The Detroit News' Scores

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For 300 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 39% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average TV Show review score: 69
Highest review score: 100 jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy: Season 1
Lowest review score: 20 Big Brother: Season 1
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 221 out of 221
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 221
  3. Negative: 0 out of 221
221 tv reviews
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  1. Ratched: Season 1
    Sharon Stone is a vengeful heiress and that’s all she is; Corey Stoll is an incompetent hitman and that sums him up. This isn’t acting, it’s posing. Happily Judy Davis and Sophie Okonedo — both Oscar nominees — do eventually develop juicy parts. And “Ratched” becomes watchable entertainment. But that style-over-content thing makes you wonder if Ryan Murphy shows would be better off with less Ryan Murphy.
  2. Emily in Paris: Season 1
    The warm and goofy and topical camaraderie of that show [“Sex and the City”] is nowhere apparent here. Nor are any laughs. There are no actual laugh lines here, just lines that let you know they were supposed to be funny. It is, in essence, a romantic picture postcard comedy show without any comedy (or much romance for that matter).
  3. The Haunting of Bly Manor: Season 1
    The nice thing is it pretty much works. Oh, there’s a great deal of silliness and some false notes — it is a ghost story, after all and some explanations add up while others just drift away. But in the end “Bly Manor” dares to make at least some sense (which is likely blasphemy to Henry James fanatics).
  4. Industry: Season 1
    The set-up isn’t unique, of course. There have been numerous shows about doctors and lawyers and such having to fight their way to success in a crowded field. The difference is those characters usually do something redeeming along the way. These people are just plain greedy and flippantly vile. Which doesn’t mean they can’t make for a guilty pleasure. And they’re a varied lot.
  5. The Crown: Season 4
    The dissonance between spoiled Royals and the modern world has turned darker, and the nobility seems a lot less noble. But it’s still a fascinating mess for us mere mortals to watch.
  6. Murder on Middle Beach: Season 1
    Madison, a conflicted yet driven narrator-as-victim, makes this a unique piece of true crime filmmaking. He captures the messy darkness that can hide behind seemingly shiny lives. Including his own.
  7. Virgin River: Season 2
    A soppy, radically inconsistent, corny and downright embarrassing soap opera.
  8. Saved by the Bell: Season 1
    "Saved by the Bell" is a throwback that looks forward, embracing the past while living in the now. And it shows that you can teach the old school some new tricks.
  9. The Queen's Gambit: Season 1
    No knowledge of chess is needed to enjoy this show. It’s more about one person’s evolution, a classic long journey through friendships, love and personal struggles. But it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Taylor-Joy making that journey; she imbues Beth with a cool confidence and her exotic, big-eyed look has an oddball eroticism that’s hers alone. Chess has never sizzled like this.
  10. The Undoing: Season 1
    “The Undoing” is somewhat undone by its dawdling pace. In truth this is a movie’s worth of story dragged out over six slow hours.
  11. The Comey Rule: Season 1
    Gripes aside, "The Comey Rule" is a frightening and timely look at recent history and its repercussions. Actors will no doubt be biting into the role of Trump for years to come, but to top Gleeson they'll have to do a a heck of a lot of chewing.
  12. Fargo: Season 4
    The new "Fargo" isn’t terrible — it’s loaded with talent, the story rolls along, there’s lots of nice dialogue. But it’s just not near as good or unique as the previous three seasons. Great shows breed great expectations.
  13. The Boys: Season 2
    Amazon series “The Boys,” which manages in its second season to be even more boisterously bleak than the first time around. ... But don’t worry, action fans, there are also plenty of exploding heads, super-battles and mountains of mayhem. This show rarely rests.
  14. Away: Season 1
    One of the producers here is Jason Katims ("Friday Night Lights,” “Parenthod”) and the warm familial intimacy of his previous shows flows through “Away.” The cast is uniformly strong and there’s a reason Swank has two Oscars. “Away” isn’t great but it is unique, and that’s good enough.
  15. The Scheme: Season 1
    The essential concerns of "The Scheme" actually fit into our current situation. That it does so in an entertaining manner — there are a number of laugh aloud moments here — is partly thanks to director Pat Kondelis, but the real reason this documentary works is because of a charismatic basketball wizard from Saginaw named Christian Dawkins.
  16. I Am Not Okay With This: Season 1
    “Okay” suffers from the same bloat as far too many streaming shows; its 140 minutes contain at most 90 minutes worth of material. Which is too bad because Lillis is an oddly arresting actress and the use of super-powers as a metaphor for teen angst and raging hormones is at least time-tested.
