Reason.com's Scores

  • TV
For 389 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 55% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 43% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average TV Show review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 The Chair (2021): Season 1
Lowest review score: 0 Elvis Lives!
Score distribution:
  1. Mixed: 0 out of 225
  2. Negative: 0 out of 225
225 tv reviews
  1. Strahovski, so strikingly desexualized that she's scarcely recognizable, fascinatingly embodies all the seemingly contradictory impulses of The Handmaid's Tale toward feminism.
  2. The Hunt is more of a high-stakes chess match, albeit one featuring spectacularly photographed athletic grace. Its preternaturally omniscient cameras document the shifting strategies employed by both predators and prey.
  3. A stunning fusion of style and story. The Night Of is noir to its very soul.
  4. A remarkable piece of work that carves muscular narrative lines though the tangled legal thickets of the trial while keeping a delicate touch on the chiaroscuro of its characterizations. If ever there was such a thing as must-see TV, this is it.
  5. But for all the documentary's merits, it does its best work in ferreting out the bite-size experiences of the grunts, not just the ones in uniform but the CIA officers, junior diplomats, peasant farmer and family members back home—the people didn't make policy but were whipsawed by it. Their stories are poignant, confusing, heartbreaking, maddening, blackly funny, or cryptic, often all at once.
  6. Bouncing unpredictably between somber dejection and daffy dark humor, Back to Life shouldn't work at all. Yet it does, wonderfully.
  7. As television storytelling, it's little short of brilliant. As history, the verdict is less certain.
  8. HBO's The Deuce is the spellbinding story of how flesh became flash, how the sex trade went from back alleys to boardrooms.
  9. An absorbing drama.... To the extent that Show Me a Hero is flawed, the problem lies not in Simon's dramaturgy but his journalistic instincts. Show Me a Hero is but a single snapshot of a lumbering crisis that unfolded over a period of nearly three decades, and while the show's narrative is painstakingly accurate within its timeframe, its wide implications are not.
  10. That's just one of the many delicious, hilarious, fascinating, and sometimes poignant anecdotes in Epix's two-part Laurel Canyon, one of the great rock 'n' roll documentaries of all time.
  11. There are a lot of reasons to love The Searcher, and that tape fragment (from the night Elvis and a pickup band turned a stately bluegrass waltz called "Blue Moon Of Kentucky" into a balls-to-the-wall jam) is a big one. Director Thom Zimny, who has made several well-regarded Bruce Springsteen documentaries, got access to everything in the Graceland archives, from home movies to ancient recordings of radio interviews.
  12. An unnervingly close-up study of the conflict. Given an astonishing level of access to both Mexican drug lords and American junkies, he's intercut their stories with a narrative about an Ohio police narcotics squad, which though far more ordinary, is still revealing.
  13. There are plenty of intriguing subplots and red herrings in Too Close, but what drives the engine is the full-speed collision of two cracked psyches, expertly played.
  14. Alternating effortlessly between weirdly funny and chillingly tense, Killing Eve is the utterly endearing love child of oddball British novelist Luke Jennings and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who writes and stars in the eccentric Brit television comedy Fleabag.
  15. Roots' greatest service may be in reminding us that, as we blunder through the ugly turmoil of present-day American race relations, we've survived worse.
  16. An elegant suspense tale in which memory and identity are both the heroes and the villains.
  17. If that sounds tedious, it isn't. Unbelievable, the rare crime drama with no bang-bang and scarcely any on-screen violence of any kind (even the rapes, seen only from the eyes of blindfolded, trussed-up victims, are confused and fragmentary), is still a relentlessly compelling binge-watch event.
  18. A rollicking psychedelic trip of a show that washes over you like a vat of Ken Kesey Kool Aid. Splashy, free-associative and generally as nuts as its schizophrenic characters, Legion is as delirious and dazzling as television gets.
  19. If you can't find something in here to enjoy, you're just not trying very hard.
  20. Watching The Plot Against America often feels like being locked in a closet with a fanatical #NeverTrumper: It'll give you a headache even if you agree with him.
  21. Chernobyl really is a horror movie: not just about errant technology, but also a maleficent portrait of an ideology that denies the existence of error.
  22. Not the least of Big Little Lies' achievements is its relentless mockery of the moneyed class of California progressives from which most of its cast and writers presumably spring. Its characters embrace every crackpot totem of fashionable liberalism with bubblehead enthusiasm that masks a profound lack of sincerity.
  23. But it's the eternal internal world of adolesence that's mostly the concern of Pen15, and that's not always a good fit for nostalgia. Erskine and Konkle do not skip past the mindless cruelty of teenagers, and it's possible that for all its rip-roaring daffiness, Pen15 is at its best when it's most lacerating.
  24. Just as he did in his O.J. Simpson miniseries, Murphy has cast his show to perfection. After a few minutes, it's nearly impossible to remember that Jessica Lange (as Crawford) and Susan Sarandon (as Davis) ever had lives apart from the women they're playing.
  25. What might have been a rather talky script is enlivened by the peerless performances of Sarah Gadon (who played the romantically doomed librarian in the Hulu miniseries production of 11.22.63) as the wan but flinty Grace and Canadian TV regular Paul Gross as the bewildered Dr. Jordan.
  26. Search Party is kind of weirdly endearing, in a misanthropic, foul-mouthed sort of way. If you've ever wondered why all your friends are self-important sociopaths, Search Party may be the show you've been waiting for all your life.
  27. It has an underbelly sufficiently dark that grown-up Kirsten's hands sport a generous number of the tattoo equivalents of gun-stock notches, keepsakes of her capable work with knives. There's also a pervasive feeling that someone—or something—is watching. And what's that mysterious comic book to which Kirsten keeps consulting as if it's a training manual?
  28. A must-see for anybody interested in film, World War II, or great story-telling.
  29. You don't have to like country music at all—in fact, you can despise it—to be swept away by these gloriously eccentric yarns.
  30. A skillful editor probably could have trimmed 90 minutes out of I'll Be Gone in the Dark that wouldn't be missed.

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