The premise of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed sounds like it was assembled from a generator: a newly divorced mom named Paula falls into a dangerous rabbit hole of blackmail, murder, and youth soccer while fighting a custody battle. Tatiana Maslany plays Paula. The combination of domestic crisis, amateur investigation, suburban satire, and whatever “youth soccer murder conspiracy” means in practice creates a tonal mixture that could collapse into incoherence or become exactly the kind of genre hybrid that generates devoted audiences.

The pitch for The Boroughs is exactly what the cast suggests: Alfred Molina, Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, and Bill Pullman live in a retirement community that gets invaded by an otherworldly threat, and they do something about it. Netflix premieres it May 21. The premise requires a tonal balance that is difficult to sustain — too much genre earnestness and the comedy collapses, too much winking at the audience and the suspense disappears — but the cast is experienced enough with tonal complexity that the possibility of something genuinely good is real.

The first season of The Four Seasons on Netflix worked because Tina Fey understood what the Alan Alda source film understood — that a dramedy about middle-aged people in long-term relationships has to actually believe in the relationships to generate any comedy worth having. The show was warmer than expected and funnier than its premise suggested. The second season arrives May 28 with the same structural premise: six friends, four vacations in a single year, and the annual reckoning that time-based stories impose on characters who are trying not to notice how much is changing.