Calling it the best new show of the fall feels too limiting, because it’s trying to be so many things to so many people. It left me dizzy from its audacity, its delight, and its occasional lack of taste. Your mileage may vary.

The Underground Railroad made me feel things about my own life and personal pain very deeply, while never letting me forget that while I could relate to aspects of this story, it is not my own. ... The show’s achievement is making every episode feel so full as to allow you to watch an individual installment, walk away for a while feeling like you’ve got a complete story, then return when you’re ready for another story featuring some of the same characters.

It’s one of the best seasons of TV I’ve seen in ages.

The third season of the anthological miniseries, which debuts Sunday, March 12, is nothing short of breathtaking in the way it attempts to show every single level of economic comfort--or lack thereof--in and around a small North Carolina farming community. From migrant workers to big wheels in agribusiness, the season covers them all.

Show Me a Hero always feels thrillingly alive and attuned to the way that all politics is personal.... One of the year's very best TV programs.

Penelope is one of the most beautifully fleshed-out characters in a sitcom today, period. It’s as much of a joy to watch Machado work as it is to watch the Alvarez family, and the people who love them, live.

Season three is as good as the show has ever been — even better, really.

It is a slow, methodical, measured, and devastating rebuttal to claims that victims of sexual assault in general and Robson and Safechuck in particular are just “in it” for the fame and the money. .... A work of extraordinary restraint. It is not salacious or leering or opportunistic. There aren’t any twists. You know where it’s going from the start. At many points, the camera just quietly waits for the subject to formulate his thoughts and find a way to keep speaking. But the power is undeniable.

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.

Season four is shot through with some of The Americans' most plaintively touching moments yet.

The first five episodes of that third season are as good as anything I’ve seen on TV this year.

The series is probably too weird to win a bunch of Emmys, but God willing, Lyonne will be nominated. She’s so good. ... Already one of the best shows of the year.

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.

This is, if anything, a sequel to season one, one that shares some of the same cast members, a bit of the same tone, and a general sense of the world tipping off its axis, ever so slightly. It's a show that wants to provoke a reaction in you, whether it's admiration, hatred, or just bafflement. It's HBO's best drama--and thus must-see TV.

This might be the show of the year. ... Even the benefits of giving itself space to experiment, or of having those funny jokes, aren’t what makes Master of None’s second season as good as it is. What really makes it work is its endless faith in the idea that people will take care of each other in the end.

I’ve seen a few episodes of Rectify’s fourth season, and they’re as sweet and soulful as the show has always been. They contain passages of stark beauty, and moments of dreamlike simplicity. And above all else, they’re guided by McKinnon’s unfailing empathy for each and every character on screen.

It’s one of the best made series on TV, in terms of writing, performance, and direction, but it rarely bothers with anything that would immediately call attention to itself.

From a pure filmmaking perspective, Exterminate All the Brutes may be unparalleled among TV docuseries; the closest I can think of is the complexity and contextualization evident in the 2016 Oscar-winning 10-part series O.J.: Made in America. Peck doesn’t rely on tired visual tropes or techniques that would make it easy to just put on the show in the background while you’re doing something else. He demands our attention with wit, craft, and well-placed anger.

Transparent's second season is the best television of the year.... Season two was an improvement in every way, small and lovely and achingly resonant.

A show operating at the peak of its powers. ... It feel[s] very much like a series that has found its moment in history.

Its second season (the first seven episodes of which are newly streaming on Hulu) evolves beyond that pretense and looks inward at Maya and Anna. The show becomes more concerned with how strong the bond of friendship can be between young girls, especially as they experience complications on top of what’s already a complicated time of life. And it makes for beautifully relatable stuff, particularly thanks to the show’s increased focus on how puberty strains Maya and Anna’s friendship.

None of this would work without a great performance at its center, and as Offred, Moss is astonishing. ... At every corner, The Handmaid’s Tale brims with invention.

Netflix's BoJack Horseman has found its footing beautifully in season two, earning the title of not just the streaming service's best show, but of one of television's best shows.

