Caroline Framke

Though the tonal shifts between Simone’s sincere commitment to serenity and Devon’s messy hijinks can be disorienting, the show is most effective when it’s not taking itself 100 percent seriously.

It’s handsomely and thoughtfully made; with only a couple exceptions toward the end as it feels the pressure to wrap things up, it largely avoids the trap of creating melodrama for the sake of it. What the show lacks in sweeping romances (no drenched Mr. Darcy rising from a lake like some siren here), it makes up for in the intimacy of family, friendship, and the fears you’d never say aloud.

They’re [Martha Stewart and José Andrés are] charming enough as a duo, sure. But I’m not convinced their particular areas of expertise make them the right fit for this diet Gordon Ramsay show, which probably should’ve faced its own identity crisis before making its chefs do the same.

The show gets lost in its own navel-gazing plot and cardboard characters, quickly stranding its leading man in a quagmire of clichés that even he can’t sell.

What’s especially frustrating about “Bumper in Berlin” is that there are enough solid elements at play here that might’ve made for a decent show. ... Instead, whether or not you’re already a fan of “Pitch Perfect,” “Bumper in Berlin” is mostly just confusing.

Despite Ortega’s fantastic performance and Burton’s active involvement, “Wednesday” as a whole never really captures what made “The Addams Family” so viscerally strange (nor is it half as visually striking). It does, however, get what makes a teen Netflix show tick. ... “Wednesday” uses the specter of its IP to lure people in and stand out among the rest. The former should prove easy enough — the latter, not so much.

It works so desperately hard to fill out six episodes — a full three hours of Clause #content! — that it just ends up dragging its feet. Scenes that should be a snappy couple of minutes go on for several too long; plots that can barely stand on their own do their best to hold up entire episodes to no avail. Trying to watch more than one episode, let alone six, feels less like having a warm mug of cocoa than chugging it and crashing off the sugar high.

There may be only so many ways to serve up brunch, so a second season would have to find yet more innovative ideas to stretch the premise. Given how it handled these first eight episodes, though, “The Big Brunch” has earned its place at the next table.

For as much promise as “The English” has, and the consistently beautiful — if strangely pristine, given the brutality constantly at hand — Western landscapes bookending every scene, “frustrating” ends up the word most fitting to describe the series at large.

It might have been interesting to see what “Mood” could’ve done given twice the time to tell Sasha’s story. Then again, being forced to do so with not just style, but efficiency, makes the breadth of its arc that much more impressive. ... Even when Sasha has trouble finding her voice, the series rarely does.