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.

Ozark’s insistence on presenting the grimiest version of its story possible stands in the way of explaining why anything within its universe is happening. The presentation and the characters and the smug tone eventually coalesce into something deeply irritating. ... Ozark is offensive and doesn’t understand why it’s offensive.

Fyre Fraud tries to draw connections between what happened with Fyre Festival and larger cultural trends, like the existence of Instagram influencers and the phenomenon of FOMO, to which millennials are particularly susceptible, at least according to the documentary. (At times their methods, unfortunately, seem a bit slipshod.) It is, in essence, a think piece.

Dickinson is a slick, stylish show, and refreshingly, it knows exactly what it’s doing.

Ryan’s part of the story is a breeze: He’s the good soldier, here to save the day. Sometimes he’ll face some sort of moral dilemma, but it’s never too difficult to guess what the outcome will be. The rest of the series is much thornier, and all the more real for it.

It feels, in every way, like a broadcast network TV show about the investigation of a police shooting.

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.

In Curtis and Dickens it has two of the best performers the franchise has ever featured, and it knows how to use them. Both are able to balance the sense that they're simultaneously terrified for the state of society and worried they won't be able to save their kids from becoming zombie chow.... Fear probably can't do the slow-pocalypse thing forever, but for a first season of just six episodes, it might be just about right.

Every time American Horror Story attempts to imbue real, pressing fear into these statements, in the way that good horror often can--think of this year’s Get Out, for example--it also gets ... well, dumb, in a way I’m not certain the show realizes.

Even when The Politician is flailing all over the place, its heart is tapped into the pain of living in a world full of rich white people and forcing down everything that makes you a little bit different. Like Murphy’s best shows, The Politician is about how sad being happy can be.

With Gaiman at the helm, and with an ample amount of time to do the book’s nuances justice, Good Omens succeeds much better than any recent Gaiman (or Pratchett) adaptation in memory. But we’re still ultimately left with a screenplay that faithfully emphasizes Good Omens’ plot rather than its profundities or literary flourishes.

I didn’t learn anything interesting, and I wasn’t left with much to think about. The special is curiously empty, aside from some touching moments of camaraderie and affection between the cast members, and the potential discomfort of realizing we’re all getting older.

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.

Ballers isn't bad, per se, but it doesn't really try for anything, either.

It wants to be a stupid time travel show about people chasing a bad guy into the past to preserve American history. And on that level, I think it succeeds!

Happy! has those films’ [the Crank movies] wild, pell-mell sense of pace and jittery, overcaffeinated style. But the series’ scripts are smart about undercutting the wild mayhem and constant introduction of new ideas with a bittersweet holiday angst.

An often thrilling look at what TV can be when it looks to its past and finds ways to update old formats for the future.

Kelley and Shapiro are a little too in love with their quirks to create a show that doesn’t occasionally tip over into unearned melodrama and/or Gothic horror, and the series’ understanding of lesbian relationships, in particular, is straight out of 1992. But at its core, where it counts, Goliath does more good than bad.

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

Goldberg and her team have a much better handle on both Meyerism and what might draw worshipers to it in season two, and that keeps the rest of the show afloat. But ultimately the show works because it captures the feeling of being enmeshed in something greater than yourself, whether that organization is bound together by faith, by familial duty, or by love.

An intriguing, but slightly less riveting, second season of Luke Cage.

Mad Dogs, in other words, is trying something that's really complicated and ambitious and failing as often as it's succeeding. But in my book, you get at least a few points for effort. It might not be great television, but at least it's not content to do the same thing everybody else is.

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.

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.

In short, Making History is supposed to revolve around the character with the least at stake, which isn’t terribly interesting, and in every episode it has to find ways to get around that problem. Pally’s a very funny guy, and Dan would make a fine supporting character. But as written, he’s not dynamic enough to carry the show.

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.

Like most new comedies this fall, Young Sheldon isn’t yet very good at conveying what it’s trying to do. But what it’s trying to do is more interesting--and potentially more artistically exciting--than whatever first impressions you might have of the show. The series is at once better and worse than what you’d expect.

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.