Rowan Atkinson’s latest comedy is full of life lessons. You can’t hope to trap a bee in a grand piano. Bees, as we know, are already endangered, so don’t microwave them.

If you find yourself in a pity rush to the vet with a comatose dog, don’t get distracted and take off your shoe to smash a bee inside the car. If you managed to destroy a Mondrian while trying to pound a bee, painting the stain red with tomato sauce won’t fool anyone; the same goes for using old CDs and triangles you cut out of rolling shutters to restore a Kandinsky mobile you hit with a tennis racket.

Man vs Bee (Netflix) replaces Nicolas Cage’s The Wicker Man as my favorite bee comedy. Do you remember what happened at the end of this movie? Nic, allergic to bees, has his head stuffed into a portable hive. “No, not the bees! he shouts. “Not the bees! Aaaaahhh!” I was still laughing about it days later. Atkinson, on the other hand, is intentionally funny in all nine episodes of this sitcom.

Atkinson, along with his writer Will Davies and director David Kerr, realize that comedy isn’t tragedy more time, but stuff more idiot. Man vs. Bee could just as well have been called Man vs. Himself or Man vs. Home. Atkinson plays Trevor, a man fired from Asda after an altercation with a trolley and a desk after finding himself on the losing side of a battle with a paper shredder. His wife is divorced and his daughter yearns, perhaps in vain, for a dad-daughter relationship during a camping trip to the Isle of Wight (proving that weirdness runs rampant in the family).

Trevor is not the right man to look after a house with voice-activated security systems and a manual so thick that, rather than a tennis racket, he should have been the weapon of choice for a long bee attack.

Julian Rhind-Tutt and Jing Lusi literally make phone calls in their heroically grotesque performances as ghastly vacation owners who relax by the pool in monogrammed sneakers, calling the man to whom they foolishly entrusted their pad in order to find out if their assets – an E-type Jag, priceless artwork, Cupcake the dog – are still intact. Meanwhile, their immaculate home ends up being destroyed in a frenzy of rage with flamethrowers. The bee, naturally, is not so burned.

I’ve always thought, I now mistakenly realize, that Atkinson’s best comedy was verbal and that Mr Bean and Johnny English were mostly for the lucrative idiot demographic. What I should have appreciated was the continuity of Atkinson’s work. Blackadder’s violent nihilism (“Baldrick, believe me, eternity in the company of Beelzebub and all his hellish instruments of death will be a picnic compared to five minutes with me – and THAT pencil”) is reproduced here. The same goes for the timeless vibe of Atkinson’s Inspector Fowler in A Thin Blue Line (“Appearances, as we’ll see, are like bus timetables: often very deceiving”). That said, there is an essential change: here, Atkinson has become Baldrick.

When he gets bitten while stuck in a dog cat flap in the middle of a bee hunt while wearing a magnetic collar for reasons that make no sense, he looks surprised – as if his cunning plan had unraveled. But, really, what did he think would happen?

I would have given this series five stars but for two things. First, the bee is terribly under-characterized. What is his motivation? Are we to take seriously the implicit assertion that male bees, evicted from their hives, are homeless and friendless and therefore this one simply seeks shelter and companionship? If so, why does this bother Trevor?

The only explanation that makes sense is that he’s furious at the continued lack of representation of bees in entertainment. Think about it. Jerry Seinfeld played the titular insect in Bee Movie; The Simpsons’ Bumblebee Man was a human mutant who set back the release of the bees by decades. You can’t be what you can’t see, especially if you’re a bee.

Second, product placement is relentless. For example, all of the absurd house’s state-of-the-art gadgets are supplied by this German electronics company whose name sounds like the French word for honey. I’d like to believe it’s a bee-related cute gag – but that seems unlikely.