When I say The Leftovers is awesome, this is what I mean: It fills me with awe.

Atlanta continues to be unlike anything else on television.

Superbly edited and paced, Made in America is one of the best rise-and-fall sagas you’ll ever see on TV.

Better Things gets better--truer and deeper--when Sam is taken by surprise (as when her ex-husband shows up unexpectedly for dinner, or when a pet dies) or when she’s jolted out of her self-absorption by a parental obligation that yields a small revelation for her. Adlon is very good at depicting Sam in mid-mixed-emotions.

This Fargo has a different idea of evil, based on something just as insidious as Malvo: The grinding amorality of capitalism, which demands more profit no matter what the human cost. In the new Fargo, this is placed in a context that is frequently witty, and balanced with scenes of great family love. The large cast is superb.

Back for a third season, Catastrophe continues to be one of the most incisive and funny portraits of a marriage on television. Or streaming services.

The Americans does an awfully good job of juggling its numerous subplots.... If there’s a weak spot in the series, it’s that the subplot involving Nina (Annet Mahendru), the Russian KGB agent now in a Soviet prison, seems increasingly extraneous to the show.

I’m happy to report that this cartoon created by Genndy Tartakovsky is as exciting, beautiful, and multilayered as it ever was.

These scenes [flashbacks to Weimar Germany], which feature Michaela Watkins doing the best with a tritely anxious, angry character, are the weakest elements of the new season, at once too pat and too melodramatic. But the show benefits from terrific casting in its supporting roles this season, with great turns by Cherry Jones, Richard Masur, Anjelica Huston, and the poet Eileen Myles.

Every time the show switches to an Oleg moment--watching him trudge through dirty slush to the gloomy home of his parents--I find my mind wandering. More invigorating is the season’s further development of Paige as a possible future spy.

Every one of the three episodes made available for review hums along at a swift pace, dropping revelations right and left--no political pun intended.

[Elizabeth is] coming to terms with her own strict upbringing, her longing for her homeland, and her profoundly ambivalent feelings about American permissiveness on the one hand, and the strict discipline of turning her own daughter over to become a tool of the Soviet state. These are the elements that come together in the fine new season of The Americans, giving it more emotional power than ever.

Moss’s performance is perfect: at once contained and open, withdrawn and bristlingly aware. ... The Handmaid’s Tale can stand on its own as a gripping drama; you don’t need to apply overlays about Trump-era conservatism or, say, parallels to the Duggar family to find its portrait of a women under duress moving.

C.K. doesn’t even seem to be placing much value on eliciting guffaws during the stand-up segments that used to give his show a jolly lift at the beginning and end of each half-hour. Interestingly, over the course of the first four episodes I’ve seen, the warmest vibes emanate from Pamela.

Season 5 doesn’t feel like more of the same; it feels like a Game of Thrones played at a new, more intense level.

The stories gain richness when Dev moves outside his comfort zone.... There is no level on which Master Of None does not bring pleasure.

Ansari clearly wants to explore a wider bandwidth of emotion in the new season of Master of None. His far-reaching efforts to achieve this are admirable, if not always effective.

The footage here is truly extraordinary and gorgeous, and, for the most part, artfully edited.

Back and as impressively irritating as ever.

A completely engrossing murder mystery, courtroom drama, and family saga.

Atlanta, the new half-hour FX series from Donald Glover (Community), is satisfying and exciting on every level.

This so-called “limited series” takes the facts of the Simpson case and, by bending and shaping the emphases of those facts, turns it into a startlingly stirring critique of racism, sexism, and the judicial system that still resonates today. To be sure, the series also contains its share of laughs and excess.

Valley turns into the story of a young company fighting for a soul its founders never realized it had. As a result, it gives Silicon Valley a bigger heart than it’s ever had before.

Issa Rae’s very funny, great-looking HBO sitcom Insecure is back for a second season on Sunday night, and it’s even better--more assured and finely detailed--than its excellent first season.

Depending on the situation, Louis-Dreyfus brings various combinations of excessive zeal, profane rage, piteous desperation, and unwarranted arrogance, all of it never less than beguiling.

The degree to which you can be moved and involved by American Crime depends on the degree to which the importance of its message and the fine performances of its stars outweigh the show’s often crushing heaviness.

The pace is deliberate, and there aren’t the kind of laughs that other dramas employ as comic relief. But there’s real wit and propulsiveness in the storytelling Ray McKinnon does in this show.

