119 reviews in this category.
Loki is the best thing Marvel Studios has produced for Disney+, and it succeeds in large part because it cares more about its protagonist's moral transformation than about the ideological messaging that drags down so many of its contemporaries.…...
Blood Sacrifice is a Netflix Sweden limited series from George Kay, the creator of Lupin and Hijack, that pairs a semi-estranged father and son as detective partners hunting a mysterious killer in Stockholm.…...
Below arrives on Netflix the same week as The Social Reckoning, and the contrast is instructive.…...
Cupertino arrives on CBS with a premise that can be summarized in one sentence: a Silicon Valley attorney, cheated out of his stock options, starts a firm to take on the tech companies that exploit ordinary people. That premise is a Rorschach test.…...
Get Jiro! is the kind of show that could only have come from Anthony Bourdain. Adapted from his DC Vertigo graphic novels and brought to Adult Swim by showrunners Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka, the series drops viewers into a post-apocalyptic …...
Small Prophets is the gentlest, most humane television series to emerge from Britain in 2026 - a six-episode comedy-drama from Mackenzie Crook (Detectorists) that does for alchemy what his previous work did for metal detecting: it treats an eccentric…...
The 2026 Amazon adaptation of Carrie is a solid, respectful retelling of Stephen King's first novel that benefits enormously from the episodic format.…...
Succession is the defining prestige drama of the late 2010s and early 2020s - a Shakespearean tragedy dressed in Brioni suits, set to Nicholas Britell's thunderous piano score.…...
East of Eden is the best thing Netflix has done with classic American literature, and it arrives at a moment when the streaming platform desperately needs a prestige win that does not feel like homework.…...
The Day of the Jackal is Sky Atlantic and Peacock's 10-episode reimagining of Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel and the 1973 film adaptation, transplanted into a contemporary political landscape with a reported budget of 100 million pounds -- making it …...
Kill Jackie is Amazon's latest thriller series, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones as Jackie Price, a wealthy art dealer with a secret past who discovers she is the target of a squad of elite hitmen known as The Seven Demons.…...
Severance is a show that thinks rather than preaches. Its anti-corporate premise reads as woke on paper, but its execution is too nuanced, too interested in genuine questions, and too grounded in traditional relationships (marriage, loyalty, sacrific…...
The Witcher should not work as well as it does. The showrunner and writers' room have been openly at odds with the source material's fans. The lead actor -- the one person on set who actually loved the books -- walked away after three seasons.…...
South Park is the hardest show on television to score ideologically because it is the only show that genuinely does not pick a side. Parker and Stone are equal-opportunity offenders operating from a first-principles libertarianism....
The Gentlemen is Guy Ritchie doing what Guy Ritchie does: fast-talking criminals, intricate violence, and an aesthetic that makes crime look like a well-tailored suit. The series is better than the film....
Youth is the most culturally interesting show of the three reviewed here because it sits exactly on the fault line.…...
Arcane is almost certainly the best-looking animated series ever made and one of the best series of any kind released on Netflix in the 2020s.…...
American Hostage is the kind of project that would have been easy to ruin. Take a true story from 1977 about a small businessman driven to violence by predatory lending, cast Jon Hamm as the square-jawed journalist who saves the day, and it would tak…...
Ryan Murphy has found a formula with Monster that is as reliable as it is predictable: take a notorious American crime, reinterpret the perpetrator as a victim of systemic oppression, and let the audience decide whether they are watching true crime o…...
Neagley arrives with a question baked into its premise: can you spin off a Reacher character into her own show without turning the franchise's traditional masculinity into a problem to be solved? The answer, gratifyingly, is yes....
Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone prequel is a brutal, beautiful Western that believes in family, faith, and the frontier virtues without a trace of irony or apology.…...
The Australian rom-com hit created by real-life married couple Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall is warm, sincere, and committed to the idea that building a relationship matters.…...
Only Murders in the Building earns its TRADITIONAL LEAN verdict not by being a conservative show, but by being a show that genuinely respects the things conservatives care about: friendship across generational divides, the wisdom that comes with age,…...
Slow Horses is the best spy show on television by a margin that is almost embarrassing. It has nothing to do with gadgetry or geopolitics.…...
Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone is one of the few television shows that genuinely deserves the word 'timeless.' Created at the end of the 1950s -- an era of conformity, Cold War anxiety, and the first stirrings of the civil rights movement -- it used…...
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is the most openly agenda-driven project Marvel Studios has produced.…...
The Americans is one of the finest television dramas of the 2010s, and it presents a uniquely challenging case for ideological scoring.…...
The Sopranos is the most important television show ever made, and twenty-seven years after it premiered, it remains the standard against which all prestige drama is measured. David Chase's mobster-in-therapy premise could have been a gimmick.…...
