James Poniewozik

It is as empathetic, funny and openhearted a series about an adult performer monetizing her exposure on the internet as you might expect to see.

Few “Malcolm” memories go un-referenced, but the revival never has a chance to develop into its own thing.

Not everything works: The series misses the heart it got from Valerie’s friendship with her stylist, Mickey (Robert Michael Morris, who died in 2017), and the season’s efforts to replace the dynamic fall short. But this season ends up doing something devilishly surprising: It makes you feel almost — almost! — nostalgic for the Hollywood it spoofed in the first two.

“DTF St. Louis” has a bit of the feel of a character piece about midlife mores smushed into the currently more commercial format of the crime-based limited series. It might not satisfy fans of that genre, while if anything, I found myself wanting it weirder and less bound by its format.

“Neighbors” has a bad tendency to gawk at its subjects; it often uses 360-degree camera effects, for instance, to convey characters’ agitation or decompensation. But it also has a curiosity and a belief, not unlike “How to With John Wilson,” that everyone is potentially interesting and worthy of empathy.

“The Muppet Show,” it turns out, doesn’t need to be retooled for a new era, because the Muppets exist outside of time. These are, in fact, your grandparents’ Muppets, and your parents’. And yet they’re exactly the Muppets you need right now.

“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” doesn’t match the scale of the series it’s spun off from. But it’s a clever, close-focus look at the little people, even if one of them is enormous.

A lack of subtlety is no vice in punk rock, but it can wear in a six-episode drama season. Fortunately, Wainwright is too curious about her characters to sketch them in their simplest terms. By the end of its first season (a second one has already been ordered), the series has expanded beyond its putting-on-a-show premise to map out a rich network of the women’s family and social relationships.

The series makes its case the way Burns’s whole body of work has: by trying to tell a full story and trusting, maybe with quaint optimism, that all kinds of Americans will want to hear it. The series might well draw controversy pointing out the founders’ contradictions. But “The American Revolution” is also deeply patriotic. It gushes with love for America’s natural beauty, for its democracy and for its professed, if not always realized, ideals.

The result is a wildly fanciful series that feels unsettlingly real at its core. Seven episodes in, I am not entirely sure where “Pluribus” is going. But to its credit, it gives me the uneasy feeling that we could be going there too.