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Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The increasing sense of precarity around the world’s infrastructure would seem to help Peacock’s “Last Light” resonate: The limited series depicts a disruption in the world’s supply of petroleum, setting off a major energy crisis and fears of global cataclysm. And yet the series never finds its gear, existing as a ripped-from-future-headlines thriller that’s neither particularly credible nor especially thrilling. Here, Matthew Fox plays the chemist Andy Yeats, who finds himself drawn into the crisis; as the world lurches into a moment of uncertainty, he’s separated from his family, trying both to find his way to them and to do what he can to bring the world back to order. The family struggles seem calculated to wring emotion from viewers, with Andy’s son (Taylor Fay) gradually losing his sight in a way that tests the tender stoicism of mom Elena (Joanne Froggatt). There’s, too, a sort of schematic element to the climate activism of Andy’s daughter (Alyth Ross); little does she know just how much her dad is doing to protect everyone’s future.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic With its pulsing burble of Blondie music and its chilly aesthetic, the 1980 Paul Schrader film “American Gigolo” is a showpiece of what would soon be the Reagan decade. Some 42 years later, a TV adaptation feels lost in time, and searching for an argument for its existence. Starring Jon Bernthal and with a pilot written and directed by “Ray Donovan’s” David Hollander (whose ties to Paramount Television Studios were severed during production), “American Gigolo” is lead-footed, and prurient rather than hot. And Bernthal seems at sea here, an unusual look for a star whose coiled charisma has elsewhere served him well. His Julian Kaye — whose name is shared with Richard Gere’s character in Schrader’s movie — emerges from a 15-year sentence we’re told happened about a decade and a half ago, but nothing about Julian’s world feels of the present day, or of Earth. Julian, we understand, was wrongfully convicted; Rosie O’Donnell’s Detective Sunday is attempting to crack the case of what really happenned, while a swirling remembered attraction between Julian and Gretchen Mol’s Michelle threatens Julian’s chances at finding a post-prison equilibrium.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic “The lessons of the fire, as we reach for something higher,” a voice wails as images of flying crows and blood dripping down a rose’s thorny stem flood the screen. “With eyes we’ve all come to know, he’s the devil in Ohio.”  This theme song has a self-conscious ludicrousness that’s ultimately earned by the series it introduces — at least in one sense. Netflix’s “Devil in Ohio” isn’t so great that its missteps end up making sense, but it’s so schlockily unembarrassed by its excesses and its shortcomings alike that it feels difficult to critique.  Here, Emily Deschanel plays Suzanne, a psychiatrist whose particularly challenging new patient Mae (Madeleine Arthur) seems in urgent need of shelter after escaping a cult. Naturally, Suzanne brings her home — and, of course, Suzanne has three daughters (played by Xaria Dotson, Alisha Newton, and Naomi Tan) from whom Mae can be acclimated into high-school life, or on whom Mae can rapidly exert her influence.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic“The Americans,” Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg’s previous show for FX, built tension according to a methodical pace. Its pleasures lay in a rigorous willingness to delay catharsis; Fields and Weisberg’s team of writers seemed actively to resist giving viewers quick and easy satisfaction, preferring to build scenes, episodes and arcs that stretched out according to their own rhythms.And their follow-up series, “The Patient,” an FX production airing exclusively on Hulu, suggests that success has prompted them to lean so far into this method that they’ve lost balance.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticMike Tyson is a figure with unusual voltage, a celebrity who fought for his spot in the firmament with a weaponized charisma. The champion boxer is relentless even by the standards of the sport, with the famous incident in which he bit the ear of Evander Holyfield casting a shadow over his achievements. Outside the ring, he’s simultaneously known for a surprising soft-spokenness that makes the listener want to lean in and for a tendency toward violence — including a 1992 conviction for the rape of Desiree Washington — that repels.A serious reckoning with Tyson’s place in our culture, in the currently on-trend format of dramatized retelling via limited series, would deal with both sides of the Tyson image, and the complicated ways they feed each other — the fact that the allure of Tyson is bolstered by our sense of him as threatening.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic“Game of Thrones” made its reputation by conjuring the politics of an entire world. And for all the grandeur of its spinoff, “House of the Dragon,” its creators’ most surprising decision may be to start small.I mean that in a very particular sense. The visuals, here, are certainly grander than those of “Game of Thrones” in its early going; anyone impressed by Daenerys Targaryen’s trio of dragons will have plenty to feast on here.