Netflix’s Living with Yourself, which launches on October 18th, is in many ways a standard sitcom. Ant-Man’s Paul Rudd stars as Miles Eliot, a man whose marriage and career are  floundering as he faces the general malaise of approaching middle age. The catch is that he attempts to get out of his familiar rut by cloning himself.

To be fair, that wasn’t actually his goal. Miles gets a tip from zero-turned-office-hero co-worker Dan (Desmin Borges of You’re the Worst) about a highly exclusive spa that gives its clients’ DNA a detox and lets them live up to their full potential. Desperate enough to pay Top Happy Spa’s $50,000 fee, Miles lies down in a treatment chair and wakes up as a new man, filled with a zest for life that has him sticking his head out car windows to breathe in the fresh air like a dog, cooking elaborate meals for his wife Kate (Aisling Bea), and outshining Dan at the office. The problem is that Original Miles wakes up in a body bag in a local forest preserve, and isn’t particularly happy to have a new and improved version of himself taking over his life.

The show’s eight, roughly 30-minute episodes largely alternate between the perspectives of Original Miles and his clone, demonstrating Rudd’s remarkable ability to play both a charming maniac and a worn-out schlub. It’s a transformation playfully shown off in a sequence where New Miles tries to act more like his progenitor by swapping out his crisp button-down shirt for a toothpaste-stained sweater, mussing his hair, lowering his voice a few notches, and sucking all enthusiasm from his tone. Almost every episode ends on a cliffhanger, and much of the series’ drama involves rewinding a sequence involving one Miles to show what the other version was up to at the time, and how it led to events playing out the way they did.

Conceptually, Living with Yourself is fairly similar to the 1996 Michael Keaton rom-com Multiplicity, with Miles quickly hatching a plan to have his clone do everything he doesn’t want to do, like going to work or hosting a party. But while Multiplicity largely leans on sexist clichés, with clones becoming more feminine or masculine based on what tasks they’re assigned, Living with Yourself writer-creator Timothy Greenberg stays more grounded by focusing on the question of how people can wrestle with the worst parts of their natures to become better people.

In that way, Living with Yourself hews closer to The Good Place, which also uses a fantastical premise to explore the potential for self-improvement. Greenberg’s show is less whimsical, but he still inserts absurdist humor into many awkward situations, like the extremely unsettled look a cashier gives New Miles as she lists the items he’s picking up, including rope, a baseball bat, and a pillowcase he’s sized for his own head. The fast gags help break up Miles’ externalized personal struggles, as well as the tensions caused by both versions of him wanting to make things right with Kate.

Greenberg isn’t especially concerned with the science involved in his premise. He just barely explains that Top Happy makes a clone with some genes improved, then transfers memories from the original client, who’s typically killed in the process. The problem is that the rules feel wildly inconsistent. New Miles knows all the moves to the dance he and Kate choreographed for their wedding, which is repeatedly performed for both comedic and emotional effect, but he’s incredibly clumsy with her in bed. One of the defining differences between the two versions of Miles seems to be that the new one doesn’t feel any of the frustration or resentment that’s been weighing down the old one since he and Kate moved to the suburbs five years ago, after Kate’s failed first pregnancy. But it’s remarkably unclear why a DNA refresh would rid Miles of his actual disappointments, especially as cracks begin to form in his psyche as he fails to seize the life to which he feels entitled.

The dynamic between Kate and Miles is wonderful, though, and Kate can also stand on her own in scenes, like the one where she chews out her tantrum-throwing tech-mogul client, showing a keen understanding of the way men can be driven by insecurities. An episode from her perspective shows the strength her marriage to Miles once had, but the show doesn’t devote enough time to how it fell apart. It’s possible most of the blame is meant to be put on Kate’s failure to get pregnant, with Miles made culpable because he ducked a fertility test appointment for two years. But that seems too simple an explanation, given that Greenberg is otherwise delivering fairly nuanced examinations about how people grow and change together.

Instead of further developing the show’s core relationship, Greenberg spends a surprising amount of time setting up plots that will only come to fruition if Living With Yourself is renewed for future seasons. New Miles takes the lead on an advertising project meant to help a telecommunications company win a big contract, but Original Miles’ attempts to prove he’s a professional match for his clone draw him into a web of corporate intrigue that’s only hinted at in the first season. While this subplot plays to one of the show’s main themes, that even good intentions can have terrible unintended consequences, its hinted menace doesn’t solidify enough in the first season to feel worth the time.

The personal catharsis meant to be delivered in the season’s final episode, “Nice Knowing You,” feels particularly rushed due to the storyline involving a pair of hapless FDA agents trying to prove human cloning is real. Their bumbling brand of comedy feels like it’s meant to mirror the police plots in Barry, but it’s underdeveloped and just gives way to a dumb scene where a thirsty Miles, locked in a breast-pumping room, resorts to drinking stored milk rather than using a presumably working sink.

While several scenes in Living with Yourself are too underlit, obscuring both sex and the show’s brief flurries of Miles-on-Miles violence, it otherwise delivers some impressively varied visuals. Set decorator Sarah McMillan did a great job with Top Happy Spa, making it simultaneously look like a cliché New Age spa, a business that would get raided for illicit prostitution, and a weird-science emporium. The ad agency where Miles works perfectly embodies a particular brand of extremely corporate edginess, with a practically glowing white conference room featuring wall mantras like “rebels love Mondays” and “you’re either in the pool or you’re out of the pool.” A nursery Miles painted with a cheerful elephant has become a cluttered mess used for storage. Each space is loaded with meaning that reflects back on the script to show how Miles has gotten to this place in his life, and to suggest what he might be able to do to move forward.

