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Rory Scovel sweated his way through postproduction of his latest stand-up special. The night it taped, he’d been sure his Minneapolis set had killed. But the laughter was barely audible in the cuts he was watching. “I thought I bombed,” he says. “Here I am, entering year 20 in comedy, only to find out I’m actually very delusional.”

Anxious, perhaps, but not delusional. There’s abundant laughter in Religion, Sex and a Few Things in Between, out Feb. 22 on Max, now that it includes actual audio of the audience — and not just Scovel’s stage mic, the only recording that he’d previously heard. The 43-year-old South Carolina native’s two-month doom spiral had been for nothing. But even if it had been the disaster he feared, Scovel has more to fall back on these days. Key roles on the Apple TV+ drama Physical and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon...

In the age of peak TV, it can be overwhelming to even contemplate indulging in any more media content. On the other hand, with episodes clocking in at an average of eight minutes, a web series is a far less ominous commitment than anything else on your binge watching list. In a post “High Maintenance” and “Insecure” world, more and more creators are using the web to deliver inventive entertainment, and many filmmakers are using the medium to push beyond conventional narrative structures.

In the Gotham Award-nominated web series “The F Word,” filmmaker Nicole Opper lovingly documented her parenthood journey with her wife Kristan, transforming the complicated and often painful foster-to-adopt process into a creative and playful docu-series. A sensitive story sprinkled with plenty of joy, the couple’s humor and intimacy makes for gripping viewing. The series came out in 2017, so it wasn’t eligible for this list, but...