Anyone who has been called a bitch-witch might have predicted the show’s big twist: there is absolutely no right way to wield your power.
TV
Editor: Sarah Kessler
Past Editor: Liz Maynes-Aminzade
Don’t Listen to Morals, Listen to Vegetables
Making food joyful—even while educating on food insecurity—is a tall order for a children’s show. But Waffles + Mochi is a show like no other.
Nuclear Noir
At its core, noir is a feeling: realizing one’s own helplessness, when faced with the vast networks of power that control everyday life.
Twelve Moral Axioms on Ryan Murphy’s Oeuvre
“I don’t quite know what Murphy means by baroque or what he means by camp, but Murphy has never been able to discern tone.”
The Broken Promises of “Bridgerton”
The show portrays a racially diverse society, but papers over white-supremacist interracial sexual assault and violence. Was there another way?
Meritocracy Is a Dystopia
Netflix Brazil’s 3% presents a desperate future city that nevertheless proclaims its citizens all have an equal shot at success. Sound familiar?
No Escape
What if comfort TV brought no comfort? Even the most innocuous shows can transform into horror, when the monster of racism bursts onto the scene.
Binging the Borderlands
Contemporary TV series that take on Latinx life have increasingly embraced the complexity of their subject matter.
What Is the Genre of Rape?
While some progress has been made, TV is still trying to figure out how to tell the stories of male-identified rape survivors.
Wrongworld
Even with its ambitious and compelling premise of robot revolution, HBO’s Westworld lacks the imagination to follow the story to its logical outcomes.
“Lovecraft Country”: A Spell Gone Awry
Lovecraft Country runs on a formula: genre clichés—however racist—only need to be painted over, so as to be enjoyed without guilt.
The Kardashians’ Multiracial White Supremacy
The many faces of the Kardashians are the many faces of the monstrous hydra of blackface. They must be critiqued to a cultural halt.
Facing Our Demons
I May Destroy You explores how sexual violation is entangled in relations of visuality.
Settler Fantasies, Televised
House-hunting and home-improvement TV shows are premised on the settler fantasy of property ownership—and that fantasy’s relationship to whiteness.
Tele-visionary Blackness
Black folks can call into being an alternative relationship to TV, one that prompts a shift in consciousness and just possibly alters the future.
Democracy, More or Less
What future does democracy have? What future should it have? And, moreover, can the problems of democracy be solved within the framework of democratic politics?
Emily Dickinson, “The Greatest Freak of Them All”?
Does viewing Emily Dickinson as unusual actually help us understand the poet or her work better?
What “PEN15” Has Joined Let No Man Tear Asunder
While today’s female-friendship narratives celebrate the central bond, they are mainly about the art of breaking up.
Distant TV
If television is giving you something right now, what might it be telling you about what you need?
Watching the End Times from the Good Place
Television responded to our cultural—and planetary—existential crisis with The Good Place.