Inkoo Kang

Moody and challenging, Birch’s “Dead Ringers” hews surprisingly close to many of Cronenberg’s story beats, but the remake is more thematically ambitious—and more consistently engaging. ... Much of the show’s creepy pleasures comes from Weisz’s magnificent performance(s).

The series’ portraiture is most compelling when the alienation experienced by the characters achieves a larger sociological resonance. ... The layers of repressed despair shaken loose by Amy and Danny’s feud are so precisely crafted that “Beef” can’t help but disappoint when, toward the season’s end, the stakes are raised to the melodrama of cinematic violence. ... In a series with such a clear-eyed view of human darkness, the eleventh-hour fuzzies aren’t given enough time for the warmth to sink in.

This energetic remix doesn’t betray the spirit of the original. Dickens’s heavy social conscience, character-driven scenes, and preposterous plotting are all deftly distilled.

Delirious and tense, the seven-part season is strongest in the early outings, when it’s unclear where Dre is headed and the writers more often buck plot conventions. Those episodes also suffer less from the series’ tonal messiness. ... But even her [Fishback's] marvellously versatile performance can’t make up for the wan character development and the tonal wobbliness that sink the series.

A remarkable work, advancing the prestige true-crime genre’s slow but steady reorientation toward centering survivors. ... Still, I can’t help feeling a lingering discomfort about “Stolen Youth” and its rather harrowing depictions of Ray’s violence.

The revival does not disappoint, setting a new standard for series resurrections by being unafraid to tackle the low-grade dismay of financial precarity and middle-age failure. ... But the character beats are disrupted by the series’ now creaky commitment to broader gags.

Paul’s undependability is soon matched by Woliner’s. It’s hard not to have qualms about the director setting up his protagonist to receive so much undeserved attention and sympathy, particularly as Paul’s ugliness toward women comes into sharper focus. ... By the end, there’s no reason to trust Woliner any more than his subject.

“Poker Face” is meant to be as comfortingly familiar as “Russian Doll” was novel and challenging. But the show still conjures as much charisma and surprise as it can inside its rather thoughtful formula.

The show’s rough-hewn center is the surrogate father-daughter bond between Joel and Ellie, but the series works best as an anthropological travelogue of post-catastrophe subcultures, teasing out the disparate ways that survivors rebuild mini-societies and create new alignments of power.

The result is an ideas-rich but disjointed series that feels like it’s tackling too much, yet somehow hardly enough, with a protagonist whose motivations are subject to whatever wild happenstance the scripts are setting up next.

Startling letdown. ... The season lacks narrative deftness and historic scale. ... Season 5 takes a more he-said, she-said approach to her [Diana's] marriage. The depiction rings true, though it lacks the camp and chaos that enlivened the previous version. ... Season 5 shies away from the inevitable; Dodi is smitten with a different spotlight-seeking blonde by its end. Because of that timidity (and the compressed time frame), the larger arc feels incomplete, structurally unsound.

It’s a credit to the scripts that the testy conversations between journalist and subject are as engaging as the scenes of Louis’s transformation from mortal to (self-loathing) monster.

The second season initially feels like a mere echo of the first. ... But the first five episodes suggest that White has undergone his own unclenching. The airless sociological fatalism of Season 1, which was matched by a claustrophobic production due to covid-19 restrictions, gives way to a more mature drama, as well as a deeper exploration of how the characters’ class concerns converge with gendered angst.

“The Murdochs” doesn’t need the Roys; the series is terrific enough on its own. Though the visuals are mostly pulled from old interviews, archival materials and (evocative) stock images, they’re so slickly edited and spliced with talking heads that you don’t feel the absence of the subjects, who chose not to participate.

The generational divide among the teachers feels organic to the setting, and the jokes are so rooted in character there’s something for everybody. ... By giving the tropes of yore such a fresh update, [creator and actor Quinta] Brunson may have forged a new classic of her own.

The sixth and final season of “The Good Fight,” the Paramount Plus spinoff of “The Good Wife,” hauntingly captures the resigned malaise of living in a reality that feels irreparably untethered. ... The Kings don’t seem to mind offering up some fan service. And yet the most satisfying storylines belong to Diane’s legal partner, Liz (Audra McDonald), and protege, Marissa (Sarah Steele).

The characters — including Elves Galadriel and Elrond, played by Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving in the films — are phyllo-dough thin, and the plots not much more substantial. ... The performances are serviceable but unremarkable, while the dialogue is particularly corny and inartful, with too many intoned monologues about the search for “the light” or the ever-vague nature of evil.

Suspenseful and darkly funny, the 10-part limited series supplies a fairly original B-plot as well. ... For all its character depth, the slyly plotted season has no shortage of twists and surprises. ... It’s a more-than-worthy follow-up to one of the best dramas of the past decade.

Sprinting from one big, defining moment to the next, punctuated with boxing scenes that are tertiary to the main tale, it’s hard to figure out what, if anything, the audience is supposed to glean from this immersive exhibit of “This is Your Life: Mike Tyson.” Nothing is revealed, only dramatized, which is certainly entertaining — but illuminating?

The most thrilling or unsettling surprises of the original show were rooted in character, and so it is with the new series. It’s too bad “House of the Dragon” takes such a long time to define and shade the Targaryens and those in their orbit. But once it’s done, their viciousness gleams all the more against the darkness.

The overall results are so shaggy and uneven, with characters and incidents from the comics that add little to the story on screen, that the reasons to adapt “The Sandman” never exceed the reasons not to have done so. ... The rocky performances and wavering accents among the secondary cast members parallel the disappointingly unimaginative (and not particularly lavish) special effects.

For most of the season’s eight episodes, Colin remains a cipher (though it’s not as if any of the other characters get much fleshing-out). ... “Uncoupled” is flat, joyless and surprisingly cold-looking.

A somber, introspective and highly mannered take on the prank show — Comedy Central meets Charlie Kaufman. ... But if the result is too often forced and airless, at least Fielder can boast once again that he’s created another singular series that doesn’t resemble anything else on television.

Hauser, the show’s standout, presents a terrifyingly shrewd version of his screen type as a darkly comic bungler (as seen in “I, Tonya” and “BlacKkKlansman”). Unfortunately, the drama’s other half — Jimmy’s descent into the hell of an institution for the “criminally insane” and forced bond with a monster that makes him confront long-repressed memories of his own violence-filled childhood — is too by-the-numbers to be emotionally engaging.

There’s plenty to praise here but also just enough to twitch a few fingers in preparation for a Hulk Smash.

No season has fully cohered, including the third outing that debuted Friday, which feels a tad too earnest for its own good.

The simplicity of the plot gives away the disastrous overconfidence in stretching the story out to 12 half-hour chapters. ... The result is a frustrating weightlessness to the ups and downs of Frances and Nick’s entanglement, which is supposed to be overwhelming and potentially life-altering because of her youth and his unique vulnerabilities. But it’s mostly just a snooze.

It’s a joy to see the rest of the series catch up with [Jean Smart's] munificent excellence in its sophomore year. The writing is funnier and more poignant, the ensemble has gelled and the tonal jaggedness that plagued the previous season has been smoothed out. With Smart never better, the first six episodes (of eight total) find the show firing on all cylinders. It’s exactly what you’d hope from any sophomore season.