Jen Chaney

The rare show that feels inscrutable at first and eventually seduces you to such an intense degree that you would eagerly die on the nearest available hill defending it.

Its characters may be quick-witted, entertaining, and portrayed by skillful actors, but listening to them drone on about the same personal problems becomes enervating over the course of ten episodes.

The producers seemed to believe that if you’re going to bother hosting an awards show, you may as well let it breathe, lean into the elements of surprise that live TV offers, and enable the honorees to enjoy themselves while still mocking the frivolity of the whole exercise. This year’s Globes got that part right.

Fight scenes and gun battles are filmed as if the viewer is looking through the eyes of the character delivering the blows or pulling the trigger. This approach is deployed just often enough to add a sense of immediacy without feeling too much like a gimmick. The Last of Us distinguishes itself most when it veers off the path laid by its source material.

Even if the broader outlines of its story are reminiscent of other music-focused films and shows, what makes this portrait so watchable is the shading brought to it by Chastain and Shannon. They show up in every episode with every color of paint on their palette, and display an effortless sense of control over every single stroke.

Absorbing but choppy fifth go-round. While it depicts tumultuous and unpredictable times for the royal family, it also presents some of the members of that family in ways that seem inconsistent with what we’ve come to expect from them, both within the context of this series and in the real world.

Dahmer has a habit of announcing what kind of show it wants to be instead of actually being that show. ... I can only hope creators will realize there is a way to tell these kinds of stories with more sensitivity and care rather than mere gestures toward sensitivity and care. In the sixth episode, Dahmer does exactly that, but it doesn’t maintain that approach for the entirety of its season. ... It’s admirable that Dahmer wants to honor the victims’ lives and celebrate who Hughes was as a person. But that effort can’t be a complete success in a show that also insists on literally reducing Hughes to a piece of meat.

It is a confusing but often entertaining time to watch television. Appropriately, the 2022 Emmy Awards honoring all that television was also a confusing, often entertaining experience. ... The Emmys was a little too much too fast — the broadcast sailed through 25 categories last night, one more than we typically see at the Academy Awards, and still finished right on time at 11 p.m. ET. But within that flurry of activity, the Emmys captured some unexpected, truly sublime moments.

It is, pardon the pun, all killer, no filler. ... There are moments of genuine discovery and shock. ... It may not be the most uplifting series you’ll watch this year, but it’s certainly one of the most thought-provoking and absorbing.

Too many times, you watch and go, “Seen this before. Yep, seen that too.” Even the dialogue nods to this redundancy. ... By the end of season four, though, the show is replaying its own greatest hits way too often.

Everyone on The Bear must always brace for the unexpected, and that is what makes this series so instantly compelling, tense, and beautiful all at once. These eight episodes may leave you breathless and a little dizzy. But when it’s over, prepare to say, “Thank you, chef.”

The visual effects are more sophisticated and so is the filmmaking; the transitions between scenes, which track four different running story lines, are more elegant and make a sprawling season feel relatively cohesive. Does it feel bloated given those longer run-times? At times, yes. But by episode three, I was again invested in what’s happening in Hawkins (as well as some new locations), and less concerned about the amount of minutes that investment required.

An absorbing exploration of commitment, friendship, and romantic love.

Hacks is at its best in moments like that, when it highlights life at its most simultaneously hilarious and wrenching. It just takes a little while for it to reach those scenes this time around. ... Season two is much looser and, like a stand-up tour, jumps from place to place without clearly addressing its broader ideas.

It’s hard to imagine gleaning something new from a subject that’s already been explored via multiple hours of television. But The Staircase, which casts Colin Firth in the role of Michael and Toni Collette as Kathleen, defies expectations, adding new perspective and dimension to a well-known story while creating an experience that differs from the docuseries.

There are moments when the show seems more interested in making a case than telling a full-fledged story, and the timeline-jumping can get confusing despite the text from incident reports used as transitions and designed to to keep us grounded in the chronology of events. Nevertheless, it’s a vivid, richly detailed series, shot with gritty intimacy by director Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard) and worth watching for a host of reasons. A big one is Bernthal’s performance.

Exceptional. ... It’s so good this season that I not only want to recommend it to Vulture readers, I want to hand out flyers to random people on the street, imploring them to watch.

One of the flaws in this well-acted but overly drawn-out limited series is that we never get sufficient insight into Michelle’s behavior.

Despite its positives, Bridgerton is ultimately not as fully, effectively transportive this go-round. Even though both seasons rely heavily on the tropes of romantic storytelling, this one makes it easier to spot those tropes and become distracted by their presence. ... But the real scandal — Lady Whistledown herself would certainly confirm this — is that there’s less excitement.

As it stands, this HBO series tells a messy, pulsating, occasionally problematic, but mostly entertaining version of the molding of a legendary basketball team. It’s not necessarily enlightening, but it is certainly a show.

The final gift this treasure of a series offers to us is a sequence that makes us feel like we’ve been part of Sam’s family the whole time.

Super Pumped makes the case that figures like Kalanick pride themselves on pushing boundaries so much that they decide boundaries don’t need to exist. And that’s interesting to explore, up to a point. But exploring that flawed, morally unmoored worldview also results in regurgitating messages that TV shows and movies about the business world have been telegraphing for decades.

It’s a multi-episode conversation that’s thoughtfully and sensitively handled, and rightly places emphasis on how Cosby’s downfall has affected the Black community. It is also transparent about how conflicted Bell and others remain when it comes to how to define this comedian, a feeling that ultimately interferes with the series reaching the strong conclusion it seems to be setting up.

Overall, The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window is short enough to not be a complete time suck yet long enough for the central gag to overstay its welcome, but honestly, if you’re on Netflix looking for a series that is funny, involves murder and wine, and is also suspenseful, you would probably be better off watching or rewatching Dead to Me.

This is a sitcom, sure. But the world it builds rings with authenticity. There are occasionally some extremely local Philadelphia jokes, and those too hit with the pinpointed accuracy of a laser beam.

This season of Euphoria is doing the most, and sometimes it’s so much that key figures fall somewhat by the wayside. This is a television series that doesn’t just depict the darker impulses of adolescence — horniness, jealousy, resentment, a flippant attitude toward one’s mortality. It wears them like a bodycon dress, a fresh gel manicure, and carefully applied eye glitter. And more often than not, this version of “too much” is a hell of a drug.

Station Eleven is a beautifully wrought piece of storytelling. ... Our world isn’t ending even though COVID is still a presence in it. But when you watch Station Eleven and become immersed in it, it really does become the whole wide world. What a gift.

There are occasional flashes of the insight and humor that helped make Sex and the City such a phenomenon in its day. ... But And Just Like That … comes across as desperate to seem cool and relevant in a very different TV landscape. Watching it made me feel old, and not because I, like these ladies, have aged since the original series. Nothing about the show feels organic; so much about it is painfully forced.