Living with Yourself isn’t particularly original, but it’s a well-executed fusion of sitcom standards and technological anxiety, anchored by a versatile star. Greenberg clearly has some big ambitions. Given the time to develop them, he could find new ways to recombine the DNA of multiple TV genres into something novel and highly entertaining.

In America, the eight-episode first season of Living With Yourself launches on Netflix on October 18th.

The raunchy Netflix animated comedy Big Mouth started as an absurd yet deeply personal show about the horrors of puberty, from inconveniently timed first periods to embarrassing uncontrolled erections. But just as the show’s theme, “Changes,” implies, creators Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin, and Jennifer Flackett never intended this show to stay static. While it’s experienced some growing pains and still has some painfully awkward moments, it’s developing into a remarkably powerful and entertaining comedy.

Middle schoolers exploring their sexuality is still the driving force of Big Mouth, which released its 10-episode third season on October 4th. But the show has expanded to follow other equally challenging teen issues, like academic pressure, mental health, and the changing dynamics between friends. While the show follows many of the traditional sitcom beats, it’s crafted a rich mythology and personal history for its characters that means new viewers will want to start from the beginning to be able to appreciate all the callbacks and see how much the characters have grown.

The main tension of the season is between best friends Nick Birch and Andrew Glouberman, voiced respectively by Kroll and John Mulaney. Nick was the sensitive smart-aleck to Andrew’s nerdy pervert for the past two seasons, but now he’s gotten more confident with the help of the Hormone Monstress Connie (Maya Rudolph of Saturday Night Live and The Good Place).

Connie and her male counterpart Maurice (also voiced by Kroll) have always been the absolute highlight of the show, which is why they’re going to be the subject of a newly announced spinoff series called Human Resources. The monsters serve as invisible mentors to the young heroes, providing deeply questionable advice about kissing, masturbation, and sending dick pics. The season 2 finale, “The Department of Puberty,” provided a look at how they work in concert with anthropomorphized versions of various body parts and emotions to guide kids through healthy development, though they aren’t all particularly good at their jobs.

Connie joined Nick after he had a succession of much worse monsters. Nick was late to develop, and in season 1, he was accompanied by the crusty, ancient, barely discernible Hormone Monster Rick (also voiced by Kroll). When Rick retired, he was replaced by the overly enthusiastic childlike Hormone Monster Tyler (John Gemberling of Broad City) who Nick banished after discovering he was working with the Shame Wizard (David Thewlis of the Harry Potter films). Both characters were worse for Nick than Connie, but they were also less entertaining as foils. While Connie still delivers terrible advice like encouraging Nick to kiss Andrew’s ex-girlfriend, the extra time with her strengthens the show.

The show’s creative team has also built on the complicated personal dramas that were introduced in season 2 and the surprisingly sweet Valentine’s Day special, providing a payoff for previously underdeveloped characters. Jay Bilzerian (comedian Jason Mantzoukas) was an obnoxious sideshow at the start of the show, perpetually annoying and disgusting the other characters with his obsession with magic and humping pillows. The pillows were anthropomorphized as women, and in one plot that really overstayed its welcome, Jay’s favorite pillow gets pregnant, gives birth to a baby pillow, and runs off.

But Jay also started masturbating with couch cushions, which were anthropomorphized as male. Suddenly, his sexual quirk turned into a way for him to discover his bisexuality. This season, he’s struggling with how to share his revelation with his friends and how to face the stigma against bisexual men. One particularly sweet segment shows him exploring his fantasies by collaborating with his horny spaz classmate Missy Foreman-Greenwald (Jenny Slate of SNL and Parks & Recreation) on slashfic starring Missy’s crush Nathan Fillion, who voices himself. It’s a fairly nuanced look at the challenges of coming out, even if Jay encapsulates his sexual orientation by screaming “I want to fuck everyone!”

Matthew (Andrew Rannells of Girls) was previously relegated to a stereotypical catty best friend to Nick and Andrew’s sarcastic buddy Jessi Glaser (Jessi Klein), but he finally came into his own in the Valentine’s Day episode by exploring the hardships of being the only openly gay kid in his small town. That adds even more pressure to his first budding relationship. His new connections come at the expense of Jessi who continues to battle the oppression of Depression Kitty (voiced with an oozing seductive malice by Jean Smart of Fargo and Legion).

Jordan Peele has been voicing the ghost of Duke Ellington, who haunts Nick’s attic, since Big Mouth’s first episode. But the bit has always seemed just a step too weird even by Big Mouth’s standards. Nick didn’t start with his own Hormone Monster, and his visits to Duke always seemed like a poor substitute for the monsters’ running commentary. Duke served a similar function, suggesting Nick could solve his problems through sex and punctuating his advice with historic anecdotes and offputting manic laughter.

But this season, Duke finally gets some highlight moments of his own. His ability to seemingly conjure any other dead celebrity results in a clever musical number about the spectrum of gender identity and sexual orientation, starring Prince, David Bowie, and Freddie Mercury. Nick writing a celebrity book report also provides an excuse for an entire episode set in 1913 where Duke paints a tale of jazz, sex, and the importance of finding your passion. It’s one of season 3’s best stories.

This season, the writers have doubled down on the show’s musical numbers, which vary wildly in tone but are always high-quality. A song in the first episode featuring all the girls in school protesting a dress code meant to protect boys from uncontrollable urges helps set the tone for the whole season. A duet where Jessi and Nick mourn the fact that none of them made it onto their peers’ lists of the hottest people in school, despite their non-appearance-related strengths, is deeply relatable. But the best of the numbers is “Anything Goes in Florida,” a ballad skewering the goofy, genuinely terrible aspects of the Sunshine State, ranging from Spring Break to stand-your-ground laws. It’s a perfect crystallization of the show’s ability to pivot from silly to serious so quickly that it causes emotional whiplash.

