Emily Nussbaum

Smartly edited, full of odd little montages and visual juxtapositions. It has its own distinctive, salty vibe, driven by McEnany’s simultaneously self-loathing and self-aggrandizing swagger.

“The Morning Show” is less addictive train wreck than glum clunker, symptomatic of peak TV: it’s yet another lacquered, poorly structured ten-episode story, whose sparks are dampened as it becomes more earnest. The best bits just make you miss livelier shows. ... When the show finally looks more closely at the women Mitch has messed with, it’s only to exploit their trauma, mawkishly so. They can’t stay in focus, because the camera has been facing the wrong way.

A challenging work of art about the intractable problem of identity—the struggle of any individual to maintain core values, when the world demands nothing but solidarity based on shared victimhood. The show is unusually fearless about letting moral discomfort linger, and manages to be stirring without ever offering false hope, a rarity for even the best-made dramas.

A surprising amount of fun. ... The result is just smart enough to feel clever, just silly enough to feel relaxing, a guilty pleasure by design.

The mood is dark-humored but not grim, because the show is stuffed with slapstick and sharp quips, slowly building a varied ensemble. ... Even minor characters—like the dead-eyed, constantly texting office manager, Stacy, played with droll lassitude by Salahuddin’s sister Zuri—have their own story arcs and funny quirks.

A joyful Sunbeam Mixmaster of a sketch show, a Spirograph set spinning through decades of black pop culture, finding faintly psychedelic patterns, in the shared tradition of Sun Ra and K-tel. Its premise is pure meta-absurdism. ... For all the show’s self-awareness, it feels warm, organic, and spontaneous, not cold or contrived.

There’s a lot of plot for six episodes. As a result, the Lyonses don’t always feel fully real. ... What grounds the series is a classic love story: the bond between Daniel (the always wonderful Russell Tovey) and Viktor (Maxim Baldry), a taboo attraction that deepens into something lasting.

The quality and the pacing vary—and the political satire, especially, walks a tricky line, as with an ad for ice that boasts free-range children instead of ones in cages. Ugly topics like this are, arguably, the ones that comedy should be taking on, but when the bits don’t work it’s rough. When they do click, however, there’s a satisfying jolt.

Torres and Ciangherotti are magnetic, and Velasco is a treat as the bubbly Renaldo. But it’s Fabrega, as Tati, who feels like the true original. Her performance evokes weirdos like Reverend Jim, on “Taxi.”

An imperfect but enjoyable production, driven mainly by the satisfying brass of its heroine, played by Suranne Jones.

Fosse/Verdon, at least in the five episodes sent to critics, fizzles, weighed down by good intentions. It’s heavy, but mainly it’s heavy-handed.

It’s most resonant when it treats its heroine as a moral mixture. When, a few episodes in, it begins to dive into Pamela’s messy unconscious, it deepens, hitting on disconcerting themes about sex and loneliness. The show’s moody, jazzy style, its reliance on the unexplained image, can border on pretension, as jazzy things so often do, but it lingers in your mind, agitating in a good way.

It’s a smart, minor-key series.

Scene by scene, it finds raw, affecting themes about mortality and grieving, and it has some legitimately cool plot twists. ... Russian Doll is propulsive and joyful.

They’re fables, not operas--undeveloped vignettes with plot twists that slam the door on ambiguity. Neither of the stories [“The Violet Hour” and “The Royal We”] was fully satisfying, but both had moments of eerie beauty. ... [The third episode, “House of Special Purpose” is] a spooky, gamy, kinky story that felt like a lesser “Black Mirror.”

The show’s better when we escape from Kathryn’s control and into the loosey-goosey ensemble, who are busy bickering, doing drugs, trading partners, and refusing to have the healthy getaway she’d hoped for.

A comedy-thriller with a serrated edge, You is a scary, delicious snack of a show, a bit like “Dexter” crossed with “Younger.”

Promising themes dissolve, episode by episode, into something more like forced quirkiness, revealing a buried conventionality, the curse of way too much cool-looking TV. ... Even an unreal world needs characters who make sense, particularly in a series that is as gooily devoted to exploring those characters’ inner lives as Maniac turns out to be. On this level, the show is half-baked and inconsistent.

Sadly, the first four episodes are--despite a very HBO combination of worldly themes and super-horny sex scenes--more of an irritant than an intoxicant.

At once a joyful watch and a morally destabilizing one, it bears some relationship to “Fleabag,” another dark British comedy driven by the narration of a deeply screwed-up individual, plotted so that its more compassionate themes come as a pleasant shock.

Easy stumbles, again and again. It’s smug where “High Maintenance” is humble. It’s formless where “High Maintenance” is graceful. It’s twee instead of funny, with a misplaced confidence that all human behavior is worth watching.

In the show’s second season on HBO, airing this month, the ease is back, thank God, and the series feels, even in slighter moments, newly confident, with an increased ability to reflect a larger world in flux. Each of the five episodes sent to critics is worth watching.

A handful of fantasy sequences are hit or miss. But the show pulls off audacious characterizations.

David Simon and his frequent collaborator, the novelist George Pelecanos, together with writers such as Megan Abbott, have made a show that is quietly transformative. ... In many ways, The Deuce is a classic David Simon.

Claws does occasionally lean a bit hard on the wackiness; it has a tendency to overindulge when it comes to extended montages and slo-mo. But, honestly, who cares? On a hot day when a TV viewer is looking for a fun kick, it’s an appealing summer offering: a sweet mojito with extra pulp.

It’s smartly plotted, with characters that deepen in the course of the show. But, refreshingly, in our era of homework TV, it’s also a joyride, all roller skates and mousse-claw bangs, synthesizer jams and leopard-print leotards, home pregnancy tests and cocaine-serving robots. By the final episodes, I was whooping at my computer screen, fists in the air, like a superfan.

A feminist cringe-comedy and, like its horny antiheroine, it’s a train wreck, freely mashing together theory and practice. It’s sometimes beautiful but also, not infrequently, repulsive, a narcissistic spectacle framed as a liberating vision quest.

The icky, idiosyncratic force of Morano’s early episodes dims slightly, as the show hints at a more conventional path: “Escape from Gilead.” Maybe this move is inevitable; it might succeed. But there’s something lost along the way--the special beauty of a bleak ending.