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.

It’s beautiful, mysterious, and a little bit maddening, and you’d want to take in every little second of the show even if it wasn’t in German with English subtitles, because every aspect of it matters.

On its face, this show is a solid new entry in the Sherman-Palladino pantheon of wisecracking heroines and the assorted people who love them. But The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is also a stellar showcase for a woman unleashing her full fury and potential in a way no one--least of all herself--saw coming, or will soon forget.

The show stands as a textbook example of how major filmmakers can and should adapt their work for television: by not trying to rewrite the rules of another medium, but by finding a way to make their signature style flow through those rules.

When the action gets up close and personal, it helps that Godless’s cast is by and large top-notch. ... After watching more than seven hours of Godless, it’s also a little hard to understand whether Frank is paying tribute to Westerns of old or indulging in their most basic clichés just because he can.

While Runaways can still feel like a show written about teens by adults (here’s looking at you, #blessed selfies and rando man at a rager peddling pills by asking girls if they “want to party”), for the most part, Runaways demonstrates empathy for its characters by allotting them time and consideration beyond their most basic descriptors.

Despite its name and Bernthal’s intense performance, The Punisher is about more than just its ruthless antihero, and proves much more incisive than it may initially seem to be. ... Even when its stylized viciousness is undercut by real-world tragedy, The Punisher, like Marvel’s very best Netflix series, gives its title character a bloody good introduction.

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.

Polley’s script is sturdy, occasionally leaning too heavily on underlining Atwood’s themes to make sure they come across when viewers don’t have constant access to Grace’s inner monologue. But it’s Harron’s direction and Gadon’s performance that truly drive the work.

Stranger Things hasn’t yet fallen into the Home Alone 2 trap. But it’s telling that the most exciting moments of season two are the ones when the characters evolve and change, and when the world around them does too.

As an overall package, At Home With Amy Sedaris is a gleeful hodgepodge of silly jokes, talk show satire, and bubbly innuendo delivered with the gusto of a host who refuses to have anything less than an amazing time. It’s fun, it’s wacky, it’s everything Sedaris does best in one Technicolor package.

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.

Mindhunter is not, by any means, a perfect show, nor does it succeed at everything it sets out to accomplish. But its intense focus on the inner workings of the human brain makes for a surprisingly fascinating watch that examines the roots of human darkness without seeming to revel in it.

The show sometimes relies too much on the power of its actors to bring home the reality of its horror, and this doesn’t always work--but when it does, it works very well.

Mr. Robot is finally evolving into the show it always should have been, and you should watch it.

Overall, The Mayor bites off a little more than it can chew. But it also proves that it not only knows where it’s going--as it teases Courtney’s real passion for his town and the support system that’ll help him in his new job--but where its strengths lie going forward.

Ghosted’s cast works hard to sell every ounce of plodding exposition.

If Big Mouth were just a series of jokes about how weird and gross puberty is, it wouldn’t be much more than a decent way to kill some time during a slow weekend. But the show achieves a new, deeper level of comedy by remaining hyper aware of the fact that puberty isn’t just about bodies changing, but about what it means to grow up at all.

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.

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.

The whole is much more cohesive, but the individual stories take some shortcuts.

One of the things that makes Star Trek so good is that it really believes in peace and inclusion and all that good stuff. It really wants to create a world where these ideals have become the guiding principles of humanity and its many interplanetary allies. Star Trek is best when it’s hopeful, but hope shines brightest amid horror. On some level, Discovery knows both of those things, and that’s why it’s a show I’m eager to keep watching.

The show’s six-episode second chapter, debuting this week, is terrific from stem to stern, taking a story that would seem unlikely to translate well to television and turning it into an eerie, Twilight Zone-style tale of suburban conformity, post-high school depression, and the inability to escape the legacy of one’s parents.

Burns and Novick are less interested in scoring political points than they are in the idea that world-changing events look so different when you’re trapped in them. More than in any other Burns miniseries, The Vietnam War lets you feel what it’s like to be crushed under history’s heel.

In its assemblage of footage from Snapchat feeds and other social media sources, as well as its collection of solid teenage performances, American Vandal gets at something true about our obsession with whodunits and how every generation finds a new way to commit very old crimes.

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 mostly about getting through the day, about getting through the week, about getting through life. It’s angry but never bitter. Joyful but never saccharine. It feels a little like magic.

It’s almost impossible to know whether there are too many jokes in The Orville or too few, both because the show doesn’t seem at all confident in whether it should even be making jokes at all, and because the jokes that are in the show are bad.