Orphan Black has the same plain club soda flavor you get in most cable action dramas now, but I have to say that I’m enjoying some of its fizz.

Da Vinci’s Demons breezily and capably finds a balance between amusing wit and dour drama.

Guest has assembled a worthy and adept ensemble of oddballs. But it remains to be seen if the story itself will catch on.

It’s a well-meaning, good-humored, hospitable hour of television, reminiscent of the nascent days of cable reality shows in the early 2000s, before everyone figured out that ratings success meant being nasty, famous and selfish.

A solid prime-time soap with a burnt-crisp soul.

The earnestness comes in pretty strong doses, but it might be good for what ails you.

A large supporting cast helps Vegas appear to be compelling and classy. And then CBS lapses into its old habit, as Lamb and company squander all this intriguing potential trying to solve their first of many cases.

It's an adrenalin-doused premise that is handsomely executed, but it feels like we get to Defcon 2 way too fast.

There is absolutely nothing new about anything seen here and yet Arrow has nice aim.

The results are, of course, compelling but also assiduously sterilized.

It isn't brilliant television, but everyone in it seems to be giving it their all--even the corpses.

Darabont and his cast excel at conjuring up a taut social study, but let the horror scenes fall oddly flat.

The Event is an intentional mess, daring you to go wherever it thinks it's going. Within the first five minutes, potential viewers will have to make their own personal choice: Am I up for this?

I'm slightly more taken with Fox's sweeter absurdedy, Raising Hope, though I still mourn the original title: "Keep Hope Alive."

Circus has no difficulty finding all the usual, romantically enthralling ideals contained within circus life, which unfortunately causes a lot of the series to feel predictable.

Public Speaking often seems to be trying to relaunch the Fran Lebowitz brand, 25 years past its expiration date. It feels like the kind of movie that old friends would make about an old friend. Which is precisely what it is.

Though deliberately and even artfully paced, Lights Out also feels protracted. It has difficulty establishing momentum in its first few episodes, even with a smattering of intriguing subplots and story lines, and no one character exerts that intangible ability to make us keep watching.

The new episodes push the saga in a few initially intriguing directions, but the cast keeps expanding into an overpopulated mishmash of disparate story threads that no longer weave together as a whole.

An intriguing but often clumsy new movie about the making of the TV show.

Too Big to Fail has momentum and a certain wonky remove, but is too epic in scope, as Gould's script struggles to match the breadth of the original journalism while the actors try to convince us that they understand all their lines.

While Web Therapy is certainly clever and occasionally funny, it lacks both the nerve and verve of "The Comeback."

Meant to celebrate innovation and entrepreneurial can-do spirit, Quirky instead eerily reflects the vapidity of the American economy and employment picture, where ideas trump labor and success is measured by top-level paydays instead of actual toil.

Detailed, but not terribly illuminating.

For its epic investment, Living in the Material World still feels like only part of the story.

Luck is suffused with brilliant acting and amazing scenes, but in a few unfortunate ways, it remains impenetrable almost until its last hour.

Scouted gives the first impression of merely being a show about models, it turns out to be a watchable session of human sacrifice lite.

There is something to like in Alcatraz's smooth momentum. The show has a spirit that comes through in spite of the flavorless cheese crumbles piled atop it.

A sharply-made if slightly off-putting reality series that follows different advertising agencies each week as they compete for new accounts.