As Amazon’s new thriller Homecoming unfolds, it becomes more and more clear that its lofty ambitions are both a curse and a blessing.

The series, which stars Julia Roberts, is built like a puzzle box, weaving a story between the past and the present that often threatens to fall apart under its own weight. Its tropes are well-worn, and its narrative doesn’t go anywhere unexpected.

And yet all these elements miraculously coalesce into a show that is still tremendously emotionally affecting. Ultimately, Homecoming has too many strengths — and is a story too strikingly told — for its flaws to find real purchase.

The title of the series refers to the treatment facility where Roberts’s character, a novice psychologist named Heidi Bergman, works to help transition military veterans back into civilian life — at least in flashbacks. In the present timeline, a few years later, she’s waitressing. When Shea Whigham’s Thomas Carrasco, a Defense Department auditor, comes calling with some questions about her former employer, her new life starts to fragment.

Directed by Mr. Robot’s Sam Esmail and written by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg, Homecoming is adapted from Horowitz and Bloomberg’s podcast of the same name, which debuted in 2016 and wrapped up last year. The podcast, which starred Catherine Keener, Oscar Isaac, and David Schwimmer, was praised for its performances and its use of audio tricks to jump between conversations, whether they be recordings of therapy sessions or phone calls.

Given Homecoming’s origins in the ongoing boom of true crime and mystery podcasts, it is predictably aimed at viewers who harbor a fascination with finding clues. And the show provides plenty of that that thorny detangling process.

But the series is ultimately less concerned with the mystery, which accordingly turns out to be less complicated than its veneer would suggest, and more with the characters working through it.

Homecoming’s cast brings emotional depth to a show that could easily feel paper-thin

By virtue of the series’ story, which involves the military and government politics, there are more macro issues at play in addressing how soldiers are treated by the countries they serve. That those points sometimes feel a little glossed over isn’t necessarily excusable, but it’s made understandable, at least, by Homecoming’s obvious intent: The series’ first season (the show was picked up for a two seasons from the jump) is made up of 10 half-hour episodes and hyper-focused on its characters, rather than on building an impenetrably twisty plot.

The show is ultimately something of a two-hander between Roberts and Whigham, as their characters are the ones actively unraveling the thread of exactly what happened at the Homecoming treatment facility. Roberts’s performance intensifies as her character’s confusion grows, crescendoing to a fever pitch — and a sublime visual trick — that will induce gasps even if you can see it coming.

It’s a reminder of why she’s one of the last real movie stars in an entertainment landscape where that label has become increasingly rare, and a major part of why Homecoming lands on its feet.

It also speaks to Whigham’s talent. Despite what could be a thankless role as a government stooge, he more than keeps up with the cogs turning around him. Whigham is one of those actors who enriches every project he turns up in (see: Fargo, Vice Principals, Take Shelter, and Boardwalk Empire, to name just a few) and yet he still seems largely underappreciated. While this role, unshowy as it is, may not be the catalyst for a breakout, he performs it marvelously.

If Roberts and Whigham are the moving parts, then the core around which they orbit is Stephan James, who plays Walter Cruz, one of Heidi’s patients. James is possessed of such innate warmth — there’s a reason he’s also one of the leads of Barry Jenkins’s upcoming film If Beale Street Could Talk — that his rapport with Roberts immediately establishes a centering force for the show, and makes it all the more affecting when it begins to erode.

Taken altogether — along with a turn from Bobby Cannavale that takes full advantage of how domineering Cannavale can be, as well as how unexpectedly tender — these pieces form a whole that’s unshakeable even when the thread of the plot starts to fray.

If you’re paying attention, Homecoming begins to betray its podcast roots

In its TV iteration, the story’s dual timelines and thematic focus on dual selves mesh well with the kind of meticulous (if sometimes a little too on the nose) imagery that Esmail is known for. In Homecoming, this is especially apparent in his method of distinguishing between the show’s timelines, which borrows from other time-traveling dramas (the recent Korean TV series Signal comes to mind) by switching aspect ratios. The past takes up the whole screen, while the present is presented in a square — a fitting choice considering how so much of the information is obscured from both viewers and Heidi herself.

The two timelines are also filmed in different styles. The past is shot in a way that’s reminiscent of ’70s and ’80s thrillers — and scored that way, too, with some tracks lifted wholesale, from movies like Dressed to Kill. The present, meanwhile, feels more like your usual contemporary drama. Unfortunately, that’s not where the show’s duality ends.

There’s nothing inherently wrong — or even new, at this point— in adapting a podcast into a TV series, as scripted series like Lore and (in a less narrative format) Comedy Bang! Bang! have paved the way. But Homecoming has a bit of a tell when it comes to how it’s jumped between mediums. It clearly has one foot stuck in its original audio-only existence, as the show sometimes struggles to keep its visuals up to speed with its sound and dialogue.

Specifically, there are a few too many phone conversations as Homecoming tries to tie its timelines together, made all the more obvious as voices are altered to make sure we know that characters are speaking on the phone. Though these sorts of conversations and the interesting sound opportunities they offer arguably made the podcast much stronger, they don’t translate smoothly to TV.

This problem is particularly glaring when it comes to Cannavale’s character, Colin Belfast. Colin is Heidi’s boss at Homecoming, and for the first half of the season, he’s almost always on the phone. The scenes, despite their visual component, underline just how important audio still is to the series, and it becomes difficult to avoid the distraction of how hard the story is working to get both voices in a conversation into the same physical place.

