New York Magazine (Vulture)'s Scores

For 278 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 42% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 54% lower than the average critic
Average TV Show review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Game of Thrones: Season 2
Lowest review score: 0 Dads: Season 1
Score distribution:
  1. Mixed: 0 out of 143
  2. Negative: 0 out of 143
143 tv reviews
  1. Contemporary TV is suddenly filled with shows starring charismatic yet ostentatiously flawed heroines: Homeland, The Mindy Project, Girls, Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. Enlightened stands out because its vision is so much wider.
  2. Louie is the anti–Anger Management: bizarre, inventive, and bold.
  3. Splendid television.
  4. Best of all, we seem to be done with the weakest element of the series, those abusive-hillbilly flashbacks. Instead, we've been left with a Madonna-whore set of blondes: all-embracing Anna and her icy counterpart, Betty of the Little White Nose in the Air.
  5. Some of the encounters evoke the returned abductees in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, while others have the nasty, bone-deep chill you associate with John Carpenter’s stalk-and-kill classics. Beneath it all is an air of existential dread. The universe is out of order. Life itself has gone haywire.
  6. Broadchurch excels at showing the awkward moments between the briskly delivered plot points, and the small details of voice and gesture that define communities in mourning (or guilty panic), and it has the good sense not to overdo anything.... And yet there's something fundamentally unsatisfying about the whole thing, as smart and intricately structured as it is--and it has nothing whatsoever to do with any writing or acting or filmmaking issues, and everything to do with the fact that we've just been to this particular narrative well too many times in 2013.
  7. Sherlock is a wonderful series. Just thinking about it makes me smile.
  8. For all its gore, gunfire, and criminal nastiness, it's a joyous show; even when the characters are scowling, the show seems to be grinning at you.
  9. Oh My God is animated by deep skepticism and an appreciation of joy, qualities that don’t normally mix in comedy and that might seem, in a different context, incompatible. But they aren’t incompatible--not here, anyway.
  10. The physicality of the visuals and the performances helps power Game of Thrones past any rough patches--not that there have been that many.
  11. Raylan Givens is off his game, but Justified is as sharp as ever.
  12. We stay interested because executive producers Graham Yost (Speed) and Jon Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes) know what they're doing and have conscripted a crackerjack cast to do it.
  14. The best of the new fall sitcoms.
  16. Sherlock (and Sherlock [the show]) is that good, we do forgive his callousness, and yeah, we'll wait for two years for his return and never let our fervor flag. In exchange, when the miracle happens and he (and the show) come back, he's as good or maybe better than ever.
  17. It's these deeper questions [Deciding to live the day-to-day performance of an ideal, a belief, an emotion, a set of principles, a faith?] that give the action and melodrama a bit of existential heft, and redirect our vicarious enjoyment away from fantasy and back towards reality.
  18. You could say it’s as close as a broadcast network has gotten to the personal artistry of the best premium-cable shows, if it weren’t bolder and more elegant than anything on pay cable right now, including HBO’s own serial-killer drama, True Detective.
  19. The first four episodes sent out for review become stranger and less “realistic” by the hour, not to mention more stereotypically HBO-like (artfully arranged corpses; drug-thug posturing and handgun-waving; gratuitous T&A) and less concerned with the case that Cohle and Hart are allegedly trying to solve. But the show’s time-shifting structure is so painstaking that even when True Detective spirals into lurid madness there still seems to be purpose behind it.
  20. [A] clever, at times tricky season opener. In Lost-like style, it strategically withholds key information that would help us make immediate sense of Don’s behavior, which by turns suggests a prisoner, a sleepwalker, and a ghost.
  21. It's the most engrossing cop series since season one of NBC's Homicide, and maybe the most raggedy and real.
  22. From the moment I saw the pilot of Girls, I was a goner, a convert.
  24. A triumph of writing, directing, and acting.
  25. Pushing Daisies will drive you crazy or make you smile.
  26. Masters of Sex is an intelligent, assured drama that gets better and better as it goes along.
  27. What makes Deadwood so fascinating is not the action we put up with; it’s the language we listen to.
  28. This is one of the best movies about the artistic process I've seen--a film that can engross and illuminate even if you know nothing of Sondheim.
  29. Rick and Morty won't get us any closer to a workable definition of Harmon's genius, but at least it clarifies that the unhinged quality that Community once had wasn't accidental.
  30. It feels lived-in, confident. That's a good sign.