Chris Cabin

Season 4's bits are (so far) another batch of bangers with minor stumbles.

It’s impossible to ignore the lack of invention and energy in Danger Island’s storytelling turns.

As a vision of adolescence facing a life-and-death crisis, it’s far too tidied, controlled, and sober to come off as relatable. There’s no sense of how seductive and overwhelming the unknown can be for an adult, never mind a kid or teenager. And as a vision of adulthood in both personal and elemental disaster, it’s simplistic, safe, and dominated by work.

There’s a vaguely pleasant handsomeness to the series but there’s no imagination and no sense whatsoever why it was important for Boyle or Beaufoy to lend their irrefutable talents to this thorny material.

The performers offer flashes of persona in quiet moments, gesticulations, and a handful of exchanges but for the most part, the characters come off as little more than figures meant to convey information from Wright’s book.

What might have been a furious reflection on the worth of style and aesthetic as compared to the humanity encased within such frames and settings is boiled down to an extensive Wikipedia page, more interested in the facts of the case than why the case was so important and shocking to the zeitgeist in the first place.

Meloni holds things together admirably but even his rousing comedic inventiveness gets drowned out by the empty edginess that Taylor & Co. have evinced here.

Dark feels strangely one-note, elevated purely by the increasing eccentricity of the plot, which eventually tip-toes into the science-fiction realm when time travel becomes a major element of the story. The less said about that the better.

The only major issue with Godless as a thoughtful and engaging entertainment is that you’re constantly aware that it could have been so much more than that.

She’s Gotta Have It melds Lee’s studied vision of Brooklyn in the age of sexting with the intimate yet ubiquitous inner thoughts and feelings of a generation of young, black artists and professionals without overtly praising or diminishing either.