The whole production is a beautiful machine, with strong supporting performances.

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

It’s fitfully interesting to see Zellner mount her new defense, but the fact that both Avery and Dassey are still in prison doesn’t exactly make you want to race through the series to witness a triumphant conclusion.

Well-acted and ponderously paced, The Haunting of Hill House would have benefited from less straining for the artistic and more of a desire to jolt its viewers.

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.

The writing as overseen by veteran Roseanne producer Bruce Helford is sharp--the tone is very similar to the 10 years of the original Roseanne you may have watched and enjoyed.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

There are definitely elements of hocus-pocus and holy cow in Castle Rock, as well as scenes of nicely disturbing violence. In other words, just what you both expect and want from a King-based product. What there isn’t, alas, is a lot of forward momentum. The storytelling is pretty logy, taking a long time to make a few points. ... The show has a strong cast. Spacek is superb as Henry’s stepmom. ... Handsomely gloomy, 10-episode project.

Sharp Objects turns out to be everything you might have wanted. And also some things you didn’t know you wanted: This eight-part HBO miniseries is a scary thriller, a Southern gothic melodrama, a serial-killer murder mystery, and a dual portrait of motherhood and sisterhood--all of it combined with a sleek ease that rarely lets any effort show.

There are subplots about Plum’s job in a Brooklyn coffee shop and a police detective investigating the militant group’s crimes that, two episodes in, don’t seem particularly promising. But Nash’s performance is awfully good, and Margulies manages to bring her own stamp to a role that seems inspired by Meryl Streep’s in The Devil Wears Prada.

Turns out, Camberbatch and company have done quite well. ... Patrick Melrose gives you the star at his Cumberbatchiest, while also exposing an audience that might otherwise never know them to the superlative St. Aubyn books.

Dowd’s performance is absolutely essential to keeping this show from tipping over into excessive self-seriousness. You’ll notice that whenever Handmaid’s Tale shifts away from Lydia and Offred, and back to the Canadian border and the subplot involving Offred’s husband, Luke (O.T. Fagbenle), and Moira (Samira Wiley), the show becomes deadly drab and dull.

The voice-over commentary that’s most valuable comes from musicians such as Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty, who deeply understand Presley’s music and motivations, and critics who’ve thought long and hard about Elvis, like Nik Cohn and writer turned producer Jon Landau. ... You’ll have your own moments of discovery. Elvis works his way on everyone individually.

Westworld, with its florid dialogue and languid self-seriousness, isn’t as much fun as Twin Peaks was. But it’s also easy to see why Westworld is the much more popular show. It’s tapping in to currents in our culture, our feelings that the world has become a far more confusing place, with power struggles that threaten any possible unity or peace. We can’t saddle up and shoot-’em-up, but we can escape and watch others do it for us on Sunday nights.

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.

This film is about the culture of complicity that grew up around Sandusky’s crimes, primarily because no one wanted to tarnish or slow down the awe-inspiring triumphs that Paterno was scoring as the winningest coach in college football. It’s an unusual way to tell this story, but Pacino and director Barry Levinson pull it off, scoring their own, more low-key, triumph. ... It’s a very good performance in a very good film that avoids sensationalizing the crimes in order to explore pain on many levels.

Every one of the three episodes made available for review hums along at a swift pace, dropping revelations right and left--no political pun intended.

The new Roseanne sometimes feels a little stiff--as though it hasn’t quite settled on its tone yet. ... There are numerous laughs in these new episodes (I’ve seen three of them), and Metcalf and Gilbert are very effective in all their scenes. (I’m reserving judgment on Goodman, who thus far seems to be reacquainting himself with the great performances he used to give regularly, as though he feels he still has to work out some of the kinks.)

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.

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.

Jacobs has found a way to play that character in such a way that Mickey is endlessly surprising rather than easily irritating. ... Gus has always been just as deeply screwed up as Mickey is. In this final season of the show, there’s a reckoning with his own neurotic behavior, and Rust shows himself fully up to this challenge as an actor. Love also delves more deeply into its supporting cast.

Once the opening hour catches us up on Jessica’s past and sets the stage for the new season, there are some good things here. We see more of the friendship between Jessica and Trish, and that’s good because female pals are still a TV rarity. ... The best moments of the new season are any scene that features the wonderful Janet McTeer as a mysterious new character.

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.

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.

Atlanta continues to be unlike anything else on television.

