When Emerald City builds much of its narrative around how weird and edgy the place is, it just feels tired. You’ve seen this take on Oz before--and done better.

Unfortunately, the season four premiere has revealed that Sherlock’s most promising and divisive element in the wake of the season three finale--the evolving three-way relationship between Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch), John Watson (Martin Freeman), and John’s mysterious wife, Mary (Amanda Abbington)--is little more than a giant distraction, a red herring for ... whatever the show has up its sleeve next.

There's only so much mileage the show can get from focusing on "everyone on this show is awful" gags. But with sharp performances and total commitment to the hedonistic material, The Mick still finds a couple new places to explore.

It’s the worst TV show of 2016. ... By the end of its second season, The Man in the High Castle has essentially abandoned everything fascinating about its first season in favor of a junky sci-fi drama with reality-hopping characters and a bunch of caricature Nazi bad guys.

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.

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

While much of the show’s first season feel needlessly twisty and jerky, the way the mystery eventually comes together while allowing for sharp observations about the show’s characters speaks to Search Party being much more incisive--and worthy of a 10-hour marathon commitment--than it might appear at first glance.

It’s not until the team travels to Daytona Beach that the tone and focus of their narrative finally shifts away from their narrative’s frustrating superimposed drama and illogical amateur crime-solving theatrics into something more meaningful.

The Crown struggles at times, but there’s something within it — a slumbering beast, deep beneath its waves, just waiting to surface. You catch glimpses of it here and there--when Elizabeth betrays someone in the name of the crown, especially--and those glimpses are enough to animate this first season.

I’ve seen a few episodes of Rectify’s fourth season, and they’re as sweet and soulful as the show has always been. They contain passages of stark beauty, and moments of dreamlike simplicity. And above all else, they’re guided by McKinnon’s unfailing empathy for each and every character on screen.

Let’s Do the Time Warp Again is a sterile facsimile of Rocky Horror’s original camp, filtered through the lens of Party City’s least inspired Halloween aisle.

The series might be made up of disparate stories that seemingly have nothing to do with each other, but the more time you spend ruminating on Black Mirror and turning it over in your head, the more those stories start to seem like part of the same thing, a world we’re all marching toward, like it or not. The episodes work sans context; they’re better when consumed as different viewpoints on the same unnamable 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.

It could be fun once it figures out where and how to direct its snark, but at the start, it’s too haphazard to make much of an impression.

In other words: they’re actual, believable people. It’s easy to root for them even as it hurts to watch them stumble--a combination that makes Insecure an immediate force to be reckoned with.

Divorce is very much going to be an acquired taste. ... But I also think Divorce has something interesting to say about the marriages of people who stay together not for love, or for the kids, but for their money.

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!

Even though it’s sleek, frequently thoughtful, and always cool, Westworld’s scattered self never coheres into anything.

A lot of the qualities that still make Allen’s movies worth watching--especially his gift for crowding a bunch of actors into the frame and giving all of them something interesting to do--are present in Crisis in Six Scenes’ final episode. But the road to get there is so needlessly long, and so pointlessly convoluted, that many viewers will be forgiven for having abandoned it long ago.

It throws a wide array of actors, including Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Aya Cash, Marc Maron, Elizabeth Reaser, Orlando Bloom, and Raúl Castillo, into varying scenarios about love, sex, marriage, and everything in between, and the results are, predictably, mixed. In the end, though, the series indulges way more mundane ramblings than anything particularly interesting.

And yet for all its mess, for all its sprawl, for all its shagginess, Transparent remains one of TV’s most vital shows and one of its most artful.

It’s formulaic as can be, yet still incredibly compelling.

Once you start looking at the individual characters’ storylines--Jack and Rebecca are going to be parents, Kate struggles with her weight, Kevin wants his acting career to have meaning, Randall tracks down his biological father-- they feel less like actual stories than like placeholders, characters to be filled in later. It’s hard to hold too much of this against the show when the characters are played by great actors, and when the pilot has a script as emotionally adroit [as] the one crafted by Dan Fogelman.

There are hundreds of family sitcoms out there, but with empathetic (and very funny) characters at its heart, Speechless is already a standout.

Sutherland perfectly captures the dizzying nausea anyone would feel in this situation. ... But there’s every chance the conspiracy stuff takes over, and if there’s one thing about Designated Survivor that gives me pause, it’s that.

Fleabag is so wonderfully messy, funny, and deeply human that these seemingly chaotic collisions feel natural.

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.

The show draws you close physically and emotionally, letting you witness its characters’ most vulnerable moments--the better to help you understand exactly what’s going on in their heads even when they try desperately to keep their thoughts to themselves.