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

Playing House is a cheerfully unhip show made by people who are very hip to the sharp edges of comedy.

Longmire is in fine, tight-lipped-verging-on-surly form.

It’s all very disturbing and creepy. It’s also not new.... The A&E special might therefore be viewed partly as an attempt to get ratings by recycling already-heard allegations. On the other hand, there’s also a sense in which we cannot hear these dreadful tales enough, so that the memory of them can live on in people other than the victims.

It’s usually the case that television procedurals that start concentrating on the heroes’ private lives make the rest of the show go soft--sentimentality creeps in. So far, thanks to the crisp, dry performances of Noble, Miller, and Liu, Elementary avoids that danger quite nicely.

It’s completely engrossing to witness Norman’s blossoming psychosis, which is frightening in a non-horror-story manner, even as Norma’s prickly personality provides Bates with regular, welcome moments of unexpected funniness.

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.

I like Donovan best when it’s more of a crime show, but I’ll take this version for the intermittent rewards it yields regularly.

SDRR places itself in the awkward position of having created--when you fold in John Corbett’s Flash--some likable characters (well, maybe not Johnny, but that’s the way Leary likes it; he’s a preening antihero to the end) who remain in search of the right vehicle to take them to another level of excellence.

Legends of Chamberlain Heights does have an engaging visual palette, a good soundtrack from music supervisor Erykah Badu, and enough cleverness beneath the dirty jokes to make it worth keeping tabs on.

Younger never stays bogged down in one theme, or with one character, for long. Foster is, as always, glowingly convincing as Liza, and the show never lets us forget that what this character--and by implication, this series--is fighting against is.

Against the odds, Jane the Virgin has managed to sustain the premise that began the show--a variation on a telenovela for The CW network--with an admirable degree of inventiveness. Satire on television just isn’t supposed to last this long, let alone continue to be so resourceful and clever.

All in all, not a great episode, but a savage and a useful one.

Oaks remains assiduously small-scale, and that only works toward its charm. (Compared with ABC’s blasting ’80s sitcom The Goldbergs, Red Oaks is a masterpiece of low-key discretion.) The pacing is sometimes tediously slow, but for the most part, Oaks is cozily welcoming.

Hunted’s premiere wasn’t very suspenseful--it was like an episode of Undercover Boss if the bosses had to keep moving all the time. The voiceover narration is a problem: While it’s a necessary element of the show, needed to introduce the huge cast of “characters” and orient a viewer in the geography of the fugitives, it also lends a cheesy, basic-cable-reality-crime-show air to the proceedings.

There are a few coincidences in the final hours that make the plotting strain credulity, and the second-to-the-last episode feels as though a big chunk of it was cut and pasted from previous seasons and leftover editing-room footage in order to reach the assigned 10 hours. Lumbering along, dragging family history along in a way that slows down its thriller storytelling, Bloodline contains too many instances of a character saying some variation on the line, “When’s it going to end?” or “How did we get here?”

For the most part, this is the Playing House you’ve either come to love or ought to be catching up with as soon as possible.

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.

As it is, writer-showrunner David Hollander has certainly crafted, last season and this one, an absorbing melodrama, aided a great deal by directors including John Dahl, who does terrific work in the second and third episodes.

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.

Herskovitz and Zwick are not damp-eyed sentimentalists. They’re wickedly good at building up characters you love to hate. ... When you combine this bubbly soap opera material with amusingly lively scenes of Will (Chris Carmack), Avery, and Gunnar getting together to form the band you didn’t know you’d always wanted, Nashville seems to be going out with an enjoyable blast.