WandaVision is the best thing Marvel Studios has ever made, and also the clearest demonstration of why Marvel Studios cannot be trusted.…...
The White Lotus is the rarest of things in prestige television: a show that is ideologically progressive but intellectually honest enough to make everyone look bad.…...
Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad is the most morally conservative masterpiece in the history of prestige television, and almost nobody noticed because it was too busy being the best show ever made.…...
The Last of Us is the best argument HBO could make that prestige television can still carry traditional values even when it checks every progressive box on the diversity checklist.…...
Westworld is a tragedy in four acts, and not the one Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy intended.…...
The Bear is not what you expect from a show about a Chicago sandwich shop. It is a pressure cooker of a drama that treats the making of food with the seriousness most shows reserve for surgery or war, and in doing so, it accidentally becomes one of t…...
Gen V is The Boys with a college campus and a slightly softer heart, which is to say it is still a relentlessly cynical, anti-corporate, anti-authority satire that treats the superhero genre as a delivery system for progressive messaging.…...
The Walking Dead ran for 11 seasons, 177 episodes, and at its peak was the most-watched scripted series in cable television history. It absorbed an enormous amount of cultural energy and then, like most phenomena, faded.…...
Baby Reindeer is a difficult series to score and an even more difficult series to recommend, but it is also one of the most harrowingly honest pieces of television in recent memory.…...
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia enters its eighteenth season as the longest-running live-action sitcom in American television history, a record it has earned by refusing, season after season, to let its characters grow, learn, or become even slight…...
Better Call Saul had no right to be this good. The Breaking Bad prequel was greenlit as a cash grab -- take the comic-relief lawyer, give him his own show, print money -- but Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould had something stranger and sadder in mind.…...
HBO's The Last of Us is the rare video game adaptation that doesn't just work but transcends its source material.…...
True Detective: Night Country arrives with the kind of prestige-TV pedigree that makes criticism feel almost impolite. Nineteen Emmy nominations. Jodie Foster's first major television role. The highest viewership in the anthology's history.…...
Lanterns is the most interesting thing DC has done on television in years, and also the hardest to score.…...
The Handmaid's Tale is one of the most openly ideological shows ever to reach a mass American audience, and it deserves to be understood as exactly that.…...
The Office is not woke, and it is worth saying that plainly because a decade of think-pieces have tried to argue otherwise.…...
Euphoria is the most important show HBO has made about teenagers. It is also, by a significant margin, the most disturbing.…...
Taylor Sheridan has built a career on making shows that the cultural left finds ideologically inconvenient and the cultural right finds surprisingly watchable despite their progressive casting choices. Lioness Season 3 continues that balancing act.…...
Reacher Season 4 is the most unapologetically traditional show on streaming television, and it knows exactly what it is. It does not apologize. It does not equivocate. It does not pause to let a character explain that violence is actually problematic.…...
Ted Lasso arrived in 2020 like a warm blanket in a cold year. On the surface, Apple TV+'s flagship comedy looks like a progressive show: a diverse ensemble cast, a female Premier League team owner, frank discussions of mental health, and an American …...
The Acolyte is a Star Wars series set approximately 100 years before The Phantom Menace during the High Republic era.…...
Batman: Caped Crusader Season 2 arrives on Prime Video with ten episodes that deepen the show's commitment to 1940s noir.…...
The Boys is a show that knows exactly what it thinks of you, your values, your country, your favorite superheroes, and your media consumption habits. It does not like most of them.…...
Elizabeth Meriwether's Elizabeth Meriwether's Furious: Season 1 arrives on Hulu with a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score and a premise that reads like an algorithm trained on the post-MeToo, post-Epstein zeitgeist.…...
Amazon's Fallout adaptation arrives as a rare thing: a video game adaptation that does not just respect its source material but enriches it.…...
True Detective Season 1 is the best single season of television HBO has ever produced, and the reason has nothing to do with the Yellow King, Carcosa, or the six-minute tracking shot.…...
Lost Season 1 is the greatest pilot-to-finale first season in network television history, and it is also one of the most spiritually serious shows ever to command 20 million viewers a week. Created by J.J.…...
The Wire Season 1 is a masterpiece of television that earns its reputation precisely because it refuses to serve any ideology cheaply.…...
The Sopranos: Season 1 is a masterwork of American television and one of the least ideologically captured prestige dramas ever produced.…...
Band of Brothers stands as the gold standard of military television, a ten-part masterwork that honors the men of Easy Company without descending into jingoism or the cynical deconstruction that defines modern war storytelling.…...
Mike Judge and Greg Daniels have done something remarkable with King of the Hill: Season 15: they brought back a beloved animated sitcom after more than a decade and made it feel like it never left.…...