It’s fascinating to watch the ways these men--and most of the principals were men--gathered information, formed theories and conclusions, and butted heads with one another over plans of action. It’s dismaying to absorb one of this miniseries’ most timely subtexts: that during the most intense time leading up to the 9/11 attack, the American media was distracted by President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Tone is everything for a show like Good Girls--it needs a strong, sure narrative pulse. It needs its own variation on the comic-thriller, its own new take on successful serious/humorous TV shows like Nurse Jackie or Weeds or (they wish) Breaking Bad. Note that all those shows were on cable and you’ve got the reason Good Girls ultimately fails: As a network show, it can’t go far enough, deep enough, into these women’s lives to make us root for them with anything like intensity. Good Girls needs to break bad much more badly than it’s allowed to as part of NBC’s lineup.

The series would certainly benefit from some editorial tightening--reducing its number of episodes to five or six would have made it considerably more exciting. As its stands, Seven Seconds is admirably acted, but it’s a slow grind.

McHale’s place in the culture has been taken up by Twitter. ... On his new show, McHale sorts through some very meager pickings.

Sucks! doesn’t hit the highs of a Netflix comedy such as BoJack Horseman, neither does it take the emotional risks of Netflix’s sorely underrated Love, which begins its final season on March 9. Sucks! has charm and will probably do what it exists to do in a context such as Netflix, which is to provide you with an easy, snackable show that can be binged without making you think too much about what you’re watching.

The material about being a black American is Tamborine’s gold mine, which is probably why it leads off the special, to get you hooked. To be sure, it’s heavy-duty stuff. ... When he starts to discuss the divorce, the roaring energy of his performance ebbs and slows.

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.

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.

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.

A remarkable cast. ... Girlfriends trades on some standard older-ladies-doing-wacky-things humor, but that’s just to put you at ease.

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.

Familiar faces like Beau Bridges, Fringe’s Michael Cerveris, and Loudon Wainwright III pop up, intriguingly. All of them give themselves over to Soderbergh, who stages the action with an efficiency that is itself frequently beautiful to behold--he makes a murky murder mystery ring with dramatic clarity.

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

It is uneven in the extreme. ... With this series and Netflix’s Black Mirror, the sci-fi anthology series is now back as a revitalized genre.

The story is told in reverse chronological order, jumping back and forth, here and there, across the trail of Cunanan’s various crimes--can sometimes seem gratuitously confusing, but once you get used to its rhythm, this American Crime Story has an irresistible pull.

Lightning is distinguished by its instantly distinctive blend of social realism and sense of humor--it is simultaneously the most relevant and the funniest of The CW/DC Comics shows.

Dave is late-period-Dave, wry, amused, and relatively relaxed. Here, Obama is very much the same. ... It’s not a great interview, but it’s a cozy one. The conversation has the easy intimacy that can occur when two famous, successful men have reached points in their lives when they can be slightly less guarded.

Meyers delivered a carefully crafted monologue that took well-phrased shots at Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and Woody Allen, while also making room for Poehler, talking from her seat, to deliver the biggest laughs of the segment with a couple of raucous, mansplaining jabs. ...Sure, some of the chatter was a little bit tedious because of sheer repetition, but it was a higher class of tedium — nobler and more heartfelt, and effective in its fervor and sincerity. Later in the evening, Oprah Winfrey turned her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award into a stirring talk about race and class and history. It was a world-class speech.

World has some terrific set pieces, such as the duo’s sloppy robbery of a gas station, and some dull patches, such as a meeting with Alyssa’s father late in the series that almost drags the story to a halt. But overall, James and Alyssa are ultimately two people we care about, and Lawther and Barden give exceptional, subtle performances.

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.

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 reason 9-1-1 seems even worse than it is, is that it has such good actors performing such awful material. How awful?: Somebody flushes a baby down a toilet!

The three best Mirrors are “ArkAngel,” “Hang the DJ,” and “Metalhead.”

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.

The bulk of Gunpowder is a reasonably exciting costume drama combining history and suspense, with fine performances by Sherlock’s Mark Gatiss as the King’s vindictive secretary of state and Peter Mullan (Top of the Lake, Ozark) as Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest sympathetic to Catesby’s efforts.

A Christmas Story Live! was solid, but it lacked the kind of emotional resonance that makes people want to see the movie over and over.

The whole international-spy thing gets repetitive fast. Kat Foster is awfully appealing as her own sort of intelligence agent whose cover is that she’s Van Damme’s hairdresser--it’s easy to see why the action hero still pines for her. That on-again, off-again romance isn’t very sustaining, however. The show is likable--no more, no less.

This first episode is such accomplished, vigorous fun, I highly recommend that you give it a look. I also guarantee you’ll wince a few times at what Nick goes through, and you’ll be glad he’s now got a chipper Happy in his life.

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.

It’s obvious from the four episodes I’ve watched that Brosnahan is giving a superb performance and that Amy Sherman-Palladino knows exactly where she’s going with the stories she and Dan want to tell. ... Gilmore Girls can wait--wait for Mrs. Maisel to burrow its own distinctive blend of comedy, drama, and romance into your heart and mind.

