Barack Obama abandoned his commitments to unions, and many top staffers went to work for the gig economy. In his Netflix series Working, the former president bears witness to workers’ suffering as if it were immutable.
The conformity of 1950s film and television was the result of the successful McCarthyist purge of leftists — and their genres — from the entertainment industry. The life of socialist screenwriter Very Caspary shows how it was done and what was lost.
Succession is heading toward its series finale, having settled into a portrait of how the ultrarich’s quest for limitless accumulation crowds out any semblance of humanity. The show is the most potent piece of class critique on TV in recent memory.
Succession's idea of a media executive personally picking a winner is no longer all that shocking. The recent defamation lawsuit Fox News settled revealed that Rupert Murdoch had been directly involved in making calls for the network.
In the new series White House Plumbers, a brilliant send-up of the Watergate scandal, Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux star as Richard Nixon’s bumbling covert operators. It's approaching a Coen brothers level of satiric genius.
Dead Ringers, which premieres on Friday, is subversive, sometimes shockingly gory, and a needful skewering of the U.S. medical system, the unethically wealthy, and perhaps most of all, the women society lauds as the arbiters of feminism.
Spread the word