It’s beginning to look a lot like overload

Those who prefer their holidays simple and austere should definitely look away from “Mariah’s Christmas: The Magic Continues,” a TV spectacular as overstuffed and inventive as an intricately designed department store window.

The musical special, streaming on Apple TV+, essentially throws every conceivable Christmas ornament at the screen. At the same time, it succeeds in its excess. It’s campy but never arch, nostalgic but not entirely derivative, shot through with glitter and bling but also vast enough for gospel choirs, sacred carols and a “Nutcracker” performance featuring Misty Copeland. Did I mention there’s a “new” invocation of the 1965 “Peanuts” Christmas special?

Look for Khalid and Kirk Franklin as themselves, performing with Carey and promoting their recent holiday single. The singer’s 10-year-old twins, Moroccan and Monroe, also appear in a brief scene. Tiffany Haddish stars as the narrator, reading an epic poem in the style of Clement Clarke Moore’s “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.” Billy Eichner appears as one of Santa’s more excitable elves, who summons Carey to the North Pole on his special hotline. Christmas, it seems, is in peril because the whole world seems out of sorts and slightly depressed, and could use a little dazzle.

“Mariah’s Christmas” is a magic place where the devotional meets the self-promotional! It’s a holiday special for those who believe that too much is never enough. And it clocks in at a tidy 45 minutes.

› A star-studded holiday offering of a very different sort, the dark horror/comedy “Silent Night” streams on AMC+. A posh couple (Keira Knightley and Matthew Goode) invite their closest friends (Annabelle Wallis, Lily-Rose Depp and Lucy Punch, among others) to their country estate for the holiday. But all the guzzled prosecco and expensive gifts in the world can’t distract them from the fact that Earth faces an environmental apocalypse. Gee, a holiday Britcom laced with political undertones. “Doom Actually”?

› Amazon Prime streams the new series “Harlem,” about four sassy New York females who get together to share tales of romantic frustrations and conquests. If you dismiss this as a lame attempt to re-create “Sex and the City” with Black characters, you’d be half right — they’re not quite characters.

› But if you accused NBC of creating “Baking It” (8 p.m., TV-PG) as a yeasty holiday variation on “Making It,” you’d be entirely correct. “SNL” veterans Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg host as contestants vie for a $50,000 prize and the title of “Best in Dough.”

› On a similar note, Netflix streams “The Great British Baking Show: Holidays: Season 4.”

› Streaming on Discovery+ since Wednesday, “Fruitcake Fraud” blends deeply rooted holiday traditions with the exploding true-crime genre. Set in Corsicana, Texas, home to the Collin Street Bakery, the source of some of America’s favorite fruitcakes, it tells a tale of embezzlement and extortion that confounded locals as well as the FBI.