Portside

 Little America wants to give its episodes extra meaning by being based on truth, because, especially right now, it is heartrending and lovely to see stories about American immigrants that are based on real lives.

The series is a long, poisoned bath in male toxicity. It was one of the best new dramas of the year.

The Mandalorian is uninterested in diapers, and so Mando gets to be a very particular image of fatherhood: the guy who doesn’t have to sweat the small stuff. It’s wish fulfillment, a fantasy of parenting stripped of all detail and specificity.

After a flop film, Philip Pullman’s trilogy of novels have now been made into a BBC/HBO TV series – and its fairytale story could not be more relevant to 2019, writes David Jesudason.

The first three seasons of The Expanse are largely concerned with how class structures and oppressive politics replicate themselves, even in the far reaches of space.

Superstore illustrates the precarious nature of unions in a retail environment with an episode that takes on the vagaries of organizing and negotiations.

Midge ultimately struck a nerve with a lot of women not because she is “perfect” but because she is, as Roxane Gay might say, a decidedly, “bad feminist.”

“This Extraordinary Being” reveals that the show's America’s first costumed crime fighter was William Reeves, the childhood survivor of the destruction of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Black Wall Street, and a queer black man.

From the artist standpoint, the influx of private equity into the music business raises the temperature as well. Swift may have hit an industry nerve by pointing to how the Carlyle Group financed Braun's acquisition of Big Machine.

We get a crash course in how the bounty-hunting system works, complete with the Bounty Hunters Guild taken extremely literally as an actual unionized workforce of bounty hunters. There are labor disputes over clients refusing to pay guild rates.