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.

It’s a monologue-heavy series, but the writing is rich and haltingly expressive. ... The family’s issues with mental illness are treated sensitively and believably, and Flanagan makes sure to counter every moment of supernatural terror with a reminder that psychological terror is real, that depression, addiction, and ideation are every bit as terrifying as anything lurking in Hill House.

The third season makes further efforts at relevance, working in new storylines about homosexuality under Nazi reign, but as with the universe-jumping the series now relies on, such efforts don’t really work when they’re not grounded in something more personal and character-based.

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.

They’re not good. I didn’t laugh, the jokes are mostly easy potshots at Trump. ... Every so often, there’s a flash of the old show’s panache, or a line-reading that Bergen knocks dead, or a flicker of terror at how bad things have gotten and how bad they could still get, and the show comes to life, for a moment at least. It’s not good, but it’s comforting.

Ryan is great, but Mr. Inbetween never manages to land on one side of the fence or the other as far as whether Ray is actually the force of justice that he seems to think himself to be. ... But given how trim it is, Mr. Inbetween is charming enough, and Ryan’s performance shouldn’t be missed.

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 the end, the show never quite proves its case as worth watching. It’s fine enough, but it will need to make a stronger case for itself going forward--just as Caruso Jr. needs to step out of his father’s shadow--in order to bring audiences back for a second season.

The most 2018 thing about Viceland’s new series The Hunt for the Trump Tapes with Tom Arnold is how impossible it is to tell which portions of it are self-promotion and which parts of it are sincere. ... There’s something oddly watchable about Arnold throwing himself against the rocks of reality, trying to wear them down.

In season five, BoJack Horseman brings all of that character development down around its ears, in a stretch of episodes that represents the most precise dissection of BoJack Horseman yet--and perhaps the first truly sustained artistic response to the #MeToo movement.

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

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.

The deconstruction of a Fred Rogers figure would make for an interesting show on its own, but Kidding transcends that premise by leaps and bounds on the strength of Carrey’s performance and a determination to make the show just as rough--and riveting--as real life.

Its fight scenes vastly improve upon the garbage disposal-like quality of jump cuts masquerading as brawls in season one, and the writing has moved away from the mind-numbing exposition that characterized much of season one, trusting the audience to understand what’s happening without dialogue constantly reminding them. However, Iron Fist’s second season isn’t exactly good when in the context of television outside of Iron Fist. Parts of it are still staggeringly clunky.

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.

The illusion of depth without any actual there there is an Ozark specialty. By the end of season two, it’s dragged itself to exactly where you’d think it would go, and racked up quite a body count (also proving it hasn’t really learned the lessons of the shows that came before it, which did their best to hold off on killing major characters). But none of it feels as if it has any meaning beyond getting from the end of season one to the start of season three. It’s a bridge to nowhere that keeps building itself right in front of you.

It spends all of its time striving desperately to reach the status of third-tier Ryan Murphy and falling flat. It has Murphy’s gleeful sadism in spades, but none of his manic camp energy; it has his treacly didacticism, but none of his genuine emotion.

No show on the air does a better job of turning moments that ought to be blips on a viewer’s radar into moments of captivating drama, and as the story moves into increasingly tragic territory in its fourth season, it’s a necessary strength to keep Jimmy’s misfortunes (self-imposed or otherwise) something to care about, rather than to revel in.

Season six isn’t as messy as the show’s fifth season--which took place over just three days and chronicled a prison riot--but it’s also nowhere near as ambitious. It’s just good enough to make me interested in watching season seven, but not good enough to make me want to see anything beyond that.

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.

There are instances when Cohen exposes moments of genuine American racism or Republican gun love that feel like they’re coalescing toward a point. But a lot of the humor is cruel and cynical, for the sake of being cruel and cynical, and even more of it points and laughs at the rubes, provoking them simply to provoke them.

Sharp Objects’s touch remains delicate throughout, thanks to its gifted lead, its beautiful writing, and, yes, its laser-sharp editing.

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

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

Its tenderness makes up for any flaws, to the degree that I know I should tell you about the flaws, but I almost want to lie and say they aren’t there, because it carries itself with the confidence of a show that knows it’s good, and if you can’t recognize that, well, that’s your problem.

Clearly, the darkness that’s always been present in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is finally breaking through in this fourth season, even though it’s also loaded with the same hysterical one-liners and fast-paced humor of the other seasons.

But trying to recreate the past is almost always impossible, as every TV revival other than Twin Peaks: The Return has been forced to grapple with. And that leaves Arrested season five feeling half finished. It’s fun in places and labored in others, sometimes in the same scene.

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.