Euphoria Season 2 is good, but not quite great. ... Without seeing the final pieces of the overall puzzle, it’s impossible to say if Euphoria Season 2 manages to succeed as a whole. What we have seen is as masterful as it is messy. Euphoria remains an imperfect gem that works best as a showcase for the next generation of towering acting talents.

Cartel gets a lot of use out of reenactments, with actors in big black Aviators and cowboy boots driving around Texas in a government-issue Impala, or trying to stay incognito as they surveil their persons of interest at horse auctions. And while that stuff is effective in building tension – Lawson and the FBI were targeting a criminal group known for killing indiscriminately, always wary of being made – it’s the case itself that’s the most interesting thing here.

Despite our reservations, #Cybersleuths: The Idaho Murders is still a good review of this grisly case, and we think that the filmmakers will eventually get their message across about the good and bad aspects of online speculation about cases like these.

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.

Miracle Workers: End Times is probably the thinnest of the show’s four seasons, but the episodes are pretty quick and there’s more than enough funny stuff to help you binge through the episodes once they hit Max.

After one episode, the jury’s still out on whether Season 2 will live up to Season 1’s story and style. But Monáe is definitely good enough to carry the season, and the story may end up going in unexpected directions.

The Ed Gein Story does an effective job of introducing audiences to a serial killer many people may not know about, but one that has had a ton of influence on horror films from Psycho to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

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 Ashley Madison Affair is a well-paced docuseries that takes enough of a jaundiced eye at Ashley Madison to show its rise and fall in the correct context.

The Pitt features clunky dialogue, ridiculous cliffhangers, and overly obvious messaging associated with easy primetime viewing. It also boasts propulsive filmmaking, endearing characters, and one seismic performance from star/EP Noah Wyle. Whatever ingredients The Pitt did or did not poach from E.R. come together to make a slight drama that nevertheless speaks to the existential angst of seeking or providing healthcare in 2025.

Jane is a cute show with an important environmental message that does a good job of getting the information across to its young audience.

The presentation of The Puppet Master: Hunting The Ultimate Conman is pretty basic, but the story is so compelling — and compellingly told — you’ll look past the production’s cheesiness.

The story behind Wild Boys: Strangers In Town is pretty compelling, even if you have much less sympathy for those “wild boys” at the end of the docuseries than you had at the beginning.

Hamm’s performance in Your Friends & Neighbors is what will keep us watching, as he transforms from a guy who has gotten too big for his britches to a guy who now knows that was the case and is doing something about it.

Eyes Of Wakanda can definitely drag at times, but the lively action sequences, well-done animation, and the moral dilemmas faced by the stories’ antagonists make the anthology worth watching.

Dr. Brain is a well-written exploration of science that perhaps goes too far, especially in the hands of someone so curious. We just hope it keeps that interesting premise and doesn’t become another run-of-the-mill thriller.

If you don’t care about the MonsterVerse movies, this show probably won’t change your mind. However, if you’re into Godzilla, Kong, or the various Titans who square off against them, Monarch is a lot of fun.

Fear City: New York Vs. The Mafia may not be the most revealing docuseries, but the interview subjects and the subject matter are still fascinating enough to give this well-worn topic a revisit.

Veers dangerously close to becoming cheesy and artificial. But the results of Farak and Dookhan’s actions is so fascinating, that we’re very interested in watching this until the end.

The most memorable bits all take place onstage.

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.

Limitless With Chris Hemsworth puts the star in some extreme situations, but the insights into his life and thinking are what’s going to keep us watching.

Because Laurie wanted to stay relatively faithful to the story, viewers are going to have to sit through some predictability to get to the witty dialogue and the inevitable reveal of the killer.

Pivoting works because of its three leads, but they’re dealing with uneven stories that we hope will be worked out as its first season goes along.

Doctor Odyssey is a pretty dumb, inessential watch, but an entertaining one, mostly due to the performances of the main cast and guest stars.

Bait is a mostly-funny show about a guy that finds out what it’s like when he makes himself go viral in order to advance his career, with a funny performance by Riz Ahmed.

Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole isn’t reinventing the “troubled detective” or Nordic noir genres, but good performances by Santelmann and Kinnaman make the show very watchable.

Despite some stylistic missteps, Archie is a well-paced story about the life of Cary Grant, who most of us really only know from the roles he played in films that are 60 or more years old.

We often complain that docuseries take six hours to tell three hours of story, which leads to a lot of filler. Here, it feels like there’s about eight to ten hours of story, squeezed into six 45-50 minute episodes. ... Corben doesn’t position this as some dark, scary, noirish true crime series, and that is refreshing.

Chris Hemsworth is personally engaging and does seem genuinely engaged as he undertakes a new round of mental and physical challenges in Limitless: Live Better Now.

While we continue to enjoy the interplay between these characters, we’re pretty sure nobody on this show has ever even seen a good mood – and that does not change with this immediately grim new season.

Despite the years between sequels, the cast of The Best Man: The Final Chapters is a well-oiled machine, and it shows in this new series.

Instead of a rehash of an event that could be easily researched, Meltdown: Three Mile Island takes a familiar event from the past half-century and fills in people’s gaps in information and debunks commonly held beliefs about the event.

We liked Men In Kilts: A Roadtrip with Sam and Graham because Heughan and McTavish aren’t trying to be brotastic or outshine each other. They’re two buddies on a roadtrip — albeit a bit of an overscripted one — and that comes across well on the show.

Am I Being Unreasonable? continues to be one of the darkest of dark comedies out there, though there may not be as many twists and turns as the first season had.

The Dog House: UK is a light and sweet diversion from all the cynical reality series out there. It would fit really well on Animal Planet, which is a high compliment for a show like this.

Once the awkwardness of setting up R.J. Decker‘s puzzle pieces ends, we see the potential for it to be a fun, quirky case-of-the-week detective series that will concentrate on its characters’ stories as much if not more than the weekly case.

American Horror Stories definitely takes care to tell stories that are satisfying and complete despite their relatively short length, but we just wish a few elements of those stories were a little more thoroughly considered.

Lawmen: Bass Reeves benefits from a sturdy performance by David Oyelowo at its center, effectively strikes the balance between tough talk, gunplay, and sentiment typical of a Tyler Sherdian production, and offers some perspective on a formative era of US history.

There’s enough going on during 30 Coins to keep a viewer interested. But at times, there’s too much going on, and it doesn’t give any time to explore the relatively small main cast and what their characters’ motivations are.

This City is Ours features a few wrinkles in its setting and approach that set it apart from the many, many similarly sprawling family crime dramas. We’ll stick with it and see what an impressively deep cast can bring to the story, which features a lot of other elements that strike us as pretty familiar.

Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord is certainly one of the darker entries in the franchise, especially among the animated series. But there is a lot of potential to dig into the personality of one of the franchise’s most notorious villains, which is always something we look forward to seeing.

The stories of the women on the DCC squad are what make America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders worth watching, even if the format sometimes feels repetitive.

While America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders isn’t going to get too dark or delve too deeply into real issues, it’s still a good behind the scenes look at how one of the most famous cheerleading squads in the world gets ready for being in the spotlight.

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 show’s not really going to change your mind about whether or not love truly is blind, but it is going to make you scream at your TV a lot (in the good way).

The refreshing thing about this series is that the members of Menudo who were interviewed appreciated the wild ride they went on, even if looking back they realize that Díaz wouldn’t be able to operate the band the same way today.

We were surprised how engaged we were with Sweet Tooth, even though it’s a show about a virus that wipes out most of humanity; it’s not something you want to contemplate as the real pandemic we’re suffering through winds to a close. But good performances and an adaptation that grounds things into some sort of reality saves the show from eye-rolling preciousness.

Tempest definitely shows potential in its first episode.

Murder Before Evensong is an engaging mystery that builds a world around Canon Daniel Clement as he becomes the sleuthing vicar that will likely solve murders in future series.

