Hitfix

It's a smart, beautifully mounted, and at times very moving production.

Young's performance continues to be extraordinary, with a monologue late in the premiere all but guaranteed to raise the dust level in your home as you watch it. But it's a measure of the work McKinnon and the supporting actors have done in demonstrating how the smaller conflicts in the lives of Amantha or Ted Jr. or Tawney can be just as powerful (to them and to us) as Daniel's larger existential crisis.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has only gotten better, more confident, and more consistent as it's moved along. It knows exactly who its heroine is, what she's good at and what makes her terrifying, just as well as it has very quickly and appealingly figured out how to turn any potential weaknesses into additional strengths.

There are still great ideas--and one great episode, "San Junipero," that I'd put up against the best previous installments(*)--but on the whole it's much more uneven than the show's previous output.

This is all one big story, but each episode builds to an interesting climax that drives the story forward, and there's not the usual sag you get with a lot of the serialized Amazon and Netflix dramas.

Insecure is less inherently dramatic than some of the other Comedies In Theory, which makes the infrequency of laugh-out-loud moments a bigger issue than on, say, Casual, but Rae is a really engaging writer and performer, and the series is charming and compulsively watchable.

HBO's other new Sunday comedy Insecure is more consistent and sure of its voice, but I laughed a lot more watching Divorce, even as I kept feeling frustrated that it didn't seem willing to fully embrace the awfulness of its premise, or its entire cast of characters. To be as good as it can be, it has to be more willing to be bad.

Even if the vibe on the whole is very retro (the show could air in the '80s and '90s, and the only notable change would be more primitive special effects-- but in the moment, the most compelling parts are about how the missions impact the characters personally, whether through the people they meet in the past, or the way their actions alter the present.

The raw material's there; the show just needs more time in the lab to hopefully get it right.

In many of its moments, it's wonderful, but it suffers from the narrative sag common not only to the previous Netflix/Marvel team-ups, but most of Netflix's attempts at the "our season is really a 13-hour movie" model. ... Still, Mike Colter is every bit the charismatic hero promised by his Jessica Jones appearances.