Josh Bell

Drew, Portia, and Elliott’s early-season character arcs end up getting the short shrift once they band together to rescue Dory, but even if Search Party feels more disjointed than ever, it still boasts plenty of its trademark deadpan humor. The eventual wrap-up is more satisfying than any conclusion since season one, providing a sense of narrative and emotional closure.

Despite its timely trappings, Next works best as an empty-calorie thriller, with plot points that only hold together if you don’t think about them too much.

Bethan’s occasional voiceover narration is an inconsistent element of the series, but her self-aware commentary is a welcome counterpoint to her infuriatingly self-sabotaging behavior. While having Bethan explain her inner thoughts can easily become a narrative crutch, In My Skin could have benefited more from Bethan’s reflective observations, which give us a deeper understanding of her often impulsive decisions.

At one point in the series, a music executive condescendingly describes Bess’s music as “darling.” While that’s intended as a dubious insult, it captures the twee, navel-gazing tone of Little Voice.

By the end, the story’s rush of exposition can be dizzying, but the pieces fall into place in ways that aren’t entirely unbelievable. And the details, remixed from so many other mystery stories by Coben and others, will make sense in almost any language.

The episodic sitcom rhythms allow for an easier access point to the narrative about identity and prejudice—both internal and external. But it seems frustratingly hesitant to assert itself as a mainstream teen dramedy with an openly gay protagonist, returning to the starting line of Love, Simon rather than building forward from it.

Both the tone and the visual style are dark and murky, and while some of the historical details are fascinating, the crime drama around them is tedious and tiresome in any era.

A manipulative sociopath and compulsive liar, Cunanan is a tough protagonist to invest in for nine episodes, and while Criss makes him suitably unsettling, the show too often skews more toward the sleazy excesses of a ’90s erotic thriller than the methodical refinement of something like The Talented Mr. Ripley.

The cases are fine for the genre, and 9-1-1 seems like an acceptable time-passer for procedural fans. From Ryan Murphy, though, that qualifies as an anomaly.

With jokes about strippers, quickie weddings and niche conventions, the show certainly doesn’t have a sophisticated or original take on Vegas. Its take on air travel is slightly fresher, but for the most part it occupies the same sitcom level as the budget airline for which its characters work.

The six-episode season gets increasingly outlandish, eventually including time travel, doppelgangers and a machine that controls the weather. It’s not quite enough to transcend the mediocre comedy, thin characters and rote fight scenes, but at least it’s more entertaining than another assembly-line D-level action movie.

Happy! has a cartoonish sensibility more suited to drawings than live action. The more it strains to be edgy and shocking, the more laughable it becomes.

It’s not surprising that Sherman-Palladino’s dialogue sparkles, but she also effectively captures the time period, injecting just the right amount of quirkiness into the historical context. The set design, costumes and visually inventive direction (often from the creator herself) lavish as much attention on Midge’s home life as her professional aspirations, filling both with rich, rewarding detail. Marvelous is an understatement.

Sometimes the sheer number of characters gets a bit unwieldy, and the interpersonal drama is less thrilling than the prospect of colorful superhero action (which goes mostly unfulfilled in the first four episodes). But the teen characters are likable and grounded, and worth watching even when they aren’t tapping into their superpowers.

It’s a slow, monotonous story without a clear antagonist, and Frank is a grim, one-note character who works better as a supporting player than a lead. Amber Rose Revah brings some liveliness as a potentially sympathetic Homeland Security agent, but she barely interacts with Frank in the first six episodes.

The thrilling final battle is masterfully staged. It takes far too long to get there, though, with entire episodes in the middle of the series that seemingly could have been removed entirely.

It’s still mostly restrained and respectable, though, with modest production values and uneven performances.

When it premiered in 1998, Will & Grace was groundbreaking for its matter-of-fact depiction of the friendship between a gay man and a straight woman, even if its sitcom rhythms were already somewhat played out. Those jokes and storylines have only gotten weaker with age, and what was once a trailblazer is now left far behind.

The most successful shows of the current true-crime boom do more than just lay out the facts, but there isn’t much indication that True Crime will be more than a competently produced eight-part Law & Order episode.

Yacenda and Perrault create such an unexpectedly engrossing mystery that the eventual muddled resolution is a bit underwhelming, and sometimes the jokes get lost in the intricate details. Over the course of eight episodes, the show develops an impressive range of believable teenage characters, and as silly as the story can be, it’s the grounded reality of the show’s world that makes it funny.

It takes a little too long for the show’s eight-episode first season to bring its focus to the porn industry, and the middle episodes in particular are dominated by less compelling, more conventional storylines. But even the more thinly sketched characters are engaging to watch, and Simon and his collaborators effectively re-create the NYC of the past, closely enough that you can feel the grit.

At best, Inhumans resembles a mediocre ’90s syndicated genre series, and blowing it up to IMAX size just puts a bigger spotlight on the flaws.

Neither a hilarious parody nor an engrossing superhero story, this version of The Tick ends up in a dissatisfying middle ground.

The showbiz material is pretty thin, and much of the series takes place in dusty desert locations (shot in New Mexico), focusing on tired crime-drama devices. There’s none of the playful humor of Sonnenfeld’s film (there’s barely any humor at all), or the sly cleverness of Leonard’s crime novels (captured much more effectively in the Leonard-based Justified).

Some of Room 104’s episodes do have a sort of half-formed quality to them, built around character relationships that seem like they are just getting started once the episode ends. But for the most part, the series is an intriguing experiment, allowing the Duplasses and their collaborators the chance to explore multiple genres and approaches.

[The Last Tycoon is] full of awkward, hokey dialogue and clumsy contrivances. Even the production values are mediocre; the occasional clips meant to replicate ’30s-era movies are especially phony and unconvincing. Fitzgerald based Monroe on real-life studio executive Irving Thalberg, but the show has Thalberg appear as a separate character, and the consistently ineffective mix of real and fictional characters highlights how poorly the series captures such a fascinating world.

The producers have come up with a somber, plodding, almost entirely humorless mix of Breaking Bad and Justified, when they should have made a show about this spitfire of a character, the only one in the ensemble who isn’t bringing everything down.

Star Francois Arnaud, who plays psychic bad boy Manfred (everyone on the show has a silly name), is bland and affectless, and even a supporting cast that also includes an angel, a witch and some sort of international assassin can’t liven up the hodge-podge of elements from better supernatural dramas (including True Blood).