Hannah Giorgis | The Atlantic

When Young People Stop Imagining a Future

2025-04-11T10:17:13-04:00

At first glance, the main character of The Teacher, the debut feature film by the Palestinian British writer-director Farah Nabulsi, seems drawn from a familiar inspirational-movie archetype. Basem El-Saleh (played by Saleh Bakri) is an English instructor at an all-boys high school, where a substantial portion of his work involves trying to motivate disaffected students. But The Teacher isn’t just another paean to the democratizing power of education, or the role that a single mentor can play in guiding listless teenagers toward conventional success. On top of all this, Nabulsi’s film spends considerable time fleshing out why school feels like an afterthought for some of Basem’s students: The movie is set in the West Bank, where Israel’s military occupation constrains the most mundane elements of Palestinian life—including what kind of future young people can imagine for themselves and their loved ones.

When The Teacher begins, the soft-spoken teacher, who lives alone, is wrestling with grief on multiple fronts. Slowly, the film reveals that Basem’s teenage son died after suffering an untreated asthma attack in a military prison, where he was serving an eight-year sentence for participating in a protest—one that he’d attended with his father. The agony of his child’s death, and the ensuing rift in Basem’s marriage, still haunts the educator, and as Basem drives along the winding roads of the West Bank, his loneliness seems to fill the screen. So when one of his students, a bright young boy named Adam (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) loses his older brother after a confrontation with settlers, Basem finds himself naturally shifting into a paternal role.

Nabulsi’s film repurposes the educator-turned-father-figure trope, using Basem’s proximity to his student to highlight the senselessness of both characters’ losses. The Teacher, which premiered in September 2023 at the Toronto International Film Festival and is now playing in select U.S. theaters, was inspired in part by the filmmaker’s travels to Palestine, where her parents were born, and where, as she described in an interview, she encountered people with firsthand experience of “cruel and absurd things such as home demolitions, child prisoners in military detention, settler violence and vandalism.” Though the film was shot well before the October 7 attack by Hamas and Israel’s ensuing bombardments of Gaza, its themes may nonetheless feel timely to viewers. At a moment when settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank is rising, The Teacher, in its best stretches, captures the intimate horrors of life under harrowing circumstances—and the lifesaving power of the relationships that people still manage to forge and nurture.

[Read: The cost of lawlessness on the West Bank]

Much of the film traces Basem’s attempts to stop Adam from trying to avenge his brother’s death—which, as Basem sees it, is a futile mission that would likely end with Adam dying. “After everything you’ve been through, you still believe there’ll be justice?” Adam asks him in an early scene. His tone is incredulous, but the question becomes a sort of guiding principle: Some characters do, in fact, believe that things can be better, despite all evidence otherwise. When the two inadvertently become involved in a plot to secure the release of 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one Israeli American soldier, a plotline loosely based on the Gilad Shalit story, Basem’s concern for Adam keeps the teenager from surrendering to the allure of violent resistance. Nothing will bring back their family members, and justice may never come through the courts, but The Teacher shows how Basem and Adam help each other work through pain that once seemed insurmountable.

At moments, The Teacher takes on more than it can handle, such as a romantic subplot between Basem and a British volunteer worker at his school. Early on, Lisa (Imogen Poots) seems intended to serve as a proxy for American and European audiences; she expresses a simple surprise at the conditions of Basem’s teaching environment. As the film progresses, this wide-eyed curiosity shifts to righteous indignation, but these reactions are muddled by her feelings for Basem. In one instance, Lisa is aghast to find a gun in his house, but her anxiety about his involvement with a local resistance group feels no more dramatic than her frustration with Basem’s reticence about the dissolution of his family. Her attempts to connect with Adam also feel forced in comparison to his quietly moving rapport with Basem.

Aside from Basem and Adam’s budding kinship, the most significant relationship in the film is the bond between its Palestinian characters and the land their families have inhabited for generations. Nabulsi depicts the West Bank with romantic vision, lingering on sweeping hillside vistas and peppering vivid memories of the natural world into dialogue. After settlers raze Adam’s family property, the teen is no longer able to see a future for himself in their village, especially without his brother. But growing closer to Basem gives him a window into what the West Bank was like long before he was born. Through Basem’s accounts of his own family history, Adam deepens his connection to the land his brother died trying to defend—and his resolve to avoid meeting a similar fate.

The White Lotus Doesn’t Stick the Landing

2025-04-07T16:12:20-04:00

This article contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of The White Lotus.

On The White Lotus, misdirection abounds. Each installment of the writer-director Mike White’s acerbic satire opens with a guest at the titular hotel chain stumbling upon a dead body, before rewinding a week to introduce a motley crew of patrons and staff who might each end up being the deceased. As these characters and their complicated relationships come into view, the question of the corpse’s identity recedes into the background; the fatal arc rarely plays out as anticipated, and is not always relevant to each character’s story.

The White Lotus, which began as a COVID-era limited series filmed in Hawaii, has always been a closely observed study of wealth and its excesses, whether carnal or material. This season, filmed mostly on the Thai island of Ko Samui, used the new setting to nudge its characters toward pursuits beyond the flesh. Guests got a crash course in Buddhist principles, a reflection of White’s own interest in the religion and its philosophies. The pacing was slower, and the tone less raucous, than in seasons past, as characters served up meditations on life, death, and the things we do to survive in between. But last night’s Season 3 finale proved that the show isn’t above an obvious, anticlimactic ending—and hasn’t quite transcended its original formula.

Perhaps more than any other TV show airing now, The White Lotus has inspired fans to share their theories about the symbolism, pop-culture allusions, and real-world inspiration on view—and how that all might manifest in the finale’s on-screen deaths. In seven preceding episodes, Season 3 zoomed in on the insecurities, selfishness, and devious choices of a wide-ranging ensemble cast. Each narrative thread seemed to tease a potentially explosive ending, and the White Lotus team promised a shocking finale. The steady stream of online chatter helped propel this season to some of the show’s highest-ever ratings, but it also inadvertently revealed the trouble with this season’s writing. Instead of deepening the psychological and interpersonal inquiries of its character studies, The White Lotus simply bombarded viewers with more—more characters, more accents, more episodes, more dead bodies, more Easter eggs to scrutinize—only to end up with a predictable outcome.

The show has always been more invested in skewering its living hotel patrons than obsessing over the specifics of any one character’s demise. But the finale undermined—and wholly ignored—some of the season’s more interesting ideas. One of the season’s main stories has focused on Rick (played by Walton Goggins), a morose middle-aged man vacationing with his earnest, wide-eyed girlfriend, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). Rick spent most of the season chasing Jim (Scott Glenn), the man he believed to be his father’s killer, before confronting him in the penultimate episode. Rick managed to walk away from the encounter without harming Jim, and the resulting calm he felt afterward marked a notable shift for a man whose entire understanding of himself was shaped by the death of his father. It also represented a heartening development in his relationship with Chelsea, who had constantly begged Rick not to choose violence.

[Read: Reclaim imperfect faces]

Near the end of the finale, all of that progress was erased. A new encounter with Jim triggers Rick’s rage, leading to a wild shoot-out across the hotel grounds. And right after Rick does shoot Jim, he learns that Jim was actually his father—with no setup or follow-through. Just moments before, Chelsea had pleaded with Rick to “stop worrying about the love you didn’t get” and “think about the love you have.” Of course, Rick doesn’t, and his refusal leads to their deaths, too. The shootings played out in rapid succession, filling the final 20 minutes of the episode with a barrage of gunplay that felt like the rushed conclusion to an action film. Where the Season 2 finale imbued its important action scenes with a modicum of whimsy, last night’s episode presented little by way of humor, stylistic finesse, or emotional release. By the time Rick tells a dying Chelsea that they’ll be together forever, just like she’d said throughout the season, the words ring hollow.

Other plotlines stacked up the possibility of immense tragedy, only to pull back at the last minute. Earlier in the season, embattled father Tim Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) had become desperately suicidal after learning he was under investigation for financial crimes. Convinced that his family would not survive the loss of their wealth, he seemed prepared to poison not only himself but also his wife and two of his children. For a short stretch in the last episode, it seemed like his younger son, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), would inadvertently die instead. But after accidentally drinking a poisoned milkshake, Lochlan was … fine, and his family soon boarded a boat departing the island (with no acknowledgment of the shoot-out that had just killed multiple people). For a moment, Tim seems ready to tell his wife and children what will happen when they get back to the United States—but then the scene ends. After eight episodes of the show hinting at a possible murder-suicide, the finale sends them off with nothing worse than a stomachache.

Another scene struck a very different note, in a marked contrast to the plot-heavy proceedings. Throughout the season, a trio of childhood friends—Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), Kate (Leslie Bibb), and Laurie (Carrie Coon)—had navigated their middle-age ennui by gossiping about one another. Then, in a lovely monologue, Laurie admitted that their bond was one of the most important things in her life. “I don’t need religion or God to give my life meaning, because time gives it meaning,” she says tearfully. “We started this life together. I mean, we’re going through it apart, but we’re still together.” It’s a beautiful sentiment, bringing some welcome closure to a true-to-life dynamic. But sandwiched in between so much plot, the scene’s gravity was undercut. If the finale had stopped trying to do so much, perhaps it could have actually given us some emotional satisfaction.

Jonathan Majors Is Looking for Redemption. Will He Find It?

2025-04-04T10:01:18-04:00

The athlete’s physique is both a marvel and a weapon. Witness Killian Maddox, a bodybuilder whose formidable muscles gleam under golden light. He is a violent man—some might even say “disturbed”—whose chosen profession leads him to use performance-enhancing drugs that further amplify his aggression. Maddox does not make vague threats toward people who run afoul of him. Instead, he specifically tells them that he will split their skull apart and drink their brains like soup—a promise he makes twice over the run of Magazine Dreams, a new movie by the writer-director Elijah Bynum.

For much of the film, Maddox, who is played by Jonathan Majors, does not seem capable of acknowledging his capacity for violence. This dismissive attitude would be unnerving in any dramatic character study, but unlike earlier cult classics about angry men in search of belonging, Magazine Dreams comes with a different context. The movie has been mired in controversy since shortly after it first debuted to a standing ovation and positive reviews at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2023, when Majors was a rapidly rising star. Two months later, he was arrested and charged with assault and harassment following a dispute with his then-girlfriend, the actor Grace Jabbari. Majors denied the allegations, but Magazine Dreams was dropped by its original distributor amid the fallout. And within the year, a jury had found him guilty on two of four charges—one harassment violation and one misdemeanor assault charge. The Magazine Dreams release seemed uncertain until last October, when it was acquired by Briarcliff Entertainment, the distributor behind the Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice.

Ahead of the movie’s delayed release, Majors has attempted to re-ingratiate himself with Hollywood decision makers and the viewing public, dominating the Magazine Dreams press run with interviews that emphasize his personal growth. The PR blitz draws attention to an uncanny parallel with his character. Magazine Dreams is a film about a man who constantly puts himself on display for others to judge: All Maddox wants is to be the best bodybuilder alive. But sheer athleticism won’t turn him into a celebrity, and his demeanor doesn’t endear him to people—Majors plays Maddox as a sullen and tightly wound outcast whose environment shapes his isolation. The athlete is not just socially inept; in several scenes, he either deliberately misleads or aggresses people who do attempt to engage him.

Whereas the character fails to earn the admiration of those around him, the embattled actor is trying to prove that he can do it successfully in real life. The Magazine Dreams press run has seen Majors portraying himself as a flawed but fundamentally good man who can transcend his past misbehavior. Several high-profile celebrities have come forward to say that they have faith in him as an actor and a man; in interviews, Majors has spoken about leaning on religion, and he sports a new tattoo that reads rebirth. And a week before the film’s theatrical release, The Hollywood Reporter published a cover story in which Majors was asked what he would say to entertainment-industry figures now, as he looks to rebuild a once-promising career. “I would tell them I’m still learning,” the actor said, “and I would thank them for participating in my growth.”

[Read: Tár has an answer to art’s toughest question]

Although some of these features do quote dissenting voices, the stories have largely positioned Majors as a fallen man who just might deserve to reclaim his mantle—someone who, perhaps, has suffered enough already. If this redemptive rhetoric feels familiar, it’s because several other men have tried to stage industry comebacks using similar language. “They’re using all the hot-button words,” one crisis-communications consultant said of Majors’s team in an interview with New York magazine. A supporting cast of women has also helped burnish Majors’s image, in part by reinforcing the actor’s view of himself as an important pillar of the Black community—the kind of charismatic male leader we all need. Majors has repeatedly denied any allegations of violence against women, but last month, Rolling Stone reported on an audio recording in which Majors appears to admit to strangling Jabbari. When asked by Complex how he felt about the audio emerging so close to the film’s release, Majors defaulted to platitudes: “There were vibrations, reverberations, same as everything before,” he said. “But I was happy I’d done my work. I was happy I’d done my work.”

The spectacle of Majors’s redemption tour has certainly overshadowed the work of the Magazine Dreams creative team and crew, as well as that of the rest of the cast. Ironically, the film is at its most compelling when it explores the deadly implications of male entitlement. The question that hangs over the screenplay is not if Maddox’s desolation will metastasize into violence, but when. Maddox struggles to connect with nearly everyone around him, especially women: When other characters ask him about himself, he either becomes tongue-tied, deflects the questions, or responds with an overwhelming barrage of information.

A date with his grocery-store co-worker, a cheerful young white woman who seems genuinely interested in him, ends on a sour note after he scares her off with an eerily matter-of-fact description of his parents’ deaths. (Maddox’s father killed his mother, and then himself.) Two uneasy sexual encounters leave him even more adrift: In one of them, a Black sex worker chastises Maddox for kissing her; the woman’s contempt, coupled with his own steroid-induced erectile dysfunction, induces palpable shame. Before the scene abruptly ends, it feels fraught with the clichéd possibility of Maddox unleashing his rage on the woman. As the story progresses, we watch as rejection or perceived disrespect plunges Maddox further into a spiral that seems destined to end with bloodshed, whether realized or simply threatened. Magazine Dreams is not always deft or subtle in its approach, but it does attempt to seriously dig into weighty, complicated material.

And yet, Majors’s press run suggests a distance between the actor and some of the film’s core elements—a blind spot that distracts from the work itself. In an interview with Variety, Majors responded to a comment about Maddox’s crushing solitude and the on-screen violence by asking where the reporter sees violence in the film. (There are several such scenes in Magazine Dreams, and some involve Majors’s face and body being covered with blood; after the journalist cited some, Majors clarified that he believes audiences have the right to perceive art as they see fit.) As Magazine Dreams progresses, Maddox descends further into his antisocial tendencies and grows more destructive. Majors has argued that this kind of behavior stems primarily from loneliness: In the Variety interview, he said that society uses “positive-sounding attributes” such as “lone wolf” and “Alpha male” to describe toxic masculinity, making it difficult for men—once they are on their own—to “get back without help.”

But Magazine Dreams doesn’t revolve around a character who’s simply been abandoned by nearly everyone. The film depicts a man whose ego isolates him and prevents him from forging genuine bonds—who pushes people away with his obfuscation, lies, and single-minded pursuit of fame through physical strength. Even before he commits any violence, Maddox conveys an inability to see himself as more than his body, or to accept any response from the outside world but praise. In that sense, the question of separating Majors, or his conviction, from the movie he headlines feels like a moot one. For some viewers with knowledge of his off-screen reputation, watching Majors radiate quiet hostility in Magazine Dreams may already make the all-consuming performance difficult to evaluate in a vacuum. And even for those who might be able to separate art from artist, the actor’s seeming lack of introspection about how violence is threaded through his film is an artistic failing. No training regimen can compensate for that.

The Cost of Perfection

2025-03-31T09:27:30-04:00

In 2018, when YouTube’s official Instagram account posted a Mother’s Day tribute, the vlogger Ruby Franke was front and center. Over the years, 8 Passengers—the YouTube channel where Franke documented life with her husband, Kevin, and their six children—had amassed nearly 2.5 million subscribers and generated upwards of $100,000 in monthly income at its peak. In some ways, she was a vision of modern motherhood: photogenic, committed, successful. But six years after her Mother’s Day shout-out, Franke’s image had crumbled. In February 2024, she and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, were sentenced to at least four years in prison after both pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse following the discovery that they had been starving, beating, and physically restraining Ruby’s two youngest children.

The influencer exposé is now a true-crime subgenre unto itself, and Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke—a new Hulu docuseries about the Frankes released at the end of February—is not the first public account of this one family’s ordeal. But the show is also one of two new documentaries that explore how the creator economy encouraged family vloggers to perform an ideal of perfect American motherhood, sometimes to the detriment of their children’s well-being. Their channels thrived by peddling maternal relatability, wrapped in palatable aesthetics, and helped usher in an era of digital culture promising that other women could earn money and praise just by turning a camera on their everyday lives. This social-media shift had tangible real-life effects: Not only did many unconsenting minors have their childhoods broadcast to the whole world, but their mothers also helped entrench—or, some might say, re-entrench—a broader view of the nuclear family as not just a worthy pursuit but a moral cause.

Watching old clips from 8 Passengers, it’s easy to see that Franke was selling a lifestyle, not just monetizing random family footage. Devil in the Family frames Franke’s approach to motherhood and vlogging as a vehicle for her core mandate: evangelism, both religious and cultural. The documentary suggests that the vlogger—who is Mormon—saw her family’s success as a reflection of God’s satisfaction. But these same religious principles were also distorted to justify poor treatment of the Franke children. Early in the series, Kevin recalls Ruby remarking that the kids were “losing their light” when they complained about constantly being filmed for YouTube—evidence of a spiritual malaise, not simple dissatisfaction with the work of always being on camera.

Even before the gorier details of Franke’s conduct were made public, her parenting had drawn scrutiny from once-devoted followers. In one pivotal instance, 8 Passengers received a deluge of disapproving comments after Chad, the Frankes’ then-teenage son, revealed that his mother had been punishing him by forcing him to sleep in their basement for seven months, on a beanbag chair. “We saw it as an innocent religious family that’s being attacked unjustly by cancel culture, and cancel culture is winning,” Kevin says of the critiques in the doc, one of many moments in which he alludes to his and his wife’s belief that 8 Passengers was a vital beacon of traditional values. Some of the documentary’s most uncomfortable asides are those in which he appears to still be enamored with Ruby, even after she asked him to move out and cut off contact with the family, and after her abuse of their children had come to light. The dissonance is jarring to witness, especially in the final episode, which includes extensive descriptions (and some disturbing images) of the physical abuse that the two youngest children suffered.

But part of 8 Passengers’ appeal had always come from Ruby’s no-nonsense views on child-rearing. Her emphasis on discipline was as central to the channel’s appeal as the light-flooded home where the Frankes filmed. Ruby modeled strategies for how other parents might stamp out concerning behavior they witnessed in their own children, casting school-age rebellion as a matter of grave importance to the health of the family. On 8 Passengers, she mocked or castigated her children for infractions as minor as failing to wake up on time for preschool, forgetting to pack their own lunch for school, or inquiring which movie the family would be going to see.

