Doreen St. Félix

Ultimately, it is Pidgeon’s Bessette that stays with you, because she feels like an invention, an injection of an idea and a rejection of the sphinx one. .... Kelly is much too recalcitrant or reverent of an actor to get at the root of Kennedy’s sexual appeal, his swagger, but at least he does look the part. The acting mandate was evidently to go puppy. There should be more grit in the story, which is too rhythmically indebted to the swoon beats of “Bridgerton.”

The series is twitching, but it’s not really alive. There is, in the end, a deadness to its clichés about writers and their subjects. It’s “The Journalist and the Murderer,” rotted with overplotting and kitsch. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love the show, or its pretensions to real storytelling, given how offensively rote some television has become. .... Ultimately, the series gives too much gravity to the writer-subject dialectic.

You will not come away from “The Staircase” convinced of Peterson’s innocence or guilt. The show makes tantalizing equivalences between the filmmaking process and the justice system as storytelling vehicles, without ever tipping into art-house arrogance.

An odd failure. It has a halting structure and a maudlin view of history that make the show feel dated.

“Bel-Air” is correctly circling around the ugliness in Black politics, but it’s too fearful of being misunderstood, or misrepresented, by its viewers. ... The show understands drama as ominous scores, leaden dialogue, and unnecessary cliffhangers.

Rogen’s Gauthier is sketched out more confidently than any other character. The alluring, trashy chic aesthetic of “Pam & Tommy” is a smoke screen for a series that is reluctant to give its protagonists—the lovers it would purport to raise to a classical perch—any real depth.

Bell’s series falls short of questioning the systems of paternalism that endowed a serial rapist with so much institutional control. Sometimes its Black American audience is rendered as an impressionable bloc, pinging between the conspiracies of white supremacy and that of Black respectability politics. ... “We Need to Talk About Cosby” is most compelling as an honest self-reflection of Bell himself, both as an artist and as a Black man invested in the betterment of his people.

Despite their endlessly harrowing moments, the first four episodes of the second season were the first time that “Euphoria” actually felt fun to me. Rue is once again a full-blown addict, and everything is horrible and scary, but also exciting and sexy and stylish.

“Gemstones” is brave, and I want it to explore rather than shy away from all that subtext—which is that straight white men are straight white men because the rest of us are not.

In "Landscapers," Sharpe and his fellow-creator, Ed Sinclair, who wrote the script, fully integrate the breaking of the fourth wall into their haunting study of marriage, victimhood, and role-play.