The new TV series Downward Dog takes on loneliness and fear and all the other gunk that gets caught in your spiritual gutters when you start feeling low. It can be warm, but only once its characters push their way through searing self-doubt to get to the other side.

The new show is — I think — supposed to be cringey but cute, equal parts wince-worthy and nostalgic.

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.

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.

As the film finishes, there’s a desire to puzzle out Patrick’s life a little more, to give him the ending you think he deserves. And maybe a small wish that there would be just a bit more Looking left to see.

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 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.

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.

This Is a Robbery (directed by Colin Barnicle) is not entirely without merits. But it swerves into ponderous territory far too often to capture the incredible stakes and weight of the crime it examines.

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.

The third season makes further efforts at relevance, working in new storylines about homosexuality under Nazi reign, but as with the universe-jumping the series now relies on, such efforts don’t really work when they’re not grounded in something more personal and character-based.

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.

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.

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.

The show’s earnest approach to relationships and sex--there’s no shying away from the awkwardness of any of it--is appealing enough to counteract the way the plot falls into a much more typical (and disappointing) pattern.

Season six isn’t as messy as the show’s fifth season--which took place over just three days and chronicled a prison riot--but it’s also nowhere near as ambitious. It’s just good enough to make me interested in watching season seven, but not good enough to make me want to see anything beyond that.

It’s formulaic as can be, yet still incredibly compelling.

It moves at a steady clip, is stuffed with cheese, and remains compelling enough to fill an afternoon. But it's also easy enough to leave behind once you have to get back to the real world.

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.

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.

Shadow and Bone fails to deliver any of the charm and emotional engagement of a Game of Thrones (when that show was at its best), or even a Winx Saga (which is objectively terrible, but in an enjoyably ridiculous way). Again and again, Shadow and Bone forces unearned story beats and melodrama. Its character-building is lackluster; its worldbuilding is mostly incoherent, and its script careens from one-liner to one-liner without much substance in between — all while the weak writing torpedos the efforts of its talented cast.

Homeland might have learned how to turn its history into an asset, but it also can’t escape the fact that, like most shows with long runs, it can do little to surprise us anymore. Danes keeps Carrie watchable through the sheer force of her charisma, and Patinkin is always a treat.

The deconstruction of a Fred Rogers figure would make for an interesting show on its own, but Kidding transcends that premise by leaps and bounds on the strength of Carrey’s performance and a determination to make the show just as rough--and riveting--as real life.

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.

Baskets makes itself compelling by refusing to make a total caricature of Chip, or Martha, or Christine. The show genuinely loves these characters, as stunted and confused as they are.

At all times, The Young Pope is a meticulously filmed series featuring a fantastic central performance--plus a bonus Diane Keaton as the Young Pope’s nun mentor!--that knows better than to take itself completely seriously.

Fosse/Verdon can never quite escape its deteriorating orbit, plunging closer and closer to the black hole that is its central subject, because it knows, deep down, how essential he is to American art. That could have tanked the whole project. And yet ... it doesn’t. Because, deep down, this is a fantastic show about a marriage.

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.

While Runaways can still feel like a show written about teens by adults (here’s looking at you, #blessed selfies and rando man at a rager peddling pills by asking girls if they “want to party”), for the most part, Runaways demonstrates empathy for its characters by allotting them time and consideration beyond their most basic descriptors.

It’s certainly a bit jarring in the way it presents its new take on Riverdale, which includes having a character gawk that “Archie got hot!” (especially since that statement is true). But it also skillfully embraces both the absurdity of its premise and the inherent drama of the soap opera genre, and the result is just self-aware enough to be truly juicy.

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.

The result is a show that’s very different and much pulpier than The Crown and its attendant elegance. It doesn’t wield the weight or depth of that Netflix gem, but depending on your appetite for royal camp, Victoria boasts plenty of moments where it’s far more deliciously fun.

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.

