Manhattan

This is the best new show of the summer.

The series is stronger and more fully realized through four episodes of season two than it was at a comparable point in season one.

In a TV world with so many choices, Manhattan is at least worth seeking out, to see if its kind of tense smartness appeals to you.

WGN America's bold new period drama Manhattan goes even further [than AMC's Mad Men], eschewing the romantic veneer altogether in a gritty story of scientific mavericks operating in extreme circumstances.

Every time the 1943 of Manhattan begins to feel like 2014, it returns to the nostalgia of movies like “The Right Stuff,” where brains and grit make the peace, back to a time when America trusted its fate to the smartest guys we could find.

hat's tough on Manhattan is that things really are substantial, which means the show can find itself at a moment of dramatic excess very quickly.... And yet that's what Manhattan is going for, and it often succeeds, particularly in the second episode, as the emotional, personal side of things starts taking hold.

Manhattan is awfully overwrought, stocked with personalities as volatile as the radioactive isotopes they're trying to tame. Its melodramatic tone makes it resemble Lifetime's Army Wives more than it does A Beautiful Mind.