Daniel D'Addario

This series provides the service of laying out a case that’s far less sensational than it could be (if because it’s leaving opportunities to gesture towards a more sweeping story on the table). ... Though viewers may crave more context and analysis, “Filthy Rich” does well at amplifying voices that tended to get lost in a story about one man who took a fall and, in his nebulous and dark orbit, many who likely never will. For this, it’s a worthwhile piece of work, if a painful watch.

In McCorvey, this slight film introduces a character well worth knowing even aside from the history she made, but simply for her grace.

The show doesn’t come up with a credible way forward, instead stumbling through familiar story beats with less gusto. It resembles, perhaps, one of its own characters after undergoing the amnesia-inducing treatment at the show’s center — certain of where it is but unclear on why, familiar in appearance but emptied out of spark.

“Labor of Love” is pleasantly low-key — especially, too, by comparison to the current market leader, “The Bachelor,” which, comes without any of “Labor of Love’s” higher-stakes framework about specifically choosing a co-parent, still manages to treat its machinations as deeply and gravely serious. This seems like the right choice.

While the series puts great effort into exposing other sides of the community, it doesn’t, elsewhere, transcend fairly simple character types, dragging us instead into recursive storytelling that’s outshone by the local color.

Bong’s film of this material had an equally thudding manner of carrying across its point. What is new here is the relative dullness of characters’ dialogue and backstories. It’s somewhat grounding that even in the midst of chaos, cataclysm and global reorganization around a bizarre means of conveyance, folks will still speak mainly in cliché; it’s also true enough to life. ... The result is watchable, but not much more.

Ruffalo’s the one you’ll watch for. But with all the talent Cianfrance brings to a show that’s ultimately a mismatch for his gifts, “I Know This Much Is True” ends up being precisely the sum of Ruffalo’s two parts.

At its core, the family story here works, and mysteries seeded through time are intriguing enough to make staying tuned seem like an appealing proposition. Where “Council of Dads” falters is when it ventures too far onto the outer branches of its premise: The council itself, as an entity, strains plausibility in a way that feels less fantasy-pleasant than, at times, silly. If the show achieves a tighter level of focus deeper into its first season, it may go from “promising” to something more.

What results is a Franken-show that’d have done the old Universal monster movies proud, lurching and stumbling through its story’s convolutions with great purpose but little worth saying. ... The first outright dud of his post-“Glee” career.

What glimpses we get of “Upload’s” electronic heaven seem at least beholden to a sensibility, however nasty; more often, we’re stuck with Nathan, a less-than-compelling Virgil leading us through a journey past life that’s, by now, become familiar enough to read as cliché.

Generally, the talent assembled here feels left out to dry:. ... Up to its final moments, this limited series strains for impact. But it’s unserious about the aspects of its story that are genuinely potentially interesting, and — up through a final twist that’s at least audacious — sillier than one might have any reason to expect.

In setting, tone, and several fine and evocative performances, “City of Angels” cements itself as a fine entrant in the horror-on-TV genre.

“#blackAF” is the most outright mean-spirited series about family life in memory, and one that seems driven by an impulse toward revealing the worst possible side of Barris’ comic avatar, one that makes the show feel at times cruel to watch.

This show’s first four episodes, indeed, generally seem to depict a show coming into a better understanding of itself as it goes on — a very heartening thing to see. Heartening, too, is a show that feels warm and genuinely escapist at a tense time in the world outside the frame.

A flawed but deeply interesting addition to the reality-TV canon.

This documentary converts into unpleasant spectacle what was always implicit in the star’s legal project. ... Kardashian West’s intentions may matter less than her results, which — in the life of Alice Johnson, at least — have been real. But there’s something garish and gross about a star personalizing an important cause by asking vulnerable people to open a vein on-camera and then never bothering to get back to the cause itself.

In all, the Loop has a striking look, but its stories — at least over the course of the three episodes sent to critics — are a bit too laconically told to justify the sit.

Klum and Gunn remain eager guides for a show whose ambition is laudable. But, too often, from its premise to its lost and confusing judging process, “Making the Cut” feels — ironically enough for a show focused on design within reach — inaccessible.

If it’s a project that’s once again more fascinating than across-the-board well-made, fascination is not nothing — certainly not when applied to a figure whose contributions deserve to be better-heralded.

The trouble with this new “Amazing Stories,” though, at least in its first episode, is its lack of Spielberg sparkle. Those tuning in expecting to see the director’s light touch and clever manner of engaging our emotions will be disappointed: The show’s first installment feels less like a revival than a holdover. ... Feeling underbaked.

The first four episodes of its rebooted self are about making competent, well-structured TV. It’s hard not to miss a show whose flaws, emanating as they did from a passionate need to be understood and desire to understand, were so deeply human, and that have been so smoothly elided in favor of a gently humming piece of story machinery, something that’s that much closer to robot.

This is a show that, even as it depicts a precarious moment and exists in one, cannot bear uncertainty. That’s a tendency that makes it both a fairly unpleasant watch, and a sacrificed opportunity to depict something smaller, more tender, and more ultimately human than the end of the world.

“Little Fires Everywhere” feels, more than anything, contained. Grant that there are, in moments, signs of something doing more than simply simmering on low. But those moments are little indeed.

Watching “Dave,” though, feels somewhat like being trapped with a terrible party companion, one who both fails to meet the energy of the occasion and is an oversharer besides. It comes bearing at once too much information and too little else of what makes television work.

“Devs” exists in a world where anything is possible. But, apart from a very few moments deep in its run, it withholds grandeur from us. ... In all, “Devs” is a misfire for a talented creator, one whose next work is worth awaiting even or especially if it comes in a nimbler, smaller package.

“Hunters” is above all else an exercise in genre pastiche, blending ultraviolence with brutally unfunny comedy. It strands its lead, Logan Lerman, in a grave and painstakingly emotional plotline.

The prolonged slip from compromise into amorality makes “Better Call Saul” compelling in the long view. ... It’s hard not to wish, though, that the series, as it enters its endgame, trusted its viewers to understand that we were watching a “Breaking Bad” prequel while keeping the delicacy of this series’s mood intact, and trusted us to remember those with whom Saul will soon be associating without resurrecting them to diminished effect.

“Love Is Blind,” then, is not “good,” but it is something; each episode feels both structured around a new milestone and nourishing in what gets in on the margins, bits of observations about differences in race or class or age or, crucially, outlook. No one is judged here, but everyone is presented as something like a rounded and full character (if not quite a whole person); each transcends the show’s early inanity and justifies the time we spend with them.