Emily Nussbaum

After making “The Good Wife,” Robert and Michelle King went rogue, creating wildly experimental series that capture the vertigo of post-Trump America.

It’s a Borscht Belt gag, but, then, Abby’s whole life feels like a punch line. Still, buried in that Eeyore-ish lament, there’s something else: Abby’s girlish fantasy of herself as a “fucking damsel” longing for rescue—by a prince or a princess, the details don’t matter. Magically, that’s just what she gets when she meets Chris, a twenty-two-year-old waiter who Abby (Abby McEnany) initially assumes is hitting on her straight sister. Played by the supremely chill Theo Germaine, Chris looks like A…

It was time to stop whining and learn to love the list—or to fake it, at least. True, this year looked particularly brutal, invoking the horrifying possibility of both a 2019 Top Ten list and a Top Ten of the decade—not to mention the necessity of a chilly, late-December deep dive into the vast, ever-expanding ocean of television, much of which I haven’t seen, including some of the rumored-to-be-great stuff. (That means you, “Lodge 49.”) A person has only two eyes, one brain, five screens, and a…

That opening sequence pulls to the surface themes of racial violence that never appear directly in Moore’s graphic novel, although they seethe at the margins, coded in Reagan-era fear of urban chaos. It’s not necessary to read the source material in order to “get” the show, but it wouldn’t hurt. A quick primer: the original “Watchmen” is set in an alternate time line, beginning in the nineteen-forties, among a group of bickering masked vigilantes, the Minutemen. The team includes one guy dressed…

“Pizzazz” was satisfying media shorthand: it was fun to say, spangled in “Z”s, faintly vaudevillian—an anxious catchphrase that framed a serious subject. But the word also captured a genuine tension about just what sort of show was being produced here, and for whom. It sounds bad to demand that a legal proceeding entertain a mass audience—that it should do more than attempt to establish the truth. It’s depressing to suggest, as Donald Trump so often has (and as Devin Nunes did, clumsily, halfway…

That’s basically what I was hoping for with “The Morning Show,” the star-crossed series set at a fictionalized “Today” show, in the midst of the #MeToo crisis: something flawed but electric, full of odd, oversized media-élite gestures; something along the lines of, say, “Smash” or “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” borderline camp dramas that I couldn’t stop watching, however hard I tried. For all its bad buzz, “The Morning Show” has a terrific cast, with Aniston, Steve Carell, as the deposed anch…

It’s an elegant, affecting sequence—at once grand and simple, movingly performed—which captures the central ethos of the show. “When They See Us,” on Netflix, is a harrowing story about a hideous injustice: the railroading of a group of five black and Latino boys for the beating and rape of Trisha Meili, who was attacked while jogging in Central Park, in 1989. The show portrays a racist justice system and an equally hellish penal system, as well as media that amplified the lies that put the boys…

It’s also the latest in a deluge of TV series that feel like a direct response to the #MeToo movement, touching on third-rail themes that are meant not merely to comfort or inspire but to unsettle. In one of “Tuca and Bertie” ’s central story lines (which I’ll spoil here, so bail if you care about that kind of thing), Bertie, who is working as a corporate cog at a magazine company called Condé Nest, gets her dream gig, as an after-hours apprentice to the celebrity baker Pastry Pete, a brilliant…

In fact, CBS had censored that week’s “Good Fight Short,” one of a series of “Schoolhouse Rock!”-like cartoons—written and performed by the singer Jonathan Coulton and animated by Steve Angel, the co-founder of the Canadian shop Head Gear Animation—that punctuate the legal drama, educating viewers on topics like impeachment and Russian trolls. The segment had been fully written and animated, then vetted by legal and run through all the regular corporate oversight. Then, less than two weeks befor…

When “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” first débuted, a lot of people complained about that title: so harsh, so mocking, maybe kind of sexist? Who exactly was being made fun of? (In the original opening-credits sequence, Rebecca herself called the term sexist—and, when the chorus cheerily sang “She’s so broken inside,” she insisted, defensively, that the situation was “a lot more nuanced than that.”) But “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” wasn’t kidding about the crazy bit. When, in the last season, Rebecca got a defini…

Then Nadia’s back in the bathroom, washing her hands. Again and again, no matter how much she tries to circumvent her fate, Nadia keeps on dying—tumbling down stairs, taking pratfalls into basements—at unpredictable intervals, inevitably ending up staring at herself in the mirror (and at us, through the camera lens). The fact that she works as a video-game coder does not seem coincidental. Sometimes Nadia makes it to the next day, sometimes not. The premise, right away, appears to be a distaff v…

The production landed at an ideal moment, tapping into a desperation among women for something sweet. For me, it felt grating.

As is my holiday tradition, I’ll divide my not-list into several smaller lists, none numbered, and change my mind along the way.

This sequence is a delight in the TV adaptation, too, which is currently airing on HBO. On a bench in their grungy, violent Naples neighborhood, Elena and Lila lounge, bodies entwined, wearing shabby dresses, reading in unison, in Italian. (The show has English subtitles.) Excitedly, Lila recites a passage in which Jo herself reads out loud, from her first published short story, to her sisters, without telling them who wrote it. At the passage’s climax, when Jo reveals herself as the author, the…

Jackson’s funny-nasty psychological thriller is about a very bad house, which is described in fabulously hyperbolic terms: Hill House is “arrogant and hating,” full of “sickening, degraded cold.” In the novel, we’re trapped not merely inside this malevolent architecture but in the mind of an unreliable mouseburger named Eleanor, a spinster whose sanity gets eaten away during her days at Hill House, where she’s gone to participate in a study about the paranormal. Mike Flanagan, the show’s creator…

The great strength of the show is that it manages to deepen its monstrous characters—to grant them meaningful context, even pathos—without glamorizing them.

HBO’s “The Tale,” a harrowing and wise two-hour drama about childhood sexual abuse, was directed by Jennifer Fox, based on an autobiographical story that Fox has been trying to tell, in many forms, for nearly four decades. (It permeates her globe-trotting documentary series from 2007, “Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman.”) When we first meet the adult Fox, played by Laura Dern, she’s a workaholic iconoclast who lives in a gorgeous loft with her loving fiancé, played by Common. Her life seems id…

More than any other showrunner, he has upended the pieties of modern television.

It would be so nice to be able to hunker down on my own sofa with “Roseanne,” the blockbuster sitcom from my twenties, a feminist show that was tough about class, with pioneering gay characters and a memorably complex teen girl. It would feel good to critique the new version with a tolerant smile—to say simply that you shouldn’t judge any sitcom too harshly, early on. In a review of this type, you’d emphasize the gulf between the actress Roseanne Barr, a rich, pro-Trump Twitter troll, and the ch…

“Jane the Virgin,” which débuted in 2014, is an extremely loose adaptation of a Venezuelan telenovela in which a poor teen-ager has the ultimate “whoops” pregnancy: she’s accidentally impregnated via artificial insemination, then falls for the wealthy bio dad. For the American version, the creator, Jennie Snyder Urman, added a fabulous framing device—a Latin-lover narrator who punctuates his remarks with the refrain “Just like a telenovela, right?” An excitable fanboy who tosses out Twitter hash…