a) "A.P. Bio"
"It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" is heading into its 13th season while this makes, along with "The Mick," the second show that one of the stars of "Sunny" is moonlighting with on one of the big 4 networks, basically doing variations of the same bawdy misanthropic thing that their main show does. It reminds me of those bands that have been around forever without ever breaking up but still have solo albums and side projects that sound exactly like the main band. That said, the first 3 episodes of "A.P. Bio" have been pretty entertaining, out of the whole burgeoning mini-genre of shows about adult employees of elementary schools behaving badly ("Teachers," "Those Who Can't," "Vice Principals," "Bad Teacher"), it feels like it has more potential than most of those, partly because it's kind of the only one that really considers what the students are thinking at all.

b) "Corporate"
The last couple decades of comedy have been full of satirical depictions of office drones and cubicle culture, from Office Space to "The Office" and so on. Comedy Central has at least put a slightly wilder spin on the Dilbertification of television with "Workaholics" and now "Corporate," which reminds me a bit of the ABC cult classic "Better Off Ted" but is a little more over-the-top with the dark touches and does stuff like an entire episode of Banksy jokes. Lance Reddick and Anne Dudek are just in the supporting cast but they're really the MVPs of this show.

c) "Absentia"
Stana Katic of "Castle" fame stars in this Amazon series about an FBI agent who disappears for 6 years while tracking a serial killer and is assumed dead, only to turn up alive. So there's a whole mystery to unravel, but the first couple episodes that we watched are more about her just returning from society and reuniting with a son who doesn't remember her, and it's all pretty emotional and gut-wrenching. I find it pretty distracting that they named a tertiary character Kelly Price, though. And when I tweeted something to that effect, the show's official Twitter account responded with what looked like a plot spoiler, so that was pretty weird.

d) "Chris Rock: Tamborine" 
Standup specials used to be something I'd channel surf to and drop in on for a 10 or 20 minutes at a time regularly when they were mostly on Comedy Central or HBO. But now Netflix produces standup specials at such a dizzying volume that I've kind of checked out and don't even watch the ones by comics I love most of the time. But I grew up in the era where Chris Rock specials were cultural events, and it felt like a big deal to see his first one in a decade. He's not firing on all cylinders all the time anymore, but in pretty much every section of the show he works his way up to a couple hilarious crescendos, there's always a musical rhythm to his routines that I really love. His piece about police brutality is about as great as you'd expect ("Some jobs can't have bad apples...American Airlines can't be like, 'Most of our pilots like to land!"). But what I really liked was how the bit about divorce led, surprisingly, into some fairly good marriage and relationship advice (alongside some stuff that was funny but not necessarily words to live by).

e) "Bellevue"

f) "The Resident"
It's been a while since I watched medical procedural time shows with any regularity, so picking up this show and "9-1-1" recently has reminded me how stressful they can be to watch, just the minute-to-minute life and death matters. "The Resident" can be pretty gripping and well done, but I don't know if I actually like or care about the cast at all. The main guy played by Matt Czuchry is kind of supposed to be a flawed character but I can never quite tell if they're writing him as unlikable or if I find the actor totally unlikable.

g) "Let's Get Physical"
Matt Jones and Chris Diamantopoulos are two guys who've both had memorable supporting roles in some popular shows, so it's a great idea to make them the leads of a show where they're rivals, especially since they have such different screen presences. I feel like the show is off to a slow start, though, like they don't really know where the laughs are supposed to come from aside from the storyline full of campy aerobics outfits.

h) "Altered Carbon"
This show is rumored to be Netflix's most expensive show to date, costing even more than "The Get Down"'s $120 million season. And it really seemed to land with a thud, and probably wasn't helped by the fact that Netflix had a more high profile sci-fi release, "The Cloverfield Paradox," just a couple days later. It's not bad, has some cool visual ideas, but I always say, even in high concept genre shows, casting and dialogue is really key to making a show anyone actually wants to watch, and aside from Martha Higareda's character, I don't really care much for the people or what they're saying in this.

