—Helen Williams—Drama Republic Ltd; AMC+; HBO (3); Apple TV+; Scott Gries—NBCThere’s too much TV to keep up with it all, even for those of us who watch it professionally. But critics are obsessive types, and I’d feel remiss if I didn’t at least try to get a handle on the best shows released each year. Below, you’ll find the fruits of that search: a roughly chronological list of standout 2026 series, with capsule reviews and links to the longer pieces excerpted here. I plan to update it at least once a month, so you might want to bookmark this page.JuneAlice and Steve (Hulu)In this dark British comedy created by Sex Education alum Sophie Goodhart, a pair of best friends become mortal enemies. Steve (What We Do in the Shadows creator Jemaine Clement) is a thoughtful, recently divorced hairstylist to the stars. Alice (UK television stalwart Nicola Walker), a loving but intense clothing designer, has a soft-spoken husband (Joel Fry); a wide-eyed teenage son (Tyrese Eaton-Dyce); and a 26-year-old daughter, Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith). One night, Steve and Izzy hook up. It’s neither party’s fault. Nobody wants to hurt Alice. Steve has no history of dating girls young enough to be his daughter and is fully aware that it’s a bad look. But they like each other. A lot. And Alice can’t get over it. What begins with Steve’s desperate efforts to keep both women in his life soon escalates into a bitter war. This is a delicate premise. But Goodhart and her cast have the sensitivity to make it work. Clement is especially good at making us feel for a character who could easily read as a creep. Alice and Steve is perceptive in drawing out the conflict’s stickiest aspects, from the sexism inherent in middle-aged men’s ability to reboot their lives with younger women to the impossibility of maintaining a candid friendship when one person is sleeping with the other’s kid.The Vampire Lestat (AMC and AMC+)Imagine that an esteemed journalist published a book profiling a real-life vampire, and then that vampire’s twisted soulmate—also a vampire—started a rock band. If this were 1985, when Anne Rice’s novel The Vampire Lestat came out, you could expect such a revelation to upend human society. But in today’s United States, an aspiring tech dystopia where the news can be weirder than the conspiracy theories? You’d get hours of social media chaos, days of cable-news hysteria, and then, most likely, everyone who didn’t already believe in lizard people would write off the author as a scammer and the rocker as a fraud. Or, as Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), now fronting glam-garage revival act the Vampire Lestat, tells it: Americans “lifted their heads from their algorithmic hand masters, uttered a collective ‘huh,’ and swiped left.” This florid voice narrates The Vampire Lestat, an alternately rollicking and gutting work of apocalyptic camp that creator Rolin Jones has suggested is, at once, the third season of his beloved Rice adaptation Interview With the Vampire and a new show with the same characters and personnel. [Read the full review.]What It Feels Like for a Girl (Prime Video)A coming-of-age drama that’s equal parts harrowing and exhilarating, Paris Lees’ BAFTA-nominated BBC adaptation of her 2021 memoir unfolds in small-town England at the turn of the millennium, as 15-year-old Byron (Ellis Howard, excellent) discovers a life beyond the feckless parents and ill-fitting trappings of masculinity they were saddled with at birth. Neglected at home and bullied at school, Byron stumbles into sex work and queer nightlife. In the latter sparkly new world, they find a community that embraces the femininity they fantasize about but never dreamed they could embody. Lees was clearly the right person to translate her story into an audiovisual medium; What It Feels Like for a Girl dazzles with the sights and sounds of Y2K club culture but never sanitizes the dangers Byron courts. Just as bright, witty, and debauched as their namesake, this unique protagonist is on a path of self-discovery, gaining insight into not just their gender identity, but also their preternatural attraction to transgression and risk. MayDeli Boys Season 2 (Hulu)Abdullah Saeed’s show about two inept Pakistani American brothers running a drug empire they didn’t even know existed before their father’s sudden death is everything a crime comedy should be: fast-paced and funny, packed with cartoonish violence and clever banter. Last year’s first season found business-savvy Mir (Asif Ali) and playboy Raj (Saagar