It’s compulsively watchable, emotionally engaging, and almost always one step ahead of where you think it’s going.

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.

There are some nice action sequences, particularly in the opening two episodes, directed by Game of Thrones‘ Neil Marshall, and the series as a whole looks great, convincingly transforming the wilds outside Vancouver into something that feels genuinely alien. But outside of everyone’s complicated relationship with the Robot (and even that’s a very slow burn), there’s just not enough there in the story or characters that feels distinctive or compelling enough to keep going.

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.

The side characters remain terrific--my favorite joke in the premiere may be Laurie’s utter bafflement at Monica complimenting her for the birth of her fourth child only hours earlier--and the show still has a gift for constructing comic set pieces like the black site-style office Richard tried to show the guys in the premiere’s opening. But the series was already reaching the point of diminishing returns last year, and appears to have arrived there now.

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.

The heavy emphasis on Lou trying to encourage the students, the other teachers, and even the whole town to live up to the show’s title unfortunately takes away from Rise‘s strengths: namely, the kids themselves. In particular, Moana star Auli’i Cravalho and Damon J. Gillespie are everything the series needs them to be.

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).

The gamesmanship between Marius and Luka’s people isn’t as bouncy as what we got last time, even if a lot of the individual cons are a pleasure to watch unfold. Much more frustrating, though, are all the non-Marius parts, and boy are there a lot of them. The season essentially turns into two separate shows that occasionally intersect.

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.

Marissa brings so much energy and fun into every scene she’s in, she even manages to make Maia seem vaguely interesting through their friendship. The rest of the show is still an entertaining (if uneven) continuation of the original’s world, but her scenes are so much livelier than anything else.

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.

Ritter is so charismatic, and so good at toggling between sarcasm and outright pain, that a lot of this is more watchable than it should be, given the glacial pace at which the plot moves and the amount of time spent on lesser characters and filler stories.

The start of the new season hits a lot of bumps as it tries to simultaneously show how everything has changed and nothing has, as if the show is having second thoughts about the new Seattle--or at least wants to very carefully ease the audience into it. The dialogue’s still sharp, and the performers appealing, but the tug of war between what the show was and what it probably needs to be now is palpable, and at times distracting.

A lot of individual pieces succeed, in part due to the versatility and appeal of the three leads--Whitman’s spent her whole career zipping back and forth between laughs (Arrested Development) and tears (Parenthood), and Hendricks (Mad Men) and Retta (Parks and Recreation) have both on their resumés, too--but too many scenes are at odds with one another.

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.

It’s plenty ambitious, but an ambitious failure, where the more you make like Greg and try to think about what the characters are thinking, the more unbearable most of it becomes.

Based on the six episodes Cinemax sent out for review in advance of Friday night’s premiere, it’s in many ways the Strike Back fans knew and loved the first time out. ... At the same time, the whole thing feels a bit thinner and more formulaic than the previous incarnation. ... It so far feels only as good as it needs to be, which is a step down from what the prior incarnation showed it could do.

Altered Carbon could become almost anything. But as with most Netflix series--as well as with most Meths--that limitless potential can too often lead to sedentary self-indulgence.

The book had all kinds of novelty going for it in the mid-’90s. The TV show lacks that same capacity to surprise, so it (based on the two episodes TNT gave critics) has to lean much more on its story and characters, which were on the sketchy side to begin with. ... The actors are all good, Brühl in particular finding the balance between altruism and obsession, but don’t especially elevate the middling material. (The period setting also forgives the hodgepodge of accents.)

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.

If you can view Cunanan not as the protagonist of Assassination, but its connective tissue, then it begins to feel more satisfying as a series of tragic vignettes about what it was like to be gay in America in the ’90s. ... But Cunanan’s just not interesting enough to support so much screen time, especially because we don’t really get to understand what makes him tick until the story’s nearly over. And even then, it’s hard to find empathy, given what we know about all the horror he inflicted.

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.

