Joel Keller

Sure, the new Punky Brewster is still a sitcom aimed at younger viewers. But it’s got a warmth and sweetness to it that feel genuine. And it’s smart enough to deal with Punky as she is now, not trying to make her into some grown-up version of her 8-year-old self.

There were some very funny moments, but they mostly involved the supporting characters (more on that in a moment). The connection between Ginny and Georgia (and, we guess Austin, but he’s just stuck in cute-kid-land for the entire first episode) needs to be warmer and stronger for us to completely buy in.

Assembly Required is a fun competition show, though it lacks some of the detail that the truly mechanically-inclined might want to see. But it’s made more fun by the presence of Allen and Karn.

It doesn’t look like it’s going to follow the traditional path that other Superman series have, and that’s just fine with us. Just as we like seeing Clark and Lois as harried parents, we’re also happy to see Superman battle some different enemies for a change.

Even though Beartown takes its first episode to set things up, it does a lot of showing instead of giving a lot of exposition. That’s a good sign that the series will make for a well-paced drama.

Allen v. Farrow is a fascinating deep dive into a case that has been all over the news media for almost 30 years now, even if it’s admittedly a one-sided account.

Devil May Care is a funny commentary on social media, religion and people’s views of Hell.

Tell Me Your Secrets is a bleak show that withholds information in order to ramp up the mystery, but to the detriment of a coherent story.

It’s A Sin is an emotionally resonant look at how the young gay community in London lived their lives with the constant threat of AIDS over their heads. The cast has great chemistry with each other, which will help strengthen their stories.

Despite its flaws, Amend: The Fight For America is a very informative docuseries about a piece of our Constitution that is the most misunderstood and overlooked, especially given its importance to how we live our lives in the U.S.

The way that Lightfoot has led the viewers down this path is intriguing.

The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song is a well-paced, well-researched look into how impactful religion in the Black community has been, stretching back to the earliest days of our country’s history.

Kenan Thompson makes for a strong center to what looks like will be a warm family sitcom. It has some pacing issues, but by the end of the first episode, we were confident that they would be smoothed out.

Young Rock starts off well and it feels like it’ll settle in to a nice family vibe once it gets into a groove with its format. And as much as we like Johnson, it will get even better when we see less of The Rock.

In trying to make this sprawling narrative TV-friendly, a narrative momentum has been lost, with too many characters and too many timelines and situations going on at the same time. The three leads, Patel, Hewson and Green, all do good jobs with their roles, but the show just feels like it’s going to wander in the wilderness like the delirious Anna before it figures out where to go.

While we saw some flashes of that potential in the first episode, we’re not sure how hard the show will strive to take advantage of those flashes.

We liked Men In Kilts: A Roadtrip with Sam and Graham because Heughan and McTavish aren’t trying to be brotastic or outshine each other. They’re two buddies on a roadtrip — albeit a bit of an overscripted one — and that comes across well on the show.

Hip Hop Uncovered has found a great angle to make the history of hip hop fresh again. It doesn’t hurt that the filmmakers get perspectives from so many big names about the history of the genre and the power brokers who made it work behind the scenes.

The scripted visuals here fill things in quite well because Berlinger keeps them weird and odd, like the hotel itself. ... Considering the complexities of the Lam case, plus the Cecil Hotel’s history, no one can claim that Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel is padded out. We’re actually wondering how they’ll cover everything in 4 episodes.

Latifah’s empathetic performance makes The Equalizer extremely watchable, as does the rest of the cast. We just hope that the cases Robyn McCall gets get better as the season goes on.

Your enjoyment of the series will depend on if you want to go on that ride with Johan and his crew, as well as watch the flashbacks that Maggie reports to Johan. We thought the first episode moved along well; despite the fact that we didn’t really get to know the group of Winterers very well, aside from Arthur, Maggie and Annika.

While The Snoopy Show isn’t the Peanuts comeback some diehard fans might want, it’s still fun to watch Snoopy, Woodstock and the gang hang out together, even if the episodes are more kid oriented than usual.

The Long Song hinges on the relationship between July and Caroline, and both Lawrence and Atwell’s performances meet this challenge. Atwell is terrific as the benign but awful Caroline, and Lawrence matches her as the whip-smart July.

Despite the fact that there are some very funny and weirdly satisfying aspects of Fake Famous, it somehow seems incomplete. ... Instead of trying to find new people willing to go with the experiment, he essentially concentrated on Dominique leaning into the experience. Yes, the social experiment still worked, but we would have liked to have seen more examples of it working than just a single person.

We Are: The Brooklyn Saints is designed to be heartwarming and inspirational, and Valdez hits the mark on both.

The first hour of The Lady And The Dale is a bit slow, but we know it’ll pick up once we get into the story of Carmichael’s marketing of The Dale and how it all came crashing down.

We grant you that the first couple of episodes of The Investigation will be frustrating to watch, given what you know about the Wall case. But seeing these cops and prosecutors make their way through Madsen’s lies to get to the truth will be interesting to watch.

The show is off to a great start. ... Tudyk’s performance makes Resident Alien work, but there’s a quirky-enough world around Alien Harry that the show should be more than a one-note joke.