The Americans is also the best show on television, by a fair amount.... The show now has the best of its first season — when Philip and Elizabeth were often at odds--blended with the best of its remarkable second--when the two found common cause but discovered that made them less effective spies.

O.J.: Made in America might be the most essential TV series of the year.

No show on the air does a better job of turning moments that ought to be blips on a viewer’s radar into moments of captivating drama, and as the story moves into increasingly tragic territory in its fourth season, it’s a necessary strength to keep Jimmy’s misfortunes (self-imposed or otherwise) something to care about, rather than to revel in.

[A] trippy, incisive comedy. ... The show always finds jokes in the bleakest of situations, like how the season opens with a chatty car ride turned armed robbery, featuring some truly expert tonal whiplash. But the moments in which Earn and his friends can just be themselves are casually, wonderfully funny in a way that highlights how much they have to hold themselves back just about everywhere else.

It’s mostly about getting through the day, about getting through the week, about getting through life. It’s angry but never bitter. Joyful but never saccharine. It feels a little like magic.

Season six, then, feels like it’s finally homing in on the series’ great theme, which is to say it’s about communication, about the gaps that open up when we don’t tell each other what’s necessary and instead stick to what’s self-serving.

Where other TV shows avoid the weight of all that death, Hannibal turns the horror into opera--bold and beautiful and over-the-top and opulent.

Fortunately, The Americans’ fifth season succeeds in addressing our current world by being its assiduously careful self. This is still a show about how, beyond politics, beyond economics, beyond nationalism, people are people. How beautiful, and how terrifying.

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.

Book fans may be at a slight advantage, since if you’ve forgotten who someone is in a book, you can always go back a few pages. That is a minor complaint in the face of a series that gripped me from frame one, despite telling a very small, intimate story that occasionally amounts to two girls learning lessons about how the world works and little else.

Fleabag is so wonderfully messy, funny, and deeply human that these seemingly chaotic collisions feel natural.

What FXX has bet on isn't the usual cheery, good-time sitcom. It's a show that unleashes the dark heart of the romantic comedy.

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.

Yes, all of this has been done before. But at every turn, Price’s writerly flourishes give The Night Of’s characters more depth than the usual stock figures. The result is surprisingly invigorating.

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.

A compliment, even if it might not sound like one: Deadwood: The Movie feels like the best TV episode of 1997. ... There is so much here that will be rich and meaningful to any TV fan, and its story is self-contained enough that you could use it as an entry point to the entire series. (That is, if you don’t mind being spoiled on several major events from all three seasons, which are depicted in flashbacks.)

Everything that was always good about Game of Thrones is still good. The ensemble cast remains one of TV's richest, from top to bottom, and even actors who seemed weak in the past (like Sophie Turner, who plays increasingly embittered Sansa Stark) continue to rise to the level of much better material.

It's a sprawling small-town saga that, nonetheless, feels lived-in and intimate. And even as it succumbs to some of true crime's greatest faults, it's always less interested in the gruesomeness of the crime than in the impossibility of finding the truth, something that serves it well. This is grim television, but it's also necessary television.

Its tropes are well-worn, and its narrative doesn’t go anywhere unexpected. And yet all these elements miraculously coalesce into a show that is still tremendously emotionally affecting. Ultimately, Homecoming has too many strengths — and is a story too strikingly told--for its flaws to find real purchase.

It’s impeccably acted, written, and directed, and no matter how ridiculous “a series about the 1970s porn industry with two James Francos” might sound to you, this is somehow not just the best possible execution of that idea, but the most thoughtful one, too. It’s the best show of the fall, by a wide, wide margin.

Appleby and Zimmer's chemistry isn't just electric, but acidic, burning through the camera lens so fast you almost forget their characters are doing truly terrible things in the name of ratings.

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

There's nothing revolutionary here, but man, what is here is some of the funniest, most soulful TV of the summer.

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.

This season proves once again that this show’s success is thanks to its incredible visuals just as much as its writing.