Shaikh) scrambling to become formidable gangsters, with ambivalent assistance from their dad’s trusted associate, the glamorous and terrifying Lucky Auntie (Poorna Jagannathan). In conceiving Season 2, Saeed must have realized that Jagannathan is Deli Boys’ true star. Now that the trio is on top, Lucky gets an offbeat romance plot that pairs her with the powerful, game-loving casino owner Max Sugar, played by Fred Armisen. Other great cast additions include Andrew Rannells as a creepily wholesome anti-drug mayoral candidate and Kumail Nanjiani as Max’s lawyer. Hacks (HBO Max)Hacks was a show about legacy. That wasn’t its only subject; comedy and power and misogyny and creativity and intergenerational conflict and work ethic and, especially in its last few seasons, the debased state of the entertainment industry were all richly explored through lines. But when we met the septuagenarian comedian at its center, Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance, the most compelling problem facing her was that, for all the millions of dollars she’d earned and all the thousands of sets she’d performed, she had yet to receive the recognition she deserved as a pioneer of her art form. Decades into a Vegas residency where she recycled moldy jokes and a staple of QVC, this workhorse was seen by just about everyone besides her obsessive fans, the Little Debbies, as a hack. It seemed inevitable that this was how she would be remembered. [Read a review of the Hacks series finale.]Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed (Apple)With a single mom eking out a living as an excellent but undervalued magazine fact-checker for a hero, this witty crime thriller takes its tale of sex work, motherhood, and loneliness in genuinely surprising directions. Yet its fidelity to the truth of each idiosyncratic character makes the show’s whiplash narrative feel believable. [Read the full review.]The Other Bennet Sister (BritBox)Austen-adjacent fiction—particularly works derived from Pride and Prejudice—has long been a cottage industry unto itself, and several of those stories cast a revisionist eye on the most maligned Bennet girl, Mary. Is it really so bad to be bookish? Could you really blame any unbeautiful teen growing up sandwiched between two perfect older sisters and two adorable younger ones for tirelessly promoting her own talents, dubious though they may be? The BBC’s The Other Bennet Sister adapts Janice Hadlow’s 2020 novel into a light yet thoughtful romantic comedy that is bound to delight fans of the genre, anyone experiencing Bridgerton withdrawal, and even, I think, those hard-to-please Janeites. [Read the full review.]Lord of the Flies (Netflix)Jack Thorne, the writer of some of TV’s best recent social dramas—including the toxic-boyhood tragedy Adolescence—brings to his four-part adaptation an eye for both the nuances of Golding’s characters and the ways in which they’re most relevant today. Bolstered by poetic visuals and stunning performances from the young cast, Thorne’s psychological approach offers profound insight into the unconscious impulses that underlie our current political crises. [Read the full review.]Conbody vs. Everybody (Criterion Channel)Extraordinarily motivated people are born into every background, but that doesn’t mean they all enjoy the same opportunities. Coss Marte grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and, while his wealthy counterparts uptown were hiring SAT tutors, made millions selling drugs. Later, as his health declined in prison, he devised an exercise regimen that would give him his future back. Conbody vs. Everybody, a docuseries from Debra Granik, applies the Winter’s Bone and Leave No Trace filmmaker’s stark but empathetic eye for outsider narratives to Marte’s post-incarceration efforts to build a fitness empire. He’s a dynamic subject, with the intelligence, work ethic, and thick skin such a project demands. An artful study of entrepreneurial tenacity in the face of systemic prejudice, the documentary also reflects Criterion Channel’s increasing investment in series—a welcome development amid a streaming landscape dominated by risk-averse megaplatforms that rarely make room for such quietly profound stories.AprilThis Is a Gardening Show (Netflix)In each refreshingly compact, 15-minute episode, Zach Galifianakis introduces viewers to the cultivation of a crop (apples, root vegetables) or a related practice (foraging, composting), with help from some good-humored expert—usually a yeoman farmer. The other constant is Galifianakis, whose