Sins Of Our Mother is an intense retelling of an ongoing story, one that has more tragedy and twists and turns than even Shakespeare could come up with. And it’s all told in a very straightforward manner because with a story this intricate, there’s no real need for bells and whistles.

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.

Despite Moss’ best efforts, the show is breaking at the seams when it comes to its larger narrative. ... Unless you’re already a dedicated Handmaid’s Tale fan, you can skip the drudgery of this season and check back in with June when the series comes to a close with Season 6.

The Serpent Queen has just enough irreverence to make what could have been a boring period story a lot more interesting, emphasizing Catherine de’ Medici’s cunning over being prim and proper.

Despite the performances in the first episode, this remake of American Gigolo just doesn’t have enough going on to justify an 8-episode series, and it’ll likely get really boring and frustrating before it gets interesting.

Monarch is a soap that’s all suds and no substance, and its most compelling character might possibly have the least screen time going forward.

When Cobra Kai really clicks is when the nostalgia factor is balanced by the interactions of the current group of kids. That balance is certainly out of whack in the first two episodes, but it’s something we hope gets restored later in the season.

Gutsy reveals enough insight about the Clintons and the people they talk to make it watchable, even enjoyable. We just wish there was more depth to the episodes.

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).

There are multiple reasons why Wedding Season works so well. The first are the two leads. ... It feels like an adventure that’ll be fun to watch. Lyttelton has also done a good job sketching out the supporting characters.

It just feels like a whole series full of toxic, near-narcissistic characters that aren’t murdering each other. We don’t want to spend our precious time on earth with people like that in real life, much less filling the cast of a young adult drama.

Devil In Ohio is a perfectly serviceable show that should keep audiences entertained for eight episodes. But at times it feels like something that’s a bit too slick and a bit too uncomplicated for a show that’s about a cult victim that ruins lives, especially a show for Netflix.

If you’re already aware of the accusations against Armie, I suggest skipping directly to episodes two and three because that’s where you’ll get to some of the more shocking anecdotes about other family members. But overall, House of Hammer is a fascinating, truth-is-stranger-than-fiction look at the way absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the way it can hurt people when no one calls it out for decades.

The first two episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are visually gorgeous, densely lived-in, and awe-inspiring at times. ... There is a big problem, though. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power might have a strong start, but its plot is laden with so many moving parts and far-flung heroes, it’s easy to see the story cratering. ... Without watching beyond the two episodes provided for review, we can only be cautiously optimistic — and skeptical of what’s next.

The Patient delivers a good story and dramatic tension in a compact package. It’s an exercise in “less is more”, and Carell and Gleeson are especially good at reining in their characters’ extreme emotions.

More than past installments, Rick and Morty Season 6 intertwines classic adventures with more plot-heavy elements for a season that feels more confident in itself than ever before.

The series is enjoyable though extremely forgettable.

The friendship at the center of Everything I Know About Love is what is going to fuel the show and keep it flying off into just showing hipster nonsense. But the first episode felt much longer than its 43-minute runtime because of all that hipster nonsense.

Little Demon makes sure to root most of its humor in character and situation instead of gags. Sure, there are plenty of gags, but we just love the idea of a seemingly relatable story being layered over by ridiculous circumstances.

We’d rather see a bioseries about Mike Tyson where Tyson is intimately involved, because we’re pretty sure it will have a lot of subtleties about Tyson’s life that Mike lacks. His life deserves better than a series that treats him like a curiosity more than anything else.

This feels like Netflix wanted to make sure that this adaptation didn’t get too saccharine, but in doing so, it just made things ever so slightly weird and off-putting.

There are a lot of elements that make Welcome To Wrexham a fascinating watch, namely how two Hollywood superstars are going to come into a small Welsh town and try to turn around its football team without making like they’re saviors.

While it could be a touch funnier, Mo is very watchable because of Mo Amer as well as its cross-cultural focus.

In Chad & JT Go Deep, their characters are as earnest as they are detached, like stoners who make no little plans but falter on the perception and follow-through. And that earnestness can mostly make up for wherever the humor becomes so indirect as to be scattershot.

We trust Greg Garcia to not beat a dead horse with pandemic gags on Sprung. But for the first episode, they are a good way to introduce the story of Jack and the rest of the characters, and Garcia is well on the way to establishing character humor as the center of the series.

Echoes is without question one of the most messy and confusing shows we’ve seen in awhile, and there really seems to be nothing for a viewer to grab onto that would tempt them to move to the second episode after the first is over.

