I’ve watched four episodes, and every one of them is hugely entertaining and frequently surprising.

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.

I found Bell to be one of the least likable protagonists in a prime time series in a while, which is really saying something in a season that has given us Notorious and Bull. ... Mulroney, not one of the liveliest of TV leading men, doesn’t just bring gravity to his role, he weighs it down with cement blocks.

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.

It lacks any character as vital and vivid as Taraji P. Henson’s Cookie. The dialogue is overwrought, and frequently tells us the very things we’re seeing on screen. The trio of aspiring stars are plucky, but they’re not very interesting, and neither is the music they sing.

Kelly, making her debut as an NBC host, marshaled her trademark steeliness, but it was no match for the insults (“Do you even understand what you’re asking?”) and the weaselly tactics of the KGB master spy. ... The fact that Sunday Night spent as much time rolling in the African mud with elephants (in a report about elephant poaching) as it did with Putin suggests how slim the pickings were in the editing room. Kelly filled up the rest of her debut by turning it over to other correspondents.

After watching a mere two episodes, I felt as though I’d squandered an entire summer watching Dead of Summer, a supernatural/horror/YA drama/soap opera, which starts moldering on Freeform Tuesday night.

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.

It’s fun but tedious.

Paxton is hemmed in by lousy dialogue and broadcast-network-predictable plot lines.

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

This star showcase does [Melissa George] no favors.... Dr. Alex doesn’t invite favorable comparisons to any doctor with dignity, and I would guess this series will not have a very long life.

Epps is deprived of the sort of good writing that would showcase his talent well.

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

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.

Except for Norm Macdonald as the voice of an alien made of what looked like quivering gelatin, I didn’t find much that was amusing about The Orville’s space odyssey. ... From its opening scene with Victor Garber assigning Ed his ship to the final, unsuspenseful shootout with alien enemies, The Orville moved from one lull to another.

This is the sort of show that could just as easily have premiered in 1997, or 1987, or 1977. ... [The] waste of talent that is most irritating about 9JKL.

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

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.

This new Jeremy Piven series is proving to be one of the more naive and ludicrous shows of the fall season.

Grim, humorless, and instantly off-putting.

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.

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.

[A] sordid enterprise.

If Making a Murderer, The Jinx, and the first season of the Serial podcast heralded a new era of true-crime stories, this one is tediously told.

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.

Featuring unconvincing dialogue. ... Notorious is otherwise instantly forgettable as soon as each scene is completed.

[A] brutally crude dramatization of the crime and its aftermath.

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!

The opening hour, premiering Wednesday after Survivor and Criminal Minds--and those are exactly the two shows Beyond Borders combines with appalling cynicism--finds Garrett and his team winging off to Thailand, where a couple of young American women, volunteering on a farm, are taken captive by a demented-looking local. (Given that despicable behavior by foreign populations is baked into its premise, Beyond Borders is, you can be sure, going to be charged with xenophobia or worse by some offended viewers very quickly.)

I’d like to say that Marvel’s Inhumans is so spectacularly awful, it’s worth tuning in just to witness the superhero train-wreck. But alas, Inhumans does not even yield sarcastic pleasures--it’s just bad. Bad in a dull way, bad in an irritating way. ... Marvel’s Inhumans is just inhumane.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

It’s completely engrossing to witness Norman’s blossoming psychosis, which is frightening in a non-horror-story manner, even as Norma’s prickly personality provides Bates with regular, welcome moments of unexpected funniness.

Aquarius and show creator McNamara take a daring leap and presume that Manson saw Wilson as a judgmental father-figure, and that notion that complicated their relationship. It’s just one example of the psychologically complex show McNamara continues to build with Aquarius.

I like Donovan best when it’s more of a crime show, but I’ll take this version for the intermittent rewards it yields regularly.

SDRR places itself in the awkward position of having created--when you fold in John Corbett’s Flash--some likable characters (well, maybe not Johnny, but that’s the way Leary likes it; he’s a preening antihero to the end) who remain in search of the right vehicle to take them to another level of excellence.

Legends of Chamberlain Heights does have an engaging visual palette, a good soundtrack from music supervisor Erykah Badu, and enough cleverness beneath the dirty jokes to make it worth keeping tabs on.

Younger never stays bogged down in one theme, or with one character, for long. Foster is, as always, glowingly convincing as Liza, and the show never lets us forget that what this character--and by implication, this series--is fighting against is.

Against the odds, Jane the Virgin has managed to sustain the premise that began the show--a variation on a telenovela for The CW network--with an admirable degree of inventiveness. Satire on television just isn’t supposed to last this long, let alone continue to be so resourceful and clever.

All in all, not a great episode, but a savage and a useful one.

Oaks remains assiduously small-scale, and that only works toward its charm. (Compared with ABC’s blasting ’80s sitcom The Goldbergs, Red Oaks is a masterpiece of low-key discretion.) The pacing is sometimes tediously slow, but for the most part, Oaks is cozily welcoming.

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.

There are a few coincidences in the final hours that make the plotting strain credulity, and the second-to-the-last episode feels as though a big chunk of it was cut and pasted from previous seasons and leftover editing-room footage in order to reach the assigned 10 hours. Lumbering along, dragging family history along in a way that slows down its thriller storytelling, Bloodline contains too many instances of a character saying some variation on the line, “When’s it going to end?” or “How did we get here?”

For the most part, this is the Playing House you’ve either come to love or ought to be catching up with as soon as possible.

The show’s regular flashbacks to the Nailer’s time in Afghanistan slow the pace and seem rather war-movie generic. The show is much better when we’re in contemporary times, such as the season premiere’s deftly choreographed shootout in a Frankfurt, Germany, ballroom.

As it is, writer-showrunner David Hollander has certainly crafted, last season and this one, an absorbing melodrama, aided a great deal by directors including John Dahl, who does terrific work in the second and third episodes.

The tone of the show veers back and forth between comedy and suspense. The name that pops out in the credits is Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files, The Man in the High Castle), who’s listed as co-creator and co-writer on every episode. There’s little of Spotnitz’s talent for dramatizing tension here. ... Indian Detective plays out like a tidy little PBS Sunday-night cozy-mystery show.

Herskovitz and Zwick are not damp-eyed sentimentalists. They’re wickedly good at building up characters you love to hate. ... When you combine this bubbly soap opera material with amusingly lively scenes of Will (Chris Carmack), Avery, and Gunnar getting together to form the band you didn’t know you’d always wanted, Nashville seems to be going out with an enjoyable blast.