For the most part, this is the Playing House you’ve either come to love or ought to be catching up with as soon as possible.

The new Gong Show, even with the unfunny Tommy Maitland, is a bit more fun than those other attempts [such as The Match Game and To Tell The Truth] at revival.

The GLOW team--that are walking clichés who gradually become somewhat filled-in creations. The weakest parts of GLOW occur when the action stops to trace the backstory of this fighter or that one--in other words, when GLOW is most like OITNB. It’s best when the show is exploring the complex friendship between Ruth and Debbie, or whenever anyone is bouncing off of Maron’s director Sam Sylvia.

A solid reimagining of the Stephen King novella of the same name, The Mist is an intriguing new example of scary TV.

I found the crimes too similar to a dozen recent TV whodunits, and Campbell’s solemn croak an irritating affectation.

The whole party-scene setting, complete with sneering guys with chains and women in brightly-colored wigs, is apparently intended to make you gawp at its carnal adventurousness. Instead, like the rest of Blood Drive, it’s as painfully boring as watching someone hit his fingers repeatedly with a hammer in an attempt to shock you.

The conversations are conducted via a Russian translator, and you have to be in the mood to read a lot of subtitles to engage with Putin and Stone’s policy discussions, but that small effort is well worth it. There are light moments here and there.

I liked Claws’s sun-baked Florida setting, and the way the cameras capture the difference between the inside warmth of the nail salon versus the harsh ugliness of store-front life outside. And Nash is really excellent, rendering Desna in all her tough, vulnerable, shrewd complexity. The writing of the show needs to become as complex as that character.

Kelly, making her debut as an NBC host, marshaled her trademark steeliness, but it was no match for the insults (“Do you even understand what you’re asking?”) and the weaselly tactics of the KGB master spy. ... The fact that Sunday Night spent as much time rolling in the African mud with elephants (in a report about elephant poaching) as it did with Putin suggests how slim the pickings were in the editing room. Kelly filled up the rest of her debut by turning it over to other correspondents.

As drama, the show is inert. After watching four episodes, I realized I’d been watching constant variations of the same narrative arc: Comedian campaigns to get stage time at Goldie’s. Pause for subplots about other comics’ personal lives. Back to Goldie’s for a performance, during which the comedian either “kills” or bombs, after which he or she is just as miserable as when the episode began.

In the three new episodes I’ve see, the show too often makes the laughs secondary to its progressive messaging.

The atmosphere feels looser, more wild and daring. ... [Michael] Kelly’s performance [as White House Chief of Staff Doug Stamper] continues to be subtle in the midst of a show that doesn’t much care about subtlety. That’s certainly true of Spacey’s ever-more-broad performance, and Wright’s near self-parody of a woman who wears her power like a suffocating mask.

There are a few coincidences in the final hours that make the plotting strain credulity, and the second-to-the-last episode feels as though a big chunk of it was cut and pasted from previous seasons and leftover editing-room footage in order to reach the assigned 10 hours. Lumbering along, dragging family history along in a way that slows down its thriller storytelling, Bloodline contains too many instances of a character saying some variation on the line, “When’s it going to end?” or “How did we get here?”

Beautiful and puzzling, funny and exciting.

Three seasons in, Kemper’s performance has become remarkably nuanced for such a slapsticky, cartoonish creation, and Kimmy Schmidt herself is starting to look like the indomitable figure that the title’s “unbreakable” was always meant to signify.

You don’t have to be rich to feel the agony of Madoff’s victims, and Wizard shrewdly transcends the the-rich-are-people-too genre by making Madoff’s family drama seem universal.

Although it’s nicely scruffy around the edges, it’s essentially a gimmick show with not enough funny lines to make Martin’s sonorous narration appealing after you listen to him for more than 15 minutes. Tolman is very good, but you walk away from the show thinking she really could have done better than this as her post-Fargo project.

The performances of Hahn and Dunne are strikingly good, all the more so given the emptiness of so much of their dialogue. Their rowdy domestic fights achieve effectiveness almost entirely through this duo’s energetic and witty delivery, not the actual content of what they’re saying to each other. As the series proceeds, it becomes more predictable.

Ansari clearly wants to explore a wider bandwidth of emotion in the new season of Master of None. His far-reaching efforts to achieve this are admirable, if not always effective.

Anne with an E both stands apart from the 1985 Anne and connects to it in its openhearted eagerness. McNulty gives an exceptionally deft, nuanced performance that is the equal of any adult performance I’ve seen on television this year. Beautifully shot, and full of marvelous supporting performances, Anne with an E is a fresh version of Anne of Green Gables that newcomers and cult fans can enjoy equally.

Slapdash and one-joke-silly, The President Show would not seem to have much of a future as an ongoing enterprise.

Many individual scenes are excellent, but the whole thing, based on the half-season Starz made available for review, doesn’t knit together.

Back for a third season, Catastrophe continues to be one of the most incisive and funny portraits of a marriage on television. Or streaming services.

Moss’s performance is perfect: at once contained and open, withdrawn and bristlingly aware. ... The Handmaid’s Tale can stand on its own as a gripping drama; you don’t need to apply overlays about Trump-era conservatism or, say, parallels to the Duggar family to find its portrait of a women under duress moving.

A delightful surprise, Great News immediately becomes one of network television’s best sitcoms.

The challenge for Valley in its fourth season was to somehow parallel the nonstop innovation that occurs in the real-life Silicon Valley while retaining the elements that have made this comedy a success--primarily, the constant, abrasive interactions between brilliant losers Dinesh, Richard, Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), Jared (Zach Woods), and Erlich (T.J. Miller). Based on the three episodes made available for review, Silicon Valley has innovated to just the right degree.

This TV series tries to capture some of the adventure in venture capitalism, but it suffers from an excess of aggressive cutesiness. ... The whole thing is alternately tedious and tiring.

As always, however, the pleasures of Fargo derive from the variety of the characters and the clever wordplay they indulge in. ... Coon and Hawley quickly establish the distinctiveness of Gloria’s character: she’s not as polite as Allison Tolman’s Deputy Molly Solverson in season one, nor as tight-lipped serene as Patrick Wilson’s Trooper Lou Solverson in season two.