Episodes of Documentary Now! naturally stand on their own as self-contained installments, connected to the original work they send up but not necessarily to each other. And yet, there are some clear throughlines in this third season, whether intentional or not. Many of these episodes have a subtle underlying theme…

The Good Fight’s season three premiere has a lot going for it, playing to all of the show’s strength with spectacular finesse. It’s a tour de force of acting, writing, and directing. But one element shines brightest of all: Audra McDonald.

Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer don’t get to flex their dramatic acting skills very often on Broad City. The madcap style of this comedy means that they’re most often giving over-the-top comedic performances. That’s not to say that there isn’t nuance in their performances from week to week. Both women have proven time…

“Searching for Mr. Larson: A Love Letter From the Far Side” is less about satirizing the documentary upon which it is based—Dear Mr. Watterson, about the creator of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes—and more about interrogating the very idea of a male, super-fan documentarian. It’s a painstaking account of one man’s…

Charmed has a lot of meta fun with its hokey setup this week, poking some fun at itself while satirizing its genre roots. Macy accidentally summons the main characters from a television series she grew up watching in which two brothers were sent from heaven to fight demons. Like a 90s version of Supernatural, with…

At this point, it’s hard not to sound redundant when writing about Documentary Now!, because the show keeps on playing to its own strengths, keeps proving time and again that it’s one of the most innovative shows on television. It shouldn’t work so well, and yet it does...over and over. Episodes, of course, are…

As last episode’s reveal suggested, so much of this season finale hinges on the inter-family dynamics of the Castillo family. That’s not a completely bad thing; the issues that plague Laurel’s family touch on a lot of the recurring themes of this show: struggle for power, inherited trauma as well as inherited evil,…

“Lost and Found” is a super queer, super Jewish, super New York episode of Broad City and therefore feels like the show in its truest form, a celebration of Abbi and Ilana’s identities as well as the city they inhabit. The episode presents yet another twisty adventure for the friends but manages to bring up some…

Documentary Now! is a show not just for fans but for fanatics. It’s so precise in its parody that whatever subject material its original source material celebrates is similarly celebrated in the parody—or, in some cases, whatever its source material criticizes, the parody sharply criticizes with equal gusto. In the…

“I’m not sure of anything anymore,” Annalise tells Tegan at the top of “Make Me the Enemy,” and boy is that an apt way to kickoff season five’s penultimate episode. How To Get Away With Murder has packed so many twists and turns into the final chapters of the season that it has lost all sense of coherence. Going off…

Broad City is really seizing the opportunity of a planned final season to really push Abbi and Ilana through some really big moments in their lives. “Artsy Fartsy” follows a pretty typical episode structure for the series and includes a lot of the show’s signature weirdo moments that just feel so much like they could…

The true marker of a successful ensemble comedy is when any combination of characters can carry a storyline. Certain duos of course make the most sense together and have standout dynamics, but Brooklyn Nine-Nine is absolutely the kind of ensemble show where you can match up any two characters and get not only comedic…

Documentary Now! unsurprisingly takes some big swings in its season three premiere. From this start, this has been an ambitious, weird series that strikes an impressive balance between niche, specific jokes and broader comedy. It has to play to viewers who might not be familiar with the source material it’s skewering…

“You’re Dead To Me” deals with the fallout of Macy learning that she was resurrected, and pretty quickly we’re treated to a flashback that establishes the logistics of that. Marisol and Macy’s father summoned a necromancer from Tartarus to bring their dead baby back, but as with most spells of this nature, it came…

Cicely Tyson’s arrival on How To Get Away With Murder typically signals it’s going to be a strong episode, and “Where Are Your Parents?” is no exception. It’s one of the more coherent episodes the show has done in a while and even contains some brief but very welcome levity, which the show is too often too short on.…

This is a rare episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine that centers the actual case in a very deliberate way with much less attention given to subplots and office shenanigans. In fact, we don’t really spend any time at the office, most of the episode unfolding at the scene of the crime where a man has been murdered with very…

Television comedies usually allow very little room for personal growth, because if the characters evolve too much and fix all of their flaws, then what exactly are we watching anymore? While Abbi and Ilana do often fall into the same traps and run up against the same obstacles in their life journeys, there has been a…

At this point, How To Get Away With Murder is just rubbing salt in the wound of DA Miller’s death. Bonnie goes to visit his mother, who reveals to her that he was going to propose and also that his death comes on the heels of his father’s death. It’s devastating to watch, especially since Bonnie is desperately trying…

In “Bitcoin & the Missing Girl,” Ilana finds the access code to ⅓ of a Bitcoin given to her by an douchey finance bro ex-boyfriend, and Abbi loses her favorite sweatshirt. That’s it. That’s the whole premise. But in typical Broad City form, the episode takes that setup and zigzags it into two adventures that are wacky…