The intensity of her approach escalated after Ruby shut down the Frankes’ original channel and began making parenting-advice content with Jodi: “Your woke child is a walking zombie,” Ruby says in one clip from Moms of Truth, a social-media group they started after 8 Passengers, imploring parents to assert control over the wicked forces taking hold of their kids. In this framing, children are not autonomous individuals worthy of respect, but future standard-bearers of their parents’ values—which means that the greatest sign of a mother’s success is producing obedient children. That view has tremendous societal implications: Researchers have found that the values survey respondents prioritize in their parenting often correlate with those they prioritize in their politics.

[Read: How parents of child influencers package their kids’ lives for Instagram]

In Devil in the Family, two of the Franke children speak for themselves. Shari and Chad, now ages 21 and 20, discuss the psychological toll of having their adolescent years mined for content. Their commentary is striking, in part because it defies the idea that children tend to be eager collaborators in their parents’ blogging business. The entire infrastructure of family vlogging relies on the labor of minors, but their participation has only recently been recognized as work. Although family vloggers have been making a living online for more than a decade, Chad and Shari are among the first children of influencers to comment publicly as adults. (The younger children, who are still minors, are not interviewed, and their faces are blurred out in the old footage.)

The two relay how their mother’s desire to project blissful domesticity had strained the family well before news of her abuses turned the internet against her. These remarks echo some of the criticism in Shari’s new memoir, The House of My Mother, which challenges the notion that parent-child relationships are unbreakable bonds. Shari’s disinterest in rekindling a relationship with her mother, and her insistence on referring to her parents by their first names, pushes back against the expectation that children express unconditional gratitude for the parents who raised them. This cultural belief leaves children particularly vulnerable to abuse at home, the memoir suggests, because it reinforces a hierarchy in which parents hold absolute power.

The events detailed in An Update on Our Family, a recent HBO documentary inspired by a New York magazine article, are less straightforward than the Frankes’ story. But the dynamics that propelled Myka Stauffer, another controversial “momfluencer,” to social-media fame share some connective tissue with the Frankes’ early vlogging days. Though the Stauffers were subject to a sheriff’s-office investigation after viewers called to report suspicions of child endangerment, authorities found no evidence that the couple had committed any crimes. Instead, their predicament illustrated something more difficult to pinpoint as an obvious moral failing—the tragic dilemma of parents who’d taken on more than they could handle, seemingly motivated at least partly by the promise of a large following.

Not long into their own social-media careers, Myka and her husband, James, realized that viewers responded enthusiastically to the reveal of a new child, the ultimate proof of a couple’s stability and closeness. When the Stauffers recorded their path to adopting a young boy from China with special needs, their subscriber count grew exponentially. Once the child arrived in the United States, the Ohio couple made him a fixture of their channel, documenting him alongside their three biological children. That included their sponsored content, such as a baby-detergent ad in which Myka claimed that the product helped her bond with the 3-year-old—whom the Stauffers had renamed “Huxley”—because “I can still feel like I’m snuggling that brand-new baby, and I get that baby scent that I never got from my son.”

The Stauffers visibly struggled with Huxley’s developmental needs, tearfully describing his diagnoses for the camera. Still, they assured viewers that they were steadfast in their commitment, because to reject him would have been to deny God’s will for their life. Followers praised the couple for their ostensibly selfless, Christlike decision to give a foreign child a chance at a better life, and the Stauffers leaned into the idea that God had chosen them to adopt Huxley in a show of faith. But the Stauffers seemingly failed to deliver on the ideals that had helped attract roughly 1 million subscribers to their various accounts: An Update on Our Family takes its name from the title of the last video that Myka and James uploaded to their joint YouTube channel, in which the two 30-somethings admitted to their subscribers that they had placed Huxley with a new family that was better suited to the child’s needs. In a written statement, Myka denied having adopted Huxley for financial gain: “While we did receive a small portion of money from videos featuring Huxley and his journey, every penny and much more went back into his care,” she said.

The dizzying montage of social-media reactions to this decision, which is presented in the documentary, shows how angrily viewers responded. And the storm of vitriol that followed the Stauffers’ joint decision was directed almost entirely at Myka, just as Ruby Franke, before the extent of her abuse came to light, bore the brunt of public critique for her parenting style. In each case, part of what enabled the husbands to bypass the overwhelming criticism hurled at their wives is the widespread notion that fathers are less responsible for child-rearing than mothers are. The image that Ruby and Myka sold to their viewers relied on the veneration of motherly authority—the idea that the domestic sphere is where women hold court and exert quiet control.

Years after the dramatic crescendos of the women’s controversies, family vlogging no longer has the same uncomplicated, aspirational allure it once did. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the work of balancing motherhood with professional demands has become significantly more difficult for a lot of American women, making some types of lifestyle blogging feel less like cheerful entertainment or useful resources and more like optimized artifice. Of course, the Stauffers’ and the Frankes’ extreme experiences don’t represent the average vlogger’s. But as family bloggers begin to speak up about moving away from states with laws intended to protect their children, the medium’s tricky ethical and economic considerations are becoming more transparent to viewers. For many women who rose to prominence by turning their children into stars, saying goodbye to the profits—and the power—may still be even harder than logging off.

There’s Nothing Else Like Netflix’s Mo

2025-03-12T08:15:00-04:00

On Mo, the Netflix dramedy about a family of Palestinian refugees living in Houston, national labels are of deep importance. Throughout the series, Mohammed Najjar (played by Mohammed “Mo” Amer) struggles to hold on to employment—and any sense of security—because he’s not yet a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. His situation is made even more complicated by the fact that the American government, and many people he encounters, doesn’t recognize his family’s homeland as a legitimate state.

Early in the show’s second and final season, which premiered at the end of January, this sense of placelessness manifests in a frustrating conversation with a powerful diplomat. Mo, who is undocumented, has inadvertently traveled to Mexico and can’t legally return to Texas; he gains an unlikely audience with an American ambassador who offers to help him. But when the politician tries toasting to “your safe return and a peaceful end to the conflict,” gesturing toward unrest in Palestine, Mo can’t stop himself from challenging the nebulous characterization. His indignation gets him thrown out of the ambassador’s house, all but guaranteeing that Mo won’t get home in time for the Najjars’ long-awaited asylum hearing. After two decades spent in legal limbo, Mo once again has to come to terms with his indefinite future as a stateless person. Despite how naturally he seems to inhabit and move between multiple identities—Palestinian, American, racially ambiguous Texan—he can’t lay claim to any of them under the law.

This toggling sense of identity is crucial to how the characters of Mo see themselves—and in a recent conversation, Amer (who co-created the semi-autobiographical series with Ramy Youssef) told me the tense exchange with the ambassador is one of his favorites. The disagreement confirms Mo’s character: He’s steadfast in his Palestinian identity, but he’s also brash and prideful in ways that routinely get him in trouble. As Amer put it to me, “He’s willing to ruin his own life to make sure that he’s staying true to it, trying to stay true to himself.” The moment is just one example of how Mo tells an honest, complicated, and, most important, funny story about a Palestinian American family—and the territorial limbo that shapes their lives, even as they live thousands of miles away.

[Read: On Mo, it’s either God or therapy]

Shows about undocumented people are still rare, and Mo was the first American series to fully focus on a family of Palestinian protagonists. But the newest episodes were made in a particularly fraught climate. Mo’s writers started working on the second season a month before the dual Hollywood strikes began in May 2023. They reconvened that October, just days before Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israel’s ensuing bombardment of Gaza. The mounting death toll in Palestine put the show’s writers in a difficult position. Some viewers may have felt that Mo had a responsibility to address the escalating violence; others could be reflexively uncomfortable with hearing the words settler or occupation, language that pops up periodically in the show’s dialogue, sometimes in heated debates that Mo then defuses with humor.

Instead of taking on the news directly, the season follows a main arc that Mo’s writers began developing back in April 2023, Amer told me. It continues a storyline from Season 1, when Mo’s widowed mother, Yusra (Farah Bsieso), started a small olive-oil business called 1947—after the last year before the Nakba, an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” that refers to the mass displacement of Palestinians after the state of Israel was created. Yusra was born in Palestine, but spent much of her life away from it. After settlers took over her parents’ land in Haifa, her family fled to the West Bank, where many of her relatives still live. Yusra later left for Kuwait with her husband; when the Gulf War broke out, the couple moved once more, to Texas. Whenever Yusra talks about the olive oil she bottles in Texas, her longing for home is obvious—but so is her commitment to creating something from the pain of the protracted separation from her relatives, whom she hasn’t seen in decades.

When we spoke, Amer recalled an aunt in Palestine shipping him some homemade olive oil and apologizing for not sending more; settlement blockades had prevented the family from accessing some of their olive groves. Still, he said, it was important to her to send what she could. That same sentiment is palpable when the Najjars finally make it to their family’s groves in Burin in Season 2, where they sing, eat, and commune with their loved ones under the shade of the olive trees. Despite the ever-present threat of violence from settlers and military authorities surrounding the groves, they rejoice because they’re together on the land. It’s one of the show’s most affecting scenes, and an uncommon representation of life in this region. Warm snapshots of life in Palestine are a rare sight in American media and pop culture, where images of Palestinians most often circulate alongside chronicles of conflict and devastation.

[Read: A Saturday Night Live monologue that felt more like a prayer]

To the extent that Mo’s depiction of violence in the West Bank or the pains of refugee life feels especially timely, it’s largely a reflection of how much American awareness has shifted since October 7. But Amer has also said the creative team’s personal griefs are sublimated in this season, in a way that enhances the show’s resonance. This season, Yusra and her daughter, Nadia, lovingly disagree over the former’s constant attention to harrowing news back home—a dynamic that is incredibly familiar to Cherien Dabis, the Palestinian American actor who plays Nadia. In October 2023, Dabis, who is also a filmmaker, was in Palestine working on a historical drama about a family displaced from Jaffa in 1948. She was forced to evacuate, and to put the feature on hold, all while overwhelmed with fear about what would happen—so the news was always on. As she explained at a recent Mo screening in New York City, “The show was like a container for so many of us to come together and talk about what we were feeling during that incredibly intense, horrific time that is not over and didn’t just begin.”

The show’s portrait of the Najjars conveys the existential stakes of their statelessness, but it also highlights the beauty of the relationships they’ve been able to forge. Because the people who love him take Mo—and the Najjars’ struggles—seriously, they aren’t afraid to point out that Mo doesn’t always wind up in hot water because he’s valiantly defending his heritage or standing up for justice in the world. Sometimes, Mo really does seem to be crumbling under the pressures of life in a country where neither his heritage nor his local bona fides are respected. But he’s often just being an impatient, inconsiderate jerk. One of the delights of watching Mo is how clearly the series engages with all of its characters’ complexities—Palestinians, the show’s blundering protagonist included, don’t have to be perfect to hold our attention.

The Rich Tourists Who Want More, and More, and More

2025-02-14T09:00:00-05:00

What do the wealthy actually want? Some billionaires have been startlingly transparent about their intent to shape the systems that govern American life. Some celebrities just need uncomplicated adoration from the masses. In recent years, several prestige shows have examined the psychology of a different, less visible category of the ultrarich. They walk down the street without bodyguards; they splurge on fancy tasting menus; they attend parties full of people with the same social breeding and balance sheets.

But when they interact with those outside their world, their hidden desires and values are inevitably revealed. On The Undoing, the murder of a working-class mother whose child attends a fancy Upper East Side private school exposes the double life of a respected local physician. On Big Little Lies, a close-knit group of rich California moms—and their breezy social norms—is subjected to the judgment of an outsider. And The White Lotus, another HBO series, has poked and prodded at the wealthy guests of luxury resorts scattered around the world, showing how the casual exploitation of others is central to their vision of leisure. Rich and poor characters alike behave badly on the show—but only the former expect to get away with their sins, and usually do.

Season 3 of Mike White’s anthology series, which premieres on Sunday, follows a motley crew of vacationers at a Southeast Asian outpost of the titular hotel. As in previous seasons, guests of the White Lotus land themselves in all manner of compromising situations when they allow their base impulses—the need for sex, or chemical indulgence—to overtake them. But the shift to Thailand also introduces a new avenue for the show’s character studies. While in Asia, some of the guests end up contemplating the role of spirituality and organized religion in their life—and bristling at Buddhist teachings that seemingly run counter to their most ego-driven convictions. The selfish tourists are trapped, as one newly sober expat describes it, on a “never-ending carousel of lust and suffering,” and those unwilling to wrestle with their discomfort may never jump off.

The most obvious conflict of principles emerges among the Ratliff family, who come to the resort because Piper (played by Sarah Catherine Hook), the college-aged daughter, wants to interview a local monk. The Ratliffs don’t spend much time together on a regular basis, it seems, and their vacation becomes an exercise in attempting to reconcile each family member’s competing priorities. Father Tim (Jason Isaacs) is cautiously permissive about his bookish daughter’s interest in Buddhism; mother Victoria (Parker Posey), seems bewildered; her brash older brother mocks it outright. “Buddhism is for people that wanna suppress in life,” Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) says to his younger brother, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), on the Ratliffs’ first night in Thailand. “They’re afraid—don’t get attached; don’t have desires; don’t even try. Just sit there in a lotus position with a thumb up your ass.”

[Read: On failing the family vacation]

To Saxon, the point of life is getting what you want—a worldview without room for avarice isn’t one he respects. That’s a fairly standard outlook for a White Lotus character, and Saxon’s experience seems to graph neatly onto the show’s established patterns: Each season features a rich, conventionally attractive white man who expects the world (or the closest available woman) to bend to his whims. What makes The White Lotus often satisfying to watch is how the show challenges these characters, however briefly, to confront the assumptions they’ve built their life on. It’s not just that they’re attached to their material objects or social status; many of them have never even thought about what their comfort demands of other people. For some characters, imagining a different way of living means being forced to see how insecure they are about their looks or how flimsy their friendships have become; for others, it’s much more existential. These journeys are more complex than a simple tale of rich people getting their comeuppance in the tropics.

Some of what gives The White Lotus its charge is the show’s insistence on pushing its characters into thorny erotic terrain. Season 3 slowly upends Saxon’s understanding of himself, as the easily attained passions he’s always taken for granted—professional success, attention from women—cede ground to unspeakable, unacknowledged yearnings. The White Lotus has often portrayed sex as an exchange of power, and Saxon’s storyline shows the haunting aftereffect of unnamed desires. Later in the series, a different character regales a former friend with memories from an era in his life when he discovered an appetite for role-play. Considered alongside Saxon’s journey, these scenes underscore how inextricable sex is from the characters’ sense of self—and how their identity is attached to invisible hierarchies. Without others affirming their superiority, be it in the bedroom or in the boardroom, they wind up adrift.

Part of why the White Lotus characters are pushed toward cataclysmic (if also fleeting) personal revelations is how the series traps them in contained, unfamiliar settings. Every season of The White Lotus opens with the killing of a character whose identity is only later revealed. The hotel guests are sometimes too self-absorbed to notice, but this season amps up the terrors lurking around every corner in the week leading to the mysterious death. The music is eerier, and the environment seems more foreboding. Even the animals pose a threat—a number of the season’s most suspenseful moments involve patrons either running away from, or getting overly friendly with, the local wildlife. And yet, most of the peril that the rich guests have encountered thus far is of their own making.

There’s only so much catharsis that a show about the ultrarich can offer. The White Lotus may be a show about wealthy people behaving reprehensibly, but it still exults in depicting their luxurious lifestyles, at a time when average Americans have been warned to prepare for economic hardship ahead. When one character says that having access to a yacht is worth the risk of being killed, her blithe assessment doesn’t land as a shocking provocation; the camera seems to be in love with the boat too. The characters are not wholly irredeemable, and some do arrive through meditation and self-reflection at meaningful answers about their compulsions, even as others remain unwilling to consider such questions about their motivations (and how their actions affect other people). But no matter how many internal crises they face, they usually end up sailing off into the sunset.

What the Fires Revealed About Los Angeles Culture

2025-01-24T09:00:00-05:00

When wildfires broke out across Los Angeles earlier this month, many publications began to frame the incalculable tragedy through the lens of celebrity news. As flames engulfed the Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood perched along the Pacific Coast Highway, a steady influx of reports announced the growing list of stars who’d lost their homes: Paris Hilton. Billy Crystal. Rosie O’Donnell. These dispatches from celebrity evacuees have broadcast the scale and intractability of the damage, underscoring something most Southern Californians already know to be true: No one, not even the rich and famous, is safe from the danger of wildfires. “This loss is immeasurable,” the TV host Ricki Lake said in an Instagram post about her home burning. “I grieve along with all of those suffering during this apocalyptic event.”

In the most basic sense, the wildfires can be understood as equalizing. An ember doesn’t choose its path based on property value or paparazzi presence, and when one part of Los Angeles burns, foreboding smoke hangs over the whole metro area. Secluded neighborhoods like the Pacific Palisades, where multimillion-dollar houses overlook the ocean, typically have far fewer evacuation routes than urban areas do. But as fires continue to ravage the area, the blazes also reflect—and exacerbate—the disparities embedded in the most mundane tenets of L.A. life. In Southern California, sights as common as a crowded freeway help explain why wildfires have become a universal threat—and why some Angelenos are less equipped than others to recover from the devastation those fires cause.

Like other extreme-weather events, wildfires are now more common and more difficult to protect against, because of climate change. The state has made some inroads in addressing greenhouse-gas emissions, which drive extreme temperatures and drought, but one of the greatest accelerants is practically synonymous with California itself. Car culture not only undermines efforts to reduce the toxic pollution that fuels climate change—it also relies on infrastructure that creates and deepens drastic inequalities among the communities that live with the consequences of climate change. Modern Los Angeles depends on cars partly because of its sprawling geography, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, an urban-planning professor and the interim dean of UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, explained to me. Yet these smog-producing cars became so central to Southern California life because of “transportation policy that has quite favored the automobile and given a tremendous amount of investment to build the freeways,” Loukaitou-Sideris said.

[Read: The GoFundMe fires]

In moments of tragedy or upheaval, not all Angelenos can take their freedom of mobility for granted, in part because of how Southern California infrastructure has developed over the past century. The multilane highways that now crisscross the area were first laid out in the late 1930s, not long after the idea of L.A. as “the city built for the automobile” emerged as a political campaign. (In the ’20s, an extensive transit network stretching from Venice well into the Inland Empire was the world’s largest electric-railway system; by the early ’60s, it had been completely dismantled to make room for freeways and buses.) Through the tail end of the 20th century, lawmakers prioritized suburban growth, enabled by car-friendly streets and expressways. Meanwhile, transit systems in urban areas—the ones that connect people in dense locations—received comparatively little funds. In the past decade, more funding has gone toward buses and rail systems, but ridership has decreased—in part because rising housing costs in transit-friendly neighborhoods have pushed out the low-income residents most likely to rely on it.