absurdist humor is much gentler here than what you might remember from, say, Between Two Ferns, chatting up little kids about the subject du jour. These segments yield plenty of modern-day Kids Say the Darndest Things moments, as well as many topically appropriate poop jokes. It’s an easy, lighthearted watch. But there’s also an earnest impetus behind the project. As Galifianakis says in the premiere: “I honestly think, for human beings and for the world itself, the only future is agrarian.” Beef Season 2 (Netflix) Can love and capitalism peacefully coexist? As the wealth gap yawns ever wider, this has become a favorite question for storytellers to explore. The rom-com Materialists threw a matchmaker into a love triangle with a perfect-on-paper rich guy and the broke schlub who was her true soulmate. The Sicily-set second season of Mike White’s hit all-star tragicomic anthology series The White Lotus stirred a dollop of amore into its predecessor’s recipe for class strife at a high-end resort. Now, Lee Sung Jin is back with Season 2 of his hit all-star tragicomic anthology series Beef, and it, too, sits at the intersection of love and money. While the new episodes don’t offer quite the same depth of character or adrenaline rush as the original, the show remains a sharply observed, virtuosically acted, and artfully shot study of human behavior at its ugliest. [Read the full review.]Margo’s Got Money Troubles (Apple TV)The rights to adapt Rufi Thorpe’s novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles for TV were snapped up nearly a year before its publication, with Nicole Kidman, David E. Kelley, Elle and Dakota Fanning, and the swaggering indie studio A24 all attached to the project. Read the book, and you’ll see why. It tells the story of a college freshman and aspiring writer who gets pregnant by her married professor, decides to have the baby—financial precarity be damned—and turns to OnlyFans to support the child. Maybe this sounds like an X-rated Juno ripoff. But Thorpe’s prose ushers us through the eponymous hero’s crises with humor and panache, filtering the bright but naive protagonist-Margo’s evolution through the voice of a narrator-Margo who has developed some perspective. She’s surrounded by distinctive, lovable yet deeply flawed characters. The dialogue is as realistic as it is punchy. It all adds up to an unconventional sort of Künstlerroman that demands to be devoured in a weekend and revisited whenever you need a pick-me-up.But just because a book is an obvious choice for adaptation, doesn’t mean that the show will live up to its source material. Margo’s layered voice presents a challenge; the novel-to-series pipeline often relies too heavily on clunky, uncinematic narration. Thorpe’s characters are so specific, their balance of prickliness and kindness and quirk so delicate, that one wrong casting choice could ruin the whole viewing experience. And it takes a certain offbeat finesse to integrate Margo’s far-out OnlyFans productions—which become a more satisfying creative outlet than any freshman comp seminar—into what is otherwise a grounded family dramedy. I’ve been extremely critical of Kelley’s prolific post-Big Little Lies output. So let me be very clear that with Margo he has succeeded where many other creators might’ve failed. It’s an ideal adaptation and one of the year’s best shows. [Read the full review.] The Audacity (AMC)A siege mentality defines The Audacity. The series joins a voluminous canon of tech satires (Silicon Valley), thrillers (Westworld), sagas (Halt and Catch Fire), philosophical treatises (Devs), and compilations of all of the above (Black Mirror); the more this sector dominates our lives, the larger it looms in the minds of our storytellers. Yet, in its portrayal of industry leaders panicking as consensus spreads that the billionaire founders who were hailed as geniuses and visionaries a decade ago have poisoned the world they claimed to be saving, The Audacity feels more contemporary than any of them. [Read the full review.]The Miniature Wife (Peacock)The show is ridiculous, to be sure. But it’s also surprisingly good. Starring and executive produced by Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen, Peacock’s sci-fi dramedy takes its premise not from a cynical suit who fell asleep watching Honey, I Shrunk the Kids but from a deadpan, surrealistic short story by Manuel Gonzales. And in a 10-episode season, creators Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner (Goliath, Ash vs Evil Dead) shade that spare source material into an