It's made with such confidence, such artistry, and such joy, that I felt reassured throughout that I was in the hands of a master storyteller — a feeling that precious few recent series, even ones I love, have been able to provide.

The action is still staggering. At various points, Zombie Spear takes on a tribe of marauders who either wear skull masks or just have skulls for heads (the show doesn't pause long enough to clarify), a pack of enormous lions, and a herd of hideous giant razorback-type creatures. Over and over, I found myself with my jaw on the floor and my fist pumping at the scale and ingenuity of the latest set piece.

That Thorne helped craft such an outstanding variation on the classic story would seem to make redundant the idea of him doing a literal adaptation of Golding's book. But his four-part take on Lord of the Flies is excellent in its own right. It understands why the story has resonated for over 70 years, and become a middle school English class perennial — and the ways in which it feels especially, unfortunately, timely at the moment.

It's a mix of extreme darkness — scenes either discuss or depict suicidal ideation, assault, and rape — and quirky humor. This is a delicate thing, where if the balance isn't exactly right, the drama feels weightless and the comedy much too heavy. The great majority of the time throughout this excellent first season, Wainwright gets it just so.

Every time I began to worry that Robinson and Kanin should have stuck with the idea of getting in and out quickly with a joke, some jaw-droppingly bizarre thing would happen, and The Chair Company had my attention all over again.

Though Pen15 started out as an extended comedy sketch, it figured out quickly that it could tell genuine, poignant stories of childhood and adolescence, even if its girls were being played by grown-ass women. Hal & Harper starts in that more serious place, and does some powerful things there.

It turns out the formula still works like gangbusters when it's these characters involved. Especially when they're handled by writers and directors and performers who understand the very delicate mix of sweet optimism and manic chaos required.

Blue Lights definitely wants to be the Belfast equivalent of The Wire. It never quite gets there, but there's also no shame in not living up to one of the greatest TV dramas ever made. At the end of the first season, two of the peelers are offered opportunities to move out of response to more esteemed divisions of the PSNI. Both decline, deciding they can do the most good exactly where they are. When Blue Lights focuses on the simple triumphs and tragedies of what Grace and the others do every day, it's terrific in its own right.

Death By Lightning makes a forceful argument that forgotten people and events can be just as entertainingly dramatized as famous ones.

This is a well-built show, where the relatively unusual setting, plus the performance at the heart of it, breathes new life into old cliches. At this point, Dark Winds is already doing variations on its own themes. But they're good themes, and interesting variations. Change can be overrated sometimes, when you're already good at what you do.

The show has actual things to say about sex work, motherhood, economic anxiety, and found family, while also being a raucous time and a great showcase for Fanning, Nick Offerman, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Nicole Kidman, among others.

Dippold and lead director Hiro Murai unleash the comedy version of Rhys in many wonderful ways. Tom is so obviously in over his head, and so easily panicked, that it's hard to hate him even as he keeps putting other people at risk.

In increasing the number of central characters from two to four — five, arguably — in jumping back and forth between America and South Korea, and in trying to say more thematically about income inequality and various forms of economic anxiety, Beef creator Lee Sung Jin's reach has exceeded his grasp this time around. There's still some good material here, and one fantastic episode that's the equal of anything in the first season. It's just not as focused, nor as potent, as it was when Yeun and Wong were going at it.

This is one of the most entertaining MCU shows — if deliberately weird and non-superheroic in a way that I expect to baffle many Marvel fans — in quite some time.

Spartacus is one of a kind. It is stylized and soapy and smart; it revels in brutality and bloodshed but it cannot be discounted as a cartoon (it actually does employ subtext, sometimes quite deftly). It nimbly avoids being a slog, but it does weigh the cost of the suffering caused by greed and exploitation as it surveys a decaying Rome on the verge of civil war (any resemblances to the times we’re enduring seem entirely intentional). This show is not for everyone, and would that more programs would try for that kind of unashamed distinctiveness. But the drama is for anyone willing to understand that Spartacus absolutely knows what it’s going for and why.

But Knight's ambitions are modest, its charms are huge. It's a reminder that while Game of Thrones is best remembered for its spectacle, many of the series' most effective moments — especially early on, when it was building an audience big enough to justify the cost of dragons and zombie hordes — were similarly modest, and mostly involved two or three characters having conversations inside castles.

Percy Jackson Season One was a vast improvement on the films, while also dealing with struggles of its own. Season Two begins in roughly the same place, but shows enough growth as it moves along to give me some optimism that Riordan and everyone else are starting to figure out how to translate what's worked so well in print to the small screen.

Parts of the show are too silly to care about at all. Parts are oppressively glum. And every now and then — almost always involving Goggins — it gets the balance just right.

The creative team leans into how much both the characters and the world of medicine have changed. As a result, the new episodes don't have the same whiff of desperation you often get with these things. The four episodes I've seen aren't nearly at the level of peak early Scrubs. But they work much more than they don't, and gave me both pleasure and relief that all involved weren't about to sour my memory of the original run.

Though some Slow Horses seasons are stronger than others, in general it makes translating Herron's stories, and toggling between moods, look effortless. Down Cemetery Road has its moments, but overall is a reminder that what Slow Horses does is a lot harder than it appears.

But if the actors are too old to be doing this, Stranger Things itself feels fairly energetic and youthful even after all this time.

Despite all of this, Rhys is having so much fun, Danes makes such a good sparring partner for him, and the story moves at such a good clip prior to that ill-conceived flashback episode, that The Beast in Me is pretty engaging for most of its eight hours. It's an example of why tropes become tropes in the first place: because they work.

Marvel has struggled the last few years, but the company has still made several large fortunes for Disney. Scrapping everything the fired creative team did would have been costly in the short term, but would have been much better over the long haul for Matt Murdock and friends.

Rooster stumbles at times in depicting the clash of generations, ideologies, and sexual urges on a college campus... It sets up various story and character ideas that it doesn't always have interest in following, and going back and forth on how ridiculous it finds both its setting and people on different sides of the student/faculty divide. But it also has a generosity of spirit, a warmth, and a trust in its performers, that evokes the charms of much of Lawrence's other work.

For all of the many flaws of those earlier years, high school was a much better setting for Euphoria than everything happening now. But there are still moments.

Does this blend of old and new — at least, new to Star Trek — actually work? At times, almost shockingly well. At others, there are as many growing pains and awkward interactions for Starfleet Academy itself as there are for its students.

Malcolm's creator Linwood Boomer and his collaborators put the passage of time front and center. Life's Still Unfair doesn't try to act like it's normal that all these people are acting the same way after decades have passed. It's entirely about how unhealthy so much of this is. It only occasionally resembles the highs of the show's younger incarnation, but it's acknowledging that challenge the entire time.

Sometimes, Vladimir finds the right balance, while at many others, it feels as lost in the weeds as its main character. Weisz is having a ball playing this dangerous mix of cockiness and cluelessness, but Vladimir as a whole never quite coheres.