Troy Patterson

In building its own voice, the show thieves profitably from several schools of self-conscious yarn-spinning as it toys with oblique approaches to straight stories, with a rigor that counters its bits of squishy whimsy. ... I don’t dare guess what the vignettes add up to, other than a show so lyrical with dream logic that it’s intriguing even when it’s not strictly successful.

There’s an amazing tonal volatility to “Love Is Blind.” Slabs of crass exploitation abut moments of deep sentiment. There are touching scenes of human vulnerability and harrowing sequences of people lying to themselves at length. Vast idiocies of human behavior provoke moments of thoughtful reflection. The warped glass of the show magnifies universal quirks of human behavior into light comic grotesques.

Spectacularly misbegotten. ... Neither the moral deliberations of “Hunters” nor its technical prowess are adequate to its ambitions.

Though the characters are ill-tempered, the show comprises generally good-natured tales of competing egos and angry compromises.

“High Fidelity” has always concerned itself with nostalgia for youthful heartbreak, but, this time around, the mists of memory haze obscure the hero. The show unfolds in some atemporal nostalgia zone; Rob seems like a middle-aged person’s idealized view of a heartbroken young person. The song remains the same, but the playback device is somehow obsolete.

If the fact that this character literally is named Karen strikes you as either too clever or else somewhat dumb, then this is not the show for you. “Avenue 5” is distinguished by a high-low sensibility in which poop jokes are about waste and entropy and fatal pollution but also, foremost, about tons of poop, the sight of which lightens the mood.

“Dickinson,” cross-pollinating literary history with adolescent fantasy, is happy to get lost in its own fertile ideas about the essence of this rare flower.

“Watchmen” is to the superhero genre what a revisionist Western is to a basic cowboy myth, with John Wayne in the saddle of the national identity. It’s good enough to warrant repeat viewing. Is it coherent enough to withstand it?

The crimes described here seem heinous because they subvert the founding myths of meritocracy, and this Lifetime movie—with its strokes of low-brow expressionism, its inadvertently funny production values, its clever lead performances—converts the news story into an exhilarating nightmare. You hate these parents and you feel for them, and each feeling intensifies the other.

“The Politician” hits a tone—furiously angry, wistful beneath its bitterness—that is indebted to the disillusionment of the Nixon era, and updated to capture the disorientation of ours. The show doesn’t quite do subtlety, or subtext, but nor do these times.

Some fans of the first season took a while to warm to it—a measure, perhaps, of the characters’ loathsomeness. This season digs into their self-loathing. The conversations are hazing rituals.

Both a decadent summit of summertime reality soaps and a glowing ill omen of spiritual rot. ... The new show retains the original’s Warholian purity of inaction and its languid tension: nothing much happens, and it is not happening at a soothing pace, under a glazy gaze.

It’s a pungent profile of a nauseating figure. ... “The Loudest Voice” sees the behind-the-scenes culture of sexual assault and the onscreen show of Barnum-ized reactionaryism as two curves of the same lens, which is trained on America and not necessarily opposed to airing anything, especially if it did strong numbers in the demo.

As it is, the many excellent small performances in “When They See Us” feel especially small because of the series’ ambitious sweep. There are a lot of full characters here, but we only get partial views of them, and the interplay between the poetic evocations of these individual souls and the grand indictment of the criminal-justice system is rarely as compelling as one might like.

The adaptation is often rote and merely serviceable. Some scenes are inspired in their brutality, but this “Catch-22” seems, incongruously, to want to inspire its audience.

The narrowness of the show helps it wear its drawing-room lightness well, and it is littered with tiny delights.

The full thing on Netflix, framed as the fruit of artistic striving, may come close to achieving its epic ambitions, but it’s too soon to tell—the verdict won’t be in until a whole generation of children, homeschooling themselves on its choreography, have come of age.

The episodes do not prove uniformly coherent, but they do reward close scrutiny.

A jolly spoof of demonic gloom.

The virtues of The Act are often distinct from the details of its dramatic arc. It’s more a ready-made parable of toxic parenthood or a mass-cultural case study than a thriller. ... Arquette’s Dee Dee combines vigilant motherhood, complicated victimhood, and complete monstrosity. The character will be remembered as an icon of our era of grift, alongside the antiheroes of “Fyre Fraud,” “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” and “The Apprentice.”

The slightness and lightness are soothing, in this quiet-storm remix of a sitcom pastiche. You feel that he has been wise enough to delight in the foolishness of Charlie’s situation, and you feel charmed to be let in on his boondoggle.

The show, like the snack, is salty and slightly sweet, and its crispness is a sign of its authenticity.

The professional challenges that Robyn faces are often plausible, and far more compelling than their resolutions, which are mostly stupid. Flack has little to say about celebrity culture with its stories of contrived sex tapes, hushed-up face-lifts, sham marriages, and bogus redemption narratives. ... The show gets somewhat less uninteresting around the fifth episode, which is set in the business-class cabin of a transatlantic flight and proves an intriguingly creepy role for Bradley Whitford.

It’s a heartfelt, crackpot homage, with an independent creative vision.

It may surprise you to hear that this programming is gripping. ... This shamefully tasty hate-watch is also a study in human nature, a fine lowbrow opportunity both to marvel at the masks we put on and to examine how and why they crack.

The show is all over the place: it’s sharp when squinting at absurdity, juvenile when diarrhea jokes plop to the fore, sappy when it spares a moment to cherish the mystery and majesty of creation.

The adults’ performances are so committed as to erase the sense of difference. With the precise physicality of their hallway trudges and great shades of meaning in their many outbursts of “Oh, my God!,” the leads balance glorious caricature and subtle evocation. ... Where “Sex Education” offers a lot of easy answers to the embarrassments of puberty, “PEN15” loiters amid its difficult mysteries and discovers an embarrassment of riches.

It renders Don Cornelius (Sinqua Walls), the creator and host of “the hippest trip in America,” as an archetypal entrepreneur, and pushes the existential overtones of his striving to the front of the mix. ... The agonies of the secondary characters--the aspiring dancers and anguished assistants and shady scenesters--range from social melodrama to crime melodrama, from buppie-career-angst melodrama to escape-from-South Central melodrama.