Beyond favoring only people with cars, these freeway networks created further social stratification. Developers often chose to place major highways in low-income areas because wealthy, and often white, homeowners lobbied against their own neighborhoods being disrupted. In their research, Loukaitou-Sideris and her colleagues traced the historical impacts of several L.A. County and Bay Area freeways built during the 1960s and ’70s. For many Californians, these roads represented freedom of movement. But researchers found that their construction had—and still has—incredibly damaging effects on the (often poor and/or Black) neighborhoods they run through. Californians in communities of color are typically not the most frequent drivers, but they live with the highest concentration of vehicle emissions—and traffic-related pollution compounds the health risks of inhaling wildfire smoke.

Because so many displaced residents need shelter, some landlords and real-estate agents are now attempting to list apartments with sky-high rents, despite state laws against price gouging after disasters. The rise of this illegal exploitation points to a sobering reality: For many Californians, the onset of a destructive wildfire is an economic catastrophe, too. That’s part of why Rachel Morello-Frosch, an environmental-health scientist and a professor at UC Berkeley, insists that evacuation maps alone don’t tell a complete story. She referred to what she and her colleagues have called “the climate gap”: how extreme-weather events disproportionately affect communities of color and those that are poor, underinsured, and underinvested. One of the most brutal fires hit Altadena, an unincorporated town north of Pasadena where people of color sought refuge from racist housing policies, and where the percentage of Black homeowners eclipses other parts of the metro area. Restoring Altadena, and preserving its Black and Latino residents’ connections to the place where they’ve built a distinct cultural history, will undoubtedly be a complicated task.

Federal support for California’s efforts to prevent future wildfires is uncertain under the new administration—President Donald Trump has already signed several executive orders that undo climate regulations. During his first term, Trump reportedly refused to give disaster aid to California on partisan grounds—and changed his mind only when informed that a heavily Republican area had been affected by wildfires. Prior to Trump being sworn in for a second term on Monday, the president’s threats to place conditions on federal aid to California were said to be gaining traction, even as the fires continued to obliterate swaths of the state. In his inaugural speech, Trump lamented that the fires are “raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country.” Earlier this month, in posts on Truth Social, he cast blame on Governor Gavin Newsom for allegedly failing to deliver basic services to residents. (Newsom’s office disputed Trump’s characterization of the governor’s actions.)

But climate change poses an existential threat to all Californians, regardless of political affiliation, class, or celebrity. As I watch my home state anxiously from afar, checking my text messages constantly for updates from my loved ones, I’ve been heartened by the mutual-aid networks and community-led efforts that have sprung up. Amid so much destruction, the rare moments of hope come from seeing how many Angelenos recognize the stakes of building a different future together. Disaster response doesn’t have to look the way it did in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, when vulnerable groups were the slowest to recoup their losses (and, in some cases, never did). As Morello-Frosch put it to me, in order for Angelenos to “return, recover, and rebuild in a way that maybe helps fortify them against the next fire,” the government would need to be invested in the health and safety of all people—and proactively account for the inequities that vulnerable communities face before the next blazes hit.

Dave Chappelle’s Sincere Plea on Saturday Night Live

2025-01-19T17:00:44-05:00

No matter how much has changed over the past decade, one thing remains true: Saturday Night Live never brings in Dave Chappelle for a filler episode. The comedian has now hosted the show four times in just more than eight years, each stint coming on the heels of a pivotal election. Last night, in the SNL installment preceding President-Elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration on Monday, Chappelle opened his monologue by detailing his attempts to turn down the daunting gig this time around. The SNL creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels had apparently tried persuading Chappelle to again take the stage following the 2024 presidential election; Chappelle spent the several weeks prior to and after Trump’s reelection rejecting the offer. He eventually relented, he said, so that “I could just get rid of all these old Trump jokes and start fresh.”

That lead-in suggested that Chappelle might spend the rest of his set revisiting familiar comedic territory. But where Chappelle has previously doubled down on his right to offend, he instead used the moment to lay the groundwork for sharp, wide-ranging commentary. “The moment I said yes, L.A. burst into flames,” he quipped, following up with the kind of posturing that audiences have come to expect from him: He acknowledged that it’s too soon to laugh about the wildfires still ravaging Southern California, then threw the camera a mischievous wink. The veteran comic knows where the line is, he seemed to be saying, and revels in crossing it simply because he can. In a marked contrast to his earlier SNL appearances, though—including his one in 2022, for which he received criticism for perceived anti-Semitic remarks—the comedian seemed mellower. And not only did Chappelle demonstrate an interest in unity, but he also offered viewers an unexpected and sincere-sounding plea for compassion.

[Read: Does Dave Chappelle find anything funnier than being cancelled?]

Chappelle wrapped his nearly 20-minute act with a direct appeal to the divided country and its incoming president. He ended with a timely anecdote about connecting with others amid deeply entrenched conflicts. Chappelle said that in the mid-aughts, after walking away from his eponymous hit show, he spent some time soul-searching in the Middle East. The comedian recalled that the late former President Jimmy Carter flew to Israel during that period; Carter was there to promote his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. Chappelle described Carter’s insistence on then going “to the Palestinian territory” despite the Israeli government saying it would be too dangerous. “I will never forget the images of a former American president walking with little to no security while thousands of Palestinians were cheering him on, and when I saw that picture, it brought tears to my eyes,” he said.

He continued:

The presidency is no place for petty people, so Donald Trump—I know you watch the show—man, remember, whether people voted for you or not, they’re all counting on you, whether they like you or not. They’re all counting on you. The whole world is counting on you. And I mean this when I say this: Good luck. Please, do better next time. Please, all of us, do better next time. Do not forget your humanity. And please, have empathy for displaced people, whether they’re in the Palisades or Palestine.

Last night’s call to presidential action was a stark departure from Chappelle’s earlier comments about Trump during the comic’s SNL debut, in an awkward, unsettling episode following Hillary Clinton’s defeat in November 2016. Chappelle stole the show with a monologue (and a Chris Rock–assisted skit) that conveyed his lack of surprise at Trump’s ascendancy. But Chappelle ended on a more serious note. He waxed poetic about the hopefulness he felt after seeing a sea of Black faces at a party held in the Obama White House: “So, in that spirit, I’m wishing Donald Trump luck,” he said. “And I’m going to give him a chance, and we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one too.” A few months later, the comic reportedly said he regretted being “the first guy on TV to say, ‘Give Trump a chance.’”

Chappelle deployed his trademark barbed humor to further thoughtful ends last night—even when he wasn’t talking about Trump. After running through a list of famous friends who lost their homes in the L.A. fires, the comic mocked the replies he’d seen on videos of the blazes. “Everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, it serves these celebrities right. I hope their houses burned down,’” he said. “You see that? That right there—that’s why I hate poor people.” Chappelle then took a drag from his cigarette, waited for the audience to finish laughing, and got to the real punch line: “’Cause they can’t see past their own pain.” The comic went on to emphasize the country’s glaring economic inequality while expressing concern for people outside his own wealthy milieu. He spoke about the working-class families that found out the week of the fires that their fire-insurance coverage had been revoked; when he seemingly misspoke by saying “health insurance,” Chappelle suggested that Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, could help either way. It was a grim joke, one that telegraphed his understanding that many Americans feel exploited by both industries—and reminded viewers that he can still bring people’s experiences into his comedy.

[Read: Chappelle was right]

Of course, Chappelle was still himself, throwing in a handful of musings about how scary it is to be famous right now and making a cringe-worthy comparison between West Hollywood and Sodom. A later sketch also saw him revisiting some of Chappelle’s Show’s most memorable (and outrageous) characters. But the stand-up never took the lazy, condescending tack that’s made him divisive among critics in recent years. (Dave Chappelle: The Dreamer, which premiered on Netflix last month, kicks off with a lengthy segment that rehashes his stalest material.) Chappelle instead drew on his experiences of living in the Midwest—something he also did, to compelling effect, when he hosted SNL after the 2020 presidential election. From this personal angle, he sought to elucidate the similarities between demographics that look wildly different at first glance. It didn’t always work perfectly, then or now, but it felt refreshingly human.

The Payoff of TV’s Most Awaited Crossover

2025-01-08T21:20:23-05:00

On Abbott Elementary, celebrity sightings are as common as a back-to-school flu outbreak or drama with the PTA. The show’s Season 2 premiere kicked off with the spunky second-grade teacher Janine Teagues (played by Quinta Brunson) trying to surprise Abbott students with an appearance from “the only celebrity that matters”: Gritty, the internet-famous mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers. In Season 3, Bradley Cooper joined a class for show-and-tell, the Philadelphia Eagles star Jalen Hurts tried to help a teacher’s boyfriend propose, and Questlove DJed a party in the school gym.

As on many a network sitcom, Abbott’s celebrity cameos tend to involve the stars playing themselves, with some embellished biographical details to sweeten their stories. (Questlove, for example, claimed that he and Allen Iverson both credit their illustrious careers to Abbott’s principal, who happens to be one of their closest friends.) Now, midway through its fourth season, Abbott has found a clever way to continue celebrating that hometown pride—and expand the show’s comedic arsenal. The latest episode taps some of Philly’s most well-known fictional personalities, using their outlandish antics to draw out a bit more edge from Abbott’s plucky educators.

In tonight’s episode, the main characters of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia saunter into the public school and invigorate the mockumentary by stirring up chaos. Anyone familiar with the long-running FX sitcom about a group of bartenders knows that the Sunny protagonists don’t belong anywhere near an elementary-school campus. Throughout its 16 seasons, the most of any live-action American comedy series, It’s Always Sunny has been a riotous, foul-mouthed chronicle of escalating misbehavior from a gang of total miscreants. The loosely plotted sitcom has followed the Paddy’s Pub slackers through outrageous, ill-conceived schemes that almost always reveal just how craven they are: They’ve smoked crack in an attempt to exploit the welfare system, siphoned gas to sell door-to-door, and outlined some deeply concerning strategies for picking up women.

Suffice it to say, none of them is getting invited to speak at a commencement ceremony or Career Day. By contrast, most of the strangers who’ve popped up at Abbott over the years, whether they’re district bureaucrats or local businesspeople, at least pretend to have altruistic motives. When these visitors cause issues for the school, it’s usually due to incompetence, negligence, or an easily resolved misunderstanding. And of course, there’s generally a moral at the end of the story—the kind of humorous, heartfelt fare that makes Abbott so beloved as family viewing.

[Read: Abbott Elementary lets Black kids be kids]

But things go awry almost immediately after the Sunny squad shows up in “Volunteers,” the first of two planned crossover episodes. The gang arrives at Abbott under the guise of offering the overworked educators some much needed help from the local school district. Instead, Mac (Rob McElhenney), Charlie (Charlie Day), Dennis (Glenn Howerton), Frank (Danny DeVito), and Deandra (Kaitlin Olson) quickly discover that there are documentary cameras rolling at Abbott, prompting the superlatively toxic Dennis to excuse himself because he knows “quite a bit about filming and consent.” The others stick around, acting slightly more buttoned-up than usual because they know they’re being recorded, but they’re still too abrasive to fit in. They admit that they’re there only to satisfy the community-service requirements of a court order, and in response to one teacher calling them criminals, ask whether it’s really a “crime” to dump 100 gallons of baby oil, 500 Paddy’s Pub T-shirts, and a Cybertruck in the Schuylkill River.

These kinds of ludicrous scenarios are par for the course on Sunny, but they strain the boundaries of the malfeasance we usually see from Abbott characters. For the educators, that creates an amusing challenge: The Sunny gang isn’t a pack of wayward teenagers waiting for an understanding mentor to show them the light, and their moral failures can’t be rehabilitated with a pep talk. No earnest, well-articulated argument for the importance of early-childhood education will make characters like these abandon their selfishness, and the unexpected dose of cynicism gives Abbott’s formula an intriguing mid-season shake-up—a nice wrinkle, considering how many network sitcoms begin to feel repetitive the longer they stay on the air.

Take the drama caused by Deandra, or “Sweet Dee.” This episode finds the lone woman in the main Sunny crew initially bonding with Janine while volunteering in her classroom: Dee praises Janine in front of the second graders after the two women realize they both attended the University of Pennsylvania. But their camaraderie takes a hit when Dee starts lusting after Gregory (Tyler James Williams), Janine’s fellow teacher—and, after a lengthy will-they-won’t-they storyline, also her boyfriend. When Janine tells Dee that she’s in a relationship with Gregory, the Sunny transplant is undeterred: “You’re good if I take a spin though, yeah?” It’s the first time Janine’s encountered a real romantic foil on the series, and as the conflict plays out, Dee’s brash flirting style forces Janine to acknowledge her fears about the relationship. These scenes offer Janine, easily the most childlike of the teachers, an opportunity to grow by facing the tension head-on—a feat made easier by her having a farcical villain in Dee.

Abbott will never be the kind of show where the main cast routinely has to fend off mean-spirited romantic sabotage or keep tabs on a man who gives off serious Andrew Tate vibes. After the volunteers slink back to Paddy’s, the most shiftless person on campus will once again be Principal Coleman (Janelle James), whose ineptitude and vanity don’t prevent her from advocating for the students from time to time. Still, the Sunny crossover episode marks a compelling chapter in Abbott’s evolution. The series has stayed family-friendly thanks to its educational setting, showcasing the comic talents of both its students and teachers. But Abbott is now proving itself adept at something different too: comedy with a real bite, even if it’s not in service of teaching a lesson.

Welcome Back to the ‘Tough Times’ Era

2025-01-06T16:48:22-05:00

Five years ago, at the 2020 Golden Globes, the comedian Ricky Gervais issued a scathing critique of celebrity activism. During his opening monologue as the ceremony’s host, Gervais took attendees to task for their apparent hypocrisy: “You say you’re woke, but the companies you work for—I mean, unbelievable,” he said, pointing out how Apple TV+ shows are “made by a company that runs sweatshops in China.” Gervais continued: “So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech, right. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything.”

At the time, the comedian’s admonition was notable for its acidity during what is typically a collegial ceremony. But despite its sour tone, Gervais’s monologue tapped into a real cultural shift: By January 2020, Hollywood’s rallying cries against Donald Trump’s first presidency had lost their headline-making power. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Meryl Streep’s impassioned acceptance speech at the 2017 Golden Globes registered as an existential defense of art and the people who make it. Three years later, such appeals no longer galvanized the industry—or viewers at home. (Neither, for that matter, did much of the actual art produced in protest.)

Looking back on it now, Gervais’s attempt to dampen awards-show speechifying also served as an early indication of how Hollywood might respond to another Trump term—something that was reaffirmed by last night’s Golden Globes. Eight years after an awards season that saw Streep and several other stars (including Hugh Laurie and Viola Davis) delivering sharp rebukes of the incoming president, the celebrities were less willing to do so again. During yesterday evening’s celebration, presenters and awardees alike largely avoided direct commentary about politics or the result of the presidential election, instead making relatively subdued allusions to “difficult moments” or “tough times.” Ahead of another January 6 anniversary, and with weeks to go before Trump’s second inauguration, the hesitation to speak more pointedly suggests that the industry is less inclined to resist MAGA with the same fervor it showed in the mid-2010s.

[Read: The Golden Globes got a little weird with it]

The cone of relative silence didn’t drop down overnight. In the past several years, Hollywood has wrestled with what constitutes acceptable advocacy. A wave of reactionary voices have decried diversity initiatives and other so-called woke campaigns, drawing scrutiny to such efforts within Hollywood and the corporate world. Many actors and creators are still navigating precarious working conditions, even after the resolution of the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes. And the war in Gaza has sparked division within the industry, prompting some entertainment workers who’ve supported calls for a cease-fire to ask for protections against being blacklisted.

During the recently concluded election cycle, these dynamics shaped the terrain on which celebrities exercised their political speech. And with Trump poised to take office again, the industry is perhaps rattled by the inefficacy of its previous calls to action—or at least lacks a vision of how to meet the political moment through either art or activism. The resulting show last night, in which several well-respected actors spoke vaguely about the importance of storytelling—and of conquering hate—felt like it could have aired in any year or political era.

In her opening set as the night’s host, the comedian Nikki Glaser briefly addressed the crowd’s failure to influence the outcome of the 2024 presidential election: “You’re all so famous, so talented, so powerful. I mean, you could really do anything—except tell the country who to vote for.” Sandwiched in a monologue that saw her skewering familiar awards-night subjects, the comment underlined the trouble with celebrity advocacy in a polarized political climate. Unlike Gervais’s 2020 jab, Glaser’s joke took aim at a perceived disconnect between Hollywood elites and the masses. (Glaser also made one of the evening’s few unambiguous references to a Trump-aligned political figure: “The Bear, The Penguin, Baby Reindeer: These are not just things found in RFK’s freezer,” she joked.)

It’s unclear what, if anything, may bridge that gap. One of the night’s more interesting moments underscored the tension between awards-show glamour and the work of producing challenging art within Hollywood. Back in November, the actor Sebastian Stan said he was unable to take part in Variety’s Actors on Actors series because he’d starred in The Apprentice, a film critical of Trump, whom his industry colleagues were unwilling to discuss. But at the Golden Globes, Stan won Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for his work on another film, A Different Man.

While accepting the trophy, Stan shouted out both projects. “This was not an easy movie to make. Neither is The Apprentice, the other film that I was lucky to be a part of and that I am proud to be in,” he said. “These are tough subject matters, but these films are real, and they are necessary. We can’t be afraid and look away.” It was the closest anyone came to directly addressing the current moment, during an evening when Hollywood preferred to turn its gaze elsewhere.

Even Barry Jenkins Can Only Do So Much

2024-12-20T08:00:00-05:00

Early in Mufasa: The Lion King, one shot quickly differentiates the new movie from the other CGI-heavy spins on classic Disney cartoons. Just before a cast of familiar characters begins recounting the titular patriarch’s origin story, his young granddaughter bounds toward the screen. For a moment, the photorealistic cub aims a warm, open look at the audience—and, instantly, we’re reminded that this is a Barry Jenkins production.

The prominence of this archetypal Jenkins image, in which a subject directly returns the viewer’s gaze, neatly captures the tension of the creative pairing that brought the film to life. Mufasa: The Lion King follows the original Lion King’s uncanny 2019 reworking, which had felt like an obvious nostalgia play—the continuation of an ongoing trend in which studios like Disney remake films from their archive and benefit by placing a familiar piece of intellectual property at the box office. So it was a surprising development when Jenkins, an auteur best known for weighty features such as Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, was announced as the director of a new prequel focused on protagonist Simba’s father.

In its most intriguing moments, Mufasa makes a clear case for how Jenkins has elevated the latest entry in the “Disney live-action-remake assembly line,” as my colleague David Sims called it. The new film follows the young Mufasa (voiced by Aaron Pierre) after an accidental separation from his parents, when a spirited cub named Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) saves the wayward lion’s life. The two come to see each other as brothers, despite Taka being a prince and his father insisting that Mufasa is nothing but an outsider who poses a threat to their family’s royal lineage—a suspicion that is partially justified when Mufasa does come to rule the land. (Eventually, Taka becomes Scar, the campy and conniving villain of The Lion King.)

