Judy Berman

Furious is a haunting interrogation of the psychology of victimhood, the logic of revenge, and the myth that the justice system exists to protect the vulnerable, and its conclusions are too messy to resolve into a pat fable of empowerment or healing.

Tropper and Pappas put twists in all the right places, effectively controlling viewers’ access to characters’ motives, loyalties, and backstories without coming across as manipulative. Larger questions arise organically, about parents who put their work—whatever it may be—before their children and about good vs. evil vs. the limitations of binary morality. There are many strong performances.

Halsey and Fitzgerald give their characters real energy and depth. But for all the many fiddle-led family sing-alongs that comprise perhaps its greatest concession to the trad crowd, the series feels a bit flat.

A smartly executed adaptation of beach-read queen Elin Hilderbrand’s 2023 hit The Five-Star Weekend and that the shamelessly expository line issues from the irony-immune mouth of a perfectionist baking influencer played by Jennifer Garner.

Storer and co-showrunner Joanna Calo seem focused on completing each character’s emotional arc. By this measure and others, the season is uneven, better than its most recent predecessors but rarely as sublime as the second half of Season 1 and Season 2. But it’s at its best when training its observant gaze on Sydney.

The show is safer and less inventive than his best work. Still, there’s fun to be had in this time machine whose ultimate destination is dad-joke heaven.

The mix of innovation and bloat yields a show that is both better than you might expect and disappointing in the same ways that most film-to-TV adaptations are. Where it does excel, so much so as to almost single-handedly warrant the project, is in its casting. No actor is more suited to remake Max Cady in his own image than Javier Bardem.

An alternately rollicking and gutting work of apocalyptic camp. .... Lestat becomes, like its predecessor, an empathetic portrait of an immortal monster with human psychology.

A generous interpretation of all this would be that Kaling— who’d been on a hot streak with Never Have I Ever, The Sex Lives of College Girls, and Running Point—is saying every generation has to make its own mistakes, no matter the institutional guardrails. That may well be true. But it doesn’t mean TV scripts should sound as oblivious as the green characters that populate them.

Sadly, The Boroughs also shares with Stranger Things a tendency to stop developing characters and relationships after efficient introductions. (The exception is Wally, a gay man whose memories of the AIDS crisis complicate his every choice.) Instead, both shows keep adding portentous but vague themes until so many ideas have been articulated that only the most anodyne takeaways survive.