Le Sage and her fellow travelers could have wandered out of an episode of ''Xena'' or ''Hercules.'' They are part of an obvious effort to give ''Dinotopia'' a self-referential smirk. These include the strong-willed, quick-witted Le Sage (Lisa Zane), who is far more interesting than the newly watered-down heroines.

The writer, Raymond Khoury, and the director, Thomas Wright, have given the plot a welcome pungency with the introduction of a randy band of baddies, the Outsiders. Tonight's story, which includes some stampeding tyrannosaurs and a magic pendant, is clever and moves fast. ‘The Underground Railroad’: Barry Jenkins’s transfixing adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel is fabulistic yet grittily real.‘Succession’: In the cutthroat HBO drama about a family of media billionaires, being rich is nothing like it used to be.‘Dickinson’: The Apple TV+ series is a literary superheroine’s origin story that’s dead serious about its subject yet unserious about itself.‘Inside’: Written and shot in a single room, Bo Burnham’s comedy special, streaming on Netflix, turns the spotlight on internet life mid-pandemic.

Here are some of the highlights selected by The Times’s TV critics: Television this year offered ingenuity, humor, defiance and hope. David (Shiloh Strong) and his tough-guy blond brother, Karl (Erik von Detten), are still competing for Dad's approval and for the attention of Marion, the lovely Dinotopian princess. Frank (Michael Brandon), peripheral in the spring, is now central to the action. For starters, all those characters are now portrayed by different actors. Gurney's whimsical Eden with standard made-for-television narrative and characters, the maxi-series has made additional jolting changes. His brainy, dark-haired son, David, says, ''Not everything makes sense.'' The father, a Type-A businessman named Frank Scott, is still unhappy about being marooned: ''I just don't understand how come we never heard of this place.''

Promise kept: here comes ''Dinotopia'' the ABC series, beginning tonight with a two-hour adventure. That was May, when ABC presented a mini-series inspired by James Gurney's fanciful Dinotopia books. These contemporary Americans had arrived on the quaint island after a plane crash, and they had learned that while ''outlanders'' like them had been washing ashore here for centuries, Dinotopia's peculiar geography made it impossible for them to leave. When we last left Dinotopia, the island where humans and dinosaurs dwell in harmony, a father and his two sons were contemplating their fate.

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