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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For now, the series functions much the same as the oil the McCullochs desperately seek in the early 1900s storyline: It’s obvious something is there, but nobody has figured out how to get to 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.

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.

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 most salient detail I can share about all of these episodes is that they’re all at least 15 minutes too long. ... Still, the qualities that made Mad Men so good are present here, if buried a bit beneath all the excess.

Despite its name and Bernthal’s intense performance, The Punisher is about more than just its ruthless antihero, and proves much more incisive than it may initially seem to be. ... Even when its stylized viciousness is undercut by real-world tragedy, The Punisher, like Marvel’s very best Netflix series, gives its title character a bloody good introduction.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Berlinger arguably could have kept much of the documentary’s archival source material, with its heavy emphasis on Bundy, while reframing the killer’s story as one about the women whose lives he cut short. Instead, he produced a perfectly serviceable Conversations that adds little to the conversation at all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Vice Principals season two is beautifully shot by director David Gordon Green, and the performances (especially from Goggins) carefully walk the line between funny and infuriating.

The show’s six-episode second chapter, debuting this week, is terrific from stem to stern, taking a story that would seem unlikely to translate well to television and turning it into an eerie, Twilight Zone-style tale of suburban conformity, post-high school depression, and the inability to escape the legacy of one’s parents.