Comedy & Humor

The Chair Company is an HBO comedy series co-created by Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin, the duo behind the cult sketch phenomenon I Think You Should Leave, marking Robinson's first leading role in a fully serialized narrative rather than a sketch showcase. Robinson stars as Ron Trosper, an ordinary corporate everyman whose life is upended by a mortifying public incident, after which he stumbles onto what appears to be a sprawling conspiracy hidden beneath the mundane surfaces of everyday commerce.

What begins as one man's attempt to recover a shred of dignity spirals into an obsessive, ever-deepening investigation, and the show channels Robinson's signature comedy of social humiliation and escalating absurdity into a single continuous story. His character's inability to let go — to simply move past his embarrassment — becomes the engine that drags him, and everyone around him, into increasingly deranged territory. Produced with Adam McKay among its executive producers, the series marries excruciating cringe comedy to the structure of a paranoid mystery.

Reviewers embraced The Chair Company as a natural, ambitious evolution of Robinson's comic voice, praising its commitment to sustaining his particular brand of discomfort across a full narrative arc. A word-of-mouth hit, it was renewed for a second season at HBO Max, where it streams.

Overcompensating is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy created by and starring Benito Skinner, the comedian and internet personality known for his viral character sketches. Produced by A24 for Prime Video, the series follows Benny, a former high-school football star and homecoming king who arrives at college harboring a secret he has spent his life burying: he is gay. To keep up appearances, Benny throws himself into an exhausting performance of heterosexual masculinity, even as he forms an intense, complicated friendship with a fellow student who is hiding insecurities of her own.

Skinner mines his own experiences for a story that is at once raucously funny and unexpectedly tender, capturing the specific anxiety of a young person terrified that the elaborate identity they have constructed might collapse. Wally Baram co-stars as Carmen, the friend whose bond with Benny anchors the series, alongside Mary Beth Barone and Adam DiMarco. The show is threaded with pop-culture references and a scene-stealing cameo from Charli XCX, giving it a hyper-current, extremely-online sensibility.

Debuting on Prime Video in 2025, Overcompensating earned warm reviews for its blend of broad comedy and genuine emotional honesty, marking a confident scripted breakout for Skinner beyond his short-form internet fame. Funny, heartfelt, and sharply observed, it streams on Prime Video.

Running Point is a breezy, joke-packed Netflix sports comedy created by Mindy Kaling, Ike Barinholtz, and David Stassen, loosely inspired by the life of Los Angeles Lakers executive Jeanie Buss. Kate Hudson stars as Isla Gordon, the overlooked sister in a basketball dynasty who is unexpectedly named president of the fictional Los Angeles Waves after her brother steps down, forcing a woman long dismissed as the family's party girl to prove she can run a struggling professional franchise.

Surrounded by skeptical brothers, a demanding roster, and a league that never quite takes her seriously, Isla sets out to turn the team around while wrangling her chaotic family. Hudson, in her first major television lead, brings her signature warmth and comic timing to a role that lets her be both glamorous and self-deprecating. The ensemble, including Brenda Song, Drew Tarver, Scott MacArthur, and Chet Hanks, gives the show a rapid-fire, workplace-comedy rhythm familiar from Kaling's other series.

Premiering in February 2025, Running Point became an immediate streaming hit and was renewed by Netflix for a second season within weeks, buoyed by Hudson's star turn and the reliable appeal of an underdog sports comedy. Light on its feet and unabashedly crowd-pleasing, it streams on Netflix.

The Paper is a Peacock mockumentary comedy set in the universe of The Office, created by Greg Daniels, who adapted the original American series, together with Michael Koman. Premiering in September 2025, it revives the beloved documentary-crew conceit by sending the same filmmakers who once chronicled Dunder Mifflin off to find a brand-new subject.

This time the cameras follow the Toledo Truth Teller, a struggling Midwestern newspaper, and the earnest new editor (Domhnall Gleeson) trying to resurrect it with a ragtag crew of volunteer reporters. Sabrina Impacciatore and Chelsea Frei co-star, while Oscar Nuñez returns as accountant Oscar Martinez, the lone original Office character folded into the new ensemble.

