"I know that there are some disturbing and repetitive shows out there," a cardboard cutout of a side character mentions in Dr. Ken's inexorably humorless pilot. Oh, you have no idea.
Picking up mere moments after last year's cliffhanger - well, after the usual tangential reference to Emma's childhood acting as a foreshadowing of events to come - Once Upon A Time's fifth season does one thing exceedingly well right out of the gate: it wastes no time. A lot of people had issues with the Frozen story arc from season 4A, and, although I don't speak for Oncers at large, I'd say a lot of that had to do with Anna and Elsa's large stranglehold over the A plot that season.
Hotel Transylvania 2 is far off from becoming a staple of the Halloween season, but on its own terms it's a relatively inventive, stylish, and somewhat hectic little movie that should make fans of the original more than happy.
It's hard to be mean about a movie this nice, but that's all The Intern is: cute, endearing, and nice, with no real drama, character depth, or apparent understanding of its own somewhat engaging central premise.
Originally titled simply Oil, ABC's new primetime soap Blood & Oil doesn't garner much distinction from the rest of the television landscape, even with the added noun to its title. That generic name - along with some questionably cheesy advertisements - may cause some to skip the new show, but there's a sort of hidden surprise in its initial simplicity. The show breaks no new ground (or fracks no new ground, as it were), but its world is intriguing, its cast does more than just show up and look pretty and it's got one of the best-paced (if overstuffed) scripts of the 2015 pilot season. Thanks to all of that, Blood & Oil manages to do something its lame moniker fails to: excite.
Coming from someone who has only seen the big screen version of Limitless in random pieces on basic cable, CBS's new-crime-procedural-with-a-different-wallpaper is shockingly deft in doing what it sets out to accomplish. There's a surprising amount of sweetness thanks to a core relationship between loner Brian and his sickly father, and the show as a whole works overtime in catching up anyone who may never have heard of the Bradley Cooper-starring film. All the same, it will hardly change the opinions of those who visibly revolt against those acronym-heavy procedurals that CBS trots out each year, but given the opportunity, there's decent a chance you'll get lost in this world along with Brian.
It's become somewhat of an outlier on a network that's invented a hashtag around Thursday night binge-watching, but returning to Nashville's slower-paced, unpretentious world is something like a comfort blanket, as well.
Simultaneously refined and deliciously pulpy, Fox's mega-hit Empire roars back to life in its second year, with all the brand-specific viciousness and gasp-earning twists fans have come to expect from the Lyons.
Finally, a reboot that works - Heroes Reborn resets its pieces onto the season one playing board with a new mystery, new characters, and new powers that all lead to some fantastically bizarre moments of television.
