If Daniels, Strong, and showrunner Ilene Chaiken are feeling pressure to maintain the show’s massive-hit status, it doesn’t show in the enjoyably scattered yet propulsive season premiere.

Familiar faces like Beau Bridges, Fringe’s Michael Cerveris, and Loudon Wainwright III pop up, intriguingly. All of them give themselves over to Soderbergh, who stages the action with an efficiency that is itself frequently beautiful to behold--he makes a murky murder mystery ring with dramatic clarity.

Lively, action-packed, and occasionally quite funny.

The show is very smart.

The new season pushes Adam Driver’s Adam and Jemima Kirke’s Jessa into a fraught relationship from which no good (for them) can come, but is interesting to watch--such a clash of acting styles those two project! And Girls continues its valiant attempt to integrate Zosia Mamet’s Shoshanna into the group in a believable manner. It’s doing this through off-beat ways that may actually end up working.

The season premiere had a lot of table-setting storytelling--at once self-recapping the saga and pointing it toward its future--but it did so with a satisfying forthrightness.

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

It’s got the sunny colors and optimistic energy of The Flash, a bright streak of feminism coursing through its storyline, and charming, star-making performance by Melissa Benoist as Kara Jor-El, aka Kara Danvers, aka Supergirl.

The filmmakers grant Durst his humanity, allowing us to see the charm, and occasional flashes of humor, that animate the man when he sometimes emerges from the fog of good fortune. In the two episodes I’ve seen, The Jinx makes good, sparing use of dramatizing some of the moments Durst describes.

American Crime does a good job of using the police-procedural framework to give viewers a structure that’s familiar and compelling. But Ridley makes sure that that structure is also capacious enough to let the actors stretch out, and, at least over the course of the four episodes made available to critics, this yields at least two superb performances.

Cranston carries the movie past its occasional biopic clichés and leaves you feeling appropriately ambivalent about Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Humans is a clever piece of work.

Irritating and fascinating, The Slap is unlike anything else on network TV.

Falk has made us care about the characters in a way that allows them to behave badly, even cruelly, without having the audience lose sympathy for them. You watch this hour premiere and wait eagerly to see what the heck is going to happen to Jimmy and Getchen next week.

If Bee can sustain the tone she presented in this premiere episode, Full Frontal is going to be an exhilarating pleasure.

Three seasons in, Kemper’s performance has become remarkably nuanced for such a slapsticky, cartoonish creation, and Kimmy Schmidt herself is starting to look like the indomitable figure that the title’s “unbreakable” was always meant to signify.

F Is For Family is an engaging portrait of a suburban family in the 1970s.

There is so much quick-fire dialogue and subtle physical comedy in Togetherness, the four stars sometimes seem like a full-functioning comedy machine.

The pilot episode is pretty much a non-stop pleasure, packed with funny scenes and big, billowy musical numbers.

There is, periodically, a kind of daringly reckless, Lucille Ball-like slapstick physicality that Farmiga brings to the role, and it contributes a welcome lightness to the show’s often grim proceedings. By contrast, Highmore’s exceedingly subtle, adroit work is slowly filling in the portrait of psycho-Norman at a perfect pace for a weekly television series.

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.

Every one of the three episodes made available for review hums along at a swift pace, dropping revelations right and left--no political pun intended.

This frequently jaw-dropping documentary by director Alex Gibney, drawn largely from the book of the same name by Lawrence Wright, demonstrates vividly how a cult can spread among people searching for something greater in their lives, some advantage over others, some grand answer.... At times threatens to get swallowed up in the loony-land it wants to analyze, it helps a great deal to have regular check-ins with Wright.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is super-clever, features a winning performance by The Office’s Ellie Kemper, and moves like a well-oiled joke machine.

Its narrative moves very slowly in the three episodes made available to critics, with a third-episode revelation that anyone who’s seen a thriller before will know is coming way before it registers with the folks on-screen. The show has atmosphere aplenty--that’s one excellent quality it shares with Mickle and Damici’s Cold In July; Hap and Leonard could use more of that film’s tightly-coiled suspense.

[Davies and director Tom Harper] reduce, expand, or toss out numerous plot lines and characters, all in the service of heavy-breathing romance and big-spectacle battle scenes in a kind of young-adult-novel depiction of Russian families caught up in 19th-century tumult.... Old pros such as Jim Broadbent, Stephen Rea, and Brian Cox are around to lend the soap opera proceedings some gravity.

Loaded succeeds as a likable show, even if it’s one that takes a bit too much self-congratulatory pride in having the boys fail.

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.