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 still a little clunky, particularly in terms of editing, and it feels as if all involved are figuring out the right ratio of jokes to information. Yet there's a lot to recommend here.

For all its obvious weak spots, the show has turned out pretty well. It's silly but emotionally resonant, and able to call back on Muppets lore without getting lost in it.

It takes a little while to rediscover its rhythms, but once it does, it feels tuned in to its world and its country in a way few sitcoms are anymore.

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.

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 Curtis and Dickens it has two of the best performers the franchise has ever featured, and it knows how to use them. Both are able to balance the sense that they're simultaneously terrified for the state of society and worried they won't be able to save their kids from becoming zombie chow.... Fear probably can't do the slow-pocalypse thing forever, but for a first season of just six episodes, it might be just about right.

Ultimately, Petrie and Ramirez created a season that fully understands Daredevil's strengths and plays to them accordingly. But this second installment is underwritten, and has failed to build on the show's fine first season.

With Gaiman at the helm, and with an ample amount of time to do the book’s nuances justice, Good Omens succeeds much better than any recent Gaiman (or Pratchett) adaptation in memory. But we’re still ultimately left with a screenplay that faithfully emphasizes Good Omens’ plot rather than its profundities or literary flourishes.

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.

GLOW, both the show and the show within the show, lives and dies by its ferocious women.

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.

Whenever Midge gets up on the standup comedy stage, her scenes are electrifying. ... It’s also a show that can never quite see past its own blinders on anything that doesn’t relate to a 1950s battle of the sexes. It knows issues around race and class exist. It even knows that issues around religion exist. But it never knows what to do with them, because it needs them to remain off camera, so that it might construct a more perfect, candy-coated world.

These teens are selfish, sure, but they’re also more ambitious and earnest than they ever want to admit. When Everything Sucks! lets them realize that and let go of the idea that everything might just suck, it becomes much more comfortably quirky in its own way, its unabashedly bleeding heart in the right place.

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.

Snowfall doesn’t get all the way there in season one, but it comes further than you’d expect. And inside its veins runs something vital and alive and different.

Despite the roiling tensions of the imminent ’60s and the various revolutions it holds, the Royal Family’s domestic politics are still what The Crown does best. And for every moment that falls apart under the weight of leaden metaphors, there are still several that shine. Royals may not be just like you or me, but they are, The Crown insists, prone to indulging the same trifling nonsense as the rest of us.

In season two, The Handmaid’s Tale continues to be an angry, searing piece of work. When it forces you to hold its infuriated gaze, it makes it clear that your inability to do so for long is exactly the point. But as it continues to broaden its world, the show needs to find a way to get more comfortable with the perspectives that make it most uncomfortable, or risk losing itself in its own myopic tragedy.

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.

As The Walking Dead began its second season, the characters became mired in an endless storyline at a small farm in rural Georgia, a farm where they stayed for almost the entire season. The comics had done it, so the show did too. Fear the Walking Dead tells what appears to be a similar story, but it's over within an episode. Sometimes not having anybody to copy is the best thing that can happen.

What it wants to be is a surprisingly effective collection of one-act plays that are sprinkled with laughs but mostly dramatic in nature. What it is is an occasionally effective (but always daring) sitcom, filmed before a live studio audience and packed with smutty jokes.

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.

[Girlboss] devotes its early episodes to doing nothing more than proving that Sophia is a surly jerk. But once Sophia finally starts to let go of her self-defeating instincts and make things happen for herself and for Nasty Gal, Girlboss becomes a lot more interesting, and a lot more fun.

Vinyl feels like it's still doing its mic checks, but somewhere along the way, it just might burst out into a blistering solo. And it's worth paying attention until it does.

Though the film’s writing tends to make too much of Rebecca’s bafflement and culture shock as she peers into the lives of the Lacks family, Wolfe never frames the Lacks as sheer spectacle.

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

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.

Mozart in the Jungle is at its best when it's being whimsical. It's at its worst when it's trying to force laughs.

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.

As sardonic and irreverent as it aims to be, I love that Deadly Class never shortchanges the anxiety and fears of being a teen, and the cast really nails their performances of those feelings. This sometimes results in lengthy narration that I could live without. But it also pays off with stories like Billy’s, or the unmistakable spark between Marcus and Saya.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

But still, slow-moving and enamored of its own darkness as Damnation is, there’s something vital and real in the show’s insistence that the United States’ institutions have failed and are only looking out for themselves.