In combination with the way that Homecoming’s first season resolves — as tied up with a bow as it possibly can be, in a way that almost betrays how committed the show seems to maintaining an aura of unsolvability — it’s the kind of weakness that would knock the legs out from under any other show.

But Homecoming’s strengths still outweigh any faults that would bring it down; as with the original podcast, the pleasure of Homecoming is in its performances, witnessing great actors do great work. There’s enough emotional depth to the story — and enough pageantry in how it’s told — to hold it all together.

Homecoming premieres November 2 on Amazon Prime.

Feel that chill in the air? That’s the temperature dropping — or maybe it’s just all of the fall TV shows getting spookier!!!

It’s hard to say why this might be happening, here in late October, because it’s not as if there’s a holiday celebrating everything scary and creepy coming up soon or anything like that. But in the next few days, TV will bear the debuts of Legacies, the latest show to join The CW’s Vampire Diaries universe; Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Netflix’s revamped spin on Sabrina the Teenage Witch; and the latest season of Syfy’s underrated horror anthology Channel Zero.

Oh, also, Sundance has a new season of its fabulously frenetic German series Deutschland 86, and Netflix has imported the British series Bodyguard, the biggest drama hit the BBC has aired in ages. Amazing!

Few of these shows are truly great, and as critics, we often have limited information on whether they’ll get better. (It’s rare to unprecedented for broadcast networks, especially, to send out many episodes for review beyond the first couple.) But there’s something in all of them worth checking out, especially if you’re a particular fan of their genres.

(A note: We typically only give ratings to shows where we feel we’ve seen enough episodes to judge how successful they will be in the long term. But this week, that’s most of them, as we’ve seen full seasons of Bodyguard and Channel Zero and the bulk of Deutschland.)

Bodyguard is thrilling, though it falls prey to some of the pitfalls of its genre

After Bodyguard premiered on the BBC in August, it quickly became the channel’s biggest drama of the year — as well as one of the biggest dramas of the last decade. As writer and director Jed Mercurio’s latest work makes the jump across the pond via Netflix, it’s clear to see why the program did so well. Despite an ultra-serious premise, the show is fun.

Richard Madden, best known as Robb Stark from Game of Thrones, stars as Sgt. David Budd, a British Army veteran assigned to protect Home Secretary Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes) after impressing his bosses by foiling a suicide bomber threat. Hawes is terrific, fleshing out a role that could have been just a caricature of a career woman, and so is the rest of the cast (including The Terror standout Paul Ready). But the series is ultimately Madden’s, who handily proves he’s capable of much, much more than brooding as King in the North.

The stresses of Budd’s job and his past are tangible in his performance, as is the fact that Budd is more than a little unstable. When he obsessively replays a tape of Julia, in which she stands by her support of the war in Afghanistan, he looks more like a villain than the hero of the story. But Bodyguard doesn’t discount the ups and downs of his emotions; unlike most male protagonists, Budd is allowed to cry, to break down, without any shades of judgment cast by the camera’s gaze. 

It’s an even-handedness that makes the show’s handling of the threat of terrorism feel somewhat strange. Political intrigue abounds, as per Home Secretary Montague’s position in the government, and it only falters when the show stoops to stereotypical portrayals of Muslim people, as TV series that have anything to do with foreign policy, such as Homeland, so often do.

It’s the biggest sore spot in the show, and persistent throughout the entire six-episode season. Just when you think the plot may have finally moved past it, it circles back, and leans into it in a way that ultimately pulls the rug out from under the finale.

The rest of the show, however, is a blast: It boasts terrific performances, unpredictable twists, and a stack of fanfic-favorite tropes (if the series’ title has you thinking of Whitney Houston, you’re frankly on the right track) executed with polish and flair. Though the thread of tension crackling at the show’s center doesn’t quite make it all the way through to the end, the journey is still enough of a roller coaster to make it well worth the ride. —Karen Han

All six episodes of Bodyguard are streaming on Netflix.

Legacies feels like exactly what it is: an attempt to keep the Vampire Diaries brand alive

For a few seasons there, The Vampire Diaries was one of TV’s most enthralling shows. It galloped when a walk would do, and it consumed wild plot twists like fire gobbling up oxygen. Like all shows that moved at such a frantic pace, it eventually became too ridiculous, but its central character dynamics were always so compelling that it could at least lean on those.

The same can’t really be said for its spinoff The Originals or, for that matter, for its grandchild, Legacies. Though Legacies is technically an Originals spinoff because it involves a character first introduced there, it is also set in Mystic Falls, the town where The Vampire Diaries was set, and it contains plenty of sexy teenage mayhem, just like The Vampire Diaries used to offer up on the regular.

Unfortunately, the pilot for Legacies feels more like a proof of concept than an exciting introduction to a TV show. Creator Julie Plec (co-creator of The Vampire Diaries and steward of this particular universe) has come up with an idea where Hope (Danielle Rose Russell) — the daughter of two Originals characters whose blood teems with vampire, werewolf, and witch DNA — starts attending a magic school that was set up in the Vampire Diaries finale. And who should work there but Vampire Diaries fan favorite Alaric (Matt Davis)?

That could be a charming premise, especially in the hands of Plec, who never met a dangerous hookup she couldn’t tease. But Legacies spends its first episode mostly racing around, trying to get everything in place for whatever nuttiness might lie ahead. By its end, you’ll have little idea of what the show looks like, beyond the vague sense that attractive 20-somethings playing teenagers will make out a lot.

