Daniel D'Addario

Its sense of giddy, unashamed fun buoys it even as the seams show. ... As it stands, it’s a captivating bit of cheese, anchored by a star making the most of a very strange moment.

Onscreen, this pairing — between a saintly being played by Michael Sheen and a fallen angel played by David Tennant, both seeking to save the world for their own reasons — is the best part of the new “Good Omens” limited series. But it’s not enough: This six-hour journey towards the end of time comes to feel grindingly slow by the end, more anticlimax than fight for Earth’s future. ... That it ends up saying so little feels like a missed opportunity.

The new series works better than it should. It elides some of the worst of the novel’s degradation of women, streamlines as best it can the most verbose of the vignettes and builds out Yossarian — played by Christopher Abbott in a performance that announces the leading-man arrival of a long-simmering talent — into a character whose angst we feel. Yet the series, in thrall to and in the shadow of one of the most sharply written novels of its era, never finds a way to live on its own.

Death is nothing new on television. But the grotesque hemorrhaging Ebola induces in its unlucky sufferers brings home the gravity of the story, and the courage of its players. ... “The Hot Zone” works best as an examination of process in precisely this way — showing what it takes to defeat an outbreak, both in Jaax’s storyline and in one told in flashback, as her mentor (“Game of Thrones’s” Liam Cunningham) attempts to find an Ebola survivor and thus to use his or her antibodies for a cure.

Tthe tone it struck in its first outing was a dully familiar one — the sense that to transgress, alone, is enough. If this show is to actually satirize the wide-open target of superhero entertainments, it’ll need to find a second gear, and quickly.

Co-produced by TV maestro Greg Berlanti and director Ava DuVernay, the story combines the pair’s strengths: The plainspokenness of Berlanti’s work and the nuance of DuVernay’s meld into a story whose strength comes in part from the audience it may potentially reach.

It’s hard to imagine anyone outside the core constituency for royals and the games they play finding much of interest in “The Spanish Princess”: Baroque in its attention to detail, but telling its version of history strictly for the fandom.

Chambers ... doesn’t have much going for it — it’s a grody, nasty piece of work, a story that would at least be endurable if it were the under-ninety-minute movie it seems to want to be.

“Thrones” is doing absolutely stellar work within the bounds set around its current era: Highly burnished entertainment that lingers on no story point a beat more than strictly necessary to communicate the idea. Dwelling on the shows it once was and no longer is seems perhaps beyond the point.

The nature of [Mary Ann and her daughter's] fractured bond will be legible enough to viewers without intimate familiarity with the previous installments. What will, perhaps, feel new is the somewhat dowdy approach to storytelling, a fundamental old-fashionedness that exists in interesting contrast to those elements of the story that are new.

Much of this feels like programming CBS has done elsewhere, and more effectively. The argument for The Code is its willingness to probe into aspects of military life and the traumas that go along with it--but given how jauntily, artificially upbeat so much of the series is, it’s unclear how serious the show even is about its central premise.

Peele’s Twilight Zone feels neither like the best of Peele nor much like “The Twilight Zone.” It’s a mismatch of talents that, in the four episodes provided to critics, falls short of justifying its presence on air in 2019 as anything but flavorless homage to what had worked previously.

The new show lacks the glimmering creativity of its source material, and, perversely enough, it manages to feel overstuffed despite its relative lack of inventive flourishes.

The Village veers all over the map and does not boast actors capable of selling all of the lines they’re given. The Village’s idiosyncracies, then, come to seem studied and affected, and its moments of connection like rudimentary and naked bits of manipulation.

As a reclamation project publicizing the influence of Verdon on well-loved pieces of theater and film, Fosse/Verdon is worthy. As television, it can’t find a rhythm that feels like its own.

The more the predictably prickly Maya, wounded by defeat the show can’t or won’t complicate, sits at the show’s center, the more it suffers. The series revolves around its Clark figure. ... It is powered solely by Clark’s resentment. And though it’s rocket fuel powerful enough to keep The Fix watchable, it forecloses any insight from a figure who may, decades later, still be too close to a story that, ultimately, is not solely her own.

This viewer, at least, remains curious and eager to see more of David’s story, one that is told with élan and confidence and played with preternatural skill.

This show’s laughs are closer to chuckles than guffaws — it’s well-observed but its ambitions feel more minor than much else in this era of the relentless big swing.

Arquette’s vivid performance in particular leans deliciously far into the show’s general lack of insight or commentary about the crime it depicts. ... Generally, The Act nails what it’s going for--a grotty, nasty, poisonous fable whose punch comes from the fact that some version of it really happened but that would be compelling regardless.

A broadcast that breaks no ground, that succeeds in re-airing exculpatory information about Syed but falls short as a documentary and as television. The Case Against Adnan Syed is a misbegotten rehash of a person whose renown belies that his story can’t sustain multiple retellings.

The film needed more insight, more spirit of curiosity and provocation beyond its pious, vitamin-rich but ultimately inert and unsurprising take on prison, in order to justify its place.

Amazon’s series braids a layer of too-easy humor-adjacent content atop a show that’s not as clued-in about politics as it thinks it is. Neither strand works on its own, but the jokes seem the clear afterthought. It’s unclear what, exactly, McKay and company wanted to achieve.

Grammer’s performance is his most puffily villainous yet, making Sideshow Bob of “The Simpsons” look complex and soft-spoken. ... Only Lefevre really stands out, not entirely positively. Her delivery of lines is unusual and offbeat, sometimes in ways that improve the script, and sometimes in ways that make the show, and Madeline, a bit challenging to spend time with.

It’s soundtracked by “ironic” peppy pop music, the clearest sign a show is more interested in maintaining a pose than in showing us something we haven’t seen before. ... After a while, endless stylization for its own sake comes to feel cluttered and, worst of all, dull.

Now Apocalypse, debuting March 10 on Starz after a Jan. 29 premiere at Sundance, pushes its tone of oddity to what will likely be the limits of many viewers’ patience, bringing several amiable performances to bear on a story that feels like a warmed-over rehash of sharper material.

State of the Union pulls off a neat trick; given both its short running time and its fleetness of dialogue, we never get tired of hearing this couple’s arguments, which could in other contexts be tiresome and circular. And both partners’ minds are so wide-ranging that — with an assist from Frears’s fleet direction — the show never grows claustrophobic.

[Black Earth Rising] squanders the audience’s goodwill with ill-conceived narrative turns, a reliance on cliché, and, worst, dialogue that defies belief. Its potential resonances as a story about how we metabolize, and prosecute, the worst of crimes ends up, soon enough, squandered as the audience loses faith in the story and its telling. ... Which raises questions about why Black Earth Rising exists at all, so inept is it at conveying the struggle at its center.

Bundy is at best an unpleasant companion through four long episodes, and at worst repellent--makes Conversations With a Killer a must only for true-crime completists. ... For the uninitiated, though, the film takes the form of the banal audio footage at its core. ... [Director Joe Berlinger] never proves why Bundy matters as anything other than a case study in narcissism.