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(Ryan Pfluger / The New York Times) What Ellen’s Kindness Concealed
The recent scandal at her talk show suggests that the host’s smiling facade covers up something dark—and hints at why that facade had to be created in the first place.
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Eli Joshua Ade / HBO What Lovecraft Country Gets Wrong About Racial Horror
The fantastical HBO series imagines white supremacists as literal monsters but fails to make its Black heroes as compelling.
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Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic Pop Culture Failed to Imagine Kamala Harris
Her candidacy meets a culture that, too often, still doesn’t know what to make of women who seek to lead.
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Getty / The Atlantic Ellen’s Celebrity Defenders Aren’t Helping Her
The comedian’s employees say that fame has enabled callousness and abuse on her show. The warm testimonies of her superstar friends highlight their point.
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Netflix Indian Matchmaking Exposes the Easy Acceptance of Caste
Netflix’s popular reality series is a tacit defense of arranged marriages and the role they play in upholding a system of discrimination.
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Shutterstock / The Atlantic Netflix’s ‘Most Popular’ List Is a Wasteland
The ranking reveals a sad reality: People are really bored right now, and that leaves a lot of room for mediocre content to flourish.
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HBO Max The Radical Exposure of Amy Schumer
The miniseries Expecting Amy captures the comedian’s complicated pregnancy with extreme honesty.
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Dominic Valente / Hulu Padma Lakshmi’s New Food Show Is a Trojan Horse
Taste the Nation is breezy in tone, but it exposes the betrayals at the heart of “American” cuisine.
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KangHee Kim Americans Are Living in an Alternate History
As the pandemic has raged on, popular culture has found new ways to ask an old question: What could have been instead?
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NBC / Getty / The Atlantic Saying Goodbye to Law & Order
Growing up, police dramas were my favorite genre to watch. But the stories they told were always at odds with the world that I lived in.
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HBO The Conundrum of a New Perry Mason
A fresh HBO adaptation imbues the classic character with unnecessary darkness and biographical trauma, when what’s most relevant about him has been there all along.
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Getty / The Atlantic What It Means to Understand Bruce Lee
The martial-arts legend looms so large in pop culture that the mundane details of his life feel like a rare treat.
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Merie W. Wallace / HBO Insecure Is Finally Growing Up
Four seasons in, Issa Rae’s HBO show is becoming the friendship study it was always trying to be.
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Sonia Moskowitz / Getty HBO’s Roy Cohn Documentary Is a Lesson for Trump
The new film explores the path of the president’s mentor from relentless aggressor to unwilling victim.
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The Atlantic The Unreality of Cops
For 32 seasons, the longest-running reality show in history sold a valorizing view of police that’s never seemed more out of touch.
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Craig Blankenhorn / Hulu Ramy Meditates on the Pitfalls of Self-Righteousness
The Hulu show’s second season explores how a misguided pursuit of religious redemption can reveal one’s truest, ugliest self.
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YouTube / The Atlantic The Curious Comforts of a YouTube Show About Group Therapy
The bite-size series Group is the latest entry in a genre that has found particular resonance in recent months.
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HBO I May Destroy You Explodes the Idea of Consent
The British writer Michaela Coel’s HBO series is a brilliant drama about an evening that’s more complicated than it seems.
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Netflix Space Force Tells a Terrible Joke About America
And the timing couldn’t be worse.
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Netflix How Is Jeffrey Epstein Still So Elusive?
A new four-part Netflix documentary strains to handle a subject who’s always out of reach.
