Hennessy has the feistiness the lead role requires, and Miguel Ferrer bears watching as her tense, neurotic supervisor. Too bad the first couple of cases were too easily cracked.

Bottom Line: Good beat, weak drama.

The premise of this one is about as dumb as you can get.

Even though I didn’t approach it with a genre fan’s enthusiasm, I will allow that this remake offers its share of scares.

King’s characters inspire indifference—except for the ones who are actively annoying—so you’re unlikely to care that some of the ghostbusters wind up dead. The author has a cheeky cameo in part 2 as a pizza delivery man, but instead of wasting his time acting he should have thought up a satisfying ending. After six hours of Rose Red, it’s truly scary to contemplate that the story may not be over. Bottom Line: Bring on the wrecking ball.

This four-part series adapted from Stephen King short stories starts off with a must-see performance by Oscar-winner William Hurt—the same kind of funny, ferocious, uninhibited turn that gave such a live-wire jolt to A History of Violence.

Director John Power establishes good pacing, as the mounting suspense alternates with scenes of banal normalcy and campy humor. The action is spread around on a solid supporting cast that includes Joanna Cassidy, E.G. Marshall, Allyce Beasley, John Ashton, Cliff DeYoung, Robert Carradine and Traci Lords...The thriller is like an attenuated, more pastoral version of the original 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But once it gets its hooks in you, you’ll be back for the conclusion the following night.

For a scary movie, this is incredibly banal. In fact, the events surrounding fateful Flight 29 are a crashing bore.

Entertaining. But is it worth eight hours of your attention? Not unless you’re laid up with a bad flu bug you just can’t seem to shake.

If the musical element seems this strained in the pilot, when the vastly talented Randy Newman is the composer of all of the songs, one dreads to think how bad it will be after the show has settled in for a few weeks and is struggling for viable melodies.

So far the show is biting, funny, touching and surprising. In short, it's an absolute delight, and possibly even better than the landmark first season.

The series nails everything that NBC's Smash failed to do with the world of Broadway theater last year, providing a rollicking backstage look at the crazy, temperamental people engaged in artistic expression.

A fun, body-flinging, old-fashioned epic.... As Kublai Khan, British actor Benedict Wong gives an impressive performance, one of the best of the year: You absolutely believe his ruthlessness, his power and his calculating thoughtfulness. As Marco Polo, on the other hand, Italian actor Lorenzo Richelmy, who looks like a more lyrical Emile Hirsch, mostly has to be put up with.

It wasn't perfect by any means--switching between live singing and all those filmed ads killed just about any theatrical energy and flow well before the three hours were up--but the production was colorful and glitch-free. Allison Williams of Girls made a much more committed Peter than Carrie Underwood did a Maria von Trapp in last year's endless Sound of Music Live!, and Christopher Walken's extremely peculiar Captain Hook was a triumph.

As a raw police procedural, Gracepoint thrives thanks to legitimately unsettling twists, sharp revelations that focus our attention on new suspects. But it's in Carver and Miller’s competing worldviews that the show finds something more substantial to work with.

With many clichés coming straight from romantic comedy films, A to Z gets slightly cheesy at times, but Feldman and Milioti's easy chemistry makes their banter believable and, well, downright adorable.

The highlight of the show remains newlywed actress Lana Parrilla, who continues to pepper her Evil Queen with just the right amount of realism to make her deliciously wicked deeds seem justified, but Frozen is just the thing that has gotten Once really moving.

It actually improves upon the successful formula by downplaying any romantic entanglements, which, at times, have weighed down the leads of Rhimes's other shows.

In all, black-ish is Everybody Hates Chris meets Modern Family, but not quite as funny as either. Well, not yet, at least.

The premiere episode of Madam Secretary, for the time being, suggests that the show is very much the little sister [to The Good Wife].... But Madam Secretary, in which Téa Leoni plays the newly appointed secretary of state, deserves to hang around long enough to formulate and declare itself.

Not all of Gotham is as successful--a side plot involving Gordon's girlfriend Barbara Kean (Erin Richards) has yet to find its footing--but this dark (and cinematically shot) series will feel right at home as the lead-in to Fox's similarly toned Sleepy Hollow.

Red Band Society, which could turn out to be one of the best new shows of the fall, is like that, constantly catching you unexpectedly.

Philip Marlowe meets Moonlighting—with a passing nod to The Odd Couple—In this delightfully inventive new detective show.

Unless several characters get more interesting in a hurry, hungry tyrannosaurs will have to provide all the excitement.

Soul Food is inconsistent, but it whets the appetite.

It's still an unabashed throwback—what folks used to call a shoot-'em-up.

Shift is competent but useful mostly as a reminder to stay healthy at all costs and avoid this sort of place. [9 Jun 2014, p.34]

The drawback to Catch Fire is that we aren't yet interested enough in the backup characters. For now Pace is reason enough to watch this on whatever TV, laptop or mobile screen you prefer in the digital age. [9 Jun 2014, p.33]