The new film seems genuinely concerned with the interiority of its characters; the animals are far more believably expressive this time around, CGI and all. And with Jenkins at the helm, Mufasa: The Lion King is also a marked visual improvement from the 2019 Lion King’s pallid, nearly shot-for-shot re-creation of the 1994 animation. The director’s sweeping, dynamic scenes emphasize the drama of the animal showdowns with an eye toward how the natural world shapes their power struggles. Bright, sun-streaked pans across the savanna and idyllic visions of flower-covered fields contrast sharply with foreboding images of unfamiliar terrain.

[Read: Disney+’s Pinnochio is a zombie]

These images are particularly striking in IMAX. Every unexpected descent into a flooding canyon or grueling trek up an icy mountain emphasizes the lions’ vulnerability to the elements—or the vital importance of their connection to the land, a thread that mirrors Jenkins’s approach in his 2021 TV adaptation of The Underground Railroad. In some quieter scenes, Mufasa speaks about his environment with reverence and insight, and Mufasa draws artful observations about how outsiders can learn from their chosen family.

But still. Even with these high-culture flourishes, Mufasa never transcends its original calling as a glitzy Hollywood product. Consider the dual casting of Beyoncé as the lioness Nala, and Beyoncé’s daughter Blue Ivy Carter as Nala’s daughter Kiara—not so much a creative choice as a promotional opportunity. And unlike many other IP-driven franchise movies that well-regarded filmmakers have directed for major studios, Mufasa commits to hitting plenty of its narrative and emotional beats through original songs. As with the 2019 remake, nowhere is Mufasa’s hollow artistic center more obvious than during these musical sequences, which highlight the upper limits of CGI storytelling—bluntly, these animals just don’t look like they’re singing—and the fundamental unbelievability of Disney remakes that depend on it.

Mufasa’s singing scenes clearly lack the playfulness that made previous Disney soundtracks so memorable, in part because live-action production is simply less conducive to fantastical, dreamlike imagery than animation is. Without this spirit, the new film’s songs, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, struggle to match the verve and passion of not only the 1994 original, but also a pair of direct-to-video animated sequels released in 1998 and 2004. The 2019 Lion King, at least, offered the allure of Beyoncé’s imperfect but catchy companion album, but the music of Mufasa largely falls flat. It’s one thing to see an animated meerkat and warthog confidently belt a Swahili phrase to a surly cartoon lion cub, and hum along—but there’s nothing fun about watching real-looking animals sing. And three decades after “Hakuna Matata,” the new lyrics still sound ripped from a generic African proverb: “We Go Together,” one of the songs, opens with Rafiki singing, “If you wanna go fast, go alone … But if you wanna go far / We go together.”

In a recent Vulture interview, Jenkins conceded that all-digital filmmaking was a considerable challenge for him and longtime collaborators such as the cinematographer James Laxton, who has been integral to establishing the director’s signature aesthetic. After the grueling, on-location shoot for The Underground Railroad in Georgia, Jenkins said that working on Mufasa offered him the opportunity to realize a massive project within the stable, controlled environment of a virtual production studio. (Of course, it also came with a Disney-sized check.) But such a setting doesn’t lend itself to improvisation—a key feature of Jenkins’s typical filmmaking process, and one that can be at odds with the priorities of a studio interested in efficiency. “I want to work the other way again, where I want to physically get everything there,” the director said about his post-Mufasa plans. “How can these people, this light, this environment, come together to create an image that is moving, that is beautiful, that creates a text that is deep enough, dense enough, rich enough to speak to someone?”

Mufasa does speak, just in more of a whisper than a roar. By demystifying its protagonist, and extending some compassion to the much-maligned Scar, Jenkins accomplishes a fair bit with a film that could otherwise have been even less compelling. And this is a children’s movie, after all—for those old enough to sit through the film’s scarier bits, perhaps the animals’ expressiveness may help imbue some valuable takeaways about family and forgiveness. For the rest of us, though, the main lesson of Mufasa is a far less generative one: Even the most talented director can’t make someone else’s unoriginal idea shine.

The 13 Best TV Shows of 2024

2024-12-12T07:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2024” coverage here.

Anyone could be forgiven for struggling to remember which TV shows aired in 2024. Whereas 2023 gave audiences the final chapters of several beloved shows—Succession, Barry, Reservation Dogs—this year may have reminded them that Hollywood is still playing catch-up after the end of the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes. Studios are also clearly struggling with the same financial and artistic issues that the strikes highlighted: Many streaming services hiked their prices and cracked down on password-sharing in reported efforts to cut costs; several also canceled or delisted their original programming.

Still, amid a glut of middling reboots and delayed seasons, some standout television arrived this year. The list below is a snapshot of our favorites from 2024—the new and familiar shows that made us laugh over classic sitcom hijinks, root for scrappy underdogs, or think more deeply about our own relationships. Whether they transported us to another century or dropped us in the middle of a high-stakes work environment, these are the series that kept our hope for TV’s creative future alive.

Kurt Iswarienko / FX

Shōgun (FX)

James Clavell’s best-selling 1975 novel, Shōgun, has been adapted before—but FX’s take made the familiar feel fresh. The sophisticated historical drama, set in 17th-century feudal Japan, follows three primary characters: Toranaga (played by Hiroyuki Sanada), a lord whose political influence seems to be waning in the face of power-hungry rivals; John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), an English sailor who’s shipwrecked on Japan’s shores; and Mariko (Anna Sawai), a highborn translator who serves Toranaga. With its striking production design and authentic rendering of Japanese culture, the show dazzled millions of viewers over its first two episodes alone—and amassed a history-making haul at the Emmys. Shōgun filled the Game of Thrones–shaped hole in my heart; it’s the kind of epic storytelling that TV has been missing, a big-budget swing that successfully balances its ambitious scope with intimate emotional arcs. — Shirley Li

Sandy Morris / HBO

Somebody Somewhere (HBO)

Somebody Somewhere is a slow-TV masterpiece in miniature, in which nothing happens until you’re suddenly watching an intense emotional breakthrough in what feels like real time. The first season introduced us to Sam (Bridget Everett), a woman who moved back home to care for her dying sister. Now mired in grief, she comes to find unexpected solace within her small-town Kansas community. Sam meets Joel (Jeff Hiller), a co-worker and pianist who becomes her platonic everything; she starts singing again at an underground queer cabaret night; she mends bridges with her family. The third and final season zeroes in on Sam’s sense of self-worth: how much she attaches to other people, and how much she finally manages to rebuild for herself. I will deeply miss this beautiful, naturalistic, bawdy, empathetic show. — Sophie Gilbert

Paramount+ with SHOWTIME

Couples Therapy (Showtime)

This Showtime series, which documents the psychologist Orna Guralnik’s sessions with couples, remains among the most incisive and watchable examples of a genre referred to by the writer Eliza Brooke as “therapy voyeurism” in a 2021 Atlantic essay. The show’s continuing appeal hinges largely on Guralnik; her calm demeanor and sharp analytical framing guide the participants (and the audience) toward astute insights about their relationship patterns. In many cases, that involves revisiting partners’ past experiences and examining their lingering effects. In some of Season 4’s most striking scenes—such as those involving two men who struggle with the lasting consequences of one’s childhood abuse—Guralnik helps her clients understand how coping mechanisms developed under duress can begin to undermine them. Viewers may not find all of Guralnik’s lessons new, but every breakthrough feels different. — Hannah Giorgis

Simon Ridgway / HBO

Industry (HBO)

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m an Industry bandwagoner who only started watching the show this year. When HBO’s drama about a group of young employees at a multinational investment bank began in 2020, there was already a surplus of stories about the amorality of corporate culture and the savagery of the wealthy. Did I really need another show tackling these themes? Turns out, I did. Industry is a propulsive watch loaded with brain-tickling finance jargon and complex characters, many of whom seem poised to change the institution they’re working for only for the opposite to happen. Its third and latest season offers a sharp dissection of how work can become an obsession, the false promises of ethical investing, and the endless cycle of avarice to which stockbrokers (and perhaps the rest of us) belong. The world of contemporary finance is ruthless, Industry posits, but it’s no trap. To those on the inside, greed is a limitless good. — S.L.

Ryan Green / Paramount+

Lioness (Paramount+)

“Best TV” by definition implies quality: well-crafted plot, plausible characters, artful dialogue. Lioness lacks most of these things—so why, then, do I run to my TV on Sunday nights with such unbalanced enthusiasm? I think it’s the show’s sheer preposterous spectacle. Ostensibly a drama about female CIA operatives charged with clandestine missions, Lioness is really a showcase for the movie stars who signed on for Taylor Sheridan’s least-coherent production so far: Zoe Saldaña as Joe, the leader of the Lioness program, bringing screaming to new heights; Nicole Kidman as Kaitlyn, a CIA official whose iciness is the foil to Joe’s yelling; Morgan Freeman as the secretary of state, providing a mouthpiece for Sheridan’s paper-thin takes on geopolitics. Lots of things blow up. Lots of people get shot. And, in an operatic display of diva hauteur, Kaitlyn tells a room full of generals that the “dick-measuring” contest was over the minute she walked in. — S.G.

Gilles Mingasson / Disney

Abbott Elementary (ABC)

Abbott has shown itself to be an adept interpreter of the joys and frustrations that teachers encounter in many public-school systems—and an energizing force for the broadcast sitcom as a format. This year, the workplace mockumentary continued its deft explorations of the challenges facing Abbott’s teachers and students. It also committed even further to classic genre conventions, serving up celebrity guests and holiday-themed episodes, and reinvigorating a familiar romantic-comedy trope: May’s Season 3 finale saw Janine (Quinta Brunson) and Gregory (Tyler James Williams) finally get together, wrapping a multi-season arc of missed connections and bruised egos. In the Season 4 premiere, which aired in October, Janine tried (and failed) to hide their relationship, while Abbott charmingly subjected the newly minted lovers to awkward hijinks of their own making. Thankfully, Janine and Gregory’s romance hasn’t overtaken the show: The other teachers have way more pressing things to worry about, including a ringworm outbreak that spreads faster than any gossip. — H.G.

Apple TV+

Slow Horses (Apple TV+)

It wasn’t a fantastic year for drama, what with all the sludgily paced trippy prestige miniseries and a Busby Berkeley–like parade of questionable true-crime re-creations. But Slow Horses didn’t disappoint. In Season 4, Apple’s sly comic thriller about a motley crew of MI5 rejects who keep finding themselves out in the field—despite their boss’s best intentions—was better than ever, introducing an enigmatic new villain (Hugo Weaving) and bringing River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) into greater focus. Come for Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb, sweaty and malodorous and razor-sharp; stay for some of the best-structured storytelling on television. — S.G.

Atsushi Nishijima / HBO

Fantasmas (HBO)

In the first episode of Fantasmas, Paul Dano stars in a faux sitcom about a man who falls in love with an Alf-like alien named Melf. He causes a national scandal by abandoning his family to marry Melf and, later, regains the trust of one of his children with Melf’s help. None of this ever comes up again, but that’s just how this singular comedy works: Its six episodes offer a collection of disparate sketches that prompt viewers to question what they’re watching. The show’s creator, the former Saturday Night Live writer Julio Torres, brings in plenty of his famous friends—his Problemista co-star Tilda Swinton, for instance, voices the element of water—to explore many of his mundane fixations, including the absurdity of dealing with customer-service representatives and the strange specificity of targeted ads. With its dreamlike tone and offbeat humor, Fantasmas may not be for everyone. It is, however, the most inventive show I saw this year. — S.L.

Jake Giles Netter / Max

Hacks (Max)

If Hacks were just a formulaic workplace sitcom riffing on the competitive affection between the comedy superstar Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her acerbic Millennial co-writer, Ava (Hannah Einbinder), I’d be down. Smart is so magnificently regal, Einbinder so winningly sarcastic, that their dynamic just pops. But in its third season, the Max show dug into late-night comedy’s sexist history in a way that made Deborah’s eventual ascension to her own desk feel both fraught and thrilling. Along the way were subplots regarding offensive jokes, Ava’s own ambitions, and Tom Cruise’s coconut cakes. The main pull of the show, though, is still its ping-ponging, odd-couple energy. (Paul W. Downs’s Jimmy and Megan Stalter’s Kayla also contributed heroically on this front.) — S.G.

Saima Khalid / WTTV Limited / Peacock / C4

We Are Lady Parts (Peacock)

May feels like it was a lifetime ago, but I still remember how excited I was to dig into Season 2 of this delightful British dramedy—and to find that it had gotten even better. Season 1 introduced Amina (Anjana Vasan), a naive but musically gifted nerd who joins the band Lady Parts to get closer to one member’s hunky brother. Much to Amina’s surprise, the sisterhood she finds through the group, which is composed entirely of young Muslim women, proves far more transformative. Now she’s all in, but the cash-strapped musicians find themselves at a crossroads: contemplating whether a fancy record contract is really their best next move. We Are Lady Parts builds on its distinctive voice and style this season with playfully pointed tracks like “Malala Made Me Do It” sending up Muslim stereotypes and intra-community expectations. Record deal or not, the women who came out swinging with “Voldemort Under My Headscarf” remain as inventive, irreverent, and unforgettable as ever. — H.G.

Lauren Greenfield / INSTITUTE

Social Studies (FX)

Lauren Greenfield’s docuseries about Gen Z’s relationship with social media—which its members have never lived without—may play like a horror movie to parents. Greenfield, who has long chronicled America’s evolving youth culture, had the high schoolers she followed record their phone screens, which means the series is packed with troubling footage of today’s teens passing constant judgment on one another—and themselves—online. Yet Social Studies isn’t an alarmist project condemning kids for being too into TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram; instead, it deftly examines how such platforms exacerbate timeless issues. Greenfield’s interviews with her subjects’ parents reveal how jealousy, isolation, and anxiety aren’t unique to Gen Z, and her phone-free roundtable discussions with teens demonstrate how aware they are of social media’s damaging effects. Social Studies suggests that the bigger problem is that the overwhelming litany of apps has been designed to make young users feel self-conscious. In their candid talks with Greenfield, Gen Zers prove that they, as the ones who best understand how such platforms work, may one day have the solution. — S.L

Peacock

Love Island USA (Peacock)

To borrow from a friend who peer-pressured me into watching the show’s whopping 37-episode run, “they really put something different” in this summer’s Love Island USA, a spin-off of the popular British reality-dating series. Previous seasons had mostly paled in comparison with the quirky original. But Season 6 of USA featured some of the franchise’s most charismatic cast members ever, who formed relationships that resonated widely: Social media was awash with surprisingly compelling clips from the Fijian villa housing the romantic hopefuls. Throwing a group of “sexy singles” together—and putting them at the mercy of an audience that can vote them off—is hardly a new formula. But the “islanders,” as they’re called, seemed to express authentic, vulnerable emotions, despite the contrivances. Months later, this season’s standout contestants have retained their cultural staying power. Just ask the NFL star Odell Beckham Jr., who’s been getting called “Kordell’s brother” since the younger Beckham (and the season’s co-winner) joined the show. — H.G.

Robert Viglasky / Disney / Hulu

Rivals (Hulu)

Yes, Rivals is an adaptation of the epic, sex-laden 1988 novel by Dame Jilly Cooper, the queen of trying to make horse-obsessed Brits sexy. Yes, it’s set in the high-stakes realm of … regional television. Yes, it’s largely about a louche show jumper turned Tory politician who can’t keep his pants zipped. The clothes are just on the right side of an ’80s-themed costume party, the score is pure soft-rock Gruyère, and everyone seems to constantly half-wink at the camera. And yet, for such a high-camp, absurd show, it’s deadly serious about the matter of what women deserve. Following along with the bed-hopping and airplane-rocking shenanigans of the swaggering Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), as well as the saintly Taggie O’Hara (Bella Maclean), the smoldering Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner), and the villainous Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), was the most entertaining distraction from the year’s unrelenting news cycle. — S.G.

Nikki Giovanni’s Wondrous Celebrations of Black Life

2024-12-11T11:51:20-05:00

In the last years of her life, Nikki Giovanni felt her memory fading. At the beginning of the 2023 documentary Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, she offered an inventive take on how the loss affected her: “I remember what’s important, and I make up the rest. That’s what storytelling is all about.” Giovanni’s playful reflection on aging and the alchemy of storytelling captured an essential truth about her work. The poet and scholar, who died Monday at 81, was a gifted chronicler of the wonders and complexity of Black life—a talent buoyed by her warm, imaginative approach to both art and social change. To read Giovanni’s poems or hear her speak was to immediately feel her profound care for Black people.

Giovanni understood that Black American cultural history was, in part, the inevitable result of centuries-long oppression—but that it was also the product of constant evolution. Through her prolific writing, activism, and engagement with younger generations, she cultivated a sense of limitless possibility about language and social movements. Giovanni’s earliest works nodded to her expansive vision. Her first book of poems, Black Feeling, Black Talk, was self-published in 1968, when Giovanni was in her mid-20s. By that climactic year, she was already a rising figure in the Black Arts and civil-rights movements, and her poetry crackled with the same revolutionary fire fueling writers such as Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, and Ntozake Shange.

Even then, Giovanni was concerned with the tender minutiae of Black American experiences, and her poetry celebrated some of the everyday pleasures that make resilience feel possible. In “Knoxville, Tennessee,” named for the town where she was born Yolanda Cornelia Giovanni Jr., the poet’s vivid imagery conveyed both her childhood delights and the precarity of living in the segregated South. “I always like summer / best / you can eat fresh corn / from daddy’s garden,” the poem begins. At its conclusion, Giovanni gestures toward the desolation left behind after the season retreats, when being warm is reserved for “when you go to bed / and sleep.” By her 30th birthday, Giovanni was regularly publishing poems that tapped into the transformative power of focusing inward as a community—and working through what that meant in practice alongside formidable intellectuals such as James Baldwin.

[Read: “The Coal Cellar”]

Decades before intra-community affirmations such as “Black-boy joy” and “Black-girl magic” went viral—and became commercialized—Giovanni drew attention to the persistence of love, jubilation, and gentleness in Black American life. The author was especially adept at conjuring the bone-deep satisfaction of another ephemeral experience: preparing and consuming food that drew on Black American culinary traditions. Like Shange, who published a culinary memoir in 1998, Giovanni saw Black foodways as a vital conduit of diasporic knowledge and connection. An accomplished, self-described “Southern cook” in her personal life, Giovanni also embraced this ethos in poems such as “My House” and “Seduction / Kidnap Poem,” which articulated a cultural consciousness rooted in femininity, and in the care work typically associated with women.

