Both hours are full of sharp material on subjects ranging from Bill Cosby (it’s complicated) to Chappelle meeting O.J. Simpson (four times!) to why he once ditched a fundraiser in Flint, Michigan, to attend the Oscars (short answer: Chris Rock). Still, after a decade away from churning out content for the masses,Chappelle doesn’t seem very sure of what those masses want or expect from him anymore--and those are the moments when his specials are at their hilarious best and questionable worst.

That Slender Man also seems evil serves to enhance, rather than lessen, his power over the imagination. But that power also comes from the belief that Slender Man is real-- and it’s in grappling with this troubling issue that the documentary makes its darkest, most complicated point. ... At two hours, it contains a bit too much footage of the backs of people’s heads in a courtroom, when it could be delving deeper into other topics related to the girls’ case.

Stranger Things hasn’t yet fallen into the Home Alone 2 trap. But it’s telling that the most exciting moments of season two are the ones when the characters evolve and change, and when the world around them does too.

As with most premieres, this first episode is a little overstuffed. ... But where The Nightly Show had trouble balancing its monologue with its roundtable discussion with its sporadic correspondent interviews, The Rundown mostly manages to streamline its material via a couple of calculated format decisions that work in the show’s favor.

There are also times when Kemper seems to be playing a thin gloss on 30 Rock's protagonist, Liz Lemon. Yet give Kimmy Schmidt enough time, and it reveals that the real comparison point to make here isn't with 30 Rock. It's with Bewitched.

For as fantastically fun as American Gods’ gods can be, the series is at its best when it brings the story a little closer to earth.

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.

By the time you reach the cliffhanger--which did not leave me excited to check out season two, even though I generally liked season one--you’ll probably have recognized Sneaky Pete for the largely fun, largely inoffensive, largely unnecessary trifle it is. But, hey, TV needs trifles too.

Casual is more wry than funny, but it has some sharp observations and moments. It's also got a secret weapon in Watkins.... Casual definitely gets better as it goes along.

Even if One Mississippi doesn’t return for a second season, season one works beautifully as a muted story about what it means to come home and realize the person you once were, the person you thought you packed up in a box and stored away somewhere, is waiting right there for you to discover all over again.

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.

[The] dissonance between classic family hijinks and twisted debauchery is exactly what makes The Detour such a fantastic ride.

The individual sketches themselves are things of beauty, running the gamut from old-school setups with one big joke that's repeated in a variety of ways right on up to those that make fun of current trends and pop culture.

If you want a solidly executed version of the [cop drama] form--or just enjoy a good detective novel--then Bosch season two should do the trick.

Once you start looking at the individual characters’ storylines--Jack and Rebecca are going to be parents, Kate struggles with her weight, Kevin wants his acting career to have meaning, Randall tracks down his biological father-- they feel less like actual stories than like placeholders, characters to be filled in later. It’s hard to hold too much of this against the show when the characters are played by great actors, and when the pilot has a script as emotionally adroit [as] the one crafted by Dan Fogelman.

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

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.

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.

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.

When it works, there’s nothing like it on TV. When it doesn’t, it’s hard not to watch in fascination as the train flies off the tracks, wondering if it might land back on them or this time finally plummet into the gorge below.

Season four's sweep is, in some ways, a little cheap (when you've written off as many characters as this show has, it's easy to buy gravitas by bringing a few back), but it's also entertaining.

The second season of Narcos, Netflix’s historical drama about drug lord Pablo Escobar and the law enforcement officers who worked to bring him down, is a marked improvement over the first.

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.

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 many ways, House of Cards has become an entirely different show between season two and season three, and in ways that seem mostly half-hearted.

It'd be easy for Preacher to operate as a cut-and-dried adaptation; the comic is vibrant, with an incredibly specific tone and complicated backstory. But in reimagining it for television, AMC dug a little deeper, and came up with something more satisfying and complex.

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.

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