Mike Hale

The story it all adds up to is numbingly free of surprise or real excitement; its one bid for honest emotion, the inevitable attraction between Reilly and the chanteuse, is a washout. (To put it in noir terms, it’s D.O.A.) “Spider-Noir” does have the advantage of being easygoing and in on its own jokes; that, along with the production design, can lull you into submission. .... What does come through, because of the relative restraint of the performance, is Cage’s inherent likability — the quality he sometimes seems to be running away from. Overall, it’s a pleasure spending eight episodes in his company.

The ordinariness of “The Boroughs” doesn’t mean that there aren’t some time-tested horror-movie ideas kicking around in it — it’s a fairly amusing gloss on the notion that the people warehoused in retirement communities are literally having the life sucked out of them. And while the main characters fall into types like the aging stud and the aging hippie, most of the performers find a little extra personality around the edges.

This Mozart is more of a straightforward working artist, alcoholic and skirt chaser. This makes for a Mozart who is more rueful and sympathetic but not much more interesting, and Sharpe gives a somewhat dutiful performance. .... The revisions have one happy result: Barton’s Salieri is a more nuanced and interesting character, with motivations more grounded in everyday life. Bettany takes full advantage in his meticulously controlled performance; we can feel the rot eating him from within. .... The question his [Joe Barton's] “Amadeus” raises is, why “Amadeus”?

Gadd has a knack for creating appealing, recognizably human side characters. But they can’t make up for the lack of substance at the center of “Half Man.” .... It’s probably not a good sign when the only people you care about in a show are the ones your hero mistreats.

The first few episodes are smart and stylish enough to make the whole package seem surprisingly organic.

Neither the storytelling nor the art has the deep emotional timbre achieved routinely by Ghibli’s master, Hayao Miyazaki, but that’s a wholly unfair standard; that the series bears comparison with the studio’s midlevel work is sufficiently unusual to deserve notice.

“Detective Hole” exhibits the genre’s preferences for sadism, sensationalism and crescendoing gore over plausibility. And Hole himself is kind of a drag, a situation that Santelmann (Ragnar the Younger in “The Last Kingdom”) doesn’t do much to alleviate. But the show is conspicuously polished and nice to look at.

“Shoresy” may have lost some of its rabid comic intensity over the years, but its ribald riffs on brotherly love can still grab your attention in unpredictable ways.

The show cuts between the two tracks metronomically, giving them roughly equal time, and there is a lot of evidence to keep track of; cellphone checkers may find themselves lost pretty quickly. What you can’t miss, however, is how the contemporary story has been conceived as histrionic soap opera. .... The early timeline, by contrast, is rational and reasonably absorbing, a straightforward (if grisly) procedural mystery that is not insultingly silly by the standards of serial-killer drama.

“Rooster” is a mess, but Carell is never less than entertaining in it. .... “Rooster” remains amorphous, though; it tries for a mix of naturalistic prestige comedy and rapid-fire, stylized sitcom and just misses both.