Among the most energizing constants of Giovanni’s writing was her transformation of simple, familiar images into resonant symbols. Just as the bountiful vegetables of her father’s garden disappear by the end of “Knoxville, Tennessee,” the title of “Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day” evokes an inevitable transition. The aging speaker in a later Giovanni poem, “Quilts,” likens herself to “a fading piece of cloth,” eventually landing on the idea that even a frayed old quilt “might keep some child warm.”

[Read: Nikki Giovanni: ‘Martin had faith in the people’]

The poet’s appreciation for the artistic possibilities of community was often expressed in direct contrast to other, more distorted views of Blackness. “Nikki-Rosa,” for example, begins with an ostensible lament—“Childhood remembrances are always a drag / if you’re Black”—and ends with a defiant declaration of the poet’s subjecthood. “I really hope no white person ever has cause / to write about me / because they never understand,” Giovanni wrote in the 1968 poem. “Black love is black wealth and they’ll / probably talk about my hard childhood / and never understand that / all the while I was quite happy.”

Giovanni’s ability to hold on to this perspective, and marry it with a distinct flair for the fantastical, imbued her poems and social commentary with a youthful curiosity well into her final years. Whereas some scholars resign themselves to the rigidity of academia, Giovanni, who was an English professor at Virginia Tech until 2022, remained committed to learning new lessons. Speaking about her 2021 poem “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars),” Giovanni recalled her realization that the otherworldly language of space exploration reminded her of the Middle Passage, the brutal voyage that transported enslaved Africans to an unfathomable new reality. “That’s what we do when we put somebody on a rocket. They’re going from Earth into an area that they don’t know—they think they might know, but they’re not sure,” she told Oxford American earlier this year, drawing out the comparison. “And so I thought, Well that’s what Black people have done. And we have survived and thrived and shared a lot of love. We brought a lot of goodness.”

August Wilson’s Histories of Black American Life

2024-12-10T11:00:00-05:00

The playwright August Wilson, who’s best known for his series chronicling 20th-century Black American life (colloquially known as the Century Cycle), paid forensic attention to how everyday families bear the scars—and inherit the triumphs—of collective histories. Art, especially music, was foundational to this understanding. In the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Piano Lesson, which was recently adapted into a Netflix movie, a piano is hand-carved with intricate portraits of an enslaved family—and years later, that family’s descendants wrestle with the value of this heirloom. At one point, after Berniece Charles (played by Danielle Deadwyler) plays the piano, she is visited by ghosts of those early relatives, transforming the music from an abstract symbol of her past into a literal conduit for her ancestors.

In The Piano Lesson, the titular instrument takes on greater significance because music, and the conditions under which members of the Charles family come to access it, is so central to their history. The play takes its name from a painting by the artist Romare Bearden, whose oeuvre served as a frequent inspiration for Wilson. Bearden’s slice-of-life canvases depicted their subjects with a tender gaze, but the sense of familiarity was neither overly sentimental nor limited to shared suffering. To watch Wilson’s play unfold—whether onstage or on the screen— is to feel the intensity of his respect for Bearden’s artistry, and for the musical traditions imbued in both of their works. Wilson’s work has been adapted several times since the premiere of his first Century Cycle play, and many of the newer works have stayed largely faithful to his vision, even after Wilson’s death (and that of his creative partner, the director Lloyd Richards). Netflix’s The Piano Lesson mostly keeps with this pattern, but the film infuses Wilson’s story with some more modern sensibilities than previous takes, helping introduce the story to new generations.

Beginning in the 1980s, Wilson’s productions offered actors such as Viola Davis, Angela Bassett, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Samuel L. Jackson early-career opportunities to take on complex leading characters. These kinds of roles were (and, in many cases, still are) rare for Black talent, but Wilson’s plays gave them rich terrain to showcase their range. Facilitating the growth of these actors, some of whom went on to become some of the most prominent names on Broadway, was one of the many ways Wilson transformed the institution of American theater. His influence extended to Hollywood too: Several Wilson-production veterans have since led major films and TV series, and his plays have found new life off the stage. Netflix’s The Piano Lesson is the second cinematic adaptation of the play; the first, starring Alfre Woodard, aired on CBS in 1995.

[Read: The man who transformed American theater]

The Piano Lesson is also the third Wilson adaptation to be produced by Denzel Washington, whose own contemplation of Black American history has long been central to his cultural prominence. Decades after Washington’s star-making turns as Malcolm X and the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, he won a Tony for portraying the thorny patriarch of Fences, Wilson’s best-known play. The 2016 film adaptation of Fences, which Washington directed and co-produced, earned him an Academy Award nomination for acting opposite Viola Davis, who took home a Best Actress trophy that year. Whereas Fences was a Denzel tour de force, The Piano Lesson showcases a new generation of Washington talents: His son Malcolm directs the movie; his son John David stars as Berniece’s brother, Boy Willie; and his daughter Katia is an executive producer. In an interview with GQ, Malcolm added that their father “was so down with the conceit that the movie was working under, which is, Let’s introduce and show young people that August Wilson is a part of them, too, that they have access to it, that they’re a part of that lineage.”

Celebrity children taking up their parents’ profession is hardly a new story, but it’s easy to see why Wilson’s work would appeal to a younger generation of Black creators. At the core of most Wilson plays is a weighty conflict that feels true to everyday life. In The Piano Lesson, Berniece and Boy Willie clash because he wants to sell the piano in order to buy the land their ancestors were enslaved on—the same land where their great-grandfather carved portraits into the piano, and where their father spent his last days taking the piano back from the slaveholders who prized it. When Berniece and Boy Willie disagree over where the piano belongs 25 years later, they’re wrestling with heady questions of familial inheritance and practical considerations about their financial future.

The tensions that the siblings work through—and the terrors that haunt the entire Charles family—feel as salient today as they were in 1936 (when the play is set), in 1987 (when it was staged), and in 1995 (when it was first adapted for television). The Piano Lesson also reflects Wilson’s enduring belief in the archival power of Black music. In a 2004 interview with The Believer, Wilson described the blues as a singular window into Black American life: “If all this were to disappear off the face of the earth and some people two million unique years from now would dig out this civilization and come across some blues records, working as anthropologists, they would be able to piece together who these people were, what they thought about, what their ideas and attitudes toward pleasure and pain were, all of that.”

In the 2020 documentary Giving Voice, one of Wilson’s longtime collaborators notes that part of the playwright’s evocative power came from his choice in subjects: a garbageman who used to play in the Negro Leagues, a trumpet player who never became famous. Netflix’s adaptation faithfully renders this concern for the quotidian, albeit with a more stylish patina. Malcolm’s directorial choices diverge from his father’s old-school creative sensibilities; the pacing is faster, the music more dramatic and less deferential to the story’s era. (The track that plays into The Piano Lesson’s final credits isn’t a famed jazz number—it’s “Wither,” an elegiac Frank Ocean song about the cyclical nature of life and love.)

Deadwyler brings a quiet but palpable grief to her performance as Berniece, outshining John David, whose fast-talking Boy Willie sometimes struggles to connect with something deeper than the character’s surface-level bravado. Even so, John David’s parentage adds an intriguing layer to his character. When he recites Boy Willie’s impassioned monologues about the importance of honoring his late father’s legacy, his clear reverence brings to mind the actor’s relationship to the larger arc of Denzel’s career. In part through these associations, The Piano Lesson dramatizes the ideas at the heart of its source material. Nearly 20 years after Wilson’s death, his words are still making it possible for newer generations to remain earnestly invested in what came before them.

Always a Girlboss, Never a Tradwife

2024-11-28T07:30:00-05:00

By the time Martha Stewart rose to fame, family life in the United States looked very different than it had during her childhood. American mothers had entered the workforce en masse, and when Stewart’s first book was published, in 1982, many women were no longer instructing their daughters on the finer points of homemaking fundamentals like cooking meals from scratch or hosting holiday gatherings. Stewart’s meticulous guides to domestic life ended up filling a maternal vacuum for many of her fans, and she inspired both devotion and envy. Oprah Winfrey, no stranger to hard work herself, once summed up the ire that many people felt about Stewart: “Who has the time for all of this? For every woman who makes a complicated gingerbread house, a million don’t even have the time to bake a cookie.”

At a moment when American women were already feeling the exhaustion of the second shift, Stewart seemed to suggest that they toil overtime to beautify their second work environment too. But despite being most famous as a homemaker, an occupation usually associated with mothers, Stewart would later appear ambivalent about motherhood itself. Before her daughter was born, when Stewart was 24, “I thought it was a natural thing,” she says in Martha, a new Netflix documentary about her life and career. “It turns out it’s not at all natural to be a mother.”

Early in the documentary, an off-camera speaker—Stewart is the only on-camera interviewee—refers to her as “the original influencer.” The label emphasizes how she shaped domestic life and purchasing trends decades before the advent of Instagram or TikTok; as one friend says, Stewart “was the first woman that saw the marketability of her personal life.” Archival images of a young Stewart exude the charming, homespun domesticity that many social-media creators now emulate. We see Stewart stooped low in her gardens, then feeding chickens in her “palais du poulet”—the French name she gave her coop (“palace of the chicken”). That visual would be right at home on the vision boards of modern influencers who broadcast their nostalgic visions of Americana to millions of followers.

But Stewart’s words, whether spoken directly to the camera or read from private letters, tell a story that diverges from tidy fantasies. Part of why Martha raises such interesting questions about motherhood, family life, and domestic labor is Stewart’s apparent doubts about the value of all three. Throughout the documentary, she seems to be confronting her own conflicting beliefs, but clearly, business—not the art of homemaking—has been the essential pursuit of Stewart’s life. And her single-minded focus on expanding her empire is what ultimately attracted the most criticism as she transformed into a gargantuan brand.

In 1987, the same year that Stewart published Weddings, a glossy guide about how to host the perfect matrimonial celebration, she and her husband separated after he had an affair with a younger woman. While Stewart promoted a book about celebrating love, she wrestled with her family’s private dysfunction—and when rumors of the affair became public, Stewart worried about the professional implications of her husband appearing absent from her carefully curated life. At one point in the film, Stewart advises young wives on how to react to their husband’s philandering: “Look at him, [say] ‘He’s a piece of shit,’ and get out of it. Get out of that marriage,” she says defiantly, cautioning today’s women not to stay, like she did, and try to work things out. (The two divorced a few years later, in 1990.)

Only when the documentary’s director, R. J. Cutler, asks about an affair that she had earlier in the marriage does Stewart concede her own actions. “It was just nothing,” she says, before decrying the messiness of divorce. “I would never have broken up a marriage for it.” It’s one thing to cheat in private, in other words, but she frowns at the public spectacle of dissolving a family unit. The moment draws attention to how tightly Stewart has attempted to control her image—and underscores how much she appears to resent the ways her accomplishments (and her misdeeds) have been judged in relation to her gender. In 1999, Stewart, then the CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, became the first female self-made billionaire in the United States. The following year, Joan Didion wrote in a New Yorker essay that the “dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”

Nearly 25 years later, Martha makes the case that Stewart was subject to different rules than her male counterparts because she disturbed conventional views of women in the corporate world. “She was ruthless,” one commentator says. “In the business world, that’s a great trait for a man. But, you know, for a woman—you know, she was a bitch.” That may be an interesting place to begin a look back at a controversial mogul, but the documentary is light on specifics about Stewart’s perceived professional shortcomings, which have included criticism that she underpaid her staff while earning millions, berated them, and sold their work as her own. Instead, we get the vague sense that some people thought she was harsh and that others found her to be an exacting perfectionist. But unlike an earlier CNN docuseries on Stewart, Martha shies away from interrogating the details of such workplace accusations in favor of rehashing how multiple powerful men underestimated or outright disliked her.

[Read: Martha Stewart must know something we don’t]

The back half of the film brings the same gender-based analysis to Stewart’s infamous 2004 trial, which began with the FBI—led by a young, ambitious James Comey—implicating Stewart in a larger insider-trading scandal. When the agency failed to indict Stewart for illegal trading, it pursued a case against her for lying to the authorities during the investigation. In the end, Stewart served five months in prison after being found guilty of charges including obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Martha presents the case as one more example of the vitriol that Stewart had long endured. To her critics, Stewart’s case punctured the veneer of her propriety; even though her prison sentence had nothing to do with her corporation, it suggested an untoward explanation for her lifestyle company’s success, one that made Stewart’s relentless drive even more unpalatable. “I’m strict and I’m demanding and I’m all those good things that make a successful person,” Stewart says in an archival clip from around the time she was sentenced.

A more nuanced view does emerge in the documentary, which later addresses how Stewart changed while serving her sentence. Her time in a West Virginia prison prompted a serious reconsideration of her enterprise—and what kinds of homes it reflected. Stewart encountered incarcerated women who’d faced much harsher realities but also wanted to turn their varied talents into viable business ventures. Hearing the other women’s stories and looking over their business plans when they sought her advice made the experience bearable for Stewart—and partially recalibrated her approach to her own work. The homecoming speech she delivered to her staff shortly after being released focused heavily on shifting the why of their work. “I sense in the American public there is a growing need to preserve human connections,” Stewart said then, adding that she had come to understand “the need to honor many, many kinds of families.”

Nearly a decade after Stewart left prison wearing a poncho crocheted by a fellow inmate, the rise of girlboss feminism popularized a style of brash, demanding leadership that Stewart embodied before her conviction. Girlboss feminism has since fallen out of favor in the corporate world, but today’s lifestyle influencers, even those who espouse traditional values, are more emboldened to openly discuss the profit-making motive of their work—especially if they look the part of the doting maternal figure. Where Stewart often succeeded in branding herself as a businesswoman before a mother, many of the most popular homemaking-content creators seem to grasp that their children are the most important emblems of the hyper-feminine fantasy they’re putting on display. As my colleague Sophie Gilbert recently wrote in an essay about a new Hulu reality series following TikTok-famous Mormon women, “the Secret Lives stars are notable for how intricately their brands are enmeshed with fertility—not the mundane reality of day-to-day motherhood but the symbolic power of sexual eligibility and maternal authority.”

These women’s popularity—and, in some cases, their families’ economic viability—is inextricably tied to how they perform sacrificial motherhood, a role that Stewart never appeared interested in. But even though the business of domesticity has shifted in the years since Stewart’s IPO, her earlier successes unquestionably primed audiences for the advent of homemaking influencers whose approach to their public image differs radically from her own. Stewart laid a foundation for an entire genre of creators who generate income by giving followers a glimpse into their kitchen—not just with her recipes but with her sheer dedication to building a brand and her unwillingness to render her labor invisible. For all the controversies Stewart has weathered, she’s always seemed to project authority because she knows what she’s doing—and she’s always behaved as though everyone would be better off heeding the boss’s advice.

The Limits of Democratic Optimism

2024-11-08T12:41:32-05:00

Throughout Vice President Kamala Harris’s abbreviated presidential run, she often emphasized one key principle that separated her campaign from that of former President Donald Trump. When Trump mocked her laughter, Harris pushed back by framing her propensity for exuberance as an invaluable strength: “I find joy in the American people,” she said in September. “I find joy in optimism, in what I see to be our future and our ability to invest in it.” On Tuesday afternoon, several hours before the polls closed, Harris once again reminded the voting public of this core value. “To everyone who has worked hard and brought back the joy during this campaign—thank you,” she captioned a video posted to her X account.

But as election results came in, jubilation seemed limited to supporters of her opponent, who espoused a very different view of the fractured electorate. Early Wednesday morning, the media projected that Trump would win, affirming that American voters remain entranced—and energized—by his divisive rhetoric. In her concession speech that afternoon, Harris asked her supporters not to succumb to despair over this moment of darkness, and instead to “fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars—the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service.” Harris’s loss is not an unequivocal indictment of joy as an organizing strategy, in electoral politics or otherwise. But it does illustrate the limits of peddling optimism as a change candidate without rigorously critiquing the status quo—especially when voters see you as part of maintaining it.

Hope is always a hard sell, and Harris inherited an unenviable candidacy: President Joe Biden didn’t step down from his reelection bid until a disastrous June debate performance (and some serious muscling within the party) forced his hand. Not only did Harris have less than four months to make her case to the American people, but as Biden’s VP, she was also saddled with the baggage of his administration—right as his approval rating hit a new low. To many voters, Harris represented an extension of the Biden policies that they (sometimes unfairly) blamed for inflation, low wages, and unemployment, a message that Trump hammered home with his slogan “Kamala broke it. Trump will fix it.” Whereas Trump was able to galvanize the GOP base by stoking economic resentments, Harris was tasked with gamely winning over frustrated voters without undermining her party’s sitting president.

Harris’s position in an unpopular White House made her a tricky messenger for idealistic visions of the future, amid both economic discontent and tremendous geopolitical instability. Her ties to the Biden administration also put Harris in a categorically different position than Barack Obama was in during his first presidential run, in 2008, when his sanguine campaign promises landed with voters in part because his call for unity offered a stark departure from hawkish, Bush-era partisan politics. As a presidential candidate, Obama was also a blank slate, having spent just part of his sole senatorial term in the national spotlight; he had more latitude to define himself because he was weighed down by very little history.

When asked what she would have done differently from Biden during the past four years, Harris said last month, “There’s not a thing that comes to mind”—other than that she would have had a Republican in her Cabinet. For some voters in the Democrats’ base, that type of rhetoric just didn’t inspire excitement—moderate Democrats’ attempts at bipartisan collaboration, which Republican lawmakers have been less keen to initiate, have at times yielded disappointing results. Nor did it ameliorate concerns about the Biden administration’s continued support of Israel’s war in Gaza, which put the party at odds with some young voters, as well as many in the Black, Muslim, and Arab American communities. Harris, a supporter of Israel, often spoke more empathetically about the conflict in Gaza than Biden did, but she also skirted the issue; asked during a CNN town hall what she would say to someone who was considering supporting a third-party candidate because of her position on the conflict, she deflected by saying that voters “also care about bringing down the price of groceries.”

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

Moments such as this undercut the Harris campaign’s cheerful aesthetics. Asking voters to look past humanitarian atrocities in the name of curbing inflation may be a strategy with precedent, but it’s not one that feels driven by a joyful service mandate. And during a year that’s been disastrous for incumbent politicians around the world, the Democratic Party failed to offer an energizing vision of doing things differently. Take The New York Times’ reporting on how Wall Street’s private-equity firms, investment banks, and wealthy corporate executives were influencing Harris’s economic-policy agenda. Giving “large corporations a seat at the table and giving them a voice,” as one executive put it, sounded to some voters a whole lot like business as usual.

For many Americans feeling the downstream pains of corporate greed, preserving the sanctity of a dysfunctional political system is not a motivating factor at the ballot box. But as in 2016, the Democrats focused heavily on how unfit Trump is for the presidency—an argument aimed at wooing suburban Republicans and independents—rather than offering their base exciting, practical solutions to the country’s problems. In 2016, substantial portions of the party’s base rallied around the populist senator Bernie Sanders, but the party instead backed the establishment figure Hillary Clinton (and, according to Sanders’s camp, ignored attempts to help keep his supporters engaged in crucial swing states). The following election cycle, the party again picked a more centrist candidate over Sanders, but Joe Biden heeded some of the lessons from Sanders’s popular campaigns—and forged a broader coalition by moving left on some issues.

