I’m desperate for the re-ascendance of old-school weekly broadcast shows — something, anything that distinguishes itself from the eight shows on offer from Dick Wolf across two networks — and “High Potential” (from Drew Goddard, whose credits include “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Alias” and “Lost”) starts off well enough.

Kaitlin Olson plays Morgan, a single mom who works the graveyard shift cleaning the offices of the Los Angeles Police Department. Dancing to music on her headphones, she accidentally knocks over a pile of crime scene photos and starts rifling through them. She’s transfixed. Then she looks over at the murder board. She walks up, grabs a marker, crosses out “suspect” under someone’s photo and writes “victim.”

Then she goes on with her night.

It’s such a tantalizing opening sequence (and a beat-for-beat recreation of the French series it’s adapted from) but strangely the show deflates from there. It’s quickly discovered that the cleaning woman — yes, that one, with the garish taste in fashion and loud mouth — has some helpful ideas about the case. She’s clever, with a good memory and a mind that sees patterns and makes connections, so she’s hired full-time, becoming the Erin Brockovich of police procedurals. The lieutenant (Judy Reyes, wasted in a nothing role) teams Morgan with a guy named Detective Karadec (Daniel Sunjata) who becomes her reluctant chaperone.

Olson is a good actor, but there’s not much versatility here; her line readings could just as easily come from the mouths of characters she plays on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” or “Hacks.” Morgan is a handful, with a chip on her shoulder, often tipping over into obnoxious. That works on Olson’s other shows, but “High Potential” needs its lead to be at least somewhat likable. In the first episode, she berates a cashier at the grocery store; the moment doesn’t illustrate her ability to do math in her head, it just makes her look like a person who takes her frustrations out on an easy target, aka someone who is working class like herself.

The show’s obvious touchpoints are long-running series like “Castle,” “Monk,” “The Mentalist,” or, more recently, “Elsbeth” and “The Irrational.” The cops are incapable of doing their jobs without the help of a dogged oddball whose unwieldiness requires a certain amount of corralling from their police minders. That framework is a lackluster substitute for Poirot’s Hastings or Sherlock’s Watson, who weren’t professional acquaintances but actual friends and point-of-view characters who threaded the needle between admiration for their counterparts and pausing to note their more absurd or annoying personality tics. It’s one reason why CBS’s “Elementary” was a cut above the rest.

“High Potential” struggles to ground itself in solid storytelling and create fully realized characters, even when they are one-offs. A case-of-the-week structure requires a specific skill and I worry writers are out of practice: Establishing a new storyline and new characters each time, with enough detail and care to get buy-in from the audience, and then resolving the mystery 40-some minutes later. Episodes should be able to stand alone as crackerjack short stories, but the results here are thin and insubstantial.

That would be easier to overlook if there were some chemistry in the central dynamic. Morgan is brash and curious and obsessive. That’s good. But she’s spent her life underestimated by everyone and we don’t get a sense of what it means to have a job that’s fulfilling, pays well and finally validates her intellect. Instead she comes across as a snarky sitcom character— even when talking about murder — whereas Detective Karadec is wooden, macho and often on the verge of popping a vein or two. This pairing of opposites doesn’t create sparks so much as a repetitive cycle. She’s smug. He’s frustrated. It gets tiring awfully quick. That they will learn to grudgingly respect one another doesn’t delight the way it should. Better writing and better performance choices — more nuance, fewer archetypes — would go a long way.

“These are laws! Principles that I devoted my entire life to protecting!”  Karadec yells after Morgan has obtained evidence through theft. Earnest outrage is certainly one way to play the scene. If he had said it deadpan, suggesting that police have a far more fluid concept of professional ethics, well, then you’d be cooking with gas.

“High Potential” — 2 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: 9 p.m. Tuesdays on ABC

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic

Rothwell might be best known for her supporting roles on “Insecure” and “The White Lotus.” She absolutely has the talent to carry a show and I hope she gets more opportunities going forward. Even so, I found myself liking “How to Die Alone” without really loving it.

Melissa (Rothwell) drives a cart around the airport terminal, transporting people with mobility needs. It’s far from stimulating. Strangers have a tendency of looking straight through her. Also: She’s broke and her ex — who is also her supervisor — just got engaged. To top it off, her best friend at work ditches her on her birthday for a hookup. She’s never even been on a plane, despite working at JFK. Things are not going well.

After some retail therapy at an IKEA-esque store called Ümlaüt (I laughed!) she heads home to build her newly purchased shelving unit by herself, which subsequently falls on top of her and next thing she knows, in the hospital. This brush with death isn’t so much a wakeup call as a nudge in a new direction. Maybe she’ll do that management training course at work. Maybe she’ll try to make new friends and put herself out there romantically. Maybe she’ll finally step on a plane and go somewhere.

Rothwell has created a character who is warm and silly one moment, self-sabotaging the next, defined by a tangy dynamic with her nearest and dearest, including her close pal played by Conrad Ricamora (“Fire Island”), and her brother played by Bashir Salahuddin (“South Side”).

