Young's performance continues to be extraordinary, with a monologue late in the premiere all but guaranteed to raise the dust level in your home as you watch it. But it's a measure of the work McKinnon and the supporting actors have done in demonstrating how the smaller conflicts in the lives of Amantha or Ted Jr. or Tawney can be just as powerful (to them and to us) as Daniel's larger existential crisis.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has only gotten better, more confident, and more consistent as it's moved along. It knows exactly who its heroine is, what she's good at and what makes her terrifying, just as well as it has very quickly and appealingly figured out how to turn any potential weaknesses into additional strengths.

There are still great ideas--and one great episode, "San Junipero," that I'd put up against the best previous installments(*)--but on the whole it's much more uneven than the show's previous output.

This is all one big story, but each episode builds to an interesting climax that drives the story forward, and there's not the usual sag you get with a lot of the serialized Amazon and Netflix dramas.

Insecure is less inherently dramatic than some of the other Comedies In Theory, which makes the infrequency of laugh-out-loud moments a bigger issue than on, say, Casual, but Rae is a really engaging writer and performer, and the series is charming and compulsively watchable.

HBO's other new Sunday comedy Insecure is more consistent and sure of its voice, but I laughed a lot more watching Divorce, even as I kept feeling frustrated that it didn't seem willing to fully embrace the awfulness of its premise, or its entire cast of characters. To be as good as it can be, it has to be more willing to be bad.

Even if the vibe on the whole is very retro (the show could air in the '80s and '90s, and the only notable change would be more primitive special effects-- but in the moment, the most compelling parts are about how the missions impact the characters personally, whether through the people they meet in the past, or the way their actions alter the present.

The raw material's there; the show just needs more time in the lab to hopefully get it right.

In many of its moments, it's wonderful, but it suffers from the narrative sag common not only to the previous Netflix/Marvel team-ups, but most of Netflix's attempts at the "our season is really a 13-hour movie" model. ... Still, Mike Colter is every bit the charismatic hero promised by his Jessica Jones appearances.

It's less MacGyver with better production values than a bad 24 retread (with a hint of imitation Shondaland DNA) that occasionally pauses for duct tape.

It's not perfect right out of the gate--Kenneth needs to be defined by more than his amusement at Maya's unrelenting (and loud) mama bear style, though Yarbrough and Driver have a good comic rapport--but the family's likable, the writing finds humor in the world of special needs parenting without ever making fun of J.J. for his condition, and that world should provide plenty of fodder for Silveri and company to mine in success.

In a way, all Guggenheim needs to accomplish in the pilot is to put Sutherland behind the desk in the Oval Office, and he does that. But Designated Survivor feels like it could be a whole lot more than that, perhaps if it started trying to do a bit less overall.

This is a slick, watered-down Lethal Weapon, which is especially frustrating because it has those moments (like the ones in the later films) where it feels like it understands the point of it all, before abandoning that to do something goofier.

At this stage of things, The Good Place is more often clever-funny than haha-funny. Thankfully, it's really forking clever, not just in all the little details of how the Good Place functions, but in the way it gradually reveals all the things wrong with the neighborhood beyond Eleanor's presence.

I came into the series expecting a raunchy black comedy, and got that, but with the added bonus of something achingly beautiful when it wanted to be.

Whether you fall in love with the Conways or not, Quarry ends very well, and in a way that leaves me hoping it can one day offer its own equivalent of that classic fourth season of Boardwalk Empire.

As with Notaro's deadpan affect, the show seems to be holding itself in reserve and refusing to engage, yet the impact--on both the serious and silly sides--ultimately lands just as sharply as one of the punchlines from Notaro's act. It's all easygoing until it's anything but.

The show has a keen, charming grasp of the way parent-child relationships can sometimes fluctuate between screaming and hugging with no transition in between, and some of the most effective Better Things moments are brief cutaways to quiet times amidst the fighting, or vice versa.

Queen Sugar feels like a show built to last--albeit the sort that will frequently inspire its viewers to get choked up, shake their fists at the sky, and wonder why they keep letting Ava DuVernay and friends so expertly control their emotions like this.

If Atlanta is a surprise, it's frequently an excellent one.

An extremely straightforward mob saga, filled with moves, countermoves, and frequent bursts of violence.

It would be easy for all this reinvention to feel jarring, or like Halt desperately racing from one idea to the next because the last one ran out of steam. But each transition has felt natural, earned, and of a piece with what came before.

The Get Down is a mess. At times, it's a thrilling mess, at other times a boring one, and there's just barely enough energy in the parts that work to power through the many parts that don't.

Over the course of the eight hours, the story and characters take on enough life of their own so that the references don't feel self-indulgent, and so that the series can be appreciated even if you don't know the plot of E.T. or the title font of Stephen King's early novels (a huge influence on the show's own opening credits) by heart.

Two episodes (one of which many of you may have seen) isn't a big sample size to judge whether Mr. Robot will avoid the sophomore slump. But they're a very promising start, and a continuation of all that made the series so fascinating a year ago.

Through seven of its eight hours (HBO didn't give critics the finale in advance), it's vital and gripping. It's not an imitator dressing itself up in the trappings of a classic HBO drama, but the real deal.

There are occasional moments where Roadies conjures memories of Crowe at his most vibrant, and others where it's genial and pleasant enough (and far more coherent than Aloha) that I'm willing to watch in the hopes that Crowe and Holzman can recapture his '90s magic, or hers, or some amazing combination of both.

ESPN's newest 30 for 30 film O.J. Simpson: Made in America proves to not only be better than The People v. O.J.--and among the best things ESPN has aired in its history--but a perfect complement to the FX show.-