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.

While Gossip Girl has savviness galore when it comes to the complexities of clout-chasing, when it comes to making its characters feel like real and interesting people, it has no idea what it’s doing. Which wouldn’t be so bad if Gossip Girl didn’t have aspirations to make you care about its characters and to develop some sort of heart.

Stripping these characters of whatever power they previously had and scattering them to the winds forces everyone into their smallest, meanest selves--which frankly becomes hard to watch, and not in Veep’s usual “cringe because it’s so real” kind of way.

In the end, the show never quite proves its case as worth watching. It’s fine enough, but it will need to make a stronger case for itself going forward--just as Caruso Jr. needs to step out of his father’s shadow--in order to bring audiences back for a second season.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The trouble with a show insisting that someone is a genius is that it has to go ahead and prove it, and nothing Alex does is particularly convincing in this arena.

Like so many prestige dramas right now, then, Here and Now lacks a strong reason for any of its individual episodes to exist. The show is just a chronicle of stuff that happens to this family, with a vague promise that something important will happen somewhere along the line.

The show’s far-fetched conceit that Nazis were behind most of the conspiratorial diplomatic tragedies of the Cold War era, the thin mystery of the characters’ relationships, and the wan pull of their wacky spy hijinks weren’t enough to justify the ideological Nazi parade on display.

It feels like just leaving the TV on as rerun after rerun piles up. The laugh lines are predictable. The gags play out exactly as you'd expect.

A lot of the qualities that still make Allen’s movies worth watching--especially his gift for crowding a bunch of actors into the frame and giving all of them something interesting to do--are present in Crisis in Six Scenes’ final episode. But the road to get there is so needlessly long, and so pointlessly convoluted, that many viewers will be forgiven for having abandoned it long ago.

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.

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.

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.

Its fight scenes vastly improve upon the garbage disposal-like quality of jump cuts masquerading as brawls in season one, and the writing has moved away from the mind-numbing exposition that characterized much of season one, trusting the audience to understand what’s happening without dialogue constantly reminding them. However, Iron Fist’s second season isn’t exactly good when in the context of television outside of Iron Fist. Parts of it are still staggeringly clunky.

The shots are perfunctory, designed to give us just enough information to keep following the story and nothing more. The performances are fine, but they rarely rise above BBC historical reenactment. The scripts are so wrapped up in explaining how everybody’s connected to everybody else that they become exhausting.

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.

Hawkins is a compelling presence, and his handling of the show’s signature action sequences suggests an actor who can carry a show. But as a character, Eric Carter is a bit of a dud, with a snooze of a backstory that does little to enliven him.

They’re not good. I didn’t laugh, the jokes are mostly easy potshots at Trump. ... Every so often, there’s a flash of the old show’s panache, or a line-reading that Bergen knocks dead, or a flicker of terror at how bad things have gotten and how bad they could still get, and the show comes to life, for a moment at least. It’s not good, but it’s comforting.

Happyish, like so many other shows of its ilk, confuses mentioning weighty, philosophical topics with actually discussing or understanding them.... And worst of all, it's so, so derivative.

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

The most 2018 thing about Viceland’s new series The Hunt for the Trump Tapes with Tom Arnold is how impossible it is to tell which portions of it are self-promotion and which parts of it are sincere. ... There’s something oddly watchable about Arnold throwing himself against the rocks of reality, trying to wear them down.

Let’s Do the Time Warp Again is a sterile facsimile of Rocky Horror’s original camp, filtered through the lens of Party City’s least inspired Halloween aisle.

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.

The Brink's level of satire never really goes beyond "the most obvious jokes you can think of about every possible group of people on the planet," and its political messages essentially boil down to the idea that the end of humanity wouldn't be that cool.

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.

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 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.

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.

Heroes Reborn is in a curious middle ground where it seems to be giving both too much and too little exposition.

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.

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.

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.

Like eating a stale Hydrox cookie when all you want is an Oreo. Combine that lack of inspiration with general Netflix bloat--this thing is 10 hour-long episodes, and its story doesn’t really start until the last five minutes of the whole season--and you have a series that feels like a single-handed indictment of Netflix’s entire creative model.

The special ... didn't just irritate me; it made me actively angry at how it wasted a great idea in the name of pointless complications and fan service.

This is a show that's unnecessarily bleak, far too impressed with its own edginess, and completely predictable to anyone who's watched television before.

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.

It's a leaden, soggy mess, that only gets messier as it goes.

See is a lightly sci-fi trip through bland environments fronted by forgettable characters who exist according to some bizarre rules.

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.

In its new miniseries incarnation, it wants to be a dumb show, full of clichés, that has something to say, and you’d be surprised how easily that tilts over into outright offensiveness.

It’s as if D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, clearly out of steam after showrunning that final season of Game of Thrones, found a way to sell off their unused, undercooked ideas under the table to the powers that produce The Witcher.

It’s almost impossible to know whether there are too many jokes in The Orville or too few, both because the show doesn’t seem at all confident in whether it should even be making jokes at all, and because the jokes that are in the show are bad.

It’s all incredibly banal and deeply uninspired. ... Brooker achieves something close to meaningful commentary on the year only when he and the rest of the writers stop cracking tired jokes and allow the absurdity of the year’s images to speak for themselves.

The clunky dialogue often creates the sense that the show doesn’t trust its audience. ... Everyone fights the same, and no one looks interesting doing it.

The Briefcase features a truly terrible idea at its center, but what's almost worse than that is how dull and repetitive it gets almost immediately.

Its rage (“we’re dying in America at the end of the millennium”) and its love (“live in my house, I’ll be your shelter”) could have given us renewed energy and hope during a long, troubled winter. Instead, due to production mishaps that could have been avoided and were then poorly handled, it barely got to make a sound.

It spends all of its time striving desperately to reach the status of third-tier Ryan Murphy and falling flat. It has Murphy’s gleeful sadism in spades, but none of his manic camp energy; it has his treacly didacticism, but none of his genuine emotion.

There are some truly janky filmmaking choices throughout. The trouble with Wahl Street is that it’s not sure whether it’s a pure vanity project or a Horatio Alger-lite primer on how to succeed in business. ... And the advice they give is ... vapid. ... The full series is barely watchable.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s bicoastal hosting job was plagued with weird timing mishaps, but they landed several funny jokes in spite of the technical issues. Fonda’s speech accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award was a terrific call for better diversity in Hollywood. ... But by and large, the Globes were an awful awards show that proved nobody involved in the production had bothered, say, to watch the Emmy Awards.