garote | Recent tv show inventory, for the heck of it:

These are in rough order with better ones later, though I consider all of them worth seeing:

Love, Death & Robots: An uneven series, but when it hits, it's great. Worth seeing but not a high priority.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The sci-fi plots here are often undercooked and over-explained. This is balanced out by really fun visual effects and a cast that works pretty hard to sell the material. Hopefully it will get better.

Obi-Wan Kenobi: I kept wanting to like it more than I did. Drags in the beginning, and takes some questionable detours, but it delivers on the bad-ass confrontation you're hoping for in the end, and that redeems it.

Raised By Wolves: Intriguing for about half of its runtime in Season 1, with intriguing character design and a Lost-style central mystery that doesn't quite make sense. Worth seeing. Then it goes off the rails completely. Haven't bothered to start Season 2.

Hawkeye: Relatively self-contained as these Marvel shows go. Hawkeye is the most grounded of the Avenger characters, and this series uses that to good effect. Worth seeing.

ZeroZeroZero: A sort of family drama wrapped around an examination of the international drug trade. The characters keep it interesting and the narrative is very focused, but some of the situations late in the series really strain credulity. Still worth seeing.

Peacemaker: Jokey, messy, stylish, and full of band-of-misfits drama. If you like what James Gunn does, this is more of the same. Worth watching but not a priority.

The Rings of Power: Fun to revisit this world in cinematic form, but the middle episodes drag, and the entire series suffers from lackluster action direction. The camera is always in the most obvious place, shooting the most obvious thing in the most obvious way. For comparison, think about the opening sequence of The Two Towers, which is absolute visual poetry. Rings of Power is not a "must see" so much as "obligatory seeing".

9-11: One Day In America: A well-constructed documentary telling the story of a few well-chosen survivors of the 9-11 tragedy. It's hard to believe so many years have passed since the incident, because some of the video used in this series is the same stuff I saw 20 years ago and it's still burned into my head from the first time.

The Book of Boba Fett: Underrated, I thought. I enjoyed it all the way through, even though it's basically a pulpy space western that doesn't stray from the very wholesome terrain that all Disney's Star Wars stuff is in nowadays. Zero sex, almost zero romance, bloodless violence, some light moral philosophizing, bonehead obvious Good and Bad guys, ... you know the drill.

Foundation: Not really faithful to the book, but whatever. Good visual effects and some nice chewy sci-fi concepts. Weirdly uneven pacing and direction sometimes. Worth seeing.

Dopesick: Very hard to watch if you are, or know someone who is, dealing with addiction. But also fairly cathartic for the same reason, because it reminds you that you are far from the only person going through this struggle. The jumbled timeline doesn't do it any favors though.

The Mandalorian: Pulpy space western, yep. More humor than the other Disney Star Wars stuff. Keeps to a more episodic feel, which works well.

Black Mirror: Some episodes are dumb and predictable, others are excellent and will stick with you for months. Hard to tell what you're gonna get each time.

The Haunting Of Hill House: A memorable and creepy series that hangs together very well, using the supernatural to dig effectively around in themes of addiction, depression, and loss. Several of the gimmicks it uses are ingenious and stuck with me long after the show ended.

Stranger Things: Focused and relatively low-stakes in the first season, and very charming. Worth seeing. Season 2 is a bit more uneven but more visually compelling. Season 3 is self-indulgent and bloated with too many characters, but still good. Season 4 ... Haven't felt compelled to see it.

For All Mankind: As it goes, it gets less and less about the premise and more about the various dramatic conflicts the characters have. I enjoyed Season 1, found Season 2 to be overstuffed with drama I didn't care about, and have barely made a dent in Season 3. There is one character in particular who gets way too much screen time in Season 2 just blundering through their personal idiocy, including an affair with a person half their age that bleeds well over into Season 3, and I'm rather sick of it. I don't know if I care enough to continue, even though I like the premise of the show and where it's going.

Loki: Lots of fun. Glad we got to spend more time with Loki, even if the premise doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Worth seeing.

Chernobyl: A riveting and often terrifying dramatic recreation, and also an excellent starting point for digging further into the titular disaster and its (literal and metaphorical) fallout.

"Why worry about something that isn't going to happen?"
"Why worry about ... Oh, that's perfect. They should put that on our money."

The Boys: Twisted and full of bizarrely satisfying moments, with tons of cool gross-out effects. Definitely worth seeing, but not healthy as binge material because the nihilism beats you down after a while. The good guys never really win, and the bad guys never find redemption, and things always end up sucking, and everyone hates and betrays everyone else, over and over. But the satire is strong, and the show can be surprisingly funny as well.

Rick And Morty: Some episodes just meander around in old sci-fi concepts while cracking modern jokes, but a surprising amount of the time the show builds on sci-fi concepts in ways that are downright impressive. Universally praised for its writing, and rightly so. If you don't know where to start, watch Season 2, Episode 4, and THEN start from the beginning of the series.

The Expanse: A nesting-doll set of sci-fi concepts, one or two per season, with more than the usual attention paid to scientific plausibility. Always several things going on at once, lots of character development, pretty dang good visual effects... Just an all-around good show. Definitely worth seeing.

Things I've seen and do not recommend:

Archive 81
Another Life
The Haunting Of Bly Manor
Mars (National Geographic series)

Things I haven't seen and probably won't:

House of the Dragon
Westworld
The Umbrella Academy
The Wheel of Time
American Gods
The Witcher
Knightfall
The Leftovers
See
Devs
Cursed
Tales From The Loop
The Handmaid's Tale
Timeless
Counterpart
The Last Kingdom
His Dark Materials
Tribes of Europa
Beforeigners
Valhalla

Things I haven't seen and might:

Andor
Shining Girls
Squid Game
Russian Doll
Moon Knight
What We Do In The Shadows
Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet Of Curiosities
The Underground Railroad