The smoothing of the show’s rough edges does make its remaining issues feel all the more abrasive. Kroll voices four main characters and a host of supporting characters, and Big Mouth would be stronger if he killed some of his darlings. His idiot gym teacher Coach Steve has been in every episode, even though he’s a one-note gag who feels like a throwback to Adam Sandler’s 1990s films. Coach Steve was fired at the end of season 2 and is blissfully absent from most of season 3, only showing up in a series of odd jobs. His stint as a Lyft driver is the only Steve segment where the jokes actually hit the mark, via a rambling end-credits monologue about the varied ways ride-sharing can be incredibly awkward.

But any goodwill the character earns there quickly falls away in the season’s penultimate episode where Steve gets a makeover from the Queer Eye Fab Five, who all voice themselves. Big Mouth relentlessly breaks the fourth wall, and jokes focusing on its status as a Netflix show are peppered throughout the season, most bitingly in a jab at 13 Reasons Why. But the Queer Eye episode feels like a 20-minute commercial, and the terrible payoff is that Steve gets his job back, meaning he’ll continue to be a comedic drag on the show.

While the Shame Wizard — the incarnation of embarrassment and self-loathing who was  season 2’s primary antagonist — briefly appears when Andrew visits a Men’s Rights group, he’s otherwise absent this season. That’s a disappointing loss, considering how much powerful conflict he stirred in season 2. He’s also missed since because while season 3 has plenty of memorable moments, it doesn’t reach a satisfying climax like season 2 did.

Season 1 of Big Mouth was all about how characters experience the beginnings of puberty in different ways. Season 2 had them coming to terms with their new raging hormones and accepting their new selves. Season 3 feels more like a series of vignettes on a theme. The rift between Andrew and Nick isn’t just caused by hormones but by other stresses, like Nick becoming addicted to the idea of social media stardom. Jay tries to earn acceptance for his sexuality while also struggling with his neglectful home life, and the more structured but loving environment he finds while briefly living with Nick. Missy grapples with anger and her newly aggressive sexuality. Taken as individual bits, Big Mouth’s comedy is sharper than ever, but it could be even better if the creators could keep all of the characters interconnected to better build off the entertaining dynamics they’ve developed over the past three seasons.

The writers try to bring all of these plots together in a final episode where the characters gain superpowers tied to their inner struggles, but the gimmick gets away from the point in a way that makes “Super Mouth” feel incoherent. Season 3 ends with a series of cliffhangers showing that some of the characters are more miserable and confused than ever. Big Mouth has already been renewed for three more seasons, so there’s plenty of time left for the characters and show to continue growing. That process is sure to be as awkward, confusing, and painful as puberty, but so far, the compassion and humor the creators have brought to the process are making the show’s growth extremely entertaining.

Batwoman, the latest entry in The CW’s Arrowverse slate of TV shows based on DC Comics, is set in a version of Gotham City where Batman has been missing for three years. To combat the crime and despair that’s spread through her town, Bruce Wayne’s cousin Kate Kane (Ruby Rose of Orange Is the New Black and John Wick: Chapter 2) borrows his equipment and mantle and takes to the streets.

In the first two episodes of Batwoman, which premieres on Sunday, October 6th, most of Gotham just believes Batman has finally returned. Kate hasn’t established her own superhero identity yet. And neither has her show, which feels stitched together from Batman canon, Batwoman’s comics, and elements of other gritty comic book shows.

Kate has her own obligatory tragic backstory, featuring a car accident caused by one of the Joker’s plots. Batman bought enough time for Kate to escape, but the car fell off a bridge with her mother and twin sister, Beth, still in it. Her father Jacob Kane (Dougray Scott of Taken 3) found a mission in Batman’s failure and created the Crows, a private security firm staffed by elite veterans. The Batwoman pilot shows Kate undergoing intense training to join the family business. Then she’s called to help save her former girlfriend and Crow member Sophie Moore (Meagan Tandy) from Alice (Rachel Skarsten), a murderer and terrorist with a penchant for quoting Lewis Carroll, but no relation to Batman’s own Alice in Wonderland-themed villain, the Mad Hatter. Alice is Batwoman’s primary enemy in the comics, and two episodes in, the show is already setting up a dynamic akin to Batman and the Joker, where the two define each other and push each other to extreme action.

The problem is that this, like so much of Batwoman, is familiar material. The show’s tough, brooding protagonist makes it feel similar to Arrow, and it’s clearly meant to be an Arrow replacement, since that show is launching its eighth and final season on October 15th. But while Arrow kicked off with a bizarre mix of elements from Batman Begins, Lost, and Dexter, the beginning of Batwoman feels like a much more straightforward mix of street-level heroics and soap-opera family drama.

Arrow also had the advantage of riding the leading wave of modern superhero TV shows, which let it escape much comparison with other entrants in a crowded field. Batwoman instead faces comparisons with the much higher production values of Netflix’s Marvel Cinematic Universe shows. In the DC Extended Universe, Supergirl has distinguished itself with its higher power level and overtly political plotlines, while The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow lean into superhero silliness. But the grittiness of Batwoman puts the show more in line with Netflix’s Jessica Jones or Daredevil. While Netflix’s shows were narratively inconsistent, they delivered phenomenal performances accompanied by gorgeous sets and genre-defining fight scenes that The CW’s budget simply can’t support.

