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.

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.

This is the kind of show that’s not going to make the big pop-culture impact of the series that precedes it--Girls--but it’s a worthy dispenser of pleasure.

Fortunately, Broadchurch, created and written by Chris Chibnall, still excels most frequently as a character study--to a notable degree, of all its major characters, who are sketched with vividness and, in almost every case, sympathy and poignance.

At its best, Battle Creek reaches for the witty whimsy of another out-of-the-way-location CBS series such as Northern Exposure. But most of the time, Battle Creek just seems like an only slightly jauntier police procedural than the ones that overrun network TV.

London Spy proceeds at a languid pace that will either draw you in, entranced, or repel you with tedium. I was drawn in, yet not quite entranced, but the series gets both better (it always helps anything when Charlotte Rampling shows up) and more flawed as it proceeds.

China Girl takes a few plot twists to keep the murder mystery going, but it becomes obscured by the constant insults and injuries suffered by Robin. ... Moss gives a terrific performance, but it’s not enough to keep this Top of the Lake afloat.

All in all, there was a lot of talent laboring heroically in The Wiz Live! to enliven material that just didn’t come to life very often.

The return of Will & Grace on Thursday after an absence of 11 years is pretty much a success. If you liked it before, you’ll probably be pleased with the new episodes, which are well-executed and excellently performed.

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.

Carefully crafted and respectful of its source material.

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.

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.

The effect of the repetitive, lurchingly-paced first couple of episodes is to frequently reduce the previously excellent performances of Sheen and Caplan to a collection of tics.

The latest version of The Tick is very enjoyable; it’s smart and visually imaginative.

After two hours of Agent Carter this week, you're left with lots of mumbo-jumbo that doesn't add up to much more than an excuse for Peggy Carter to strain her nylons while jumping off moving cars.

I’m not completely sold on The Last Man On Earth as an ongoing enterprise, and I wonder how long audiences are going to stick with it. At the same time, I admire Last Man’s spirit of adventurousness, and hope the show can make good on what is a far bigger conceptual challenge than most sitcoms ever attempt.

The three best Mirrors are “ArkAngel,” “Hang the DJ,” and “Metalhead.”

Quarry is a startlingly good, absorbing new show to sink down into, deeply.

This season of Archer has a great look: this cartoon version of film noir features richly dark blues, greens, and black, and the pacing has the hypnotic pull of a dream turning into a nightmare. Of course, this being Archer, it’s also loaded with lots of double- and single-entendres, and energetic vulgarity.

[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.

The degree to which the show succeeds will probably rest on how many viewers tune in and like what they see in Hall’s brash, energetic performance.

It’s a show that’s structured like a sitcom but frequently works like a low-stakes drama that just gets more emotionally expensive. After you’ve watched all 10, Love stays with you like a memory you can’t--or don’t want to--shake.

Right now, the new series looks both promising (especially good this night: Angela Bassett and Adina Porter sharing the same role as Matt’s sister, a police detective clinging to new sobriety) and limiting: How many times can Roanoke slam a door and make us jump?

For a premiere, this Late Show was exceedingly polished yet loose-limbed.

The new season of Inside Amy Schumer is very funny, and, just below its surface, very thoughtful.

The main subplots of Bosch gather power as they proceed.

Donovan is managing to walk a fine line between hardboiled entertainment and over-cooked melodrama.... it’s sometimes as good as almost anything else out there.