i) "2 Dope Queens"
I adore Jessica Williams and I guess it's nice that she has a popular podcast, but this whole thing of adapting podcasts into TV shows seems like not a great idea. I attended a live taping of a podcast a few months ago and it was a fun night and this show reminds me a lot of that, but the loose fun of a mostly improvised stage show of a few people making conversation does not really translate to television that well.

j) "Grown-ish"
Doing an "A Different World"-style college spinoff about one of the kids from "Black-ish" seems like kind of a natural, if unimaginative idea. But Yara Shahidi really is pretty capable of carrying a show on her own, even if I wish they dropped the "Black-ish"-style voiceover narration in every episode, and they do a pretty decent job of making it a topical show about what the college experience actually is today. It's not laugh out loud funny very often, but it's had its moments, I think they're still finding their footing, the cast is pretty good. Importing Deon Cole's character from "Black-ish" has been implemented a little awkwardly but he's always funny so it's not really a problem.

k) "Waco"
I remembered when it was announced that Michael Shannon had been cast in a miniseries about the Branch Davidians and thought it was gonna be amazing to see him play a cult leader. But then I realized that he's too old to play David Koresh and Taylor Kitsch would be Koresh while Shannon plays an FBI hostage negotiator. I always dismissed Kitsch as a pretty boy would-be action star that Hollywood failed to make happen, but I tried to give him a chance to prove himself in this. I dunno, though, I feel like the voice he does is so stylized and maybe it's accurate to play Koresh as having sex with his mom glasses on but it felt like Kitsch was just going over-the-top with his portrayal. And even though there are two whole episodes before the ATF standoff begins, it just feels like you don't get that much meaningful background on who these people were and how they got into that mess.

l) "The Four: Battle For Stardom"
I feel like this show was designed as an alternative to "The Voice" but they didn't really develop the idea much further than "what if we have the singers in 4 big circular brightly lit chairs instead of the celebrity judges/coaches?" It's pretty entertaining because 2 of the judges are Diddy and DJ Khaled (and Khaled is basically a prop comic on this show). But the whole idea is that any given time they have 4 singers in contention and new challengers can always knock them out of the 4. And there was so much turnover from week to week that it was hard to really get attached to anyone and root for them, although there were a few I rooted against, especially Jason Warrior (a total weirdo who is said to have taken anger management classes after he lost on "The Voice" but really did not take it well when he was eliminated on "The Four"). Plus there was a whole debacle where the one non-famous judge, label exec Charlie Walk, was accused off sexual harassment and kicked off the show right before the finale, and it was really awkward how they kind of tried to pretend it had always been 3 judges and minimized his footage in clips from previous episodes. The girl that won last week, Evvie, was really good, though, she deserved it.

m) "Llama Llama"
My kids only have one or two of the Llama Llama books that we haven't read a whole lot, but I showed them a little of the Netflix series based on them, and they weren't too interested and I can't blame them. Kid's books usually need some creative license to turn into a decent screen adaptation, especially when the books are heavy on wordplay or rhymes, but unlike say, most Dr. Seuss adaptations, they didn't really even incorporate the rhyming into the show that much.

n) "Breathe"
Apparently Amazon is getting into distributing foreign series in America like Netflix has been doing a lot of, which is a good idea. But the Indian crime series "Breathe" doesn't have subtitles for all the Hindi and Tamil dialogue on U.S. Amazon, unlike Netflix's imported shows, which seems pretty stupid. I watched one episode and the story seemed intriguing from what I could make out, and visually it's really well done, but I can't keep watching a show where I have no idea what anybody is saying.

o) "Grand Prix Driver"
I started watching this Netflix documentary series narrated by Michael Douglas but quickly realized that I just don't care about racecars.

p) "Dirty Money"
Another Netflix doc series, one that's pretty interesting and centered around white collar crime and financial scams, really some good explanation of all this infuriating stuff that happens all the time that I think the newsmedia really has failed to explain or highlight the importance of enough to the general public.

x) "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"
The third season has been such a rollercoaster ride of pretty emotional episodes that I was starting to feel like there were fewer songs and laughs. But the last few episodes as they run up to the end of the season this week have been pretty great, bringing back weird Trent for another episode was inspired, Paul Welsh is such a delightfully creepy performer.

z) "The X-Files" 

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