“How to Die Alone” swings from breezy, absurdist moments (one sequence mimics the surreal effects of being high on Percocet) to more grounded and heartfelt moments. None of it quite hangs together. Like “Insecure,” the episodes are a loose collection of moments, but tonally the show is all over the place, and structurally it might have benefited from a more traditional format. The season finale wraps mid-story with an awkward, unsatisfying cliffhanger, which is a trope overembraced in the streaming era. It rarely works as intended. Leaving audiences with a sense of resolution is important and I wish more shows understood that.

Airports have a way of feeling like “The Twilight Zone,” where all good sense and equilibrium goes to die, so it’s a rich setting for a workplace comedy. If travelers are often at their worst, what is that like for employees? “How to Die Alone” doesn’t fully take advantage of those opportunities, but that may not be where Rothwell’s interests really lie. Fair enough.

“How to Die Alone” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Hulu

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic

The series premiered 25 years ago, which is as good an excuse as any to look back at a pop cultural phenomenon that not only reshaped Hollywood gangster stories, but ideas about what TV could even be.

“The Sopranos” was among the earliest examples of “prestige” and Gibney’s documentary is aiming for something prestige-adjacent. It’s on the self-serious side, but maybe jokily so? Their interview takes place on a set that’s a replica of Dr. Melfi’s office, where the psychiatrist and Tony Soprano held their therapy sessions. There’s something funny in the idea of putting Chase in the very same hot seat he created, but it’s a surprisingly flat visual motif meant to underscore the idea that he’s here to spill his guts. He claims to be a reluctant participant, then talks his head off. Make of that what you will, but the parallels to Tony’s mixed feelings about his own psychoanalysis aren’t as interesting as Gibney might have hoped. Even so, if you liked the show, this is an enjoyable revisit through the eyes of key talent.

It’s the kind of behind-the-scenes material that used to be featured as a DVD extra, and it’s satisfying on those terms. But in today’s landscape, it can only exist as a stand-alone project, which creates more portent around it than it probably warrants. The first 10 minutes are saddled with nervous, chaotic, overlapping editing that speeds through Chase’s biography to better focus on the show itself. Once the documentary takes a breath and starts telling a story, it suddenly becomes watchable. But “Wise Guy” ends by mimicking the show’s divisively abrupt final note, which leaves the impression that there’s a deficit of original ideas animating this endeavor.

Split into two episodes, it includes interviews from writers, cast members and HBO executives who talk about the show’s origins, evolution and struggles. There are grainy clips from audition tapes, plus old photos of Chase when he was young, and you realize he has always had what one colleague describes as resting dour face. Is that innate or shaped by a taxing relationship with his mother, Norma?

He spent much of his childhood in the same New Jersey town where the show was filmed, and when he got married in 1968, “a couple of my uncles took me aside and said, ‘You’ve got to get out of here. You’re not going to stay married if you stay here.’ Because they knew what my parents were like and they were really talking about my mother. My wife would not have been able to take it. My mom was just nuts. So we left the night of our wedding and started for California.”

The show’s success meant he and his wife would ultimately be able to buy a house in France. It’s a brief aside but it stands out, because many Hollywood writers and showrunners today are struggling to achieve the same financial windfalls. One hit show isn’t enough to hit the jackpot anymore.

But it was for Chase. Other name-brand producers with similar levels of success have used that to build a TV empire for themselves. Not Chase, which makes him unique. He misses the problem-solving involved in running a TV series, but I would have also liked to hear his thoughts about the kinds of shows that followed in the wake of “The Sopranos,” or what he makes of the depleted state of network TV. He says he found the latter too confining (his credits include “The Rockford Files” and “Northern Exposure”) but everyone in Hollywood is stressed at the moment and the old school broadcast shows remain the most stable and remunerative for people both in front of and behind the camera. Chase isn’t fighting those battles anymore, which presumably frees him up to have some public opinions about the state of television today. Too bad we don’t hear about any of that.

He’s so obviously proud that “The Sopranos” was a representation of his Italian American heritage. Gibney doesn’t ask about Italian Americans who pushed back on that portrayal. Does Chase have myopic view of things? Maybe. Storytellers are allowed that. But isn’t it more interesting in hindsight to explore some of those anxieties through conversion? That was one of the show’s strengths — tackling discordant ideas about who we are and how we want to live. What’s the point of building a set to look like “The Sopranos” if you’re not trying to broach some of the show’s more ambitious conversations about life?

Every character who had a relationship with Tony was making a deal with the devil. Are there parallels to Chase in there? Gibney only glancingly acknowledges the tension that existed in the writers room (which one writer calls toxic). “Let’s put it this way,” Chase says obliquely, “I used to get very angry because no one was coming up with anything. And then since those days I’ve thought, yeah, maybe that’s because you said no to everything, so they stopped.”

Tony made a deal with the devil too, he adds. “He’s really the devil’s representative. But he wasn’t happy with his deal, was he? That’s what I often felt. People said, ‘Oh, he should have been punished!’ and my response was, ‘He was punished every day, this guy — you didn’t see him being miserable for all these years?’”

“Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Max

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

Adapted from the 2018 novel by Elin Hilderbrand, the plot kicks off at a Nantucket wedding hosted by the groom’s wealthy parents, played by Kidman and Liev Schreiber. Everything is elegant and photo-ready at the Winbury family’s waterfront estate. Then a dead body turns up in the water. The nuptials are postponed and the police bring in each person, one by one — guests, employees, members of the family — for questioning. How inconvenient for the Winburys, who are all about their gleaming facade, no matter how fake. This is a family that occasionally asks their nearest and dearest to sign NDAs, so their obsession with appearances and obfuscation complicates the investigation.

Kidman is at the top of her game here as a regal, glorious snob who is unflappable, but wound so tight she just might snap. She’s a famous writer of murder mysteries (ironic!) and she’s the one who makes this lifestyle possible. Her husband comes from family money that has since evaporated, so it’s her sizable income that’s paying the bills. (It’s unclear if anyone else in the family actually works.) The pressure to keep up appearances isn’t just about social class, but about maintaining their carefully crafted personas — the perfect couple of the title — that has been so lucrative for her as an author. Schreiber, with his perpetual stubble and sun-kissed complexion, embodies a guy who is both sexy and unbothered. Perpetually on vacation, he’s content to smoke pot all day and be everyone’s object of desire.

They have three sons — too dull to name or describe — and the dysfunctions of the family become the central drama. Dakota Fanning plays a mean girl who is deeply unhappy beneath it all — of course she is, she’s married to a dud waiting to cash in on his Winbury trust fund. Meghann Fahy is the maid of honor, and her performance is not unlike her turn on “The White Lotus” — sunny but hiding many secrets. That’s no insult to Fahy, she’s extremely good, but here’s hoping she doesn’t get typecast, she seems too talented for that. Eve Hewson plays the bride, who isn’t embraced by the family so much as tolerated and she brings a reluctant energy to the proceedings. Is this really all it’s cracked up to be? She’s down-to-earth and has modest origins that are a world away from this “stratospherically high rent district,” as the enclave of second (or third or fourth) homes is described in the novel.

The show has streamlined and tweaked the book, which means many of Hilderbrand’s droll observations about wealth have been excised (one of the Winbury’s cars, as seen through the eyes of the bride’s mother, “looks exactly like what people drive in across savannas of Africa on the Travel Channel”).

Changes are part and parcel of adaptation, and expected. But Netflix is treating the identity of the drowned person as a spoiler initially — first we must meet all the players at the rehearsal dinner on the beach before we find out which one turns up dead — whereas the book lays out this information from the start. The mystery of who has been killed, which we learn soon enough anyway, is so much less interesting than the how and why and whodunit of it all. I say all this to suggest that perhaps we (and by we, I mean producers and media executives) have put too much stock in the power of spoilers when, really, good storytelling is enough.

“The Perfect Couple” needn’t have worried. Entertainingly absorbing and beautiful to look at, the show (created by Jenna Lamia and directed by Susanne Bier) has “general audience” written all over it and is a great example of what the genre can be when it’s handled with skill and wit. It’s more or less an Agatha Christie manor house mystery given an American sensibility, and the resolution, which is just one of the many ways the Netflix series diverges from the book, is a massive improvement from the source material.

There is no primarily point-of-view character but Hewson’s bride might be the most vital; she’s underwritten (that’s an issue with most of the lineup here), but her growing suspicion of the family she plans to marry into prevents the show from becoming yet another exercise in wealthaganda. Her distrust is the necessary splash of cold water on the show’s aspirational trappings — she’s an outsider who sees how empty this all is, and has no problem voicing her concerns. She’s not just another hanger-on hoping to benefit from their largess and it’s the essential perspective usually missing in these kinds of shows.

“The Perfect Couple” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Netflix

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

Based on Mick Herron’s Slough House book series — named for the dingy London headquarters where the slow horses have been banished —  Season 4 adapts the 2017 novel “Spook Street.” It begins with a bang, as David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce) blows away someone he believes has infiltrated his home. Who the hell did he just kill?

Lamb (Gary Oldman) arrives and, with typical unemotional disinterest, IDs the body. Chances are, he’s lying about whose corpse lies splayed in that bathtub. It’s a choice that has all the hallmarks of the simple but necessary subterfuge that is Lamb’s stock in trade.

Meanwhile, a car bomb has exploded in London and Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas, formidable as ever) is tasked with finding out what happened and preventing any further incidents. One of the long-running jokes of the series is that, as MI5’s No. 2, the top job remains forever just out of reach. That means she’s stuck answering to intellectually inferior men and she can’t help but cop an attitude in her own pristine way. But it’s never clear what drives her. Does she actually care about preventing carnage and something as squishy as … human lives? “There isn’t a big picture to running an intelligence agency,” she sighs, “it’s just putting out fires every bloody day.” Maybe she’s just obsessed with the job and the power it confers.

