Toward the end of the premiere, Remini is shown saying she’s hearing the same stories “over and over”--that the abuse and harassment former members are subjected to have similar traits. Unfortunately, that’s not much of an incentive to keep watching her series, which even during the first hour becomes a little repetitive. Nevertheless, Remini comes across as a sincere crusader.

The entire enterprise is sentimental and predictable, which goes without saying. What pulls it all together is what pulls together everything Dolly Parton touches: heartfelt emotion, un-ironic portrayals of modest sincerity (Nettles and Schroder are particularly effective), and a gift for turning treacle into musical gold.

Overall, the pacing of the new Anne is rather slow, but not so much that it ruins the underlying heartfelt emotions that make just about every variation on Anne of Green Gables irresistible.

The show works as a comedy, as a satire of the way certain people live now and of the true-crime genre in its search for Chantal. Search Party’s half-hour episodes zip by so quickly, you’ll probably binge on them sometime during the upcoming holiday.

A tremendously moving documentary.

Each individual hour of The Affair holds your attention, and perhaps it’s best to just keep watching before deciding whether the overarching narrative is cohering in a satisfying way.

Some of the best aspects of A Year In The Life are the ways the four episodes continue, and deepen, the show’s richest themes.

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

Letty may be a hot mess, but she’s an essentially decent person--why, she even listens to self-help tapes to try and psych herself into leading a better life. But if you let the show carry you along--especially into the strong second episode, directed by Carl Franklin--you may find yourself rooting for these antiheroes.

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.

[A] brutally crude dramatization of the crime and its aftermath.

Morgan and director-producer Stephen Daldry make the show engrossing both as history and as a drama about family ties.

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.

A sub-Mad Men piece, filled with trite characters and anachronistic dialogue.

I found Bell to be one of the least likable protagonists in a prime time series in a while, which is really saying something in a season that has given us Notorious and Bull. ... Mulroney, not one of the liveliest of TV leading men, doesn’t just bring gravity to his role, he weighs it down with cement blocks.

It’s aimed at millennials yet making fun of them constantly, and aimed at McHale fans while putting the star in his least-flattering light.

None of these characters is particularly happy or remotely satisfied with his or her station in life, and in a lesser show, they’d be depressing downers. But thanks to the writing of show creator Ray McKinnon, these are people who strike you as folks you know, or whom you may be yourself.

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

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

The whole thing comes wrapped in music: a couple of typically clever original numbers, and incidental touches such as a novel use for Scott Joplin’s ragtime touchstone “The Entertainer.” Even the show’s theme song undergoes a re-think; as Rebecca explains, it’s “an emotional thesis statement for myself.” It’s this kind of self-consciousness--tart and pointed, yet not excessively vain--that gives Crazy Ex-Girlfriend its lift.

All in all, it’s a season of Black Mirror you’ll enjoy if you like your sci-fi/fantasy/horror laced heavily with social commentary. Me, I wish the messages were ladled on with a lighter hand.

There isn’t much to laugh at in this production, which has taken its arch irony and presented it with an earnestness that works against the nature of the material.

At its best, the TV show has a bit of a Hitchcock feel (the doomed romance of Vertigo) and an even stronger pull toward Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock homage Obsession (1976). At its weakest, Chance is melodramatic.

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.

As Eyewitness proceeds, there are some credibility-stretching coincidences and relationships that are revealed that you might find difficult to accept without rolling your eyes--some of the plot strands tie together rather too neatly. But Nicholson is terrific, and if you’re in the mood for a bleak mystery in the same general area of The Killing or Top of the Lake, Eyewitness is worth a look.

[The movie] does drag at the beginning and the end. The middle material, however, dramatizing the assassination attempt and its aftermath, is engrossing.

Miranda sings badly with great gusto; she is witheringly sarcastic to people even though we know she has misunderstood what they’ve said. It’s a very impressive, thought-through presentation by Ballinger. I admire it, but I also didn’t find it funny.

The problem with Water is that it keeps promising revelations that are constantly withheld, as though we might not keep watching if the show tipped its hand about what all this dream investigation is really about.