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.