Davies’s skill with structure is on full display here; the first installment is an immaculate introduction that builds and builds and ends with a wallop. His consistent cleverness, rather than coming off glib, charges the work with immediacy and verve. The storytelling is urgent, with few wasted moments. ... This is a stirring requiem for the dead, shot through with defiant life.

“Clarice” is not aiming for the moon; it is aiming for — and achieves — CBS cop show. It’s a franchise in search of a purpose.

We’re talking about a dense, complex history. No one film can hope to get all of it, and this one leaves a lot out. (Mention of the Black Power movement is all but absent here.) Still, there’s a lot, encapsulated in short, deft commentary by scholars and curators.

Latifah puts a human face on the formulaic silliness and incapacitates faceless bad guys with aplomb, but there’s nothing in the pilot that requires her to do anything but coast on her charm.

At just four episodes, “Saints” is rare among docu-series today in not feeling stretched out. I could imagine a longer version that spent more time with the players and coaches at home. But there’s something to be said these days for a series that leaves you wanting more.

Zackary Drucker (a producer on “Transparent” and “This Is Me”) and Nick Cammilleri, have packaged a complex and contradiction-laden tale adroitly and with remarkable legibility. The assurance with which they tell it matches the boldness with which Carmichael printed counterfeit money or created a company to make and market the Dale.

Only the new Season 4 character Élise (Anne Marivin), from the rival agency Starmédia, does not appear to have any redeeming traits besides her ecologically friendly mode of transportation. ... The excellent Season 4 opener milks Charlotte Gainsbourg’s real-life whisper-soft voice for laughs, and the episode easily ranks among the show’s funniest. The prickly relationship between fame and art runs through the entire series.

A hypnotic, meandering, surreality-TV walk into the knotty jungle of Lurie’s mind that explores living as an art form in itself. ... Lurie isn’t teaching painting. But he’s teaching something. Patience, purpose, attentiveness to your inner voice. It may seem rambling or self-indulgent at times. But the digressions are the point. The show, which at six half-hour episodes does not overstay its welcome, is like an apprenticeship with a crotchety bohemian Yoda.

The running device of the Nobody apparition makes Season 2, while still raucously funny, a more serious and spooky outing. So does the advance of real-life history, as the Civil War looms closer. ... There is little hard documentation from this period in the poet’s life. All of which frees this show to take poetic license — to tell its version of the truth, but to tell it weirdly, delightfully slant.

Odd does not, by itself, equal good, and on the evidence of the three episodes made available for review, the eccentricities of “WandaVision” are mostly just weighing it down. It feels as if we’re still waiting for the real show to get started, and even with half-hour episodes (reminiscent of the hit Disney+ sci-fi serial, “The Mandalorian”) that’s a long time to wait.

[Two episodes are] a very small sample, but it’s what we have, and it’s a jarringly flat 42 minutes of television. No blame goes to Danson, who strides through the role of Neil Bremer, the newly elected and largely unqualified mayor of Los Angeles, with his typical aplomb.

Despite the efforts of the talented director Aisling Walsh (“Maudie”), who gives the film a welcome restraint and clarity, “Elizabeth Is Missing” doesn’t hit the mark — the screenplay is too fussy and tricky, and the resolution to the twin mysteries, with its mixed notes of heroism and resignation, isn’t convincing. ... Maud may not come fully alive in the script, but there’s nothing missing in Jackson’s portrayal.

The various marriage plots and melodramas feel familiar (and, in the season’s back half, drawn-out), and the gestures at upstairs-downstairs class-consciousness are underdeveloped. But what works here is fizzy and fun enough that you may not care. Page is magnetic. ... Dynevor likewise balances Daphne’s romanticism and independent-mindedness, and the bow-chicka-wow-wow physical chemistry between the two leads is a character in itself. ... The old-newness of “Bridgerton” is a kind of statement in itself.

Though the majority of the movie focuses on this singer’s powerhouse vocals during her 2019 Sweetener World Tour, there are glimpses into Grande’s offstage life that are a refreshing contrast to her glam persona. ... Light touches mixed in with bops like “Thank U, Next” and “7 Rings,” lend — if only slightly — an endearing, multidimensional human shape to the performer seen strutting the catwalk in thigh-high boots before thousands of adoring fans.