  17. The Umbrella Academy: Season 2
    The violence factor is as high as the candy-colored production values, Kate Walsh returns as the dripping-evil top villain, and Ritu Arya adds snap as a sharp-talking wild card. Race and LGBTQ issues provide ballast, but for the most part “The Umbrella Academy” is just inspired bloody silliness the second time around.
  18. Jim Gaffigan: The Pale Tourist
    Gaffigan offers some nice ugly tourist notes, but as the show goes on he leaves Spain behind. At the end he’s riffing on American rodeos and talking about the Toledo Zoo. Not surprisingly, he’s funnier on home ground.
  19. Hanna (2019): Season 2
    The highly watchable second season does a good job examining questions of family, trust and friendship while offering up plenty of shootouts, fights and dicey situations to keep things moving. Unfortunately the writing here can get pretty lazy in those dicey situations.
  20. Cursed: Season 1
    Langford (“Knives Out,” “13 Reasons Why”) is effective if not exceptional, somewhat mirroring the entire enterprise. The gore quotient here runs high, but unlike “Thrones” and “The Witcher” there is no underlying erotic throb fueling things and humor is scarce.
  21. Stateless: Season 1
    The system is a mess, no doubt, fully awful, unfair and brutal. And “Stateless” approaches this head-on. It just would have been nice to reflect more on those who are abused than the white folk who cage them in. Again, yeesh.
  22. I'll Be Gone in the Dark: Season 1
    A parade of rape enactments threatens to drag and a halo hangs dangerously over McNamara’s head at times. But “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” always rights itself and ends up both engrossing and enlightening. It doesn’t have all the answers — no one does — but it asks the right questions in the right way.
  23. Perry Mason: Season 1
    Strained at times, wandering at others, “Perry Mason” finds its footing eventually and by its end you may want to watch a second season even as you hope it’s better than the first.
  24. I May Destroy You: Season 1
    “I May Destroy You” is fascinating TV, taking a dark subject and turning it every which way. It can be shocking, it can be fun (which is also somewhat shocking), it can hurt and maybe even heal. No matter what, it’s an unsettling revelation.
  25. Space Force: Season 1
    A lot of humor ends up left behind and most of it stops short. This is a show that cuts with a butter knife instead of a razor blade. And it cuts every which way instead of one direction. The result is, not surprisingly, a mess.
  26. Patton Oswalt: I Love Everything: Season 1
    This isn’t the brash, acid-tongued nerdy Patton Oswalt of the past, this is instead a more domesticated and content creature. Maybe he does indeed love everything. More power to him. Because apparently happiness does not preclude humor.
  27. I Know This Much Is True: Season 1
    It’s all technically impressive. And it’s all a monumental bummer.
  28. After Life: Season 2
    Gervais mostly finds a balance between humor and deep darkness, though he sometimes falters (far too much time is spent on an obnoxious therapist). And, like many comic actors, he seamlessly transitions to drama; even better, he poignantly walks the tightrope between despair and laughter.
  29. Tales from the Loop: Season 1
    “Tales from the Loop” is so low-key it stands out simply by not standing out. There are no mega-explosions apparent, no eye-popping special effects or gore celebrations. It offers meditations on man in a modern world beyond easy control. Which hardly seems like science fiction.
  30. Run: Season 1
    By the time you hit the fifth of its eight episodes you may find yourself yelling at the screen in amazed delight.
  31. The Plot Against America: Season 1
    Created and written by David Simon (“The Wire,” “The Deuce”), “The Plot Against America” isn’t some garish exploitation of goose-stepping Nazi nastiness. It’s far too wise for that.
  32. Hunters (2020): Season 1
    “Hunters” works in black-and-white and stereotypes, hiding in the bygone, but today anti-Semitism is on the rise and American Nazis apparently include “very fine people” according to one prominent source. Perhaps now wasn’t the time for a wildly uneven, superficial, comic book-type treatment of this particularly sick and unfortunately still-relevant dynamic.
  33. Locke & Key: Season 1
    It knows it’s walking familiar ground — spooky but never scary, occasionally violent but never gory, magical but hardly wondrous. Watchable but nowhere near fascinating.
  34. Avenue 5: Season 1
    “Avenue 5” seems more likely to just drift off into the void. There are, of course, good people at work here. Hugh Laurie stars as the spaceship’s clueless commander, Josh Gad is the clueless zillionaire funding the spaceship, Suzy Nakamura plays the tycoon’s clueless assistant. You get the drift.