These early episodes have some of the usual growing pains first-year comedies go through as the creative team figures out what’s funny about each actor and character; they’ve already solved McDermott/Dave, so you have to wait to see if the others can catch up.

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 drama’s second season (it debuts Friday; I’ve seen all 10 episodes) unfortunately isn’t at that level [of season one]. It’s peppered with moments, and even whole episodes, that evoke the quality of season one, but overall there are enough decisions to bring it down into “If you like this sort of thing, you’ll probably like this sort of thing” territory, where once it was the sort of show where I always had to preface my remarks with, “I know this doesn’t sound like it’s for you, but…”

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.

Though Netflix provided critics with the whole first season in advance, I ran out of patience after six episodes; they featured maybe enough material to justify three episodes, and probably two.

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.

There’s a potentially great show lurking not far beneath the surface ... But every time the stronger version of the series gets its head above water, it gets shoved back down by a puzzling creative choice that left me wondering if it's worth waiting around to see if Shaw and company can achieve SMILF's full potential.

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.

There are so many interlocking agendas and conspiracies and secrets that the show feels more like work than it originally did, no matter how much Esmail tries to pare things back to the basics. Beat to beat, it can still knock me off my chair, but then we get back to keeping track of who’s really loyal to whom, when Angela might or might not be telling the truth, or what Tyrell’s motivations are, and the episodes can start feeling much longer than they actually are.

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.

Not a pantheon installment--which, given how many amazing episodes the show has done over close to 20 years, is no sin--but wickedly funny at times, and effective at both bringing us back into the fold and setting up this season’s storylines.

With each passing minute, Inhumans feels slower, dumber, and emptier.

They play like an old-school Law & Order episode elongated well past the point of interest, without any of the nuance or larger sociological implications that justified Murphy and friends devoting so much time to the O.J. Simpson trial.

Shaun improvising surgical procedures with whatever he can find on a TSA conveyer belt, or flashbacks to Shaun’s very difficult childhood, are effective, and promise a solid, if familiar, show to come. But boy oh boy do the scenes where his colleagues debate Shaun’s fitness for the job labor, while also feeling like artifacts from around when Big Bang Theory debuted, if not earlier.

There’s promising raw material in both shows (with Young Sheldon, it’s the mother/son dynamic and the chemistry between Perry and Armitage), but they have work to do refining it after these pilots.

Star Trek can be whatever it wants. Discovery is Star Trek. Maybe even, in time, a really good merging of past traditions and present television.

One of TV’s boldest, and most focused series has become shaggy around the edges in its more recent two. At its very best, it’s capable of moments of such beauty and emotional truth that very little of Peak TV can even glance at, let alone touch. But getting there requires more effort, and patience, than before.

The good Good Place news: this is still a wonderful show--better, in many ways, now that creator Mike Schur has laid his cards on the table for us all to see. The new installments are livelier and funnier than before, particularly the third and fourth episodes.

Better Things makes its own leap by getting smaller, more intimate, and more focused. ... This was a great show in that first year. It’s even greater now.

It’s still one of the best shows on television.

It doesn’t quite stack up to the original, in part because the lake town itself was such a huge part of the first series, in part because some of the coincidences that drive both stories play more convincingly in a small community than in a big city. But the acting is remarkable.

Virtually every joke in The Orville is out on an island. At times, it’s not even clear what the joke is meant to be, but simply that there is one. And while it’s a relief that Palicki isn’t playing the disapproving woman who rolls her eyes at the naughty dude at the center of the story, none of the writers seem to know what to do with her, either.

The world and its citizens are so rich that it’s a pleasure to spend time in it at all, as written by this team, as directed by the great Michelle MacLaren and others (including Franco for a couple of episodes), and as performed by this superb cast.

The show doesn’t always hit the very narrow tonal target it’s aiming for, but when it does, it’s both intensely satisfying and feels like nothing else on TV.

Halt and Catch Fire is almost over, yet these early episodes feel like it’s just getting warmed up. Enjoy it while you can.

Creator Davey Holmes (Shameless, In Treatment) was wise to not aim directly at the movie, but his replacement ideas are a mixed bag.