entertaining, remarkably insightful portrait of marriage, family, and the skewed narratives people create for themselves about both. [Read the full review.]The Testaments (Hulu)Often presented in closeup, Elisabeth Moss’s face—a mask of feral determination—was the key visual motif of The Handmaid’s Tale. Faces are also integral to The Testaments, a loose adaptation of the 2019 sequel to Margaret Atwood’s 1985 masterpiece. Chase Infiniti’s open expression and the youthful flush of co-star Lucy Halliday contrast with the furrowed mug of Ann Dowd’s Aunt Lydia; innocence, meet experience. It might surprise those who know the novels or the original series that creator Bruce Miller, who also helmed its predecessor, has taken this follow-up in a conspicuously young-adult direction. The choice yields a brighter, richer, more varied and nuanced story in which coming-of-age tropes mingle with Gileadean bleakness to reveal new facets of a state premised on male supremacy. While many of the problems that afflicted The Handmaid’s Tale as it dragged on persist, and the need for consistency between the series introduces more, I was surprised at how well it all worked. [Read the full review.]MarchThe Comeback Season 3 (HBO)Each of the show’s three seasons—but especially the final one, which premiered March 22 on HBO—has been a perceptive snapshot of Hollywood’s discontents at a given moment as well as a hilarious work of cringe comedy. Taken together, its 21-year arc captures the intertwined evolution of scripted television and its vulgar doppelgänger reality TV, the former undergoing monumental shifts as the latter was helping to reshape society. The Comeback has always squinted into the camera and wondered: “What are we doing?” If ever there was a time to pause for reflection on that point, it’s the present. [Read the full review.]Dynasty: The Murdochs (Netflix) Rupert Murdoch has a reputation for cheating at family games of Monopoly. As scandals go, this doesn’t exactly rise to the level of News of the World hacking famous phones. But it’s pretty telling from a psychological standpoint; what kind of person needs to win that badly, even when the stakes are nil and the opponents your kids? Director Liz Garbus (What Happened, Miss Simone?) picks up on the metaphor in the fascinating four-part docuseries Dynasty: The Murdochs, which visualizes the Murdoch children’s very public succession battle as a gilded board game presenting various paths to the ultimate objective: inheriting the patriarch’s throne.Sunny Nights (Hulu)If you ever wished Breaking Bad were less a descent into the abyss of the human soul and more “Yeah, bitch! Magnets!,” your new favorite show has arrived. I don’t mean that as a slight to Sunny Nights, a lively Australian crime comedy starring and executive produced by Will Forte and D’Arcy Carden. Jesse Pinkman’s exclamation of awe at the wonders of science was no throwaway; it was the payoff of years’ worth of sharp character development that began with a science teacher enlisting his burnout former student to help him cook meth. [Read the full review.]Ladies of London: The New Reign (Bravo)What makes the show so much better than its many stateside counterparts? First and foremost, it’s the cast. Martha Sitwell is like Marlene Dietrich meets Marianne Faithfull, a brassy blonde whose bumpy ride through life has included teen motherhood, homelessness, modeling for Vivienne Westwood, marriage and divorce from a baronet. Speaking of nobles: Lady Emma Thynn beat out a certain other TV star to become the first woman of color to marry into the British aristocracy. An American expat who has fully embraced British eccentricity and emotional opacity, Kimi Murdoch could be a Toni Collette character. She can often be found trading witticisms with Mark-Francis Vandelli, a self-described professional aesthete, reality-TV veteran, and the rare man to merit main-cast status on this kind of show. While actor Margo Stilley made her name in the notoriously explicit film 9 Songs, Myka Meier is a Pollyannaish etiquette coach. Ladies’ first big blowup concerns a rumor that an old fair-weather friend of Myka’s is a madam. There has also been some remarkable headwear. What more could a Bravo devotee ask for?This City Is Ours: A Crime Family Saga (AMC+)The Sopranos gave us a gangster in therapy for panic attacks. Now, here’s This City Is Ours, whose protagonist is a gangster (James Nelson-Joyce from A Thousand Blows) whose low sperm count and eager-to-conceive girlfriend (Hannah Onslow of This Is Going to Hurt) have him