House of the Dragon isn’t good; it’s great. ... House of the Dragon is definitely the show Game of Thrones fans want, full of drama, fire, and blood. Oh, and lots of dragons.

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.

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is unashamedly mundane, weird, funny, and feminine — and that’s why it is such a success.

There’s some behind-the-scenes stories that will be entertaining to hardcore fans. Largely, though, there’s a stiffness to the proceedings, a conscious attempt either not to be Winning Time or to directly rebut it. ... Legacy seems so determined to avoid controversial subjects that it comes off dry as a result; even the show’s willingness to discuss the Buss family’s internal struggles over control of the team feels somewhat contrived.

This is a winning portrait of two guys in South Central L.A. with opposing life philosophies who find they each have something to learn from the other.

As with most anthologies, your mileage may vary with Tales Of The Walking Dead, depending on which episode you watch. But the performances are entertaining enough to make up for some fractured storytelling and weird, overly positive vibe.

The show continues to be a realistic and empathetic portrayal of what being a teenager looks like.

This new version of A League Of Their Own explores territory that the original movie didn’t even attempt to explore. Whether that makes the series a coherent whole is yet to be seen. But it certainly is off to a good start.

It treats Oly’s surprise pregnancy as a fact of this girl’s life, and it will be interesting to find out how she manages being a mother and an overachieving student.

Any worry that Baby Groot would wear out his welcome was unwarranted. Each short zips along at a perfect pace, deploying sight gags that hit their mark every time.

Despite the slow pace, easy clues and overreliance on guffaws, we still found ourselves playing along as if we were watching the older versions on BUZZR. And the modernized version of the ’60s theme song is pretty fun. If the show gets a second season, we hope Fallon and Quinn tighten things up to make the show move a bit faster.

I Just Killed My Dad is the rare true crime docuseries that tells a story that hasn’t been picked apart and retold over decades, and tells the story in a brief, relatively compact manner.

Season 3 is not just the most thrilling and emotionally charged installment yet… Locke & Key Season 3 is a fitting ending to Locke & Key, and easily one of the best seasons of a fantasy series released this year.

If you’re a casual fan of English soccer, it’s a great way to immerse yourself in an up-and-coming teams success. If you’re a hardcore fan, it offers you the behind-the-scenes looks you can’t get enough of.

While not our cup of tea, we definitely see how appealing The Sandman would be to fans of Gaiman and his work. We’re just not sure it’s particularly accessible to those of us who are new to the story.

Reservation Dogs improves on its excellent first season by deepening the community on the rez, making it less about the Dogs and more about traditions, people who think they know the traditions but don’t, and just how funny and rich life there can be, even if people have to be creative to get by.

Mike Judge’s Beavis And Butt-Head is more or less the same show that was such a hit in the ’90s. And because it’s about idiots doing dumb things, the funny stuff will always be funny, no matter what decade it is.

It’s interesting to revisit 1999, to look at the crackly VHS footage and say “What did it all mean?”, especially in the context of the decade that came next. Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 doesn’t dig all the way into those larger questions. But it does offer a primer, and its share of insights.

The Hillside Strangler: Devil In Disguise is a straightforward retelling of the famous serial killer case. But it definitely gives information and perspectives that people who paid attention to the case four decades ago might not have either gotten or remembered.

Industry is chock full of people being deliciously awful toward one another and making blatantly personal plays for financial gain, making all of their machinations eminently watchable.

Amber Brown is a delightful family sitcom, highlighted by Bonnie Hunt’s witty, easygoing writing style and Carsyn Rose’s revelatory lead performance.

While there’s a lot about Uncoupled that’s frustratingly shallow, Harris’ performance and the show’s frequent funny moments are more than enough to keep us watching.

Before the final scene of Paper Girls, we were going to give this show a big old thumbs down. But that final scene set the stage for a show that has the potential to be a fun ride, or at the very least something that’s a little different than what we’ve seen before.

As much as we couldn’t take our eyes off Gugu Mbatha-Raw during the first episode of Surface, her performance can’t save a show that doesn’t seem to have enough story to justify an 8-episode series.

Barrera sells the idea that she can absolutely survive, making her resourcefulness in the situation almost plausible. Now we just need to see where the plot goes, which will play out in those flashbacks. ... One of the things we like about the six-episode limited series is that the episodes are all around 30 minutes, so you’re not seeing Liv wandering around the wilderness for hours on end.