Somehow the car bomb and that death in David Cartwright’s home are connected, which necessitates a sojourn to France, where someone has tried to raise a small army of killers from birth. For what purpose? Unclear. But this ragtag paramilitary operation has fallen apart now that its members have grown into adults. What remains are just a few thugs, but their leader (Hugo Weaving) has an important connection to old man Cartwright and lingering resentments have a way of, well, lingering. Weaving is especially good as an entirely realistic villain, playing him with an American accent and an American sense of entitlement. It is a wonderfully grounded contrast to his similarly nefarious Agent Smith from “The Matrix” franchise. A more complex performance, too.

If the show’s third season was unusually obsessed with guns, the violence here erupts with more thought and narrative purpose and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. As a series, “Slow Horses” doesn’t offer tightly plotted, clockwork spy stories; think too deeply about any of the details and the whole thing threatens to fall apart. But on a scene-by-scene basis, the writing is such a delicious combination of wry and tension-filled, and the cumulative effect is wonderfully entertaining. Spies have to deal with petty office politics like everyone else!

Even so, I remain unconvinced the show knows what to do with its various slow horses. Outside of River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), who is intense and droll, they are too one-dimensional to justify their screen time. The rancid charisma of Lamb (who seems slightly less putrid this season; he’s still a greasy mess, but the dark overcoat he wears pulls him together in a way that his rumpled raincoat never did) and Taverner’s wily gamesmanship do much of the heavy lifting. Oldman and Thomas are the kind of seasoned performers who bring real vitality to their knives-out dynamic, which more or less repeats itself each season. That’s not a complaint. “Slow Horses” doesn’t pretend that the series or its characters need to evolve in order to remain interesting. Tackling a new case each season, while keeping the same format and framework, is enormously satisfying when done well. And it’s one of the few shows that has avoided the dreaded one or two year delay between seasons that has become standard for streaming. Instead, it provides the kind of reliability that has become increasingly rare. It probably helps that each season is based on one of Herron’s books.

A consistent theme in “Slow Horses” is that the younger generation — even the non-screwups at The Park, Slough House’s upscale counterpart — aren’t especially good at this spy stuff. At least, they’re no match for the cagey instincts and hard-won experience of Lamb and Taverner and anyone else who cut their teeth during the Cold War. It’s not that the old guard are invulnerable, they’re just smarter somehow. The newer generation? One bad guy manages to pull off an ambush that thwarts all their training. Herron and the show aren’t just cynical about MI5’s corruption, they’re cynical about the agency’s ability to do anything even remotely resembling the job at hand.

“Slow Horses” Season 4 — 3 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Apple TV+

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

The disappointment is real — but this is also a romanticization of the past. TV has always been profit over art. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help us understand what’s happening now.

But I get why it’s easy to buy into the fantasy that things were better before streaming upended everything. Survivorship bias means we remember all those old network shows that ran for multiple seasons and then lived on in reruns, but not the countless others — and truly, the numbers are staggering — that were canceled only a few episodes in, becoming yet more pop cultural detritus consigned to the Hollywood junk heap.

But it’s never been this bad — right? I don’t know if that’s accurate either! Around 600 scripted shows premiered in 2022. But go back 20 years, to 2002, and that number was 182. More shows are getting made, therefore more shows are getting canceled. But proportionally, the percentage canceled might not be drastically different.

With the traditional broadcast model, a long-running hit with 22 episodes a season can mean big profits, especially in syndication. For generations, that financial incentive also did the work of shaping audience expectations for the regularity that came with long-running shows.

None of this applies to streaming originals. That’s because money isn’t pouring in — at least, not money pegged to individual shows. The business model is different, which means the goals are different. Here’s how entertainment journalist Rick Ellis explains the thought process in his Too Much TV newsletter: “While many people in Hollywood don’t want to believe it, three new originals with eight-episode seasons are better for subscriber numbers than one show with 24 episodes. Especially because three different shows provides more of a chance you’ll have one that breaks out with audiences.”

Perhaps! But this has left audiences feeling forsaken. And people who make their living in television are experiencing one of the most intense periods of professional destabilization in recent memory.

Who wants a diet of short-run shows only? Maybe it wouldn’t feel so dire if a nice chunk of streaming shows — 10 or 15 of them across different platforms — were getting multiple seasons.

The history of television is littered with shows that barely made it to double-digit episodes, but there were always exceptions — shows that struggled in the early going but were given a chance to find an audience. That’s not because executives were more nurturing than they are now; if a show with mediocre ratings stayed on the schedule, it was probably because there was nothing else to fill the slot.

The 1979-80 TV season was notorious for the number of shows that failed, including “Salvage 1” starring Andy Griffith as a guy who recovered abandoned space junk and used it to build his own rocket. Fourteen episodes aired in the first season. When the second season rolled around, the network aired just two episodes before pulling it off the schedule for good. Imagine how frustrated audiences must have been! But that wasn’t uncommon; four or eight episodes might air and then — poof — suddenly a show was gone because it was a ratings disaster. At least with streaming, you’re getting a completed season (even if it’s short) before it’s canceled.

Here’s another frustration you hear right now: Hollywood has never been more obsessed with IP, aka intellectual property. I agree that this endless lineup of prequels and reboots and adaptations is tiresome. No one wants to take a risk on original ideas. But let’s not fall into the trap of revisionist history, either. Going back decades, spinoffs have always been part of the TV landscape, which is really just another way of saying … IP

IMDb has a page listing “Short Lived TV Shows 1970’s/80’s” and it’s a fascinating time capsule. Never heard of most of these shows. But what’s really surprising is just how many were based on movies (cough, IP once again).