What’s striking about watching The X-Files in 2018 is just how rejuvenated it feels. While it’s never going to hit the heights of the third or fourth season from the original series (which aired from 1993 to 2002), the 2018 iteration is a damn sight better than the 2016 one.

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.

Taboo is essentially like its title. It teases and teases and teases something envelope-shattering and a little bit disturbing, but then it settles for the same old tropes you’ve seen before, albeit more handsomely delivered than usual.

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.

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.

Once everyone settles into a rhythm of absurdity, Santa Clarita Diet sharpens right up. It just takes a few episodes for everyone to figure things out.

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.

Despite these [technical] flaws, Hairspray Live tapped into a rare kind of joy that’s hard to produce on television, let alone during a live broadcast--a kind of undeniable glee that happens when great songs, talented singers, and sparkling dancing collide.

Ozark’s insistence on presenting the grimiest version of its story possible stands in the way of explaining why anything within its universe is happening. The presentation and the characters and the smug tone eventually coalesce into something deeply irritating. ... Ozark is offensive and doesn’t understand why it’s offensive.

Fyre Fraud tries to draw connections between what happened with Fyre Festival and larger cultural trends, like the existence of Instagram influencers and the phenomenon of FOMO, to which millennials are particularly susceptible, at least according to the documentary. (At times their methods, unfortunately, seem a bit slipshod.) It is, in essence, a think piece.

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

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

King’s work is at its most frightening when its monsters are more familiar than abstract, reminiscent of the darkness we might encounter every day in others and in ourselves. Castle Rock manages to capture the fear that comes from recognizing that darkness, and as long as the show doesn’t get too preoccupied with the more conventional horrors lurking just offscreen, it may just become the scariest series on TV.

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.

Every time American Horror Story attempts to imbue real, pressing fear into these statements, in the way that good horror often can--think of this year’s Get Out, for example--it also gets ... well, dumb, in a way I’m not certain the show realizes.

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.

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.

I didn’t learn anything interesting, and I wasn’t left with much to think about. The special is curiously empty, aside from some touching moments of camaraderie and affection between the cast members, and the potential discomfort of realizing we’re all getting older.

The show overexplains here and there--especially in the first episode--but after some early jitters, it settles in and simply lets its world be.

Ballers isn't bad, per se, but it doesn't really try for anything, either.

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!

Happy! has those films’ [the Crank movies] wild, pell-mell sense of pace and jittery, overcaffeinated style. But the series’ scripts are smart about undercutting the wild mayhem and constant introduction of new ideas with a bittersweet holiday angst.

An often thrilling look at what TV can be when it looks to its past and finds ways to update old formats for the future.

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.

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

Goldberg and her team have a much better handle on both Meyerism and what might draw worshipers to it in season two, and that keeps the rest of the show afloat. But ultimately the show works because it captures the feeling of being enmeshed in something greater than yourself, whether that organization is bound together by faith, by familial duty, or by love.

An intriguing, but slightly less riveting, second season of Luke Cage.

Mad Dogs, in other words, is trying something that's really complicated and ambitious and failing as often as it's succeeding. But in my book, you get at least a few points for effort. It might not be great television, but at least it's not content to do the same thing everybody else is.

Sense8 is a show forever trapped between two things--its core artistic impulses and its need to over-explain everything that happens within its confines. That makes it at once beautiful and maddening, either a complete travesty or a whacked-out masterpiece--and sometimes both in the same scene.

For a series that makes a lot of basic storytelling stumbles and often seems to feature characters who can only speak in exposition, Altered Carbon’s first season is surprisingly gripping, especially in its superior back half. This is probably the best first season of a Netflix drama since The Crown’s first year dropped in late 2016.

In short, Making History is supposed to revolve around the character with the least at stake, which isn’t terribly interesting, and in every episode it has to find ways to get around that problem. Pally’s a very funny guy, and Dan would make a fine supporting character. But as written, he’s not dynamic enough to carry the show.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s called Will, and its focus lies in its shallow, dull, and unconvincing portrait of Shakespeare. What a waste.