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticSpoiler alert: This review contains spoilers for “Saul Gone,” the series finale of “Better Call Saul.”It turns out that there was one person the once and future Jimmy McGill would put ahead of his own self-interest.In the striking and elegant finale to one of TV’s most consistently strong dramas of the past decade, Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman, to borrow a phrase, broke good. Having finally been apprehended, Saul structured a plea bargain that would have him in and out of prison in a plausibility-stretching-but-who’s-counting seven years.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticSPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers for the Season 4 finale of “Westworld,” entitled “Que Será, Será,” now streaming on HBO Max.Reviewing the first four episodes of “Westworld’s” fourth season, I noted that the show seemed unnecessarily convoluted, purposefully obscuring what was even happening until the season’s fourth episode. With the back half of “Westworld’s” season having now aired — the finale dropped August 14 — that convolution seems to have served a purpose.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIn entertainment, as in sports, it’s all about timing.Which makes “Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers” a victim of the TV industry’s current interest in its subject matter. (Perhaps that can be blamed on the ’80s Lakers being the most recognizable, and most accessible, team to build a series around in the wake of the smash success of the 2020 Michael Jordan docuseries “The Last Dance.”) Jeanie Buss, the CEO of the NBA’s Lakers, has executive-produced Hulu’s documentary tribute to the team that was already, this year, at the center of Apple TV+’s doc “They Call Me Magic,” about star Magic Johnson, and HBO’s scripted “Winning Time,” about her late father Jerry Buss’ stewardship of the team.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticThe news that Anne Heche has been declared legally dead from the injuries she sustained in an Aug. 5 car crash comes as a particularly baleful end to her story. There’s not merely the obvious element of human tragedy for Heche and her family, as well as, it ought to be said, the woman whose house Heche destroyed with her car. But Heche’s final days playing out in a spectacle of tabloid interest and ambiguity around her state of mind comes as an eerie echo of various moments throughout her life in public. Heche was a star dimmed and diminished by the aura of scandal that she couldn’t shake — and one who, despite that, tried unrelentingly to bring the audience into her world.Heche was, first, a gifted performer; she went from being an Emmy-winning soap star to film stardom in the late 1990s and seemed, with lead roles in “Volcano” and “Six Days, Seven Nights” to be locked and loaded for A-list fame, a blonde counterpart to Julianne Moore with a bit more jitter underlying her calm. (A favorite performance of mine of hers at the time is as a White House aide in “Wag the Dog,” amoral but poised, and sparking with ideas that might salvage a doomed presidency.) And though she would go on to other accomplishments on film, TV, and stage, Heche’s story necessarily must include mention of what halted her ascendant career: In 1997, the year of “Volcano” and “Wag the Dog,” Heche began publicly dating Ellen DeGeneres.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticThere’s something that feels a bit overextended about Amazon Prime Video’s new series adaptation of “A League of Their Own,” and it isn’t just the runtimes.With episodes of this eight-part season flirting with the hour mark — meaning that there’s several times as much series as there was of the 1992 film about the all-women Rockford Peaches baseball team — this show seems at times unsure of what to say next, or where to take its story. And attempts to broaden the scope of that story can alternately present an admirable curiosity about what more can be said about the history of women in baseball and a tendency to avoid engaging history on its own terms.Here, as in the Penny Marshall-directed film, we’re in 1943 and following a group of female athletes, this time led by Carson (Abbi Jacobson, who also co-created the series with Will Graham).

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic“No one else acts the way she acts,” says director Christopher Guest of his frequent collaborator Jennifer Coolidge. “I don’t mean acting as an actor.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticGet ready to check back into “The White Lotus.”HBO’s anthology series about life among the wealthy and dissatisfied at a chain of upscale resorts will premiere its second installment in October, Variety can exclusively reveal.The Mike White-created series is shifting the action to Sicily, where new hotel staffers and new guests will face off; Jennifer Coolidge, this week’s Variety cover star, is the only series regular to be returning, as she reprises her role as spiritually seeking socialite Tanya McQuoid. Above, check out Coolidge in Euro-glam mode in the exclusive first image released of the new season.In its initial, Hawaii-set season, which aired in the summer of 2021, “The White Lotus” was a sensation, immediately pulling in 1.9 million viewers across linear and digital platforms for its finale, a number that only grew from there.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticSay this much about “Keep Breathing”: It’s admirably immune to streaming-era bloat.Could its story, of a woman confronting the pain of her past while trying to stay alive after a plane crash, have been told in a ninety-minute film? Well, sure. But in six episodes that hew pretty close to the half-hour mark, the series makes its points, underlines them a couple of times, and then moves on.Here, Melissa Barrera plays Liv, who is clinging to life (get it?).