Granted, there are worse reasons to make a TV show. And I’m not even all that concerned that “angst-ridden magic school” is already the premise of Syfy’s The Magicians, one of TV’s best shows. But Legacies will need a little more time in the oven before it can be as good as its grandparent. Then again, the same was true for The Vampire Diaries, which took about half a season to iron out its kinks. Maybe we should all check back in in March. —Todd VanDerWerff

Legacies debuts Thursday, October 25, at 9 pm Eastern on The CW.

Deutschland 86 is a kicky spy sequel with great action and sneaky depth

If you missed Sundance’s Deutschland 83 when it debuted in 2015 — becoming the first German-language series to air on American television — you missed a treat. The ever-so-slightly trippy tale of a young East German man pressed into service as a spy in West Germany, Deutschland made for an enjoyable companion to something like The Americans, brimming with the passions of youth rather than the muted tensions of adulthood.

It also had more action sequences, as well as a more direct portrayal of both sides of the Cold War, with multiple stories set on both sides of the Berlin Wall. The series won a Peabody and an International Emmy, and gained a surprisingly large cult following around the globe.

The follow-up series Deutschland 86 (give yourself a point if you guessed that it’s set in 1986) reunites most of the characters from the initial series, but it has the definite feel of a sequel more than it does a second season, perhaps because three years have gone by, in our reality as well as the show’s.

It’s shifted locations — though Berlin is still important, much of this season’s action takes place across several countries in Africa — as well as deepened its themes of loyalty to country, to family, and to friends. It’s reminiscent of John le Carré’s many books about George Smiley, the veteran spy whose perspective the great novelist used to dissect the end of the Cold War.

Through the first six episodes (Sundance made all 10 available to critics — a great sign of confidence — but I only had time to screen six), 86 sometimes strains to fit every single important issue and idea of the 1980s into its narrative. There’s a storyline about the AIDS crisis that feels a little tacked on, at least so far, and the expansion of the story to more fully involve the CIA similarly feels like the show is grasping for capital-I Importance just a bit.

And yet both Deutschland seasons are tapestries more than anything else. Where The Americans was intimate, Deutschland loves to lose itself in sprawl. On some level, both of these series are about how little the forces that run the universe — be they capitalist or communist — care about the lives of those living under their thumb. It’s telling that part of 86’s political storyline revolves around various countries’ response to apartheid in South Africa, a state-sanctioned creation of a permanent underclass that ostensibly democratic governments have to be shamed into denouncing.

But in the world of Deutschland, people are always sanctioning the creation of underclasses. It’s just something humans do. The series is at its best when it captures the small, human moments that play out amid these flashes of chaos — stolen kisses and thwarted connections and pitched hand-to-hand battles. It’s not perfect, but if it strove for clean perfection, it wouldn’t be nearly as good. —TV

Deutschland 86 debuts Thursday, October 25, at 11 pm Eastern on Sundance. It will then air two new episodes per week, on Thursdays and Fridays, for three weeks, before airing its remaining four episodes on Thursday, November 15; Friday, November 16; and Saturday, November 17. If that confused you, you’re probably best off just streaming episodes as they appear on Sundance’s website. Deutschland 83 is available on Hulu.

Channel Zero’s latest season explores the gory, terrifying heart of marriage

Syfy’s Channel Zero is one of TV’s hidden treats. Each new season of six episodes adapts a new creepypasta, those supposedly true, terrifying tales that lurk in backwater corners of the internet, like the subreddit r/nosleep. They usually take the basic idea of the story (a bizarre kids’ show, or a staircase appearing in the middle of nowhere), then filtering it through creator Nick Antosca’s sensibility, which means all three seasons of the show so far have indulged in rich ruminations on family relationships, alongside odd creatures lurching about empty suburban backstreets.

The new fourth season, The Dream Door, adapts a story by Charlotte Bywater whose premise is, more or less, “What if, all of a sudden, there was a door in your basement where there wasn’t one before?” Antosca and director E.L. Katz (who directs all six episodes) turn this question into an examination of marriage, of how little you might know about your partner, of what might be hiding behind their magic door that’s not hiding behind yours.

The two are ably assisted by Maria Sten and Brandon Scott as Jill and Tom, the couple at the story’s center, and by a terrifying demonic creation named Pretzel Jack, a contortionist clown drawn from Jill’s dreams and/or nightmares. He flings himself about the screen like a Slinky, knife in hand, all the better to stab anybody who might hurt Jill. And that number could include Tom.

If you’ve watched the other three seasons of Channel Zero, The Dream Door could feel slightly derivative, particularly of the second season, No-End House (still the series’ best). If nothing else, it only underlines how same-y so many creepypastas are. So many of these tales resemble the empty, modern homes they’re often set in, formed by the same cookie cutter but filled with ancient, primal terrors nonetheless, as if acknowledging that the scariest thing about modernity is how it numbs you in a way that distracts you from what you should really be scared of.

The Dream Door sags considerably in its midsection, but it ends well. And any time Pretzel Jack appears on screen, it’s understandable if you feel low-grade terrified. But should Channel Zero be granted more seasons (please, Syfy!), it might do the series well to leave the drab confines of suburbia that both it and creepypastas in general can feel trapped in behind. —TV

Channel Zero: The Dream Door debuts Friday, October 26, at 11 pm Eastern on Syfy. One new episode will air each night at 11 pm through Wednesday, October 31. Hey, that’s Halloween! Stream previous seasons on Shudder.

