As Queer as Folk continued its eight-week run, a strange thing happened. It began to mellow into a compelling drama that many viewers began to find as absorbing as any late-night soap opera. [15 Apr 1999, p.E1]

You could, as the series winds along and pads out the time with a subplot about Dalby’s former Soviet lover, wish for some of the film’s silliness to enliven the lovely photography and bespoke nostalgia. And the story, while more coherent and consequential, still has a laboratory-maze quality to it. You could also wish, it must be said, no matter how unfairly, for some of Caine’s blunt magnetism.

There’s a lot going on inside “The Essex Serpent,” not all of it successful, though the mini-series is generally handsome, literate and quite well acted.

Moffat and the director David Nutter (“Game of Thrones”) have made it watchable — favoring humor and action over soap opera — but they haven’t managed to conjure the emotion, or dramatize the ideas, that so many people seem to find in the story.

Tics like these are easy enough to overlook in an action-oriented spy thriller; more bothersome is how the new season adds love to Tamar’s motivations (and encumbrances), a move that jacks up the emotional stakes but makes the drama squishier and a little less interesting. The show does fine with the prickly, mature relationship of Faraz and Naahid, but Tamar and Milad’s romance doesn’t rise above cliché, and Sultan and Alenabi don’t bring much heat to it.

Dawson's Creek offers a lesson in the dangers of overhype. But Mr. Williamson does seem to have written hit all over it.

The unhurried pace, the cleverly interlocking story lines and the general lack of pretense and contrivance remain in place. It is still, depending on your preferences, a doddering throwback or an oasis of old-school rationality and calm. (If you’re keeping score, we’re going with oasis.)

“Ridley Road” is soap-operatic and improbable, with mostly tepid dialogue and mostly routine action. On the other side of the ledger, it has a good cast and it presents the story without a lot of fuss or (until the closing scenes) undue melodrama or sanctimony.

While the show is no big deal, it handles the psychological and farcical ramifications of Joanna’s dilemma with a sensitivity that gives the sitcom setups an emotional kick you wouldn’t necessarily expect. Some of this has to do with Bayer’s performance — she nails Joanna’s blend of arrogance and abashment with an ace sketch comic’s facility.

“We Own This City” is still a very good show, with granular realism, a sly sense of humor and fine acting top to bottom. But its indictments lack the character shading that animated Simon’s adaptations of the housing-policy story “Show Me a Hero” and his own book “The Corner.” ... “We Own This City” instead works as a kind of appendix, an updated extra for Simon and Pelecanos’s existing, well-earned fan base.

The show takes an unfortunate turn at a certain point, when it feels the need to take the themes it has been adroitly finessing and make them explicit and grindingly literal. ... Regardless, there’s pleasure in de Swarte’s portrayal of the dogged, take-no-prisoners Natasha and in the sweetly addled performance of the newcomer Amber Grappy as Natasha’s younger sister. And there’s the baby.

As the violent, manipulative alcoholic and the vain, snobbish fabricator punch and counterpunch in “A Very British Scandal,” the opaqueness of the characters gets tedious and increasingly mystifying. ... Bettany, playing the more shallowly drawn of the two, fares better. He is thoroughly convincing as a smooth-talking, sociopathic cad. ... Foy gives it a valiant try — it’s hard to imagine a more expert performance in the role. But she’s trying to make sense of a cipher.

The mechanics of the story in “Tokyo Vice” are familiar from decades’ worth of both Japanese and American gangster films. But they’re treated with sufficient respect and professionalism, and just enough imagination, to make another ticket on this particular Shinjuku carnival ride worth the investment, at least if you’re inclined to enjoy leisurely neo-noir.

The show around Oldman is not entirely up to the standards set by his performance, but it’s not too far off — “Slow Horses” is a highly satisfying celebration and sendup of the John le Carré novels that clearly inspired it.

An intermittently charming biographical hodgepodge on HBO Max.

This new series is less sappy than Providence and less graphic than C.S.I. And Ms. Hennessy gives Jordan an appealing, loose-cannon attitude, a long way from the buttoned-down assistant district attorney she played on Law and Order.

As a drama, it’s built entirely around the Isaac vs. Isaac cage match, which supplies fair to middling action and sentiment and consistently satisfying laughs. It’s characteristic of the Marvel Disney+ shows that the ability of the performers exceeds the inventiveness of the crew. ... Jeremy Slater (“The Umbrella Academy”), the show’s creator, and its director, Mohamed Diab (the Egyptian features “Cairo 678” and “Clash”), are only fitfully successful at combining psychological drama, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” desert adventure and superhero origin story.

American Dreams is a frustrating mix, often sensitive and winning in its treatment of the Pryor family, and hackneyed in its reach for historical relevance.

Despite the echo of a hokey past, the quirky Now and Again is one of the season's most appealing shows, largely because it grafts its Frankenstein plot onto a romance: the hard-bodied hero has a mind that still yearns for his middle-aged wife.

As visually satisfying costume drama, the period sections of “Pachinko” are unimpeachable. Also impossible to argue with is the excellence of the show’s large, mostly South Korean and Japanese cast. ... Too often, though, their work is wrapped in several layers of Hollywood gauze; the subtlety of their performances gets obscured by the general tendency of the production toward tasteful schmaltz. ... The TV “Pachinko” melted away while I watched it.

The two-episode Season 3 premiere, airing Thursday, is “Atlanta” in top form, going to new places while maintaining that unsettling sense of never knowing how the ground might shift. ... Spectacular and haunting first episode. ... The two episodes sent to critics for review are a mere peek, but they give no sign of the show’s having lost a step in the past four years.

Feels like a return. It’s not a triumphant one, but it has touches of the old Schumer, smart and transgressive and self-aware. They’re stretched out a little too thinly over the 10 half-hour episodes, and they don’t really compensate for the overall sentimentality and simplistic psychology. But for the true fan, they’ll be worth the relatively short binge.

If the creative team can maintain an element of surprise and trust the viewer to get the premise already, and if Mr. Phillips can relax and seem to have a bit of fun, Wolf Lake could grow on people.

When the story is being allegorical, it can be dreary and more than a little condescending. When it plays things straight with a fairy-tale chaser, it goes down smoothly.

Absolutely Fabulous is grandly bawdy and uninhibited; Cybill, more restrained for American sensibilities, ends up too often being only vulgar. Still, Ms. Shepherd and Ms. Baranski have their delightful moments. And the series appears to be getting stronger.

Few shows on TV have funneled as much complicated feeling through a camera lens as “Better Things.” And the terrific final season lets you have it at full blast. ... As this remarkable final season shows, it is anything but [small].

Dull. Comer, Oh and Shaw did a lot of work perfecting the brilliant surfaces of the characters Waller-Bridge created, but the characters are looking washed-out now, and the performances look correspondingly wan.

The two-act structure, the “separate but equally important” intro, the Mike Post theme music and the dun-dun are still there. But the hallmarks of the show at its best — urgency, tricky plotting, bourbon-dry humor and, especially, powerful but economical acting — are missing. Maybe someone can subpoena them before the season’s over.