Emma Stefansky

It’s so same-y that even recasting its main character barely registers after a couple of episodes, and its moments of true interest are few and far between. If you’ve made it this far, you could do worse than keep watching, but you may get the feeling you’ve seen it all before.

Creative kills and an eclectic cast of characters can’t save the show from eventually feeling repetitive. Its pattern of “whodunit” arguments between survivors punctured by scenes of violence grows stale after four or five episodes – which is a pretty big problem, considering Hell Motel is eight episodes long.

Volume 4 of Love, Death and Robots continues to platform creative and innovative animation and storytelling, its short-form anthology nature a strength rather than a hindrance.

With a capable cast of supporting characters and a delightfully idiosyncratic trio of leads, the show turns the formulaic British crime procedural on its head in increasingly delightful ways.

Happy Face treads a very wobbly line and occasionally stays on track. It critiques true-crime fandom while also offering up more of the same to its already rabid audience.

The result, unfortunately, is a lot less than the sum of its many, many parts. The main problem with The Residence is that there’s too much of it. Its hour-long episodes (a crime for any comedy series) are stopped dead by flashbacks and flash-forwards that turn the very act of watching into a chore while you’re forced to parse where each scene exists in the timeline.

The harrowing result demands your attention in exactly the way that disposable “second-screen entertainment” has all but abandoned.

Peacock’s Long Bright River, based on Liz Moore’s bestselling 2020 novel, tests the limits of both Seyfried’s dramatic capacity and the crime limited series as a format, and mostly succeeds—though it takes a while to get where it’s supposed to go.

The Pleasantville archetype of a surface-level perfect environment masking something terribly wrong underneath is always fun to see, and Grosse Pointe Garden Society feels like the kind of show that could turn into must-watch appointment TV, if allowed to fully bloom.

There’s sometimes enough in Good Cop/Bad Cop to set it aside from everything else in its range, but watching the episodes feels, after a little while, more passive than it should. Most of the jokes are forecast long in advance, the playful dialogue between characters feels rote, and the interpersonal relationships are nothing we haven’t seen before.