If I rarely find Horseman more than mildly amusing, I certainly recognize the careful craft behind it, as well as the excellent vocal performances by regulars including Amy Sedaris, Alison Brie, Paul F. Thompkins, and Aaron Paul.

As always, however, the pleasures of Fargo derive from the variety of the characters and the clever wordplay they indulge in. ... Coon and Hawley quickly establish the distinctiveness of Gloria’s character: she’s not as polite as Allison Tolman’s Deputy Molly Solverson in season one, nor as tight-lipped serene as Patrick Wilson’s Trooper Lou Solverson in season two.

A disarming, completely absorbing piece of work.

One of the most difficult things a sitcom can do is to monkey with its basic premise, scattering characters here and there, while retaining its quality (and its audience). This usually happens with shows whose casts are aging--when a series set during high school must graduate its class to college, for example--and the results are frequently dire, or at the least, second-rate. Not so with Veep.

Each of Fleabag’s six episodes is a tightly-composed variation on her character’s wild, bad-girl humor, and her personal (especially sexual) and professional frustration.

Any fears that the departure of series creator Armando Iannucci would result in a diminishment of quality are immediately allayed. New showrunner David Mandel demonstrates a firm command and light touch in keeping the new episodes centered around Louis-Dreyfus and Selina’s bursts of anger, her deflations of despair, and her reactions to both the stupidity and shrewd mendacity of her staff.

Anyone with an interest in music will want to see this portrait of the artist as a young man pursued by demons into the pit of heck.

Casual proceeds from a place of diffidence, of setting up the mildest of jokes and seeing how softly the show can make them land.

Review remains one of the most entertaining, and occasionally quite moving, shows on television.

Wicked and shrewd, Better Call Saul has the suspense of a thriller and the emotion of a family saga.

To write out episode-themes like this makes Catastrophe sound potentially dreary about marriage equality and parental strain. Trust me, it’s the exact opposite: so exhilarating, so gaspingly funny, you’ll burn through the episodes as fast as you can.

The Good Place is very well written, full of good jokes about bees and clowns and clam chowder. But it’s got another layer: it’s also about power dynamics and morality systems--how they shift and mutate depending on how people interact.

UnREAL is as hard-boiled and adventuresome as any male-dominated, gritty, “dark” premium-cable show you’d care to throw an Emmy at. The performances by Zimmer and Appleby are amazingly nuanced and layered, especially for a show whose gimmick, Everlasting, insists upon the superficiality of women’s images of themselves.

Julie and Billy are enthusiastically mean, sarcastic, and lovable--all at once.

The precision of the details--the way Broad City lets you think it’s meandering while remaining laser-focused on the timing of the gags and hitting a hilarious crescendo--is a wonder to behold.

A remarkable cast. ... Girlfriends trades on some standard older-ladies-doing-wacky-things humor, but that’s just to put you at ease.

If you love Orange Is The New Black, you’re going to be pleased with the way the new season unfolds. If you’re more skeptical of its ongoing strength, you may feel, as I did, that some of the show’s irritating habits have increased.

Dowd’s performance is absolutely essential to keeping this show from tipping over into excessive self-seriousness. You’ll notice that whenever Handmaid’s Tale shifts away from Lydia and Offred, and back to the Canadian border and the subplot involving Offred’s husband, Luke (O.T. Fagbenle), and Moira (Samira Wiley), the show becomes deadly drab and dull.

Wolf Hall makes for wonderful television in part by resisting the current trends in wonderful television.... It’s every bit as good as Downton Abbey, and when it comes to moody shrewdness, Wolf has it all over Mad Men.

The whole thing comes wrapped in music: a couple of typically clever original numbers, and incidental touches such as a novel use for Scott Joplin’s ragtime touchstone “The Entertainer.” Even the show’s theme song undergoes a re-think; as Rebecca explains, it’s “an emotional thesis statement for myself.” It’s this kind of self-consciousness--tart and pointed, yet not excessively vain--that gives Crazy Ex-Girlfriend its lift.

Falk and company--they really go for it, whatever “it” it is they intend.

That it took eight episodes to get there [Gyllenhaal’s character finally throws off her Candy image to become Eileen, the director of porn scenes from a woman’s point of view] suggests two things: that The Deuce is rather muddled in its sense of purpose, and that this show really deserves a second season, to show us whether the series can take Eileen and her sisterhood into a more complex realm.

