Scott Von Doviak

If you’ve stuck with the show all this time, however, this is your reward: a conclusion that’s thematically rich, often exciting, and as satisfying a wrap-up to the series as one could hope for under the circumstances.

City On A Hill is watchable enough, with strong production values and some great location work, and it’s possible that the show will find its footing after a shaky start, as Billions, its predecessor in this Showtime slot, did. In its first three episodes, however, it’s far too dependent on what has come before.

Although it boasts more star power and a slightly higher grade of production value than The Brave, it also saddles its characters with the sort of personal travails that are meant to humanize them but generally only function as over-familiar padding.

The Brave is refreshingly free of obligatory domestic baggage. Its thrills are generic, but at least it stays focused on the mission.

Get Shorty isn’t in much danger of challenging Justified as the best TV adaptation of Leonard’s work, but as comfort viewing in the dog days of August, it gets the job done.

An attempt at fusing those two approaches, the 10-part hybrid series American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story weaves archival footage, new interviews, and dramatic re-enactments into a shoddy tapestry.

By the end of the fourth hour, Six already feels like a feature film that’s been padded to meet an eight-episode order. It’s diverting at times, but nothing you haven’t seen before.

The air leaks out as the season approaches its conclusion, with the final few hours consisting mostly of repetitive showdowns and reversals.

Without giving anything away, the series has subtly tweaked King’s ending while still delivering on its emotional impact. 11.22.63 is sometimes a bumpy ride, but the destination is ultimately worth the journey.

The only outside voice to place these stories in a larger context is a narrator given to portentous statements about our lives becoming gigabytes of data uploaded to the cloud. The subject matter is worthy of the docuseries treatment, but Dark Net is a shallow wade into the deep web.

That whiff of commerce would be easier to take if the new material were more compelling, but every second of screen time devoted to the crunchy, pleasant enough single “Trouble” takes away another opportunity to hear that sandpaper voice on the music that really matters. Still, there’s enough of the latter to make Under The Influence worth a watch, even if it sometimes seems that Richards will still be around a hundred years from now to tell the tales.

Public Morals is a handsome production that could benefit from more variety; half the scenes unfold in smoky saloons, and the washed-out cinematography favors browns and yellows to a distracting degree. Its story is engaging enough on a comfort-food level, but its themes are spoon-fed.

Penn’s film is far more compelling when it sticks to the history lesson and stays out of the dump.

The whole production is airless and stagy; the sound design is so bad, you can hear the actors’ voices echoing off the sound stage walls. Olympus evokes the unreality of a high school play, but it isn’t going for campy laughs like the Sharknado movies.