There’s a very important, delicate line that a comedy like this can’t cross: the one where it could be seen as inviting viewers to laugh at Sam’s many quirks (his obsession with penguins and all other things Antarctic, for instance). Atypical never crosses it--Gilchrist’s performance is too sincere and vulnerable to allow it--but at times a lot of the whimsy is generated from how exasperated his loved ones are at dealing with him.

It’s familiar stuff that Kelley could adapt in his sleep--The Practice never seemed to run out of charismatic serial killers who always managed to hoodwink poor stupid Bobby Donnell until after he was suckered into getting them an acquittal--but the details, and the performances, are all well-drawn enough to make it a pleasing rendition of this classic rock tune.

It is, like First Day of Camp, very hit-or-miss. Some of the newbies never entirely click, while other relative latecomers (particularly Wain and Lake Bell as Hebrew-speaking lovers who rope Ken Marino’s muscular virgin Victor into solving their fertility issues) inject some fresh life into the proceedings given the absence of some characters and the diminishing returns of others.

For this to work requires a strong actor playing Cora, and Biel (who also executive produces) delivers.

The Defenders is yet another Netflix ultra-slow burn. None of the heroes interact at all in the first hour. ... The parts of Defenders that actually, you know, feature all the Defenders are promising enough--if only for the chance to watch Jessica continually insult the others--for me to gladly watch the second half.

The suits, hats, gowns, and sets all look smashing, and the actors are strong, particularly Bomer ratcheting up his boyish charm to its most potent in order to convey how justly beloved Monroe is in an otherwise-cutthroat town. But the characters all feel like stock types borrowed from other series, even if many of them were created by Fitzgerald back in his final days, and the whole thing feels a bit dull. I have all the love in the world for tales of pre-WWII Hollywood, but ran out of patience with this one by the end of the fourth episode.

Not every Room 104 story worked for me, but I’m glad I kept going long enough to make it to the dance episode, and the best ones were so powerful that I’ll happily gamble a half-hour at a time on the others. This one simple hotel room can become anything, and when it turns into just the right thing, look out.

What might have felt like a novel idea 10 or 15 years ago--middle-aged white anti-hero does something terrible to help his family, and only gets pulled in deeper and deeper--is now so tired that it would require sheer brilliance to come out feeling as fresh and untainted as all the money that Marty cleans. And Ozark isn’t up to that challenge.

If “Dragonstone” was familiar in its structure and pacing, it was also for the most part a very satisfying return to the world of Westeros, resetting the chess board as the endgame draws perilously close.

The show’s generally more amiable than it is funny, with most of the overt laughs coming from Mary McCormack as Casey, sarcastic executive from the company that bought Cat Factory. (“Think of me as a sexy Darth Vader,” she tells them.) But the genuine affection the friends have for each other is charming (and in many ways a bigger deviation from Silicon Valley than the size of everyone’s bank accounts), and the better stories find a sweet spot between absurdity and sincerity.

Friends From College is a shrill and unpleasant dramedy about the dangers of maintaining youthful friendships deep into adulthood.

7 Days in Hell was an out-of-nowhere delight. If Tour de Pharmacy isn’t quite as great, it’s still reassuring to know this band can come back together every few years for more hilarity that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

The series, which carries the tagline “How crack began,” has style and a strong lead performance from Idris, but it’s too familiar, especially early on, of other, better drug sagas--more methadone than the real fix.

It feels more like, well, a TV show--one that better understands its strengths and its weaknesses, and that is actually going somewhere, narratively as well as physically, after being stuck in an uninteresting place for too long.

GLOW takes its time teaching its characters, and its audience, the tricks of the wrestling trade. ... But that’s okay, because it gets the far more entertaining part of the field--the soap opera, and the over-the-top commitment everyone makes to it--right. It’s an absolute pleasure.

Orange Is the New Black is a frequently great, occasionally maddening TV show. That’s still the case even in a season that only covers three days in the lives of its many, many, many intricate characters.

