Clement has years of comedy writing for television under his belt, and Waititi years of directing. The two play to their strengths here, and the results are enough to get audiences to overlook the moments when the jokes don’t land or the humor is a little musty.

There are hundreds of family sitcoms out there, but with empathetic (and very funny) characters at its heart, Speechless is already a standout.

Sex Education is one of the rare works that go beyond that trope to give depth and validation to teenage insecurities and emotions that coexist with raging hormones and mythic sex drives.

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.

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.

While not every moment works, Brockmire the TV series offers a world worth visiting, and characters worth rooting for, even when they stumble.

The series is so full of empathy for its characters, and its actors are so game to dive into any conversation or game, no matter how silly, that One Day at a Time becomes a joy to watch almost immediately.

It boasts terrific performances, unpredictable twists, and a stack of fanfic-favorite tropes (if the series’ title has you thinking of Whitney Houston, you’re frankly on the right track) executed with polish and flair. Though the thread of tension crackling at the show’s center doesn’t quite make it all the way through to the end, the journey is still enough of a roller coaster to make it well worth the ride.

Every time you think you have Hap and Leonard pegged, it heads off toward something different. It’s pulp, but with its head firmly on its shoulders.

After watching her stumble with a stubbornness approaching active determination for so long, seeing Hannah take new steps toward self-improvement--small and stuttering though they are--comes as a relief.

When the show focuses on that best version of itself, it feels brilliant and paranoid and, above all, prescient.

It’s a monologue-heavy series, but the writing is rich and haltingly expressive. ... The family’s issues with mental illness are treated sensitively and believably, and Flanagan makes sure to counter every moment of supernatural terror with a reminder that psychological terror is real, that depression, addiction, and ideation are every bit as terrifying as anything lurking in Hill House.

Mindhunter is not, by any means, a perfect show, nor does it succeed at everything it sets out to accomplish. But its intense focus on the inner workings of the human brain makes for a surprisingly fascinating watch that examines the roots of human darkness without seeming to revel in it.

Togetherness is a really, really well-executed version of this particular story [somewhat affluent white married couple in Los Angeles], with the Duplass brothers' inimitable directorial style meshing perfectly with the sorts of comedies HBO often embraces.

There's so much thought put into each scene, the composition of each frame, and the camera angles being used that you could mute the show and still come away with a brilliant, emotional story.

What makes that bigger picture so maddeningly compelling is the way The Keepers explores a pathology of abuse and its effect on victims, chronicles the strange inescapability of trauma, reflects on how society treats the word of women, and reveals the shattering reality that justice can feel so empty.

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.

If Breaking Bad gained dramatic tension from viewers feeling trapped between wanting Walter to redeem himself and wanting him to do even more horrible things, Saul can't really have that tension, because we know Saul's worst impulses will win out.... And yet there's so much about Better Call Saul that clicks, it's hard to hold too much of this against the program.

UnREAL is a great many things, including a dark satire of reality TV, a satisfyingly comedic soap opera, and the ultra-rare female antihero drama.

Sharp Objects’s touch remains delicate throughout, thanks to its gifted lead, its beautiful writing, and, yes, its laser-sharp editing.

Both hours are full of sharp material on subjects ranging from Bill Cosby (it’s complicated) to Chappelle meeting O.J. Simpson (four times!) to why he once ditched a fundraiser in Flint, Michigan, to attend the Oscars (short answer: Chris Rock). Still, after a decade away from churning out content for the masses,Chappelle doesn’t seem very sure of what those masses want or expect from him anymore--and those are the moments when his specials are at their hilarious best and questionable worst.

That Slender Man also seems evil serves to enhance, rather than lessen, his power over the imagination. But that power also comes from the belief that Slender Man is real-- and it’s in grappling with this troubling issue that the documentary makes its darkest, most complicated point. ... At two hours, it contains a bit too much footage of the backs of people’s heads in a courtroom, when it could be delving deeper into other topics related to the girls’ case.

Stranger Things hasn’t yet fallen into the Home Alone 2 trap. But it’s telling that the most exciting moments of season two are the ones when the characters evolve and change, and when the world around them does too.

As with most premieres, this first episode is a little overstuffed. ... But where The Nightly Show had trouble balancing its monologue with its roundtable discussion with its sporadic correspondent interviews, The Rundown mostly manages to streamline its material via a couple of calculated format decisions that work in the show’s favor.

