Louie is back, as raunchy, candid, and hilarious as ever.

The network has risked its own reputation for cutting-edge, genre-busting shows by churning out a sitcom whose main joke is how derivative, unfunny, and unconvincing it is.

The Newsroom is timely, well acted, and big-hearted, but offers few surprises.

A lean moral thriller, Inside Men considers the core impulses of such justification, and draws out severe implications with considerable skill.

In its first season, Love in the Wild was thoroughly mediocre. But any improvements this year are sadly negated by the presence of McCarthy.

Despite its early dependence on Western and Gender War clichés, Longmire shows potential.

Weight of the Nation encourages viewers to feel responsible for their own lives and to make informed choices.

As White Heat covers so much historical ground--and offers a range of aging makeup effects--it suffers on occasion from a lack of humour.

In its focus on such details, the show finds humor in the contradiction between the staff's renowned arena and the petty ways they get things done.

The first episode is not a courageous start, despite good acting from the ensemble cast, generous location shooting, and a quirkily realized context.

With its precisely drawn characters, winning performances, and frank, well-observed humor, Girls is a knockout.

The show's formula looks to be this: the silly plots swirl, the brokers scheme, and the minions toil, but in each episode, Liv finds a moment to chat with one of these wise, powerful, and inevitably troubled women. In these moments, Scandal is slightly less tabloidy and soapy, and slightly more beguiling.

The new episodes present an almost a too intricate meditation on power. Game of Thrones demands that you pay attention or be left behind.

It's more subtly, and more forcefully too, a quest for understanding, specifically an understanding of how the world works.

The show's historical bread-and-butter is accompanied by a thin dramatic gruel, for the most part.

Frozen Planet recycles some material from previous films from under the same umbrella (I'm pretty sure those duck-hunting wolves were in Life) as well as covering territory very well-trodden by other films.

Despite pacy editing, superb action choreography, and location shooting across Europe, the whole turns out to be yet another re-run of that updated Western, 24, which pits an arrogant outlaw protagonist against friend and foe alike.

Herzog listens and interjects his own helpfully perverse insights.

Amid this seeming disorder, Jason Isaacs breathes a wry life into Britten, as a man who slowly feels himself accessing levels of consciousness and perception he never imagined, even as his psychiatrists label them "illness" and his work partners question their relevance.

The special effects won't keep you up nights, the transformations and the blood remain un-frightening. Instead of such visceral sensations, the show reveals what's human in monsters and vice versa.

Doomsday Preppers can't seem to help occasionally taking a jab at the undeniable eccentricity of prepping, or generally making light.

This unchallenging adaptation of Chris Bohjalian's bestseller wishes it could be American Beauty. Or maybe Desperate Housewives.

The River plainly evokes Lost.

If Smash lacks the benefit of Aaron Sorkin's hyper-literate and unmistakable dialogue, it follows Studio 60's format, observing the producers, writers, and actors who collaborate on a show, particularly what happens backstage.

For these all-too-brief moments of sheer visceral exhilaration, all of the related backroom machinations, self-destructive manipulation, and blithe dishonesty of the characters seem completely justified.

So far, its mix of spirituality and science, familial and global struggles, is galvanizing.

The performance and the script's stretches (stick around for Peterson's climactic strip search) are less convincing than campy.

On Freddie Roach [is] Peter Berg's extraordinary six-part HBO series.