The Night Agent is still perfectly good “watch while doing laundry” TV, but it feels like the third season is even more lunkheaded than the first two, and the absence of Buchanan is huge.

Ten Pound Poms works because its characters are easy to root for as they try to make new lives for themselves in Australia. And the fact that the show is working towards a conclusion ensures that the stories will stay focused.

Unless you’re a Gordon Ramsay completist, Being Gordon Ramsay feels like it’s going to be six episodes of of the same pleasant but dull Ramsay promotional material that we saw in the first episode.

56 Days is supposed to show the erotic chemistry between two people that led to a wild affair then a gruesome murder. But the affair feels artificial and the investigation of the murder feels excruciatingly drawn out, and the timeline jumping makes the show tiring to watch.

Whether you were a fan or not, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model is a fascinating and thorough look at one of the biggest reality franchises ever—warts and all.

Some of the incidents that begin the disputes are a bit confusing. .... But some are so “normal” they’re crystal clear. .... It’s disputes like the ones in the second episode that feel more real to us.

While the fourth season of Dark Winds is taking a chance by going off the rez, seeing Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito facing big changes brings interesting context to what might be normally be considered a standard police thriller case.

As nicely shot and acted as Museum Of Innocence is, the story isn’t fleshed out enough to give us a real idea of what drew its main characters together, besides it just being a taboo pairing.

Can You Keep A Secret? is a funny show about a family who tries to get something they think they deserve, without much of an idea of how their plan will play out.

How To Get To Heaven From Belfast is a sharply funny examination of how friendships change over time as well as a pretty darn good mystery.

Believe me when I say that Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette is the first truly captivating new show of 2026 and an instant addition to the list of shows you’ll want to watch and rewatch… just have a box of tissues at the ready.

Dinosaur isn’t gut-busting funny, but its humor is purely character-driven, and it gives a view of autism that we’ve rarely seen on TV.

STREAM IT, but with reservations. The second season of Cross still has a lot of charm, especially in the relationship between Cross and Sampson, but feels like it’s going to take some time to really find what its primary story is going to be.

While we still think The Artful Dodger is still a fun watch, we’re wary about the second season making jumping through story hoops to make sure Jack and Belle stay apart.

Because of the performances of Keke Palmer and the fantastic supporting cast, we’re all in on The ‘Burbs, despite some concerns about aspects of the plot that won’t get the attention they deserve.

Season 4 of The Lincoln Lawyer retains its light touch, even though its main character is fighting a shocking murder charge from his jail cell.

Seeing The Muppet Show back as if it never left is not only comforting and nostalgic, but it’s still really entertaining. Let’s hope Disney decides to go forward with a new series after the success of this special.

Despite the ever-charming presence of Cuoco and fantastic European vistas, Vanished just feels slight and predictable, and even borderline implausible.

Season 3 of School Spirits feels like the show is struggling to figure out where to take its story after two pretty well-defined arcs in the first two seasons.

Bridgerton Season 4 Part 1 retains the charm of past seasons, but it often feels like two clashing shows, competing for ultimate attention. .... My only hope is that that drama can be a bit more streamlined, a bit more sexy, and bit more focused on our wonderful season leads when Part 2 rolls out on February 26.

Wonder Man is a Marvel show that’s accessible to even non-Marvel fans mainly because it’s less about the MCU and more about an actor who is trying to land the biggest role in Hollywood while not getting too lost in his own head. If that includes his superpowers, all the better.

We still think that Memory Of A Killer has the potential to go in directions other thrillers haven’t, simply because of the cognitive decline Dempsey’s character will be suffering through. But through the first two episodes, there’s not enough of that to make the show feel much different than other conspiracy thrillers of recent vintage.

The commentary by dozens of admirers and career-highlight TV and movie snippets are great of course, nostalgic but purposeful, meaningful in the context of Brooks’ life and influence on showbiz. But Apatow digs just deep enough to show that the guy is a true, honest-to-gosh restless artist at heart.

If you’re looking for a lot of teen angst and conflict, Finding Her Edge is probably not for you. But the performances are good enough that you’ll have no problem sitting down and watching this mostly easygoing show with your entire family.

While Free Bert could be funnier, we do appreciate that Kreischer and his co-creators took a chance and made his show about something rather than just an extension of his comedy persona.

We wish the new Star Search had some better pacing, and that the judges were a skosh tougher on the acts than they are. But for the most part we watched and voted along with the rest of the audience watching live, and rooted for those we liked. That’s the sign of an overall good show.

