Reason.com's Scores

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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. Positive: 225 out of 225
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 225
  3. Negative: 0 out of 225
225 tv reviews
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  1. The Underground Railroad: Season 1
    Awful...A sci-fi fantasy vision of slavery and race relations, the TV version of The Underground Railroad is an incoherent mess of artistic pretension, full of scenes that are not under-lit but un-lit, nonsensical soliloquys with neither symbolic nor literal value (why would a slave recite lines from Gulliver's Travels to a young woman just beaten nearly to death by the plantation owner?) and surreal flashbacks that only further trash what is a very tentative narrative.
  2. The Handmaid's Tale: Season 1
    Strahovski, so strikingly desexualized that she's scarcely recognizable, fascinatingly embodies all the seemingly contradictory impulses of The Handmaid's Tale toward feminism.
  3. The Hunt: Season 1
    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.
  4. The Night Of: Season 1
    A stunning fusion of style and story. The Night Of is noir to its very soul.
  5. Atlanta: Season 1
    It benefits from the sort of deadpan, off-the-wall humor that powered 30 Rock.
  6. The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story: Season 1
    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.
  7. The Vietnam War: Season 1
    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.
  8. Back to Life: Season 1
    Bouncing unpredictably between somber dejection and daffy dark humor, Back to Life shouldn't work at all. Yet it does, wonderfully.
  9. When They See Us: Season 1
    As television storytelling, it's little short of brilliant. As history, the verdict is less certain.
  10. I May Destroy You: Season 1
    Her plot is a Byzantine mish-mash, her characters complex but uninterestingly so, and her attention to detail frequently unpleasant.
  11. The Deuce: Season 1
    HBO's The Deuce is the spellbinding story of how flesh became flash, how the sex trade went from back alleys to boardrooms.
  12. Show Me a Hero: Season 1
    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.
  13. Laurel Canyon: Season 1
    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.
  14. Elvis Presley: The Searcher
    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.
  15. Insecure: Season 1
    Seems less a sitcom than a character study inflected by melancholy humor and hip-hop idioms. It sometimes tries a bit too hard to flash its street credentials (the episodes all have titles like "Messy as Fuck" and "Thirsty as Fuck"), but that's more than compensated for by its obdurate refusal to bill itself as the master narrative of black women. It's content to be the piquant story of two confused friends trying to navigate the uncertainties of the young-adult world.
  16. The Trade: Season 1
    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.
  17. Too Close: Season 1
    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.
  18. Killing Eve: Season 1
    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.
  19. Roots (2016): Season 1
    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.
  20. Homecoming: Season 1
    An elegant suspense tale in which memory and identity are both the heroes and the villains.
  21. Unbelievable: Season 1
    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.
  22. Legion: Season 1
    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.
  23. The White Lotus: Season 1
    If you can't find something in here to enjoy, you're just not trying very hard.
  24. Wormwood: Season 1
    Wormwood, ultimately, is a wildly overblown embarrassment to Morris' reputation.
  25. The Plot Against America: Season 1
    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.
  26. Chernobyl: Season 1
    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.
  27. Big Little Lies: Season 2
    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.
  28. PEN15: Season 1
    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.
  29. FEUD: Season 1
    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.
  30. Alias Grace: Season 1
    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.
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