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

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.

Galavant feels like a slapped-together production that will only confirm the suspicions of heathen TV-watchers who think most musicals consist of flimsy stories padded out with tunes that repeat the plot developments.

[Nic Pizzolatto's] chosen the hardboiled-detective genre as his main menu, and given us three eggs so overdone, you couldn’t even stick a fork in them.... Each of the lead actors is doing superb work: Farrell, McAdams, and Kitsch find distinctive ways of expressing their troubled pasts and difficult present-day situations.

White People turns out to be a well-meaning but toothless exploration of its topic.

The more scenes there are between Rabe’s agent Claire Bennigan and her new partner, Jessup Rollins (Revolution’s Derek Webster), the better the show is.... It’s best whenever the Drill-chatting kids are onscreen, with young Kylie Rogers particularly skilled at being unnerving.

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.

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

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.

I have to give Marling and Batmanglij credit: I don’t usually have much patience for humorless, convoluted hooey like this, but their narrative pacing, and some of the performances ... are enthusiastically committed and effective.

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 story lacks much in the way of momentum other than the downward spiral of too much booze, too little creation of art. Z: The Beginning of Everything is a spiffy soap opera, but not much more than that.

The opening night of this three-part miniseries sets up a standard genre premise: Aliens contact Earth.... These productions [The Expanse and Childhood’s End] suggest there’s now more to Syfy than Sharknado sequels, so that’s encouraging.

Overall, this seems as though it will be one of Syfy’s most engaging new series as the channel continues to get back into the hardcore sci-fi and fantasy genres.

Despite its quaint picturesque town backdrop, The Casual Vacancy is an ugly little piece of work, filled with bitterness, sniping, selfishness, and cruelty. There is no character other than Barry who seems remotely appealing or interesting.

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!

A warm family sitcom Sex&Drugs is not. Neither is it a very funny sitcom.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

The Astronaut Wives Club frequently doesn’t seem to know what it wants to do.

The new AHS is, alas, mostly an exercise in style. Its flimsy plot, at least this early in its game, is something left over from a bad Ross Macdonald novel.

They [Duchovny and Anderson] slip back into their roles with a gratifying conviction, if not quite enough to make you forget their recent prominence in Californication or The Fall or Aquarius or Hannibal.... The new X-Files hour is fine for what it is, but it lacks the kick of minty-freshness, in favor of the musty tang of mythology.

The atmosphere feels looser, more wild and daring. ... [Michael] Kelly’s performance [as White House Chief of Staff Doug Stamper] continues to be subtle in the midst of a show that doesn’t much care about subtlety. That’s certainly true of Spacey’s ever-more-broad performance, and Wright’s near self-parody of a woman who wears her power like a suffocating mask.

Horgan and showrunner Paul Simms, clearly working closely with Parker, who’s one of the show’s executive producers, have constructed Divorce so that it feels at once inevitable and surprising.

The jokes are difficult to locate.