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.

The series might be made up of disparate stories that seemingly have nothing to do with each other, but the more time you spend ruminating on Black Mirror and turning it over in your head, the more those stories start to seem like part of the same thing, a world we’re all marching toward, like it or not. The episodes work sans context; they’re better when consumed as different viewpoints on the same unnamable future.

Stranger Things might be a hodgepodge of lots of other things, but there’s a sincerity to it that’s hard to fake. And in its appropriations of those other things, it somehow becomes something new that rises above its collage-like origins.

Despite these [technical] flaws, Hairspray Live tapped into a rare kind of joy that’s hard to produce on television, let alone during a live broadcast--a kind of undeniable glee that happens when great songs, talented singers, and sparkling dancing collide.

This version of Jesus Christ Superstar was a pulsing adrenaline rush that felt like a fizzed-up energy drink to the face.

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.

King’s work is at its most frightening when its monsters are more familiar than abstract, reminiscent of the darkness we might encounter every day in others and in ourselves. Castle Rock manages to capture the fear that comes from recognizing that darkness, and as long as the show doesn’t get too preoccupied with the more conventional horrors lurking just offscreen, it may just become the scariest series on TV.

The show overexplains here and there--especially in the first episode--but after some early jitters, it settles in and simply lets its world be.

With American Crime, ABC and Ridley are at least trying something. That they succeed far more often than they fail is worth praise in and of itself.

Polley’s script is sturdy, occasionally leaning too heavily on underlining Atwood’s themes to make sure they come across when viewers don’t have constant access to Grace’s inner monologue. But it’s Harron’s direction and Gadon’s performance that truly drive the work.

Being a comedian can be a thankless grind, but in Pete (not to mention Holmes’s) hands, it’s a joy to remember that the whole point is to make people laugh.

[The Kings'] writing remains sharp and witty. Their knack for telling stories through crisp visuals gives The Good Fight a high-gloss sheen. And their antennae are still tuned to hidden vibrations in the country’s subconscious, picking up on the tremors that are about to become earthquakes.

What The First is: a surprisingly affecting drama about several families and a planet in crisis.

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.

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.

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.

Overall, The Mayor bites off a little more than it can chew. But it also proves that it not only knows where it’s going--as it teases Courtney’s real passion for his town and the support system that’ll help him in his new job--but where its strengths lie going forward.

Every actor on Vida is great; Barrera’s performance in particular blooms with searing clarity as Lyn is forced to face her own reckless choices. But it’s Prada’s Emma who becomes both the backbone and the beating heart of Vida as she grapples with her mother’s truth and the painful reality of learning it too late.

The whole is much more cohesive, but the individual stories take some shortcuts.

It’s certainly a bit jarring in the way it presents its new take on Riverdale, which includes having a character gawk that “Archie got hot!” (especially since that statement is true). But it also skillfully embraces both the absurdity of its premise and the inherent drama of the soap opera genre, and the result is just self-aware enough to be truly juicy.

The episodic focus also allows the show to skip over big swaths of time when nothing interesting is happening, the better to get to the good stuff. That leaves GLOW slightly less than the sum of its parts. But at the same time, the parts are so inventive, so stylish, and so fun that I feel churlish pointing out how they don’t quite cohere into anything more in the end. Maybe the best advice I can give is: Watch this show. Watch it several times. It’s a good one