Television

Critic at large John Powers has speed through both seasons of Jack Ryan, which he says serves up something reassuringly nostalgic.

HBO's new series has plenty of court intrigue, scandals and betrayals, but the script amounts to little more than a historical greatest hits, bouncing from well-known event to event.

Rather than rehash the 1980s superhero comic, series creator Damon Lindelof preserves the original's mood, themes and tricky structure — but uses them to tell an engrossing, totally new story on HBO.

The new Netflix series, which centers on a privileged teen determined to win the race for high school president, features erratic characters and a plot that moves at an unsettlingly rapid pace.

Green wrote a book on singing cowboys and is featured in Ken Burns' new PBS series about country music. He says he fell in love with Western music from an early age: "It completely entranced me."

TV critic DAVID BIANCULLI says this Fall there's at least one new series from the broadcast networks worth sampling from the start. It's from CBS, and it's called 'Evil.'

Arquette has been nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of a civilian worker who enables a prison break in the Showtime series Escape at Dannemora. Originally broadcast April 29, 2019.

Waller-Bridge is nominated for five Emmys for the Amazon series Fleabag, about a single, 30-something Londoner dealing with tense relationships, grief and love. Originally broadcast May 13, 2019.

Stiller's Showtime series, which is up for 12 Emmys, centers on the true story of two convicted murderers who broke out of a maximum security prison in 2015. Originally broadcast Jan. 8, 2019.

After appearing in nearly 800 TV episodes and 100 films, the noted character actor received his first Emmy nomination for his role as a handler to a hitman in the HBO series Barry.

The superbly acted HBO series is a darkly funny riff on King Lear. Members of a family struggle for control of a media empire — and not one of them is likable, but all of them are fun.

Set in an immigration detention center, the seventh season of the Netflix series continues to take the plight of poor and minority women seriously — and it does so with a surprising amount of humor.

"Drawing is way of exorcising fears, and, for me, a way of controlling them," Hanawalt says. She's the creator of the Netflix animated series Tuca & Bertie and creative designer of BoJack Horseman.

The original Veronica Mars premiered on television 15 years ago, which, in TV terms, was a whole different era. David Milch's HBO series Deadwood, which just reunited its cast for a fabulous TV movie, premiered that year. So did two major hits for ABC, Lost and Desperate Housewives. And 2004 also brought us the premiere of NBC's The Apprentice.

Acorn TV's new series follows a Scotland Yard team led by a detective whose wife has gone missing. London Kills combines the reassuring closure of a network cop series with a strong forward momentum.

Torn, who died Tuesday, won an Emmy Award for playing the gruff producer Artie on The Larry Sanders Show. In 1994, he told Fresh Air that he based his character on Johnny Carson's long time producer.

Sarah Jessica Parker has spent much of her acting career exploring what it means to be in a relationship — and to be single. In the HBO series Sex and the City, which ran from 1998 until 2004, she played Carrie Bradshaw, a single writer chronicling her experiences with the Manhattan dating scene. Now, in the HBO comedy series, Divorce, she stars as Frances, a mother of two navigating the dissolution of her marriage.

David Bianculli reviews the new miniseries 'The Loudest Voice' starring Russell Crowe as the former Fox news chief Roger Ailes.