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

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 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.

What The First is: a surprisingly affecting drama about several families and a planet in crisis.

It’s the worst TV show of 2016. ... By the end of its second season, The Man in the High Castle has essentially abandoned everything fascinating about its first season in favor of a junky sci-fi drama with reality-hopping characters and a bunch of caricature Nazi bad guys.

By the time the last three episodes roll around, House of Cards’ final season has abruptly buried itself in a whole host of weird, borderline anti-feminist tropes. ... Every time season six starts to build some momentum behind either of its other two major ideas, it lumbers backward to ponder what Frank would have done, or what Frank would have wanted, and it kills that momentum immediately.

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.

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.

These jokes aren't funny ones. They're old, threadbare ones that Galavant does nothing to build upon. In fact, they might be Galavant in a nutshell: everything seems different, but this is the same old TV slop in a different suit of armor.

It's an okay cop drama, to be sure, but it's definitely a cop drama you have seen many, many times before.

As always, the series dances on the line between satire and sermons with merry aplomb. Under the care of creator and writer Charlie Brooker and director David Slade, that dance consists of considerably more style than substance in Bandersnatch. But the film, which you can think of as a luxuriant aperitif before Black Mirror season five (which currently has no known release date, though it will presumably debut sometime in 2019), is interesting enough from start to its five different finishes that you probably won’t be too upset by its lack of larger thematic cohesiveness.

It’s beautiful, mysterious, and a little bit maddening, and you’d want to take in every little second of the show even if it wasn’t in German with English subtitles, because every aspect of it matters.

The show is every bit as good, as delightfully odd, and as touching as the comic.

Something as pulpy and cinematic as cops chasing criminals should be loaded with juicy stories. Fear City somehow manages to both be far too simplistic and utterly lost in its own weeds. ... There’s a place in the world for uncomplicated nostalgia for the old days. But it should never be as vapid, or dull, as Fear City.

The Alienist might go very, very wrong in future episodes, and it’s already clear how the series might be more interesting if it took the plot of the novel as a suggestion instead of a road map. But there are enough pleasures around its edges to keep me watching.

It’s honestly pretty fun to watch, all glossy and zippy. But it’s also fundamentally at war with itself.

The project is also a bit of a mess. It feels like De Felitta never stops moving his camera, even when simply sitting still might do. And Robbins's script is filled with scenes where characters have largely inconsequential conversations... But at the very least, it's worth tuning in to the miniseries for five or 10 minutes to watch a great actor show off what made him so great in the first place.

It's so relentlessly self-serious that it becomes increasingly tough to sit through. There's no levity or break from the insistence that what we're watching is a very important story about a family falling apart. If the characters were more active, or even just funnier, that might make them more palatable to hang out with. As it is, they're all mostly there to glower and worry about what they stand to lose.

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.

After five seasons, but especially in 2017, House of Cards’ curdled cynicism feels less and less like weary wisdom and more like a high school student flipping off a civics teacher.

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.

The show sometimes relies too much on the power of its actors to bring home the reality of its horror, and this doesn’t always work--but when it does, it works very well.

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.

It could be fun once it figures out where and how to direct its snark, but at the start, it’s too haphazard to make much of an impression.

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.

The illusion of depth without any actual there there is an Ozark specialty. By the end of season two, it’s dragged itself to exactly where you’d think it would go, and racked up quite a body count (also proving it hasn’t really learned the lessons of the shows that came before it, which did their best to hold off on killing major characters). But none of it feels as if it has any meaning beyond getting from the end of season one to the start of season three. It’s a bridge to nowhere that keeps building itself right in front of you.

There are instances when Cohen exposes moments of genuine American racism or Republican gun love that feel like they’re coalescing toward a point. But a lot of the humor is cruel and cynical, for the sake of being cruel and cynical, and even more of it points and laughs at the rubes, provoking them simply to provoke them.

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.