  35. The Outsider (2020): Season 1
    The infectious nature of evil is an underlying theme here. This is one case where an infection doesn’t move quickly enough. Is it watchable? Sure. Is it memorable? Nah.
  36. Lovecraft Country: Season 1
    Even though it has a continuous story arc the show goes through tonal shifts, moving from Indiana Jones to grindhouse to bump-in-the-night scares, so that it almost feels like an anthology. But the dark, disturbing cloud of racism is ever present and seeps into every corner of the show like a wraith. Except this monster’s real.
  37. Teenage Bounty Hunters: Season 1
    “Teenage Bounty Hunters” is pretty much as good and bad as you’d expect it to be. Well, maybe a bit more bad. Which is unfortunate because the show’s young leads — Maddie Phillips and Anjelica Bette Fellini — have wonderful chemistry, batting teen nonsense, emotional eruptions and giddy observations back and forth with crisp timing.
  38. Flint Town: Season 1
    Flint is a timebomb, and Flint Town is an impressively crafted tick-tock of things going wrong with a place, one after another.
  39. Altered Carbon: Season 1
    Big issues of body, mind, identity and technology shuffle around the Altered Carbon universe, but the show often drags its feet in order to fill its individual episodes’ running times.
  40. Atlanta: Season 2
    Glover has conceptualized Atlanta so that he can do with it whatever he wants; he’s not bound by traditional sitcom rules or limitations. That’s the fun of it. It’s his ride, and where he goes is anyone’s guess. But it will be worth the trip.
  41. Friends From College: Season 1
    You end up identifying more with the people from outside the group, looking on as these people force friendships with folks from their past they’ve clearly outgrown. As viewers, we know how they feel.
  42. The Handmaid's Tale: Season 1
    [It] sounds pretty dark, and it is, but the wonder of both Atwood’s novel and the series is that it actually manages to be playful and witty at times.
  43. Harlots: Season 1
    Harlots, on Hulu, is certainly audacious. And ambitious. But whether it will be able to pull off it’s fine-line feminist balancing act remains to be seen; this show may end up groundbreaking or it may end up a train wreck. In the meantime it’s hard to look away.
  44. Amy Schumer: The Leather Special
    She’s absolutely as funny as she was two years ago, which was pretty darn funny. But the humor--most of it revolving around sex, body issues and relationships--feels dated.
  45. American Crime: Season 3
    There are slight miscues--Kimara’s attempts to become pregnant seem a distraction--but this very busy boat stays upright and moves forward, shifting just enough to stay interesting.
  46. Making History: Season 1
    It’s all very silly, but there’s bite beneath some of the yuks.
  47. FEUD: Season 1
    Feud: Bette and Joan is delicious fare, a mix of catty gossip and vile manipulation, a look at the dark underbelly of celebrity culture and the desperation that comes with aging out of the limelight.
  48. When We Rise: Season 1
    A sprawling look at the gay liberation movement in the U.S. during the past five decades, spread over eight hours, featuring an abundance of talent, occasionally too earnest, at times heartbreaking, and pretty much always eminently watchable.
  49. Big Little Lies: Season 1
    Just because it’s well-acted doesn’t mean Big Little Lies is worth enduring.
  50. Santa Clarita Diet: Season 1
    The gore level is playful, not scary, and the idea that true love conquers all, even a craving for human flesh, permeates the show. Sheila, Joel and Abby can still live the American dream, it will just taste a bit odd.
  51. Detroiters: Season 1
    This is a comedy by natives for natives and residents near and far. It’s that undeniable sense of pride and ownership that will make you “stand up and tell ’em you’re from Detroit” between bouts of laughter and smiles.
  52. Legion: Season 1
    It is, to say the least, audacious. More importantly it’s interesting. It’s about the interior as much as the exterior. That’s weird. That’s good.
  53. 24: Legacy: Season 1
    It’s all very breathless, as it should be, and Carter scores points by weaponizing a rather large object at the first episode’s end. But the original “24” was character-driven to a large extent by Keifer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer and elevated even further when Mary Lynn Rajskub’s Chloe O’Brian came along. No such fire or chemistry is evident here.
  54. Sneaky Pete: Season 1
    At first you’re rolling your eyes at what seems an absurd stretch of a premise, but soon enough you’re buying its always-on-edge predicaments and after a few episodes you’re hooked into its story-upon-story acrobatics. Pete may be sneaky, but he’s not dull.
  55. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017): Season 1
    A Series of Unfortunate Events makes it downright difficult to “Look Away.”
