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.

If you love Orange Is The New Black, you’re going to be pleased with the way the new season unfolds. If you’re more skeptical of its ongoing strength, you may feel, as I did, that some of the show’s irritating habits have increased.

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

BrainDead is, overall, a smartly put-together piece of work, but it lacks the sharp sting of political criticism it seems so ardently to want to burrow into your brain.

The problem with Animal Kingdom is that we’ve seen so many dark, gritty family noirs on basic and premium cable, much of the air of menace that hovers over the new show seems like musty air rechanneled from other sources. It also doesn’t help to center the show around J--the character is a blank-faced kid whose reactions are minimally interesting.

Superbly edited and paced, Made in America is one of the best rise-and-fall sagas you’ll ever see on TV.

Casual proceeds from a place of diffidence, of setting up the mildest of jokes and seeing how softly the show can make them land.

UnREAL is as hard-boiled and adventuresome as any male-dominated, gritty, “dark” premium-cable show you’d care to throw an Emmy at. The performances by Zimmer and Appleby are amazingly nuanced and layered, especially for a show whose gimmick, Everlasting, insists upon the superficiality of women’s images of themselves.

The show is beautifully shot and well-directed, and the premiere’s opening scene with Jacob is truly jolting. But the series suffers from the context surrounding it: The netherworld is all over TV, in A&E’s just-canceled Damien, on Fox’s Lucifer, and the fall-TV remake of The Exorcist. As a result, Outcast feels overly familiar, something it shakes only in a subplot involving Kyle’s sister, played very well by Wrenn Schmidt (Boardwalk Empire), who has a haunted past of her own.

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.

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

The new Roots excels in the naturalism of its performances to make the horror of slavery vividly painful--and the resistance to it uplifting--in a way that deepens the tale.

Sir resembles the Shakespeare character he’s playing, and that’s the chief flaw in Harwood’s play--a too-easy irony. But Harwood makes up for it with the crackling dialogue that pushes The Dresser along at a terrific pace.

I didn’t laugh very frequently watching Lady Dynamite, but I was never less than absorbed by it.

The final episode contains clues and answers to mysteries that, when the season ends and you think about it, could easily have been introduced in the first or second episode without any diminishment of suspense--indeed, would probably have resulted in a pleasing increase in suspense. As a languid mood piece, Bloodline is one pleasantly decadent binge. And as I said, Chandler and Cardellini are particularly effective.

Cranston carries the movie past its occasional biopic clichés and leaves you feeling appropriately ambivalent about Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Too much of the show consists of simmering, of waiting for things to happen--kind of like Fear The Walking Dead, come to think of it. Except Preacher is prettier to look at (it’s very well art-directed), and it’s more dry and dusty.

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.

Grace and Frankie has become, therefore, a show about letting go of grudges, being more accepting, and enjoying life--all very good sentiments that surface rarely in most other current sitcoms. Still, there’s the matter of actually being funny, which the show is, most of the time, not. At its worst, G&F goes for that most obvious of current sitcom clichés.

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.

Dreadful creator John Logan has firm control over the series’ mordantly witty, dry tone. He has me hooked again.

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.

Valley turns into the story of a young company fighting for a soul its founders never realized it had. As a result, it gives Silicon Valley a bigger heart than it’s ever had before.

Any fears that the departure of series creator Armando Iannucci would result in a diminishment of quality are immediately allayed. New showrunner David Mandel demonstrates a firm command and light touch in keeping the new episodes centered around Louis-Dreyfus and Selina’s bursts of anger, her deflations of despair, and her reactions to both the stupidity and shrewd mendacity of her staff.

The half-hours made available for review contain some clever lines and concepts, but not as many laughs as last season.

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.

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.

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.