It’s fitfully funny, occasionally sad, and fond of long digressions that seemingly have nothing to do with anything--but might be the whole point.

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.

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.

This season of Orange gets better and better the longer it goes (though, weirdly, the slasher homage is dropped into the middle of the otherwise very good back half of the season), and the final three episodes go from strength to strength. ... There are a lot of plot holes and missteps along the way. But that doesn’t negate the power of the closing passages of the season.

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.

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.

It's a wild, weird blend of influences, and not all of it works. The Path is not a great TV show--not yet--but it's great-adjacent.

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.

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

It manages to find some middle ground between the typically cynical, technology-obsessed Black Mirror and the original Twilight Zone. The stories have been updated for the modern era in theme and content (sometimes people swear, which is honestly a little jarring), but the visuals continue to suggest more than depict.

While much of the show’s first season feel needlessly twisty and jerky, the way the mystery eventually comes together while allowing for sharp observations about the show’s characters speaks to Search Party being much more incisive--and worthy of a 10-hour marathon commitment--than it might appear at first glance.

Divorce is very much going to be an acquired taste. ... But I also think Divorce has something interesting to say about the marriages of people who stay together not for love, or for the kids, but for their money.

Kelley and Shapiro are a little too in love with their quirks to create a show that doesn’t occasionally tip over into unearned melodrama and/or Gothic horror, and the series’ understanding of lesbian relationships, in particular, is straight out of 1992. But at its core, where it counts, Goliath does more good than bad.

It's not as good as it wants to be, but it's still just propulsive and ridiculous enough to be entertaining. It's good shitty television, and that's something we all need in our lives.

Splitting Up Together is at its best when it leaves the granular ins and outs of this arrangement for the ways Lena and Martin are dealing with not being a unit anymore.

It’s in the interactions between the Branch Davidians and the federal government that the Dowdles best capture the sense of an easily avoidable yet nonetheless inevitable catastrophe. Where they struggle is in conveying how it would feel to live a life so tightly entombed in cataclysm that manipulation and abuse become simple facts of life, not dark horrors to overcome.

The journey into Jessica’s past feels like familiar territory, making the show seem less urgent and less captivating than it previously did. The back end of these 13 episodes is much more exciting and also a lot weirder (in a great way) than the first half.

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.

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.

Ryan’s part of the story is a breeze: He’s the good soldier, here to save the day. Sometimes he’ll face some sort of moral dilemma, but it’s never too difficult to guess what the outcome will be. The rest of the series is much thornier, and all the more real for it.

It could get very good in the future, even though it’s not there yet.

Vice Principals could end up being some solid fun to fly through on a lazy Saturday. If it decides to double down on its characters’ grosser instincts, however, it could fade into the list of countless angry-dude-driven comedies that are just angry for the sake of it.

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.

Book readers will undoubtedly find things to love in the twisting Gothic sets (thank you, Netflix’s generous budget!), its clear affection for the source material, and the generous runtime a movie adaptation could never allow. From the outside looking in, though, unraveling Lemony Snicket’s many strange-for-the-sake-of-it twists and scattershot storytelling feels like more trouble than it’s worth.

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

But trying to recreate the past is almost always impossible, as every TV revival other than Twin Peaks: The Return has been forced to grapple with. And that leaves Arrested season five feeling half finished. It’s fun in places and labored in others, sometimes in the same scene.

It’s not until the team travels to Daytona Beach that the tone and focus of their narrative finally shifts away from their narrative’s frustrating superimposed drama and illogical amateur crime-solving theatrics into something more meaningful.

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

As in a number of Netflix docuseries, the thesis of How to Fix a Drug Scandal isn’t clearly presented early on, which means you’re often left with the feeling of trying to absorb a lot of narrative, information, and evidence, but not sure how it’s supposed to relate to the rest of the story, or what point it’s driving toward. ... Yet Carr’s thoroughness is unassailable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It feels, in every way, like a broadcast network TV show about the investigation of a police shooting.

