The emotional balance of the season is very different, even though it’s leading somewhere rewarding and meaningful by the end.

The new episodes deftly explore what happens next for June and everyone else in a way that feels true to the source material, while also feeling a bit looser and more sure of itself now that the story is wholly the series’ own. ... In many ways it was even better than The Handmaid's Tale's already impressive debut season.

One of the best things the show figured out how to do was to draw lots of stories from lots of different Bosch novels, keeping Bosch, Edgar, and company so busy that there are never the dead spots you get in most shows that use the “It’s a 10-hour movie” narrative approach. This season, though, felt like it had too much on its plate in both quantity and quality of cases.

It’s still not a great show, but it’s a much more enjoyable one to watch this time around.

A new season that’s weirder and more vivid than before. ... The new season is at once more opaque and more direct than the first one. The premiere is so full of digressions that the plot eventually begins to feel like the real digression, yet by the end of it there’s a clear structure in place for how David will be dealing with the Shadow King.

It’s the rare revival that not only justifies its existence, but draws most of its strength from how much time has passed and what’s happened in the interim.

Trust has its own flaws, but it also has that blend of true crime, macabre comedy, the foibles of the rich and famous, and social issues that made The People v. O.J. so addictive.

Barry’s actions towards the end felt right and honest to me, and elevated the series over the well-executed but familiar and occasionally timid comedy of its first half.

It’s the same show, but better, which is the sort of sophomore year jump you’d expect from a pair of veteran showrunners like Kripke (Supernatural) and Ryan (The Shield).

It’s a great cast, and the show has its moments of both wry humor (my new ringtone will be Carey Mulligan asking, as Kip tries to chase down an errant lead, “Where the fuck is Boca Raton?”) and great pathos, and for once you won’t feel like a streaming drama is overstaying is welcome, but Collateral’s reach ultimately exceeds its grasp.

Glover and friends seem to have hit on a new way to surprise the audience: by making Atlanta, at least for a while, into a more conventional TV show. The three episodes given to critics are by far the most consistent in terms of story and tone of any comparable stretch from season one. ... Atlanta can be great because you never expect what it might do next. But that’s far from the only reason it’s great, as the start of season two so potently demonstrates.

Both Stern and the less-seasoned Feldman are appealing performers who’ve written themselves characters they know and can play well, in both their righteous moments and their deeply flawed ones. And even when the story sags here and there, This Close is a reminder of the creative value of more inclusive storytelling.

Once the first few episodes have established the main story threads — Luke’s pursuit of Kate, a feud between the AV and theater kids that Luke attempts to squelch by teaming up to make a ’50s-style sci-fi movie starring Oliver and Emaline, a character contemplating a step out of the closet — Everything Sucks! manages to calm down and, like Kate, just exist. And it’s much more endearing in that mode: a lovable mix of elements from a lot of Netflix’s other recent YA series like Stranger Things, The End of the F***ing World, Big Mouth, and more, that also manages to feel distinctly like its own thing.

But just as there are two Howard Silks, there are essentially two Counterparts: the spy drama with science fiction trappings, and the character study with same. Spy Howard often has to carry bureaucrat Howard through the latest crisis, and the character version of Counterpart can more than carry the spy story when it starts to feel too pokey.

The series doesn’t always tackle these ideas gracefully--or, at least, subtly: its fictional city is called Freeland. But the canvas the Akils are painting on feels much richer for looking beyond basic good vs evil, time travel, doppelgangers, and all the other tropes of the genre. ... But it’s a promising start, and a long-overdue showcase for Williams.

Within the first five minutes, we get flashbacks to a nine-year-old James sticking his hand in a deep fryer just to feel something, and abundant evidence that he kills small animals. The show actually gets much darker from there. But also, somehow, much more lovable.

grown-ish is less consistently funny than its parent series, but it’s likable and smart, and has surrounded Shahidi with an appealing cast of new faces, plus one familiar one.

It’s significantly better across the board [than season 3]. Brooker and company have a firmer handle on the proper architecture for each story (only one, “Crocodile,” really drags), and if the show is starting to repeat itself a bit (the last episode of this batch, “Black Museum,” is basically Black Mirror’s Greatest Hits), the execution tends to compensate for the spottiness or familiarity of the ideas.

It’s not peak, season three X-Files, because too much time has passed, too many stories have been told, and the world is too different from the one in which Mulder and Scully first partnered. But, the mythology episode aside, it’s much better than it has any business being, particularly given what we got two years ago.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel tells its story with verve and wit and warmth, and it digs deep enough into Midge’s psyche so that we can understand just how well she understands the dilemma that she and Lenny Bruce share.

Some of it is well-meaning but didactic and sledgehammer-y, with the episode about words that kids should stop saying feeling at times like the actors stepping out of character to recite position papers. Some of it is so jarring--like the end result of Nola’s friend Shemekka (Chyna Layne) exploring bootleg cosmetic surgery option to further her dancing career--it’s a wonder nobody talked Lee out of it. And a lot of it is utterly stunning in how it combines words and music and pictures to create what feels like a new audiovisual language.

Fortunately, the acting is strong enough to keep things interesting, even with the usual Netflix drama pacing issues (which only Stranger Things seems largely immune to).

So no, this Runaways isn’t a literal recreation of a beloved comic. But it works in its own right, and feels more fun and durable than a lot of its Marvel TV counterparts.

It’s often predictable and to the grimdark end of the Quality Drama tonal spectrum, but the period itself is fairly novel (Carnivale was over a decade ago), and it plays its familiar tunes with brisk competence.

The narrative’s not quite as propulsive early enough as a result, but the character work largely compensates for it. And even the various slow burns converge into a huge, thrilling flame for the season’s climactic hours.

Penhall, Fincher, and the rest of the creative team take a dry, no-frills approach to most of the narrative. The overall aesthetic isn’t flashy, but that’s the point--this is exhausting, sad work involving both victims and perpetrators who led small lives that have become shockingly big--and the drama is more potent because of how plain-spoken so much of this is.

I’ve seen the first three episodes, and they are delightful.

The Gifted falls pretty squarely in the middle. Based on tonight’s pilot episode (the only one Fox screened for critics), it gets the basics down and doesn’t try to deliver more than what you might expect, for better or worse.