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.