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.

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.

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.

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.

Based on what I’ve seen of Loki so far, the show is off to a great start. I’d even say it’s more promising than WandaVision at the outset.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Both Sebastian Stan and Anthony Mackie boast a ton of charm and charisma, and the themes Marvel works with here — trying to show the everyday labor of coping with the Snap, the beginnings of Sam’s ideas about legacy and how race may factor into it, how superheroes deal with trauma — haven’t really been mined yet within the MCU. There’s easily enough story to keep both hard-core and casual fans coming back for at least a couple of episodes.

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

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.

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.

It’s a Sin isn’t trying to jolt a reaction out of its audience the way The Normal Heart urgently needed to. For better or worse, the miniseries is sweeter and more sentimental. It’s not asking for action or apology, but for humanity to remember the joy that all the Ritchies, Roscoes, and Colins brought to this world, and to never let it be erased.

It is comfort food TV right down to its bones, and it is comfort food TV that works, even for a curmudgeon like me.

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.

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

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.

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.

Taylor-Joy’s cerebral acting meshes perfectly with Beth’s story. She’s an actor of micro-expressions, of flickers of eyes and twitches of lips, and what makes The Queen Gambit such a good fit for her is the way she keeps both the viewer and Beth’s opponents at arm’s length.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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’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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Undone is a frequently beautiful and thought-provoking ride.

All of this detail starts to pay off when the story gets more complex, and the pace quickens a bit. Because so much work has gone into making all of the characters distinct and individualized, you never once feel distracted by the puppetry, or jarred out of the series’ serious tone.

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

In its most successful episode, Chester confronts a Japanese prisoner of war who taunts, threatens, and ultimately bonds with him over their shared love of baseball and their exhaustion with the battlefront. It’s a deeply compelling episode of television and warrants a place for The Terror in any list of the year’s must-watch series. But it has nothing to do with ghosts. I wish The Terror had done a little more work to make its ghosts feel as necessary as its timely history lesson.

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

It occasionally indulges in cutesiness in its efforts to idealize the past; it’s still trying to work out how to reinvent its old storytelling tropes while it wants to reach toward the future. But over the course of its eight-episode run, the new Veronica Mars does make a strong argument that it is better equipped to handle the nostalgia problem than nearly any other revival we’ve seen so far. And the result is a sharp, wistful, melancholy season of television that is also a terrifically entertaining murder mystery.

Most of season two’s flaws and frustrations have been ironed out in satisfying and interesting ways in season three. ... This time around, however, a new set of problems arises — and weirdly enough, a lot of them don’t concern the story itself, but the show’s aesthetic and technical choices.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

More than anything, Tuca & Bertie is just funny. It finds humor in just about everything: in the serious subjects, in the gross things about women that are rarely talked about, in growing into your 30s, in the monotony of long-term relationships, in fun new crushes, and, most importantly, in female friendship.

A terrific start to the series’ final run.

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.

[There's a] plot twist rooted in circumstance rather than in character. As a storytelling choice, it’s just a little bit clumsy. Eve’s storyline, meanwhile, is moving more slowly than Villanelle’s: There are fewer murders, and more conversations with telemarketers (sounds dull, isn’t). But it carries enormous dramatic potential, because Eve is committing spy-vs-spy adultery. She’s begun to investigate a new female assassin.

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.

On top of returning to the familiar, season seven feels more connected to current issues, as well. ... Where Veep is headed is hard to tell.

Clement has years of comedy writing for television under his belt, and Waititi years of directing. The two play to their strengths here, and the results are enough to get audiences to overlook the moments when the jokes don’t land or the humor is a little musty.

Always at the core of the show is the toxic, twisted relationship between Annie and the people who hate her for existing. ... In counterpoint to that twisted relationship is Annie’s evolving relationship with herself. That’s where the tenderness that is fundamental to this show’s ethos comes into play.

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.

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.

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.

The result is not so much a show for today’s teens, but rather a show for adults to wistfully look back at those years after having experienced every moment of awkwardness, heartbreak, anger, genuine friendship amidst a world of jelly pens, AOL chatrooms, retainers, landlines, and the Pen15 club.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sex Education is one of the rare works that go beyond that trope to give depth and validation to teenage insecurities and emotions that coexist with raging hormones and mythic sex drives.

Good Trouble strikes me almost as TV’s first good Gen Z drama. It’s forthright and earnest, and it wears its politics on its sleeve. It understands that the world is filled with junk, but sometimes you can make something beautiful out of that junk. And it knows that even if the end is near, it’s not quite here yet. There’s still time.

The five episodes I have seen take the best stuff about True Detective and finally wed it to a story that proceeds in a mostly satisfying fashion.

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.

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.

In rebooting the beloved series, Stevenson has created something special, a cartoon that both honors and improves on the original by amplifying its characters’ feelings, and emits equal parts electricity, joy, and warmth. Like its titular hero, She-Ra is so full of heart that it’s easy to recognize its humanity, even with all the super-powered hijinks going on.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It boasts terrific performances, unpredictable twists, and a stack of fanfic-favorite tropes (if the series’ title has you thinking of Whitney Houston, you’re frankly on the right track) executed with polish and flair. Though the thread of tension crackling at the show’s center doesn’t quite make it all the way through to the end, the journey is still enough of a roller coaster to make it well worth the ride.

The series is at its best when it captures the small, human moments that play out amid these flashes of chaos--stolen kisses and thwarted connections and pitched hand-to-hand battles. It’s not perfect, but if it strove for clean perfection, it wouldn’t be nearly as good.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At its best and its worst, Big Mouth is a vivid, excruciating voyage back to a time in life that so many of us would love to completely forget, but laced with enough humor and good-hearted horniness (for those of all genders and sexual persuasions) to remind us why getting to the other side of puberty is worth it after all. ... Season two has made a case that Big Mouth should run for as long as it can keep telling painfully funny stories about horribly painful moments of life.

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.

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.

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.

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.