Without the murder-mystery focus, the plot meanders. Whether they will get caught in their lies is the driving question here. That, it turns out, is not entirely interesting. Luckily, these women and these performances are so much so that it doesn’t really matter.

Deadwood: The Movie is the perfect ending to television’s all-time best show. ... Just as it’s to be expected, Milch balances such touchingly somber moments with instances of camaraderie, treachery, violence and absurdity.

Gaiman manages the not-inconsiderable feat of capturing his narrative’s race-against-the-clock propulsion, all while making plenty of time for an overstuffed cast of characters and numerous detours, rewinds, asides and demented flights of fancy. Good Omens boasts an assured sense of tone from the very start. ... Good Omens wouldn’t soar without its two leads, who are so perfectly (mis)matched that they immediately elevate the series to must-see status.

As great as season one was, season two is just about perfect. You could even call it watching it a religious experience.

The esteemed actors [Stellan Skarsgard and Jared Harris] bring nuanced, complicated baggage to their protagonists, who are navigating a bureaucracy uninterested in failure, and so too does Emily Watson as Ulana Khomyuk, a nuclear authority (and composite character) who aids Harris in his quest to contain the Chernobyl tragedy as well as deduce its underlying cause. Together, the show’s headliners lend the action gravity and humanity . ... Renck and Mazin’s haunting miniseries.

There isn’t a single inventive scare lurking in Chambers, a 10-episode Netflix original that seems like it was devised by the streaming service’s famed algorithm. ... Most will feel as if they’ve already seen Chambers before. Those new to such substandard beyond-the-grave stuff, on the other hand, will wish they’d never seen it in the first place.

Homecoming is an incredible concert film, but it’s also a testament to the totality of Beyoncé’s vision, the fact that she gave us a groundbreaking performance and then, a year later, showed us how to watch it. The real beauty of Homecoming isn’t the performance footage or the flashes of Beyoncé’s inner life; it’s the latest opportunity to see her mind at work.

Les Misérables doesn’t mess with what works, and at six-plus hours, it has the space needed to do justice to its every incident and emotional upheaval. While a few minor elements are condensed or discarded, Davies’ script is true to Hugo’s tome in terms of basic plot particulars and rousing spirit.

Equal parts nostalgia trip, investigative inquiry and tabloidy exposé, it revisits stories and stars that are defined by their notoriety. In doing so, it affords a fascinating glimpse at the unique dynamics that make wresting so popular.

The series is certainly competent, one collaboration that changed the face of American theater telling the story of another. But you’re looking for more of a Fosse shoulder roll, the extra tap in the time step, the unexpected contortion in the jazz number--the kinds of quirks that made Fosse and Verdon singular and unique. Their relationship was anything but by the book, and you wish this dramatization wasn’t afraid to go a little more off-script.

Perfect is a strong word, but Killing Eve is a series that merits those. ... Everything that worked so well in season one is back in essentially the same form, and it’s working again.

Throughout, The Twilight Zone casts its ominous action in distinctly modern terms. The problem is that, in three of its maiden four outings (which run anywhere from 36-54 minutes), both the message and the twist--if a stab at the latter is even made--are so obvious that their wannabe-timeliness can’t save them.

Arrested Development’s one-liners and inward-looking allusions fly by at the speed of light, and at this point, the show has long since given up trying to accommodate new viewers. It’s a comedy whose main frame of reference is itself, and while that likely limits its appeal outside its cadre of hardcore fans, its latest go-round reconfirms that, though many sturdy imitators have followed in its wake, it still sits upon the absurdist throne.

Delivering bleakness and black comedy in distilled form via stories that rarely last more than fifteen minutes, it’s like Black Mirror for the ADD-addled video game crowd. ... Love, Death & Robots is at its finest when it’s short, sweet and satirically nasty.

[The Case Against Adnan Syed] is both a lucid primer on its notorious mystery, and a follow-up marked by intriguing new details that amplify uncertainty about its subject’s culpability.

We get little snapshots of moments in Sam’s life, yet each glimpse is so fully realized and emotionally rich that you see whole story lines immediately—whole lifetimes, really.

Thanks to this engaging--and slyly timely--adaptation of Christie’s 1936 novel, it ably earns first-runner-up status. ... Poirot’s arrogance, of course, remains. Yet in Malkovich’s skillful hands, the detective is a more detached and interior genius, destabilized by his shaky professional standing and, also, by the long-ago catastrophe that made him who he is today.

A slick, functional update of an L.A. noir. But it takes far too long to get weird—you’ll have to stick around until episode four for the sex cults, incest, violence, and freaky performance art; until then, it’s too many clichés from movies you’ve seen before, with little new to add.

As of night one, the new Conan feels a lot like the Conan O’Brien who has now been part of the late-night landscape for a quarter of a century.

Even if it’s less nuanced than The Americans and a bit cornier than The X-Files, Project Blue Book has a pulpy energy that carries it over its rougher patches. Whether it has legitimately grand truths to uncover remains to be seen, but for now, it recognizes that concrete answers aren’t nearly as entertaining as mankind’s enduring (and tantalizing) quest to comprehend the great unknown.

It’s great on paper, but in practice, the show faces a number of insurmountable obstacles that make it almost unwatchable. First and foremost: This Lindsay Lohan show is barely about Lindsay Lohan. ... Without its supposed star, all that remains is a reality TV show that barely bothers to have a premise.

It all started as an admirably bizarre reality series that revelled in its unabashed spectacle and lunacy. But it became, somehow, a bit of a bore.

The interactive aspect of the viewing experience is seamless, and each adventure manages to be tonally unique and narratively distinct. But it turns out that when television starts to become a video game, the integrity of the story is muddied by the thrill of choice and control.

As refreshing as it is to hear DeGeneres open up in a more nakedly honest way than we are used to seeing, she’s at her purest comedically in the special when she returns to the type of observational humor that made her famous in the first place.

The decision to have an automaton narrate a documentary about killer robots seems a bit too on the nose, and at times lends the project a distracting, though no less engaging, Westworld-esque futurism. ... The documentary is more engaging when it examines the effects of robots and automated labor on the workforce and world economies.

There’s such a strong rhythm to the comedy it’s impossible not to fall in step, even in less successful story arcs. The scenes in Paris and, later, the Catskills, carefully tread a line between dazzling and swooning, and twee and overly cutesy. Your mood will likely determine which direction it wobbles. But when it executes, it’s phenomenal.

Dogs is exactly as earnest and heartwarming as you’d expect. There’s no sly message here, no convoluted takeaways about the human condition--only the irrefutable fact that dogs are amazing, and humans are pretty damn lucky to have them.

The early run of episodes seems unsure where it fits between the winking, sardonic tone of Scream Queens or American Horror Story: Coven and the soapiness and melodrama of Riverdale. (And, like too many streaming series, episodes could be half as long and the narrative could move twice as fast.) But fear not. A creative light bulb seems to turn on as the season hits its final stretch. If only an actual one would turn on, too.