It’s both binge-able yet also easy to consume one bite at a time. How involved you become in the show depends on how much you’re beguiled by Wise’s charming performance and her character’s informative dialogue.

Ultimately, the sheer pleasure of Godless defeats any reservations you may have about it. Daniels is both hilarious and scary, and he’s clearly having a great time pulling on his scraggly beard as this project’s ultimate villain. And there’s a long, well-staged shootout at the end that is both very-traditional-western and something totally new, because more than half the shooters are women, with guns blazing.

It remains to be seen where Runaways will go when the show really establishes what the powers of these teen heroes are--in these early episodes, it’s all the producers can do to simply sketch in the personalities of what is, when you add in the parents, a very large main cast. Right now, there’s a nice tension here between the ways adolescents often tend to isolate versus the ways they’re forced to come together as a team.

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.

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.

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.

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

Harron has found an original cinematic language to convey Grace’s memories, a dream-like narrative propulsion that carries us along. ... Levi is Alias Grace’s only false note: he seems to have walked right off the set of Chuck without adjusting for the time-period here. Sarah Gadon’s performance is transfixing.

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.

It affirms all the reasons you liked the first Stranger Things, and deepens your knowledge and affection for its storytelling and characters.

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

Too Funny to Fail succeeds in being funny about failure.

There’s not much suspense or any thrill of discovery as we watch Holden and Bill slowly tumble to the patterns in serial-killer methodology. ... That said, Mindhunter is engrossing, and the central performances by Groff and McCallany are highly distinctive and complementary. The whole production has an assurance that’s comforting in the midst of all the unsettling time we spend with depraved law-breakers.

As the series progresses, Loudermilk’s sobriety and his pessimistic attitude toward life are tested, making the character more three-dimensional. He and the show named after him start off interesting and get better as they proceed.

The third season, based on the four episodes I’ve watched, is strong and exciting and moves the narrative along at an invigorating pace.

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.

Even--or especially--if you don’t get the humor in that last one, the country-music knowledge being arrayed before you in Tales From the Tour Bus is sure to both enlighten and entertain you.

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.

The degree to which the show succeeds will probably rest on how many viewers tune in and like what they see in Hall’s brash, energetic performance.

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.

This hour-long dramedy relies heavily on Ritter’s ability to sell its outlandish, at times confusing, premise, and to the degree that it succeeds, it’s almost entirely due to the star’s powers of persuasion over any objective standard.

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.

The return of Will & Grace on Thursday after an absence of 11 years is pretty much a success. If you liked it before, you’ll probably be pleased with the new episodes, which are well-executed and excellently performed.

About four hours into this six-episode series I just wanted to know how it all turned out so that I could be free of these mostly-unpleasant people. That I stayed to the end is a measure of the Williams brothers’ skill as plot-creators, I guess, but it’s also not a huge recommendation.

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.

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.

Young Sheldon has a certain Wonder Years glow to it. The challenge for the show going forward is to keep young Sheldon a believable, likable kid while also emphasizing the eccentric qualities that make him an effective comic creation. From this first episode, it really feels as though that’s not going to be a problem.

[The trip to Israel] As a change-up intended to place the family in a new, revelatory context, it doesn’t quite work: The Pfeffermans just get on a tour bus and kvetch about the same stuff.

The Good Place is very well written, full of good jokes about bees and clowns and clam chowder. But it’s got another layer: it’s also about power dynamics and morality systems--how they shift and mutate depending on how people interact.

It was such a pleasure to sink down into these jokes with Seinfeld, such a treat to be carried along by such a confident professional. It’s rare to be treated this way by any piece of current entertainment; enjoy his achievement here.

Better Things gets better--truer and deeper--when Sam is taken by surprise (as when her ex-husband shows up unexpectedly for dinner, or when a pet dies) or when she’s jolted out of her self-absorption by a parental obligation that yields a small revelation for her. Adlon is very good at depicting Sam in mid-mixed-emotions.

There is both a unity and a contrast between their two comic personas that is sharp here.

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.

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.

That it took eight episodes to get there [Gyllenhaal’s character finally throws off her Candy image to become Eileen, the director of porn scenes from a woman’s point of view] suggests two things: that The Deuce is rather muddled in its sense of purpose, and that this show really deserves a second season, to show us whether the series can take Eileen and her sisterhood into a more complex realm.

Falk has made us care about the characters in a way that allows them to behave badly, even cruelly, without having the audience lose sympathy for them. You watch this hour premiere and wait eagerly to see what the heck is going to happen to Jimmy and Getchen next week.

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.

Thankfully, those voice-overs seem fewer this season, the better to concentrate on the show’s action, which is frequently startling and absorbing.

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.