There are also times when Kemper seems to be playing a thin gloss on 30 Rock's protagonist, Liz Lemon. Yet give Kimmy Schmidt enough time, and it reveals that the real comparison point to make here isn't with 30 Rock. It's with Bewitched.

For as fantastically fun as American Gods’ gods can be, the series is at its best when it brings the story a little closer to earth.

I imagine that when everything starts locking into place, the first episodes will take on a new meaning. Until that happens, WandaVision’s debut is an intriguing, visually captivating world with a lot of question marks, one that’s full of potential but also requires a bit of patience.

By the time you reach the cliffhanger--which did not leave me excited to check out season two, even though I generally liked season one--you’ll probably have recognized Sneaky Pete for the largely fun, largely inoffensive, largely unnecessary trifle it is. But, hey, TV needs trifles too.

Casual is more wry than funny, but it has some sharp observations and moments. It's also got a secret weapon in Watkins.... Casual definitely gets better as it goes along.

Even if One Mississippi doesn’t return for a second season, season one works beautifully as a muted story about what it means to come home and realize the person you once were, the person you thought you packed up in a box and stored away somewhere, is waiting right there for you to discover all over again.

The show stands as a textbook example of how major filmmakers can and should adapt their work for television: by not trying to rewrite the rules of another medium, but by finding a way to make their signature style flow through those rules.

[The] dissonance between classic family hijinks and twisted debauchery is exactly what makes The Detour such a fantastic ride.

The individual sketches themselves are things of beauty, running the gamut from old-school setups with one big joke that's repeated in a variety of ways right on up to those that make fun of current trends and pop culture.

If you want a solidly executed version of the [cop drama] form--or just enjoy a good detective novel--then Bosch season two should do the trick.

Once you start looking at the individual characters’ storylines--Jack and Rebecca are going to be parents, Kate struggles with her weight, Kevin wants his acting career to have meaning, Randall tracks down his biological father-- they feel less like actual stories than like placeholders, characters to be filled in later. It’s hard to hold too much of this against the show when the characters are played by great actors, and when the pilot has a script as emotionally adroit [as] the one crafted by Dan Fogelman.

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

The storytelling here, from a team led by David Kajganich and Soo Hugh, gains strength from its slow burn. The utter desolation and horror of the series’ back half is made more potent by how relatively normal things are for the first few episodes, before reality starts to buck and heave like the ever-shifting ice.

It’s a slower burn than you might expect, but it also grows a little more rewarding with every episode. It’s one to keep an eye on.

Maybe it seems like a stretch to call a show about dick jokes and poop one of the most well-crafted and self-aware works to come out of the last few years, but in season two, American Vandal has only continued to surpass expectations.

When it works, there’s nothing like it on TV. When it doesn’t, it’s hard not to watch in fascination as the train flies off the tracks, wondering if it might land back on them or this time finally plummet into the gorge below.

Season four's sweep is, in some ways, a little cheap (when you've written off as many characters as this show has, it's easy to buy gravitas by bringing a few back), but it's also entertaining.

The second season of Narcos, Netflix’s historical drama about drug lord Pablo Escobar and the law enforcement officers who worked to bring him down, is a marked improvement over the first.

Stranger Things might be a hodgepodge of lots of other things, but there’s a sincerity to it that’s hard to fake. And in its appropriations of those other things, it somehow becomes something new that rises above its collage-like origins.

Maniac isn’t weird enough to really achieve what it wants to, but it does say something--however accidentally--about how reality is already weird enough.

In many ways, House of Cards has become an entirely different show between season two and season three, and in ways that seem mostly half-hearted.

It'd be easy for Preacher to operate as a cut-and-dried adaptation; the comic is vibrant, with an incredibly specific tone and complicated backstory. But in reimagining it for television, AMC dug a little deeper, and came up with something more satisfying and complex.

The season struck me as too artistically conservative in many places. In particular, Moments in Love requires you to be all in on Denise and Alicia’s marriage early on for the later strife they face throughout the fertility treatment process to land. ... The tight frames of this season don’t imprison the characters. They imprison the show itself.

Fortitude turns out to be an intriguing blend of things a bunch of different nations' television networks do really well.

Ryan is great, but Mr. Inbetween never manages to land on one side of the fence or the other as far as whether Ray is actually the force of justice that he seems to think himself to be. ... But given how trim it is, Mr. Inbetween is charming enough, and Ryan’s performance shouldn’t be missed.

