Kathryn VanArendonk

The relative tightness of This Fool’s central dynamic is one of its chief strengths, particularly for a ten-episode season.

A rare gem among the prequel set. ... Queen Charlotte is not just superficially delightful, but indeed, notably attentive to the logic of its narrative world. It is, one nearly quails to suggest, quite thoughtful about its position as the wellspring of this imaginative yarn. So far from empty nothingness, Queen Charlotte makes an effort to embrace precisely those qualities its fatuous forebears so fervently sought to avoid.

At moments, or from a slight remove, Baby J appears to be an excoriating act of self-disclosure full of details and scenes of abject emotional lows that invite descriptions like brutal and honest. Up close, though, it looks like a comedy special that cannot help but rebuild every single wall it wants to break down.

Martin aims to make SAP one of those good, small, delicious moments, and they succeed.

Succession’s fourth and final season is a shining example of the best qualities of long-form storytelling, and of TV in particular. When we’ve lived with characters for multiple seasons, there’s a sense that we know them, and know them well. ... It is a joy to discover all the ways these characters can still sneak up and grab us, all the ways we can still be walloped by a smile, a quick phone call, or a casual family gathering.

The biggest failure of Selective Outrage is not Rock himself, but everything around him — the direction, the staging, and the abysmal pre- and post-shows. ... The special’s final ten minutes, in which Rock finally takes on Will Smith and the Oscars, are the strongest part of the show. In fact, the special improves steadily from about the halfway point. ... The whole thing almost rights itself … and then that sloppy, excruciating post-show kicks in.

Perry Mason’s second season finally puts both pieces together, and it is a gavel-banging good time.

What might like look like standard-issue fare from the outside is actually packed full of ultra-premium ingredients meant to evoke complex emotional responses of joy, sorrow, melancholy, Schadenfreude, yearning, delight. Except unlike some of Lucy’s creations, which occasionally go so far that they’re barely edible, the new season of Party Down also manages to be astoundingly satisfying.

The first 20 minutes are classic Maron riffs on how bad it’s all gotten. ... But after those first 20 minutes, Maron begins to shade in other colors. ... In a lesser stand-up’s work, a stretch of material as balanced and insightful as that one could be the centerpiece of an hour. For Maron, it’s there as a bridge from where the special begins to the place he wants to spend the bulk of his time: talking about the death of his partner, the director Lynn Shelton. It’s an extraordinary run of jokes.

It is a sturdy kind of storytelling, and sturdiness is not splashy or thrilling. But it is reliable, and the show’s structural resilience fits neatly into its underlying worldview. There’s a deep, warm sweetness inside Poker Face’s ten episodes. ... Poker Face knows itself, and it gives viewers exactly what it has promised: a criminal, a detective, a crime, and a solution.

Fantastically funny third season. ... South Side’s balance of fast-moving narrative and inane one-off jokes works on all levels here, especially when the series leans into absurdism.

He has keen observational powers, but in Little Big Boy, they are almost wholly devoted to what it feels like when your bowels go awry. ... The shame of those experiences and Kroll’s depression after a particularly brutal breakup are the highlights of Little Big Boy. ... The momentum of those opening stories starts to falter toward the end as Kroll shifts into a more straightforward retelling of the past several years of his life.

The best joke in Patton Oswalt’s new Netflix special, We All Scream, starts with Oswalt attempting to explain his experience of the pandemic. ... Much of the rest of the special feels so thin by comparison and regrettable because it means the most memorable joke in an otherwise meager special is a description of an unfinished project that’s been polished up to make it look complete. What’s supposed to be a packed barn full of clown pubes is, sadly, several hairs short of a bush.

The return of Inside Amy Schumer often tries to reflect that alarming world, to greater and lesser success. Schumer’s sketch series is at its best, though, when it’s reaffirming that some things are still reliable. ... Amid the show’s other sketches, “Fart Park” feels like a safe haven in the darkness. Schumer wants the revival series to reflect all the righteous fury she obviously feels about the state of the country. It would be nice if there were a few more farts to help the medicine go down.

