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?

A must-see for anybody interested in film, World War II, or great story-telling.

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.

Unless you have a mysterious fascination with ravaged children or junkies coming apart at the seams, this show is best avoided.

A skillful editor probably could have trimmed 90 minutes out of I'll Be Gone in the Dark that wouldn't be missed.

For Baranski, who arrived to her second-banana job on The Good Wife through a career in comedy (notably as Cybill Shepard's drunken socialite sidekick in Cybill), this is the role of a lifetime, and she responds with the performance of a lifetime.

Fascinating and often horrifying.

Watching it will definitely give you some painful 1960s and 1970s whiplash.

What I do know is that Shadows, the series, is FUNNY —often deadpan, sometimes quietly droll, sometimes howl-at-the-moon hilarious.

There's no story or character development, just an endless chorus of set-up, punch line, repeat. And the punch lines aren't nearly cutting enough to carry all that indolently dead weight.

Better Things is a faithful female-themed re-creation of Louis C.K.'s other shows: witless and angry, mistaking contempt for satire, self-important in its clueless disregard for plot, characterization or other niceties of the performing arts.

Speechless deftly blazes trails between irreverence and crudity, topicality and political correctness.

That's Lovecraft Country: A mélange of spectacular special effects, nerdy obsession, and crippling racial animus, all wrapped up in a tumbling free-form narrative that doesn't make much sense.

The audience, tentatively, clapped, and Fitzgerald's dancing career was over. Forty million records later, it seems the Apollo audience got it right.

Everything about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is balls-out nutbaggery, including its origin: It started out as a half-hour comedy for premium-cable channel Showtime and somehow wound up on a network devoted mostly to high-school bitchery and boy-band vampires, where it's not always clear if the demographic target of 13 to 34 refers to age or IQ.

There's more than one escape going on in Dannemora, even if all the routes end in the same place.

In the #MeToo era, HBO's Sharp Objects will inevitably be proclaimed a work of eloquent female empowerment. It isn't. It's slow, confusing, over-gothed and under-articulated. There's a good story squeaking from underneath all the messy baggage it carries, but it's probably easier to just go to Kmart for another suitcase rather than unpack this thing.

It's a serious--and seriously disturbing--piece of work about a pair of 12-year-old Wisconsin girls who, inspired by a creepy internet meme, lured a friend into the woods after a birthday party and stabbed her 19 times.

A gem of subversive mockery, trashing everything from New Age cosmic-muffin deism to central planning with gleeful comic bloodlust.

Unfortunately, there are also a lot of epically failed moments as well, almost all of them related to Schenkkan’s script, which paradoxically tries to cover too much while delivering too little. Instead of focusing exclusively on the battle over the civil rights bill, he tries to fold in the entire year of 1964, which included everything from the Gulf of Tonkin naval incident that launched full-scale American intervention in Vietnam to the arrest of a key Johnson aide caught performing a homosexual act in a public restroom weeks before the election that threatened (or so the president feared, anyway) to destroy his campaign.

It's a blackly hilarious comedy, a grim character study, a slow unraveling of a troubling past, a dazzling coming-out party for comedienne Kaley Cuoco as a lead actress and, yeah, a vexatiously fascinating murder mystery. You won't be able to take your eyes off of it.

A rambunctious sci-fi/fantasy slice-and-dice of theology, myth, and hot-button sociology, with a generous dollop of pure depravity thrown in just for fun and Nielsen points, American Gods is a dizzying journey through humanity's obsession with theism and dogma. It doesn't always make sense--maybe it never makes sense--and its pace is dreadfully uneven. But a show in which a religious pilgrim trekking through the wilderness of a big-box electronic store is tempted by a goddess disguised as Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy, murmuring from a TV screen, "Hey, you ever wanted to see Lucy's tits?" is not easily dismissed.

It's really a window into life inside the inner city, where—contra The Wire—not everybody is out on the corner hustling dime bags.

HBO's clear-eyed documentary Homegrown: The Counter-Terror Dilemma, produced in conjunction with CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen's new book, United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists, tries to imbue the discussion with some intelligence and nuance.

This Is Us is what TV people refer to (usually more in delusional wishfulness than real belief) as "relatable," meaning that you'll recognize the characters and their quandaries and triumphs from your own life.

A slow-burning horror-genre delight.

Though Evil manages some truly unnerving moments, particularly the scenes with the lascivious demon, it's more about ideas than the pea-soup-vomiting stuff audiences usually expect from stories about demons and exorcism. In post-Kardashian America, it may be too late to convince viewers that evil is more than a matter of table manners.

And like slumber parties, The Wilds bounces around from silly to interesting and back. It's helped by some very good performances, particularly that of Sarah Pidgeon (Gotham) as Leah, the kid who embraces literature literally. I was also heartened by a few scenes in which the Gen Zs don't seem to come from a galaxy quite so far, far away.