With per-episode running times of 25 minutes or longer (around four minutes more than a standard network animated show), there are some pacing issues and general fuzziness here and there. But for the most part, it's a neat little series with potential to be a whole lot more.

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.

When the action gets up close and personal, it helps that Godless’s cast is by and large top-notch. ... After watching more than seven hours of Godless, it’s also a little hard to understand whether Frank is paying tribute to Westerns of old or indulging in their most basic clichés just because he can.

The show draws you close physically and emotionally, letting you witness its characters’ most vulnerable moments--the better to help you understand exactly what’s going on in their heads even when they try desperately to keep their thoughts to themselves.

Its tenderness makes up for any flaws, to the degree that I know I should tell you about the flaws, but I almost want to lie and say they aren’t there, because it carries itself with the confidence of a show that knows it’s good, and if you can’t recognize that, well, that’s your problem.

The Dream Door sags considerably in its midsection, but it ends well. And any time Pretzel Jack appears on screen, it’s understandable if you feel low-grade terrified.

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.

It’s a cliché in TV criticism to say that the real protagonist is the setting, but Corporate flips that idea on its ear: Here, the setting is the antagonist, and every day you can stay alive within it is another day when you might lose yourself completely. I realize that maybe doesn’t sound very funny, but trust me, at a certain point, you laugh because your numbing corporate job has sapped you of the ability to cry.

The two episodes I screened also made me laugh quite a bit. None of the jokes are going to be all-timers--okay, maybe one line about Pierce Brosnan will make it into the time capsule but the characters have a warm and funny way about them that the original Roseanne had in spades and the new version too often replaced with mean-spirited insults and the like. While the characters still tease and insult each other incessantly, there’s more warmth to it.

A terrific start to the series’ final run.

In its assemblage of footage from Snapchat feeds and other social media sources, as well as its collection of solid teenage performances, American Vandal gets at something true about our obsession with whodunits and how every generation finds a new way to commit very old crimes.

Yes, it’s self-indulgent. But A Year in the Life succeeds despite its "getting the gang back together" vibe.

Every actor on Vida is great; Barrera’s performance in particular blooms with searing clarity as Lyn is forced to face her own reckless choices. But it’s Prada’s Emma who becomes both the backbone and the beating heart of Vida as she grapples with her mother’s truth and the painful reality of learning it too late.

Instead of filling that opulent, 19th-century setting with true passion and heart, the show comes off like many of the aristocrats it’s skewering: soulless and vapid.

Lots of times, they would baldly state what they were thinking or feeling, leaving nothing to the imagination, and even 6-year-old children were often deeply aware of their buried psychological motivations. The cast’s performances are good enough to compensate for much of this, but it’s still a bummer to get to the end of a juicy scene and have it conclude with dialogue that’s desperate to sum up everything that preceded it.

There are spots where it's too overbuilt for its own good. Some might find that it lacks sophistication and is occasionally unseemly. But for comics fans (like me), who've watched superheroes slowly trade their joy for popularity, there are moments that will leave you with an irrational grin on your face. Supergirl isn't the best show on television right now, but it's one you might love the most.

Too much of those first nine episodes is taken up with vague hints of something dramatic happening just over the horizon.... Chandler, Mendelsohn, and Spacek all give searing performances. In particular, the final confrontation between Chandler and Mendelsohn is filled with meaty moments that both actors sink their teeth into.

This is full-throttle, blood-soaked television, and even when it's not hitting every mark, it's still a great time.

As of its first four episodes, Underground is in a solid position moving forward, thanks to its breathless momentum and wonderful anchoring performances from Hodge, Smollett-Bell, Vann, and Miller in particular.

The crime solving sometimes seems perfunctory, and some of the characters feel purely functionary. But the series is still having a ton of fun throwing many ideas at the wall to see what sticks. That so much is sticking already is cause for anticipation of even better things to come.

The Looming Tower, despite its high stakes and its ostensibly true story (though many details have been changed), is a cop show. A really well-done cop show, admittedly, but a cop show. And more power to it.

The whole is much more cohesive, but the individual stories take some shortcuts.

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.

Most of Humans' characters are bores, and the story unfolds with the stately pacing of the typical cable drama.

Assassination may not be as enjoyable to watch as O.J., but it’s striking to see how thoughtfully all involved approach a very different story in a way that gives it its own tone, its own themes, and its own grandeur. This is a more difficult but more ambitious work, and it stands as a worthy companion.