Scroll down the list and … there was a TV series based on “Casablanca”?? (Lasted all of five episodes; maybe Sam got tired of playing that piano every week.) There was another based on “The King and I.” Also: “Breaking Away,” “Animal House,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “The Four Seasons,” “Logan’s Run” and more — all hoping to be the next “M*A*S*H,” I’m guessing.

I’m not in the prediction business and I can’t say whether the TV industry can recover if it continues to abandon the kind of long-running shows that become part of the fabric of our pop cultural lives. But it’s also a mistake to think through the current challenges if we’re only taking into account what’s transpired over the last 10 years or so.

Viewer discontent is real. Media bosses might want to start taking that seriously again.

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

Nothing seems amiss at first. There’s no body or obvious crime scene. But Sazz hasn’t been answering calls or texts, and once Charles and his pals start poking around, they realize there’s been another murder in the building. Slowly but surely, they piece together the clues.

In an amusing twist, Hollywood has come calling. A studio wants to turn their podcast into a movie. So off they go to the Paramount lot in Los Angeles to sign away their life rights. This is such an enjoyably meta idea, because both Steve Martin and Martin Short have a rich history of satirizing show business in general, and the vapidness of Los Angeles in particular. Unleashing Charles and Oliver’s neuroses and egos in a Hollywood setting works as well as expected, largely because Selena Gomez’s Mabel functions as a splash of vinegar. She is less dazzled, and skeptical about the whole thing.

But all the pieces are already in place, including a script, a cast and a directing duo who are fresh off a “heart-wrenching, deeply, deeply viral Walmart ad campaign.” The directors are sisters whose last name is Brothers. They are the Brothers sisters. The show’s delight in wordplay remains intact!

I’m generally less enthusiastic about the show’s (over)reliance on A-list guest stars to fill out its world, with the exceptions of Shirley MacLaine (Season 2) and Meryl Streep (Season 3 and a brief return in Season 4). But you can’t argue with the lineup this season. Molly Shannon is the sharklike studio exec who has hired Eugene Levy to play Charles, Zach Galifianakis to play Oliver and Eva Longoria to play Mabel, whose character has been aged up by a couple of decades because apparently focus groups found the real age gap creepy. (Since when has Hollywood cared about that?!) Galifianakis is especially prickly about the gig and proposes a risky take on the character: “I was thinking about maybe playing him talented.”

At the studio, our New York threesome stumble upon a Hollywood backlot version of their home city — an old-school rap beat plays as a guy pushes a hot dog cart and a mother leans over the fire escape to holler at her kid — and it’s funny because this blatantly and hilariously corny depiction of a quasi-Washington Heights neighborhood is no less stereotypical than the show’s own depiction of New York’s Upper West Side.

They don’t stay in LA for long. Back at The Arconia, their glorious apartment building, they find proof that Sazz (Jane Lynch, who is piquant in all the right ways) is indeed dead. Even so, she shows up as a ghostly apparition who accompanies Charles on his quest to solve her murder — or, she tells him, maybe she’s just a “manifestation of your rapidly declining mental state.” His grief feels more poignant this time and losing his friend seems to cut him deeper than the previous tragedies he’s weathered.

The show’s great balancing act — between humor and moments that hit you in the gut — has always been its strength. Melissa McCarthy’s comedic instincts fit right in, as Charles’ over-the-top sister, with whom they temporarily bunk at her house on Staten Island. She is somehow melancholic and exuberant all at once.

A bar frequented by stunt performers is called Concussions and it’s the kind of throwaway but memorable joke that has you think: Please let this silly-smart show continue for a few seasons more, with its vulnerable, sardonic, wonderfully screwball outlook on life and death and everything in between.

“Only Murders in the Building” Season 4 — 3 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Hulu

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

Even so, it’s not the deluge of the recent past.

Six hundred scripted shows premiered in 2022. That was never going to be realistic long-term and media companies have cut back. But it’s also made the professional lives of screenwriters and others in Hollywood more precarious than ever (unless you’re a big-name star). Overall, Hollywood remains in a state of flux, with layoffs at Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global. The latter — which is the parent company to a sizable chunk of TV operations, including CBS, Showtime, Comedy Central and Paramount+ — may or may not have a new owner by the time you read this, with two rival bids duking it out. What either outcome means for you, the viewer, is unclear.

I would be remiss for not mentioning that one of the best shows in recent memory isn’t premiering this fall; it just became available on Netflix and is probably new to most viewers. That would be AMC’s “Interview with the Vampire,” which is smart and funny and far better than any adaptation has a right to be. I don’t even like vampire stories, but here I am, in the bag for this one.

With that out of the way, here’s a snapshot of the coming weeks, presented in chronological order. It’s a fever dream of adaptations because Hollywood’s love affair with IP (intellectual property) continues unabated.