While the actors may settle into a better dynamic later in this opening season, most of the performances in the first two episodes feel stiff. Skarsten’s performance is the highlight of the show so far, swiftly alternating between whimsical dialogue and vicious threats. But other characters are dealing with the heavy burden of getting enough exposition out of the way to set up a supporting ensemble for Batwoman, in the style of all the other CW shows. That cast includes Kate’s med-student stepsister Mary Hamilton (Nicole Kang) and Luke Fox (Camrus Johnson), son of the Wayne Enterprises researcher played by Morgan Freeman in the Christopher Nolan films. When Kate finds the shockingly obvious secret entrance to the Batcave in Bruce Wayne’s office, Luke agrees to rework one of Batman’s suits to fit her, and teaches her about the hero’s array of useful gadgets. It’s infuriating that so far, Kate still hasn’t asked him how he learned Bruce’s secret, what happened to her cousin, or any questions that don’t suit her immediate needs.

Batwoman’s writers have followed in the footsteps of the first seasons of Arrow and The Flash by giving their title character an unavailable love interest. Kate and Sophie met while attending a military academy that banned gay relationships. Their romance got Kate expelled, and Sophie renounced her to stay enrolled, eventually graduating and marrying a man. It’s a powerful reminder that while significant progress has been made in LGBT equality, discrimination based on sexual orientation is still legal within many US institutions.

That conflict also has a lot more depth than the ones in Arrow and The Flash, where the heroes pretty much had to wait for their romantic rivals to die so they could make their moves. As Mary puts it during a beautifully awkward family breakfast, “Can we talk about the fact that [Sophie’s] married to a man? I’m not trying to label her or anything, but what’s her deal, exactly?” Sophie doesn’t seem particularly happily married, but the question remains whether she’s bisexual, or has suppressed her sexual identity to help her career. Considering the powerful on-screen chemistry she’s shown with Kate, hopefully it won’t take a full season and a dramatic death for them to figure it out.

For a show about an openly gay woman, Batwoman is otherwise surprisingly conservative in its politics. While most of the Arrowverse shows are produced in Vancouver, Batwoman shot some of its exterior scenes in Chicago, the same city where The Dark Knight was filmed. Chicago’s high rates of gun violence have made it a punching bag for Republicans arguing against gun-control legislation, and this version of Gotham carries through the theme by making the city into a nightmare of urban decay. It’s particularly jarring seeing shots of the city’s landmark areas, which are typically populated by international tourists, instead covered with trash and homeless encampments.

The conservative messaging goes beyond the visual cues. While Kate decided to become Batwoman instead of joining the Crows, viewers are still meant to sympathize with Jacob and Sophie as they operate a paramilitary organization within a major American city. Gotham’s police want to lock Alice up in Arkham Asylum, even as she questions Kate’s sanity, in an homage to the “Who’s crazier?” question at the heart of many Batman and Joker plots. Given the controversy around the release of Joker and mental illness repeatedly being used as a political scapegoat for mass shootings, it’s unfortunate that Batwoman couldn’t take a more nuanced, original approach to the issue.

Rose’s version of Batwoman first appeared on-screen in 2018 in the Elseworlds Arrowverse crossover event, and the first few episodes of Batwoman actually take place before that plot, to establish how she became Gotham’s protector. Two episodes in, she has yet to don the distinctive bright red wig she wore in that event, the one that makes it clear she’s a different Caped Crusader from the one who’s built such a huge fandom. Presumably, the wig will eventually be a plot point showing she isn’t satisfied with living off her cousin’s powerful reputation, and that she intends to forge her own path. Hopefully by then, Batwoman’s writers will be on track to do the same thing.

Batwoman premieres on The CW on Sunday, October 6th, 2019.

A young hero must learn to use his exceptional powers to stop a terrible threat and save his friends, family, and possibly the entire world. It’s a pretty typical setup for a superhero origin story, but Netflix’s new series Raising Dion, which launches its nine-episode first season on October 4th, changes things up by making its hero a seven-year-old. Splicing family drama with comic-book action produces some engaging story beats, but the friction between the two genres eventually makes the show fall apart.

Raising Dion follows Nicole Warren (Alisha Wainwright), who’s left raising Dion (Ja’Siah Young) alone after his brilliant meteorologist father Mark (Michael B. Jordan of Black Panther and Creed) drowns saving a woman’s life. When Dion starts moving objects with his mind, Nicole realizes it’s really going to take a village to raise this kid, and she turns to friends, family, and more unlikely allies to help train and protect him.

While Jordan’s star power and boundless charisma is unfortunately limited to flashbacks and the occasional supernatural vision, creator / writer Carol Barbee has assembled a wonderful cast centered on the show’s charming, precocious title character. Young brings a powerful sense of joy and innocence to Dion as he discovers the extent of his powers and strives to use them to help others. He’s absolutely adorable as he sets about designing his own costume and Fortress of Solitude, which takes the form of a pillow fort in his room. The only sour note is the amount of product placement involved in his tendency to use his abilities to acquire his favorite name-brand snack foods.

Those powers add an extra layer to the traditional family-drama conflicts between Dion and Nicole who’s struggling to maintain a job and care for her son. Mark’s death has forced them to move out of a more affluent neighborhood and sent Dion to a new school where he struggles to fit in, both as a nerdy kid who loves science and comic books and as one of the few black students. 

One of the show’s most poignant episodes centers on an incident where Dion uses his telekinesis to stop skater bully Jonathan (Gavin Munn) from running off with his father’s watch. In a clear sign of racial bias, the principal blames Dion for the fight, forcing Nicole to talk with her son both about using his powers responsibly and about the hard life he’s likely to have ahead of him because of his skin color.

