Aja Romano

The new show is — I think — supposed to be cringey but cute, equal parts wince-worthy and nostalgic.

Instead of filling that opulent, 19th-century setting with true passion and heart, the show comes off like many of the aristocrats it’s skewering: soulless and vapid.

It’s all incredibly banal and deeply uninspired. ... Brooker achieves something close to meaningful commentary on the year only when he and the rest of the writers stop cracking tired jokes and allow the absurdity of the year’s images to speak for themselves.

Some pointed and strategic tonal shifts throughout the series’ nine episodes also help keep the pace from flagging, though I’d argue that nine episodes was a few too many. Conversely, given proper attention, the series’ climax could have been significantly expanded and dramatized.

The show finds its strongest moments when it layers realism atop metaphorical racism to induce a mounting, increasingly surreal two-fold horror. It’s weaker in terms of connecting those moments back to its overarching plot. But that weakness also feels intentional and refreshing — as if the show is also repudiating the pompous dramatics of its silly cult full of white people trying to something something pure bloodlines, something something sorcery, something something existential cosmic terror.

Unsolved Mysteries manages to satisfy both its old and new audiences and deliver at least one case that’s as unique as it is baffling. The rest of the half-season is weaker, but “Thirteen Minutes” gives fans plenty to work with.

The show’s far-fetched conceit that Nazis were behind most of the conspiratorial diplomatic tragedies of the Cold War era, the thin mystery of the characters’ relationships, and the wan pull of their wacky spy hijinks weren’t enough to justify the ideological Nazi parade on display.

All of this detail starts to pay off when the story gets more complex, and the pace quickens a bit. Because so much work has gone into making all of the characters distinct and individualized, you never once feel distracted by the puppetry, or jarred out of the series’ serious tone.

In its most successful episode, Chester confronts a Japanese prisoner of war who taunts, threatens, and ultimately bonds with him over their shared love of baseball and their exhaustion with the battlefront. It’s a deeply compelling episode of television and warrants a place for The Terror in any list of the year’s must-watch series. But it has nothing to do with ghosts. I wish The Terror had done a little more work to make its ghosts feel as necessary as its timely history lesson.

Most of season two’s flaws and frustrations have been ironed out in satisfying and interesting ways in season three. ... This time around, however, a new set of problems arises — and weirdly enough, a lot of them don’t concern the story itself, but the show’s aesthetic and technical choices.

With Gaiman at the helm, and with an ample amount of time to do the book’s nuances justice, Good Omens succeeds much better than any recent Gaiman (or Pratchett) adaptation in memory. But we’re still ultimately left with a screenplay that faithfully emphasizes Good Omens’ plot rather than its profundities or literary flourishes.

Clement has years of comedy writing for television under his belt, and Waititi years of directing. The two play to their strengths here, and the results are enough to get audiences to overlook the moments when the jokes don’t land or the humor is a little musty.

If this documentary added anything substantially new to the conversation that Serial began in 2014, its efforts might feel more worthwhile. Instead, in its determination to uncritically embrace the narrative Serial created, it accomplishes the opposite of its aim to show that Syed was wrongfully convicted.

Its rage (“we’re dying in America at the end of the millennium”) and its love (“live in my house, I’ll be your shelter”) could have given us renewed energy and hope during a long, troubled winter. Instead, due to production mishaps that could have been avoided and were then poorly handled, it barely got to make a sound.

Berlinger arguably could have kept much of the documentary’s archival source material, with its heavy emphasis on Bundy, while reframing the killer’s story as one about the women whose lives he cut short. Instead, he produced a perfectly serviceable Conversations that adds little to the conversation at all.

As always, the series dances on the line between satire and sermons with merry aplomb. Under the care of creator and writer Charlie Brooker and director David Slade, that dance consists of considerably more style than substance in Bandersnatch. But the film, which you can think of as a luxuriant aperitif before Black Mirror season five (which currently has no known release date, though it will presumably debut sometime in 2019), is interesting enough from start to its five different finishes that you probably won’t be too upset by its lack of larger thematic cohesiveness.

It’s a monologue-heavy series, but the writing is rich and haltingly expressive. ... The family’s issues with mental illness are treated sensitively and believably, and Flanagan makes sure to counter every moment of supernatural terror with a reminder that psychological terror is real, that depression, addiction, and ideation are every bit as terrifying as anything lurking in Hill House.

Black Mirror is most effective when it attempts to map old human behavior onto new technologies. It’s much less effective when it tries to map new technologies onto old stories.