“Slow Horses” (Sept. 4 on Apple TV+): The British spy series returns for Season 4 with an adaptation of Mick Herron’s “Spook Street,” which centers Jonathan Pryce’s recurring character, who may not be long for this world: “What happens when an old spook loses his mind? Does the Service have a retirement home for those who know too many secrets but don’t remember they’re secret? Or does someone take care of the senile spy for good?”

“Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist” (Sept. 5 on Peacock): Adapted from a true-crime podcast, the limited series tells the story of an armed robbery that took place on the night of Muhammad Ali’s 1970 comeback fight in Atlanta. Here’s how the podcast describes the crime: After the fight, guests attending an after-party (thrown by a hustler known as Chicken Man) were greeted not with food and drink, but the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun. Starring Kevin Hart as Chicken Man and Don Cheadle as the police detective assigned to the case.

“How to Die Alone” (Sept. 13 on Hulu): Natasha Rothwell (“Insecure” and “The White Lotus”) stars in this comedy as a millennial stuck in a miserable existence: “I’m broke, my family thinks I’m a lost cause, my love life is a joke and the punchline is, I work at an airport.” A brush with death prompts her to start taking chances.

“Three Women” (Sept. 13 on Starz): The drama centers on the lives of three women (talk about an accurate title!) including a suburban housewife who begins an extramarital affair, an entrepreneur navigating an open marriage and a student who accuses a teacher of an inappropriate relationship. All three tell their stories to a character played by Shailene Woodley.

“Moonflower Murders” (Sept. 15 on PBS Masterpiece): A former book editor living in Greece and running a hotel (played by Lesley Manville) is drawn back into her old literary world when she’s asked to figure out whether a novel about a murder is fact or fiction. Based on the book by Anthony Horowitz.

“Agatha All Along” (Sept. 18 on Disney+): “WandaVision” was the first Marvel TV series to premiere on the streamer and it remains the best. That’s because it eschewed your typical superhero storyline in favor of the cheeky and bizarre, plunking down a couple of MCU characters into various sitcom templates of old. It also featured a very funny performance from Kathryn Hahn, and her character’s long-gestating, witch-focused spinoff is finally here. The teaser suggests the show will be entirely different in tone and interests than its predecessor. That’s not a selling point for me, but Hahn is so … decisions, decisions.

“The Penguin” (Sept. 19 on HBO): This eight-episode TV series from DC Studios puts Batman nemesis The Penguin front and center, played by Colin Farrell under 576 layers of prosthetics. (I’m exaggerating, but he’s as unrecognizable as he was in 2022’s “The Batman.”) The premise is very Batman-saga-meets-the-Italian mob.

“Frasier” (Sept. 19 on Paramount+): I wasn’t a fan of the first season of this reboot, which had no understanding of what made Frasier Crane — and the people surrounding him — so much fun. But here we are with Season 2, which is loading up on guest stars from the original show — including Dan Butler as Bob “Bulldog” Briscoe, Edward Hibbert as Gil Chesterton and Harriet Sansom Harris as Frasier’s agent, Bebe Glazer — with Frasier returning to his own radio station in Seattle for an episode. Peri Gilpin, who played Roz, will also appear as a recurring character.

“A Very Royal Scandal” (Sept. 19 on Amazon): In 2019, Britain’s Prince Andrew gave a now-infamous TV interview about his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, which ultimately led to him withdrawing from official royal duties. The backstory of how that interview came together has already been adapted for the screen by Netflix and it was a pointless exercise with a self-congratulatory tone. But at least it was only a movie-length treatment. Amazon’s upcoming version is spread out over three episodes and stars Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson.

“Matlock” (Sept. 22 on CBS): The original “Matlock” of the 1980s and ’90s was an Atlanta-set legal drama starring Andy Griffith. This new version has an actor just as beloved at its center — Kathy Bates — but the premise is slightly different. She plays Madeline Matlock, a folksy defense attorney who, thanks to her rotten finances, can’t retire just yet, so she seeks out an entry-level job at a slick corporate firm in New York. But the real story — her real motivation for working there — is more complicated. That part makes up the ongoing storyline, while each week there’s a new client to defend.

“Midnight Family” (Sept. 24 on Apple TV+ ): The Spanish-language series follows a med student in Mexico City who moonlights as part of her family’s privately-owned ambulance service. It’s adapted from the absorbing 2019 documentary of the same title, which is well worth seeking out whether you plan to watch the Apple series or not (it’s streaming free on Pluto). Here’s a bit from my write-up when it screened locally:

“Mexico City has a population of 9 million, but according to a figure provided at the film’s beginning, the government operates fewer than 45 emergency ambulances. Privately operated ambulances attempt to fill in those gaps and director Luke Lorentzen’s high-adrenaline vérité film offers an immersive look at this underground economy, as seen through the eyes of one family-run business. … The documentary is the antithesis of eat-your-vegetables filmmaking. It has the intensity of an action film and the moodiness of a noir. It’s thrillingly shot and incredibly thought-provoking. It’s one of my favorite documentaries in recent memory. … You worry for everyone — patients (who are having one of the worst days of their lives) and paramedics alike. The latter are frequently stopped by police, who shake them down for bribes. This becomes a major impediment; they are barely getting by.”

