Beautifully crafted and excellently acted, Casual is well worth checking out, to see if its mood and rhythms fall in sync with yours.

This film is about the culture of complicity that grew up around Sandusky’s crimes, primarily because no one wanted to tarnish or slow down the awe-inspiring triumphs that Paterno was scoring as the winningest coach in college football. It’s an unusual way to tell this story, but Pacino and director Barry Levinson pull it off, scoring their own, more low-key, triumph. ... It’s a very good performance in a very good film that avoids sensationalizing the crimes in order to explore pain on many levels.

Falk and company--they really go for it, whatever “it” it is they intend.

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.

The story is told in reverse chronological order, jumping back and forth, here and there, across the trail of Cunanan’s various crimes--can sometimes seem gratuitously confusing, but once you get used to its rhythm, this American Crime Story has an irresistible pull.

TV Flash continues to be the most satisfying of all the broadcast network adaptations of comic-book superheroes.

Westworld, with its florid dialogue and languid self-seriousness, isn’t as much fun as Twin Peaks was. But it’s also easy to see why Westworld is the much more popular show. It’s tapping in to currents in our culture, our feelings that the world has become a far more confusing place, with power struggles that threaten any possible unity or peace. We can’t saddle up and shoot-’em-up, but we can escape and watch others do it for us on Sunday nights.

Dowd’s performance is absolutely essential to keeping this show from tipping over into excessive self-seriousness. You’ll notice that whenever Handmaid’s Tale shifts away from Lydia and Offred, and back to the Canadian border and the subplot involving Offred’s husband, Luke (O.T. Fagbenle), and Moira (Samira Wiley), the show becomes deadly drab and dull.

Even--or especially--if you don’t get the humor in that last one, the country-music knowledge being arrayed before you in Tales From the Tour Bus is sure to both enlighten and entertain you.

It’s fascinating to watch the ways these men--and most of the principals were men--gathered information, formed theories and conclusions, and butted heads with one another over plans of action. It’s dismaying to absorb one of this miniseries’ most timely subtexts: that during the most intense time leading up to the 9/11 attack, the American media was distracted by President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Fun and clever, with serious things to say about sexism and ageism.

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

This hour-long dramedy relies heavily on Ritter’s ability to sell its outlandish, at times confusing, premise, and to the degree that it succeeds, it’s almost entirely due to the star’s powers of persuasion over any objective standard.

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.

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.

A charming and even, yes, inspiring new series.

The Quad features some strong performances and isn’t afraid to plunge enthusiastically into the genre of nighttime soap opera.

He’s very good at making jokes that are carefully constructed and timed down to the syllable sound like ordinary conversation. He adds to his growing catalogue of acute observations about marriage and raising children, and articulates some differences between middle-aged Louis and his more youthful self.

Here is a series for an American audience that grants us the intelligence to be able to read subtitles, which are deployed to help convey the tart flavor of the various tongues spoken in the show. Combine this with the show’s frequently lovely visuals, and Vikings remains the kind of burly soap opera that appeals to an ever-wider audience.

The Missing is one compelling piece of work, full of what the anguish of having an abducted child does to a family over the years. It’s also a prickly mystery story that occasionally relies on a few too-neat coincidences to pull off its startling conclusion. The performance that ties everything together is Karyo’s.

It’s almost cartoonish in its approach to the sitcom, to an extreme that sometimes pushes it into avant-garde territory: Not only would Daffy Duck understand what Kimmy is up to--so would turn-of-the-20th-century Dada and Surrealist artists. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is Fey and Carlock’s PhD project in comedy.

It’s off to a very good start. Dickens and Curtis and the actors playing their kids (Dillane, Alycia Debnam-Carey, and Lorenzo James Henric) are terrific.... Fear The Walking Dead has art on its addled mind, and is all the better for it.

Even the third episode, which is loaded with a lot of backstory origin material about Quinlan’s past, doesn’t get bogged down. When it’s good, The Strain moves as quickly as those long, creepy tongues that burst out of the strigoi’s mouths to suck your blood.

Descriptions cannot convey the crispness of the writing, and the surprising chemistry that’s already in place among a group of actors with widely differing styles of comedy. Credit writer Justin Adler and director Jason Winer for coming up with an atmosphere and look for Life In Pieces that unifies, rather than fractures, the show.

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.

A rare new sitcom with as much heart and soul as jokes and wackiness, Detroiters is a welcome surprise premiering on Comedy Central Tuesday night.

Last Kingdom is imaginative and amusing, and Uhtred makes for a smart, tough, randy central character.

Beautiful and puzzling, funny and exciting.