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.

At its best, the show does a good job of portraying each slave as an individual with his or her own strengths and flaws, while, on the other side, the whites are also placed in the social context of the times.... There are some jarring touches in Underground. One of them is good: the use of contemporary music by artists such as Kanye West to underscore bristling discontent. But another contemporary trope occasionally takes a viewer out of the drama, as when one character or another sometimes uses phrases that no 19th-century person would have uttered.

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.

A fairly straightforward affair, rejecting subtlety and implication in favor of escape attempts and some body-piercing-by-sword. The hour opted to touch all the Westeros bases, galloping from subplot to subplot in an edition that doubled as a recap of last season.

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 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.

Much of the soap-opera storytelling apparatus that frequently made the series a guilty pleasure rather than a pure pleasure--has been jettisoned. In its place is a more leisurely pace and, at its best, a soulfulness that Nashville has long struggled to achieve.

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.

Any show that refers to the bad guy as “the worst man in the world” may not be terribly subtle, but the brisk pacing and Hiddleston’s regular displays of sly spy trickery and vigorous punches to the soft guts of decadent baddies will really get a viewer’s pulse quickening.

If you’re willing to go along with the show’s carefully conceived aimlessness, it has the pull of a book of inter-connected short stories.

Right now, the new series looks both promising (especially good this night: Angela Bassett and Adina Porter sharing the same role as Matt’s sister, a police detective clinging to new sobriety) and limiting: How many times can Roanoke slam a door and make us jump?

All in all, it’s a season of Black Mirror you’ll enjoy if you like your sci-fi/fantasy/horror laced heavily with social commentary. Me, I wish the messages were ladled on with a lighter hand.

If Time Traveling Bong isn’t as laugh-out-loud funny as Broad City, it has its own, more whimsical and laid-back charms. It’s a nice way to end a few evenings, by sitting back and watching two likable people light up for adventure.

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.

Ansari clearly wants to explore a wider bandwidth of emotion in the new season of Master of None. His far-reaching efforts to achieve this are admirable, if not always effective.

There are times when Snowfall tries too hard for poignant irony, such as setting the scene of a vicious beat-down endured by young Franklin to the breezy beauty of Bill Withers’s song “Lovely Day.” But if you’re in the mood for a dark but sunny, meticulously detailed TV-show-as-novel narrative, Snowfall may draw you in.

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.

London Spy proceeds at a languid pace that will either draw you in, entranced, or repel you with tedium. I was drawn in, yet not quite entranced, but the series gets both better (it always helps anything when Charlotte Rampling shows up) and more flawed as it proceeds.

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

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.

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.

Showrunner-director Greg Yaitanes (Banshee, Quarry) does a frequently fine job of shooting these evidence-gathering sessions with lots of intensity and suspense--this despite the fact that Worthington isn’t really that compelling as Fitz.

House of Cards has opted to diminish its central figure to allow others to emerge, even if that is done strategically, in the hope of consolidating his personal power. Whether that’s a winning strategy remains to be seen when all of the episodes are available to be binged.

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

It’s like an extremely well-acted power-point presentation on what to do, and what not to do, when a sexual assault occurs.

It would have helped, perhaps, if the production wasn’t so drawn out, but rather condensed to a tightly assembled, one-night TV-movie. But at its best, When We Rise achieves the inspirational status it desires, and goes beyond that, to portray the romanticism of rebellion as an exhilarating, desirable goal.

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.

The new Gong Show, even with the unfunny Tommy Maitland, is a bit more fun than those other attempts [such as The Match Game and To Tell The Truth] at revival.