Daniel Fienberg

Kudos for its topicality and its performances, especially that of star Summer H. Howell, but this Carrie is finally less distinctive and far less scary than it should be.

Calling Brothers “Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson’s Grown-Ups” doesn’t offer much incentive to watch. But it properly sets expectations.

American Hostage starts off promisingly, peaks in the middle and overstays its welcome — in part because after initially focusing on what were apparently the wrong characters, few of its storylines end up being interestingly resolved.

Without delineated chronology or themes, JAŸ-Z in 8 never feels like it’s building to anything. There’s no holding out of a key song or a key story for that last episode, so it’s probably perfect for weekly viewing but it really drags as a binge.

It won’t fully work for viewers whose exclusive reason for watching can be boiled down to “Very Big Man Punches Stuff,” but it’s a generally entertaining potboiler of the sort that Amazon does frequently and well enough.

An above-average show. But it was still a letdown. Because of the repeated formula just nine months after the last telecast, the 2024 Emmys suffered from fatigue and even staleness.

It was an ungainly and ill-flowing night. .... The second half of the show and the first half felt completely disconnected, as if to acknowledge that some viewers watch award shows for silly comedy bits and some watch for sincerity, while implying that nobody watches for both. This is not true.

The adaptation of John Nixon’s Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein is so packed with fictionalization, contrivance and one-dimensional secondary characters that what’s true frequently gets lost in the ludicrousness.

What Snowfall lacked in cohesion, it reliably made up for in audacity and ambition.

If Last Seen were any longer — most episodes are under 50 minutes — its failures would probably irk me more, but as is I was able to put the stumbles aside and concentrate on Brammall, Lourdes and the murky situation.