Yellowjackets sometimes attempts so much that it trips over itself, like a fumbled fast-break play on the soccer field. But between its confident willingness to get weird — sinister trees, bloody bees, pernicious facsimiles! — and its relatively sure grip on its world-building, Yellowjackets is making a compelling case for its own longevity.

Swarm feels boldest when it wonders when person-to-person devotion becomes abstract glorification, and what inner mechanics inspire someone to give themselves over to another. ... By separating Dre from one hive and dropping her into the orbit of another queen, Swarm sharpens its conflation of love and family with control and coercion. It’s too bad, then, that the series abandons the commune so quickly to put Dre back on fury road.

Ted Lasso is amiss figuring out what kind of show it wants to be and what storytelling priorities it wants to hold on to in its final act. ... The third season is laying such a didactic track for Ted’s more enlightened, uniformly positive influence on the Greyhounds that its various subplots feel like they’re treading water until they’re hit by the Lasso effect.

Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes didn’t provide many laugh-out-loud moments (though “Cocaine Bear, leave Malala alone!” has a decent shot at an afterlife), but he kept things moving and light on their feet without ever trying to make the show about himself. ... When the Oscars work, they work because the winners say or do something memorable. And last night gave us plenty of that.

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.

For all the series’ delights — the chemistry between Sam Claflin and Riley Keough, the constant scene-stealing by Camila Morrone, the fizziness of the original songs — there’s an unignorable smallness throughout, a sense that, as with that Fleetwood Mac T-shirt, we’re settling for a copy of a copy.

Exodus is as hyper, hilarious, and hypnotic as its prior installments.

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.

Its characters may be quick-witted, entertaining, and portrayed by skillful actors, but listening to them drone on about the same personal problems becomes enervating over the course of ten episodes.

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.

The producers seemed to believe that if you’re going to bother hosting an awards show, you may as well let it breathe, lean into the elements of surprise that live TV offers, and enable the honorees to enjoy themselves while still mocking the frivolity of the whole exercise. This year’s Globes got that part right.

Fight scenes and gun battles are filmed as if the viewer is looking through the eyes of the character delivering the blows or pulling the trigger. This approach is deployed just often enough to add a sense of immediacy without feeling too much like a gimmick. The Last of Us distinguishes itself most when it veers off the path laid by its source material.

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.

Even if the broader outlines of its story are reminiscent of other music-focused films and shows, what makes this portrait so watchable is the shading brought to it by Chastain and Shannon. They show up in every episode with every color of paint on their palette, and display an effortless sense of control over every single stroke.

Absorbing but choppy fifth go-round. While it depicts tumultuous and unpredictable times for the royal family, it also presents some of the members of that family in ways that seem inconsistent with what we’ve come to expect from them, both within the context of this series and in the real world.

The result is a portrait that feels like half–Tennessee Williams play, half–Men are from Mars, Women Are From Venus. The cast, in particular Aubrey Plaza and F. Murray Abraham, elevates the material’s gender-based clichés (women are shrews, men cads) with performances that are precisely bemused or aggrieved. ... But without a greater guiding thesis about why marriage reaffirms gender roles for people who otherwise consider themselves progressive, or a secondary plot focus to round out this vacillating heterosexual frivolity and panic, The White Lotus feels defanged.

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.

Dahmer has a habit of announcing what kind of show it wants to be instead of actually being that show. ... I can only hope creators will realize there is a way to tell these kinds of stories with more sensitivity and care rather than mere gestures toward sensitivity and care. In the sixth episode, Dahmer does exactly that, but it doesn’t maintain that approach for the entirety of its season. ... It’s admirable that Dahmer wants to honor the victims’ lives and celebrate who Hughes was as a person. But that effort can’t be a complete success in a show that also insists on literally reducing Hughes to a piece of meat.

Andor swerves by refusing to make Cassian blandly noble. In Luna’s accomplished hands, he’s pricklier and more nuanced than that. ... In taking time to grow its central character, Andor unveils an ensemble with characters who drive a number of intriguing subplots. ... The interiority and self-reflection it demands have created the most challenging and invigorating work in this galaxy in years.

It is a confusing but often entertaining time to watch television. Appropriately, the 2022 Emmy Awards honoring all that television was also a confusing, often entertaining experience. ... The Emmys was a little too much too fast — the broadcast sailed through 25 categories last night, one more than we typically see at the Academy Awards, and still finished right on time at 11 p.m. ET. But within that flurry of activity, the Emmys captured some unexpected, truly sublime moments.

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.

It is, pardon the pun, all killer, no filler. ... There are moments of genuine discovery and shock. ... It may not be the most uplifting series you’ll watch this year, but it’s certainly one of the most thought-provoking and absorbing.

House of the Dragon’s rote mimicry of its predecessor undermines character development and dampens any sparks generated by its ensemble, and literally, due to a lack of sustained time with the titular creatures. ... The problem is not just that the dragons here feel less physically tangible than they did before or that they lack definitive personalities. It’s that House of the Dragon takes them for granted, just as it does our attention.