Jackson McHenry

Stretches for both satire and straightforward cuddliness. Abby’s adventures in the universe of styling tend to be the strongest bits of the series because Avantika is a gifted comedic actor. .... Elsewhere, the show loses its grasp on what exactly it wants to say about these dweebs, if much at all.

The Comeback’s shaggy, despairing, hilarious, and sometimes baldly sentimental third season spends its first two episodes running through all the horsemen of the Hollywood-pocalypse.

Cope is so naïve and the show is so unwilling to build toward a larger critique that Boots comes off as propaganda.

From its opening moments, House of Guinness is too busy accelerating to go for full immersion.

The show is ludicrous, but our own reality is equally, if differently, ludicrous (see: professional troll Bari Weiss may soon be in charge of CBS News), and I can’t help but find The Morning Show’s depiction of the twilight of television news compulsively watchable. At the very least, maybe it has something to reveal about what falls through the cracks in a news business built on cults of personality.

The whipped-cream portions of Too Much are never as compelling as the glass-shard self-laceration at which Dunham excels. When that mode does make scattershot appearances in the series, it overwhelms it.

Overcompensating does a pretty good job of it, while also throwing in American Pie–level humor about drinking beer out of a giant penis for a frat initiation. Still, that’s where the vagueness about time becomes all the more frustrating: If a character’s experience in the closet is so defined by the culture he’s absorbing, then that experience will transform depending on the moment in which the character exists.

For light fare — an amuse-bouche, essentially — Carême gets the job done.

A project that is, somehow, even more Amy Sherman-Palladino–y. It’s way more energized, so intent on its niche fascinations it can’t help but charm you.

It’s possible to build a coherent whole from contradictory perspectives, especially through focusing on unifying themes, but Apple Cider Vinegar swerves between its narrative lanes haphazardly and unsubtly. .... There’s little here that justifies spending six long episodes with a pathological liar or convinces you that the show has anything new to say about social media.