Barbee skillfully addresses the complicated social issues around racism and single parenthood, but she brings in plenty of humor to keep the story from getting too heavy. One of the main sources of comedy is Dion’s godfather Pat (Jason Ritter) who uses his knowledge of comic books to serve as a mentor while fighting with Nicole about his tendency to spoil the kid. Dion’s classmate Esperanza (Sammi Haney), who uses a wheelchair, fuses the show’s social consciousness and silliness. She wistfully talks about the pain of being invisible to the rest of the school, while forcefully pushing herself into the role of his new best friend. She also makes sure Dion’s fortress is up to Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards.

These grounded, personal conflicts add depth to Raising Dion’s superhero fare, which is more boilerplate. Dion is pursued by a monster he dubs “the Crooked Man,” which is apparently killing other people with powers, in the style of Heroes’ Sylar or Sense8’s Whispers. The creature’s look appears to have been modeled after the Mind Flayer from Stranger Things, and Raising Dion also pays homage to Netflix’s smash hit about kids dealing with the supernatural by setting its theme as Pat’s ringtone. When Nicole and Pat want to understand the nature of both the threat and Dion’s abilities, they dig into Mark’s research for Biona, the science and technology company where he and Pat worked together. At times, that group seems just as shady as the various government operations running the show in Stranger Things.

In attempting to give equal time to family drama and science fiction, Barbee doesn’t fully develop either. An episode meant to establish Nicole’s complicated relationship with her older, more successful sister Kat (Jazmyn Simon) feels flat because so much character development is forced into a single episode. When push comes to shove, Kat is willing to sacrifice her career and romantic relationship for Nicole and Dion, but that loss loses its sting since so little time is spent on showing what those things mean to her.

The issue is even worse when it comes to the complexities of the superhero plot. A major twist is telegraphed early enough that it’s not particularly surprising when it happens, but Barbee never devotes the time to explaining why or how it happens, making the shift feel jarringly abrupt. It’s particularly frustrating since the first season’s final episode includes a flashback to Nicole meeting Mark, which is sweet, but it easily could have come earlier in the show, leaving space for showing why events suddenly come to a head and how the story reached this point.

The climax is also watered down by the dual mandate to have Nicole’s personal plot reach its own conclusion. It’s discordant to watch her get so excited about finally earning health insurance and rekindling her passion for dancing right as her son is being threatened by a murderous monster. Late in the season, Raising Dion brings up unusually powerful points about male entitlement and accepting boundaries. It directly confronts traditional TV plots, but, again, it’s brought up and resolved so quickly that it loses the intended impact.

Integrating personal dramas into comic-book stories is nothing new. That balance is at the heart of the CW’s slate of superhero soap operas, and it defines Peter Parker’s struggles to manage high school while he’s fighting supervillains. But the distance Raising Dion creates between the two elements by centering the story on the hero’s normal mother makes the show feel disjointed. Spider-Man’s plots can come to a head when he has to save a bus with his classmates on it, but there’s no reason for Nicole’s maybe-love-interest dance instructor to show up anywhere near the final showdown with the Crooked Man.

The mundane nature of the personal dramas in Raising Dion creates further dissonances with the big stakes of its comic-book elements. The CW shows boost soap opera drama to superhero levels work by making the personal plotlines as outsized as the action, as characters learn that close relatives are secret supervillains or time-travelers. Raising Dion is clearly trying to mimic Stranger Things with its intergenerational conflicts and focus on how relationships grow and change in the face of the unknown, but that show’s ensemble nature makes it easier to have a lot of smaller stories that only coalesce during the setpiece finish. After a decidedly underwhelming climax, Raising Dion teases its next season by setting up an even more trite cliffhanger. There’s certainly potential in the show’s premise and charming cast, and in its ambitious attempts to address issues that superhero stories normally avoid. But in order to succeed, the writers will need to find a better balance between the disparate parts.

When Alma, the sharp-witted, deeply troubled protagonist of Amazon Prime’s new animated series Undone, dresses as Dorothy for Halloween at age eight, her physicist father Jacob admits he doesn’t understand The Wizard of Oz. “You’ve got this girl Dorothy, right?” he asks. “She’s living a normal boring life, and she gets a chance to live an exciting life, and all she wants to do is go home. If you had a chance to do something amazing, would you just want everything to return to normal?” 

Jacob doesn’t know it, but his argument gets some strong support from the film’s unofficial sequel, Return to Oz, where Dorothy insists her adventures in another world were real, so her aunt and uncle commit her to an asylum for electroshock therapy. Like that movie, Undone, which releases on September 13th, repeatedly makes it clear that living an exciting life can come with a terrible price.

Jacob (Bob Odenkirk of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad) dies in a car accident that Halloween, after leaving Alma (Rosa Salazar of Alita: Battle Angel) alone so he can tend to some mysterious crisis involving his work. Alma has never really gotten over it. She lives like a sleepwalker until she gets into her own near-fatal car crash. Jacob appears to her in the hospital to tell her that the trauma has awakened a latent ability to become unstuck in time, a power he thinks she can use to prevent his death. Alma’s grandmother was schizophrenic, but Jacob insists his mother actually had the same power as Alma and was just misunderstood. Through more than half of the show (five of the series’ 22-minute episodes were provided for advance review), Undone pointedly avoids addressing whether Alma’s ability is real or she’s experiencing a mental breakdown.

Undone employs rotoscoping, a technique where animators trace over live footage, for a smooth but surreal effect. Richard Linklater used rotoscoping to give Waking Life its dreamlike quality and A Scanner Darkly its psychedelic feel. Undone creators Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Kate Purdy use the technique in Undone to convey a sense of unreality, contrasting Alma’s fairly mundane life of working at a daycare and fighting with her sister Becca (Angelique Cabral) and mother Camila (Constance Marie) with the vivid cosmic planes and fantastic forests she visits when using her powers. Animation studio Submarine used oil paintings to produce these backdrops, and it’s incredibly startling when Alma’s regular surroundings, like her hospital room or home, are torn away and replaced with those more vibrant spaces. The show quickly establishes a sense that anything can happen at any time.