making repeat visits to a fertility clinic. Don’t worry—that isn’t what the show is actually about. But creator Stephen Butchard’s choice to frontload it sets up a crime drama that, like a lesser (yet still quite good) Sopranos, distinguishes itself more through the care it takes in developing characters and relationships than for its empire building and bloodbaths.Vladimir (Netflix)In the series premiere of Netflix’s Vladimir, Rachel Weisz awakens from troubled sleep to a cascade of texts, sighs deeply, and addresses the camera with pleading eyes. “All I want is a life free of complications,” says her unnamed lead. “If I can’t have power, can I at least be free from other people’s drama? Free from their behavior? Free from their needs and desires?”It feels appropriate that free appears four times in this monologue, one of the character's many fourth-wall-shattering asides. She is a blocked novelist who teaches English at a liberal arts college. And there is no setting more emblematic of freedom—and its discontents—than the campus, where tenure is supposed to protect the intellectual liberty of faculty and students living independently for the first time try on new ideas and identities. [Read an essay on Vladimir, HBO’s Rooster, and the return of the campus sex comedy.]FebruaryThe Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins (NBC)Having always preferred the darker, more manic and referential humor of 30 Rock and Community to NBC contemporaries like The Office and Parks and Recreation, I’ve found the relative scarcity of that style disappointing. So I’m extra delighted to report that The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins—an NBC sitcom that stars Tracy Morgan and is co-created by Robert Carlock, a longtime collaborator of executive producer Tina Fey—is network TV’s first worthy heir to 30 Rock. What that show was to SNL, this one is to the NFL. The surprise is that it also smartly cribs from The Office’s playbook. [Read the full review.]Can You Keep a Secret? (Paramount+)True fans of British comedy know that there are few people funnier than Dawn French, who won over global audiences as The Vicar of Dibley’s eponymous earthy cleric and as half of a legendary sketch duo with AbFab’s Jennifer Saunders. The BBC One import Can You Keep a Secret? puts her at the center of a six-episode sitcom that manages to be both dark and cozy, as a retired grandmother, Debbie Fendon, whose husband, William (Mark Heap), is mistakenly pronounced dead. Instead of correcting the error, the scheming matriarch hides him in the attic and collects a life insurance payout. (“I was impressed by how much we got for him!” she crows.) That the Fendons don’t think to immediately tell their devastated adult son, Harry (Craig Roberts), that his dad is still alive is only the first delightfully absurd wrinkle in this mischievous black comedy.How to Get to Heaven From Belfast (Netflix)Lisa McGee broke through with a sui generis comedy that mined aspects of her own experience to find authentic humor in a harrowing situation. Derry Girls, which followed teens in McGee’s native Derry in the years preceding 1998’s Good Friday Agreement, was a raucous, joke-dense show that juxtaposed mundane adolescent rites of passage with the daily horrors of life in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Now McGee is back with a crime drama—one bound to earn comparisons to Sharon Horgan’s post-Catastrophe murder romp, Bad Sisters. Combining the latter show’s core of complicated relationships between women (and its fondness for outfitting those women in enviable knitwear) with the sidesplittingly verbose, extremely Irish sensibility of Derry Girls, her new Netflix series How to Get to Heaven From Belfast lands as both an example of the pivot to crime drama and a commentary on it. The plot gets a bit woolly towards the end, the mix of tones doesn’t always work, and I sometimes wished I could watch its central girlfriends do anything besides play amateur detective. Still, even if you’re over whodunits, McGee’s cleverly meta spin on an overdone genre and her genius for comedy, dialogue, and character development make for an altogether good craic. [Read the full review.]The 'Burbs (Peacock)The series takes its title, backdrop, and relatively little else from the big-screen horror comedy The ‘Burbs. Styled like a B movie but led by A actor Tom Hanks, the 1989 original put a self-consciously silly spin on the Hollywood cliché that picket fences and manicured lawns conceal all manner of private suffering (see: All That Heaven Allows, Revolutionary Road, American Beauty, The Stepford Wives, and many more). The new ‘Burbs, expanded to eight episodes by creator Celeste Hughey, seems at first to be a stale, simplistic fusion of its namesake and the more recent wave of racially attuned social thrillers popularized by Get Out director Jordan Peele. (Palmer also starred in Peele’s latest movie, 2022’s Nope.) But the show finds a unique voice fast, revealing a sense of humor that is gentler than that of its influences and unusually nuanced in its take on suburban secrets. [Read the full review.] Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History (PBS)Too many historical documentaries feel like audiovisual textbooks, slogging blandly through sepia-tone photos and letters of the “Dearest Abigail, I write to you with a heavy heart” variety. There’s a place for that kind of thing, don’t get me wrong, but its predominance makes it all the more exciting when a documentarian approaches history from a unique, analytical perspective that feels tailored to the present. Which is precisely what Henry Louis Gates Jr.—the Harvard professor, author, and driving force behind PBS docuseries including The Black Church and Great Migrations—has done in Black and Jewish America, a four-part exploration of the complicated relationship between two inextricably connected minority communities.JanuaryWonder Man (Disney+)Wonder Man is not like other Disney+ Marvel projects. Nor is it like the other Disney+ Marvel projects that were hyped as being not like other Disney+ Marvel projects (see: Wandavision) but ultimately abandoned ambitious storytelling in favor of generic, VFX-heavy fight scenes and choppily integrated teasers for the next MCU movie. This alone might’ve made it the platform’s best Marvel show yet. But smart casting, witty writing, lively directing, and artful character development have also yielded the rare superhero riff that, as Kovak puts it, finds the human underneath. [Read the full review.]Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man (HBO)What’s left to say about Mel Brooks, one of the past century’s most celebrated voices in comedy? A lot, actually. The obligatory army of A-list funny people (Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, Sarah Silverman, Dave Chappelle operating at minimal annoyingness) assembles to praise him in this two-part doc from directors Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio. More fascinating, though, is what Brooks has to say for himself. Not just lucid at 99, but also insightful and open, he talks Apatow through a career longer than almost any other in entertainment, from his teenage gig as a Catskills busboy slash Borscht Belt understudy and big postwar break as a writer for Your Show of Shows to Brooks and best friend Carl Reiner’s signature 2000-Year-Old Man routines and his influential spy-spoof series Get Smart. That, of course, was all before he changed the face of comic filmmaking with 1967’s then-divisive The Producers, followed by an astounding run of classics in the ’70s and ’80s: Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, History of the World Part 1, Spaceballs. Incredibly, he’s still working, with plenty of success.The Beauty (FX)In The Beauty, Ryan Murphy and co-creator Matthew Hodgson have concocted a genre-hopping oddity that sounds unlikely to work. The big surprise is that, unlike so many of Murphy’s recent projects, it does. The series proceeds from a premise that immediately calls to mind the darkly comic horror movie The Substance, an underdog 2024 Best Picture contender that earned Oscar nominations for both its director, Coralie Fargeat, and its star, Demi Moore. A revolutionary biotech product called The Beauty catalyzes—through a grotesque process involving a sort of flesh cocoon—radical physical transformations, turning the old, the sick, the ugly, and the merely average into young, healthy, stunning specimens of human perfection. Most creators would presumably want to downplay the resemblance between their new show (which is based on a decade-old comic by Jeremy Haun, an executive producer, and Jason A. Hurley) and one of the most prominent movies of the last few years. But brazenness has always been Murphy’s M.O. Of all the people he could have cast as The Beauty’s yassified mastermind, he chose Ashton Kutcher, a man equally famous for his career as an actor turned venture capitalist and for marrying a 42-year-old Moore when he was 27. [Read the full review.]Riot Women (BritBox)Riot Women, a revelatory series