It’s frequently witty, vulgarly funny, sexy, and suspenseful. It makes you want to see its next scene the instant a new episode ends.

The cast here is exceptional.... There are times when the pace of Show Me A Hero becomes predictably metronomic.

I didn’t laugh very frequently watching Lady Dynamite, but I was never less than absorbed by it.

Outlander’s appeal remains focused on the interplay between Claire and Jamie, a union of two very different people joined in mutual attraction, lust, and a meeting of the minds. No matter what country they’re in, they’re the duo that’s the twosome with the mostest.

The challenge for Valley in its fourth season was to somehow parallel the nonstop innovation that occurs in the real-life Silicon Valley while retaining the elements that have made this comedy a success--primarily, the constant, abrasive interactions between brilliant losers Dinesh, Richard, Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), Jared (Zach Woods), and Erlich (T.J. Miller). Based on the three episodes made available for review, Silicon Valley has innovated to just the right degree.

The documentary is never less than engaging, but as a piece of filmmaking, it’s rather shapeless. Now the deaths of Fisher and Reynolds give it an unintended shape and purpose. It captures these two extremely vital spirits in the very recent past, and makes you feel the loss of them even more sharply.

There is both a unity and a contrast between their two comic personas that is sharp here.

American Crime does a good job of using the police-procedural framework to give viewers a structure that’s familiar and compelling. But Ridley makes sure that that structure is also capacious enough to let the actors stretch out, and, at least over the course of the four episodes made available to critics, this yields at least two superb performances.

Its refusal to reduce any of the crimes it portrayed to standard TV gestures, as well as the vividness of its two lead characters, give it an afterlife: I’d guess that many people will watch the series over again, even knowing how it turns out, just to spend time in the bleak town of Broadchurch.

It’s like an extremely well-acted power-point presentation on what to do, and what not to do, when a sexual assault occurs.

Falk has made us care about the characters in a way that allows them to behave badly, even cruelly, without having the audience lose sympathy for them. You watch this hour premiere and wait eagerly to see what the heck is going to happen to Jimmy and Getchen next week.

The voice-over commentary that’s most valuable comes from musicians such as Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty, who deeply understand Presley’s music and motivations, and critics who’ve thought long and hard about Elvis, like Nik Cohn and writer turned producer Jon Landau. ... You’ll have your own moments of discovery. Elvis works his way on everyone individually.

This frequently jaw-dropping documentary by director Alex Gibney, drawn largely from the book of the same name by Lawrence Wright, demonstrates vividly how a cult can spread among people searching for something greater in their lives, some advantage over others, some grand answer.... At times threatens to get swallowed up in the loony-land it wants to analyze, it helps a great deal to have regular check-ins with Wright.

If Bee can sustain the tone she presented in this premiere episode, Full Frontal is going to be an exhilarating pleasure.

Hannibal is the most radical enterprise on network television right now.... Hannibal is also one of the most hilariously ridiculous shows on TV. The fussy perfectionism of Hannibal Lecter, from his impeccable suits with jaunty pocket squares to his smirking murmurs of polysyllabic nonsense, is screamingly camp while lacking the wit of truly accomplished camp.

Sir resembles the Shakespeare character he’s playing, and that’s the chief flaw in Harwood’s play--a too-easy irony. But Harwood makes up for it with the crackling dialogue that pushes The Dresser along at a terrific pace.

It’s a completely hypnotic enterprise--a nightmare you are compelled to remain within, to see what happens.

Insecure is a show with great confidence--Rae immediately sweeps you up and carries you along on her journey of false starts, little triumphs, and big disappointments.

Key and Peele returns to Comedy Central on Wednesday night with an exceedingly strong half-hour that once again demonstrates the range of not only the duo’s performance skills, but their ideas as well.

I’ll keep checking it out for its incidental pleasures. A lot of Baskets’s best humor is totally random

Not every episode can reach these heights [of one of the funniest sequences in the first season], but with an ongoing story and no apprehension whatsoever in abusing its main character beyond the limits of humanity, there’s no reason that Review won’t continue to be worthy of five stars.

The structure of most OITNB episodes--in which one character is brought to the fore and we see flashbacks to that person’s past history, details about how that woman or man was shaped and became the person she or he is--has by now, in the new season, become predictable, either comfortingly or tediously so, depending on your degree of engagement with the series.... It’s all pretty pleasant, even if the jokes are often corny.