“The Last Days of the Space Age” (Oct. 2 on Hulu): Starring “Chicago Fire” alum Jesse Spencer, this eight-part dramedy is set in Perth, Australia. The year is 1979: Power workers are on strike, the city is hosting the Miss Universe pageant and the U.S. space station, Skylab, is about to crash nearby. According to the show’s description: “Against this backdrop of international cultural and political shifts, three families in a tight-knit coastal community find their marriages, friendships and futures put to the test.”

“Disclaimer” (Oct. 11 on Apple TV+): Cate Blanchett stars in this limited series from Alfonso Cuarón playing a powerful and celebrated journalist whose personal secrets are revealed in a novel by an unknown author played by Kevin Kline, who is looking to humiliate the woman he believes is responsible for his own pains and losses. Sacha Baron Cohen plays her wealthy husband.

“Ghosts” (Oct. 17 on CBS): This sitcom about the misadventures of ghosts trapped in a manor house and their human companions wasn’t nominated for a best comedy Emmy this year, despite being one of the funniest shows on TV right now. Much as I admire “The Bear,” which is nominated for best comedy, here’s a show that’s consistently comedic each episode … but I digress.

“Poppa’s House” (Oct. 21 on CBS): Starring Damon Wayans and Damon Wayans Jr. as father and son, the idea for the sitcom came about when a house across the street from Wayans Jr. became available and Wayans Sr. considered buying it. And then he reconsidered. “I was like, ‘Hell no!’ because their mother would be like, ‘Go to your Poppa’s house!’ Everybody would be sending them to me,” he said in a recent interview. “I told my agent, and he said, ‘That’s a show!’”

“Before” (Oct. 25 on Apple TV+): Billy Crystal stars in this 10-episode psychological thriller as a widower and child psychiatrist treating a young patient who has a haunting connection to his past. A rare dramatic role for Crystal.

“The Marlow Murder Club” (Oct. 27 on PBS Masterpiece): From the creator of “Death in Paradise” (yet another Masterpiece mainstay) comes the TV adaptation of “The Marlow Murder Club” book series, which follows a retired archaeologist who teams up with a dog walker and a vicar’s wife. Together they become an amateur trio of sleuths in England, piecing together clues and grilling witnesses.

“St. Denis Medical” (Nov. 12 on NBC): We haven’t had a hospital comedy on network TV since “Scrubs.” This one is a mockumentary from Justin Spitzer (“Superstore”), but another clear inspiration here is “The Office.” The trailer looks promising! Hopefully the show will be able to score some satirical points about how absurd and frustrating so much of our health care system has become. Among the cast are comedic ringers including David Alan Grier, “Superstore” alum Kaliko Kauahi, Wendi McLendon-Covey (now freed up from her long run on “The Goldbergs”) and Allison Tolman.

“Cross” (Nov. 14 on Amazon): Aldis Hodge (“Leverage”) stars in this TV adaptation of the Alex Cross book series as a detective and forensic psychologist who digs into the psyches of killers and their victims in order to identify — and ultimately capture — the culprits.

“Landman” (Nov. 17 on Paramount+): Starring Billy Bob Thornton, the series is set amid the oil boomtowns of Texas and is based on the podcast “Boomtown,” offering an “upstairs/downstairs story of roughnecks and wildcat billionaires fueling a boom so big, it’s reshaping our climate, our economy and our geopolitics.” Would it surprise you to learn the series was created by “Yellowstone’s” Taylor Sheridan, who has become the key force behind most of Paramount+’s recent output?

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

The pair had been eyeing a career of Grand Slam wins together before an injury put an end to all that. Five years later, Justine is working as a physiotherapist at a posh tennis academy with lush grass courts on a country estate. Now in her early 20s, her life is considerably less dazzling as she tries to manage her simmering rage and disappointment with boozy nights out. Meanwhile, her ex-coach, Glenn, has moved on with another player, who has just won the French Open. Did you watch the match, asks Justine’s mother? She shakes her head no. “Why would I fangirl over the coach who ditched me?”

When Glenn returns to England to work at the same tennis academy where Justine is currently employed, she’s less than happy about this turn of events. His presence has a way of rubbing his success (and their shared history) in her face. Hence her decision to go public with that explosive accusation. Whether anyone will believe her is an open question, including close friends and even her mother, who have all weathered Justine’s tenuous relationship to the truth.

The intimacy between a coach and athlete often goes unexplored in real-life or fictional contexts. That’s what “Fifteen-Love,” from show creator Hania Elkington, is interrogating. When does it go over the line? What does that look like? (The show premiered in the UK last summer on Amazon; not sure why it’s getting its U.S. premiere on Sundance Now, but such are the vagaries of streaming.) Whereas filmmaker Luca Guadagnino’s recent and similarly tennis-themed “Challengers” comes across like a series of provocations, “Fifteen-Love” is aiming for something meatier while also indulging in plenty of entertaining twists and turns.

