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

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.

It’s an imperfect recreation of a show that, even at its dazzling best, was almost proud of its imperfections, and it’s the first reunion project in a long time to not make me regret the existence of it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When it’s studying and performing the rituals of that new religion [stand-up comedy], Crashing is a treat, and a worthy new addition to the comedy house of worship HBO has been building for decades. But, like the fictional Pete Holmes, you have to endure some mortification to get there.

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).

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.