Alma’s trips through time feel like an extension of the work Bob-Waksberg and Purdy did as the creator and writer-producer of BoJack Horseman, where the title character has on occasion lost time and simply found himself in new scenes, due to his perpetual drug use. Alma skips backward and forward in time, letting the writers weave in flashbacks that explore her family life, but also jump forward to events that won’t occur in real time for several episodes. The technique is similar to the time-travel thriller Primer, but the narrative is much easier to parse, thanks to the guiding hand Jacob provides in telling Alma — through her, the audience — what’s going on and why.

As with BoJack Horseman, Bob-Waksberg and Purdy have shown a remarkable ability to pack each episode with dark drama, sharp comedy, and touching interplay between well-developed characters. The dynamic between Alma and Jacob is something between father and daughter, and Jedi master and Padawan. For every goofy moment where Alma gently ribs her dad or backpedals in a story to impress him instead of telling him the truth, there’s one where he urges her to avoid all other relationships so she can focus on her powers and his mission. That myopic focus would be disturbing even if it wasn’t possible that he’s just some complex delusion pulling Alma away from her living family.

BoJack and Alma share a lot of similarities, with complicated relationships with their families and a desire to use comedy to cover up their inner anguish. In the first episode, “The Crash,” Alma’s mom asks her to bleach her upper lip ahead of a dinner celebrating Becca’s engagement to her mayonnaise-bland but rich boyfriend, Reed Hollingsworth (regular BoJack Horseman guest star Kevin Bigley). Alma instead pencils a curly mustache on her lip. She often goes on political rants, and she out calls people around her on their hypocrisy with a contemptuousness that makes her feel like a hybrid between BoJack and Aubrey Plaza. But the tenderness Alma lets herself show when calming down a rambunctious kid at daycare or genuinely apologizing to Becca gives her a relatable, sympathetic quality that BoJack typically lacks.

While traveling through time, Alma retreads not only her own memories, but those of the people closest to her. Seeing those other perspectives produces a radical empathy similar to what the consciousness-sharing characters experience in the Wachowski sisters’ Netflix series Sense8. Alma gets to reconnect with her younger sister by reliving how much Becca once idolized her as a child, and she finds a new respect for her practical mother by learning that there was a lot she didn’t know about her more imaginative father. But the most touching example comes from a fight between Alma and her boyfriend Sam (Siddharth Dhananjay). Sharing his memories, she comes to understand his fears of losing her, as she explores the isolation he’s felt as an Indian immigrant.

Alma is mostly deaf, though she can hear with the help of a cochlear implant. That just adds to the show’s focus on the subjective nature of perception, as the audio gets a muffled, submerged quality whenever Alma removes the external portion of her implant. The subtitles laying out her lip-reading are missing words to make it clear her comprehension isn’t perfect. It’s a jarring effect, particularly since Alma occasionally removes the device with the explicit intention of tuning the rest of the world out so she can focus on her increasingly strange inner life.

Adult Western animation has traditionally leaned on the absurdist comedy popularized in Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block. BoJack Horseman is filled with ridiculous wordplay and jokes about its cast of animal people, but it uses that humor to lure viewers in before stunning them with deeply dramatic portraits of despair. It feels like Bob-Waksberg and Purdy built a similar bridge to get to the more powerful elements in Undone, which could have easily been a live-action science-fiction drama with hourlong episodes.

But the short episodes keep the narrative tight and mysterious, a technique that worked well for Amazon’s psychological thriller Homecoming. And the animation removes any limits on its visual ambitions. Undone’s rotoscoped style can be off-putting and startling, thanks to the shifting spaces and breaks with reality. The nonlinear storytelling and unreliable protagonist add to the sense that there’s no solid narrative ground to stand on here, which can be disconcerting. But the show’s combination of old animated technology and its fresh approach to serialized science fiction is appealingly ambitious and powerful. If this series helps mark a new wave of American adult animation, it could be the start of something truly amazing.

All eight episodes of Undone will be available on Amazon Prime Video on September 13th.

Since Game of Thrones ended in May, HBO’s streaming rivals have been racing to capture their share of the viewers who still crave shows packed with fantasy spectacle, intrigue, and sex. Amazon seems especially focused on winning over genre fans: its Prime Video service is currently spinning up an epic-fantasy lineup that promises series based on The Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time. It’s starting its run with the original show Carnival Row, which will release its first eight-episode season on August 30th. It’s a gorgeous, well-written, and unrepentantly political series, but it’s at its absolute worst when the writers try too hard to make it feel like Game of Thrones.

Carnival Row is set in a world that resembles what the 1800s might have looked like if the great European powers established colonies and fought proxy wars in the realms of the fae rather than in India or Africa. Six years before the series starts, British Empire stand-in The Burge retreated from the fae nation of Tirnanoc, leaving it in control of The Pact, a group inspired by the World War I Central Powers. The defeat caused a refugee crisis, with desperate fae fleeing to The Burge where they’re largely resigned to a life of menial labor and discrimination.

The story primarily follows Burge investigator Rycroft Philostrate (Orlando Bloom of The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises) and fresh-off-the-boat faerie Vignette Stonemoss (Cara Delevingne of Suicide Squad). The two met and fell in love during the war, bonding by sharing a copy of Philo’s favorite scientific-romance novel, and both were left deeply damaged by their parting. A romance novel also sparks an impossible relationship between two soldiers in Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga comic book series, but while the concept isn’t original, Bloom and Delevingne’s powerful performances bring life to the haunted, soulful Philo and fierce but brittle Vignette.