Yellowstone Season 1 is the foundation of what would become the most culturally significant conservative drama of the 21st century.…...
Ride or Die is Amazon Prime Video's glossy new action-comedy series that pairs Octavia Spencer and Hannah Waddingham as best friends on the run through Europe after one of them is revealed to be an elite international assassin.…...
Lucky is a sleek, confident crime thriller that arrives on Apple TV+ with the kind of pedigree that commands attention: Anya Taylor-Joy as the con artist on the run, Annette Bening as the mob matriarch who wants her dead, and Jonathan Tropper (Banshe…...
Daredevil: Born Again arrives with a question hanging over it: can Disney make something as raw as what Netflix made? The answer, after a creative overhaul that scrapped the original legal-procedural vision in favor of a proper continuation, is a qua…...
House of the Dragon faces an impossible task: follow Game of Thrones while avoiding the ideological rot that infected its predecessor in later seasons. Against all odds, it mostly succeeds.…...
Breaking Bad Season 1 is a masterclass in moral storytelling that arrived on AMC in January 2008 and changed television forever.…...
Stranger Things Season 1 is the rare cultural phenomenon that earns every ounce of its acclaim.…...
Apple TV+'s Widow's Bay is the best new show of 2026. It is also, against all expectations for a series about a demonic covenant maintained by a small-town government, surprisingly traditional....
Severance Season 1 is the best new television series of 2022 and one of the most thematically ambitious shows of the streaming era.…...
Chernobyl is the best thing HBO has ever produced and one of the most morally coherent works of television in the medium's history.…...
Netflix has done something genuinely surprising with Little House on the Prairie (2026): they made a period drama about pioneer life that respects its source material.…...
Succession Season 1 is one of the most acclaimed television series of the past decade and one of the most ideologically coherent left-wing artifacts ever produced by a major American network. It is not a show with progressive themes.…...
Silo is one of the best dystopian series on television, and its third season is its most structurally ambitious yet.…...
House of the Dragon Season 3 is the show's most consequential season by a considerable margin.…...
Game of Thrones Season 1 is one of the most culturally significant television seasons of the twenty-first century, and it is also one of the most traditionally moral.…...
The Bear Season 3 is the season where the show stops trying to be loved and commits to being honest. That honesty is uncomfortable, often frustrating, and at times genuinely difficult to watch.…...
The Bear Season 2 is the story of what happens when people who have been surviving decide to build something instead. That turns out to be a more traditional story than Season 1, and a richer one....
The Bear is about what it costs to be good at something and what it takes to build something that lasts.…...
Zero Day wants to be the definitive post-9/11 political thriller for the current moment: a catastrophic cyberattack on American infrastructure, a former president recalled to lead an investigation, and a Washington ecosystem so corroded by partisan w…...
The Alien franchise has been waiting for someone to bring the xenomorph to Earth in a serious way since at least the 1990s. Two Alien vs. Predator films tried and largely failed.…...
Squid Game Season 3 is the conclusion Hwang Dong-hyuk was always building toward. It is bleak, morally committed, and technically excellent. Whether you find it satisfying depends almost entirely on whether you share his politics....
The final season of Stranger Things carries the weight of a cultural event. This is a show that built a genuine audience relationship over nearly a decade across five seasons. The finale has to be worth that investment. It mostly is....
Cobra Kai is the most unexpectedly traditional piece of entertainment American television produced in the 2020s. That is not a qualified statement. It is a simple observation that requires no asterisk and no apology....
The question Tulsa King Season 2 has to answer is the same question every successful second season faces: did you have more story, or did you just have more episodes? The answer here is yes and yes, which is the good answer.…...
Reacher Season 3 does something the third season of almost any television series struggles to do: it deepens without diluting. The premise is unchanged. Jack Reacher wanders into a problem, identifies who is responsible, and makes them regret it.…...
Landman Season 2 picks up where the first season left it: Tommy Norris is still the man between the world that produces energy and the world that consumes it without acknowledging what that production costs.…...
The Pitt is the best network-style medical procedural in years, possibly since ER was at its height. It is not accidental that Noah Wyle, who spent years on ER, is the lead. Creator R. Scott Gemmill also came up through that show's writer's room.…...
The Boys is one of the most technically accomplished shows on streaming television. It is also one of the most nakedly ideological. Season 4 drops whatever pretense remained....
Invincible remains the best superhero show currently in production. That verdict still holds in Season 3. It also holds a few progressive elements that cost it points on this scorecard. Both things are true, and they're both worth understanding....
Fallout Season 2 is competent prestige television that can't quite escape its own contradictions....