He wants the audience to feel moved. It also feels like someone might pass around a pamphlet on how to make good life choices. It might be a relief if someone did, actually. It would be a way to laugh at his own performance, to acknowledge how overwrought and overdetermined it sometimes feels. ... The material of The King’s Jester makes it noteworthy. That fact remains true, though you do wish Minhaj could stop trying to convince you of how noteworthy it all is.

The story is expansive enough to fill up the show’s huge map, and where its fantasy premises promise impressive set pieces, like a battle with an ice troll or ships sailing into the Undying Lands, The Rings of Power lives up to those promises. Its emotional core, though simplistic, is just as big and openhearted.

The show is built on two central figures who aren’t as strong as the minor characters orbiting them. ... So much of it could be gloriously delightful if it were just a little less conscious of navigating around the triumphs and drawbacks of its predecessor.

The portrait The Sandman provides feels as paint-by-numbers as any other generated by the Netflix algorithm. The series rushes so quickly toward a kinder, cuddlier version of its titular character that his transformation first feels curiously weightless, and finally emotionally hollow — an ephemera evaporating in the daylight, or perhaps yet another example of beloved IP getting lost in the queue.

Industry is an incredibly watchable show, but for my money (which is largely allocated in a risk-averse portfolio of mutual funds), the primary draw is how much fun it is to listen to. It’s not so much a radio play as it is a fully immersive sound bath, made of constantly roiling tension and the occasional relief of someone in the background yelling about NFTs.

It’s an indulgent project, but it’s thoughtful enough about episodic shape to justify the run time. By the end, it cannot help but trend toward a touch of mysticism, and yet it’s hard to begrudge Hawke’s bald fondness.

It is meant to disorient the viewer, and it works. ... Most important, it feels true. It is true enough that as the rehearsals play out, as more and more twists and M.C. Escher–esque turns are introduced into the rehearsal process, your body registers them as true and responds accordingly. You cannot help but want to cringe because it’s so byzantine and so simultaneously emotionally naked. Like it or not, that sensation of bodily distress is the feeling of Fielder’s rehearsals succeeding.

In its totality, it’s a monument to surrealist queer pettiness, standing high atop a foundation of incredible comedic harmony. It is overwrought, exhausted, and self-mocking, and it’s buoyed by Early and Berlant’s palpable delight.

There are stretches of Joel Kim Booster’s Netflix special Psychosexual where the magnets wobble a little — bits where the effort of doing stand-up feels mostly in service of a metatextual point Booster is trying to make. Fairly often, though, the magnets hold. In those moments, Psychosexual feels buoyant and alive.

Even though Players is a foreign setting to me, it is also a fun and poignant portrait of some specific types of guys.

More than once, I was frustrated by season three — frustrated enough to resort to all-caps yelling to anyone who could listen. Even still, there are few shows I’ve enjoyed more this year and few finales I’ve looked forward to more than this one, and despite those frustrations, I still vastly prefer the show’s impulse to dig into the painful places rather than to skitter around on superficials.

On one side, there’s the heaviness of Macdonald’s death and his memory. On the other side is the special itself, which is not quite ephemeral, but it’s close. It’s thin. Some portions are striking and fun, some feel like incomplete approaches to an idea that’s not fully there yet, some are simply overworn premises without enough oomph to distinguish them. ... The indistinctness of Nothing Special does create an opportunity to remember him. Like the comedians gathered at the end, it’s an invitation.

The most off-putting thing about The Time Traveler’s Wife, right from the jump, is how strangely chintzy and thin it looks. ... Bad news. It does get more sad, but it absolutely does not know how to make that emotional gravity tie into the silly fun stuff.

The new sketches manage to surprise amid the wash of familiar allusions.