William Hughes

Moonhaven works as both a mystery and a sci-fi allegory; despite a sometimes slow pace, it steadily layers on clues to both the murder and the culture that produced it. ... But it’s also a quietly human series, whether racing toward the next beat of the mystery or taking a moment to appreciate the strange (sometimes corny) beauty of the world it’s created for itself.

The irony is that it’s actually a pretty solid B in terms of most of its individual aspects, and it’s only when it tries to jam all of them together into a cohesive whole that the seams start to show. ... As is, the show ends less on a dramatic question mark about the grand nature of the War In Heaven and more on what the whole series, ultimately feels like: a slightly sweet, not especially eventful shrug.

Sometimes these efforts are awkward. Sometimes these efforts are outright corny. But occasionally—and especially when Moffat and Nutter are willing to take their hands off the throttle and let the show live in the weird emotional intricacies of the relationship it’s supposed to be about—James and especially Leslie manage to make you understand why Henry and Claire’s love is so compelling.

Sometimes the comedy of The Pentaverate lives up to those ambitious visuals, often with structural or meta jokes, like the silly Irons intros, or a running gag that is, hands down, the finest comedy work of Maria Menounos’ career. ... The Pentaverate is more wistful than scatalogical when it comes to its satire, though.

Schreiber and Ha have good hero-sidekick chemistry, and there’s an element of dedicated sci-fi weirdness that keeps things from feeling too rote. (Bokeem Woodbine, for instance, is having a lot of fun in a second-episode role as literally the only person John knows who is not a government-altered killing machine.) But the whole thing is brought down by the writing—which never goes for a second-draft line when a first-draft line will do—and by an abiding and pervasive sense of cheapness.

Mythic Quest reminds us of how wonderful it can be to dip back into a comedy series that has so much to say about, and so much passion for, its actual subject matter.

If you can hang with its shifts, you’ll find a show that is working at high speed to try to embody multiple elements on the superhero cynicism scale, sometimes all at once. Funny, exciting, and emotionally smart—seriously, Sandra Oh is killing it here.

Sometimes punk-rock anarchy is indistinguishable from simple, tuneless thrashing, and that’s a pitfall The Watch falls into more often than not. It’s worth a watch, if only to see if you’re the person BBC America has made it for. But don’t be surprised if it doesn’t turn out to be the watch for you.

Pretty much everything that makes Aunty Donna’s such an unrelenting delight is right there from the jump: a mixture of playful silliness, sudden violence, and self-skewering meta-comedy that infects the entire production.

Console Wars never quite settles on the story it’s trying to tell.

Getting to see these kids bounce off each other, and Howerton, is still a hoot, and while the show falls back into the run-of-the-mill rhythms of the sitcom more often than we might like, it’s still a flavor of “run of the mill” in which Patton Oswalt spins devil sticks in an effort to sexually out-display an ever-delightful Paula Pell. If the show’s coasting a bit at this point, at least it’s still doing so in roughly the right direction.

Book 3 is Infinity Train’s best season to date, and the show’s engine show no signs of slowing down just yet.

More importantly, it just feels fantastic to be back in this world—even if said world isn’t actually, well, Ooo. The show’s comedy writing is as sharp as ever, and a whole host of great guest stars and returning voices (Randall Park, John Hodgman, John DiMaggio, Tom Kenny, Stephen Root, and more) all bring their characters to life with that very specific Adventure Time blend of irony and sincere weirdo glee.

The transitory nature of death in this universe allows the show’s writers to mine some very dark laughs out of moments of surprise violence or gore, and the fact that they’ve got William B. Davis, The X-Files’ own Smoking Man, on hand to lob some of the bleakest one-liners doesn’t hurt. But as bracing as Upload’s comedy can be, it’s the human side that often lets it down.

The series shares with its protagonist a tendency to spend too much time and energy on maintaining the look of normalcy, leaving large portions of its first installment feeling just a tad too restrained. There are early signs of life. ... But it’s not until the back half, when Sewell lets the mask start to slip, that The Pale Horse stops futzing around with classiness and finds its sense of nasty, brutish fun.

Mythic Quest is funny. And Mythic Quest is capable of real feeling. The show’s biggest demerit, then, is that it can’t seem to find a way to be both at the same time; rather, it frequently feels like a tag-team match between its two sensibilities, with comedy doing the heavy lifting for the vast majority of that time. But that disjointed feeling isn’t enough to sabotage all the things Mythic Quest actually gets right.

When the worst thing you can say about a series is that every episode ends up being better than the one that preceded it, that leaves an exciting amount of room to grow. Especially when you can see it steadily moving out of the shadow of the show Netflix might have wanted, in favor of the far more interesting series it might actually turn out to be.

At 22 minutes, episodes occasionally strain the limits of its dialogue-free, roar-heavy approach to storytelling. As an event, though—as a dose of bracingly original animation from a master of the form—it’s hard to question its few missteps. After all, everybody’s gotta eat.

In the past, Star Wars has only ever given us brief glimpses of what it’s like to pass through any given hive of scum and villainy (even one that’s been sanitized for kids’ TV). Resistance seems ready to give the little guy his shot, and for a franchise that’s always loved an underdog, it’s an idea that arrives with a lot of force.