Liam Mathews

The first three quarters of this six-episode season is a vague story that takes a long time to go nowhere. There's not enough character for a character study and not a clear enough plot for a satisfying thriller.

Halo commits the sin of reminding the viewer of a similar, better show [The Mandalorian.] ... But ultimately, what pushes Halo from being mediocre to good is its action.

Atlanta remains one of TV's most distinctive shows, if not the most distinctive, artistically ambitious show of its era. It's hilarious, disturbing, sad, and silly all at once, and is unafraid to challenge its audience. It's intelligently confrontational humor that forces white viewers to consider what they're laughing at. Unless it somehow falls off a cliff in quality after the first two episodes, Atlanta Season 3 keeps the show's streak of being one of the best shows on TV alive.

Even though The Thing About Pam has significant flaws, it is compulsively watchable.

Super Pumped is imperfect, but it's mostly successful. It's a fast-paced and entertaining story of an Icarus you can't wait to see fall.

The Endgame feels like it wants to be a little crazy, and it's straining against its self-imposed strictures.

The modesty of its thematic and narrative ambitions keep Inventing Anna from being a great show. It could have been truly great if it had decided to really be about something, but instead it's content to just be fun. It knows what it is and succeeds at what it sets out to do.

As We See It is an authentic and respectful look at the lives of neurodiverse people and their loved ones that's life-affirming and tear-jerking.

Overall, 1883 is a grand, well-made Western adventure that fans of the genre and the less soapy parts of Yellowstone will enjoy, should they choose to embark on the perilous journey from cable into the streaming frontier.

It doesn't conjure up nostalgic memories of the late '90s and early '00s. It just turns I Know What You Did Last Summer into yet another sour Gen Z drama without much personality of its own.

The most revelatory part of The Good Lord Bird is how funny it is.

The conspiracy plot is twisty and surprising, and is the rare plot like this that stays interesting as it gets deeper. A lot of thrillers like Utopia have trouble sustaining themselves past the initial premise in the first couple of episodes, but Utopia remains compelling.

It posits that Comey is an imperfect but decent man who did what he thought was right and whose biggest flaw is an outsized ego. ... But the show fails to adequately contextualize Comey's mistakes, which are institutional rather than just personal. It's a failure as an attempt to clarify recent history, made worse by a series of artless creative choices.

At this point, even after three years between seasons, the Fargo model has gotten a little stale. Season 4 is feeling a bit like diminishing returns. Which is not to say the show is at all bad; it's still fun to watch and exceptionally well-made. It just doesn't feel as vital as it once did.

On paper, it has the elements of a hit. But in practice, it's another example of how many things have to go right to make a successful show, and Brave New World has too many parts out of place to be a success — and stripped out one of the most important parts that would have made it a success.

Douglas has the thoughtful craft and righteous anti-patriarchy anger you'd expect from the person who made Nanette, but it has a lighter touch, a looser structure, and no moment like the climax of Nanette in which she doesn't tell jokes, only truth.

The limited series is as complete a portrait of Michael Jordan's extraordinary basketball career as fans will ever get. It's a Citizen Kane-like biography of Jordan's relentless pursuit of greatness at all costs.

It's a chilling and effective reflection of American life in the past five years and semi-paranoid fantasy of where the country could head, with a remarkable level of craft in its acting, writing, and direction.

Dave Burd made a whole show about how "Dave Burd" has a terrible penis.

Hunters directly imitates Quentin Tarantino's distinctive style but lacks his sophistication and mastery of craft. A Tarantino film can make you feel like you've seen all these puzzle pieces before, but never assembled in this way. Hunters makes you feel like you're watching a really long Tarantino knockoff that lacks the director's humor and audaciousness.

Edie Falco is so talented that she can make this formulaic CBS cop drama watchable. She can't quite make it good, but she saves it from being bad.

McMillions' flaws are outweighed by how good the story and characters are. It feels like a heist movie.

If it weren't for the references to weed vapes, Outmatched could have been time-warped from the early '90s.

The past few years have seen a flood of Stephen King adaptations, and The Outsider is different than all of them. It's fascinating to see his familiar themes (grief) and tropes (people controlled by a malevolent force) rendered in the somber tones of an HBO drama.

Deputy is a melange of Western and cop show cliches in a novel-enough package, thanks to creators Will Beall, who writes, and David Ayer, who directs the pilot.

Reprisal would be a lot of fun if it were 100 minutes long. Unfortunately, it's 10 episodes, some of which are fully an hour long. Reprisal suffers from the same problem so many shows in the Peak TV era do: Not enough story to justify the runtime.

Servant is creepy, compulsively watchable fun, with a distinct personality. It shows that Apple is willing to make shows that are pretty dark, pretty risky, and not particularly aspirational.

Creator Alena Smith has thought the world out well, and the show feels grounded in its own reality. It doesn't overdo the ironic modernity, instead sprinkling a handful of mild swear words and slang terms into each episode in a way that doesn't take the viewer out of the story. It's pretty artfully done.