The first season of Wednesday was a cultural phenomenon by Netflix's own metrics, becoming the second-most watched English-language Netflix series ever.…...
The Pitt Season 2 premiered January 8, 2026 on HBO Max. It follows the same format as Season 1: each episode covers roughly one hour of a single fifteen-hour shift at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, nicknamed 'the Pitt.' This season is set on t…...
Season 2 of Daredevil: Born Again premiered March 24, 2026 on Disney+ and is being released weekly through May 5. What follows is a review based on episodes 1 through 5, which constitute the majority of the season. Spoilers follow....
Taylor Sheridan has built an empire making television for the people coastal media forgot. Landman is that empire's newest flagship, and it's the most specifically industrial show he's ever made....
Mike White's third season of his luxury-resort mortality play takes the show to Thailand, raises the body count's spiritual ambitions, and arrives at roughly the same place the previous two seasons arrived: the rich are hollow, the beautiful destroy …...
Bridgerton Season 4 is a Cinderella story set in a version of Regency England that has no memory of actual Regency England.…...
Wednesday is the Netflix show that everyone watched. 252 million households in its first 28 days. The most-watched English-language Netflix series at its release. Jenna Ortega as the new Wednesday Addams became a genuine pop-culture moment.…...
Sylvester Stallone is 77 years old and he is having the best run of his career. Tulsa King is not a great show in the prestige television sense.…...
The Terminal List has a 40% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and a 94% audience score. That gap tells you everything you need to know about where the show sits culturally....
Shogun is the best television event of 2024 and one of the finest historical dramas ever made. That is not hyperbole.…...
House of the Dragon is Game of Thrones's best legacy: a prequel that proves the world Martin built is deep enough to sustain great television without the Stark family at its center. It is also, from a VirtueVigil perspective, genuinely complicated.…...
Not a woke trap. The Night Agent is one of Netflix's most reliable action properties precisely because it delivers exactly what it promises: a good-looking guy with a badge chasing bad guys through exotic locations.…...
Adolescence is the most important piece of television produced in 2025, and that's not the same thing as saying it's the best....
Pluribus is the rarest thing in modern prestige television - a show that genuinely refuses to tell you what to think.…...
The Penguin is the best argument that prestige superhero television doesn't have to be ideologically captured to be excellent.…...
Black Mirror returns for its seventh season with six new episodes that collectively demonstrate both why the show has endured and why it has never been fully co-opted by any one ideological tendency.…...
Andor Season 2 is probably the finest piece of television Disney has produced under the Star Wars banner - and it is, without reservation, the most explicitly political. These two facts are related.…...
This preview is based on available trailers, creative team history, and pre-release information. Scores and verdict reflect our prediction only and will be updated upon release....
The original Scrubs ran nine seasons across NBC and ABC, and at its best it was something genuinely special: a workplace comedy that balanced absurdist fantasy with real emotional stakes, that portrayed medicine honestly enough to earn respect from a…...
This preview is based on available trailers, creative team history, and pre-release information. Scores and verdict reflect our prediction only and will be updated upon release....
Dan Fogelman built his reputation on This Is Us - a show that knew exactly how to make you cry, that understood emotional architecture with almost clinical precision, and that often used that precision in service of specific progressive narratives ab…...
This preview is based on available trailers, creative team history, and pre-release information. Scores and verdict reflect our prediction only and will be updated upon release....
This preview is based on available trailers, creative team history, and pre-release information. Scores and verdict reflect our prediction only and will be updated upon release....
Yellowjackets arrived with a pitch that practically dared you to watch: a girls' soccer team crashes in the Canadian wilderness, and over nineteen months they descend into tribal violence and cannibalism. Season one delivers on that promise, mostly.…...
Season 1 of The Bear is genuinely great television. Carmen Berzatto returns to Chicago after his brother Michael's suicide, inheriting a failing Italian beef shop, a mountain of debt, and a staff that ranges from hostile to barely functional.…...
There was a time when Stranger Things felt like a miracle. In the summer of 2016, Netflix dropped this weird little show about a missing kid in small-town Indiana, and it captured something audiences had been starving for.…...
Ozark is genuinely good television. Across its four-season run, it delivered some of the tightest crime-thriller writing on any streaming platform.…...
Season 1 earned enormous trust through grounded storytelling and earned emotional beats. Season 2 leverages that trust to introduce ideological reframing that would not have survived scrutiny if presented upfront.…...
The anti-corporate themes are structurally embedded and largely organic to the world-building. Some ideological markers are present but remain secondary to genuine narrative ambition.…...
Continues the Yellowstone universe's commitment to depicting traditional American values - land stewardship, family loyalty, personal sacrifice - without apology. Characters are defined by their choices and virtues, not by demographic categories.…...