from the feminist-minded Happy Valley and Gentleman Jack creator Sally Wainwright, casts an empathetic eye on the rarely acknowledged struggles of older women: loneliness, invisibility, menopause and the stigma that surrounds it, caretaking fatigue. That might make it sound like a downer. In fact, this six-episode series about women of a certain age who form a punk band to compete in a local talent competition—and accidentally change their lives in the process—is totally gripping. Raucous, insightful, and darkly witty, it’s a portrait of belated liberation sure to invigorate viewers at any stage of life. [Read the full review.]Stayer (Viaplay)Once you’ve watched Riot Women, why not try another European import about over-the-hill rockers? In truth, Pia Lykke’s Norwegian drama Stayer has less in common with Wainwright’s show than it does with 2025’s many films about penitent fathers of daughters who have good reasons to resent them: One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value, Jay Kelly, The Phoenician Scheme. As in some of those movies, our protagonist, Even Elstad (Aksel Hennie), is a successful artist—in this case, a cantankerous rock star still touring on the strength of a massive hit that he hates. That relatively minor problem fades into the background when he’s suddenly called back to his hometown to raise an estranged teenage daughter (Hannah Elise Adolfsen Fjeldbraaten) who doesn’t want to know him. I found Even’s earnest music pretty grating. Yet an outstanding cast, scripts that are perceptive about grief and remorse, and Hennie’s impressionistic directing more than make up for it.Bookish (PBS)One of TV’s most giggled-about series of late is the Fox medical drama Best Medicine, whose main character is named Dr. Best. To that, the British cozy-mystery factory says: “Hold my teacup.” Behold Bookish, a detective show set just after World War II in London, whose bookstore owner hero is called Gabriel Book (creator Mark Gatiss, who also co-created Sherlock). When a new employee, Jack (Connor Finch), suggests that a sign reading “Book’s” is grammatically incorrect, the exchange that ensues is “Who’s on First?” for literary pedants. Book’s whole bookseller-by-day, gumshoe-by-night deal is adorable, as is his chummy marriage to his childhood friend Trottie (Polly Walker, also seen this month in Bridgerton). But all isn’t as saccharine as it initially appears to be. Industry Season 4 (HBO)Industry creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have, over the course of four seasons, upgraded their HBO drama about young finance employees in London from smart soap to somehow-even-more-entertaining laboratory for the dissection of capitalism. While Season 3 mixed beakers labeled ethics and money, with explosive results, this year’s arc puts love and sex under the profit-motive microscope. If there was ever any doubt that Down and Kay were bearish on the combination, it was dispelled within the opening scenes of the premiere, which paired characters played by two famous former child actors—Kiernan Shipka, a.k.a. Mad Men’s Sally Draper, and Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton—for a tawdry, deceptive, disastrous hookup. Industry is where innocence goes to die, choked out in bed by various personifications of greed. In keeping with that central theme, the season has a cast now entirely liberated from the Pierpoint & Co. trading floor circling a payment processing startup called Tender as it cuts ties with an OnlyFans-esque platform, Siren, in a play to become a mainstream “bank killer.” [Read the full analysis of the season's most fascinating episode.]The Pitt Season 2 (HBO Max)The stars and stripes are flying as Dr. Michael Robinavitch motorcycles to work in the opening sequence of The Pitt’s excellent second season. It’s 7 a.m. on the Fourth of July, a holiday that will flood the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center with heatstroke cases, injured swimmers, and kids messing around with fireworks. Before that chaos takes hold, it’s worth noticing the American flags that flank the entrance to the emergency department. In choosing this day to revisit the Pitt’s tireless ER staff, one of the most deservedly acclaimed shows that premiered last year doesn’t just wring gross-out humor from a hot dog-eating-contest winner’s digestive distress (though it’s not too self-serious to resist doing that). It also reclaims the increasingly fraught concept of patriotism as a practice of caring for our neighbors, whoever they may be. [Read the full review.]