Also…

• PBS’s Native America (9 pm Eastern on Tuesdays) is a massive four-part documentary miniseries uncovering the history of Native Americans across the Western Hemisphere. If you have any interest at all in this subject matter, it’s well worth checking out.
• Paramount Network’s long-beleaguered TV miniseries adaptation of Heathers will finally air on American television, after several months of delay and the complete removal of one episode that was dubbed “too controversial.” It’s being burned off, two episodes per night, from Thursday, October 25, through Monday, October 29. You can also watch the whole thing on Paramount’s website. We weren’t offered screeners, but the reviews from critics who were aren’t promising.
• Netflix’s big launch for the week is its new version of Sabrina the Teenage Witch now entitled Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Friday). Read our full review here.
• It’s Christmas movie season on Hallmark again, with the debut of Christmas at Pemberley Manor (8 pm Eastern on Saturday). Hey, we almost made it to Halloween before Christmas movie season started. Almost!
• Two brand new late-night talk shows launch on Sunday: E! and Busy Philipps’s Busy Tonight (10 pm Eastern on Sunday) and Netflix’s Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj (Sunday). We’ve seen neither, but we wish Philipps and Minhaj only the best.

Every week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and culture writer Karen Han get together to discuss the latest episode of NBC’s loopy comedy The Good Place. This week, they’re discussing the fifth episode of the third season, “Jeremy Bearimy.” (Because the first two episodes aired as one installment, the number of episodes is one ahead of the number of weeks the show has aired.) Spoilers follow! Proceed with caution if you haven’t seen the episode!

Karen Han: I can see clearly now, the rain is gone! And by “rain,” I mean Chidi’s shirt. Okay, so “Jeremy Bearimy” still kind of feels like a transitional episode of The Good Place — out of the ethical frying pan and into the fire — but it also feels like more of a return to form for the show, and more importantly, everything that happened in the first few episodes of season three now makes sense. Getting to this point might have been a little circuitous, but I think it was worth it!

As it turns out, The Good Place cast’s recent adventures on Earth have been a way for the show to kick off a brand new experiment with a brand new set of stakes. After being caught scheming in front of an interdimensional portal, Michael and Janet are forced to come clean to Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason about what’s going on, and the result is somewhat devastating.

Now that our core four know the truth about the Good Place, none of the good things they do from here on out count toward them getting into it. Indeed, the mere fact that they know, with certainty, that it exists means they can never get in. Nothing means anything anymore.

The resulting revelations and existential crises that define “Jeremy Bearimy” are perfectly tailored to each of The Good Place’s human characters; Chidi, for example, literally loses his shirt as his typical hand-wringing over the moral implications of any given situation is suddenly rendered irrelevant. (Remember in season one’s “Chidi’s Choice” when Eleanor said Chidi is “surprisingly jacked?” She was not joking; the dude is swole!) Meanwhile, Tahani literally starts throwing money around.

The Good Place’s explicit explanation of the gang’s different philosophical viewpoints is kind of beautiful, even if it is a little heavy-handed. It’s also necessary grounding for the way the show seems to be about to buck its central mechanic, now that Good Place/Bad Place points are kaput. While the show isn’t doing something radically new, it does seem to be evolving in accordance with its exploration of philosophy. The points were never the point, no pun intended, and we — and the characters — understand that now.

That said, I’m not sure how Larry Hemsworth figures into the equation (Larry, I’m sorry for the things I said about you last week), or how The Good Place is going to move forward with regard to its plot. Will there be more additions to the gang? How will their new mission to help others be good affect their own moral journeys?

These questions have as much potential to flip the script as to stymie the show’s progress. I think I understand where it’s going morally and ethically, but I won’t pretend I can see much further. Not that I’m complaining — unpredictability is a big part of The Good Place’s charm.

All in all, I think “Jeremy Bearimy” is solid, and an overall improvement on the preceding episodes if also inextricably built upon them. Todd, did it do anything to boost your confidence as to the direction of season three?

Finally, season 3 feels like it has the direction it’s been lacking

Todd VanDerWerff: This episode didn’t just have to reboot the entire season. To some degree, it had to reboot the entire show. And you know what? I thought it did a darn good job.

After the third season’s first few installments spent a lot of time getting everybody into the same room at the same place and time, it was almost a relief to have the ensemble cast bouncing off of each other all at once, like it was vintage The Good Place season two again or something.

“Jeremy Bearimy” is named for, uh, the way that time passes in the afterlife, a weird squiggle of a timeline that resembles the name in the title (just go with it). But where the episode really succeeds is in finding a way to get back to The Good Place’s most basic question of all: How do you be a good person? And, really, why try to be good at all?

Shifting the action of the show to Earth was always meant to give these questions more concrete stakes, I suspect. While I never wanted to see Eleanor and Chidi and Tahani and Jason end up in “The Bad Place,” the threat didn’t quite have real teeth. In theory, however, there’s more to lose on this earthly plane, provided the show can find a way to finagle it. What’s smart about “Jeremy” is the way it contorts itself, leaning as far into those stakes as possible. Now the characters can’t get into the Good Place. So what’s the point of ever trying to do good?

