Insecure is a show with great confidence--Rae immediately sweeps you up and carries you along on her journey of false starts, little triumphs, and big disappointments.

Horgan and showrunner Paul Simms, clearly working closely with Parker, who’s one of the show’s executive producers, have constructed Divorce so that it feels at once inevitable and surprising.

The show is no out-of-the-box winner, but it has possibilities to become an intriguing nighttime soap with sparks of electricity.

TV Flash continues to be the most satisfying of all the broadcast network adaptations of comic-book superheroes.

Sasse and Anderson are pretty charming, and I’m curious to see if the show can sustain its premise into a second week.

Timeless works in a lot of timely commentary via the characters of Rufus and Lucy, who in earlier eras, as a black man and woman, are not treated well. Having made such sociopolitical points, the series is also free to become a potboiler adventure, with a lot of frantic searches for both historical figures who need protecting, and for Flynn, who’s out to cause mayhem.

Hopkins and Wright are excellent, as is Ed Harris as a guest who’s grown so comfortable in his role-playing of the Gunslinger that he says he rarely leaves Westworld. Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton--playing an innocent farm girl and a jaded brothel madam, respectively--do very well in the context of Westworld’s inherently problematic sexual element. ... But much of the necessary scene-setting--of happy guests arriving and discovering the joys of shooting and screwing to their hearts’ content--becomes repetitive quickly.

There are times when Luke Cage strains at the confinement of the genres it uses, when its superhero, gangster, and crime fiction subplots seem too familiar, too flimsy, to contain all the drama Coker and his writers want to pour into this show.

Getting any mileage out of Miley and her Bernardine Dohrn-with-a-husky-voice character proves unrewarding. Most of Crisis is spent listening to Sidney and Kay dither about hearing aids, Freudian analyses, and one-liners that sound dusted off from Allen’s decades-old standup act.

Younger never stays bogged down in one theme, or with one character, for long. Foster is, as always, glowingly convincing as Liza, and the show never lets us forget that what this character--and by implication, this series--is fighting against is.

Back and as impressively irritating as ever.

It’s fun but tedious.

The pleasant surprise is that this new Exorcist, as conceived by writer Jeremy Slater, is both well-acted and at times quite disturbing.

Featuring unconvincing dialogue. ... Notorious is otherwise instantly forgettable as soon as each scene is completed.

The dialogue is occasionally overripe (“I’ve been ready my whole life”; “You do this for you!”) but for the most part modestly crisp.

Chemistry is key to a project like this, and Wayans and Crawford have it. Even in the series’ cartoonish exaggeration of what crime-fighting is about (yelling, screaming, and car-chasing), Lethal Weapon has a comic snap that is entertaining.

Wednesday night’s pilot is more of a palette-cleanser than a full meal: It sets up the situation without having the time to see how everything will be digested.

Speechless, created by Scott Silveri, wants to avoids mawkishness and pity so much, it goes way overboard in the other direction, making the audience feel like the cop who declines to chase after Driver when she’s speeding: he finds her so hostile and obnoxious, he says it’s just not worth confronting her.

All the acting is equally good, something you can’t say about most ensemble-cast shows. Basically, This Is Us is a well-designed emotion machine that, by the end (for the record, I freely admit I didn’t see the end-twist coming--you might, because you’re smarter than me), had me eager to see how this is all going to shake down in Episode 2.

It makes for a funny pilot, but the exact quality that made Parks and Recreation such a novel, engrossing series--its exploration of goodness and decency; its rejection of cynicism--is what weighs down The Good Place somewhat. Its punchlines, after a while, seem based on the same set-up: Eleanor bad, Good Place good.

If Making a Murderer, The Jinx, and the first season of the Serial podcast heralded a new era of true-crime stories, this one is tediously told.

It makes a smooth transition to pay cable, one that retains all of the original’s charm and distinctiveness while adding some bigger-name stars into the series’ heady mix.

Each of Fleabag’s six episodes is a tightly-composed variation on her character’s wild, bad-girl humor, and her personal (especially sexual) and professional frustration.

Right now, the new series looks both promising (especially good this night: Angela Bassett and Adina Porter sharing the same role as Matt’s sister, a police detective clinging to new sobriety) and limiting: How many times can Roanoke slam a door and make us jump?

Legends of Chamberlain Heights does have an engaging visual palette, a good soundtrack from music supervisor Erykah Badu, and enough cleverness beneath the dirty jokes to make it worth keeping tabs on.

The War Room introduced us to the concept of corrupting-the-process campaign consultants as image-makers, and in its comic, half-hour way, Documentary Now!’s The Bunker--written with a pitch-perfect ear for 1990s blather by comic John Mulaney--does a fine job of distilling this feature-film message quite succinctly.

Son of Zorn has the feeling of a show that wants to be edgier than it is (which may be one reason creators Reed Agnew and Eli Jorne stepped away from the project once production was underway).

Notaro keeps the show moving along with a lot of low-key funny observations while always allowing for moments of seriousness and even sadness to enter into the mix.