Portside

In an era where more scripted shows are being produced than ever before — why aren’t we trying to make more shows like the HBO classic?

Watching “I Love Dick” is like attending an exhibition for which the artist has supplied her own curator’s notes. It’s an experience as much as a story: arresting, disorienting and provocative. It’s also very conscious of explaining to you how and why it arrests, disorients and provokes.

Here’s how the scene plays out. As the sharply dressed god paces back and forth in front of the believers who summoned him, he lays out a terrifying vision of what the future holds for them and their descendants: slavery, torture, death, and hundreds of years of being screwed over by structural racism.

The system that the Hulu series operates within shows there were laws to protect property, but not women and certainly not sex workers.

“Guerrilla” is a who’s who of 1970s radical movements, and by Episode 2 a flow chart is required to keep up with the revolutionary networks at play: The Weather Underground. Black Panthers. German Marxist-Leninists. Rhodesian revolutionaries. The Front de libération du Québec (yes, even Canada was radical in those days).

In the wrenching fifth episode of the series, Reggie gets into a fight with a white character who uses the N-word at a party, then winds up held at gunpoint by the campus police. As Richardson explained, the episode, which was directed by Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins, rejiggered the structure of the show and forced the writers to figure out a new way forward.

Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel lays bare the horrors of collusion with the patriarchy.

Part 2 of Baz Luhrmann’s Netflix series about hip-hop’s origins continues the squandering of great material and talent.

Big Little Lies and the problems of whiteness, access, class, and privilege intersecting with feminism.

If you really want to understand how Moscow sees U.S. intelligence, turn off the congressional hearings and start watching “Adaptation.”