Well, goodness can be its own reward, the episode argues, and while I’m sure this latest development will somehow be undone in a few weeks, I don’t mind the idea of following these characters around while they try to do good things and eat some of Jason’s delicious bag of tacos.

The underlying theme of The Good Place, I think, is that any sort of rigid system designed to provide absolute morality barometers is inevitably going to fail, because humans aren’t great at rigidity. Season three has perhaps bitten off more than it can chew a few times in that regard, but it’s at least wrestling with the idea that these questions are no longer just theoretical. They have real-world applications beyond the question of where you go after you die.

Also, there is no way the Jeremy Bearimy timeline doesn’t come back into play before this season is up, perhaps as a loophole for whatever corner the characters are currently backed into. (Remember: The dot on the I is Tuesdays. Also July. Also never.)

The Good Place knows moral change is incremental and doesn’t happen overnight

Karen: Jeremy Bearimy is definitely coming back, and I think the characters’ core traits are, as well. Eleanor and company have definitely changed since they first died. But as we see in this episode, they’re not so far along in their moral development, or rather, they’re still mostly the same people that they were when we first met them.

It’s a nice reminder that this kind of moral change is incremental; it doesn’t suddenly happen overnight. That said, everyone has evolved a little bit. Eleanor is quick to return to her previous self-identified status as a trash bag (she really takes that bartender to task), but she’s emotionally vulnerable to the significance of a child’s drawing to a father, even after having to go out of her way to get it to him. And Tahani, though still tethered to her enormous fortune, has a better handle on what to do with it (and true altruism in general) thanks to Jason.

This episode also serves as a welcome reminder of just how not-human Michael is. His line about humans being goo and juice is hysterical, as is his insistence that their best course of action might be for him to kill them all. Granted, he’s trying to use his demonic powers for good, now, but he still has a little ways to go when it comes to understanding how people work.

And, not to take this discussion in a Jeremy Bearimy direction, but the revelation of Jeremy Bearimy is also kind of a reminder of just how wonderfully nutty this show can be — the episode comes close to being the platonic ideal of a Good Place episode, in that it’s chock full of philosophy with a side of supernatural strangeness.

Again, the fact that all the action is now taking place on Earth is a bit of a restriction, but Michael and Janet’s explanation of Jeremy Bearimy alone is enough of a reminder of the fact that we’ve literally been through heaven and hell to get to this point. (I think it comes back to what you were saying above about rigidity, in that the rigidity of any given setting on the show has eventually been broken in order for the story to progress.)

It’s encouraging that being on Earth hasn’t put much of a damper on the proceedings, because it feels a lot like what comes next will also be Earth-bound — and, speaking to one of our biggest concerns from last week’s episode — it seems as though all of the characters will be sticking together for the foreseeable future.

Todd: If there’s something I most appreciated about this episode, it was the ending, which outlined the major schools of moral philosophy, in brief, before Chidi concluded that only nihilism mattered, which he illustrated by making marshmallow and candy chili. (You do you, Chidi.) I’m always impressed with how The Good Place can boil down these major ideas into a few simple sentences, which we understand better because the show itself has found a way to dramatize them.

But the paradox of “Jeremy Bearimy” is the way that it depicts what true altruism might look like. Eleanor and the gang have no reason to do good. There’s no reward for them, beyond the nice feeling they might get when they help somebody out, or just give someone $5,000 (AUD).

They’re just doing what they know is right, because it might provide them with a short-term boost of good feeling and general warmth toward their fellow human beings. But, as anybody could tell you, that feeling wears off, and the world is full of ways to convince you to think more about yourself than those around you.

This is what still makes me ride or die for The Good Place, no matter what weird tangents it takes that I don’t always enjoy. The show has found a way to be didactic — to have old fashioned morals — without really feeling like it’s preaching. I didn’t quite realize how the show was outlining ideas about deontology and consequentialism and so on until it hammered the point home in Chidi’s lecture. I was being made to think about my larger place in the universe, while also laughing at some very silly jokes. And that’s enormously hard to pull off!

I’m still a little worried about all the time the characters are going to be spending on Earth, since Michael and Janet seem more or less trapped here, too, but I think there’s something quietly radical about the way The Good Place has twisted itself into pretzels to get to a place where the Good Place, the Bad Place, and even the Medium Place just don’t matter. Rules, regulations, larger ethical codes: They’re all useless if you don’t find a way to put other people first.

“Jeremy Bearimy” has its issues here and there — I don’t quite buy that all of the human characters would be so blasé about learning that they died and were resurrected — but it made me feel, for the first time, like season three is on a firm path toward something I’m going to find rewarding on the whole. It took some pretzel logic to get there, but I’m happy to have followed it around its swirling loops and twists in order to re-situate myself in this weird, wonderful world.

(Also: My friend Ben played the bartender Eleanor talks to, something I somehow did not know until I watched the screener. Shoutout to Ben. Good work, pal.)

Sometimes, TV networks hold back their biggest nights until the fall season has calmed down a bit, the better to have more time to promote them. So it is this year with ABC’s Tuesday night lineup, which pins all its hopes on the Roseanne spinoff The Conners.

We have thoughts on The Conners elsewhere, but below you’ll find thoughts on the network’s brand new nostalgia comedy The Kids Are Alright, its new cop drama (and Nathan Fillion vehicle) The Rookie, and the premiere of Black-ish season five, a.k.a. the series’ return after a weirdly tumultuous fourth season. (Also returning is Splitting Up Together, but we don’t have time to watch everything.)

