Pat Brown

If sometimes, despite the shift in setting, these new episodes can feel as familiar as a trip we’ve taken before, The White Lotus remains television’s most intriguing and precise murder mystery-cum-social satire.

The first six episodes are fun, light, and well-crafted, but much of what Strange New Worlds offers can’t help but come off as clever franchise strategizing.

Human Resources proves that there’s both comedy and poignancy yet to be mined from the impulse-creature conceit, even if it can’t fully expunge the aura of being an arbitrary spin-off.

The series is less a situational comedy about the stress of vacation than a satire on white American privilege. But it’s one in which the laughs are often supplanted by intimations of a barely obscured and gathering darkness, and in which the plot often appears subordinate to the seductive atmosphere of Disneyfied decadence gradually sliding into degradation.

This shift to a more ensemble-driven, idea-focused format is welcome. Despite a premiere that augurs poorly for its broader narrative arc, Discovery’s third season at least momentarily succeeds in thinking about undiscovered things to come.

At once hyper-local and global in its concerns, I May Destroy You feels eminently contemporary, a necessary artistic distillation of a distinctly modern form of life.

Big Mouth is at its best when its mile-a-minute humor supports, rather than distracts from, its open exploration of the convulsions of early-teen sexuality.

[These episodes] explores varying aspects of these women’s lives with each relatively self-contained episode. Even if a couple of these stories end up a tad undercooked, this approach to serial television gives GLOW an admirably democratic vibe, as it eschews the notion that there’s a single experience of the ‘80s that should dominate above the others.

The sense of cheapness and naked commercialism that pervades the series makes its explicit depiction of disturbing violence—a death by firing squad, the gang rape of a Jewish woman by German sailors—feel unearned and, particularly in the latter case, completely irresponsible.

The new season saddles its hero with more trauma, both psychological and physical, but loses the real-life resonance of the show’s previous themes, becoming an exercise in self-reflexivity.