While the upcoming season is uneven--there are a few awfully wobbly moments in the saggy middle hours--the series is well on its way to going out in a manner that will have its fans sweetening their cups of tea with salty tears.

The new AMC show is packed with rigorously choreographed and slicingly edited action scenes, and it builds a mythology that combines elements of Asian martial-arts movies, American Westerns, film noir, horror, biker flicks, and nighttime soap operas.... One big problem with Badlands is its punishingly dour tone, utterly devoid of humor or any fleeting moments of lightness.... I just wish Into The Badlands was more fun.

Scorsese and Winter and a whole host of talented episode writers and directors including Jonathan Tropper (Banshee), S. J. Clarkson, Debora Cahn, and Adam Rapp labor mightily to bend you to the will of Richie Finestra--to see and hear the music the way he does, as full of endless innovation and possibility--but too often, Vinyl traps you in a familiar cycle of sex and drugs and rock & roll.

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.

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

The imagination of the show is all front-loaded, in the conception of the characters, yet what they actually DO when they are met by Renautas Corp is tiresomely predictable: they engage in yet another chase scene.

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

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.

[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.

No one is ever going to say Fuller House is great TV, but as a nostalgia item, it will probably amuse its original, now grown, audience for an episode or two.

Hannibal is the most radical enterprise on network television right now.... Hannibal is also one of the most hilariously ridiculous shows on TV. The fussy perfectionism of Hannibal Lecter, from his impeccable suits with jaunty pocket squares to his smirking murmurs of polysyllabic nonsense, is screamingly camp while lacking the wit of truly accomplished camp.

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 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.

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.

The anti-chemistry between Gad and Crystal, though played for laughs, doesn’t often result in them. Instead, my interest was held by the opportunity The Comedians provides to think about why there’s such a widening gap between Crystal’s kind of big-gestured, boisterous comedy style and Gad’s quieter comedy of sweaty desperation.

Although it’s nicely scruffy around the edges, it’s essentially a gimmick show with not enough funny lines to make Martin’s sonorous narration appealing after you listen to him for more than 15 minutes. Tolman is very good, but you walk away from the show thinking she really could have done better than this as her post-Fargo project.

The puppetry and however the heck they film these creations display excellent technical artistry. Alas, The Muppets arrives with two flaws: rather less funny, and with too much Miss Piggy.

I found the crimes too similar to a dozen recent TV whodunits, and Campbell’s solemn croak an irritating affectation.

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.

In general, Knock Knock was pleasant, open-hearted, but far too staged to really take full advantage of its hook: being live TV.

Scenes of cage-match violence are regularly inserted to break up the boring office scenes of people sitting across from each other at desks, jawboning about corporate strategies. The result makes the future seem like a more extreme version of the present, which, in turn, is simply depressing.

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.

With an hour that spends much of its time focusing on people chatting about what they’re doing now and what they should be doing in upcoming scenes, Fear The Walking Dead is in danger of putting Chris Hardwick out of business: This whole episode of Fear is itself like a slightly soggier version of Talking Dead.

The first couple of episodes were directed by Todd Holland, whose work on Malcolm in the Middle reminds you that he knows how to be clever with broad material, but here, the scripts fail his talent.

The show is well-staged; it’s just that there’s not much of a show.

A grim test of endurance, Game of Silence wants to do honorably by its subject matter while also luring you in with lurid shocks. It’s a combination that cannot hold itself together.

It’s very clear from the dialogue, pacing, and tone that Doubt would really like to remind you of still another CBS show--The Good Wife--but, sorry, it’s nowhere in the same league.

Over the first five episodes made available for review, the show--created by Peter Mattei with producers including Peter Tolan (Rescue Me) and Paul Giamatti--amounts to a hill of beans. Beans with a lot of gassy verbiage.