Cheery Evil is not. But it remains riveting television, mordant and sinister with a faint sadness hanging around its edges.

King’s personal fascinations and Larraín’s abstractions mix badly in Lisey’s Story, a deeply confusing series that does eventually reward steadfast patience, but also does a lot to push a skeptical viewer away.

The show’s fourth season doesn’t offer us a salve for this phenomenon [how central therapy has become to our culture]; it, too, is more interested in the performance of therapy than the science of it.

What makes the whole thing work, start to finish, is McGregor’s huge, bizarre, involved, and inspired turn as Halston. ... Halston is easily Murphy’s best show for Netflix to date.

Mosquito Coast goes big on gorgeous atmospherics; you can practically feel the heat of the desert and smell the fruit on display in the street market. Theroux is particularly good at making the most of the wide berth the script gives the actors. ... But even his absorbing performance can’t make Mosquito Coast make sense. ... Mosquito Coast’s biggest problem may be that the show doesn’t really have enough story for seven episodes.

Dive bars and broad accents abound. In the midst of unearthing a domestic nightmare, Mare’s courage at confronting the demons of this town offer up a particularly satisfying kind of catharsis, where women paying attention to each other can save each other from the worst kind of bogeyman.

The Nevers joins His Dark Materials and Lovecraft Country as recent HBO endeavors in the genre space that feel like rushed properties, stuffed with good ideas but underbaked in execution. There's something a little too silly about The Nevers at present. Simply put, we not seeing Whedon at his best, and it's difficult to imagine how the show will resolve into something coherent when its creator has stepped away.

As a standalone history, it leaves a lot to be desired. It feels as if the miniseries is an attempt to sell us on the fact that while this slice of history—various sunglasses and sapphires and all—is interesting, the full details of it are too difficult to dramatize fully.

Made for Love is so dryly funny that it is almost brittle, but the tone reflects the loopy surreality of the post-present. ... A merciless takedown of the absurdities of ultra-capitalist tech futurism, embodied by the frail egos of its psychologically stunted robber barons.

For someone who isn’t especially moved by the MCU, a mumblecore Marvel where superheroes mostly spend their time struggling through difficult conversations as they reckon with their legacy feels kind of great. I’m worried, though, that it won’t last past my idea of what the series could be.

The show bristles with gimmicks and gags and surreal overlaps between puppet world and real world. Then again, it is a show with puppets made for children that wants to excite them about the foods that weird them out. Some sensory overload is called for. ... Even if it doesn’t convince your kids to eat gazpacho, Waffles + Mochi is a show that feels wholesomely entertaining.

An exhausting nihilism fuels Genera+ion, which grafts the preening, lukewarm snark of Gossip Girl onto the bracing pseudo-realism of Larry Clark’s Kids.

The show works as well as it does because it understands the deepest roots of American identity, good and bad—and its exploration of what is inevitable and what isn’t is what makes For All Mankind such a fascinating watch.

It’s a Sin is best when it avoids such didactic point-making, when it has yet to issue any grave conclusions. As Ritchie and the gang simply try to live their lives—generous, selfish, scared, awed, horny, in love—the series affords them the roundness denied them by aggregate assessment.

Even as a critic, it feels impossible to consider this series as a piece of art. It’s journalism, because it goes to great lengths to place much-obscured facts at the forefront of a story that has long been told through the lens of P.R. spin.

Breeds labors mightily in the role, but she is not quite convincing as a single-minded, self-abnegating workaholic who lives on ramen and orange soda. ... Much more compelling are the show’s supporting cast. ... The series is an appropriate sequel to The Silence Of The Lambs — and certainly a better one than the 2001 feature film Hannibal, which was less interested in those ideas. But in order to reach the artistic heights the Hannibal TV series did, Clarice will have to step out from Silence Of The Lambs’s shadow and stop trying so hard to ape Demme’s style.

The series is as engaging as a juicy book read curled up on some shabby couch in a rented cabin, a random object found on the shelf and opened merely to pass the time until it becomes something more: a genuine, if mild, passion.

For all its invention, the ever so slightly gnawing tedium of WandaVision suggests that Marvel’s reach has not yet become so total that it can plug its characters into literally anything. Which may come as something of a relief for people weary of the brand’s hegemony. But, the show is a good enough that it ought to be a big hit.

What results is a two-part feature that lives in the shadow of much better sports documentaries exploring similar themes, like those in ESPN’s 30 for 30 series—including Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America and Stanley Nelson’s Michael Vick. Both of those films are rigorous case studies as well as investigations of how both race and fame operate in the U.S.

It’s aiming at exposing hypocrisy, but ends up snidely nihilistic. The series is free-wheeling, almost alarmingly so, with its ultra-contemporary iconoclasm, but the zingers rarely land. The show is grumpy rather than irreverent, cranky instead of astutely sharp. ... Fey and Carlock’s house style doesn’t work so well when their characters have actual agency; it turns their narcissist fluster into real threat. What works best on Mr. Mayor is the goofier stuff, more timeless and less pointed gags amiably carried off by a game cast.

Bridgerton is a satisfying inversion of tropes, a bonfire of our period-drama vanities. That’s about all the insight it delivers—but this holiday season, eight hours of getting the hell out of the real world is a precious gift indeed.

The show’s earnest charge is a nice change of pace from the bleak, empty cynicism and snark that so often infuse contemporary young adult-aimed TV series. The Wilds has slyer elements as well, particularly a canny critique of hashtag-girlboss corporate feminism that unfolds throughout the season’s second half. It helps, too, that the show looks great. ... Even better, The Wilds is the rare streaming series that earns its length.

Occasionally—in the four episodes (of ten) that I’ve seen—that self-seriousness pays off and the series, adapted from an Israeli show by lauded British dramatist Peter Moffat, achieves a certain tragic gravitas. But much else plays as elegant pulp, rather than the credible, searing inquest into a city and its ills that the series might think it is.

As amusingly improbable and slick as the show is, The Flight Attendant digs deep when necessary. That comes through especially in how the story depicts Cassie’s relationship to drinking. ... It makes for a strong counterpoint to the somewhat ridiculous world of crime that she’s wandered into; the plot points don’t have to be believable if the character feels like a real person.

Above all, I Hate Suzie is a masterclass in tone. ... I Hate Suzie is ambitious, thorny, darkly humorous, and incredibly charming—a portrait of vulnerability that bewitches not by prettifying itself, or making itself ugly, but instead with stark, unfiltered honesty. Suzie is not always the hero of this story—the title indicates she’s sometimes her own worst enemy—but the show’s dedication to her range of being is what ends up making I Hate Suzie so lovable.

The result is an absorbing season, both incredibly satisfying and, often, painful to watch unfold.

A Teacher is a sophisticated portrait of a villain, one that uses its 10 episodes to uncover her misdeeds—and throw them into stark relief.

[The second episode is] a different tone from the first episode, more crime drama than social commentary, but it’s still engaging. Then—bizarrely and rather disappointingly—the show becomes a courtroom drama. ... As the show leans into legal strategy and the dreary interiors of courtrooms, it leaches out all the nasty fun that made the series so gripping in the first place.