Boiled down to its essential elements, Hanna is a bland fish-out-of water tale punctuated by short bursts of sudden violence.

BrainDead manages to be intermittently intriguing just through the sheer strangeness of its premise not to mention the sparkling chemistry Winstead exhibits both with Tveit and Semine. And in a different series, Pino’s cheerful, adulterous, win-at-all-costs politico could’ve been downright fascinating. Ultimately, though, like the inside-the-beltway white matter that gets consumed by those little alien critters and winds up turning to pink goo, BrainDead goes splat under the weight of its outsized aspirations.

There’s a good TV show to be made about a sitcom wife’s secret double life. (WandaVision explored similar ideas with much greater success.) But here, the concept turns sour and curdled, and we end up as miserable as Allison is.

Aniston infuses Alex’s story with genuine emotion, and reminds us what a gifted dramatic actor she is. But the rest of the show lets her down. It’s a solid performance lost in a sea of jumbled ideas and missed opportunities.

Even if you’re not a Buffy buff, there’s enough retread here to give déjà vu to viewers of Whedon’s other series. ... Perhaps the show’s premium cable berth ultimately will allow the show to flower in a way different from that of Whedon’s other series, all of which aired on broadcast networks. Sadly, though, the most noticeable indicator so far of The Nevers‘ more permissive network standards are the proliferation of boobs for boobs’ sake.

A gaudy and campy docudrama sung in the key of Ryan Murphy (though Murphy isn’t involved in this production), Clipped bites off far more than it can chew. It’s part underdog sports drama, part overheated soap opera and part overly broad cultural satire… none of which are entirely successful.

In lieu of an actual story, we’re treated to a constant stream of wink-wink references to jokes from past seasons. ... We do get more Bluth family interaction this season, but the cast members mostly look older and worn down... and not in a funny way.

Those of us who tune in to the other two shows in the franchise have already been here, seen this — and we’ve seen it done with greater artfulness, efficacy and urgency. Adding this third series to the rotation, even temporarily, feels more than a little bit like beating an undead horse.

It’s a lot of money spent in service of a show that’s not very good. It’s well-intentioned, but Mad Men already chronicled this era with much more skill and subtlety.

Netflix's "Vladimir" promises a steamy forbidden romance, but it fails to deliver, bogged down by curdled cynicism and tired clichés.

By the second episode, Mr. Mayor is already resorting to bad toupee jokes and the aforementioned “PPPORN” debacle. (Really, no one at City Hall raised a red flag about that one?) Even a sure-fire winner like getting Ted Danson stoned on weed gummy bears somehow falls flat. (He ends up fighting a hockey mascot, for some reason.) The actors seem almost resigned here, too.

Trouble is, there’s not a single surprising twist on any of the threadbare inside-showbiz tropes, and even worse, every single zinger feels like it’s from a hastily assembled first draft.

They need a strong villain to play off of, though, and generically mean rich girl Alexandra Cabot (Camille Hyde) doesn’t quite cut it. I found myself wishing for more screentime for The Other Two‘s Heléne York, who plays Katy’s bitchy coworker Amanda. She’s sharp enough to provide a worthy foil for Katy, at least… but in the world of Katy Keene, it seems, any and all sharp edges have been rounded off to a safe dullness.

The only redeeming factor here is Cohen, who does an admirable job making all of this as fun as possible.

Despite a top-notch cast, Apple TV+’s Palm Royale is a middling soap that lacks laughs and emotional depth.

It all makes for an uncomfortable mix of gentle small-town shenanigans and gritty crime twists, and neither of the two are sharp enough to really hook you. Ultimately, Ginny & Georgia feels like it was made to fill a space in the “Because You Watched” row on Netflix… and for a streamer intent on keeping you binge-watching no matter what, maybe that’s enough.

It’s an instantly gripping premise (previously mined by Battlestar Galactica), but a tricky one to pull off, and Designated Survivor stumbles a bit in the execution.

A disappointingly mediocre follow-up that lacks the unique spark of the original and isn’t interesting enough to justify how convoluted it is.

It all unfolds along predictably miserable lines, and confirms that there’s not really ten episodes’ worth of story here to tell. A Teacher is just an uncomfortable, frustrating viewing experience, and not in the ways it’s meant to be.

The first hour didn’t grab me hard enough that I want to stick around to find out.

Murphy has done great, daring work elsewhere, and that’s why actors will follow him anywhere. But 9-1-1 is neither great, nor daring--and these actors deserve far, far better.

USA’s The Rainmaker is a tepid, muddled retelling of the classic John Grisham legal thriller that falls short, despite John Slattery’s charms.

The fatal flaw here may actually be the hour-long format: Get Shorty could maybe work as a rapid-fire half-hour comedy, but at 60 minutes each, the episodes feel bloated and sluggish as they drag their feet getting to the good stuff.

Iron Fist Season 2 marks an improvement over its well-derided freshman run, but still lacks punch.

Despite an all-star cast and a promising premise, Netflix’s No Good Deed falls victim to thin characterization and an inconsistent tone.

Unfortunately, you won’t need to get past the second commercial break of the pilot episode to realize you’re watching the most banal type of procedural, dressed up in garish period costumes and clogged with faith-versus-science questions that get explored with all the depth and nuance of a political debate on The View.

Graphically violent and morose, it rubs our noses in the ugly side of humanity for no good reason, and for a legal thriller, it’s remarkably dumb, with its characters making unforgivably boneheaded decisions at every turn.

Mostly, any flicker of emotional complexity gets trampled by the plot as it barrels forward in five different directions at once. A whole lot happens in Zero Day, it’s true… but I can’t say I cared much about any of it.