During their courtship, Vignette and Philo discuss the transcendent power of stories in a way that’s reminiscent of Tyrion’s awful electioneering monologue in the final episode of Game of Thrones. But the metatext feels earned here because of the nuanced work series creators René Echevarria (The 4400) and Travis Beacham (the writer of the original script Carnival Row is based on) are doing to explore empathy and discrimination. Carnival Row avoids simplistic narratives where the persecuted fae are good, racists are bad, and the best path for everyone is liberal inclusivity. Instead, they delve into the systemic problems that trap people in bad circumstances and the intense difficulty of enacting change.

The racial narrative weaves throughout the show as Philo investigates a series of murders of fae that his superiors would rather just ignore. Burge Chancellor Absalom Breakspear (Jared Harris of Chernobyl and The Expanse) argues that his country must accept refugees because they’re culpable in creating the fae’s plight. But even he uses the show’s colorful collection of racial slurs and seems to have a hard time telling his fae bodyguards apart. Other politicians use the same rhetoric as Donald Trump or Boris Johnson to argue that the new arrivals are taking jobs from citizens and changing the character of the country. The Burge is largely dominated by Caucasians, but it has some people of color in its elite ranks; at one point, Parliament member Sophie Longerbane (Caroline Ford) invokes her own dark complexion and asks whether discrimination against the fae will eventually be seen as the same as that against other humans. In a twist, she concludes that it won’t because the fae “are nothing like us” and deserve their second-class status.

Carnival Row also doesn’t simplify its setting by making discrimination against the fae the world’s only social problem. Women still have little power in this world, and homosexuality is a crime. While the fae are mostly used as a metaphor for refugees and racial discrimination, there’s also an undertone of queerness led by the casting of Delevingne, who is bisexual and genderfluid, playing a bisexual faerie. That subtext is brought home by a subplot involving a gay doctor who secretly performs abortions and operations to help the half-blood children of humans and fae pass as human.

But the best version of Carnival Row’s exploration of discrimination involves a plot that effectively combines Pride and Prejudice and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. When socialite Imogen Spurnrose (Tamzin Merchant) learns that the biggest house in town has been purchased, she plots to catch the new owner’s eye. When the buyer turns out to be a fae named Agreus (David Gyasi), she hatches a Jane Austen-esque plot to save her family from financial ruin by having him pay her to ingratiate him into The Burge’s high society. 

That’s a particularly difficult task since Agreus is equally blunt with bigots who view his arrival with disgust and with condescending liberals who want to hear about the homeland he was happy to leave behind. He’s a toughened pragmatist who’s made his fortune in part by helping humans oppress his own people, and he has little patience or sympathy for fae who are trapped in worse circumstances. His plot has almost nothing to do with the main storyline, but the dynamic between him and Imogen, who grows from one of the show’s most hateful characters to one of its strongest, is so compelling that their scenes stand out even as the rest of the show descends into murder, magic, and mayhem.

It’s also one of the few plots that comes to a satisfying conclusion by the end of season 1. While Philo’s intrigue-heavy investigation starts strong and involves some genuinely surprising twists, it fails to stick the landing as it ends up tangled in the show’s mediocre political drama. Both Sophie and Absalom’s wife, Piety (Indira Varma of Game of Thrones and Rome), are meant to be masters of manipulation, but they just come across as pale imitations of Littlefinger and Cersei Lannister, respectively. Their schemes involve a battle for control over Piety and Absalom’s slacker son Jonah (Arty Froushan) who is easily the show’s blandest character. Both he and Sophie are thrust into increased prominence in the season finale, which could make them an even bigger drag on the show’s already-announced second season.

But even when the story lags, the visuals never do. Shot in the Czech Republic, the show is filled with wonder-inspiring setpieces like chase scenes along the roofs of The Burge, battles between men and mythical creatures in the snowy mountains of Tirnanoc, and assaults by the scythe-like zeppelins of The Pact. The costumes and makeup are stunning, giving depth to the portrayals of the fae with touches like different styles of horns and the scarification that marks faerie priestesses and mystics.

There’s plenty of sex in Carnival Row, often made more spectacular through glowing wings faeries can use to take their intimacy to new heights, but there’s none of Game of Thrones’ notorious sexposition. Instead, Carnival Row’s writers trust viewers to keep up with their world-building, regularly dropping terms like “Haruspex” and “mimasery” with almost no explanation beyond the immediate context. That tactic avoids clunky exposition that can bog down genre works, and it also makes the world feel mysterious and largely unexplored, even after eight episodes. It’s a clever technique that could keep viewers engrossed in Carnival Row’s mysteries for seasons to come and hopefully give the writers the freedom to continue forging their original identity.

Carnival Row launches on Amazon Prime Video on August 30th.

In 1982, Jim Henson and Frank Oz redefined fantasy filmmaking with The Dark Crystal, an ambitious, puppet-driven movie that tells a wondrous story about an ancient world on the brink of destruction or salvation. In the post-Game of Thrones fantasy licensing frenzy, it would have been easy for Netflix to snap up the rights to the Dark Crystal world, make a cheap knockoff, and count on nostalgia to lure viewers. Instead, Clash of the Titans and The Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier has produced a true labor of love. The series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance builds on everything that made the film great, and it has the potential to become a classic in its own right.

The Dark Crystal, set on the dying world of Thra, followed two Gelflings — the last survivors of a small, elfin race — on a quest to restore a crystal power source that was corrupted by a malevolent birdlike race known as the Skeksis. Age of Resistance, which releases its 10-episode first season on August 30th, is set before those events. The Gelflings are a thriving society of disparate clans loyal to the Skeksis, but are stirred to action when they learn that the Lords of the Crystal are killing Gelflings to extend their own lives. 

