The glamour in Pan Am may indeed be manufactured--doubly manufactured, given the re-created places and planes--but it's not empty: The show says, yes, this is as good as it looks, and it looks very good

The dialogue has a nice snap, the jokes come from just to the left of where you expect them to, and the players are all first-rate.

The show can be, in odd passing moments, unexpectedly, almost nervily touching.

It's a solid enough formula, and if the writers have overly epic ambitions, they also have a collective eye for detail.

The Fades works.

It works because it's less about who we were then--it's a fantasy of who we were then, really--than about who we are now.

The artfully composed images are both crystal clear and cinematically creamy.

Well made and never boring--the director is Julian Jarrold ("Becoming Jane")--Appropriate Adult is a first-class example of what British filmmakers do well when they are not trying to look like American filmmakers.

It is a suitably complicated and pictorially engaging work of period suburban mystery, with a large cast of characters

The show mines the long-standing tension between those who believe in fate and those who believe in control while holding all strains of outrageous behavior up for both mockery and scrutiny.

[The taped linking] bits feel a little forced compared to the sketches, which are consistently smart and smartly acted and flow easily from ordinary premises to weird conclusions.

You will laugh, you will cry and if it seems a bit treacly, it is.

His style of filmmaking--to obsessively explore his subject from as many points of entry as possible--is the cinematic definition of thought-provoking.

Like the wonderful documentaries of ESPN's "30 for 30" series, The Announcement not only captures a remarkable person and an unforgettable moment, it proves once again the universal appeal and importance of professional sports.

There is a cool cleverness to the show that is both attractive and off-putting; the characters are flawed and hyper-aware of their flaws, the stories so bent on covering every angle of self-examination that there is no real role for the viewer to play.

Even if you don't particularly feel for Selina--you don't root for her, particularly, or against her--there is continual pleasure in watching the actress make her go.

The value of the series, then, is its, well, weight, its relentless attempt to remind us of what we know, to connect many important dots and clear away the emotional and cultural fog that often blurs discussions about obesity, and to offer hope in the form of personal stories, regional projects and past success.

Hatfields & McCoys is a star-studded, gorgeously produced and astonishingly nuanced look at America's most famous family feud.

Every performance here is good--the young actors are remarkable--and though the script sometimes goes just where you would expect it to, the characters seem authentically unpredictable.

Miller is certainly competent and even compelling as this round of newly imagined Sherlock Holmes.... Liu gives her Watson the perfect blend of wariness and admiration--she is clearly brilliant in her own right and while she may be his keeper, she is not his chronicler. And her journey may turn out to be just as interesting as his.

What sets Push Girls apart [from other reality shows] is that these plots, and these women, are actually interesting.

Nashville is big, bold, wildly ambitious and great fun, with top notes of Robert Altman's "Nashville," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "All About Eve."

[Political Animals is] a high-class, relatively naturalistic, behind-closed-doors soap opera that plays in fairly obvious yet also fairly affecting ways with the space between public face and private pain and is made highly watchable by an excellent cast that finds the human among the hokum.

It's hard not to love a show with a comely apothecary, and it's impossible not to love the new season of Grimm.

NY Med is a surprisingly addictive medical docu-series, fascinating as much in form as it is in function. The third in a series of similarly-themed programs prod

As before there is a nice balance between social drama and personal business, the tragic and the comic, exaggeration and authenticity.

Beyond the emotional pull of the individual stories, Get to Work breaks down a certain us/them barrier, showing with painful clarity the holes left by the absence of family structure and education.

Given a boatload of fine performances and an attractive milieu, it remains very much worth watching even when it feels like the writers are depending on your inattention or forcing their characters to act improbably in the service of a puzzle-plot that at times feels held together with string and tape and white glue.