Phillip Maciak

While plenty of Nashville is compelling, detailed, and beautifully acted, plenty of it feels boilerplate.

The series manages to be both entertaining and self-reflexive, populist and purposeful, and that's a rare thing in and of itself.

The New Normal is a nominally progressive comedy with more gay jokes and regular old racism than Gallagher's stand-up act.

True Blood has never been a show with a conscience, so it's awkward watching it try to get one in a hurry.

Mistaking vulgarity for comic edge and very thinly stretched punnery for wit, Veep is less a trenchant satire about contemporary politics than it is a relentlessly mean-spirited spectacle about crummy people.

The series isn't jaw-droppingly hilarious, but the writing is self-assured and full of punchy, Tweetable one-liners; its thin skein of a concept is enough to lend the proceedings some narrative structure, but not enough to make it feel programmatic, and its central performances are confident right out of the gate.

Life's Too Short is occupied with nonsensical and barely developed sketch ideas as well as Extras-style celebrity cameos, Gervais and Merchant among them.

Downton Abbey remains an extremely reliable television show. The appeal of the series is its pastness, its portrait of a completely foreign culture from a land before time.

[A] starry-eyed, badly acted, occasionally stirring series.

Asking viewers to simply look his characters in the eye, Milch has created an infuriatingly but genuinely moving drama.