Dissecting people--and classes, and ideas--is all that Howards End is interested in. It does so beautifully, with intellectual precision and an able and charismatic cast, but also with a clinical, not-quite-ironic distance. It’s an easy story to enjoy and admire, and a very difficult story to love wholeheartedly.

The thrill of exploration, or the examination of family dynamics, never feels like it arises organically from the action, in the way it might have on the show’s most obvious forebear that isn’t its direct predecessor: Lost.

Killing Eve is a show outside of Eve and Villanelle’s tense, mutual hunt; its cases and kills of the week are, in fact, compelling. But as long as the show has this pair’s obsession, respect, and intrigued attraction to each other pulsing at its center, it’ll be a thrill to watch unfold.

This version of Jesus Christ Superstar was a pulsing adrenaline rush that felt like a fizzed-up energy drink to the face.

Splitting Up Together is at its best when it leaves the granular ins and outs of this arrangement for the ways Lena and Martin are dealing with not being a unit anymore.

The trouble with a show insisting that someone is a genius is that it has to go ahead and prove it, and nothing Alex does is particularly convincing in this arena.

Season six, then, feels like it’s finally homing in on the series’ great theme, which is to say it’s about communication, about the gaps that open up when we don’t tell each other what’s necessary and instead stick to what’s self-serving.

It takes a little while to rediscover its rhythms, but once it does, it feels tuned in to its world and its country in a way few sitcoms are anymore.

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.

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.

All the Money frequently felt truncated, its story too sprawling for any of its characters to really connect, only Plummer holding the story together; Trust, meanwhile, feels a little scattered and bulky, constantly distracted by whatever catches its fancy when it might be better off bearing down and focusing on a particular storyline.

It knows what it wants, and every so often, it even achieves it. But when it falls short, it’s even more disappointing to know that it got so close.

The journey into Jessica’s past feels like familiar territory, making the show seem less urgent and less captivating than it previously did. The back end of these 13 episodes is much more exciting and also a lot weirder (in a great way) than the first half.

Every time you think you have Hap and Leonard pegged, it heads off toward something different. It’s pulp, but with its head firmly on its shoulders.

[A] trippy, incisive comedy. ... The show always finds jokes in the bleakest of situations, like how the season opens with a chatty car ride turned armed robbery, featuring some truly expert tonal whiplash. But the moments in which Earn and his friends can just be themselves are casually, wonderfully funny in a way that highlights how much they have to hold themselves back just about everywhere else.

The Looming Tower, despite its high stakes and its ostensibly true story (though many details have been changed), is a cop show. A really well-done cop show, admittedly, but a cop show. And more power to it.

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.

Like so many prestige dramas right now, then, Here and Now lacks a strong reason for any of its individual episodes to exist. The show is just a chronicle of stuff that happens to this family, with a vague promise that something important will happen somewhere along the line.

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.

It’s in the interactions between the Branch Davidians and the federal government that the Dowdles best capture the sense of an easily avoidable yet nonetheless inevitable catastrophe. Where they struggle is in conveying how it would feel to live a life so tightly entombed in cataclysm that manipulation and abuse become simple facts of life, not dark horrors to overcome.

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.

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.

Penelope is one of the most beautifully fleshed-out characters in a sitcom today, period. It’s as much of a joy to watch Machado work as it is to watch the Alvarez family, and the people who love them, live.

Blue Planet II will be one of your favorite TV events of the year, and its deep dive beneath the waves of the world’s oceans will prove both soothing and engaging.

It’s a cliché in TV criticism to say that the real protagonist is the setting, but Corporate flips that idea on its ear: Here, the setting is the antagonist, and every day you can stay alive within it is another day when you might lose yourself completely. I realize that maybe doesn’t sound very funny, but trust me, at a certain point, you laugh because your numbing corporate job has sapped you of the ability to cry.

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.

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.

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.