Finally, we also have thoughts on Netflix’s new Toni Collette series Wanderlust, which has already aired in the United Kingdom. So if you’re from the UK, this will be a retrospective for you. How lucky!

Few of these shows are great, and as critics, we often have limited information on whether they’ll get better. (It’s rare to unprecedented for broadcast networks, especially, to send out many episodes for review beyond the first couple.) But there’s something in all of these shows worth checking out, especially if you’re a particular fan of their genres.

(A note: We’ve only given ratings to shows where we feel we’ve seen enough episodes to judge how successful they will be in the long term. This week, that’s Wanderlust, of which we’ve seen the entire first season.)

The Kids Are Alright is alright. (It was right there. What did you expect?)

On its surface, ABC’s The Kids Are Alright — think The Wonder Years, but set in the ’70s and amid a huge Irish Catholic family living in Los Angeles — doesn’t seem to be breaking any new ground. But not every show needs to break new ground to be a success.

Where The Kids Are Alright sets viewers at ease is in its execution. The pilot has some clunky exposition and forced jokes (a reference to “phony news” might make you groan a bit). But that’s also forgivable in a show that has 10 major characters to introduce, eight of them the family sons, differentiated mainly by their age. When it comes to being able to explain all of these characters in a word or two, The Kids Are Alright succeeds considerably, despite only having 22 minutes to pull off the task.

ABC’s kid-casting department has always been the best in television, but the network has outdone itself here, with every one of these boys, who range in age from a tiny baby to a seminary student, expertly chosen both to fill their role and to feel like they fit together as a family. In particular, Jack Gore, who plays Timmy, the would-be entertainer whose adult memories provide the show’s narration (thanks to creator/showrunner Tim Doyle), is a surprisingly strong center for the show, despite his young age.

The show also boasts strong work from Michael Cudlitz and Mary McCormack as the boys’ parents, who express a kind of exhausted, off-brand dignity. And its ’70s milieu provides a tension between old ways and new that feels of the moment.

This is still very much A Sitcom Pilot, with all the “Oh, hey, I’m going to tell you about our relationship to each other, because we need to get in some exposition” lines that implies. But the casting works, and the writing underscores the bonds among these characters in a way that makes them feel like a real family. It’s not all the way there yet — but it’s at least alright. —Todd VanDerWerff

The Kids Are Alright debuts Tuesday, October 16, at 8:30 pm Eastern. It bears no relation to the film or song of the same name.

Black-ish has entered the elder statesman period of the family sitcom life cycle

The fourth season of ABC’s wonderful comedy Black-ish roiled with an unusual amount of tension. First, the network pulled a completed episode (dealing with the country’s recent political unrest) from the schedule, then announced it would never be aired. Then a late-season series of episodes putting the show’s central marriage in danger drew mixed critical responses.

And finally, the series’ creator and mastermind, Kenya Barris, exited his deal with ABC Studios in favor of setting up shop at Netflix. He will continue to be involved in Black-ish as long as it’s on the air, but he has taken a step back from the show and will otherwise be working for an entirely separate media company.

Add to this all of the typical problems of a family sitcom entering its fifth season — the kids are getting older (and thus less cute), the family dynamics are played out, and it’s hard to figure out how to keep the older kids involved in the story when they might normally be off at college — and you have a recipe for a show that could easily spin its wheels, racking up more episodes for a syndication order but slowly declining during its last few years on the air.

Judging by the first two episodes of season five, however, the show, while more tired than it’s ever felt, is still one of TV’s best family comedies, mixing the sort of lighthearted family stories that are the center of this subgenre with more thoughtful and probing explorations of black life in America.

Episode one, “Gap Year,” investigates why black men who are born into wealth are more likely to fall into poverty than white men born into wealth. Episode two, “Don’t You Be My Neighbor,” takes on the wave of calls to the police complaining about black people doing pretty much anything, like having a block party or hanging out in a Starbucks. The new episodes also lean into the aging of the child cast, doing some fascinating things with the now-teenage Diane in particular.

If you like Black-ish, then, you’ll be more than fine with these new episodes. The show has lost a step, sure, but it’s a lost step due not to turmoil but rather age. Few shows can make it to 100 episodes — the line Black-ish will cross later this fall — without being a little less surprising and audacious. Now an elder statesman, Black-ish seems more than happy to step into a more distinguished phase of its life. —TV

black-ish returns Tuesday, October 16, at 9 pm Eastern on ABC.

The Rookie is a star vehicle that sneakily plays by ensemble drama rules

Give Nathan Fillion this: When it came time to choose his return to television, the Castle star didn’t latch onto any of the presumably dozens of star vehicles thrown at him. Instead, he grabbed hold of a show that seems like a star vehicle — in that it’s named after his character — but boasts a surprisingly robust ensemble. That makes The Rookie one of the fall’s best new dramas. (A low bar to clear, admittedly.)

Fillion plays the rookie of the title, John Nolan, a man in his 40s who, after stopping a bank robbery, decides to move to Los Angeles from his little Pennsylvania town and join the LAPD. Now, most of this decision-making occurs offscreen, which leads to the first five minutes of the show’s pilot feeling hilariously abrupt. The focus veers wildly from John feeling like his life has had no meaning or adventure to him stopping the robbery to him at his first day on the job with the LAPD. You’d be forgiven for turning off the pilot in these moments.