Trial 4 takes some time to get going, and the first episode ironically shows very little of Sean Ellis, it’s still a compelling story of corruption and the determination of a man to clear his name.

While Clark may dabble a bit too much in making Clark Olofsson into a hero, it’s still an entertaining look at how Olofsson saw his life, whether the stories are true or not.

The Chosen presents the life of the central figure in a major world religion with an unabashed adoration for the teachings of Christ. But it’s also increasingly capable of existing on a level of dramatic storytelling with a historical bent. This balance will only get more important as the chapters and verses of the gospels begin to collide with the realities and demands of episodic television.

Steeltown Murders has the potential to be a really intriguing mystery that spans 30 years, as long as the scenes from the Seventies flow well into the scenes from the Aughties and vice versa.

The Artful Dodger doesn’t try to replicate the vibe of Oliver Twist. It has its own vibe, one that moves quickly, is often funny, and is mostly entertaining to watch.

Despite our reservations about the storytelling in The Big Cigar, we were impressed by Holland’s turn as Huey P. Newton. That alone is enough to watch this fast-moving series.

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.

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.

Slow Horses has a bit of a generic case at its center, and it feels like some members of the Slough House team get short shrift, at least at first. But Oldman’s presence elevates our interest in just how everyone who works at Slough House actually got there.

American Primeval is an unsparing look at a segment of the American West in the 1850s that pretty much saw conflict, blood and death every single day. It’s certainly bleak, but it also reflects what it was really like for people heading West at that time, and why survival was probably their greatest achievement.

It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but The Midnight Gospel is fascinatingly strange, and if you listen to what is actually talked about, you may come away with some insight into the human condition.

It’s a well-acted show with some reasonably intricate foreign relations plotting at its core that would have been right at home on network television in the 2000s or 2010s, save for a few f-bombs here and there. Our opinion of the show hasn’t really changed in that regard, though we do think that the plot is now getting so intricate, the show may be nudging itself more towards the “prestige TV’ end of the spectrum.

On Call has a nice pace to it, and the performances of Bellisario and Larracuente are understated and effective. Sure, it’s a police procedural, but at least its format and subject matter are a little different than what we normally see.

The Great North has some work to do to get to the level of its cousin shows, Bob’s Burgers and Central Park. But with a great voice cast and Bouchard overseeing things, it should get there eventually.

Will you come away from Last Light thinking you watched the best show ever? No. But it’s got more than enough action and intrigue, a family that’s trying to reunite during a worldwide crisis and Matthew Fox being his usual charming, gritty self (eventually).

Stanley Tucci isn’t exactly the most relatable or warm presence as a travel host, but he is thorough, and Tucci In Italy is a good continuation of the journey through the country that he started on CNN in 2021.

While the first episode of We Were The Lucky Ones is a bit confusing and the show has too many characters to keep track of, King’s and Lerman’s performances anchor the series and make it worth watching, even if the rest of the characters won’t get as well-explored.

Land Of Women is a pleasant-enough show that has a story that will go down easy, with good performances sprinkled throughout.

It’s an enjoyably ludicrous premise which sits somewhere between Agatha Christie classic And Then There Were None, recent aristocratic horror comedy Ready or Not and mid-‘00s one-season wonder Harper’s Island. The acting, on the other hand, is more daytime soap opera. ... By taking aim at the privilege of the 1%, the most satisfying [chapter], too. But we’d still prefer Cronenberg to take the director’s chair for season five.

Your level of engagement with the series will depend entirely on how easily you get queasy.

It’s breezy and fun, and you won’t need your brain too much.

Its amazingly crafty kids and Great British Bake-Off positive vibe makes for a fun way to pass 40 or so minutes.

There seems to be a disparity between the warm relationship between these siblings and the funny lines that are supposed to come out of this relationship. But the relationship is so well-established so early, we’re rooting for it to get funnier.

The Undeclared War sports good lead performances, some creative storytelling and a plot that steadily builds tension. And we don’t have to look at that much code, which is a plus.