Several years later, Harris could have used that enthusiasm—but Democratic leadership didn’t seem to give much thought to why those voters supported Sanders in the first place. Despite the fact that voters consistently identified the economy as the issue most important to them, Harris stopped criticizing Big Business abruptly during her campaign, and the party walked back an earlier proposal to lower everyday costs by combatting grocery price gouging. In the immediate run-up to the election, the campaign pivoted away from emphasizing other commonsense, populist ideas that have clear benefits for average working Americans. Paid family and medical leave, which Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, signed into Minnesota law as the state’s governor, is tremendously popular. So, too, is raising the minimum wage, as results on some state ballot measures show, even in red states such as Alaska.

The rich may insist that money can’t buy happiness, but anyone who has struggled to feed their children or afford rent knows that nothing is more thrilling than finally attaining a modicum of financial security. Addressing the barriers that many Americans face when trying to get there—and their frustrations that the Democratic political establishment doesn’t share their priorities—might just have inspired some lasting optimism this time around.

A Surprising Window Into the Growing Pains of Older Adults

2024-10-31T09:57:59-04:00

For more than 25 years, some of reality TV’s most memorable—and villainous—contenders have declared that they’re “not here to make friends.” But on The Golden Bachelorette, the second Bachelor-franchise installment focused on a romantic lead older than 60, friendship isn’t a fruitless distraction from the main event. The new series follows the 61-year-old widow Joan Vassos and an eclectic group of men hoping to win her over—some of whom have also lost their spouse. In a pleasant break from standard reality-TV convention, including within the Bachelor franchise, many of the show’s most charming moments focus on the friendships formed among Joan’s suitors.

By highlighting the men’s bonds with one another, the new series builds on The Golden Bachelor’s refreshing exploration of finding love after grief, and the ways a person’s identity can shift in late adulthood. Together, the men wrestle with profound changes brought on by widowhood, retirement, divorce, and other big transitions. In its inaugural season, The Golden Bachelorette has offered a rare window into some of the distinct social and emotional challenges that Americans encounter later in life—and the varied connections that help them mitigate such weighty stressors.

Last year, Joan was an early favorite on The Golden Bachelor, where she quickly captured the septuagenarian widower Gerry Turner’s interest. But after just three episodes, the mother of four walked away from the show to care for her newly postpartum daughter. Yet being on the program offered Joan an emotional reward beyond finding a permanent partner. During her brief time as a contestant, “My heart kind of got a little fix from Gerry,” she said during a tearful exit. “As you get older, you become more invisible. People don’t see you anymore.” Her words resonated with many Golden Bachelor viewers, especially franchise newcomers and other women around her age. Now, with Joan at the fore, The Golden Bachelorette sheds light on the inner complexities of the men who are hoping she’ll see them. And by turning its attention to the unlikely intimacy forged among the male contestants, the show pushes beyond the one-dimensional stoicism that’s common in depictions of men their age.

Most of the two dozen men competing for Joan’s affections, who are between 57 and 69, have experienced bereavement or devastating heartbreak. Although the world of The Golden Bachelorette—where the suitors live with one another under the same roof—is obviously a staged environment, the losses the contestants have suffered are very real: As of 2023, more than 16 percent of Americans who are 60 or older (about 13 million people) were widowed. Losing a spouse has tremendous consequences for the surviving partner’s physical, mental, and emotional health—which can begin even prior to bereavement, especially for caregiving spouses. And yet, “we as a society are not necessarily super skilled and comfortable at talking about death and loss,” Jane Lowers, an assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine, told me. “Some people will back away from engaging with somebody who’s going through grief.” A partner’s death can also lead to a crisis of self, she added, if the bereaved spouse had come to see caregiving, or being half of a marital unit, as their essential identity.

On The Golden Bachelorette, loss largely brings people together, even as it prompts difficult internal reckonings. Many of Joan’s most meaningful conversations with her suitors make reference to her late husband, the milestones they shared, and her conflicting feelings as she attempts to find love again. But even when she isn’t around, the men speak candidly about grief—Joan’s, as well as their own. When one suitor announces that he’s leaving the mansion because his mother died, the others rally around him, with some tearing up as they offer their condolences and reflect on how beautiful his interactions with Joan have been.

[Read: Reality (TV) is getting kinder]

Another moving exchange involves a widower named Charles, who has spent almost six years racked with guilt, wondering if he could’ve done something to save his wife from a fatal brain aneurysm. Speaking with Guy, an emergency-room doctor, Charles shares that one detail of his wife’s death has always troubled him—and he looks visibly relieved when Guy reassures him, after explaining the science, that there was nothing he could have done. Later, as Charles recalls this conversation when talking with Joan, he tells her that “it changed my life.” These scenes aren’t just a striking contrast to the hostile atmosphere that’s typical of many dating-oriented competition series in which the contestants spent time together; they’re also an instructive representation of relationship-building among older men. Rather than peaceably keeping to themselves, the Golden Bachelorette men prioritize vulnerability and openness with one another. “I came in, arrived at the mansion with sadness, missed my wife,” Charles says when he leaves midway through the season. “After several weeks here at the mansion, it really helped me … the remaining friends, we bond together. We opened our hearts.”

The silent anguish that Charles describes has dangerous real-world ramifications: After the death of a spouse, widowers experience higher rates of mortality, persistent depression, and social isolation than widows do. “It’s in part because they don’t have these close friendships like we’re seeing on the show,” Deborah Carr, a sociology professor at Boston University and the author of Golden Years? Social Inequality in Later Life, told me. “Their social ties often were through work, and then that diminishes once they retire—or their former wives did the role.”

But widowers aren’t the only demographic represented on The Golden Bachelorette. And today’s older Americans have far more complex social lives than in years past, partly because marriage, companionship, and caregiving all look different—and, often, less predictable—than they did several decades ago. Now about 36 percent of adults who get divorced are older than 50, a rising phenomenon known as gray divorce. As Carr put it, “We’re certainly moving away from that ‘one marriage for life’”—which shifts how single adults past 50 see their romantic prospects.

The Golden Bachelorette chronicles what it takes for contestants to open themselves up to love, romantic or otherwise. As these changes happen in real time, the show keeps an eye toward the importance of emotional transparency when navigating later-in-life relationships. The men on the show sometimes acknowledge that they were raised to feel uncomfortable with overt displays of sentimentality, but they appear to recognize the long-term toll of suppressing their feelings. Carr added that she was pleased to see how quickly a group of men with so little in common came to embrace one another. “Even though it’s an artificial situation,” she noted, “a lot of those lessons can be imported to other men.”

On The Golden Bachelor, the isolated production environment ended up nudging the women toward one another, too. “We were all sequestered in this mansion without our phones and television and social media, so it made it very easy to connect with people very quickly at a deep level,” Kathy Swarts, one of the contestants, told me. When we spoke, Kathy was just leaving Pennsylvania, where she’d been visiting Susan Noles, one of her closest friends from The Golden Bachelor. Both told me, in separate conversations, that they counted joining the show as a transformative choice, and that their age also gave them a unique perspective on discovering love—whether with Gerry or with new friends. For Susan, watching the men navigate the same journey has been fascinating—and it’s different from watching the franchise’s earlier seasons, or other reality shows, because the contestants are mostly parents and grandparents.

“We’ve given our lives to our children,” Susan explained, adding that younger contestants have “not experienced what we have—we’ve had the ups, the downs, the horrible, the broken hearts, the happy moments.” By the time they enter the mansion, the Golden contestants largely know who they are and what they want. That changes what it means to win: Though they may not come to the show looking for new platonic bonds, we see the participants recognize the beauty of forging friendships with peers who meet them as individuals—not as extensions of their families or employers. This season’s men may have begun as strangers, but they leave The Golden Bachelorette having found a “group of brothers,” as one departing participant calls his competitors.

The Transparent Cruelties of Diddy’s Entertainment Machine

2024-10-15T11:06:44-04:00

For decades, the hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs has been one of the most influential men in the music industry. Last November, the singer Cassie Ventura, Combs’s former partner, filed a staggering 35-page lawsuit accusing the rapper of raping, drugging, and physically abusing her over the course of a decade. He and Ventura settled the suit out of court just one day later, with Combs not admitting to any wrongdoing. Six months later, after CNN published a graphic hotel-surveillance video that shows Combs assaulting Ventura in 2016, he claimed “full responsibility.”

In the weeks after Ventura’s accusations came out, several other women filed lawsuits accusing Combs of sexual assault, which he categorically denied. And in September, the singer Dawn Richard, a former member of two musical groups started by Combs, filed a 55-page lawsuit accusing him of sexually assaulting her, depriving her and her fellow Danity Kane bandmates of basic needs while requiring them to remain under his watch, and routinely refusing to pay his artists wages or royalties. (In a statement responding to the lawsuit, one of Combs’s lawyers said Richard had “manufactured a series of false claims all in the hopes of trying to get a payday.”) Last month, Combs was indicted and arrested on federal charges that include sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, and racketeering. Combs, who pleaded not guilty to all the charges, is now detained in New York City after being denied bail twice.

Central to Richard’s lawsuit is Combs’s alleged behavior during Making the Band, the competition series that he produced and hosted from 2002 to 2009. The MTV series attracted millions of viewers during its run; Richard’s lawsuit references numerous incidents that were filmed for the show, and included in the final product. Along with Ventura’s allegations, the suit prompts a broader reassessment of Combs’s cultural power—and pushes audiences to reconsider the hostile behavior that he often willingly broadcast to the public.

Though the worst of Richard’s allegations about Combs’s behavior were not depicted on Making the Band, the series did help lay the groundwork for many of the invasive, burdensome expectations of the modern music industry. Today’s young artists readily anticipate that their fans—and, more pressing, their record labels—want them to entertain the masses with their lives, not just their music. However benign a viral TikTok trend may seem now, Making the Band was an early experiment in training audiences to enjoy watching just how much control record labels wield over vulnerable musicians. The series laundered Combs’s open hostility toward a group of young women he was responsible for as an eccentric style of artist management—and his label, Bad Boy Records, profited from viewers’ interest in his abrasive displays of authority.

By 2005, when Richard joined Making the Band 3, Combs had already formed (and disbanded) a coed group that featured in an earlier iteration of the show. During the first run, Combs subjected contestants to outlandish, demoralizing tasks that had nothing to do with making music. One, which was later parodied in a famous Chappelle’s Show skit, required the artists to walk more than five miles to fetch him cheesecake from a Brooklyn restaurant. “Honestly, my feet felt broken and my knees felt like all the cartilage was gone,” one former band member told Essence in 2017. When they returned to the Midtown Manhattan studio to find that Combs had left, she said, “I wanted to cry.”

With Making the Band 3, Combs attempted, for the first time on the show, to create an all-female group—and his ruthless approach to artist development seemed to take a darker turn. Richard’s suit contends that the show’s environment enabled Combs to maintain alarming control over the young women, and that a TV-friendly version of his cruelty was projected to millions of viewers. One accusation is that Combs routinely made “disparaging gender-based remarks such as calling them ‘fat,’ ‘ugly,’ ‘bitches,’ and ‘hoes’” throughout filming and after the group was formed. Revisiting the show and how Combs promoted it at the time, I’m struck by just how often Combs tossed around similar language. Even when he used less objectionable words, he nonetheless conveyed the message that the women were not his equals. “I don’t think no human being has been able to just figure out the woman,” he told the Associated Press ahead of a season premiere, adding that he anticipated great TV because the female competitors would all need to deal with “having their monthly cycle coming together, and emotions and moodiness and competitiveness.”

[Read: The cruel social experiment of reality tv]

Making the Band 3 spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on the young women’s bodies, and how Combs saw them. He treated the contestants’ physical presentation as alternately a disqualifying embarrassment, a reflection of his own star-making prowess, or an invitation to leer. The very first time Richard appears on-screen, during a group audition, Combs points to her as though he’s eyeing a romantic interest. “With the jeans on—she’s exceptional,” he says. After every stage of the selection process for the girl group, which ended up being called Danity Kane, Combs attempted to police how the women looked. For example, once the contestants made it past auditions and into a smaller cohort, the remaining contenders were constantly corralled into the gym, having food taken away from them, and belittled for not having six-pack abs. (It’s notable that not even five minutes into the first episode, one young woman swears, “I’ll work out ’til I kill myself.”)

Even after the final group was chosen, Richard alleges, Combs continued to exert authority over the musicians’ bodies. When she or “her Danity Kane bandmates requested meals or rest, Mr. Combs refused and chastised them with derogatory comments like ‘you bitches don’t want this’ or ‘y’all are not hungry enough’ or ‘I’m paying you bitches to work,’” the lawsuit claims. Although some of his belittling comments made it onto the air, Combs’s casual delivery belied the apparent severity of his off-camera control over the women’s basic needs: Richard alleges that Combs often sent his associates to wake the Danity Kane members in the middle of the night so that he could watch them rehearse; the studio sessions sometimes went on for three to four days, during which the singers felt forced to choose between eating and sleeping.

Part of why Combs’s televised mistreatment of Making the Band contestants didn’t draw much mainstream pushback at the time is that he was hardly alone in his valorization of hard work—and he was adept at reframing workplace abuse through the language of artistic self-sacrifice, often by referencing his own career. “It’s a blessing to be in the recording industry … but there’s a lot of misconceptions,” he says at one point. “A lot of times when people get into this, they don’t realize how hard they’re gonna have to work to achieve the goal.” As Combs’s business empire expanded in the new millennium, he presented himself as the bootstraps exemplar—a poor Black boy from Harlem who’d hustled his way into becoming a multimillionaire. (In a statement issued after his arrest, Combs’s lawyers leaned on some of these tropes, defending their client as “a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving family man and proven philanthropist who has spent the last 30 years building an empire, adoring his children and working to uplift the Black community.”)

On Making the Band 3, Combs sometimes praised the contestants’ vocal abilities—but more often, he reminded them that any natural artistic inclination mattered far less than a Sisyphean work ethic. By creating a false dichotomy between talent and dedication, Combs justified the show’s grueling demands of contestants, his role as their kingmaker, and his explosive anger when the women failed to meet his expectations. Combs appeared to relish the opportunity to degrade the women, often criticizing them in front of one another and then pausing to let the harsh words sink in for the whole group. “Some of you are gon’ be broken on your own; some of you are gon’ step up to a challenge and shine,” he warned them after showing up unannounced in their dormlike living quarters one night.

[Read: What did hip-hop do to women’s minds?]

Making the Band purportedly offered the young women a clear, albeit grueling, path to stardom. But in practice, the show seemed to prioritize providing Combs access to them: In his host commentary, Combs gleefully remarked on the fact that he had “19 girls under one roof!” In hindsight, his blithe delivery accentuated his seeming confidence that neither MTV executives nor the show’s audience would raise significant concerns about his televised mistreatment of the young musicians. During the show’s run, Combs’s on-screen cruelty was all but unremarkable: Hip-hop, and the music industry more broadly, has a long history of devaluing women as expendable sex objects. Women who raise objections to alleged abusive conditions have often been met with indifference, skepticism, or outright hostility, including being shut out from work. When Combs equated the breaches of his artists’ autonomy with the pressures of making it in music, he played directly into this familiar dynamic.

Competition shows such as Making the Band also tapped into a much more widespread belief that fame—or the chance to attain it—justifies any pains that may be suffered as a result. When the series premiered, it joined a growing number of reality-TV programs that drew viewers in by glamorizing the benevolent tyrant chosen to host—and by disguising the soul-crushing takedowns they regularly meted out to contestants under the guise of constructive criticism. Richard’s suit alleges that Combs’s behavior created “an atmosphere of uncertainty and intimidation.” That assessment could have been applied to other reality-TV judges, on shows such as America’s Next Top Model, The Apprentice, The Biggest Loser—and there’s no shortage of clips in which a host excoriates a young participant over something trivial.

For viewers who consumed a relentless stream of media that surveilled and antagonized celebrities, perhaps the judges’ treatment of the artistic hopefuls seemed to be part of life in the public eye. Some of these audience attitudes persist today, despite the evidence of how damaging such environments can be for contestants: Former cast members from several modern reality series have filed lawsuits alleging that the production staff on their respective shows subjected them to inhumane working conditions, depriving them of sleep, food, and other basic needs to make them more vulnerable to camera-friendly conflict. Now, 15 years after Making the Band ended, it’s clear how the series—and Combs’s star power—was key to ushering in an era of entertainment predicated on humiliating young people as they pursued their artistic ambitions.

Combs’s apparent disdain for the aspiring musicians on his show still pervades multiple spheres of culture, including newer platforms. Audiences who tune in to vocal-competition series may not run major record labels, but they have their own kind of power now: Because algorithm-driven social-media feeds function as de facto audition stages for entertainment-industry hopefuls, individual listeners can change the trajectory of an artist’s career just by proselytizing online. And dedicated fans are not the only ones wielding these newer tools. Stirring up negative sentiment about an artist, especially through baseless mockery, has become its own pastime, rewarded by the thrill of a negative feedback loop. And on modern reality-TV shows, participants often find themselves navigating destructive conditions optimized to extract drama for viewers’ amusement. If there’s anything that Making the Band proves now, it’s that suffering is easy to ignore when an entire industry treats it like a joke.

Even SNL Is All About the Vibes

2024-09-29T12:52:57-04:00

Last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, the premiere of the comedy juggernaut’s 50th season, started with a battle of vibes. The lengthy cold open ping-ponged between campaign rallies for the two main presidential candidates, turning first to Vice President Kamala Harris (played by Maya Rudolph). “Well, well, well. Look who fell out of that coconut tree,” Rudolph said at the top of her speech, referencing the viral meme that buoyed Harris’s candidacy after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July. The actor continued with a nod to the comedic persona that she’d first developed for the politician half a decade ago. “Your fun aunt has returned,” Rudolph said. “The ‘funt’ has been rebooted. 2 Funt 2 Furious.”

Back when Harris was best known as Biden’s 2020 running mate, Rudolph’s decision to play the politician—a former prosecutor—as a free spirit tapped into an unexpected dimension of her character. By now, SNL viewers are familiar with the “funt” antics, in part because Harris herself has leaned into them. Rudolph’s latest rendition of the VP acknowledged Harris’s newfound prominence on the political and cultural stage, and the shift in how many Americans now seem to view her—and what they want to see more of. “My campaign is like the Sabrina Carpenter song ‘Espresso,’” Rudolph’s Harris said early in the sketch. “The lyrics are vague, but the vibe slaps.”

