Steven Scaife

Based on the four episodes made available for review, season three is more of a throwback to Ted Lasso’s original formula of silly plus tender, multiplied by wickedly smart. It’s only in comparison to the show’s previous highs that these episodes feel somewhat earthbound.

Perry Mason’s second season may be watchable, but it’s so much louder about saying so much less.

We never see an ordinary workday, and we have so little sense of the characters’ personal lives that any mention of them feels jarring. They seem to exist only as lenses through which to view the ensuing chaos, not least of which because the series fails to drum up a plausible reason for Craig and Elaine to stop shopping their résumés around and stay at CompWare. Viewers, luckily, are under no such obligation.

Clearly there are meant to be modern parallels in this tale of hucksters duping people who will believe whatever they want to believe. But the themes never quite gel, leaving even the histories of more complex characters like Jack feeling undercooked.

Occasionally, Poker Face feels as though it’s running up against the fundamental disconnect of its format: that murder is a serious crime that happens to a real person but also a constant vehicle for pure entertainment. ... But in the end, the series is designed to ably coast on Lyonne’s charm as she spars with its myriad guest stars—and on that front it delivers in spades.

Ahead of the predictable and unsatisfying cliffhanger, the series slows to a crawl, and there’s an inescapable sense that it’s built every inch of its reveal-driven plotting around a mystery that can’t even manage to be very mysterious.

We wouldn’t believe it without the knowledge that it’s true. All the same, it manages to ground itself in a truth that’s much more terrifying for how mundane it is: These events have as much to do with their central bogeyman as they do with a broader culture of conservatism that fosters parental self-involvement and naïveté.

Perhaps the individual parts of Entergalactic might have been more effective if they’d been chopped up into individual music videos. Taken all together, however, they create a mind-numbing experience whose writing and visual stylings remain dispiritingly earthbound.

The show’s overqualified cast—which also includes Keegan Michael-Key and Judy Greer—at least wring mild comedy from even hackneyed cracks about clashing age groups and the sort of timing-based gags that tend to involve the phrase, “He’s right behind me, isn’t he?”

Players may not reach the comedic heights of American Vandal, but it most visibly follows in that show’s footsteps by taking its characters seriously, no matter how ridiculous their situation may be.

The series has a few charming deviations from the 1965 film, and the allegiances between its characters are excitingly muddled, especially across scenes where they make veiled threats to one another in polite settings. But expanding the story has done its tired themes few favors.

The series has lost the air of uncertainty in favor of depicting lives whose problems are implausibly neat and solvable. It’s a journey for definite solutions that feels less like the messy, disorienting process of being alive than playing a video game while reading the strategy guide.

Roar feels more like a series of free-floating metaphors tied limply to the skeleton of a plot.

The series is doubtlessly setting the stage for an eventual explosion of conflict encompassing parties both in and out of Greenvale, but with the early storylines mostly given over to the slow reveal of everyone’s past, it’s easy to wish that it took a little less time to pick up steam.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey starts strong but, by failing to probe further into its protagonist’s life, its main character only grows thinner as the story progresses.

Whatever massaging has gone into coherently dramatizing this story never feels like enough. Travis often goes on about how the Uber app is meant to be a “frictionless” experience, but this misshapen series is anything but.

The rubber hose animation of the ‘30s is a striking and novel skin to stretch over a traditional run-and-gun video game, but as a series of bite-sized stories, The Cuphead Show can’t help but come up short.

The Afterparty operates smoothly in an overtly parodic mode, but the series feels out of its depth when it tries to go for anything else.

Each story is directed by different independent animators, and though all of the roughly half-hour segments are handsomely made, the series as a whole lacks a sturdy foundation.

The melancholic poetry of the original series largely evaporates, leaving this version feeling somehow more cartoonish than the anime that spawned it.

Chucky walks a fascinating tonal tightrope as a funny, absurd series that engenders sympathy as well as shock for characters who are more than worthy of our derision. It creates a world of malleable, alienated kids failed to varying degrees by their parents, and then it expresses the danger of what they find once they’re pushed away.

The Premise would do better to simply commit to its white-centric myopia rather than occasionally and clumsily gesturing toward peripheral people of color. Though the series shows some insight into the hypocrisy of its subjects, it seems oblivious to its flattening of marginalized characters into little more than bystanders to some white person’s mess.

In another show, Lisa might have been the naïve victim in a cautionary tale about what can happen in the pursuit of power. Instead, as the series brings her own transgressions into focus, she remains bracingly imperfect, an anchor for the deep and hopeless pessimism that Brand New Cherry Flavor clearly and forcefully articulate.

The series captures a feeling more successfully than it develops its characters, but there’s a thematic power to that aimlessness.

Dr. Death relishes in the lurid details and messy personal lives of its characters, employing nonlinear chronology for maximum drama and ironic juxtaposition. But despite the show’s few thrills, its structure only reveals an unsteady grasp of the story at its center.

A great deal of the show’s appeal, though, lies in that sometimes overreaching ambition, which insists on tackling the difficult topics that exist even within this vibrant and inscrutable universe. In that regard, the series remains genuine and insightful even when it doesn’t always quite succeed.

Kevin Can F**k Himself is a series about rebellion with a format that feels rebellious in only the most superficial sense, an effective visual statement that ultimately doesn’t do much more than very slowly mash together two eminently familiar TV staples, the bland sitcom and the escalating problems faced by a character who breaks bad.

In the end, the show feels even less ambitious than The Witcher, but like that other Netflix fantasy series, it at least progresses at a fairly brisk pace.