‘Inside’: Written and shot in a single room, Bo Burnham’s comedy special, streaming on Netflix, turns the spotlight on internet life mid-pandemic.Here are some of the highlights selected by The Times’s TV critics: Television this year offered ingenuity, humor, defiance and hope. They’re intelligent, welcoming people, and yet we’re very clear how terrible they look - not only to Claire (who challenges Jocasta directly) but also to Jamie. Ditto the family attorney, furious at the cost and danger the family would assume by freeing slaves. Her assurances that she buys slaves in family lots because they’re more efficient feels utterly benevolent to her, and we are rightly meant to find it horrifying. Aunt Jocasta (Maria Doyle Kennedy, nimbly walking a very thin line) manages to be both human and chilling. It doesn’t have this problem with everyone. It won’t let them be wrong - not with things like this. And, crucially, “Outlander” is committed to having Jamie and Claire be heroes, not just protagonists. But any narrative that centers well-meaning white people in the middle of something as fraught as American slavery has a lot of work to do. In the past, putting Jamie and Claire in a no-win scenario has been a catalyst for character development, showing us the choices they make and how they’re affected by failure. Shortly thereafter, Claire rescues a slave who is being hanged by a hook because he fought back against his overseer, but then learns that she has saved his life only so that he can be torn to pieces by the furious white men at the door. He finds out, however, that freeing the slaves is near impossible because of North Carolina law. He sets a condition: On inheriting the estate, he will free all Auntie’s slaves. Jamie is quickly confronted with his inescapable family legacy because Jocasta wants him to inherit her fortune. Now they’ve come to River Run to visit Auntie Jocasta, and her 152 slaves.

The white-savior framework felt like a way for the show to acknowledge slavery without making Jamie and Claire tackle it head on. (They promised to free him - and did, although Temeraire’s patent disbelief was that subplot’s best note.) But he existed largely as a plot point, and the slave auction scene was more concerned with how Claire felt than with the slaves. Last time “Outlander” engaged the subject of slavery, Claire and Jamie bought a person.

Season two outlander episodes