Alex McCown

There’s nothing innovative about this project, but its commitment to fleet storytelling and a game cast take it far.

Sweet/Vicious is a rousing shot of whip-smart wish fulfillment, despite its occasional missteps.

Wolf Creek isn’t great writing, unevenly starting and stopping a half-dozen stories en route to the end; but once it begins, you need that resolution to be satisfied.

Eyewitness isn’t reinventing the narrative wheel (really, it’s just adding an additional number of axes to a crowded chassis), but these strong emotional elements and Nicholson’s fantastic lead performance keep it grounded and entertaining.

Aftermath wants to be fun (and funny), but it doesn’t yet trust the audience to find the humor in the extreme situations without putting a button on every moment. These conflicting parts could all come together as the show finds its feet, but for a first impression, this pilot nose-dives.

It still moves in fits and starts, but each of the first five episodes improves on the last, and as the show focuses more on the strength of its breakneck storytelling, it’s becoming not just the best reason to try Crackle, but one of the more promising new streaming series of the year.

Dead Of Summer is a mess, but it’s the kind of mess that allows for a degree of back-handed enjoyment at the absurdity of it all.

The unfortunate tendency to pile on the daytime-worthy dramatics means the show’s strongest element--the thorny and fraught nature of a murder case in the era of social media--gets underserved all too often.

Outcast is a creepy, unsettling treat—and one of the strongest TV debuts of the year.

When it gets to the meat of the dark source material that gives the show its name, the action is kinetic and satisfying in a manner previous seasons occasionally struggled to provide.

Those who have never seen the show will find this the easiest place to pick it up since the pilot, and those who have been along since the beginning have a series again playing to its strengths. The biggest asset is still the one that gives the show its essence: Tatiana Maslany’s performance remains superlative.

Those expecting a return to form should not be disappointed: Both for good and ill, The X-Files is back, and in essentially the original packaging.

What the series lacks in depth and visual elegance, it more than makes up for in sheer entertainment value. Colony combines the best aspects of USA’s past (generic shows that are nonetheless sugary treats) with the heady rush of its contemporary, Mr. Robot-era mission: Classing up the joint.

Like Amazon’s similarly good-looking but unsteady The Man In The High Castle, The Expanse has a compelling story to tell, but is somewhat unwilling to play to the strengths of its format. But unlike that series, Syfy’s latest picks up steam as it pushes forward, gaining confidence that the audience will be along for the interplanetary ride. By the fourth episode, it’s firing on (mostly) all thrusters, with thrilling heroics, shocking deaths, and a sense of urgency building across the various narrative threads.

A special that spits and sputters when the star is required to play-act himself, but comes breezily to life when he dispenses with the semi-serious put-on, and goes full raconteur. The ghost of Nick Winters haunts the proceedings of A Very Murray Christmas more than a little.

For a show so saturated with angry, volatile men (and it’s almost all men, here), there’s an awful lot of brooding. But the actors are so strong, and the world they’ve created so lived-in, the show can get away with some of these early missteps.

By the end of episode three (titled after yet another brand-new character, Morgane), almost everyone is miserable, and there doesn’t seem to be much hope for relief from the unrelenting gloom. Thankfully, the show remains so brilliantly acted and written, and so masterfully shot, it’s never anything less than compelling.

The Unauthorized Beverly Hills, 90210 Story shines, for much the same reason as the original series: Inexplicably, all this stupid crap is a lot of fun to watch.

There are brief flashes of potential. ... But the show simply lacks the confidence to let its audience connect the dots.