This fictionalized version has strong moments, and the cast is so deep and the level of incidental detail so rich that it’s an eminently watchable show, but one that hasn’t quite figured out how to properly exploit the setting it knows so well.

Carmichael Show is actually funnier the darker the subject matter gets.

It was slow and strange in ways that felt like Lynch was deliberately baiting his audience to see how much they would tolerate--and how much they actually remembered about the old show--after so much time away. ... And yet I loved every plodding, baffling minute of it. ... I went into the night terrified that all the usual TV revival problems would become exponentially worse when filtered through Lynch’s own storytelling eccentricities, and I came out of it exhilarated. Baffled at times, but exhilarated.

The breadth of season two is much wider, as is the depth. Ansari and Yang are trying so many more things, and succeeding far more often than you might expect even after that wonderful debut.

A weird, fascinating, alternately lovely and funny show.

At times, it’s a deep and powerful saga, while at many others, it’s more of an exercise in style over substance. But what style!

It’s a stunning performance by Moss. ... The more we get to know Ofglen, the harder Bledel’s performance hits, until a pair of scenes late in the third episode will leave you a puddle on the floor from what she does in them. The cast is excellent overall, particularly Dowd and Strahovski. ... Riveting new drama.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks on the whole is a missed opportunity, despite some strong individual moments and a fine cast that also includes Reg E. Cathey, Rocky Carroll, and Peter Gerety. Oprah’s so good in it, though.

The second season and now the third aren’t exact translations of the books--nor should they be, since what works in one medium doesn’t automatically in another--but they feel to me both like the Harry Bosch from the page and like a very solid TV cop drama.

There’s a palpable joy throughout, not only in the performances by actors like Thewlis and Winstead who play the more outgoing roles, but in the way that Hawley and his collaborators assemble the pieces. ... If the new season turns out to be a slightly diminished version of what came before, that’s still a pretty good place to be.

The new episodes don’t represent another radical leap forward in style or quality the way season two was, but whatever’s lost from the shock of the new (nothing here is quite as weird or surprising as the cavewoman prologue or “International Assassin,” though a joke in the second episode and a party sequence in the fifth come close) is gained in how much more we know all the characters at this point, and how aware they are of their proximity to their story’s end.

This isn’t a story taking place in a parallel timeline to Breaking Bad, but one traveling down the same terrible track. And, like Saul Goodman’s most important client once said, nothing stops this train. All we can do is travel along it with these superb actors and the gifted writers, directors, and editors who keep the train moving, trusting that we’ll be wildly entertained even as it takes us someplace we keep hoping it won’t.

AMC’s version of The Son (it debuts Saturday night at 9; I’ve seen the first two episodes) is a glum, lifelessly condensed take on the material that in the early going doesn’t even rise to the passable standard of Hell on Wheels.

The other half of what makes Brockmire special--raunchy and depraved, but also surprisingly tender and even romantic (imagine Catastrophe if most of it took place at a minor league ballpark)--is how Azaria and the show’s creator, Joel Church-Cooper, are able to find the vulnerable human being underneath the accent and his familiar plaid blazer, even as Brockmire never breaks character or stops talking like he’s doing play-by-play on his own life.

The whole gang finally knows everything about Liv, brains, and the undead as a whole, and man oh man is iZombie soooo much better as a result. ... There’s still arguably too much going on, though, even if the pieces are more unified.

It’s a tough story. An honest story. And a story that beautifully connects its Baker’s dozen of tales and characters with each other, and the audience, even though there are some bumps and missteps along the way.

The new episodes are more nimble and fun without ever undercutting the tragedies at the heart of the story, and as a result it’s a better showcase for the appealing leads.

The new episodes deftly bring its many stories together with as much righteous anger as artistry, I felt a tingle in a part of my brain that has largely laid dormant since my days as a TV tourist in West Baltimore.

Samurai Jack wasn’t a property I’d been dreaming of ever seeing again, but it’s emerged from its trip through time and space far better than most of the recent TV revivals.