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

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.

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.

Hopkins and Wright are excellent, as is Ed Harris as a guest who’s grown so comfortable in his role-playing of the Gunslinger that he says he rarely leaves Westworld. Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton--playing an innocent farm girl and a jaded brothel madam, respectively--do very well in the context of Westworld’s inherently problematic sexual element. ... But much of the necessary scene-setting--of happy guests arriving and discovering the joys of shooting and screwing to their hearts’ content--becomes repetitive quickly.

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.

In general, the further Shooter strays from Phillippe’s character, the weaker the show becomes.

The structure of most OITNB episodes--in which one character is brought to the fore and we see flashbacks to that person’s past history, details about how that woman or man was shaped and became the person she or he is--has by now, in the new season, become predictable, either comfortingly or tediously so, depending on your degree of engagement with the series.... It’s all pretty pleasant, even if the jokes are often corny.

The first episode of Gypsy is a tough slog, what with a dallying pace and Jean making silly voice-over pronouncements . ... Allow yourself to be taken in by Watts’s wily strategy, and Gypsy may, at its best, be viewed as an interesting character study.

Marcella starts off well, but pretty soon its pace is impeded by a number of subplots and the abrupt introductions of characters whose role in the overall plot is either unclear or irrelevant. The series has a familiar enough cop-show structure, so if you like Friel’s performance, you’ll be carried pretty far along into the season.

Odd Mom Out is uneven but ultimately likable, and Kargman and Buckley have a nice chemistry as husband and wife.

The first night of Madoff is both entertaining and instructive.... But the first night ends on a breathless cliffhanger, and Thursday’s concluding night resolves that cliffhanger in a way that made me feel cheated of drama. And the TV movie only proceeds to slide further.

The Sinner is at once intriguing and frustrating.

Animals is intriguing, and if you’re in the right mood, its leisurely pace and slacker rhythms can pull you in for a while.

Brewster classes up the proceedings considerably with comic timing the rest of the cast ought to study.... Grandfathered doesn’t have too many solid punchlines--it gets by on charm, which Stamos possesses in abundance.

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.

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.

The performances of Hahn and Dunne are strikingly good, all the more so given the emptiness of so much of their dialogue. Their rowdy domestic fights achieve effectiveness almost entirely through this duo’s energetic and witty delivery, not the actual content of what they’re saying to each other. As the series proceeds, it becomes more predictable.

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.

I liked Claws’s sun-baked Florida setting, and the way the cameras capture the difference between the inside warmth of the nail salon versus the harsh ugliness of store-front life outside. And Nash is really excellent, rendering Desna in all her tough, vulnerable, shrewd complexity. The writing of the show needs to become as complex as that character.

The writing is uneven.... But then there are numerous other fine touches.

The tropical backdrop looks great--it’s like watching an episode of Survivor with a bunch of hyped-up macho actors (in other words, exactly like an episode of Survivor, minus Jeff Probst). But you have to put up with a lot of macho bluster and silliness, with dialogue that sometimes shades over into Three Stooges territory. (“Why were you running?” “I was running because you were running!”) If your tolerance for tough-guy bravado with flashes of violence is high, you might enjoy running with these mad dogs.

The whole concept--fleshed out by producers Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg, and Marc Guggenheim--has the potential for amusement, especially in its mix of motivations.... [But] There are elements that weaken the show. The dialogue is stilted (“Grant me the permission to change the timeline just this once!”), the acting, with the exception of the fluid Garber and the amusingly tough slouching of Lotz, tends to be stiff

It’s warm, it’s goodhearted, it sends out positive messages. What it isn’t is funny.

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.

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.

Halt and Catch Fire doesn’t seem to trust that the viewer will know what it’s talking about.

As good as Anderson is throughout, her Stella suffers from a Season 3 lack of development--we learn nothing about her in this new season that we did not know from the previous two (apart from a couple of small autobiographical details dropped in the final hour). And some characters who had been important to the series--I’m thinking particularly of John Lynch’s cop Burns--recede or fall away in disappointing ways.

The acting remains first-rate. It’s too bad, therefore, that the show proceeds with its various, intriguing subplots at such a slow pace.