We’re certainly intrigued by the mystery that’s at the center of The Resort. But we also hope that Milioti and Harper get more of their own story to dig into, as opposed to being just a typically bored married couple who come together under extreme circumstances.

When you watch the first episode of The Most Hated Man On The Internet, all you want is to see Hunter Moore get his comeuppance. Thanks to this relatively brief docuseries and its speedy pace, you’ll get that wish pretty quickly.

In the grand television tapestry of manipulative teen girls, Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin isn’t revolutionary. But it is fun. Original Sin reworks the central themes and mysteries of the first series just enough to turn this tried-and-true premise into an all-out horror romp. No lie.

Primal Season 2 is an absolutely magnificent addition to an already fantastic set of episodes. It’s one of Tartakovsky’s best by far, and he’s proven that this is a franchise that’s only going to get better with time. From top to bottom, it’s one of the best animated series going right now.

Despite the self-indulgent aspects of The Last Movie Stars, Ethan Hawke has created a fascinating docuseries about one of the biggest Hollywood power couples ever, as well as the issues that defined their marriage.

Rap Sh!t suffers a bit from some broad gags and the phone-centric gimmickry we cited earlier, but at its heart is a story of two friends taking on the patriarchal world of hip hop, and that story is one we’re eager to watch.

Between the CGI blood, the disjointed dramatic scenes, and the somewhat stilted expert interviews, it feels like anyone who wants to get the history of the Colosseum in Rome would be better served reading its Wikipedia entry than slogging through 8 hours of Colosseum.

The Captain is broad enough to entertain anyone, but it’s an absolute must-stream for baseball fans.

Farzar could be a good show, but unless you’re a big fan of dick jokes — and we know you’re out there! — you’re not going to find a lot to laugh at with this show.

Packed with humor, heart, and some of the coolest action scenes of the year, it’s a show that will leaving you alternatively screaming at and cheering for your television. Resident Evil is simply a great time.

We’re excited about what Robinson is developing, right from the first half-hour. It’s going to be a hangout show, sure, but a hangout show where Phoebe and her friend group are going to comment on everything they think is trash, which is pretty much everything. So social comedy, fun hangout situations, and character-driven jokes… The formula seems to obvious, we wonder why more current sitcoms don’t do this.

It’s telling that Wexner himself did not want to be interviewed for the docuseries. That association with Epstein is going to be explored in-depth in the subsequent two episodes, especially episode 2, and it seems like that is what is going to dominate, more than even the usual vagaries of the fast fashion world that Wexner helped pioneer.

D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?! is a stylish docuseries that fills in a lot of blanks about a legend that has made a permanent home in our pop culture firmament, and the investigation that’s no closer to being solved now than it was in 1971.

There’s plenty of material here to fill the breezy half-hour episodes of What We Do in the Shadows, where bits ricochet wildly off crown molding and claw foot furniture.

Despite the Goop-ish feeling we get seeing a man of privilege getting to go on psychedelic trips while counting Netflix’s money, there is still information that he imparts in How To Change Your Mind that will, well, change your mind about psychedelics.

The result is a defiantly unpredictable mix of cringe and pathos that delivers a distinct blend of genuine emotion and laugh-out-loud humor. In a streaming world that thrives on conformity, The Rehearsal is the audacious outlier that delivers a wholly unique viewing experience.

If The Anarchists were just about the movement itself, it would be boring and enraging. But because it’s about how the movement got infiltrated by people who made things increasingly chaotic and violent, we’re ready to see where the rest of the series goes.

Claim To Fame isn’t high art, but it’s fun to guess along with the housemates, even if you can Google your guesses and find out who the housemates are before they’re revealed on the show.

Black Bird has enough interesting performances and just enough of an intriguing story to smooth over some its more generic and cliched parts. Lets hope the rough patches smooth out as the story goes along.

Boo, Bitch is a show whose main characters do more than enough to carry a show that has mostly generic secondary characters in an overdone genre. Without Condor and Colletti playing the main roles, the show would have been very forgettable.

Trigger Point has lots of tension, and a fair amount of action. What it doesn’t really have is much character development or an intriguing central plot. But you try to look away as Lana tries to defuse bomb after bomb after bomb.

The tone of the show can be a bit too cheeky at times, but it does have a light touch, and Melanie’s almost-giddy sex-positive personality certainly helps the shy couples open up.