Serviceable, workmanlike, maybe just good enough to keep you on the couch for nine hours.

If you can look past some wooden dialogue and stiff acting, however, the new season might be the show’s best as an adventure-drama delivery system — the creators have only gotten better at pacing and packaging a taut conspiracy thriller over 10 weeks.

The thriller, adapted by Peter Moffat from the Israeli series “Kvodo,” is good at ratcheting up the pressure but not at investing the viewer beyond the plot machinations. The characters feel like stock illustrations in a moral-philosophy seminar hypothetical.

“Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions” is straightforward and cozy. ... Swift, Dessner and Antonoff perform as a trio on guitars, piano and a handful of other instruments, stripping away some of the fussy intricacies of the album’s studio versions in a way that heightens the songs’ sense of pristine contemplation.

It works! The new “Saved by the Bell,” debuting Wednesday on Peacock, is quick and funny, and it achieves a tricky blend of staying true enough to its source material while adapting to the standards of the day.

The prominence of race in the series’s analysis — critical theory, in a mild form, manifesting in a mainstream television project — can seem both entirely appropriate and slightly out of balance. While the documentary also gives a detailed portrait of Reagan as a fantasist who believed in and embodied a mythical American ideal, it could do a more comprehensive job of showing how race, nostalgia and American exceptionalism were inextricably woven together in his politics.

Not making Claire an obvious monster might be a brave choice post-#MeToo, but Fidell hasn’t made her anything else that’s particularly interesting or revealing. ... [Robinson] has more of a struggle making sense of Eric, who’s positioned as sensitive and fragile but comes across as preternaturally adult, in a way that doesn’t quite add up.

All the pieces work fine — its gray and noisy world is fully realized and each character has a clearly defining schtick. But the show doesn’t appear to be about anything. Everyone is in favor of winning and opposed to losing, but there’s no meaningful motivation or specificity to any of their behaviors.

Not every detail of the series’s social and political intrigue makes sense, especially with regard to the newspaper business. The human side of the equation mostly adds up, though, and Laurie nails the contradictions of Laurence, who tries kindness on for size but only to see whether it fits with his consuming ambition.

A sweeping, radically curious five-part series. ... It’s a complicated mural of civic life that lets its subjects speak for themselves and resists reducing their concerns to bumper stickers. ... A final episode that might have seemed like a postscript instead brings the series’s threads together.

This should all be sexily entertaining, and even fun. .... The fun lasts a little way into the second episode, with Jonathan’s whereabouts uncertain, Grace’s nerves fraying and the shape of the mystery still unclear. It dissipates pretty quickly after that. ... Scene after scene, we’re put through the wringer of watching manifestly intelligent people doing stupid and highly improbable things on the witness stand, on TV or in response to late-night booty calls. ... After a while, everything else about the show is just noise.

“Gambit” never quite gets back to the charm of its Dickensian opening chapter, though, and it gets thinner as it goes along. Frank pulls off his combination of themes with a lot of old-Hollywood-style skill, but in the mix, neither the sports nor the personal-demons story line hits the levels of visceral excitement or emotional payoff that you might want. In the end, it was an admirable package that I wanted to love more than I did.

In its determination not to be sensationalistic errs on the side of vagueness. (If the point is that Nilsen was just an empty shell, it’s not made in a way that I found very compelling or particularly chilling.) ... Enjoying “Des” — well, appreciating “Des” — has to do with its details, which include the seamless, highly capable ensemble work among Mays, Watkins, Tennant and Barry Ward (as Jay’s right-hand man) and the appropriately musty evocation of the period by the production designer Anna Higginson and the cinematographer Mark Wolf.

As on “Orange,” the comedy of “Social Distance” is sharp, provocative and cathartic, and more often than not, it’s rooted in pain. Though the episodes are short, some less than 20 minutes, watching them feels like entering the lives of full characters who have stories and conflicts that predate the pandemic and would be interesting even without it.