The gameplay in Million Dollar Secret moves along at a good clip, and the playfully arch Serafinowicz really adds some fun to a format that we’ve been seeing a lot of lately.

Taken on its own merits, there are definitely interesting story prospects for the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale. .... While it might be cathartic to watch June, Moira and others try to bring the government down, the show now might be too close to reality for our comfort.

While it took a bit of time to get our bearings with regards to what’s going on in the Heavenly Realm, we still enjoyed the first episode of American Born Chinese because of the earthly part of the story, as well as the well-done action sequences.

Despite the first episode’s draggy pace, the aftermath of the Gardner Museum robbery is what will keep us watching.

The final season of Atlanta has a sense of the surreal that makes the delivery of its message a whole lot easier to take than the show’s third season, which felt like more of a take-your-medicine exercise at times.

Bad Monkey has a bit of a shaggy feel to it, with potential to fly off in a lot of different directions and a lot of characters to keep track of. But if anyone can keep a show like this on point, it’s Lawrence and his crew.

While this new version of Kung Fu has been CW-ified to its detriment, there’s more than enough to like about it to recommend it, hoping that the stupids that infiltrated the pilot get smoothed over in subsequent episodes.

The Genetic Detective succeeds because Moore is charming as hell and the process she uses to solve these cases are fascinating.

Dead Still‘s mystery is just in its beginning stages in the first episode, but the chemistry between the three leads is readily apparent, and that will fuel the rest of the first season.

3 Body Problem may fail to inspire true awe, but there’s enough fun, shock, and horror to keep sci-fi fans engaged. It is a completely competent season of television.

Martin acknowledges at one point they’re perhaps preaching to the choir in the theater, but perhaps more than a few viewers unfamiliar with Martin will happen upon their special and learn a thing or two, too.

The Come Up doesn’t look like it’s going to be a particularly deep show, and anyone who’s older than the cast members have seen this kind of show many times. But it’s fun to see how the “youngs” in 2022 see the big city.

If it weren't for Deborah Ayorinde and especially Sarah Niles, we'd likely tell people to skip Riches because it's so over-the-top soapy. But the two lead performances are so compelling that it will definitely make viewers flip to at least the second episode after the first is over.

Churchill At War does a good job at repackaging well-examined material in enough of a new way to keep viewers engaged, and maybe even learn some things about Winston Churchill they didn’t already know.

The improvised scenes are where the show crackles with energy, even if old farts like us can’t understand 100% of the skaters’ lingo. ... Also, the energy among the five stars is palpable, given the history that they’ve had in the past few years. When the group splits up, things get more stilted.

We complain about how impenetrable the world of Shadow And Bone is, but we also know that the story is an enjoyable adventure. We just wish things were a hair easier to follow.

It feels that Trying is going to try (pun intended) to get the emotional wringer of the adoption process right instead of falling back on TV cliches about it. It also helps that Smith and Spall play a couple that are great together and you want to see get what they’ve been hoping for.

We don’t recommend watching every episode of Marvel’s 616, but there should be enough material in the eight-episode first season to keep you occupied for a few entertaining hours.

You can’t help but feel relaxed while watching The Great Pottery Throw Down, and it’ll be interesting to see how the ante gets upped not only during the first season, but across all of the show’s three seasons.

Overcompensating‘s first episode has a few funny moments, but tries to[o] hard in other spots. But the friendship between Benny and Carmen is worth following, as long as Benny starts making his way out of the closet quickly.

The Harper House has plenty of curb appeal: Goofy characters, real-life sentiment, a mildly acidic tone. It probably won’t be the best house on the block, but it’s funny enough to warrant taking in a few more episodes.

While we don’t love the storytelling in the first episode of Women In Blue, the performances by the four lead actresses are very watchable and the serial killer mystery that will be a big part of the first season is going to be a good driver of action.

While Oh My God…Yes! A Series of Extremely Relatable Circumstances isn’t quite as funny as it should be, we like Williams’ vision of a near-future South Central and the really crazy friendship that the main trio has forged.