With 14 new episodes--the third of which is MST3K’s 200th overall--there are bound to be both hits and misses. And sure enough, once the initial excitement of recognizing the familiar format and bad movies we love has worn off, the differences begin to peek through.

All of this is incredibly interesting, and it gets much wilder from there, with compulsively watchable tangents galore and incredible access to the inner workings of Joe’s world. ... But it feels like Tiger King keeps getting distracted by shiny objects.

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.

Always at the core of the show is the toxic, twisted relationship between Annie and the people who hate her for existing. ... In counterpoint to that twisted relationship is Annie’s evolving relationship with herself. That’s where the tenderness that is fundamental to this show’s ethos comes into play.

This is a show that’s willing to both revel in the witch fantasy and to think about its limitations in a way I’ve never quite seen a TV show do before, to examine about what kind of women are allowed to be powerful, and what kinds of boundaries are put upon them in consequence. And it has an incredible amount of fun while it does so.

In spite of its flaws, Harlots is far more addictive and even thoughtful than I initially gave it credit for. It doesn’t shy away from its characters’ more morally horrifying choices, nor the devastating circumstances that led them there.

In season two, The Magicians is darker, deeper, and just plain better than it was in season one, and it makes a claim for being one of the most unexpectedly great shows on television.

Even though it’s sleek, frequently thoughtful, and always cool, Westworld’s scattered self never coheres into anything.

As a TV show, I Love Dick’s makes the smart choice to lean into the book’s aggression, giving Hahn the freedom to fully let loose. The series embraces every sordid, horny detail of Chris’s desire, staring viewers directly (and often literally) in the face and daring us to blink.

The first episode is packed with juicy moments, in terms of both character and unexpected plot twists. By the end of the pilot, the show's combination of thematic thoughtfulness, buddy criminal character moments, and shocking blood spatter are very much in place.

Murder Among the Mormons, Netflix’s latest true crime docuseries, feels weirdly bloated and malnourished all at once.

Being a comedian can be a thankless grind, but in Pete (not to mention Holmes’s) hands, it’s a joy to remember that the whole point is to make people laugh.

The best thing season two does is dig into both how alluring and how dangerous the sensates’ connection is.

The so-called “new but not really” Will & Grace maintains the same cadence as the show’s original iteration. However, as far as its actual content goes, some of the best moments are the ones that couldn’t have happened more than a decade ago.

One of the things that makes Star Trek so good is that it really believes in peace and inclusion and all that good stuff. It really wants to create a world where these ideals have become the guiding principles of humanity and its many interplanetary allies. Star Trek is best when it’s hopeful, but hope shines brightest amid horror. On some level, Discovery knows both of those things, and that’s why it’s a show I’m eager to keep watching.

It's the most unusual new comedy of the year, and it's also one of the best.

Black Mirror is most effective when it attempts to map old human behavior onto new technologies. It’s much less effective when it tries to map new technologies onto old stories.

Once it settles in and allows itself to get weird after the premiere gets the setup out of the way, Archer: Dreamland becomes the hilarious ride it should’ve been from the start.

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.

Overall, The Mayor bites off a little more than it can chew. But it also proves that it not only knows where it’s going--as it teases Courtney’s real passion for his town and the support system that’ll help him in his new job--but where its strengths lie going forward.

Love's first four episodes are so overstuffed with bland filler that episodes two, three, and four could've been cut altogether, and the show could've skipped right from the pilot with "The Date" without the plot losing much importance. The show's saving grace is that the far more interesting end of season one is a promising sign for season two, which Netflix ordered months before the show even premiered.

The five episodes I have seen take the best stuff about True Detective and finally wed it to a story that proceeds in a mostly satisfying fashion.

It throws a wide array of actors, including Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Aya Cash, Marc Maron, Elizabeth Reaser, Orlando Bloom, and Raúl Castillo, into varying scenarios about love, sex, marriage, and everything in between, and the results are, predictably, mixed. In the end, though, the series indulges way more mundane ramblings than anything particularly interesting.

Given Dee Dee’s continual emphasis on appearance throughout Gypsy’s life, it’s hardly surprising that we’re left with questions about Gypsy’s ultimate level of control over her own narrative; yet what’s really surprising is how easy it is to believe her when she says she misses her mother. It’s one of many contradictions and paradoxes that Carr balances throughout the film, and one of many moments that make Mommy Dead and Dearest a must-watch for any fan of true crime, or any fan of stories from the depths of the troubled South.