GLOW, both the show and the show within the show, lives and dies by its ferocious women.

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.

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.

These teens are selfish, sure, but they’re also more ambitious and earnest than they ever want to admit. When Everything Sucks! lets them realize that and let go of the idea that everything might just suck, it becomes much more comfortably quirky in its own way, its unabashedly bleeding heart in the right place.

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.

Snowfall doesn’t get all the way there in season one, but it comes further than you’d expect. And inside its veins runs something vital and alive and different.

Despite the roiling tensions of the imminent ’60s and the various revolutions it holds, the Royal Family’s domestic politics are still what The Crown does best. And for every moment that falls apart under the weight of leaden metaphors, there are still several that shine. Royals may not be just like you or me, but they are, The Crown insists, prone to indulging the same trifling nonsense as the rest of us.

In season two, The Handmaid’s Tale continues to be an angry, searing piece of work. When it forces you to hold its infuriated gaze, it makes it clear that your inability to do so for long is exactly the point. But as it continues to broaden its world, the show needs to find a way to get more comfortable with the perspectives that make it most uncomfortable, or risk losing itself in its own myopic tragedy.

Given Dee Dee’s continual emphasis on appearance throughout Gypsy’s life, it’s hardly surprising that we’re left with questions about Gypsy’s ultimate level of control over her own narrative; yet what’s really surprising is how easy it is to believe her when she says she misses her mother. It’s one of many contradictions and paradoxes that Carr balances throughout the film, and one of many moments that make Mommy Dead and Dearest a must-watch for any fan of true crime, or any fan of stories from the depths of the troubled South.

As The Walking Dead began its second season, the characters became mired in an endless storyline at a small farm in rural Georgia, a farm where they stayed for almost the entire season. The comics had done it, so the show did too. Fear the Walking Dead tells what appears to be a similar story, but it's over within an episode. Sometimes not having anybody to copy is the best thing that can happen.

What it wants to be is a surprisingly effective collection of one-act plays that are sprinkled with laughs but mostly dramatic in nature. What it is is an occasionally effective (but always daring) sitcom, filmed before a live studio audience and packed with smutty jokes.

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.

[Girlboss] devotes its early episodes to doing nothing more than proving that Sophia is a surly jerk. But once Sophia finally starts to let go of her self-defeating instincts and make things happen for herself and for Nasty Gal, Girlboss becomes a lot more interesting, and a lot more fun.

Vinyl feels like it's still doing its mic checks, but somewhere along the way, it just might burst out into a blistering solo. And it's worth paying attention until it does.

Though the film’s writing tends to make too much of Rebecca’s bafflement and culture shock as she peers into the lives of the Lacks family, Wolfe never frames the Lacks as sheer spectacle.

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

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.

Mozart in the Jungle is at its best when it's being whimsical. It's at its worst when it's trying to force laughs.

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.

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.

After watching her stumble with a stubbornness approaching active determination for so long, seeing Hannah take new steps toward self-improvement--small and stuttering though they are--comes as a relief.

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.

The crime solving sometimes seems perfunctory, and some of the characters feel purely functionary. But the series is still having a ton of fun throwing many ideas at the wall to see what sticks. That so much is sticking already is cause for anticipation of even better things to come.

Yes, it’s self-indulgent. But A Year in the Life succeeds despite its "getting the gang back together" vibe.

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

But still, slow-moving and enamored of its own darkness as Damnation is, there’s something vital and real in the show’s insistence that the United States’ institutions have failed and are only looking out for themselves.

It’s fitfully funny, occasionally sad, and fond of long digressions that seemingly have nothing to do with anything--but might be the whole point.

Black Mirror is most effective when it attempts to map old human behavior onto new technologies. It’s much less effective when it tries to map new technologies onto old stories.