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.