A marvelously acted piece. If the subject matter sounds grim, it is, but the production is exciting: well-acted, suspenseful, and moving.

Dreadful creator John Logan has firm control over the series’ mordantly witty, dry tone. He has me hooked again.

The new Roots excels in the naturalism of its performances to make the horror of slavery vividly painful--and the resistance to it uplifting--in a way that deepens the tale.

As always, this episode of Mad Men had entertaining moments.... Weiner wants you to realize that, over time, a wiseguy like Roger inevitably becomes insufferable. The problem is, removing such fun from Mad Men only makes the overall experience of watching Mad Men more joyless.

Even--or especially--if you don’t get the humor in that last one, the country-music knowledge being arrayed before you in Tales From the Tour Bus is sure to both enlighten and entertain you.

The exhilarating thing about Difficult People is that it consists of aggressive insult humor that’s rooted in a friendship that’s all heart.

The whole production is a beautiful machine, with strong supporting performances.

One of the smartest, most charming and funny shows you’re likely to see all year is Catastrophe.

Halt and Catch Fire doesn’t seem to trust that the viewer will know what it’s talking about.

All in all, it’s a season of Black Mirror you’ll enjoy if you like your sci-fi/fantasy/horror laced heavily with social commentary. Me, I wish the messages were ladled on with a lighter hand.

If Legion can maintain the balance of thriller-tautness and hallucinatory chaos that is done so well in the show’s opening hours, this will truly be a unique and superb superhero series.

The achievement of The Returned is that it creates its frights chiefly from an atmosphere of the quietly uncanny. Indeed, the show is at its best when it’s impossible to tell who is more dead: the returned population, or the living whose souls have expired from despair.

It’s almost cartoonish in its approach to the sitcom, to an extreme that sometimes pushes it into avant-garde territory: Not only would Daffy Duck understand what Kimmy is up to--so would turn-of-the-20th-century Dada and Surrealist artists. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is Fey and Carlock’s PhD project in comedy.

A tremendously moving documentary.

Much of the soap-opera storytelling apparatus that frequently made the series a guilty pleasure rather than a pure pleasure--has been jettisoned. In its place is a more leisurely pace and, at its best, a soulfulness that Nashville has long struggled to achieve.

You’re the Worst proved to be one of the most amusing and unusual sitcoms to premiere last season, and Wednesday night’s second-season premiere lives up to its promise.

Mom is back for a third season on Thursday night, and the sitcom has really found its comic groove. Also its tragic groove. Because that’s the way Mom works--its present-day laughs are always threatened by fragile futures and haunted pasts.

The third season, based on the four episodes I’ve watched, is strong and exciting and moves the narrative along at an invigorating pace.

He’s very good at making jokes that are carefully constructed and timed down to the syllable sound like ordinary conversation. He adds to his growing catalogue of acute observations about marriage and raising children, and articulates some differences between middle-aged Louis and his more youthful self.

Any show that refers to the bad guy as “the worst man in the world” may not be terribly subtle, but the brisk pacing and Hiddleston’s regular displays of sly spy trickery and vigorous punches to the soft guts of decadent baddies will really get a viewer’s pulse quickening.

Rare is the movie adaptation that is not just excellent, but which becomes its own radiant achievement. It doesn’t seem too early to bestow that praise upon Bates Motel.

Fun and clever, with serious things to say about sexism and ageism.

Harron has found an original cinematic language to convey Grace’s memories, a dream-like narrative propulsion that carries us along. ... Levi is Alias Grace’s only false note: he seems to have walked right off the set of Chuck without adjusting for the time-period here. Sarah Gadon’s performance is transfixing.

World has some terrific set pieces, such as the duo’s sloppy robbery of a gas station, and some dull patches, such as a meeting with Alyssa’s father late in the series that almost drags the story to a halt. But overall, James and Alyssa are ultimately two people we care about, and Lawther and Barden give exceptional, subtle performances.

Morgan and director-producer Stephen Daldry make the show engrossing both as history and as a drama about family ties.

Mr. Robot and creator Esmail have earned this quirky, almost mild and studious, way to commence the second season; for fans, trust in the show has been established.

Here is a series for an American audience that grants us the intelligence to be able to read subtitles, which are deployed to help convey the tart flavor of the various tongues spoken in the show. Combine this with the show’s frequently lovely visuals, and Vikings remains the kind of burly soap opera that appeals to an ever-wider audience.