Emily Nussbaum

Smartly edited, full of odd little montages and visual juxtapositions. It has its own distinctive, salty vibe, driven by McEnany’s simultaneously self-loathing and self-aggrandizing swagger.

It’s a sharp character portrait and a dreamy mood piece, one style inflecting the other.

“The Morning Show” is less addictive train wreck than glum clunker, symptomatic of peak TV: it’s yet another lacquered, poorly structured ten-episode story, whose sparks are dampened as it becomes more earnest. The best bits just make you miss livelier shows. ... When the show finally looks more closely at the women Mitch has messed with, it’s only to exploit their trauma, mawkishly so. They can’t stay in focus, because the camera has been facing the wrong way.

A challenging work of art about the intractable problem of identity—the struggle of any individual to maintain core values, when the world demands nothing but solidarity based on shared victimhood. The show is unusually fearless about letting moral discomfort linger, and manages to be stirring without ever offering false hope, a rarity for even the best-made dramas.

A surprising amount of fun. ... The result is just smart enough to feel clever, just silly enough to feel relaxing, a guilty pleasure by design.

A joyful Sunbeam Mixmaster of a sketch show, a Spirograph set spinning through decades of black pop culture, finding faintly psychedelic patterns, in the shared tradition of Sun Ra and K-tel. Its premise is pure meta-absurdism. ... For all the show’s self-awareness, it feels warm, organic, and spontaneous, not cold or contrived.

The mood is dark-humored but not grim, because the show is stuffed with slapstick and sharp quips, slowly building a varied ensemble. ... Even minor characters—like the dead-eyed, constantly texting office manager, Stacy, played with droll lassitude by Salahuddin’s sister Zuri—have their own story arcs and funny quirks.

There’s a lot of plot for six episodes. As a result, the Lyonses don’t always feel fully real. ... What grounds the series is a classic love story: the bond between Daniel (the always wonderful Russell Tovey) and Viktor (Maxim Baldry), a taboo attraction that deepens into something lasting.

Torres and Ciangherotti are magnetic, and Velasco is a treat as the bubbly Renaldo. But it’s Fabrega, as Tati, who feels like the true original. Her performance evokes weirdos like Reverend Jim, on “Taxi.”

The quality and the pacing vary—and the political satire, especially, walks a tricky line, as with an ad for ice that boasts free-range children instead of ones in cages. Ugly topics like this are, arguably, the ones that comedy should be taking on, but when the bits don’t work it’s rough. When they do click, however, there’s a satisfying jolt.