Reviews were generally warm, praising the show for finding its own rhythm while honoring the spirit of its predecessor, and Peacock renewed it for a second season. By centering a dying local newspaper, the series gives its workplace comedy a timely, bittersweet backdrop. The Paper streams on Peacock.

Sirens is a darkly comic Netflix limited series created by Molly Smith Metzler, adapted from her own stage play Elemental. Unfolding over a single volatile weekend at a lavish seaside estate, the five-episode series is a sharp, stylish study of wealth, control, and the strange dynamics that bind women to the powerful people they serve.

Meghann Fahy stars as Devon, a woman who arrives at the opulent beach compound convinced that her younger sister Simone (Milly Alcock) has fallen under the cult-like influence of her glamorous socialite employer, Michaela Kell (Julianne Moore). As the weekend spirals, alliances shift and the line between rescue and delusion blurs, with Kevin Bacon rounding out the ensemble as Michaela's billionaire husband.

The series generated significant buzz for its performances — especially Moore's imperious matriarch and Fahy's live-wire outsider — and for its glossy, unsettling tone. A tight, bingeable limited run, Sirens leaned into mythic imagery to ask uncomfortable questions about caretaking, class, and who really holds the power in the relationships that money creates.

Netflix's The Four Seasons is a warm and quietly heartbreaking comedy about middle age, long marriages, and the way friendships both sustain and complicate our lives. Based on Alan Alda's beloved 1981 film of the same name, the series follows three couples who vacation together across four seasons: spring, summer, fall, and winter. What begins as a celebration of decades-long friendship becomes a reckoning with everything those decades contain, including the secret that one couple is separating — and the disruption that announcement sends through the entire group.

Tina Fey heads the ensemble and her presence — both as a creative force and its most prominent face — gives the show much of its tonal intelligence. The comedy is deeply funny in the way that only works rooted in emotional honesty can be: the laughs arrive from truth, not from performance. Steve Carell, Colman Domingo, Will Forte, Marco Calvani, and Kerri Kenney-Silver round out an ensemble that plays with the genre's romantic comedy conventions while consistently exceeding them. The series never condescends to its characters — these are people in the middle of their lives, trying to figure out what still matters.

The Four Seasons arrived on Netflix as a passionate alternative to youth-fixated content, and found an immediate audience among viewers hungry for comedy that took adult relationships seriously. Praised for the naturalistic ease of its ensemble performances, for each seasonal episode's distinct mood, and for Fey and her collaborators' refusal to resolve the show's central tensions too neatly, it quickly became one of the platform's most-discussed originals of the year. Three couples. Four trips. A lot to unpack.

Palm Royale is a sun-drenched comedy set in the glittering social world of 1960s Palm Beach, Florida, following Maxine Simmons, a determined woman of modest means who schemes her way into the exclusive enclave of the ultra-wealthy. Kristen Wiig is radiant in the lead role, bringing both comic precision and unexpected emotional depth to a character who wants desperately to belong and is willing to do almost anything to get there. The series captures the era's spectacular fashion and social rituals with a knowing wit that skewers the absurdities of upper-class aspiration while finding genuine humanity in its characters.

The supporting ensemble is a comedy lover's dream: Carol Burnett plays a comatose socialite whose estate Maxine is determined to inherit, while Allison Janney commands every scene as the imperious queen of Palm Beach society who sees Maxine as both a threat and an amusement. Ricky Martin, Laura Dern, Josh Lucas, and Leslie Bibb round out a cast that seems to be having enormous fun inhabiting this pastel world of parties, rivalries, and secrets. Creator Mindy Kaling and showrunner Abe Sylvia strike a tonal balance between screwball comedy and soap opera melodrama that keeps each episode careening forward in delightful directions.

Palm Royale arrives at a moment of renewed enthusiasm for prestige comedies that blend lush period aesthetics with sharp social satire, and it earns its place in that tradition. Wiig's performance alone would make it required viewing, but the series' generosity toward even its most outrageous characters and its genuine warmth beneath the comedy make Palm Royale a genuinely pleasurable escape into a world of gorgeous excess.