The drama is engaging, but fans of the book should prepare for a wildly different story.

The idea of different chronological variants of the same character wandering the same timeline would be a forbidden paradox in most time-travel tales. But The Time Traveler's Wife embraces it. Because highly emotional moments in his life act as a kind of magnet for Henry's temporal tumbles, there are certain moments—the awful ones, mostly, like the death of his mother—where there are as many as 20 versions of him looking on, all as dumbstruck with horror as they were the first time they witnessed it.

It's more of a generational collision over the meaning of sex and relationships, disquieting and discouraging regardless of which side of its generation gap you're from, but surprisingly engrossing.

As a critic, I get paid to watch TV shows, which is a lucky thing for Apple TV's new series Shining Girls, because for its first two and a half hours, it's nearly unwatchable, even though it starts with a reasonably enticing premise: a couple of reporters trying to track down a serial killer. Slooooow, confusing and riddled with what-the-hell moments, it moves at the pace of a snail on Quaaludes. And then, the snail gets a shot of crystal meth. Shining Girls is an immensely entertaining show, if you have the time and patience to wait it out.

Explosive and appalling, 61st Street tears off its mundane outer wrappings to reveal foundation garments of pure steel.

Always weird, sometimes annoying, but frequently fascinating, Outer Range has Yellowstone's same sense of a cowboy family unaware that it has lived out its time—but in this case, the encroachment is not being done by modernity, but something antediluvian that's returned for a possession it left behind.

It should also be noted that Minx is almost certainly the most penis-friendly show in television history, though HBO's teen-boinkfest Euphoria is providing some stiff (heh heh) competition.

With the storyline frequently repetitious and almost entirely incomprehensible, it seems that only headhunters and professional sadists will likely manage to maintain long-term interest in That Dirty Black Bag.

As the shows progress and they begin mucking around with their hairstyles, difficult morphs into near-impossible and all the doppelganger gimmickry makes it feel like you're sitting through every scene twice. Which, as any good minimalist can tell you, is about 1.5 times too many.

In the long run, it's a good bet that NBC's new crime drama The Endgame is going to prove infuriatingly terrible. But for now, it's electrifying. It's the crack of television, except you don't need a pipe, just a remote.

Even if you've never watched Dateline NBC—but more especially if you have—NBC's miniseries The Thing About Pam is irresistibly entertaining.

What's for sure is that if you like the Reacher books, you'll like the Reacher TV show. The blend that marks the books—of brute force and dry wit, of rootlessness and personal loyalty, of animal savagery and human decency—is present and accounted for.

Quite the opposite of American Auto's sheer looniness, Grand Crew seems intent on redefining the word "tepid."

Like Gasteyer, the rest of American Auto's cast—including Harriet Dyer (The Invisible Man) as a promiscuous publicist, Jon Barinholtz (Superstore) as a corporate heirhead and Tye White (NCIS: Los Angeles) as a bemused assembly-line worker yanked up into management so there will be at least one person there who knows something about cars—is uniformly hilarious.

It has an underbelly sufficiently dark that grown-up Kirsten's hands sport a generous number of the tattoo equivalents of gun-stock notches, keepsakes of her capable work with knives. There's also a pervasive feeling that someone—or something—is watching. And what's that mysterious comic book to which Kirsten keeps consulting as if it's a training manual?

Watching it will definitely give you some painful 1960s and 1970s whiplash.

Like the history from which it springs, Glória is taut, tight and terrifying.

Harriet the Spy is probably better described as cute, though the kids' novel on which it's based was strange and arguably a little disturbing back in the day.

It's sometimes soggy and silly, sometimes sharply insightful; sometimes a politically correct sledgehammer, sometimes waspishly funny. One thing that seems certain is that it's far more ideologically attuned than its predecessor. The original version certainly had a political bent, but only in a broad, traditionally sci-fi way: ruthless totalitarians bad, smiley-faced anti-totalitarians good. The new show is far more specifically tethered to the woke politics of 2021.

What makes New Blood worth watching is the return of a couple of grisly old friends. Hall and Carpenter may be playing their characters the same old way, but that's as memorable as ever.

Queens is undeniably a soap opera—a highly entertaining one—but it's also a wry and often endearing commentary on both the wisdom and the decrepitude of advancing age.

If we ever have a Scopes trial on the existence of devolution, Legends of the Hidden Temple is going to be Exhibit A.

Ghosts is more cute than funny. Though it must be given credit (if that's the right word) for breaking the broadcast-TV barrier on a particular euphemism for fellatio, which the ghosts use frequently without any awareness of its modern American significance. Now, on to the rusty trombone.

This CSI is indistinguishable from all the rest: The same spectacular camera zoom and splashy skyline photography. The same disturbing obsession with corpse porn.

The shark-jumping occurred in Happy Days' fifth season. But a critic who waits five years to declare a shark jumped these days probably won't have a show left to declare dead; three and a half seasons is now considered a healthy lifespan for a TV series. So let's give mad props to NBC's La Brea, which vaults the Selachimorpha in precisely nine minutes when it debuts next week.

But mostly the problem with Our Kind of People is its silly parlor-game sensibility.

It's very funny, rather charming and … well, GOOD.

To my amazement, it's funny, slightly daft, and wonderfully contemptuous of not only the reality genre but the entirety of television. Where else would you ever see brother-and-sister twins dry-hump one another during a dance tryout while a producer screams to his assistant, "Call research and see how incest plays in the Midwest!"