Unsolved Mysteries manages to satisfy both its old and new audiences and deliver at least one case that’s as unique as it is baffling. The rest of the half-season is weaker, but “Thirteen Minutes” gives fans plenty to work with.

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.

There's only so much mileage the show can get from focusing on "everyone on this show is awful" gags. But with sharp performances and total commitment to the hedonistic material, The Mick still finds a couple new places to explore.

All the Money frequently felt truncated, its story too sprawling for any of its characters to really connect, only Plummer holding the story together; Trust, meanwhile, feels a little scattered and bulky, constantly distracted by whatever catches its fancy when it might be better off bearing down and focusing on a particular storyline.

If the series ultimately gives in to the kind of structural gimmicks that keep its first episodes from moving forward--like the flashbacks upon flashbacks--it could easily collapse in on itself and settle into being a decent, if unremarkable drama. But if it takes a step back, pares down some of those devices, and lets its compelling characters tell the stories, The Family could become something a whole lot more interesting.

It knows what it wants, and every so often, it even achieves it. But when it falls short, it’s even more disappointing to know that it got so close.

If this documentary added anything substantially new to the conversation that Serial began in 2014, its efforts might feel more worthwhile. Instead, in its determination to uncritically embrace the narrative Serial created, it accomplishes the opposite of its aim to show that Syed was wrongfully convicted.

In short, it’s a mixed bag. The show’s signature fight scenes are still fantastic, as is the Punisher himself, Jon Bernthal. But something seemed to go wrong in the writers’ room this go-round, and even with a new dynamic that changes Frank’s life, there are still some stories in play that might have been better wrapped up in season one.

Unfortunately, the season four premiere has revealed that Sherlock’s most promising and divisive element in the wake of the season three finale--the evolving three-way relationship between Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch), John Watson (Martin Freeman), and John’s mysterious wife, Mary (Amanda Abbington)--is little more than a giant distraction, a red herring for ... whatever the show has up its sleeve next.

This show (which will run for eight episodes total; I’ve seen seven) lapses into flatness whenever it possibly can, and it is always very ready to tell you exactly who is right and who is wrong in any given situation. In the end, it all ends up feeling exhausting.

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

While the cast is solid enough that it can sell almost anything, taking a third trip to Camp Firewood makes for a reunion that would’ve been best left to our imaginations.

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.

It all chugs along under the basic idea that you don’t need to have too many feelings about what’s actually happening onscreen as long as everything is beautiful to look at--until the final two minutes of the pilot, when two estranged lovers meet in an empty room.

Legends still has a ton of potential, largely thanks to its talented cast. Before it can realize that potential, however, the show will have to course-correct from some seriously clunky, scattered missteps.

When Emerald City builds much of its narrative around how weird and edgy the place is, it just feels tired. You’ve seen this take on Oz before--and done better.

You, Me and the Apocalypse is a character-driven piece that's awkwardly shoehorned into a plot-driven piece, and that means neither side entirely works.

It wants to be a stupid time travel show about people chasing a bad guy into the past to preserve American history. And on that level, I think it succeeds!

The thrill of exploration, or the examination of family dynamics, never feels like it arises organically from the action, in the way it might have on the show’s most obvious forebear that isn’t its direct predecessor: Lost.

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.

Like most new comedies this fall, Young Sheldon isn’t yet very good at conveying what it’s trying to do. But what it’s trying to do is more interesting--and potentially more artistically exciting--than whatever first impressions you might have of the show. The series is at once better and worse than what you’d expect.

On the whole, however, the show simultaneously feels like it has too much going on--in that there are eight regulars to service, all with their own season-long story arcs--and too little--in that there's rarely any real conflict between the characters.

Physical would be unwatchable misery if it wasn’t for Byrne’s performance. Her Sheila is a mess that’s fraying at her edges. In Byrne’s hands, that jittery exterior gives way to a bellowing sadness and frustration not just at her life gone wrong, but also the state of the world around her.

Roadies isn’t all there yet, but it’s trying something different.

Ghosted’s cast works hard to sell every ounce of plodding exposition.

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.

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.

The Mandalorian is perfectly fine entertainment. But it’s also fundamentally empty entertainment and not a great harbinger for many Disney+ original programs to come.