Station Eleven takes Mandel’s book and amps up its sense of a cozy post-apocalypse, where humanity comes together, rather than drifting apart. I entered the series deeply skeptical, and I left it feeling at least semi-hopeful for what humanity might yet become, even after the end. ... The alternation between storytelling modes also gives the show a pleasant rhythm once you fall under its spell.

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.

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 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.

What makes Atlanta special is the way it adds texture and flavor to a core you already know, and the reason the show is so compulsively watchable is that it perfectly executes that core.

And yet for all its mess, for all its sprawl, for all its shagginess, Transparent remains one of TV’s most vital shows and one of its most artful.

DuVernay’s series offers a different way into the story, one made for an age of true crime obsession — and not only is it compelling, but it’s desperately needed.

Perhaps the most exciting development in Big Little Lies’ second season is that there’s more depth to each of the characters, allowing Witherspoon, Dern, and Kravitz in particular to give even more impressive performances. ... The show appears to be exchanging an all-consuming, incendiary mystery for a tale that’s less mercurial but no less hearty, and it’s still an absolute pleasure to watch.

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

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.

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.

In season two, it's altogether richer, more daring, and even more fun.

In season five, BoJack Horseman brings all of that character development down around its ears, in a stretch of episodes that represents the most precise dissection of BoJack Horseman yet--and perhaps the first truly sustained artistic response to the #MeToo movement.

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

Killing Eve is a show outside of Eve and Villanelle’s tense, mutual hunt; its cases and kills of the week are, in fact, compelling. But as long as the show has this pair’s obsession, respect, and intrigued attraction to each other pulsing at its center, it’ll be a thrill to watch unfold.

It wasn't as immediately satisfying as season two, but it was, in some ways, even more important to the run of the show as a whole, and it built to a final set of episodes that are as good as anything Orange has attempted so far.

The new status quo and even more skewed power balances within the prison doesn’t just test every single character. It pushes all of them to their limits, and eventually throws them right the hell off the cliff they’ve been teetering on the edge of.

The series is stronger and more fully realized through four episodes of season two than it was at a comparable point in season one.

Even though the season clocks in at around six hours in total, it feels more momentous than that, and in a good way. By grounding its laughs, its tears, and its storytelling in the ups and downs of a family, One Day at a Time avoids feeling gimmicky. ... The episodes themselves are beautifully constructed, too, with some of the best third acts in television today.

Dear White People is, in other words, one of the most confident new TV comedies I’ve ever seen--and that confidence is what ends up making it so compelling.

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

The real beauty of Legion is its unpredictability and insistence on pushing back against the traditional hero narrative.

Insecure season two is more self-assured than ever.

In some episodes, it's really good, and even when not everything clicks, it's relentlessly addictive, returning the primacy to a story that was ceded to the tabloids long ago. The miniseries digs deeper than you'd expect, poking at the messy intersections of race, gender, and class that so much TV still shies away from, and it will remind you, time and again, of bits and pieces of the trial you'd completely forgotten about.

Mr. Robot is finally evolving into the show it always should have been, and you should watch it.

In other words: they’re actual, believable people. It’s easy to root for them even as it hurts to watch them stumble--a combination that makes Insecure an immediate force to be reckoned with.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A terrific start to the series’ final run.

This sense of coming together perversely helps excuse some of the show’s excess.

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.

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.

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.

Blue Planet II will be one of your favorite TV events of the year, and its deep dive beneath the waves of the world’s oceans will prove both soothing and engaging.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Feud’s scripts and direction relish every ounce of drama they can squeeze out of their source material, but the show wouldn’t be half as captivating without Sarandon and Lange. They both embrace the opportunity to capture the essence of these screen sirens with as much compassion as digging into the most vulnerable parts of someone’s life could possibly allow, before unleashing Bette and Joan’s trademark acidic wit.

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.

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

If Big Mouth were just a series of jokes about how weird and gross puberty is, it wouldn’t be much more than a decent way to kill some time during a slow weekend. But the show achieves a new, deeper level of comedy by remaining hyper aware of the fact that puberty isn’t just about bodies changing, but about what it means to grow up at all.

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.