Robyn Bahr

Think America’s Next Top Model meets So You Think You Can Dance. ... Lizzo’s emphasis on personal vulnerability, body positivity and fat acceptance is simultaneously heartening and cloying. The empowerment talk can be stultifying, but the sets and costumes awash in galvanizing neons, pastels and iridescents maintain the energy.

Meatier Season 2 delves into Emily’s personal growth. Her emotional progression is gradual and almost imperceptible until the last two episodes of the season, when you suddenly realize yes, she might still be grating to the last, but she’s no longer the wide-eyed naïf she was when she stepped out of that cab in the fifth arrondissement. ... As was with the first season, the most valuable people on screen are Emily’s coworkers.

AJLT is not particularly funny or horny but it’s also not striving to be. It would rather ask the larger existential questions.

Chad is often hilarious, bracing and sweet.

The film is pleasant and watchable, a cheerleading effort to rally support for a purported stand-up sisterhood, but I kept waiting for the personal revelations that would drop my jaw. ... Scope may be Nevins' most conspicuous weakness here. In wanting to capture "women in comedy" as a cultural monolith, she ends up erasing the individualized voices and personae that help these women stand out in their industry.

I question whether preschoolers and kindergarteners, the seeming target audience, would be able to cognitively follow along with Waffle and Mochi's brimming half hour escapades. The loving intentions are clear, but the writers often play with too many lessons at once.

It remains unclear how the new protagonist will impact the show's overall momentum, as these opening chapters work to transition viewers to a new narrative schema. So far, Leslie's character provides some classic "fish out of water" levity to an otherwise self-serious superhero melodrama. That novice energy comes at some cost, however, to the series' established emotional dimensions.

No longer solely relying on dizzying tonal juxtapositions, the series flourishes in ten-episode Season 2 thanks to this revamped balance between 21st-century absurdity and 19th-century poignancy.

Bialik's bubbliness isn't enough to overpower the flabby storytelling and trite third act moralizing, but Call Me Kat has the potential to deepen its ensemble's characterizations over time. As of now, though, I only want to be friends with Kat and Kat alone.

Nair splashes us with jiggly sex scenes and unsubtle camerawork. The potency of Seth's story remains intact; Davies and Nair's stylization nearly clobbers it.

Despite my mean-girl enmity toward the protagonist, Emily in Paris is strikingly watchable, an escapist confection brimming with easily digestible plots, costumes and characters. Turn off your brain and crank up Candy Crush.

At its worst, The Duchess is a disastrous Catastrophe copycat. At its best, it's a deranged mother-daughter love story. But nothing can erase the stink lines radiating off this alleyway dumpster.

With an infectious guitar-infused pop soundtrack and a goofy-cute trio of kindly Emo Ken spirits to drive the fun, nine-episode Julie and the Phantoms rises from kiddie shlock to buoyant family entertainment.

Acorn's imported British comedy The Other One, also inspired by a true story of fraudulent fatherhood and long-lost siblings, charmingly finds the middle ground between dense pathos and glib laughs. The show is a rare gem.

Warm, thoughtful and intimate, the doc is no ordinary celebrity vanity project or insider's peak reality series. ... Think of Expecting Amy as Schumer's Madonna: Truth or Dare or Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé, sans the chiaroscuro pretensions of both. ... In the portrait of this artist, we finally see the effort put into being "effortless".

I'm delighted to find that Netflix's 10-episode adaptation of the series is not only warm and effervescent — it's downright among the best shows the streaming platform has produced to date.

Thematically, Warrior Nun is nothing you haven't seen before, and aesthetically, nothing you ever want to see again. Bleak, dour and trudging, the series contains none of the kitschy, blasphemous fun of its title.

A grandiloquent mess.

At its best, Trying candidly lays bare the emotional filigree of failing to conceive a child and choosing to devote your life to a tiny stranger. At its worst, it yokes us to two unlikable people who grind you down with their endless neuroses.

Betty, beautifully and unselfconsciously queer, resides somewhere on the hazy spectrum between matriarchy and endless summer. ... Some viewers may complain Betty goes nowhere, or moves too muddily. I found its languor soothing, an emancipating celebration of femme self-acceptance.

Watching Issa and Lawrence once again dance around each other and their history and witnessing Molly struggle in another relationship makes for repetitive storytelling, even if the friends' frustration with each other acknowledges this Möbius-strip behavior. Retreading old patterns isn't fun for friends, and it certainly isn't fun for viewers. ... The HBO comedy is as funny as ever, but I miss its lighter spirit.

Greig and Walter, stalwart veterans of British stage and screen, lead a compelling ensemble. ... If you can tolerate period dialogue peppered with modern idioms, you'll find a zippy and engaging soap in Belgravia.

Be Our Chef is a charmingly peppy, brainless half-hour. I mean that with loving intent.

Despite showrunner Will Davies' best efforts to electrify the stakes with contemporary high-fantasy clichés ranging from sassy maidens to Shamanistic bloodlines, the story remains downright quaint and the climax laughably limp.

Babies takes a non-linear approach when highlighting the families, editing in footage of infants and toddlers as dictated by the episode's theme, not the chronological progress of the child. ... This choppiness ultimately denies viewers the opportunity to bond with the babies as characters, so we instead start seeing them as objects to "prove" the developmental theories proposed by the episode's featured researchers.

The show is pleasant, manic and stale all at once, yet neither sophisticated nor weird enough to engender immediate viewer loyalty. Judging from the two episodes available to critics, I see potential for it to grow and eventually find its voice. But it also appears to be stuck on the wrong premise.

High Maintenance still hypnotizes, even as we've slipped from the delicate optimism of the early 2010s to the bulldozing nihilism of 2020s. In the terrific opening episodes of Season 4, we watch the masks go on and the masks come off. ... You never know what little delight you're going to find.

The premiere feels so sluggish — I could barely see what the contestants were putting together, only quick cuts across their displays while they fussed over whether to choose a duck theme. To combat this, the producers cleverly include some fun stop-motion segments to bring the Lego minutiae alive, but these brief vignettes are far and few between. ... Arnett's signature unctuousness is awkward here, as he tries to insert self-deprecating (but still ultimately self-involved) humor into the proceedings.