  56. The Young Pope: Season 1
    Lush, often surreal, filled with contradictory characters and backstabbing intrigue, The Young Pope is one of the more remarkable television shows in memory.
  57. Taboo: Season 1
    It’s a rich mix of intrigues with the occasional bout of brutal violence as Delaney tries to build his own empire and assumedly reclaim his one true illicit love.
  58. Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds
    Simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking.
  59. Emerald City: Season 1
    It all looks good, but Arjona never gains real traction as Dorothy and some of the side stories become distractions. Still, Emerald City is an ambitious, if derivative, project for broadcast television.
  60. Ransom (2017): Season 1
    It’s not bad television, really. It’s just by-the-CBS-book television.
  61. The Mick: Season 1
    Like "The Simpsons," "Married with Children," "Malcolm in the Middle" and other Fox sitcoms, the ridiculous reach is what makes "The Mick" work.
  62. Good Girls Revolt: Season 1
    Is GGR the best show on television? No, but it’s pretty solid.
  63. Star: Season 1
    For the most part, Lee Daniels traffics in tawdry messes. With Star, his latest TV project for Fox, he is at his tawdriest and messiest.
  64. The Lost Tapes: Season 1
    What The Lost Tapes adds, beyond all the terrifying footage, is a plethora of perspectives and insights.
  65. Mariah's World: Season 1
    Mariah’s World isn’t breaking any molds. But because the supreme diva Mariah is the star, there’s a certain ridiculous, hilarious, hyper-stylized charm to the proceedings.
  66. Incorporated: Season 1
    The production values are high, the acting efficient, the story teems with twists and turns.
  67. Shooter (2016): Season 1
    Watching Shooter as a series is like falling back into a well-known and familiar story, just one with lots of guns. It’s downright comfortable. And that’s odd.
  68. The Great Indoors: Season 1
    The pilot is a bit clunky setting all this up (there’s also Jack’s local bartender and friend, Eddie, played by Chris Williams), but the actors are all pretty sharp, as are the cross-generational jokes.
  69. Man With a Plan: Season 1
    Man with a Plan just makes you wish he’d take his sincere befuddlement elsewhere, someplace that mattered. Simply put, Matt LeBlanc is too good to be this irrelevant.
  70. Falling Water: Season 1
    By the end of the first episode you have little idea what’s going on; by the end of the fourth show the series is starting to gel a bit, but questions have been piled upon questions and soooo many characters have been introduced you need a scorecard.
  71. American Housewife: Season 1
    All these characters manage to work, at least in a broadcast-show way. This is mostly because of Mixon’s constant narration and commentary; she’s offering a sarcastic-neurotic voiceover on her own absurd life.
  72. Insecure: Season 1
    Yes, Issa, Molly and Lawrence are all a bit insecure; heck, the world itself is insecure. But this show is strong in the face of it all.
  73. Westworld: Season 1
    The question of whether artificial intelligence can gain consciousness is obviously timely. The question of whether Wood and company can make Westworld as emotionally viable as it is fascinating to watch remains to be seen. Still, try looking away.
  74. Van Helsing (2016): Season 1
    Van Helsing obviously wants to be “The Walking Dead” with vampires, but it lacks that show’s production values, cast and over-the-top imagination.
  75. The Exorcist (2016): Season 1
    The young skeptical priest and older exorcist priest will team up to do battle with the devil while Davis looks on wide-eyed, apparently, and this will be dragged out on a weekly basis. Heaven help us.
  76. Pitch: Season 1
    Pitch has a simple enough premise: It follows the first female player in major league baseball. Interesting. But what do you do with it? That’s the question that lingers over this new Fox show, which is undoubtedly timely but also seems somewhat dramatically limited. ... The series wisely looks at the isolation that’s resulted from Ginny’s single-minded pursuit of baseball.
  77. The Good Place: Season 1
    Just as “Parks and Rec” was built around a strong female character (Amy Poehler), so is The Good Place and Bell brings her daffy range of sensibilities to the show. She somehow manages to run through sassy, clueless, innocent, rude, earnest, spunky, well-intentioned and selfish modes in every episode.
  78. Queen Sugar: Season 1
    It could all be so cheesy, but somehow it’s not. Credit DuVernay for giving us a sense of Louisiana--and black--life that rises above mere plot manipulations. You believe these people; you care for them. And that’s sweet enough.
  79. Survivor's Remorse: Season 3
    Usher slowly but surely emerges as a major contributor on this underrated series filled with genuinely funny and touching moments.
