There is both a unity and a contrast between their two comic personas that is sharp here.

Except for Norm Macdonald as the voice of an alien made of what looked like quivering gelatin, I didn’t find much that was amusing about The Orville’s space odyssey. ... From its opening scene with Victor Garber assigning Ed his ship to the final, unsuspenseful shootout with alien enemies, The Orville moved from one lull to another.

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.

That it took eight episodes to get there [Gyllenhaal’s character finally throws off her Candy image to become Eileen, the director of porn scenes from a woman’s point of view] suggests two things: that The Deuce is rather muddled in its sense of purpose, and that this show really deserves a second season, to show us whether the series can take Eileen and her sisterhood into a more complex realm.

Falk has made us care about the characters in a way that allows them to behave badly, even cruelly, without having the audience lose sympathy for them. You watch this hour premiere and wait eagerly to see what the heck is going to happen to Jimmy and Getchen next week.

The show bursts with clever casting and concepts. ... After a few episodes, however, much of the characterization in Cult starts to seem cartoonish and over-drawn. ... In other words, this is the usual AHS/Ryan Murphy pop-culture potpourri.

Thankfully, those voice-overs seem fewer this season, the better to concentrate on the show’s action, which is frequently startling and absorbing.

The comedy here consists primarily of jokes that would not have been out of place on one of those old Cheech and Chong comedy records. ... The rest of the time, it’s strictly sitcom writing at its most rote.

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

Get Shorty is an intriguing, curious new show. ... Get Shorty is a little wobbly in the quality of the writing.

Kelley has made Janey Patterson, as played by Mary-Louise Parker, into a romantic interest for Hodges. This fix is not only needless--that’s one reason Taylor’s Ida exists, as she did in King’s novel: to provide Hodges with some intimate comfort--but it seems both less believable. ... Putting that aside, Mr. Mercedes is awfully good.

Julie and Billy are enthusiastically mean, sarcastic, and lovable--all at once.

As it is, writer-showrunner David Hollander has certainly crafted, last season and this one, an absorbing melodrama, aided a great deal by directors including John Dahl, who does terrific work in the second and third episodes.

Is the show funny? Sort of. It’s certainly charming, in a frequently vulgar sort of way, and well performed by the cast and guest stars.

The Sinner is at once intriguing and frustrating.

Showrunner-director Greg Yaitanes (Banshee, Quarry) does a frequently fine job of shooting these evidence-gathering sessions with lots of intensity and suspense--this despite the fact that Worthington isn’t really that compelling as Fitz.

Room 104 is extremely uneven.

Diana, Our Mother is a very touching and forthright hour spent with the sons and other people who knew Diana.

The show has an occasionally suspenseful twist. (Electrocution in the water: Watch out!) But as it proceeds, Ozark takes way too long to make a few good points and to showcase a few good performances, most prominently Jason Bateman’s.

Issa Rae’s very funny, great-looking HBO sitcom Insecure is back for a second season on Sunday night, and it’s even better--more assured and finely detailed--than its excellent first season.

The show’s regular flashbacks to the Nailer’s time in Afghanistan slow the pace and seem rather war-movie generic. The show is much better when we’re in contemporary times, such as the season premiere’s deftly choreographed shootout in a Frankfurt, Germany, ballroom.

Loaded succeeds as a likable show, even if it’s one that takes a bit too much self-congratulatory pride in having the boys fail.

The season premiere had a lot of table-setting storytelling--at once self-recapping the saga and pointing it toward its future--but it did so with a satisfying forthrightness.

All the stars are as likable and watchable as you might think they’d be, yet the show that they’re in is nearly bereft of humor or poignance. It’s as though everyone signed on without reading a script and, good sports all, just forged ahead anyway.

In truth, the bi-ped hamsters of Big Brother offer a more realistic view of humanity than this unbelievable new disaster-drama series.

For all its frenetic pacing, Will seems wheezily old-fashioned, the umpteenth attempt to attract a young audience to great art by modernizing it--except that Will’s ideas of modernity are a half-century old.

The Defiant Ones works on almost every level: as a primer on the music industry, as gossip, as biography, as a time capsule of the 1980s, the 1990s, and the beginning of the 21st century. Neither Iovine nor Dre is particularly eloquent about their own achievements, but The Defiant Ones does that work for them, excitingly.

There are times when Snowfall tries too hard for poignant irony, such as setting the scene of a vicious beat-down endured by young Franklin to the breezy beauty of Bill Withers’s song “Lovely Day.” But if you’re in the mood for a dark but sunny, meticulously detailed TV-show-as-novel narrative, Snowfall may draw you in.