There are just enough moments of B-movie action thrills in the season’s best episodes to keep people watching, but this is the definition of Netflix’s “Watch While You Use Your Phone” television—maybe you won’t notice its lack of new ideas or willingness to repeat the same lame bits over and over again.

Even with its flaws, “American Born Chinese” is a very entertaining contemporary update of groundbreaking source material for the family. Fans of the original might miss its edge, but it compensates in solid storytelling, great wuxia action, and star-making turns for Ben Wang and Jimmy Liu.

Even when “Platonic” can be too enamored with its minor victory of simply representing a different kind of love, Byrne and Rogen will then do something together that’s funny or sweet or endearing. You can’t fake chemistry like that.

Even though there’s an overarching story, each episode has an individual style and atmosphere. A beautifully animated family series, “Gremlins: Secret of the Mogwai” features the same dark and chaotic tone of Dante’s films while paying tribute to its Chinese folklore culture.

“Ghosts of Beirut,” offers up a “Zero Dark Thirty”-esque search for Mughniyeh, spanning multiple decades and perspectives. But in juggling all of these points of view, it conveniently forgets to make any of them particularly interesting, resulting in a stilted spy drama that refuses to elevate itself above mere procedure.

The result is a well-balanced show that delivers real laughs while portraying a true TV rarity: the Chicano family.

The answers are expansive and touching.

As much as Roach gets the job done here, I wondered if Stiller might have pulled the pieces of this inconsistent effort together with a more needed flair. ... Arquette rocks here yet again, holding “High Desert” together even as it threatens to wander off into the barren TV landscape.

It all adds to a comedy that feels like homework, wading through a dated aesthetic to arrive at a series of depressing scenarios powered by a negative, if all too plausible, view of humanity. ... It’s reaching for laughs. But it doesn’t quite grasp those either.

Sometimes, it feels like the timelines aren’t equal in terms of storytelling or viewer interest, but the writers and editors are smart to let long scenes play out within them before zipping to the next. I hope the show doesn’t get more manic with the time jumps because it’s right on the verge of doing that a bit too much already.

“Silo” has echoes of projects like “Blade Runner,” “The Expanse,” and even “The Platform,” but it also has its own confident voice, a complex storytelling tone more reminiscent of literature than traditional streaming dramas. ... One of the best of 2023 so far.

"Queen Charlotte" is fun and bawdy, offering more than the sometimes-questionable pleasures of “Bridgerton” seasons past. It gives us more than gossip (the Lady Whistledown voiceover is there still, courtesy of Julie Andrews) and delivers on the “great love story” it promised between Queen Charlotte and King Charles.

The star-studded malaise of “Bupkis” teeter-totters between amusing and boring, and it's too apparent how much the scenarios are pleased with themselves but have little depth.

A glossy but moving tale of resistance and courage, and the risks everyday people take just to hold on to their humanity. ... But the clear highlight of an already-stellar cast (which also includes Noah Taylor and Andy Nyman as fellow Annex residents) is Schreiber, whose Otto is the pillar upon which the show truly rests.

This series perpetuates a damaging myth and one that doesn’t need an eight-part, hour-long prestige retelling. No matter how strong the casting, how compelling the plot, and how coveted the original IP, “Fatal Attraction” remains entertaining enough but rotten at its core.

"White House Plumbers" is better before it gets to Watergate, with the first half depicting how Liddy and Hunt were bombastic but somehow good at their jobs. ... The “Can you believe this actually happened?” angle of "White House Plumbers" loses its edge when it gets to the aftermath of Watergate and underwhelms its supporting performances.

“Citadel” has it all backward—it's entertainment that's not made for those who watch for the plot, and yet is packed with it, at the detriment of its chance to be dumb fun.

Olsen becomes increasingly riveting as “Love & Death” unfolds, forcing us to question how much we should like, forgive, or understand her. I’m not sure we ever will. But we’ll clearly continue to be fascinated by her.

You can feel the elements that made “Saint X” such a compelling novel become stretched, flattened, and dissipated by the show’s too-leisurely approach.

Hughes’ series is best looked at as a portrait made of splattered paint and by a seasoned hand, inspired by wisdom mined from hard memories. It is meant to have its flourishes looked at close-up, but also appreciated for the larger shapes that appear when one steps back and sees the full scope.

This one pays off your patience. Don’t overthink it. Don’t watch it with your phone on. Give into its strange storytelling structure and breathtaking acting display. You’ll be rewarded. You may be nauseous too. But you won’t be thinking about the original.

It’s an extremely talky show. ... Luckily, the creators hired an ensemble of performers to make this kind of intellectual discourse genuine. So even as “The Diplomat” circles the same drains of dissent and diplomacy, it remains interesting for anyone intrigued by what makes the political world tick.

While “Mrs. Davis” sometimes feels like it lacks the teeth or focus to really land, it is never anything less than fascinating, even when it’s frustrating. It helps that Lindelof and Hernandez found a performer as fearless as Gilpin.

To its credit, the McVeigh subplot is the only thread that comes off as particularly greedy here. But the series' larger problem is that the execution does not rise to meet the ambition of its story.

The second season of "Blindspotting" cements it as one of the best and boldest shows airing on television today.

“The Last Thing He Told Me” doesn’t bother to be escapist fun. It’s plodding to the extreme, wasting the talents of almost everyone involved—the one exception being that I would watch Aguilera in a cop show.

The will-they-won’t-they of this season is not if Midge will make it or what man she picks next. It’s whether she’ll find a way back to Susie. And that has been the greatest strength of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel"—under its protagonist's impeccable hats and charmed life, it's the story of workplace relationships, ambition, and female friendship.

Impeccable dark comedy. ... [Hader] has a master’s command of blocking and pacing, each episode an exercise in prismatic stillness, often giving way to explosive violence. ... It’s hardly the original premise, but it’s hard to think of a show that explores it with as deft and devilish a hand as “Barry.”