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.

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.

What’s striking about watching The X-Files in 2018 is just how rejuvenated it feels. While it’s never going to hit the heights of the third or fourth season from the original series (which aired from 1993 to 2002), the 2018 iteration is a damn sight better than the 2016 one.

Even over just eight episodes, the show’s tone goes through several rapid transitions that don’t always land. By the end, however, Barry establishes itself as a uniquely empathetic shot of weirdness that hits its target more often than not.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The new TV series Downward Dog takes on loneliness and fear and all the other gunk that gets caught in your spiritual gutters when you start feeling low. It can be warm, but only once its characters push their way through searing self-doubt to get to the other side.

Assassination may not be as enjoyable to watch as O.J., but it’s striking to see how thoughtfully all involved approach a very different story in a way that gives it its own tone, its own themes, and its own grandeur. This is a more difficult but more ambitious work, and it stands as a worthy companion.

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.

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.

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.

The Alienist might go very, very wrong in future episodes, and it’s already clear how the series might be more interesting if it took the plot of the novel as a suggestion instead of a road map. But there are enough pleasures around its edges to keep me watching.

Too much of those first nine episodes is taken up with vague hints of something dramatic happening just over the horizon.... Chandler, Mendelsohn, and Spacek all give searing performances. In particular, the final confrontation between Chandler and Mendelsohn is filled with meaty moments that both actors sink their teeth into.

A story demands that it be led by its most compelling characters, and in most cases, that means the oppressed, not the oppressors. Humans can be intriguing, even enthralling. But it’s always held back by its title.

A well-done cop show that doesn't reach for too much and mostly accomplishes what it sets out to do is the sort of thing just about anyone can have on in the background.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The so-called “new but not really” Will & Grace maintains the same cadence as the show’s original iteration. However, as far as its actual content goes, some of the best moments are the ones that couldn’t have happened more than a decade ago.

If Breaking Bad gained dramatic tension from viewers feeling trapped between wanting Walter to redeem himself and wanting him to do even more horrible things, Saul can't really have that tension, because we know Saul's worst impulses will win out.... And yet there's so much about Better Call Saul that clicks, it's hard to hold too much of this against the program.

Sense8 is a show forever trapped between two things--its core artistic impulses and its need to over-explain everything that happens within its confines. That makes it at once beautiful and maddening, either a complete travesty or a whacked-out masterpiece--and sometimes both in the same scene.

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.