Harris’s speech was the first of many moments when SNL emphasized the strangeness of the current political environment, in which intangible “vibes” are perhaps the single most valuable currency. Throughout the premiere, the show did point to some concrete policy differences between its political characters—Rudolph’s Harris led into her “Espresso” joke with a reassurance that she would protect reproductive rights—but it spent more time depicting their opposing demeanors. “If we win together, we can end the dramala. And the traumala,” Harris promised. “And go relax in our pajamalas.” Meanwhile, the show portrayed former President Donald Trump, played by James Austin Johnson, as seemingly more animated by ambient racial resentment than by a desire for peace or any specific plans for the country. “They say that me blaming the Democrats for inciting violence is the pot calling the kettle Black,” he said over at his rally, skewering Trump’s real-life obsession with Harris’s racial background (and his apparent inability to understand that biracial people exist). “But, frankly, I didn’t know the kettle was Black until very recently. I thought the kettle was Indian, but then he decided to turn Black.”

SNL’s mood-based satire extended to its treatment of the vice-presidential nominees. In his debut as Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, the guest actor Jim Gaffigan riffed on a rhetorical slogan Walz popularized over the summer. “Trump and Vance are weird, all right? They want the government to control what you do in your bedroom and what books you read,” he said, as Rudolph’s Harris nodded behind him. Gaffigan infused Walz’s well-known earnestness with a more raucous, high energy, otherwise leaning into the governor’s folksy demeanor more than subverting it: “In Minnesota, we have a saying: Mind your damn business. We also have another saying in Minnesota: My nuts froze to the park bench.” In contrast to Rudolph’s Harris happily ceding the floor to her VP pick, Johnson’s Trump more reluctantly called up his running mate, J. D. Vance (played by an amusingly cast Bowen Yang). SNL framed the GOP gathering as lackluster compared with the Democrats’ (almost) hip soiree, a choice that the show also underscored in a later skit led by Yang.

On “The Talk Talk Show With Charli XCX,” Yang played the British pop singer whose early Harris endorsement helped propel the vice president to meme-driven popularity among younger voters. The retro-feeling skit, in which Sarah Sherman played the Australian musician Troye Sivan, featured Yang’s Charli XCX interviewing three unlikely guests: the famed Swiss nightlife maven Susanne Bartsch (played by a criminally underutilized Jean Smart, the night’s host), the CNN news anchor Kaitlan Collins (Chloe Fineman), and the representative Jasmine Crockett (Ego Nwodim). Instead of taking advantage of her access to one of Washington’s more recognizable political journalists, Yang’s Charli XCX put all of her hard-hitting questions to Smart’s Bartsch, skipping over Fineman’s Collins. And she used her time with Nwodim’s Crockett to largely mine for potential discourse bait. “I have a song on my album called ‘Mean Girls,’ and you went viral this summer for what you called Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Yang’s Charli said, referencing a verbal spat between the two politicians during a House committee meeting back in May. “I want to hear you pop off on everything, so this is ‘Jasmine Crockett’s Mean-Girl Cam.’” The segment tasked Crockett with offering blistering political commentary in a pithy, quotable fashion. Asked about gerrymandering, she called it out for being a “crazy-shape, crooked bitch.” Something, Crockett implied, just feels wrong about it: “Why is that county shaped like a tapeworm with a hat on?”

“Weekend Update” best crystallized the show’s approach to satirizing our current moment: ambience-led, with doses of sharper insight when convenient. Yang took the spotlight while channeling a figure that’s become surprisingly relevant to political conversation. Appearing as the viral pygmy hippo Moo Deng, Yang played his character as an overwhelmed young starlet in the vein of the pop musician Chappell Roan, who’s been publicly wrestling with the weight of fame in recent months. Roan’s anxieties stem in part from how both her zealous fans and commentators across the political spectrum have reacted to recent videos in which she’s expressed reservations about endorsing Harris. Yang’s exasperated, Roan-coded Moo Deng was a wild contrast to Devon Walker’s braggadocian portrayal of the embattled New York City mayor, Eric Adams. Where Moo Deng begged for privacy and emphasized her youth, SNL’s Adams stopped by “Weekend Update” to brag about being the “first mayor to get out of the office and into the VIP” section of nightclubs. Part of what landed the mayor in hot water, the segment suggested, is his obsession with “bringing swagger back to the city.” The most damning thing Walker’s Adams says starts as a positive self-assessment: “What was once a swagless dump is now a swag-tropolis.” After a beat, he added that his tenure has also left New York “with significantly more crime than before.” As it turns out, vibes aren’t actually everything. SNL, at moments, seemed to recognize that. Politicians probably should too.

The Particular Pain of the Middle-Aged Millennial

2024-09-24T08:05:00-04:00

As an accessibility driver at New York City’s JFK airport, Melissa Jackson spends all day cheerily ushering other people toward the kinds of dream vacations she’ll never experience herself. The protagonist of Hulu’s How to Die Alone is terrified of flying—and even if she wasn’t, Mel can’t imagine scraping together enough money to travel. She has no savings, no real friends, and no romantic prospects. Naturally, she’s also afraid of falling in love.

The new series, which Natasha Rothwell created and stars in, joins shows such as Insecure, Atlanta, Girls, and Broad City in capturing the ennui of a Millennial protagonist who feels stuck in place. But unlike those comedies about feckless 20-somethings, which premiered in the 2010s, How to Die Alone focuses on the arrested adolescence of a Millennial who’s now in her mid-30s, and still not doing much better. (Though Rothwell, who was born in 1980, is technically a young Gen Xer, she plays a 35-year-old on the show.) And as much as Mel might be to blame for aimlessly slogging through adulthood, How to Die Alone also depicts the hurdles that many of us in the new “lost generation” still face as we approach middle age.

By now, the sociopolitical troubles plaguing Millennials are well documented: As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote in 2021, the “pandemic recession has led not-so-young adults to put off having kids, buying a house, getting married, or investing in a car—yet again.” And in the time since, many either are still playing catch-up or find themselves trapped in a precarious version of the American dream, all while watching the richest people in the country profit from those with limited economic mobility. Mel’s life is undeniably affected by these phenomena, and by the interpersonal trends that have sprung up alongside the economic challenges: Whereas her closest work friend is a rich kid who has a job only to satisfy a trust-fund requirement, she struggles just to afford astronomical living expenses. For her 35th birthday, the best thing Mel can splurge on is a dresser from a European home-goods store that’s meant to stand in for IKEA, a brand that’s come to symbolize Millennial domesticity—even as the products tend to crumble under repeated use, a metaphor in and of itself.

Millennial-focused series have long nodded to the instability faced by a generation of perma-renters: Early in Insecure, for example, a dilapidated couch symbolized the decay in one couple’s relationship, and even after the sofa was replaced, the damage was done. Rothwell, who was the first writer hired on Insecure, rose to fame for playing Kelli, the character most removed from the dysfunction of the main cast. Kelli reliably served as a refreshing contrast to Issa, Insecure’s bumbling protagonist, in part because she seemed to have it together. Issa’s journey followed a common path, taking her closer to self-assurance as she crossed into her 30s, but Kelli—a fun-loving, outspoken accountant—seemed like she was already there from the start.

Mel is a far cry from that confident tax professional. At the start of How to Die Alone, she sounds more like Atlanta’s fretful Princeton dropout, Earn, or one of the anxious miscreants on Girls—despite being several years older than all of those characters. Part of what fuels Mel’s insecurity is the persistent feeling that major milestones are passing her by as she ages, that she should have already figured things out by now—a sentiment that seems to be shared by many other Millennials. At one point, she negatively compares herself to the pop singer Lizzo, whose feel-good anthems captured a certain kind of Instagram-quotable girlboss optimism that became popular in the late Obama era. To Mel, Lizzo’s success at 35 is just another reminder that some people her age have managed to live out the promise of such idealistic visions.

For all her worrying that being 35 makes her too old to achieve some goals, Mel also doesn’t feel like enough of an adult to climb the professional ranks. That, too, is now a common sentiment—and the show’s attention to it marks an interesting pivot from the career dilemmas reflected in previous generations’ pop-culture 30-somethings: Take Frasier Crane, the Kelsey Grammer character who was already an established psychiatrist when he first appeared as a guest on Cheers in 1984. Frasier certainly had career crises, mostly driven by his romantic failures. But as a Harvard-educated Boomer, he never seriously questioned whether he was capable of practicing medicine.

[Read: “Gen Z” only exists in your head]

And it wasn’t just white Ivy League alums who claimed success for themselves as they entered their 30s: In the pilot of Girlfriends, which premiered in 2000, Gen Xer Joan Clayton (Tracee Ellis Ross) was a 29-year-old attorney who not only excelled at her work but also lied about being younger to make the wins seem even more impressive. It’s clear which side of the sellout-DIYer binary she saw herself on, but in today’s economic conditions, most rungs on the corporate ladder simply have fewer benefits to offer. Working long hours at a law firm is no guarantee of affording a mortgage, much less in the historic Central Los Angeles, where Joan was a proud homeowner.

How to Die Alone wrestles with what it even means to try when opportunities for career advancement come few and far between—and how Mel’s professional woes color her relationships with her family, her closest friend, and the ex she regrets leaving. Mel wasn’t born into wealth, but her mother and older brother seem comfortably middle-class, and they’re baffled by Mel resigning herself to a life of five-figure debt. Their frustrations with her don’t come solely from a place of judgment—like most families, they just can’t afford to cover Mel’s expenses indefinitely. Whatever grace they may have extended to her in the past seems to have expired as she edged further into her 30s, a decade when a woman floundering in her love life seems to draw as much condescension as one struggling with work does. The message is clear: Mel needs to get serious—now.

Without spoiling too much, there’s an unlikely shift in their dynamic late in the season—but not because Mel gets a fancy new job. Thankfully, How to Die Alone doesn’t present a management-training program as her ticket to happiness, or even to self-actualization. Instead, the series spends considerable time exploring the unexpected sources of support around Mel, and nudging her to invest in the people who have always seen more in her. Although Mel still finds herself landing in some trouble later on, it’s clear that she’ll benefit from having let those people get closer—even if it means they’re witnessing her messiness up close. The chaos might not be fully resolved, but she finally grows up when she accepts that there’s no virtue in navigating it on her own.

Everyone Knows The Bear Isn’t a Comedy

2024-09-16T12:16:04-04:00

When Jean Smart stepped onto the Emmys stage last night to accept the award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, the six-time Emmy winner took a cue from Deborah Vance, the veteran comedian she plays on Hacks. Almost immediately, Smart told a joke: “It’s very humbling, it really is. And I appreciate this, because I just don’t get enough attention.”

It was Smart’s third time landing the prize for her portrayal of the electrifying septuagenarian, but the 76th Emmys ceremony marked a new milestone for the Max series. Later that evening, Hacks was named Outstanding Comedy Series—beating out the expected winner, a show that tests the meaning of the category itself. The Bear, a tense, claustrophobic FX/Hulu series about the staff of a Chicago-area restaurant, did break its own record by winning 11 of the 23 categories it was nominated in. But two of the evening’s biggest awards went to Hacks, a comedy about comedians. Last night’s broadcast might be the first signal that the Television Academy is paying attention to industry discussions and online chatter about a long-standing debate: Is The Bear really even a comedy?

At the strike-delayed 75th Emmys, in January, The Bear claimed Outstanding Comedy Series among its six trophies in the major comedy categories. After the ceremony, when asked if he would consider the show a comedy, the executive producer Josh Senior said, “I think the show is true to life. Sometimes it’s funny, and sometimes it’s real.” That’s accurate, and the show is hardly the first dark, moody production to be up for comedy awards in recent years. But The Bear doesn’t exactly have a high laugh-to-cry ratio, making it an awkward fit alongside more traditional comedies such as Abbott Elementary and Only Murders in the Building. Senior also suggested that The Bear is eligible as a comedy because of its half-hour run time, but that reasoning is outdated: The Academy stopped using run time to distinguish entries in the drama and comedy categories in 2021, and there’s precedent for series being moved from one to the other. Back in June, before the nominations for last night’s Emmys were announced, Variety reported that “networks and strategists have been attempting to trigger a TV Academy review of The Bear to shift it to the drama series race, where it will face off against its network sibling, Shōgun.”

That change didn’t end up happening, but last night’s awards brought the underlying question out into the open. At the top of the evening, the father-and-son hosting duo of Eugene and Dan Levy—whose own sitcom, Schitt’s Creek, won Outstanding Comedy Series in 2020—addressed the contention directly: “I know some of you might be expecting us to make a joke about whether The Bear is really a comedy,” Eugene said. “But in the true spirit of The Bear, we will not be making any jokes.” (The good-natured joke was one of many about Hollywood’s idiosyncrasies: Dan also celebrated the Emmys as “broadcast TV’s biggest night for honoring movie stars on streaming services.”) In doing so, the Levys laid a comedic foundation for the Outstanding Comedy Series upset, using humor to relay the confusion—and, in some cases, disappointment—that viewers feel when seeing The Bear win so many comedy awards while sitcoms such as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The Other Two have rarely been recognized.

Some of the audience’s bewilderment about The Bear’s take on comedy stems from the show’s rapid release cycle and the awkward timing of the previous Emmys ceremony. The Bear is one of the rare prestige series that doesn’t take multiple years to put out a new season. So by the time Season 1 of The Bear swept the comedy categories in January, its (more tender, less breakneck) second season had already aired. And in the lead-up to last night’s awards, which were for Season 2, the series had already released its third season—an unfortunate overlap given that, as my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote about the new episodes, “the meaning and implications of trauma have become the only subject The Bear wants to explore.” Carmy’s flashbacks and intrusive thoughts were especially difficult to watch, making it harder to remember the moments when pointed comedy had cut through the tension of earlier seasons.

[Read: It’s easy to get lost in The Bear]

The Bear cast’s earnestness throughout the night helped cement the feeling that the show is a serious work taking on weighty themes. Liza Colón-Zayas gave a heartfelt acceptance of her history-making award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, and a sincere Ebon Moss-Bachrach accepted his second consecutive win for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. Their speeches, and the cast’s red-carpet interviews, tended to diverge from the jocular energy of other comedy ensembles—like the cast of Only Murders, who traded loving jabs as they announced Moss-Bachrach’s win. And in addition to Eugene and Dan Levy’s hosting throughout the night, viewers got to watch a jovial Schitt’s Creek mini-reunion play out as the cast introduced Catherine O’Hara to present the Outstanding Comedy Series award.

Across the show, the Hacks acceptance speeches seemed to reflect the viewing audience’s appetite for reveling in humor: When the co-creators Paul W. Downs, Lucia Aniello, and Jen Statsky accepted the award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, the three riffed on the importance of comedy. “We make a show about comedy because as three weird, lonely kids, it was the thing that made us feel connected to other people,” Downs said before Statsky whispered something unintelligible in his ear. He continued: “Okay, Jen is saying she was popular, but two weird, lonely ki—” and then again revised his take after a whisper from Aniello: “Okay, so Lucia wasn’t unpopular, but it made one lonely weirdo and two semi-popular girls feel connected to other people.”

Any kind of art can do that, but the Hacks creators made the case for comedy as a uniquely effective tool for building bridges. Humor isn’t an incidental element of these stories, or a bonus for viewers who grit their teeth through anxiety-inducing material; it’s what makes them so powerful. As Aniello put it in another speech, “When you laugh with someone, you have something in common with them.” Finding the humor in trauma can be cathartic—and some of the most perceptive scenes in The Bear clearly convey that. But a series that takes its laughs very seriously—as Hacks clearly does—is more than just a frivolous delight.

Kaos Offers a Sharp Twist on a Familiar Story

2024-09-06T07:00:00-04:00

In an 1898 issue of The Atlantic, the classical scholar Thomas Dwight Goodell published an impassioned defense of original Greek literature, which some of his contemporaries had criticized as irrelevant. Compared with the complex plots of then-modern plays, Greek tragedies appeared “tame and colorless” to some readers, bogged down by oration instead of action. Goodell’s essay lamented a seemingly pervasive belief among poets, playwrights, and scholars that “the Greek drama is merely the germ of which the Elizabethan drama is the full flower.”

More than 125 years later, that germ is still sprouting. The stories and conventions of Greek tragedy continue to enrich English literature—and make their way into new artistic mediums. One of the most recent works to draw extensively from these myths and narratives is Kaos, an eight-part Netflix series that revolves around a gutsy scheme to dethrone an insecure, tyrannical Zeus (played by Jeff Goldblum). Along with its amusing study of the surly deity, Kaos reinterprets classic tales of figures such as Eurydice, Ariadne, and Caeneus, with their themes of familial strife, populist rebellion, and the struggle between free will and destiny. And with its quick pans and ultra-saturated colors, Kaos evokes the vibrant maximalism of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. The result is a darkly funny, visually rich saga that highlights the enduring relevance of these moral quandaries and character studies—without taking itself too seriously.

Kaos arrives at an interesting moment for the classics. In recent years, books such as Madeline Miller’s Circe have introduced new readers to ancient myths through the perspectives of women. These “feminist retellings” of famed Greek tales have become a massively popular mini-genre in part because they reframe familiar dramas around characters who have rarely taken center stage—an intriguing choice in the years following #MeToo, especially to readers in highly engaged social-media communities like BookTok. And because pop culture is undeniably influenced by the trends that drive the publishing industry, some of these books are now being adapted into visual works.

Unlike some retellings, including the recent Elyse John novel, Orphia and Eurydicius, Kaos doesn’t flip the genders of its protagonists to emphasize that women can be heroes too. But it does cleverly interrogate how gender informs its characters’ experiences of life on Earth, in the Underworld, and even on Mount Olympus—and, by extension, how the characters are portrayed in the canon itself. For example: The series depicts Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau) as a reluctant muse to the rock star Orpheus (Killian Scott). In an early scene, she bristles when her husband says he’s named his latest song after her. (In the chorus, Orpheus poses questions that inadvertently capture how suffocated his wife feels in their marriage: “Is it a little too much / Breathin’ the air from your lungs? / Is it a little bit much / Under the weight of this love?”) That setup helps establish Orpheus’s eventual mission to rescue her from the Underworld as a selfish pursuit, motivated by his desire to possess Eurydice rather than restore her to a life of her own making.

[Read: All of Shakespeare’s plays are about race]

While Orpheus labors to retrieve her, Eurydice meets several other characters whose mythic origins have often been retold through the lens of male violence or aggression. But here, Medusa and Persephone are not feeble captives of the Underworld or scorned women constantly seeking revenge. And Caeneus, a transgender man, gets a new backstory that mercifully supplants the violent rape that catalyzes his transition in the original myth. Kaos balances the weight of these reinterpretations with its irreverent depictions of the most powerful woman on Mount Olympus: Hera (Janet McTeer) may be miserable with the philandering Zeus, but she’d rather hold on to her authority than befriend a woman beneath her status, and so she turns her husband’s affair partners into bees in some of the show’s more creative sequences.

