Matt Wilstein

The 80-minute special contains some of his darkest and most compelling material to date. The laughs may come ever-so-slightly fewer and farther between than in his previous work, but Mulaney’s willingness to peel back the curtain on his inner turmoil in a way he’s never done before adds a new depth that, by the end, only makes the special funnier.

Marc Maron is not the first comedian to mine laughs from the darkest moment of his life. But he’s now done it better than just about anybody else. ... From Bleak to Dark proves that the riskiest thing you can do as a comedian is look inward and find a way to laugh through the pain.

The special really takes off at the end when he turns toward the future and what the country might look like if it continues in the direction it’s been heading in recent years. ... Ultimately, Oswalt doesn’t need to punch down because he is so good at making himself the punchline.

Now that his many disciples are doing their own versions of that trick across network, cable and streaming TV, the bar has been raised and you can feel Stewart straining to reach over it in these first couple of episodes.

As of night one, the new Conan feels a lot like the Conan O’Brien who has now been part of the late-night landscape for a quarter of a century.

As refreshing as it is to hear DeGeneres open up in a more nakedly honest way than we are used to seeing, she’s at her purest comedically in the special when she returns to the type of observational humor that made her famous in the first place.

Ultimately, Who Is America? is a much-welcome return to form for Baron Cohen. ... Baron Cohen proves that he still has what it takes to get under the thin skins of the powerful people he clearly believes are making America worse. Watching them show their true colors to the world has never been more satisfying.

The Chris Rock of Tamborine is a man in the middle of a life transition. He’s less brazenly confident than he was in his younger days, humbled at least a bit by nearly losing the right to see his own children. But while he may have been brought low as a husband and father, Rock’s powers as a comedian have not been diminished.

Like many classic sitcoms, it has taken Silicon Valley until its third season to truly hit its stride.

The Americans itself has never been better.