The Beauty is focused, gruesome and just funny enough to keep things moving. All of this is miraculous, given Ryan Murphy’s recent track record.

Will the six episodes of Steal be full of tension-filled twists and turns or just spiral out into silliness? We’re certainly interested enough in the story after the first episode to find out, but given that the running time is only about five or so hours, we’re hoping things will stay tight and tense.

Drops of God: Season 2 continues to deliver a layered, character-driven story that raises the bar from Season 1 as it blends cultures, explores complex family ties, and satisfies the senses on an even greater scale.

From witty one-liners and endearingly exaggerated personalities to physical comedy, musical numbers, and more it bears repeating that Shrinking is very funny and never maudlin. The series excels at giving viewers emotional whiplash (complimentary), but the team hasn’t just mastered the art of flicking from poignant to playful scenes on a dime.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is a perfectly entertaining entry in the now-60-year-old Trek franchise, punctuated by fun performances by Hunter and Giamatti. We just worry that the more generic-feeling Academy portion of the series will overwhelm the usually-reliable starship adventures.

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials is a well-paced, traditional Christie adaptation with a fun-to-watch young protagonist at its center, which is rare in the world of the classic mystery novelist’s stories.

Season 3 finds Spear, dead but not down, on a journey he doesn’t know the shape of, which only means more opportunity for this series’ already impressive animation and storytelling.

Between Will Smith’s joking but reverent hosting and the sweeping visuals, Pole To Pole With Will Smith is a show that’s worth watching, even if you stopped being a fan of his post-slap.

It’s a wildly entertaining rollercoaster that will have you rooting for the complex characters, questioning who you can trust, and reexamining your own biases in a way that doesn’t feel derivative.

Riot Women is a poignant and often funny look at women trying to break out of the bubbles they’re put in during their 50s and 60s, with the added fun of a great ’90s-heavy soundtrack and songs written specifically for the series.

Things take a little while to develop in the first episode of Hijack‘s second season. But once we learned exactly what was going on, we were locked back into what we expect to be a fast-paced season, with the usual excellent performance from Idris Elba.

To be honest, there’s a lot I genuinely dislike about this show. .... And yet, the show is also undeniably addictive; the characters and their behaviors might be unlikeable, but with new lies and mysteries unfolding in every episode, there’s just enough there to get you to binge the whole thing.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a charming new addition to the Game of Thrones franchise that will woo you back to Westeros.

If you’re going to wait a decade to create a second season of a show, it’s got to do two things: It’s got to remind people who watched the first season what the connections back to that season are, and it’s got to tell a new story that’s just as compelling as the first season was. The second season of The Night Manager definitely accomplishes the first, but hasn’t yet proven that it’ll accomplish the second.

Whether you’re a fan of Jujutsu Kaisen or you simply love beautifully animated, eye-catching visuals, from the first episode alone, Jujutsu Kaisen: Season 3 cements itself as engrossing, intense, and well worth your time.

This season of The Traitors offers several big changes, fortunately all for the better.

While Laurie’s presence Anglicises Tehran a bit, we’re still intrigued by the subtleties of Tamar’s and Faraz’s stories, especially now that their stories have started to come together.

Girl Taken builds its tension in a straightforward manner, not through trickery or withheld information, and that is a rare commodity on streaming TV these days.

There’s a lot of entertaining weirdness going on in Coldwater, so much so that the problems we have with the characters and plotting might end up being overridden by it. So, even if the show isn’t all that good, it might still be fun to watch.

While we’re unsure if the twists and turns in The Game are going to be good or stupid, we’re still interested in how Huw is able to hold onto his family while playing this cat-and-mouse game with Patrick.

The performances and potential for lots of twists makes His & Hers a show that we want to see more of. But the first episode needed to give viewers a few more crums of contextual information in order for it to make more story sense.

[Coben's] insights tend to be generic in nature and spoken by Coben in a way that sounds like he’s reading from a cue card. In fact, Coben’s presence eventually becomes a bit of a liability. .... Despite the stiff and unnecessary narration by Coben, Harlan Coben’s Final Twist still does a good job of giving viewers lots of surprises in each episode’s brief running time.

Whereas it once felt like all of this show’s challenges were emanating from the same place they do on Jimmy Donaldson’s YouTube channel, with others doing them instead of MrBeast himself, Season 2 of Beast Games feels better positioned inside what we all understand as contemporary reality competition.

