Ross McIndoe

The characters’ antics and idiosyncrasies—disrupting each other’s classes, dedicating lectures to tearing down each other’s work, talking insistently in literary quotations—often verge on the cartoonish. ... Lucky Hank does traffic in some interesting ideas about the generational divide between faculty and students.

This lack of character development renders the show’s big, dramatic confrontations inert.

The Company You Keep eschews this opportunity for tension or real sparks in favor of a straightforward good-versus-evil tale and easy likeability. As a crime show that ardently refuses to get its hands dirty, it can’t help but come off as a one-dimensional photocopy of better films and TV shows.

While Shrinking does sail a bit close to the wind at times, it mostly does a good job of keeping its whimsical side sufficiently anchored in reality.

The side-quest to find her mother never really turns up anything especially revelatory and only adds to the sense that Kindred is spinning its wheels.

Three Pines boasts the mysterious murders, puzzling clues, and various other requisite tropes of a compelling detective tale, flat dialogue and wooden acting mean that Gamache is unlikely to be joining Marple, Holmes, and Benoit Blanc in the pantheon of on-screen sleuths.

The series puts a spiritual spin on the police procedural, carrying out a compelling investigation but ultimately struggling to uncover anything profound.

Painfully obvious jokes made at the expense of painfully obvious targets abound. If you fed the jokes from any number of early-2000s sitcoms into an AI generator, it would probably spit out something resembling Blockbuster.

Shantaram suffers from a problem that is symptomatic of the streaming era: Despite the novel’s 900-plus pages, the series should have been a movie.

Thanks in part to the cunning charm of the period story, balanced by its present-day sections, Interview with the Vampire meaningfully comments on identity, intersectionality, and abuse, while still managing to be an intoxicating series about guys with gigantic incisors who sleep in coffins.

In its first few episodes, Andor has established an exceptionally immersive world and put the pieces in place for a tense, thrilling story underpinned by big ideas. By returning to some of the series’s core principles rather than merely recycling old parts, Andor might be the most exciting new beginning the Star Wars universe has enjoyed since those giant yellow letters first crawled up the big screen to invite us into the galaxy far, far away.

From the triumphant scenes in which Maddie and David rekindle their relationship inside a World of Warcraft-like video game to Chanda’s disturbing encounter with the ghoulish remains of UIs past, the wildly inventive Pantheon paints an online world as a place of boundless possibility, a lifeless digital abyss, and everything in between.

Mike refuses to equivocate on Tyson’s guilt and, as a result, finally seems ready to reckon with everything that its lead character truly is. And unless they pull their punches, the final three episodes are squared up to deliver a total knock-out.

With its morbidly intriguing premise and two powerhouse actors at its center, The Patient would have been a blast even if it was just another grisly thriller about a high-functioning psychopath. But it chooses to delve deeper than that, asking some poignant questions about empathy that even those of us who don’t shackle people to our bedroom floors can learn from.

From its first bloody explosion, Little Demon has such a gleeful disregard for the bodies being flung around and torn asunder that the moments of occasional earnestness don’t really cohere with the rest of the series. Little Demon is a more effectively provocative show when it’s being truly demonic. ... Still, the hit rate of Little Demon’s jokes is high enough to make each individual episode enjoyable whether they add up to anything greater or not.