Talented and good at her job, Justine is also obsessive, inappropriate and stunted. She comes to work hungover and her reckless unpredictability doesn’t match the academy’s upscale vibe, whereas Glenn fits right in and is trusted implicitly. He’s a smooth operator and an egomaniac who is either adept at managing the needy psychology of elite athletes, or a master manipulator — or maybe both. Is Justine getting screwed over, or is she trying to screw him over? She’s a loose cannon and messy enough that someone might believe she’s lobbing false accusations to torpedo Glenn’s future. But that doesn’t automatically mean he’s not a predator. So who is the lying party?

Smartly, the series doesn’t rely on this mystery to carry the entire narrative, but reveals the truth halfway through the six-episode season, when the story shifts into a thriller about whether it’s even possible to hold people accountable.

Vulnerable and mouthy and charming despite all her rough edges, actress Ella Lily Hyland keeps you guessing just enough in the beginning about Justine’s motives. That she resembles Anna Kournikova is just an extra bonus that sells the tennis of it all. As Glenn, Aidan Turner is doing all kinds of interesting things that simultaneously lean into and subvert the hunky leading man persona he crafted for Masterpiece’s “Poldark,” his best known role in the U.S.

Justine walked away from tennis after a lingering wrist injury that may have worsened for suspicious reasons, but everyone — including Glenn — keeps saying she could have bounced back if only she had stuck with her physical rehab.

So what exactly happened between these two? A series of flashbacks first complicates then clarifies that question and the show has found an intelligent way to straddle the line between nuanced sensitivity and juicy drama, all set against a gorgeous backdrop. It’s smart, endlessly watchable and the kind of series that would likely find a larger audience were it available on a more popular streamer.

“Fifteen-Love” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Sundance Now

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

Adapted from author Carl Hiaasen’s 2013 comic crime novel, the show is from Bill Lawrence, of “Scrubs” fame, and, more recently for Apple, “Ted Lasso” and “Shrinking.” Lawrence has a tendency to go sappy in ways I find emotionally dishonest — the men at the center of his shows, including this one, are frequently stunted but good-hearted and we’re supposed to adore them for it. But tonally, the 10-episode season of “Bad Monkey” is aiming for something different, and for the better.

Yancy is the quippy, easygoing lone ranger of the type that often shows up in the novels of Thomas Pynchon or Elmore Leonard, with unending confidence, but judgment that isn’t always the best. The kind of guy who doesn’t follow the rules, but somehow nails the bad guys anyway. That’s a promising setup.

The show largely works. But I would like it considerably more if someone other than Vaughn were in the central role. He doesn’t embody a specific character so much as play a version of his well-worn persona, delivering a glib, fast-talking patter but little else to suggest there’s a human being underneath all that bluster. He’s blank behind the eyes.

Audiences will likely be drawn to the show either way. Despite an abundance of television thanks to streaming, the actual quality in the aggregate has gone way down. I think at this point viewers are just grateful for anything halfway competent and entertaining and the kind of easy watching that doesn’t insult your intelligence.

So what’s with that arm pulled from the water back in the Keys? Yancy is instructed to drive it up to Miami and hopefully offload the case to the good folks of Dade County. But not before he buys some popsicles and fresh crab and tosses them in the cooler along with the arm. At the morgue, he meets the medical examiner, Rosa (Natalie Martinez), who will eventually team up with him on the case (and fall into bed with him, as well). If only there were some sizzle between them, but their chemistry remains theoretical.

A parallel storyline unfolds in the Bahamas, where a young fisherman named Neville (Ronald Peet) and his pet capuchin monkey (who is neither bad nor good, but simply there) live a simple and idyllic life in a beach shack left to Neville by his father. Turns out, the land has been sold out from under him and the humble abode is demolished when a couple of obnoxious American developers (Meredith Hagner and Rob Delaney) come looking to build a resort. They are also — surprise! — connected to that mysterious arm.

Looking to stymie their plans, Neville seeks out the services of a priestess known as the Dragon Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith), who is suffering a crisis of confidence and just wants off the island. Her story takes a while to get going — initially it veers awfully close to exotifying the character — but it becomes the most resonant narrative of the series, especially as it pertains to her push-pull relationship with her grandmother (a terrific L. Scott Caldwell). Turner-Smith’s career has been underwhelming so far, but when she gets a chance to be vulnerable here, she’s quite good.

Eventually, Yancy and Rosa make their way to the Bahamas, where the storylines finally intersect. An unseen narrator guides us through it all — sample voiceover: “(She) knew she might get a UTI banging in the jacuzzi, but she still felt it was worth it” — which gives the show a mirthful energy and personality it’s otherwise lacking. Plus, there’s a brief but welcome appearance by Scott Glenn, underplaying it beautifully as Yancy’s extraordinarily Zen father.

The show is fundamentally a portrait of downmarket scammers and oddballs who lack a moral compass or even a conscience. The setting is a fantasy all on its own, considering the Florida Keys are ground zero for sea-level rise in Florida. But maybe that’s too much of a bummer for “Bad Monkey” to acknowledge. It’s happy to tackle the sleazoids of humanity. But the climate crisis? As if!

“Bad Monkey” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Apple TV+

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.