Mr. Corman is billed as a “comedy,” somehow, but it’s missing the laughs. It seems to be going for cringe comedy, but we just end up cringing. I felt more sad watching it than anything. Ultimately, Josh’s lack of direction and gloomy worldview are an anchor that drags the narrative momentum to a halt.

While it displays some dazzling visual flair and is plenty ambitious in its scope, like a certain famous Scarecrow, this ponderous revamp doesn’t seem to have much of a brain at all.

[The actors are] saddled with unlikable characters, a distasteful infidelity plot and an erratic tone that never quite finds itself.

The end result feels like a hideous pastiche of focus-group testing, procedural clichés and CliffsNotes literary references that got pulled out of the incubator about two seasons too early.

All of Alex’s quirks (she has a tendency to spit while talking) and surgical brilliance (practically on a whim, she pulls off a heart transplant procedure that only four others have managed before her) can’t mask the grim fact that she’s ultimately a collection of threadbare drama-series clichés. ... Even worse, the show’s supporting characters are all some combination of bland, unbelievable, and/or reprehensible.

Perhaps some day Chelsea will inspire a fascinating intellectual discussion about the perils of noisily promising something new on the late-night scene, then delivering the TV equivalent of an ancient burlap grocery sack: a good idea in its infancy, perhaps, but now on the brink of everything imminently falling out of the bottom with a messy splat.

With tired punchlines and a new cast that lacks the easy charm of the originals, Netflix’s That ’90s Show is a total buzzkill.

It does manage to find a few laughs when Wayans and Wayans Jr. are just riffing and one-upping each other; in fact, I’d rather watch Senior and Junior cutting it up off-camera. Instead, we’re left with lots of silly voices, a few crude Neanderthal views… and not a lot of substance.

Here and Now feels like a rough draft for a TV show that never got refined into a coherent premise. I’ve sat through four hours of it, and I still don’t quite know what it is... other than not worth your time.

The comics’ jokes aren’t funny. Because of that, we don’t buy into their talent and can’t get invested in their journey. And as soon as they step offstage, any semblance of humor dries up completely.

There’s not a lot of nuance to be found here, with any trace of psychological depth replaced by cheesy love montages and paint-by-numbers confrontations. We’re given no sense of why Debra is making these terrible decisions... over and over and over again.

A quality cast does its best, but can’t salvage the cringe-worthy dialogue and paper-thin characterizations.

When it’s not burying us in an avalanche of creaky sitcom clichés, it’s creeping us out with inappropriate sex jokes.

It does not improve, and just keeps hammering the same tired joke over and over again. It’s a colossal waste of everyone’s time and talent. Cringe humor without the humor is just cringing.

The Terminal List‘s plot defies logic, if you stop to think about it for even a minute, but it confidently shoves its way past any such concerns. It’s utterly humorless, too, punctuated by crude bursts of graphic violence. ... The cast is talented, to be sure, but they’re just going through the motions here.

It sets out to be the comprehensive historical record of gay rights in America, but its unwieldy structure and clumsy writing make it more of a footnote.

L.A.’s Finest is a loud, dumb mess of a cop drama, loaded up with corny punchlines and incoherent plotting.

The whole series feels like Netflix fed Arnold’s old action movies into ChatGPT and filmed whatever came out, unedited.

See relies on graphically gory battle scenes to carry a largely incoherent story, but I found myself giggling far more often than its creators intended. You almost have to admire its goofy confidence… as wrongheaded as it might be.

Hershey’s commitment to the role is impressive, but it’s not enough to follow Damien into the schlockiest circle of TV hell.

An uninspired soap with laughably bad dialogue, The Waterfront is trying to be the new Yellowstone, but it doesn’t come close.

The series does boast a breakout performance from newcomer Ashleigh Cummings. It’s just too bad that nothing else about the show lives up to that performance. Instead, any flickering glimmer of quality gets smothered by a drab visual palette, sluggish plotting and a crushingly dour tone.

Don’t throw away your vote on The Regime, a ridiculous and misguided political satire that even Kate Winslet can’t salvage.

We’re supposed to feel bad when the media treats Jones like a joke in one scene, and then laugh at how dumb she is in the next. (Casting Taran Killam as Paula’s volatile husband was also a mistake: His presence makes their scenes play like a SNL digital short.) It’s this clumsy blend of didactic “weren’t we awful back then?” hindsight and sleazy sensationalism that ultimately makes Impeachment one of the year’s biggest TV disappointments.

An overstuffed, often ridiculous supernatural drama that somehow manages to make a town filled with magical creatures seem crushingly dull.

Peacock’s Roman epic Those About to Die is an overstuffed, underbaked slog that slumps when the action ends.

The Orville feels like a vanity project, plain and simple, and while it might be fun for MacFarlane to run around shooting phasers and playing Captain Kirk, it’s not much fun to watch. Because it doesn’t work as comedy. It doesn’t work as sci-fi. It just doesn’t work at all.

Tycoon completely misses what makes the movie business so special.

Murphy’s productions always tend to favor style over substance — aside from FX’s triumphant Pose, which finds the beating human heart inside its flamboyant characters — but this might be his emptiest effort yet.

The framing device the ABC version uses to bring us into and out of the story is so clunky, it’s not worth discussing. ... The whole endeavor feels like the Disney ride version of Dirty Dancing: cleaner, prettier and way frothier than the already frothy real thing.

Across the board, Disjointed is marred by very broad, yell-y acting, with the cast straining to sell woeful jokes that range from tired pothead stereotypes (boy, are they forgetful!) to vulgar double-entendres.

The whole enterprise just feels very phoned-in. LeBlanc appears mostly disinterested during his scenes, and the script doesn’t bother to give Adam any character traits beyond “a slightly less dumb version of Joey.”