The jokes are more quippy asides than things that are borne out of character. Some of them hit, but most miss. In fact, almost the entire first episode felt like a lame attempt at replicating the HIMYM formula, save any memorable characters.

It’s about time we were reminded that comedians aren’t just observers or philosophers, but sometimes more importantly the voices we need to hear to remind us of the plights of those among us who don’t enjoy the same rights as the rest of us.

Despite the series’ scattershot focus, America The Beautiful has more than enough spectacular footage to satisfy fans of nature docuseries.

The personality of The Terminal List can best be described as “grim,” as are the performances of Pratt and the rest of the cast. Life right now is pretty grim as it is; we don’t need this much monotonous darkness in our entertainment, too.

As big as Stranger Things has stretched in season four, the avenues by which its parallel narrative threads will converge are becoming more clear with the revelations of volume two. And that’s exciting, watching as all of these characters, long broken apart, find their way back to each other.

You are absolutely not going to come away from Who Is Ghislaine Maxwell? with any sympathy for the woman, who was just sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in Epstein’s sex trafficking circle. In fact, you may come away from the show with a little bit of pity for her, inasmuch you can pity her for the conditions that led her to this point in her life, not for the actions for which she’s about to be locked away. ... One thing we don’t really get an insight on, at least in the first episode, is Maxwell’s inner life.

Only Murders In The Building, unlike the true crime podcasts the show satirizes, doesn’t go into a sophomore slump after a great first season. Now that its comic rhythms are well-established, it actually feels like the show may be even better in Season 2.

They prove time and again that as singular as they may be individually as scene-stealers, they’re a powerhouse duo together. Even if plenty of their sketches find themselves feeling a pinch of imposter syndrome. No, they belong here. They certainly belong here.

Led by strong work from Evan Rachel Wood, Thandiwe Newton, and Aaron Paul, the sleek visual aesthetic Westworld works with allows it to coast on its own cool weirdness whenever the plotting starts to chase its own tail.

Because of key performances from Doherty, Hall and Bennett-Warner, Chloe goes from a predictable stalking tale to an entertaining thriller that may take some unexpected turns.

You certainly need to be in the mood to laugh at slapstick in order to enjoy Man Vs. Bee. But there is no one on the planet who does slapstick better than Rowan Atkinson, and this series shows off all the skills that have made his career so successful.

Loot is a very watchable, and funny-enough show. But we just want a Maya Rudolph series to really make its star a tour de force.

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.

The Bear is more dark comedy than a laugh riot, but its anarchic style and family vibe make for a kinetic show that might have some surprises in store for its viewers.

The case of the Beatrice Six is an interesting one, and we’re pretty sure that once Mind Over Murder gets into the details of how the six got arrested, convicted and exonerated, it’ll move better. But you may want to have your finger on the fast forward button during the first couple of episodes.

The Umbrella Academy never met a time traveling wrinkle it didn’t like, and for season three, there’s a lot of fallout to sort through. But with strong characters both old and new, there’s plenty of reason to see it through.

Booster retains his command of the stage and the audience throughout. ... You will laugh, even if you’re not gay or Asian.

The Lake is a coming-of-age show that isn’t trying to be for kids, but is also trying to tell a multi-layered story with smart, character-driven jokes, which it succeeds to do most of the time.

You don’t have to be a gamer to enjoy Players, even though the inside references will likely give gamers a smile. It’s a classic story about the veteran being displaced by an overconfident rookie, and it’s one that’s executed well.

We’re still not sure of God’s Favorite Idiot will right itself or just become a train wreck. The second episode definitely gave us signs that it will try to make McCarthy’s character more than an ad-lib machine.

Based on the first four episodes that were given to critics, it’s too early to tell if The Old Man will be the indisputable masterpiece is promises to be. Regardless, one thing is clear: FX has something special on its hands.

Dark Winds feels like it will deftly combine a standard murder mystery, tribal traditions and difficulties, and supernatural elements, tied together by a great performance by McClarnon.

Evil continues its smart combination of weekly cases with strong character arcs, all with the Kings’ dry sense of humor intact throughout the first episode of Season 3.

Why would we want to sit around and watch something to make us feel sad about Saget when we could watch him do what he did best: Make us laugh. ... Skip this and instead search for actual comedy from Saget.

Hollywood Houselift isn’t a particularly interesting show if you’re not already a Flipping Out fan, and it definitely pales in comparison to that show. But if you’ve been missing Jeff Lewis’ particular sense of style and, uh, work ethic over the past three years, this should give you the fix you need.