Will Trent continues to go deeper into its characters’ lives and psyches, transforming the show from an average crime procedural to one of the best character-driven dramas on any broadcast network.

Yet another spectacularly bold, absolutely brilliant, and shamelessly brash season of television, but it’s also darker, grander, and more culturally relevant than any season of the show before.

We enjoyed the quirky fun of the first episode of Best Medicine, as well as the layered performances of Josh Charles and Abigail Spencer.

The Pitt Season 2 is a perfectly executed season of television. Rather than buckling under pressure, the HBO Max show’s cast and crew returns with wholly-deserved swagger. .... An early, strong contender for the best show of the year.

Land Of Sin is a solid Scandi noir thriller, and any issues you may have with the plot or story telling won’t take away from following along with Dani and Malik as they try to figure out the case.

Run Away is another solid Coben thriller with good performances, a little bit of humor and lots of twists. Will it be memorable five seconds after you finish watching it? Probably not. But it’s something good to binge over a weekend.

Nightsleeper has the potential to be a tense six-episode thrill ride or it could be a predictable bore. The first episode makes us think it might be the latter, but there are enough good elements in the first episode to keep us watching.

There’s enough that we like about The Copenhagen Test to recommend it. It feels mostly like a solid conspiracy drama with a little bit of sci fi mixed in, but we hope the muddled first episode isn’t a bad sign of what the rest of the season will be like.

If you’re a Chappelle fan, nothing I say will change your mind. But if you want just the heart of the comedy matter without all of the unnecessary cruelty or trolling, then SKIP ahead to the 33-minute mark, where you can then STREAM IT for his closing story.

Adult Swim’s The Elephant is a fun experiment that turns out to be an entertaining 23 minutes of TV (48 if you extend it to the accompanying documentary) from some very talented creators.

Emily in Paris isn’t going to make your Top 10 Best Shows of 2025 list. But it’s still a high-quality comfort watch with good vibes and a charming cast that can give you a much-needed rest from reality.

While the prizes up for grabs on What’s In The Box? are exciting and NPH is an affable host, the game play drags and the reality elements are too irritating to keep us watching.

The world of Fallout expands in Season 2, but all of it still feels focused on the overall story of a post-apocalyptic world created by greed and avarice trying to survive.

As long as you know what you’re getting yourself into, STREAM IT to see what Sherman is like outside of the constraints of NBC and 30 Rock. Just note it might not be a great idea to eat or think about eating while watching this!

Taylor Swift: The End of an Era is a nice illumination into the singer-songwriter’s hugely-scaled professional operation and her personal, sometimes emotional world.

Little Disasters has some annoying “perfect family with secrets” tropes, and uses some irritating narrative devices like foruth-wall-breaking snippets and narration. However, we liked the exploration of this unlikely friendship between a medical skeptic and a doctor, and how their differences end up threatening one of their families.

Simon Cowell: The Next Act combines the homelife version of the host’s caddish personality with the process of finding, founding and making a boy band flourish. We’re just intrigued enough to see if Cowell really can go from zero to One Direction in the space of six episodes.

Man Vs. Baby is the kind of show that you can put on and just laugh without thinking too hard, which is likely the exact reaction Atkinson and Davies wanted the audience to have.

The second season of Percy Jackson And The Olympians starts off with a raucous episode and promises to send its heroes on a new quest immediately, which is exactly what an adventure series where we already know everyone should do.

The scenery, Morgan’s charm, and the good casting will keep you watching Destination X, even though the gameplay is too complicated and frustrating.

STREAM IT, if you’re a fan of the Spartacus franchise. If you’re not, you’re going to be too confused and confounded by Spartacus: House Of Asher to want to continue past the first couple of episodes, so SKIP IT

Fiona Nolan and her family are the more interesting of the two, if only because how they came together. .... When Anderson and Headey are in scenes together, it’s hard to look away.

The New Years keeps its storytelling relatively simple, focusing on the main characters as we peek in on their evolving relationship over a decade.

We’ve only seen one episode, so it’s hard to say whether this new cast will actually resonate with the audience. But from what’s been shown so far, they certainly seem to have potential.

While it’s not an investigation per se, we appreciate the strong journalistic approach Reckoning takes, using direct quotes and personal experience, wherever it can, to establish historic, scary patterns in Combs’ behavior. At the same time, director Alexandria Stapleton is an artful builder of tension, which makes Reckoning eminently watchable.

