A grim test of endurance, Game of Silence wants to do honorably by its subject matter while also luring you in with lurid shocks. It’s a combination that cannot hold itself together.

Outlander’s appeal remains focused on the interplay between Claire and Jamie, a union of two very different people joined in mutual attraction, lust, and a meeting of the minds. No matter what country they’re in, they’re the duo that’s the twosome with the mostest.

Grim, humorless, and instantly off-putting.

The Detour has already been renewed for a second season, so the show has time to develop into something more interestingly amusing.

Tucked away on Cinemax and by now almost doggedly proud of both its cult status and its utter unpredictability, Banshee remains a pure pleasure machine, at once vulnerable and sturdy, and determined to go out on its own terms, whatever the hell those may be.

With an hour that spends much of its time focusing on people chatting about what they’re doing now and what they should be doing in upcoming scenes, Fear The Walking Dead is in danger of putting Chris Hardwick out of business: This whole episode of Fear is itself like a slightly soggier version of Talking Dead.

To write out episode-themes like this makes Catastrophe sound potentially dreary about marriage equality and parental strain. Trust me, it’s the exact opposite: so exhilarating, so gaspingly funny, you’ll burn through the episodes as fast as you can.

A vivid character study, a tense law-firm drama, and an educational deep-dive for any viewer who’d like to learn the ins and outs of what we researchers call “transactional sex.”

The Path is a winding one--the show has pacing problems, which is to say, it’s awfully slow in many spots. The acting is very good, but too much of the series forces the performers to play one note: grave concern or worry.

[The Catch] is so aggressively Shonda-ed--with fast cutting, split-screening, long romantic looks, and pop music competing with the dialogue in an attempt to boost your energy to keep watching--that it very nearly plays like a parody of a Shonda Rhimes show.

This star showcase does [Melissa George] no favors.... Dr. Alex doesn’t invite favorable comparisons to any doctor with dignity, and I would guess this series will not have a very long life.

I admire the series without being very engaged by it, but I can certainly see why you might get more hooked on it.

The opening hour, premiering Wednesday after Survivor and Criminal Minds--and those are exactly the two shows Beyond Borders combines with appalling cynicism--finds Garrett and his team winging off to Thailand, where a couple of young American women, volunteering on a farm, are taken captive by a demented-looking local. (Given that despicable behavior by foreign populations is baked into its premise, Beyond Borders is, you can be sure, going to be charged with xenophobia or worse by some offended viewers very quickly.)

The Americans does an awfully good job of juggling its numerous subplots.... If there’s a weak spot in the series, it’s that the subplot involving Nina (Annet Mahendru), the Russian KGB agent now in a Soviet prison, seems increasingly extraneous to the show.

Really, it’s only Warburton who’s able to muster the rare amusing moment, and that’s not because of his lines, but rather the way he delivers them, with his unique combination of squints and grimaces and slow-drawl responses.

Bosch is a fine piece of TV work, one of the best examples of how to take what works on tightly-formatted network crime shows and supplement it with some of the looser freedoms of pay-cable crime series.

If you’re willing to go along with the show’s carefully conceived aimlessness, it has the pull of a book of inter-connected short stories.

At its best, the show does a good job of portraying each slave as an individual with his or her own strengths and flaws, while, on the other side, the whites are also placed in the social context of the times.... There are some jarring touches in Underground. One of them is good: the use of contemporary music by artists such as Kanye West to underscore bristling discontent. But another contemporary trope occasionally takes a viewer out of the drama, as when one character or another sometimes uses phrases that no 19th-century person would have uttered.

Watching, you feel as though its story is just familiar enough to seem inevitable whenever it’s not tedious, and its earnestness short-circuits any electrical charge of wit or sexiness.

Damien has moments of nicely spooky atmospherics, but it’s neither scary nor fun, and when you’re dealing with this topic and this character, you have to move in one of those two directions, or you’ll just lose the battle to the devil of tedium.

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.

You’re meant to get hooked in the mystery of Danny and the reactions he provokes. Where’s he been? Who really kidnapped him? Was he kidnapped? Is this Adam the original Adam? Why did one member of the family apparently frame Hank? I can’t say I was very intrigued by these provocative questions, mostly because The Family does such a poor job of dramatizing them in a lively, believable manner.

The first couple of episodes were directed by Todd Holland, whose work on Malcolm in the Middle reminds you that he knows how to be clever with broad material, but here, the scripts fail his talent.

House of Cards has opted to diminish its central figure to allow others to emerge, even if that is done strategically, in the hope of consolidating his personal power. Whether that’s a winning strategy remains to be seen when all of the episodes are available to be binged.

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.

No one is ever going to say Fuller House is great TV, but as a nostalgia item, it will probably amuse its original, now grown, audience for an episode or two.

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.

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.