Carlos Valladares

All of the zany genius of Heller’s 1961 best-selling novel has been sapped from Hulu’s new six-episode adaptation, which begins streaming Friday, May 17. And the humor is nowhere to be found.

The result is that Shrill is not shrill, but it’s often blah and boring.

The documentary is less focused on finger-pointing than Jackson fans or the late singer’s estate might think. It’s more focused on hearing these men tell and tell until their minds can’t bear to tell anymore. It’s more focused on changing up the still-unfolding post-Harvey Weinstein shift in our reactions to victims’ stories of alleged abuse.

The only bright spots are the aforementioned Buscemi, Radcliffe’s occasionally charming oddball behavior (he loves to squirt mustard packets into his mouth to celebrate a job well done), and a man named Mike Dunston. ... It strains so much for clever zings, then becomes bulky when it devotes episode-long subplots to killing Bill Maher by exploding his penis, or humiliating the executive archangel (Karan Soni) by showing him tending to God after the deity’s bouts of diarrhea.

What Russian Doll has is heart--but heart without cheap sentiment or bosh. ... It is matter-of-fact in acknowledging modern failure and disillusion, without ever trying to nail it down, avoiding the tones of hectoring obviousness that mars recent items-in-vogue like “BlackKkKlansman” and the bratty jabber of Aaron Sorkin scripts. In a soothing, down-to-earth way that doesn’t have all the answers, Lyonne and company show us how to deal with the deaths, literal and figurative, we face every day.

“I Am the Night” is a low-rent “Chinatown”-like series that’s gratuitously old-hat, but pretty watchable despite a tortured self-awareness of its own decrepitud

Cheadle and Hall approach the roles with a lack of piousness, infesting their characters with humorous bits of business that almost always land. ... One feels Hall’s anger, but like Richard Pryor, she mines a bleak and tense situation for all its comic potential--and the results are perpetually perceptive.

The performances deal in the kind of insipid caricaturing on the order of the Millennial who confuses polo with polio in “Three Billboards.”

Could Netflix do justice to the books? The answer: “Yes, and then some” — an American idiom which here means, “Binge it; here’s something which goes above and beyond mere ‘goodness’ — and reaches into the realm of knockout profundity for kids and adults alike.”

Much of the show is a conscious bowdlerization of the epic Thackeray novel. What is lost in the wry and fat prose, the skewering of petty gnat-sized gentry, is regained in the lean performances of the perpetually suffering actors, especially Cooke’s Becky Sharp.