While Yellowjackets is far from perfect, and while it is absolutely the kind of series that will irreparably fall apart somewhere along the line (my money is on the season four premiere), I feel as jazzed by its first six episodes as I did by the first few Lost episodes back in the day.

Dear White People is, in other words, one of the most confident new TV comedies I’ve ever seen--and that confidence is what ends up making it so compelling.

Based on what I’ve seen of Loki so far, the show is off to a great start. I’d even say it’s more promising than WandaVision at the outset.

The Underground Railroad made me feel things about my own life and personal pain very deeply, while never letting me forget that while I could relate to aspects of this story, it is not my own. ... The show’s achievement is making every episode feel so full as to allow you to watch an individual installment, walk away for a while feeling like you’ve got a complete story, then return when you’re ready for another story featuring some of the same characters.

From a pure filmmaking perspective, Exterminate All the Brutes may be unparalleled among TV docuseries; the closest I can think of is the complexity and contextualization evident in the 2016 Oscar-winning 10-part series O.J.: Made in America. Peck doesn’t rely on tired visual tropes or techniques that would make it easy to just put on the show in the background while you’re doing something else. He demands our attention with wit, craft, and well-placed anger.

Both Sebastian Stan and Anthony Mackie boast a ton of charm and charisma, and the themes Marvel works with here — trying to show the everyday labor of coping with the Snap, the beginnings of Sam’s ideas about legacy and how race may factor into it, how superheroes deal with trauma — haven’t really been mined yet within the MCU. There’s easily enough story to keep both hard-core and casual fans coming back for at least a couple of episodes.

It is not a perfect show, but it’s a lovable and endlessly watchable one. Sometimes, when you just want to watch a fun TV show, “lovable and watchable” is better than perfection anyway.

It’s a Sin isn’t trying to jolt a reaction out of its audience the way The Normal Heart urgently needed to. For better or worse, the miniseries is sweeter and more sentimental. It’s not asking for action or apology, but for humanity to remember the joy that all the Ritchies, Roscoes, and Colins brought to this world, and to never let it be erased.

It is comfort food TV right down to its bones, and it is comfort food TV that works, even for a curmudgeon like me.

Taylor-Joy’s cerebral acting meshes perfectly with Beth’s story. She’s an actor of micro-expressions, of flickers of eyes and twitches of lips, and what makes The Queen Gambit such a good fit for her is the way she keeps both the viewer and Beth’s opponents at arm’s length.

Some pointed and strategic tonal shifts throughout the series’ nine episodes also help keep the pace from flagging, though I’d argue that nine episodes was a few too many. Conversely, given proper attention, the series’ climax could have been significantly expanded and dramatized.

Its second season (the first seven episodes of which are newly streaming on Hulu) evolves beyond that pretense and looks inward at Maya and Anna. The show becomes more concerned with how strong the bond of friendship can be between young girls, especially as they experience complications on top of what’s already a complicated time of life. And it makes for beautifully relatable stuff, particularly thanks to the show’s increased focus on how puberty strains Maya and Anna’s friendship.

The show finds its strongest moments when it layers realism atop metaphorical racism to induce a mounting, increasingly surreal two-fold horror. It’s weaker in terms of connecting those moments back to its overarching plot. But that weakness also feels intentional and refreshing — as if the show is also repudiating the pompous dramatics of its silly cult full of white people trying to something something pure bloodlines, something something sorcery, something something existential cosmic terror.

All that time spent on extreme exposition pays off in a flashier, more entertaining, tighter second chapter. Season one of Umbrella Academy set the board, and season two plays the game. There’s a lot more zapping and superpower-ing in season two, which should appease comic book fans who want to see superheroes do that kind of thing. But it also swings for something way more emotionally resonant.

In the end, Normal People is not the second coming of Dawson’s Creek, the forever pinnacle of cheesy-slash-earnest teen dramas. It’s crafted with much more care and artistry than its WB forebears, and it’s sadder and darker than they were too. But there’s a sweet, silly soapiness to this show that makes it all the more appealing to get lost in.

At times the plot of Unorthodox feels a little too carefully devised to maneuver characters into places where they can encounter one another; at the same time, that makes for pleasurably succinct storytelling.

For All Mankind is nowhere near perfect, but it’s deeply watchable — eventually.

Dickinson is a slick, stylish show, and refreshingly, it knows exactly what it’s doing.

Calling it the best new show of the fall feels too limiting, because it’s trying to be so many things to so many people. It left me dizzy from its audacity, its delight, and its occasional lack of taste. Your mileage may vary.

Even when The Politician is flailing all over the place, its heart is tapped into the pain of living in a world full of rich white people and forcing down everything that makes you a little bit different. Like Murphy’s best shows, The Politician is about how sad being happy can be.

Undone is a frequently beautiful and thought-provoking ride.

All of this detail starts to pay off when the story gets more complex, and the pace quickens a bit. Because so much work has gone into making all of the characters distinct and individualized, you never once feel distracted by the puppetry, or jarred out of the series’ serious tone.

Not everything about this series works, but everything about its lead performance does. And for a first season, that’s more than enough.

In its most successful episode, Chester confronts a Japanese prisoner of war who taunts, threatens, and ultimately bonds with him over their shared love of baseball and their exhaustion with the battlefront. It’s a deeply compelling episode of television and warrants a place for The Terror in any list of the year’s must-watch series. But it has nothing to do with ghosts. I wish The Terror had done a little more work to make its ghosts feel as necessary as its timely history lesson.

This sense of coming together perversely helps excuse some of the show’s excess.

It occasionally indulges in cutesiness in its efforts to idealize the past; it’s still trying to work out how to reinvent its old storytelling tropes while it wants to reach toward the future. But over the course of its eight-episode run, the new Veronica Mars does make a strong argument that it is better equipped to handle the nostalgia problem than nearly any other revival we’ve seen so far. And the result is a sharp, wistful, melancholy season of television that is also a terrifically entertaining murder mystery.

Most of season two’s flaws and frustrations have been ironed out in satisfying and interesting ways in season three. ... This time around, however, a new set of problems arises — and weirdly enough, a lot of them don’t concern the story itself, but the show’s aesthetic and technical choices.

Perhaps the most exciting development in Big Little Lies’ second season is that there’s more depth to each of the characters, allowing Witherspoon, Dern, and Kravitz in particular to give even more impressive performances. ... The show appears to be exchanging an all-consuming, incendiary mystery for a tale that’s less mercurial but no less hearty, and it’s still an absolute pleasure to watch.