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticDarren Star has, in recent years, had a Netflix success with “Emily in Paris” — a show that, depending on your vantage point, is either a death knell for TV comedy or a sunnily surface-level jaunt whose idle pleasures are just that. Star, the creator of “Sex and the City” and “Melrose Place,” has a gift for skating the viewer across smoothly luxurious settings.Which may be the problem, or one of them, with his latest series for Netflix, which he created with Jeffrey Richman.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic“Surface” is just good enough for a sympathetic viewer to want it to be better.Like Apple’s most recent glossy drama about a woman in danger, “Shining Girls,” “Surface” effectively evokes the confusion of not knowing who or where one really is; here, Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars as Sophie, a woman who suffered a brain injury in an apparent suicide attempt, and now has no sense of who she is. And as on “Shining Girls,” a crystalline depiction of inner turmoil coexists alongside absurdity that grows a bit tough to take.For conspiracy swirls around Sophie.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticDeep into “The Last Movie Stars” — a six-episode HBO Max documentary series directed by Ethan Hawke — Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward appear on the cover of a 1980 issue of McCall’s magazine. In the headline, his name comes first, then hers, then a reference to “their very private marriage.”This may come as a surprise, even as the order of names, and Newman’s face forcing Woodward’s to the cover’s bottom half, make perfect sense.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticTaron Egerton is at the center of Apple’s new drama “Black Bird,” a show that asks him, foremost, to be a reactive force. Tangled in the prison system after his plan to plead out for a short narcotics-charge sentence blows up, Egerton’s Jimmy Keene is offered the opportunity to get out.

J. Kim Murphy Amazon Prime Video has canceled “Night Sky,” its science-fiction series starring Sissy Spacek and J.K.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIt can feel at times as though the logical endpoint of the streaming revolution is a restaging of the TV landscape of, say, 1990, just atomized across vastly more players. It’s inevitable: With so much content, certain traditional, and perhaps little-missed, forms can’t help returning.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticSPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not watched Episodes 8 and 9 of “Stranger Things 4,” now streaming on Netflix.Writing about the first seven episodes of the current, fourth season of “Stranger Things,” I noted that its ambition was both laudable and detrimental, gesturing back to a more exciting era of Netflix while also freighting each episode with more than it could bear.The final two episodes of the fourth season, which launched July 1, prove that doubly true. The moments that sing — including, once again, in the cadences of Kate Bush, this season’s musical patron sorceress — really are on a different level than just about anything the streamer has done lately.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIn his new Amazon series “The Terminal List,” actor Chris Pratt is built like a brick wall, and has about half as much charisma. His character, James Reece, is on a Charles Bronson-esque mission of revenge against the forces that ambushed his Navy SEAL platoon in the field and, back home, irrevocably altered his family life (with his wife played, mainly in flashback, by a wildly overqualified Riley Keough, and his daughter by Arlo Mertz).

Selome Hailu After four weeks in the No. 1 position of Netflix’s Top 10 chart, Season 4 of “Stranger Things” has finally slipped from the top. Season 3 of “The Umbrella Academy” took that position during the June 20-26 viewing window, having premiered on June 22.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic“Only Murders in the Building” was a surprising triumph last year — a comedy whose amiable, low-key wit built in power as its first season ran on. With fine work by Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez at the center, it added up to a portrait of disaffected and alienated people.In its second outing, “Only Murders” no longer has its element of surprise: We know what it can do.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIn the new season of “Westworld,” Evan Rachel Wood’s character describes the concept of the NPC — in video game parlance, the “non-player-characters,” the electronic background figures who exist to serve the person in control. Going by Dolores, Wood’s character once lived such a fate herself, as a sentient “host” at a theme park; having long since freed her mind, she’s now known as Christina, living in an American city, working at a video game company where she’s the one telling stories.Well, stories on the margins, at least.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticMaybe in part because the present looks so bleak, it’s lately been a boom time for shows about looking back on childhood. “The Wonder Years,” on ABC, is an update of the 1980s classic, now narrated by Don Cheadle as he reflects on the Montgomery of the 1960s.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticWhen “The Umbrella Academy” last aired new episodes, in July 2020, its star occupied a different place in the culture, under a different name.Elliot Page, the Academy Award-nominated performer, is by far the highest-profile member of the show’s cast — all playing a family of superheroes perennially trying to thwart apocalypse. And his public disclosure that he is a trans man in late 2020 presented the series with a conundrum as it looked ahead to a third season.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticA partnership with Melissa McCarthy — one of the defining comic talents of the past 10-plus years — might seem like the sort of thing a streamer would want to spotlight and celebrate. So it’s surprising that “God’s Favorite Idiot,” a new comedy series on Netflix, dropped without ever been having made available to critics in advance.Surprising, that is, to those without familiarity with the breadth of McCarthy’s oeuvre.