The series is a polished genre exercise with characters that feel like predigested tropes.
The HBO film’s ostensible authenticity does little to add dramatic heft to its stock character moments.
The Netflix show’s premise is like a playfully morbid Escher painting.
The series is unable to render any of the visual imagination its source material practically begs for.
The miniseries transforms Agatha Christie’s novel into a formulaic, adamantly bleak exercise.
The series operates in the same world-weary register as its superior predecessors.
The show’s compelling core narrative can become overwhelmed by tangential storylines.
Black Monday dabbles in farce, social commentary, and character study, without managing to establish a coherent point of view.
Season three of True Detective plays to the first season’s strengths, but it also feels like an admission of defeat.
Whatever assemblage of parts make up an individual viewer’s experience of Bandersnatch, it represents the best and worst of Black Mirror.
Almost all of these shows—even the most joyfully escapist among them—seemed preoccupied in 2018 with the forces which make us who we are.
The Kominsky Method’s broad, formulaic humor undercuts any poignancy in the show’s portrayal of men in their twilight.
Homecoming’s visual ambition is complemented by its intellectual curiosity.
Wanderlust arrives at the underwhelming conclusion that the grass only seems greener on the other side.
Camping focuses primarily on why things happen rather than merely striving toward hijinks.
The Romanoffs, an anthology series co-written and directed by Matthew Weiner, is ambitious but disappointingly inconsistent.
While impressive for its detailed and certainly imaginative world building, Maniac rarely dares to truly confound its audience.
The Haunting of Hill House is a kind of riff on madness in its many forms, a sojourn of loss and regret.
Kidding is a capital-E earnest drama that just so happens to star comedians.
In season nine, The Walking Dead concerns itself with the nitty-gritty of ensuring an egalitarian system of government.
It’s a tangle of plot threads, almost all of which are either underdeveloped or overly intricate.