While we get an origin story, it’s not drawn out, and right from the start, Murdock is fighting crime. The fighting is particularly well-staged.... The dialogue, however, could use some of that snap. The exchanges between Matt, Foggy, and Karen aim for the sort of brisk funniness that was a hallmark of shows these producers have worked on, including Buffy and Angel, but it’s mostly strained stuff. Actually, the purely plot-driven lines are more amusing.

The anti-chemistry between Gad and Crystal, though played for laughs, doesn’t often result in them. Instead, my interest was held by the opportunity The Comedians provides to think about why there’s such a widening gap between Crystal’s kind of big-gestured, boisterous comedy style and Gad’s quieter comedy of sweaty desperation.

C.K. doesn’t even seem to be placing much value on eliciting guffaws during the stand-up segments that used to give his show a jolly lift at the beginning and end of each half-hour. Interestingly, over the course of the first four episodes I’ve seen, the warmest vibes emanate from Pamela.

As always, this episode of Mad Men had entertaining moments.... Weiner wants you to realize that, over time, a wiseguy like Roger inevitably becomes insufferable. The problem is, removing such fun from Mad Men only makes the overall experience of watching Mad Men more joyless.

Wolf Hall makes for wonderful television in part by resisting the current trends in wonderful television.... It’s every bit as good as Downton Abbey, and when it comes to moody shrewdness, Wolf has it all over Mad Men.

It’s as though this show wants to set up hurdles for itself to overcome. Happily, it does. Much of this is due to Foster, who radiates so much eager energy, you have no trouble buying the premise of the sitcom.

This show is guided by sitcom pros, but it doesn’t feel like an old-pro show at all. It doesn’t go for easy or cheap laughs, and most of its scenes don’t follow the usual sitcom trajectory--instead, they take odd twists and turns.

Rendered without much embellishment and acted with firmly controlled vigor, Killing Jesus, a TV adaptation of the bestselling book by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, is a fine retelling of the story of Jesus Christ as a historical figure.

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.

Deceptively loose and shambling, Big Time is one of those shows--like the show it follows, Workaholics--that’s going to quickly attract a cult following. Get in on it now.

Corden did a terrific job of showcasing all his talents, including singing a ballad at the end of this first night. He’s well on his way to being a nightly crowd-pleaser whom you may be talking about the next day.

Bloodline is well worth your time.

One Big Happy is a loud, frantic sitcom so eager to please, you may want to avert your eyes.

A charming and even, yes, inspiring new series.

At his best, as is frequently on display here, Harmon knows how to overload a scene with references to everything from dinosaurs to Lawnmower Man, and still keep the action moving.

Powers gives you the slam-bang super-hero action you want, as well as the hard-boiled tone many cop shows aim for and seldom attain.

Cuse and Tucker (the latter also worked on True Blood) do a good job of translating the deeply unsettling miracle at the heart of this show.

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.

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

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.

I hope [Arquette’s] getting paid a heckuva lot for striding through this new hour of televisual malware.

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.

We don’t even get away from those awful homages to Edgar Allen Poe that used to stud the show’s Joe Carroll scripts--the new season contains murderous rhymes with terrible scansion such as, “While you lie/More die.” Written in blood, of course.

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.

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.

The Underwoods--usually robots of ambition, subsisting only on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches--engage in sex at a moment that would not inspire lustful feelings in more ordinary folk. It’s touches like this that keep the viewer of House of Cards off-balance, eager to fire up the next episode in the Netflix queue. The third season of House of Cards comes up with some formidable foes for Frank Underwood.

The infernally clever, multiple-Emmy'd producer Bertram van Munster has found a way to make even a dating-game theme interesting.

Really, if you need a watchdog group to tell you to stay away from a show lets people air their steamy details while moist perspiration clings to silk pajamas left over from Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion closet, you might be gullible enough to enter... the Sex Box!