While the show uses much of the world-building and some of the plot points from J.M. Lee’s prequel novels, the show has its own protagonists and structure. The story beats will still feel familiar, given how closely they follow the Lord of the Rings formula. To defeat a terrible evil, reluctant heroes must put aside their differences and band together, find unlikely allies, gather lost lore and weapons, and overcome betrayal. The similarities are particularly strong given that the Gelflings’ short stature and love of music makes them feel distinctly hobbit-like.

The heroes seem unfortunately bland because of the fidelity Jim Henson’s Creature Shop paid to the original puppets and their largely unexpressive faces. While the designers strove to distinguish them with a wide variety of complexions, clothing, and hairstyles befitting their clans and status, the characters feel indistinct in the early episodes. The Skeksis General skekUng (Benedict Wong of Doctor Strange) lampshades the issue by complaining that he can’t tell the show’s three Gelfling princesses apart. 

While most of the characters eventually come into their own, the Gelfling warrior Rian (voiced by Taron Egerton of Rocketman and the Kingsman series) never really gains any defining personality traits besides being brave and good with a sword. His genericness makes the moments when he’s supposed to be inspiring his people fall flat. Far more nuanced are the scholarly princess Brea (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Deet (Nathalie Emmanuel of Game of Thrones), who leaves her underground home at a tree’s behest to spread word of a pending ecological disaster.

Still, the first season’s best hero isn’t a Gelfling, but a Podling, a member of an even more diminutive race that the Skeksis use as servants. The aspiring Podling paladin Hup (Victor Yerrid) is only barely capable of communicating with his traveling companions, but he gets by with a heavy dose of expressive charm and by blowing loud raspberries whenever he’s displeased.

Any distinctive qualities the heroes lack is more than made up for by the show’s villains. Leterrier has assembled an incredible cast to play the Skeksis, who alternate between hatching monstrous schemes, bickering with each other, and luxuriating in the pleasures their rule has bought them. Simon Pegg voices the manipulative skekSil the Chamberlain so well that his portrayal is practically indistinguishable from Barry Dennen’s version in the original film. That’s no small feat, considering how much of the character is built on distinctive vocal tics and a sing-song tone that manages to be both comical and ominous. 

Mark Hamill’s voice for sketTek the Scientist is just a few steps removed from the one he’s used for various iterations of Batman’s nemesis the Joker. (The similarity is particularly clear in sketTek’s frequent bursts of maniacal laughter.) Andy Samberg absolutely steals an entire episode as a Skeksis heretic who shares the secret history of the world with the Gelflings through a mix of opera and puppetry, and Jason Isaacs brings the dark gravitas he showed as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films to the Emperor skekSo. The writers spend plenty of time showing how a profound fear of death leads the Skeksis to commit an escalating series of horrors, and not a moment of that time feels dull or wasted.

The original Dark Crystal film has stood the test of time so well thanks to its puppets and practical effects, which still look distinctive and well-crafted more than 30 years later. Age of Resistance is committed to maintaining that legacy by minimizing CGI in favor of puppets and animatronics. The detail is absolutely incredible, from the grotesque Skeksis to the menagerie of strange critters that make Thra feel as fully realized as Pandora from Avatar.

Every episode brings some new visual wonder, like a giant manta-ray-esque creature ridden by a desert-dwelling tribe of Gelflings, a swarm of giant arachnids that assemble themselves into a mouth to speak to the Skeksis, or the carriages the Skeksis ride around Thra, which are controlled by giant pill bugs rolled into wheels.

The constant cavalcade of cute animals and goofy characters is sure to delight kids, but parents eager to share their fond memories of The Dark Crystal should be prepared for just how dark Age of Resistance gets. Like any epic fantasy, it’s filled with noble sacrifices and tragic deaths, and the writers don’t pull any punches when it comes to showing the Skeksis brutally torturing and murdering characters. The show is in many ways tonally similar to the 1984 fantasy film The NeverEnding Story, and it’s likely to traumatize as many children as it delights.

The film established a world that was strange and mysterious, but it barely skimmed the surface of its potential in its 90-minute runtime. The Age of Resistance writers are filling that blank space in a way that feels natural rather than superfluous. They’ve invented past conflicts, expanded the roles of characters from the film, and built a nuanced social order for the Gelflings that helps explain how the Skeksis came to power and maintained their grasp on Thra for a thousand years. The writers have also created numerous minor touches that add to the character of the world, like beautiful, somber rituals for the choosing of a new Gelfling leader, and a way of mourning that still embraces the show’s central philosophy that death is a necessary, important part of life.

One of the most remarkable feats of building on the source material comes from the show’s use of dreamfasting, a Gelfling ability to share memories through touch. In The Dark Crystal, it was used to quickly share backstories in a visual way, and to build fast intimacy. Age of Resistance expands considerably on the idea, exploring the ways dreamfasting would affect society, from letting couples relive their favorite moments together to a leap of faith that allows strangers to move past possible social deceptions. So much thought went into the ability that the writers even had the Chamberlain show his cleverness by coming up with a way to undermine the power.

All this world-building has the potential to feel terribly depressing for film viewers who already know the fate in store for the Gelfling people. But one of the series’ many clever twists makes it clear that Age of Resistance isn’t a typical prequel, and that the writers aren’t entirely bound by the film’s events. It’s just another sign that the series’ creators understand why viewers would want to return to Thra and know just how to keep them there. Given that the season ends with multiple cliffhangers, it’s clear that the creators hope to continue the show with that knowledge in mind, further developing the characters and the film’s wondrous world.

In the US, the 10-episode first season of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance debuts on Netflix on August 30th, 2019. Release dates may vary in other countries.