Megan Garber

For All Mankind is doing what it has always done: considering the human cost of historical achievement. But the show’s new season hints that its exploration of those costs will be both more nuanced and more overt as its story proceeds further into the future.

We live, though, in uniquely incompetent times, and one of the shows that best captures this fact is a work of stylized history. White House Plumbers. .... As with traditional treatments of competence, the story delights in the details, turning Watergate into a step-by-step origin story.

Nearly every character in Blockbuster exemplifies a version of this tension: adulthood and childhood, intersecting at awkward angles. That makes the show, like so many of its fellow workplace comedies, an apt reflection of its time. ... Blockbuster becomes not just a workplace comedy but also a family comedy and a buddy comedy. ... Blockbuster is comedy infused with loss, as a fact and as a looming threat. It is a show fit for a moment shaped by regressions.

The show carefully calibrates shtick and insight. “Tell the story a certain way,” Zoë says to Danner, solemnly, “and any one of us could’ve done this. But tell the story in a different way, and none of us did this.” Lines like that—blatant exposition, not of plot but of premise—could easily wear thin. But just as the show starts to seem overly enamored of its conceit, it remembers its own genre: comedy.

The introduction of an actual therapist into the mix of characters in Ted’s orbit—she does professionally what Ted prides himself on doing informally—allows the show to explore the nuances of its own convictions.

Its reunion special spends nearly two hours frantically arguing that the ubiquity is deserved. ... Friends offered a world devoid of the world. The show’s reunion has now continued the tradition. The special is fan service that also attempts to rationalize the fandom itself. It is trying its best to have it both ways—the enforced intimacy of the sitcom and the market imperative of the global franchise. It is a telethon guided by a tautology.

It presents itself as airy infotainment even as many Americans are unable to access even the most basic forms of medical care. That makes the show deeply uncomfortable to watch. So does The Goop Lab’s just-asking-questions approach to health—its breezy mistrust of expertise itself.

The question becomes how you treat the discomfort—as something to be celebrated, or as something to be denigrated. Ansari’s answer, over a show that has some great jokes and some distinctly less-great ones, is another kind of ellipsis: Can we just talk about something else? ... Another way that Right Now is of its moment: It is a work of winkily manufactured authenticity.

It often has the feel of an infomercial whose miracle product is a lanky resident of El Paso. This, too, is unsurprising. What is striking, though, is the low-stakes nature of the miracle.

The show’s infusive reliance on Johnson, a polymathic performer whose legendary charisma seems always to be in beast mode, makes The Titan Games compelling almost in spite of itself. ... The athletic competition, with all its pomp and camp and spectacle, does the thing so many other entertainments will not, or cannot, do: It offers viewers an escape into certainty.