a winter-time mystery that will show you people even colder than you may be these days, Fortitude is an absorbing one.

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 show is no masterpiece, despite the PBS rubric it falls under, but it’s dozy fun, and a nice respite from so much of the creepy, “edgy” crime dramas that continue to pop up on network TV like scary clowns.

He’s got some work to do in the pacing of the table discussions, but Wilmore’s sensibility is immediately relatable: common sense enlivened by a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo.

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.”

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.

Girls is (at this point almost surprisingly) good.

There is so much quick-fire dialogue and subtle physical comedy in Togetherness, the four stars sometimes seem like a full-functioning comedy machine.

If you aren’t watching Banshee, I’d say now’s the time to climb aboard. It’s a show that’s just hitting its stride, and that stride averages about 100 miles an hour.

The Emmy-nominated Archer is one of the most satisfying comedies of any sort, its densely packed jokes contrasting with the airy, assured confidence a show achieves when its characters seem so three-dimensionally real to their audience.

The series hits the ground running, letting the viewer fill in the narrative gaps. In other words, Empire is that rare nighttime soap opera that credits its audience with understanding without a lot of tiresome explanation, and whose purpose is to entertain, to surprise, and to confuse.

Show creator Julian Fellowes has defeated jaded skepticism again.

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.