STREAM IT, obviously, if you’re a Beatles fanatic and are looking for something to nap to after Thanksgiving dinner. Anthology has lived a few lives by now, but this updated streaming version feels clean and presentable, just like the young and scrubbed Beatles in 1964.

Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age is not only great to look at, but is well-paced and provides some scientific context to the era known as the “Ice Age”.

With its TV-G rating, Prep & Landing: The Snowball Protocol is great, kid-friendly holiday entertainment. While it’s likely not going to enter the pantheon of annual holiday re-watches, it’s the ideal show for the under-10 crowd.

While the subject matter of Heated Rivalry is somewhat daring, the first episode plays out like something that used to be shown late nights on Cinemax instead of story with well-drawn characters and romantic chemistry between its leads.

Stranger Thing Season 5 Part 1— streaming now — is full of gaudy special effects, nonsensical lore, and insane plot devices, and yet you will still somehow fall under the show’s spell. That’s because it was never the spectacle or super-sized episode run times that won audiences over. No, the best part of Stranger Things is still, as it’s always been, the sheer humanity of its characters and the incandescent talent of its young cast.

A big component of his celebrity is his general niceness, and as the singer ambles around midtown, it’s all as amiable as his style of performance typically is. What mild pressure One Shot exerts on the viewer is through its technical maneuvering, but neither Sheeran nor his crew seem to care about “proving it.” It’s just a mechanism to move the singer’s nice guy energy into multiple spaces, and sure, maybe sell a few records along the way.

We want the show to be compelling and relatively self-contained so “civilians” like us don’t have to do extensive research to crack the show’s code. The Mighty Nein succeeds in that regard, for the most part, though there were times during the first episode where we were scratching our heads about who was who and what was what.

The second season of A Man On The Inside may or may not have as much of the sentiment and emotion as the first season, but it should be just as funny, thanks to Schur, Danson, and a great cast.

The first episode of Had I Not Seen The Sun sets up an interesting dual story about a serial killer’s high school years and how a filmmaker connects with one of his victims years later.

The second season of Landman is stronger than the first, mainly because the women on the show are in a stronger position than they were last season, giving Thornton’s Tommy all he can handle.

The American Revolution is yet another example of how Ken Burns and his collaborators take what we already know about a historic event and, through meticulous research and extensive interviews with historians, goes really deep into the topic in an entertaining way.

The Seduction is a good looking series with fine performances and enough kinkiness to satisfy fans of boddice-ripping period dramas.

While we liked the performances of Whitehall, Duchovny and van Houten, Malice really doesn’t give the viewers much in the way of dramatic momentum in the first episode, and the show doesn’t know whether it wants to be funny or scary.

With furious fight action and a noble hero to follow through its pitched battle tension, Last Samurai Standing feels like a limited series well worth your time.

Tiffany Haddish Goes Off shines because the comedian goes on a trip of a lifetime with her actual friends, and decades of memories and history together inform everything they do on this trip.

The Beast In Me benefits from a focused story that puts its Emmy-winning leads in a good position to do their best work, especially when they’re on screen together.

I once said Season 2 was better than Season 1. But now, Season 3 might have them both beat.

We still appreciate Wiig’s performance as Maxine, as well as the performances of Janney, Duffy and more. But Palm Royale is so in love with its own sense of late-’60s, early-’70s kitsch and piling on characters and plotlines, that those performances often get lost under a blizzard of words.

It’s definitely a shadow of what it once was, but the characters are still classic, and the lessons they teach are given in a way that will stick in the minds of the kids they’re trying to teach.

Bat-Fam is a watchable show that isn’t as funny as it wants to be, but a dad version of Batman trying to manage a crazy household has a lot of potential.

The show doesn’t try to go for cheap gags but instead roots all of its comedy in the characters and the found family that populates Happy’s Place (the bar as well as the series). That continues in the second season, with a couple of twists that will make the season a little more interesting.

Stumble is not only funny, but it has a surprising amount of heart and character-based humor, and our hope is that it’ll improve on both factors after a strong start.

Maxton Hall: The World Between Us enters its second season with a bang, having its main characters immediately go off the rails in the first episode. We can’t wait to see where the action takes us from here.

It’s another series by Vince Gilligan that’s both visually and dramatically compelling to watch, especially with Rhea Seehorn being featured throughout.