Ellen Gray

A strong supporting cast includes Margaret Avery as her sick and often fretful mother, Richard Roundtree as her father and Lisa Vidal as her producer and friend, Kara. But it's Union's commitment to all the craziness in her character's life (including sex in all the wrong places, with all the wrong people) that's likely to make Being Mary Jane my newest guilty pleasure.

[Mahershala Ali's] take on Hays enhances rather than overwhelms a story intriguing enough to justify the show’s 35-year timeline.

It’s probably not the best news to hard-core Stephen King fans that I like what I’ve seen of Castle Rock, the J.J. Abrams-produced Hulu series that’s set in one of the fictional Maine towns King has so creepily populated. Because I’m the kind of viewer who tends to like the TV adaptations of King’s stories right up until the moment the otherworldly horror really gets going.

Adams--as a woman who has pain written all over her--is the best reason to stick with Sharp Objects as it winds its way, sometimes a mite slowly, through twisted mysteries with deep roots.

Watching a man, even a man who looks terrific on a horse, trying to hold on to what he already has can take Yellowstone only so far. It’s the son who got away who could help Dutton stay interesting, and maybe even teach him something about fatherhood.

The Last Defense is good enough television not to show all its cards in the first hour. That’s also its power.

The thing about newsrooms is that they’re full of characters, and always have been, even before Twitter made us count them. The Fourth Estate gets that and shows the people behind the bylines, the podcasts, and the tweets. ... You might see, yes, how hard they try, but also why--and even, amid their obvious exhaustion, how much fun they have doing it.

For Whom the Bell Tolls covers the things you’d expect, including his years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. But it acknowledges his flaws, including a powerful temper. And it doesn’t skip past some painful bumps in his biography.

You might come to One Strange Rock for its host, Philadelphia’s Will Smith, but you’ll stay for the astronauts. ... The visuals in One Strange Rock, are beautiful, occasionally strange, sometimes even otherworldly. Rock’s true stars, though, are people like Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to command the International Space Station.

Its casting is more diverse, its women more nuanced. Its Robot is amazing. But the story, which I liked better 10 episodes in than I did at the beginning, takes a long time to get off the launchpad.