  80. Power: Season 3
    Power is as sexy, flashy and addictive as it has always been. The only difference is the women in Ghost’s world have a lot more to do and say--and the series is better for it.
  81. Vice Principals: Season 1
    The level of profanity here would likely give any real life vice principal a heart attack, and Gamby’s stupidity is world class. Eventually you realize he’s just a lonely, sad jerk in need of validation. Comedy, you’ll recall, is just tragedy upside down.
  82. The Night Of: Season 1
    Turturro bites into the role with bitter humor and wounded idealism. Still, it’s Ahmed, at times resembling a young Andy Garcia, who is at the heart of this series, with his innocence being stripped away as the slow wheels of justice threaten to grind his soul. It’s powerful, and timely, stuff.
  83. Mr. Robot: Season 2
    Mr. Robot remains one of the most dizzying, intoxicating, challenging shows on television, a gripping look at mental illness and brilliance run amok, tied to an essentially sweet, if damaged, character. It’s a show that poses Big Questions and dares to leave them hanging.
  84. American Gothic (2016): Season 1
    As summertime smarmy yarns go, American Gothic holds promise.
  85. Animal Kingdom: Season 1
    As gritty, dysfunctional family, crime-fueled dramas go, Animal Kingdom roars with dark promise.
  86. Feed the Beast (2016): Season 1
    The show’s biggest problem, though, is it’s hard to like either of its main characters.
  87. Outcast: Season 1
    The show is mostly a slow-burn look at Kyle as he tries to make sense of all the damage that seems to follow--and grow--around him. He may yet turn to prayer.
  88. Chelsea: Season 1
    Although this is certainly the most narcissistic talk show in memory, it depends wholly on whether you enjoy Chelsea or not.
  89. Preacher: Season 1
    There are few serious undertones, but lots of lively excitement, despite all the lingering questions, which will assumedly be answered. Have faith.
  90. All The Way (2016)
    There are some fine supporting performances here--most notably from Bradley Whitford as a loyal-if-appalled Hubert Humphrey, Melissa Leo as the beleaguered Ladybird Johnson and Stephen Root as J. Edgar Hoover. But, beginning to end, this is a tour de force for Cranston. Great stuff.
  91. Houdini & Doyle: Season 1
    It’s not necessarily bad, understand, just surprisingly underwhelming considering it’s called Houdini & Doyle. One expects fireworks; instead we get consternation.
  92. Containment: Season 1
    This is a disaster movie writ large for TV and the simple fact is, it works despite some none-too-subtle turns. You can’t help being enthralled by a story you wouldn’t want to be a part of.
  93. Confirmation
    Like the tremendously successful “American Crime Story: The People v O.J. Simpson,” HBO’s new film, the ultra-sharp Confirmation, is a look back at the muddled ’90s, when racism and sexism were shockingly overt, and one could be used to undercut or confuse the other on the public stage.
  94. Game of Silence: Season 1
    The pitch here can be shrill. The warden makes Satan look like a nice guy, and Gil has a temper that can be wearying. But the essential tension--who will finally tell the truth? everybody is lying to somebody--makes for compelling, if exhausting, drama.
  95. Wynonna Earp: Season 1
    It’s all a bit fuzzy, but then it’s all in good fun. Television has plenty of room for strong female characters.
  96. The Catch: Season 1
    What starts off as a lusty and dewy-eyed dance between lovers quickly turns into a taut game of cat and mouse more titillating than the pair’s pending nuptials. Enos and Krause have palpable chemistry.
  97. Underground: Season 1
    Underground lingers on the slave experience, and that experience is appropriately awful and inhumane and certainly dramatic. But it’s also a show that wanders a bit too freely, undercutting its important subject matter and forward momentum by interfering with itself. As a show, it needs to learn how to keep it together.
  98. Love (2016): Season 1
    It doesn’t follow the usual rhythms of television--Apatow puts the long in longform storytelling--but there are times when you want to tell him to just get on with it already.
  99. Vinyl: Season 1
    To be sure, there are some fine performances, notably by Olivia Wilde as Richie’s former Warhol girl wife; Juno Temple as an ambitious gofer who wants to work her way up; and Ray Romano as Richie’s beleaguered right-hand man. But they’re mostly drowned in the confusion as the show veers from drama to farce to mostly poor musical interludes.
  100. The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story: Season 1
    You already know the outcome. Yet you can’t stop watching, thanks to Murphy’s flashy dramatization, which is just the approach the “Trial of the Century” richly deserves.
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