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

Okay, I’ll buy into it for the sake of the wonderful acting being done here. Then too, Jeffrey Reiner’s direction is superb, the rhythm of his framing and the cameras’ points of view underscoring without intruding upon the drama.

It’s the way third-episode writers Meredith Stiehm and Alex Gansa set up and execute this latest Carrie psychodrama that gives it the import and narrative propulsion that makes it well worth investing in the Mathison Mental Health Project once again.

The new season of The Leftovers is an exhilarating experience in trying to understand that certain fundamental things cannot be understood.

It wants to evoke that sense of non-stop crisis, and it’s willing to sacrifice believability and good writing in the service of frantic pacing.

The show is very smart.

In general, Noah came across polished and so smiley, he seemed nearly jubilant.

Brewster classes up the proceedings considerably with comic timing the rest of the cast ought to study.... Grandfathered doesn’t have too many solid punchlines--it gets by on charm, which Stamos possesses in abundance.

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.

Don Johnson, who’s worth his weight in gold or oil--anchors the show as North Dakota tycoon Hap Briggs.... You can bet the first hour climaxes with some of the main characters rolling around in oil, punchin’ and brawlin’. But the show could develop its own mythology of contemporary wildcatting.

Quantico is slick enough, and well-enough cast, to probably keep a good-sized audience watching.

The imagination of the show is all front-loaded, in the conception of the characters, yet what they actually DO when they are met by Renautas Corp is tiresomely predictable: they engage in yet another chase scene.

Rosewood still seems like something you’ve watched before. It’s like Burn Notice meets Royal Pains interrupted by Cops.

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.

Ultimately, with its ceaseless meanness and barrage of put-downs, Scream Queens is more exhausting than exhilarating.

The puppetry and however the heck they film these creations display excellent technical artistry. Alas, The Muppets arrives with two flaws: rather less funny, and with too much Miss Piggy.

Alternately bad and laughably bad, Minority Report is one of the few new fall shows that can probably be fairly judged on the basis of its pilot alone: There are so many things working against it, it’s hard to imagine how the show could be better, even if Fox had sent out more than just its first episode to critics.

What keeps the first episode from slipping into absurdity is the commitment to action displayed by star Alexander and creators Martin Gero and Greg Berlanti.... Blindspot could be a good show--nothing revolutionary, but a fun escapade in the weeks ahead.

It’s all very disturbing and creepy. It’s also not new.... The A&E special might therefore be viewed partly as an attempt to get ratings by recycling already-heard allegations. On the other hand, there’s also a sense in which we cannot hear these dreadful tales enough, so that the memory of them can live on in people other than the victims.

I liked that Best Time Ever was big and loud and frenetic and ambitious. I just wish I could have suspended my disbelief for even one segment.

It’s a measure of how confident this underrated-in-every-way show has become that it can confidently separate the two lovers and let Danny carry a completely independent subplot with such comic success.

Everything surrounding the colorfully bloody bastard-execution-ing is grungy soap opera.

Longmire is in fine, tight-lipped-verging-on-surly form.

Once I accepted Project Greenlight’s cynical choice, I have to admit the show became immediately transfixing: It’s always fascinating to watch people who dislike each other in stressful workplace situations.

You’re the Worst proved to be one of the most amusing and unusual sitcoms to premiere last season, and Wednesday night’s second-season premiere lives up to its promise.

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

Created by writer Ben Watkins, Hand of God has the pace of a pulp novel anxious to keep an audience watching, heedless of believability or motivation.

Show creators Chris Brancato, Carlo Bernard, and Doug Miro want to tell two parallel tales: The DEA investigation and hunt for Escobar, and Escobar’s point of view in his ever-increasing ambition, power, and ruthlessness. Narcos is superb at delineating the latter: You really get an understanding of how a poor, not especially charismatic man rose from the rabble to become one of the richest, most feared men in the world.... In contrast to this, the efforts of Murphy and Pena to defeat Escobar are, of necessity, more hit-or-miss.