Troy Patterson

By turns winningly silly, curiously flat, and hauntingly off-key, the series presents a case study in the artistic perils of trying simultaneously to present a fresh satire of the military-industrial complex and a comfort-food buffet of workplace-sitcom commonplaces. It seems stranded between the caustic and the cutesy.

In building its own voice, the show thieves profitably from several schools of self-conscious yarn-spinning as it toys with oblique approaches to straight stories, with a rigor that counters its bits of squishy whimsy. ... I don’t dare guess what the vignettes add up to, other than a show so lyrical with dream logic that it’s intriguing even when it’s not strictly successful.

There’s an amazing tonal volatility to “Love Is Blind.” Slabs of crass exploitation abut moments of deep sentiment. There are touching scenes of human vulnerability and harrowing sequences of people lying to themselves at length. Vast idiocies of human behavior provoke moments of thoughtful reflection. The warped glass of the show magnifies universal quirks of human behavior into light comic grotesques.

Spectacularly misbegotten. ... Neither the moral deliberations of “Hunters” nor its technical prowess are adequate to its ambitions.

Though the characters are ill-tempered, the show comprises generally good-natured tales of competing egos and angry compromises.

“High Fidelity” has always concerned itself with nostalgia for youthful heartbreak, but, this time around, the mists of memory haze obscure the hero. The show unfolds in some atemporal nostalgia zone; Rob seems like a middle-aged person’s idealized view of a heartbroken young person. The song remains the same, but the playback device is somehow obsolete.

If the fact that this character literally is named Karen strikes you as either too clever or else somewhat dumb, then this is not the show for you. “Avenue 5” is distinguished by a high-low sensibility in which poop jokes are about waste and entropy and fatal pollution but also, foremost, about tons of poop, the sight of which lightens the mood.

“Dickinson,” cross-pollinating literary history with adolescent fantasy, is happy to get lost in its own fertile ideas about the essence of this rare flower.

“Watchmen” is to the superhero genre what a revisionist Western is to a basic cowboy myth, with John Wayne in the saddle of the national identity. It’s good enough to warrant repeat viewing. Is it coherent enough to withstand it?

The crimes described here seem heinous because they subvert the founding myths of meritocracy, and this Lifetime movie—with its strokes of low-brow expressionism, its inadvertently funny production values, its clever lead performances—converts the news story into an exhilarating nightmare. You hate these parents and you feel for them, and each feeling intensifies the other.