But credit where it’s due: The Rookie is interested in exploring more rookie cops beyond John. In particular, the show adds to its mix of brand new cops Melissa O’Neil as Lucy, a hyper-competent young woman with something to prove, and Titus Makin as Jackson, the son of a cop who’s kind of coasted into the job. Then it pairs all of these rookies with more experienced training officers looking to advance their own careers, which provides a fun blend of motivations and character dynamics.

There’s plenty of stuff in The Rookie that doesn’t work. It doesn’t really try to do anything new with the cop show format, and there’s one big twist around the episode’s midpoint that made me sigh in irritation.

But in a world of cop shows still wedded to the closed-off, more procedural nature of shows like Law & Order and CSI, it’s kind of fun to have a series more interested in building out a large ensemble of characters, where the cases are secondary to the characters bouncing off each other. And in Fillion, the show has a star who’s refreshingly free of vanity (mostly), willing to portray himself as an over-the-hill guy huffing his way through his first days on the job. —TV

The Rookie debuts Tuesday, October 16, at 10 pm Eastern on ABC.

Wanderlust can be a little too literal-minded, but it’s honest where it counts

There are so many moving parts to Wanderlust that it can be hard to keep track of its narrative flurry — but in a show about the ins, outs, ups, and downs of relationships, that may be inevitable. But aside from the realization that catalyzes the events of the series, the story is maybe the flimsiest part of the whole series anyway.

For any other show, that might be a death knell, but it doesn’t matter so much for Wanderlust. The show’s earnest approach to relationships and sex — there’s no shying away from the awkwardness of any of it — is appealing enough to counteract the way the plot falls into a much more typical (and disappointing) pattern.

The crux of the series, written by Nick Payne and premiering on Netflix in the US, is Joy (Toni Collette) and Alan’s (Steven Mackintosh) mutual decision to have sex with other people. They’ll remain married — they still love each other, and their family — but their sex life has stalled, and this may just be the change they need.

It’s a bold beginning, given that any kind of infidelity or polyamory tends to be either exoticized or damned in media portrayals, and Wanderlust manages not to present it that way by focusing on the emotional strings tying these people together.

That strength comes through in the patients Joy sees in her day-to-day work as a therapist, who provide micro versions of the crises and changes that the main cast go through. (Andy Nyman and Robin Weaver are particularly great as a couple coming in for counseling.) But of course it’s down to Collette and Mackintosh to hold down the fort.

As proven earlier this year in Hereditary (just the most recent of many examples), Collette is capable of anything. And Mackintosh — whom you may remember from Luther or as any number of weirdos, corporate stooges, and yes men from the past handful of years — is finally allowed to put his prodigious charm to use. They keep things moving, literally and figuratively, even as the story starts to flag and veer in the most predictable directions.

The other relationships in the series are treated with similar tenderness toward experiences ranging from young love to exploring one’s sexuality to dealing with an age gap. It’s all treated with an eye toward honesty rather than shock value, and ultimately is what makes the show worth watching. —Karen Han

All six episodes of Wanderlust debut on Netflix on Friday, October 19.

There’s also …

• ABC’s The Conners (Tuesday at 8) is surprisingly good for something hastily cobbled together from the ashes of the Roseanne revival. You can read more of our thoughts on the spinoff here.
• Two streaming docuseries return for their second seasons on Friday — Netflix’s Making a Murderer and Amazon’s Lore. We’ll have more on the former later in the week, but making 10 episodes out of the handful of new developments in the Steven Avery case since season one aired turns out to be a tall order. The latter remains agreeably spooky, if a little unsure how to bridge the gap between the podcast that inspired it and its TV self.
• Two new TV movie/miniseries projects of note that debut this weekend: HBO’s My Dinner With Hervé (Saturday at 9 pm) casts Peter Dinklage in the role of Fantasy Island star Hervé Villechaize (he of “The plane! The plane!”). Meanwhile, PBS launches a five-episode adaptation of the Wilkie Collins novel The Woman in White (Sunday at 9 pm) that looks to be a lavish take on a terrific Victorian mystery.

Every week, we pick a new episode of the week. It could be good. It could be bad. It will always be interesting. You can read the archives here. The episode of the week for October 7 through 13 is “I am Goliath Strong,” the third episode of the 37th season of CBS’s Survivor.

It seems improbable that Survivor can still shock and surprise in its 37th season — how much drama can you milk out of a single reality show, after all — but the mere fact that the CBS stalwart has been running so long makes it clear that something about its base formula is working. And in the three episodes of season 37 that have aired thus far, that base formula has already yielded multiple bombshell moments.

The gimmick this season — beyond the usual “strand a diverse group of people in a tropical setting, divide them into teams, and make them fend for themselves” construct — is “David vs. Goliath.” One of the two teams is comprised of underdogs, i.e. “Davids,” while the other is made up of overachievers seen to have every advantage, i.e. “Goliaths.” It’s a distinction that’s almost immediately visible — most of the Goliaths are clearly more athletic types, while most of the Davids are a scrawnier bunch; the Goliaths just look like they have a better chance of surviving in the wild.

For the first two weeks of the season, it seemed like those designations were actually going to have a significant effect on the game: The Goliaths won both challenges, regardless of whether the challenges required more brains or brawn. All of a sudden, the Davids were down two members, not only because their losses meant they were subject to Tribal Council, but because of an emergency, as David team member Pat Cusack had to be medically evacuated in the season premiere after injuring his back in a freak boat accident. (Host Jeff Probst took pity on the Davids following the incident, sparing them a Tribal Council for that episode.)