The women and queer characters of Kaos don’t merely serve as the show’s ethical guardrails; they make the fight against Zeus’s despotic reign more dynamic than a simple battle between good and evil. Moral ambiguity is a hallmark of the classics themselves, but it’s also in line with past work from the show’s creator, Charlie Covell, who adapted the dark comedy The End of the F***ing World for TV. That series turned its attention to the misery (and tenderness) in its protagonists, an angsty teenager and a budding killer. In charting their unlikely romance, Covell pulled off a surprising feat of humor and nihilism—which Kaos accomplishes at a grander scale.

For the most part, Kaos pulses with the same offbeat confidence and alluring style. At times, the show strains to reconcile its ancient source material with aesthetic sensibilities clearly influenced by more modern works. Goldblum isn’t just one of several actors to embody Zeus in the past decade; he also plays the role with the same quirky braggadocio he brought to Grandmaster in 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, a riff on his own quirky and braggadocious persona. If not for the minor detail of Zeus being a deity, many of the familial conflicts that emerge in the show’s first episode could have easily unfolded on two of the most popular series of the past several years: When he and Hera bicker against the lush, ornate backdrop of Mount Olympus, it’s hard not to recall the palatial Sicilian resort at the center of The White Lotus. And after Zeus rejects a watch given to him by his son Dionysus, he tacks on some fatherly criticism that immediately brings to mind Succession’s cantankerous leader (and the most fidgety of his eager young scions). Aspirational settings and complicated father-son narratives are hardly scarce in pop culture, but in a series that covers less thematic ground, these parallels might register as uninspired. Kaos does much more than recast fictional billionaires as literal deities, though—it also spends considerable time with the people whose lives they upend.

One of the most consistent elements of Greek mythology is how it can help us glean new meaning—and real catharsis—from the familiar. In a reboot-obsessed entertainment climate, Kaos and other inventive Greek retellings model a more generative approach to intellectual property by building on, rather than simply rehashing, their source material. However ageless family dysfunction might be, the best of these recent works still manage to make every unhappy child of Zeus—mortal or divine—unhappy in their own way. The characters’ specific grievances (and triumphs) reflect the eras that refashioned them, even as the foundation of their stories remains the same. As Goodell wrote so long ago, “Many generations will pass from the scene, and many a little system and literary school will have its day, before those plays lose their freshness and their power to elevate and charm.” Kaos is yet another testament to that prophecy.

Emily in Paris Doesn’t Need a Makeover

2024-08-21T13:12:28-04:00

In the first season of Emily in Paris, the show’s plucky American heroine doesn’t speak a lick of French. For every turn of phrase that could move Emily Cooper (played by Lily Collins) up a Duolingo level, the marketing ingenue peppers her cheery English sentences with a whole lot of embarrassing merde. Luckily for Emily, things are finally looking up on the language front. The first half of Season 4, which is now streaming, catches up with her after nearly a year of life in Paris, during which she took some much-needed French classes. These days, Emily approaches language acquisition the way a toddler might: by repeating new words incessantly.

The latest addition to Emily’s fledgling French lexicon is trompe l’oeil, a term first explained to her in one of the new episodes. The phrase, which her friend uses to describe an apple-shaped dessert, refers to an artistic technique that creates the illusion of a three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional surface. Emily in Paris goes on to use trompe l’oeil as a catch-all descriptor for its characters’ deceptive actions. But the phrase is particularly relevant this season, as the show strains to escape its reputation as a flat comfort watch and present itself with more depth. This has meant moving away from some of the transparently ridiculous fare that made the show an early-pandemic hit and toward more serious, unexpected subjects.

But the appeal of Emily in Paris is that the show has always been the precise opposite of a trompe l’oeil. Viewers have known exactly what to expect every season: The anxious, loudly dressed Chicagoan at its center invariably finds herself embroiled in a low-stakes kerfuffle, then shimmies out of it quicker than she can open up TikTok or plop a beret onto her head. Often, Emily has pulled off these feats simply by schooling her French counterparts on the American approach to a given issue. In the first season, for example, she raises objections to nude images of a model in a perfume ad. Not only does Emily end up shifting the direction of the campaign; she also distracts her colleagues from the unfortunate French error she’d made upon arriving at their photo shoot. (“Je suis excitée” does not, in fact, convey work-appropriate enthusiasm.) This low-friction ethos has made Emily in Paris a paragon of guilty-pleasure viewing. As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote in 2021, the show “dreams of a world in which following your bliss, regardless of others’ evaluations, pays off every time, while bowing to others’ standards makes only misery.”

This season, Emily in Paris struggles to hold on to this core principle, instead dipping into tricky topics that call for a defter hand. The series revisits #MeToo, picking up on a previous plotline involving Emily’s boss, Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu). When Sylvie was younger, she worked for Louis de Léon (Pierre Deny), a powerful businessman who leads a Louis Vuitton–esque luxury-fashion house. Sylvie is one of the many employees, current or former, whom Louis has sexually harassed, and this season finds her weighing whether to speak with a reporter investigating his misconduct. France has had public reckonings with workplace sexism and sexual assault, but Emily in Paris is not a show that’s well suited to exploring the complexities of #BalanceTonPorc.

Social movements rarely lead to quick, decisive wins that can be celebrated with a bottle of champagne, and the series seems unable to reconcile the gravity of Sylvie’s story with the fluff and spectacle around it. Emily in Paris serves up somber recollections about Sylvie’s former boss alongside an absurd revenge scheme orchestrated by another character: One of Louis’s designers goes behind his back to debut formal wear with ornate phallic designs hanging from the front of the pants. “Men can’t keep their dicks in their pants,” the designer explains in an earlier scene. “Why should we pretend otherwise?” Emily in Paris thrives on such ham-fisted mic drops, but the riotous reveal happens during a disco-night party, and neither the festive mood nor the immensity of the rebellion really sticks.

This season’s tonal dissonance draws attention to the shallowness of the social commentary—and distracts from the self-aware frivolity that first endeared Emily in Paris to audiences. Another arc initially seems intended to critique aspects of American culture beyond the workaholism that Emily personifies. After a pregnant character goes missing, one of her friends casually suggests that she may have left town to have an abortion. When Emily appears surprised by the idea, the friend offers a matter-of-fact response meant to come off as characteristically French: “Yes, it’s not illegal in this country.” Including that line in this season, two years after the fall of Roe v. Wade, is an interesting choice. But right after gesturing toward a weighty subject, Emily in Paris returns to a much more familiar theme: Emily’s frustration with French romantic norms. When Emily finds out that the pregnant character and her girlfriend are temporarily living with the child’s father, she’s exasperated by the arrangement: “Is this a French thing? Is polygamy legal here?”

[Read: Knocked Up and the American impulse to edit out abortion]

Emily in Paris is most confident when the toughest questions facing its protagonist involve what time of day to post an Instagram of the Eiffel Tower. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the series neglects to flesh out another woman’s experience of navigating major changes in her body and relationships. The show’s aversion to letting that kind of discomfort breathe, midway into its fourth season, reflects one of the many pitfalls of series designed for binge-streaming. Emily in Paris isn’t equipped to offer clear-eyed analysis of the real world in bite-size releases, and that’s fine. The show can just keep doing what it does best—filtering its home city through the rose-tinted, cat-eye glasses of an expat who never grows out of being a tourist.

It Should End Here

2024-08-10T07:00:00-04:00

If you’ve so much as glanced around an airport terminal recently, you’ve probably seen the name Colleen Hoover. Since the start of the pandemic, Hoover and her dedicated readers have reconfigured the publishing landscape: The author, who has nearly 4.5 million followers across her social-media platforms, is far and away the most prominent author on BookTok, the industry-shaping literary corner of TikTok, where “CoHo” is discussed with the enthusiasm generally reserved for A-list musicians. Thanks largely to the digital evangelism of the “CoHort,” eight of the 25 highest-selling print titles of 2022 (and four on the 2023 list) were Hoover novels.

Now a film adaptation of It Ends With Us may project Hoover’s most popular novel—and her broader oeuvre—into a new tier of recognizability, much like prior screen adaptations did for reader-driven sensations such as Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey. Originally published in 2016, Hoover’s book follows a young woman named Lily Blossom Bloom, who is on the precipice of realizing her lifelong dream to open a flower shop. After the death of her father, who abused her mother throughout her childhood, Lily begins dating an attractive, enigmatic neurosurgeon named Ryle—and when Ryle becomes violent toward her, Lily faces a series of difficult choices in her agonizing quest to break the cycle of abuse. Led by Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively, the new film refracts this coming-of-age tale through the glossy lens of a big-budget Hollywood production soundtracked by Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey. But the result is a disjointed project that highlights the shortcomings of Hoover’s dull approach to character-driven storytelling and social commentary.

As a visual work, It Ends With Us magnifies the contradictions (and, in rare moments, the pleasures) of its source material. Hoover’s book, with its pink-and-violet cover, is often marketed as a romance novel—or at least recommended as one by the CoHort, many of whom are young women or teenagers. For Gen Zers, who have spent their formative years living through a series of overlapping global crises, the predictably banal turmoil in Hoover’s books can offer a much-needed emotional release: “I feel like we all just want to feel something so badly,” one college student said in a 2022 Washington Post article about TikTokers who record themselves crying while they read Hoover’s work. Like Hoover’s other stories of romance, suffering, and redemption, It Ends With Us—both the book and the film—begins with a vision of all-consuming infatuation: Ryle (Justin Baldoni) and Lily (Lively) first meet on the roof of his high-rise building, where they exchange “naked truths” about their lives. After Lily laments not giving a proper eulogy for her father, Ryle consoles her with a mantra that recurs three more times in the book: “There is no such thing as bad people,” he tells her. “We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things.”

Early in the film, Baldoni imbues Ryle with energizing humor and charisma, making the initial connection with Lily feel less like projection from a bereaved young woman onto a hot, brooding stranger. The self-described commitment-phobe Ryle quickly declares his love for Lily, and by the time he proposes, Ryle has seemingly undergone a classic romance-trope conversion: The alluring Lothario has found the one woman capable of opening him up to love. Following their initial honeymoon phase, Ryle’s abuse might come as a “plot twist.” But It Ends With Us isn’t really about love—it’s about intimate-partner violence, as Hoover has said. On-screen, the second-act shift is meant to convey the idea that an abuser can come in all forms. Baldoni, who also directed the movie, said he viewed Ryle not as “a mustache-twirling bad guy” but “a guy with deep pain and deep trauma who makes terrible decisions that are never acceptable or excusable in any situation.”

[Read: M.F.A. vs. GPT]

Despite its stated interest in addressing generational cycles of abuse, It Ends With Us doesn’t spend much time exploring the roots of Ryle’s intense familial trauma—or even Lily’s. Instead, the film periodically zooms out to introduce some levity through his sister and brother-in-law (respectively played by Jenny Slate and Hasan Minhaj, who both seem out of place in the soapy mess). The erratic storytelling undermines the serious issue at its core: It Ends With Us is strikingly myopic in framing the central conflict as a marital rift, ignoring the fact that divorce alone may not keep Lily safe from Ryle, a wealthy, respected surgeon with institutional support.

Lily’s feelings about Ryle are also interrupted by Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), a former teenage boyfriend with whom she reunites in the present. Atlas, who was homeless when they met and now owns a popular restaurant, quickly becomes Lily’s white knight. It’s one of the most common tropes in romance—the old lover, here to rescue the heroine from a current crisis—but it undercuts the already didactic messaging about the gradual onset of domestic violence.

On the page, all this may scan as intense, as Hoover’s breathless prose communicates that Lily is stuck in a heady and confusing situation. But in scenes performed with miserable seriousness, Lily’s dilemma is more tortuous than liberating. Lively’s acting is particularly ill-suited to the gravity of bigger emotional scenes, which is especially noticeable when she defaults to the mischievous, flirty energy that defined her past roles. Visually, It Ends With Us jumps between warm, light-filled imagery and a gloomy, foreboding palette, sometimes within the same setting—choices that draw attention to fundamental inconsistencies in a story that can’t decide what it wants to be or whom it’s for.

Even so, It Ends With Us will have no trouble finding an audience—it’s already set to have a formidable box-office debut this weekend, and CoHo fans can look forward to at least one other upcoming film adaptation. For all the tonal confusion of Hoover’s novels, readers continue to gravitate toward the repetitive writing and heavy emphasis on shocking twists. Like the protagonists in Twilight and 50 Shades, the characters at the center of Hoover’s books tend to be young women who self-actualize by negotiating (often porous) boundaries with powerful men. To young people who have become inured to the misery of modern life, there’s a seductive premise in these novels: Relentless suffering can give way to freedom—and hot sex—if women want it badly enough. On-screen, performed by real people, it’s not as convincing.

A Hot New Bombshell Is Taking Over Reality TV

2024-08-07T07:00:00-04:00

Love Island USA, the most-streamed reality show in the country, is not difficult to understand. It’s a dating competition where an initial group of 10 or so singles arrive on an idyllic island and are split up into couples. Before long, new “bombshells” arrive to test their connections ahead of “recoupling” ceremonies that leave single islanders vulnerable to being “dumped”—that is, eliminated from the show. The reality-TV format of sticking a bunch of attractive young people in the same place and observing the ensuing chaos isn’t new, but the Love Island franchise has clicked with viewers in part because of its campy, fluorescent take on the classic setup. Every season, the islanders’ shared living quarters are outfitted with the show’s signature highlighter color scheme, giving the palatial villas an amusingly dormlike quality. Although contestants are usually in their 20s, the series incorporates games and challenges that sometimes make it feel like the passion project of an overzealous freshman-orientation leader.

These elements come directly from the original Love Island, a British dating show that premiered back in 2015. In the time since, viewers around the world have come to appreciate its playful decor and cheerful use of regional slang. The success of Love Island USA is actually part of a pattern that extends well past this one franchise: For several decades, many of America’s most popular reality-TV shows have been heavily influenced by European productions and creative sensibilities. Love Island USA wasn’t an immediate hit when it debuted in 2019, but the franchise’s cultural takeover in the U.S. aptly illustrates why American audiences find British reality series so refreshing.

In an era of global, on-demand streaming, it’s been much easier to simply watch U.K. reality shows—which, broadly speaking, offer a gentler version of competition programming befitting historical stereotypes about proper England and brash America. Upon making it overseas, The Great British Bake Off became an immensely popular comfort watch, with American audiences drawn to its lack of interpersonal turmoil. Domestic adaptations of U.K. shows tend to simplify formats and play up conflict: The American version of Bake Off, with its frenetic visual edits, abrupt music changes, and preference for sound bites over dialogue, is nowhere near as serene as the original. On the more extreme end is something like the U.S. Hell’s Kitchen, the Gordon Ramsay–fronted cooking show, where the celebrity restaurateur is best known as a yelling meme come to life. Ramsay is almost comically unpleasant for American audiences, but that on-screen aggression is far less central to his U.K. series. On YouTube and other streaming platforms, viewers who could do without the overwrought hostility but still enjoy his tell-it-like-it-is demeanor can find episodes of Ramsay’s more congenial British originals almost as quickly as they can queue up MasterChef Junior on FOX.

U.K.-based programs, and the aesthetic preferences of British creators, have also informed modern American television in more subtle ways. In a recent book, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV, the critic Emily Nussbaum chronicles the origins of Survivor and several other American works that shifted the reality-TV genre. Many of them, including shows that were not just re-creations of existing U.K. series, were co-created or developed by British producers. Others derived inspiration from the narrative principles of U.K. shows, which tend to observe from a distance. Survivor, for example, thrived because of an approach that one of its British co-creators described to Nussbaum as “‘situationalism’: building an artificial setting so self-contained that a story was forced to blossom inside it, like a bonsai tree.”

That might sound obvious now, more than three decades into the rise of modern reality TV, but the Survivor format was created just a few years after the first season of MTV’s The Real World in 1992. At the time, the idea of blending cinema verité with carefully constructed artifice had yet to take off. The Real World had established some of the most widely used tools in the genre—as Nussbaum notes, “the shared house, the deliberately diverse ensemble cast, and the ‘confessional.’”And early on, producers nudged the show’s cast members toward juicier interactions from behind the scenes, using a method that Murray’s co-creator, the longtime soap-opera producer Mary-Ellis Bunim, referred to as “throwing pebbles in the pond”—a subtler way of stirring up drama than in some contemporary shows, which occasionally play out as though producers are directly feeding storylines into cast members’ mouths.

The impact of The Real World on all reality programming can’t really be overstated; in particular, Love Island and other contemporary British reality series sometimes feel like they combine the earnestness of the initial Real World seasons with a modern commitment to chipper, maximalist aesthetics. Perhaps more than any other contemporary reality-dating series, Love Island encourages viewers to toss some glitter-coated pebbles: By downloading the (highly profitable) companion app for each spin-off, audiences can cast votes that affect real-time outcomes on the show.

[Read: The cruel social experiment of reality TV]

For its recent seasons, Love Island USA moved to Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming platform, which enabled it to embrace the low-stakes raunch of its foreign counterpart. (Previous seasons aired on CBS, a broadcast network that’s subject to federal regulations on swear words and depictions of some sex acts.) Love Island U.K. introduced American viewers to British slang through voice-over narration, the islanders’ conversations, and even the villa’s aesthetic—neon signs bore slogans like eat, sleep, crack on, repeat. On Love Island USA, which included a handful of British contestants in this season’s cast, islanders sometimes speak like they’ve just emerged from an immersion course in the same slang—a comical, perhaps inadvertent habit that makes some of their disputes feel especially light-hearted. (“Can I pull you for a chat?” will always sound less ominous than “We need to talk.”) The show also hews closely to the languorous pace of the U.K. original—it airs nearly every weeknight, one of the many reasons the series racked up so many viewing minutes this summer.

These clear connections to the U.K. series help set Love Island USA apart from the cadre of American reality shows that more typically emphasize heartbreak and marriage over whimsy—and makes it way more fun to discover on social media as a new viewer. In the crowded reality-dating arena, this season of Love Island USA also offered audiences something few other shows do—a chance to watch two dark-skinned Black women actually experience romance (and have fun with a dynamic cast along the way). And last week, for the first time since Love Island launched nine years ago, the British show joined its U.S. spin-off in awarding a Black couple the season’s top spot—a coincidence that fans on either side of the pond have been celebrating online and citing as a way to draw in even more first-time viewers.

In a sense, Love Island’s popularity isn’t remarkable—it’s just the most obvious recent example of how young people latch onto cultural products that connect them to a highly engaged, diverse fandom. The franchise has brought a welcome dose of liveliness to the reality-TV landscape, deviating from the high stakes of American dating shows such as 90-Day Fiancé and The Ultimatum by undermining the reality-TV expectation that contestants will be wholly disinterested in nurturing friendships. Elimination scenes can be brutal, but they’re rarely hostile—contestants seem to find nothing more agonizing than being forced to pick which of their fellow islanders to send home. For viewers, the tension of these moments is tempered by the distinctive, aspirational backdrop, with warm and punny voice-over narration by the Scottish comedian Iain Stirling. No matter what happens, there will almost always be another episode the next evening to smooth things over, like the island tides themselves.