But the time to get complacent with expectations is over. Episode 2, “The Chicken Has Flown the Coop,” ended with an upset, as Jessica Peet was voted out of the David tribe over the expected “weak link” Lyrsa Torres after a last-minute round of votes. The twist put some cracks in the David tribe’s foundation — and then this week’s third episode, “I am Goliath Strong,” ended with the previously solid Goliath tribe in much the same position. Jeremy Crawford, one of the stronger players on the team, was sent home instead of Natalie Cole, who’d been the subject of elimination whispers since the beginning of the game.

It’s an understatement to say that the machinations of season 37 already feel particularly sharp (and more than a little petty). That has everything to do with Survivor playing to its known strengths of assembling dynamic casts and forcing contestants to strategize, both together and apart — and stirring up drama in the process. But what’s especially fascinating about the season so far is how it’s relying on the same old strengths that were present when the show debuted nearly two decades ago, while simultaneously showing off new ones that have emerged over its tenure.

Survivor’s 37th season is thrilling because its contestants already know how to game the system

Survivor has been on the air for too long for the people competing on it to not be fans. In the season 37 premiere, one of the show’s more famous longtime-viewers-turned-contestants — Mike White, who you may recognize as School of Rock’s Ned Schneebly — even professed his Survivor fanaticism in one of his testimonials to the camera. And the kind of strategizing that’s evolved out of that inevitability has altered the way the game is played.

In the first two episodes of this season, it seemed foretold that, were the Goliaths to ever be sent to Tribal Council, Natalie Cole would be the one going home. Directly or indirectly, she’d managed to antagonize most of her teammates, and there’d already been conversations brewing about voting her out. When she failed to complete this week’s puzzle challenge in time — marking the Goliath tribe’s first loss — her exit seemed nearly guaranteed.

That the votes abruptly turned and Crawford was ousted instead speaks to Survivor’s reach — the members of the Goliath tribe were thinking not just in terms of personal relationships, but in terms of what would make the game easier to win for themselves. Cole came across as dead weight for the team, but she didn’t seem like a threat. Crawford, in contrast, appeared to have a shot at ultimately winning the game. He was strong enough to win physical challenges, and smart enough to try to stack the team deck in his favor. So he had to go.

But what was even more shocking than Crawford being voted out was that the vote against him (apart from Cole’s, of course) was unanimous. The idea that a strong competitor like Crawford had to be eliminated to clear a path for the rest of the tribe seemed to have taken root. Even White, who had formed something of an alliance with Crawford over the course of the past two episodes, voted for Crawford to be sent home, not wanting to rock the boat.

If nothing else, White’s vote emphasizes how people are now playing the game. From the season’s first episode, in which he snuck away from the camp to find an immunity idol (a move that’s since been copied by other players, from both tribes), he’s been playing with long-term strategy in mind. That approach is something he clearly developed as a fan of the show, over the course of 36 prior seasons’ worth of study.

Putting together a dynamic cast is key to the show’s survival

If there’s another ingredient in just how great season 37 has been so far, it’s that the casting department struck gold when choosing contestants. They reflect the usual amount of reality TV engineering, sure, but what’s genius is the way that almost every member of the cast seems to fit a certain niche — from the jock to the nerd. By focusing on recruiting contestants who can build and inform an overarching story rather than just being cutthroat competitors, Survivor has added an extra emotional hook in a show that easily could have gone stale after so many years.

It still strikes me as a minor miracle, for instance, that White is on the show at all. The fact that he’s a (relatively) public figure makes it feel like you’re seeing someone you know on your TV screen, maybe a friend of a friend of a friend. He’s also just a delight to watch; that his sheer devotion to Survivor is part of what got him cast is endearing (in an interview with Indiewire, he said that he’d hounded the show’s producers for years — though he had to go through the same casting process as everybody else), as is the fact that he seems to be a Goliath odd duck.

In this season’s first episode, White was somewhat amazed by the other members of his team, e.g. people who look to be in tip-top shape and are more conventionally attractive, whereas he described himself as “not one of the beautiful people.” It’s a kind of self-deprecation that has persisted throughout subsequent episodes as well.

Then there’s the other Wikipedia-able member of this season’s cast, professional wrestler and White’s fellow Goliath teammate John Hennigan, who refers to himself as the “Mayor of Slamtown.” Like White, he comes from an entertainment background and thereby knows how to embody and sell a certain persona. He has said that Survivor is his chance to play as himself, not as his wrestling alter ego. But his statements that he is using the game to develop “old-school human skills,” like “conversations and laughing with friends” — made in apparent earnestness during a testimonial aside — seem like Slamtown sayings more than anything else.

They’re real people, but they slot into archetypes that lend Survivor a more narrative shape, especially against the more familiar backdrop of in-fighting and backstabbing, alliance-making and showmancing. (If you told me that the David team’s Christian Hubicki, who White referred to as “Big Bang Theory” in the season premiere, had been made up and scripted to fit the nerd archetype, I would believe it. Hubicki really is that nerdy, and it’s great.) The effect has brought plenty of intrigue to a 37-season-old formula. After all this time, Survivor is still making waves by showcasing all of its strengths, both new and old.

Survivor airs Wednesdays at 8 pm Eastern on CBS.