Television

The latest episode of “Poker Face” solidifies it: Rian Johnson’s work as a visual storyteller is fundamentally conservative. Johnson, infamous among fanboys for “The Last Jedi,” is probably best known for the “Knives Out” films. The…

After the first two episodes of HBO’s “The Last of Us” proved faithful to the eponymous video game, the third installment veered sharply from the source material in its portrayal of characters Bill (Nick Offerman), a cantankerous doomsday…

There have been a lot of TV shows set in Chicago. Maybe its big-shoulders reputation, mixed in with the cultural panache that earns it the title of Capital of the Midwest, makes it alluring to Hollywood writers. Not many shows get it right,…

The ongoing trend of mass domestic migration from blue states to red states, especially in the wake of Covid, has fundamentally altered the source of economic activity and growth from coastal states such as California and New York to states…

The first episode of the long-awaited adaptation of “The Last of Us,” a prestige TV zombie story based on a popular video game of the same name, premiered this past weekend on HBO. The critical buzz had been fierce the preceding week and…

If the pop culture offerings of 2022 that garnered the highest accolades share only one quality, let’s call it self-loathing. Not just self-loathing, but a recoiling upon itself, at the deepest level, of the privileged class. How many…

Over the past decade, the term “peak TV” has become shorthand for an ever-increasing barrage of TV series being produced. Variety reported last week that 2022 tallied a total of 2,024 original shows released. That figure is finally expected…

When popular action heroes like James Bond and Ethan Hunt have dominated what most people think of as the spy genre, it’s understandable that most people have no clue what spies actually do — namely, infiltrate dangerous places and collect…

HBO’s “White Lotus” is the sharpest commentary on western decay in popular culture, a subtle and subversive invasion of America’s favorite medium. As the second season proved again on Sunday, Mike White challenges limp modern assumptions…

It’s no secret that the American entertainment industry is an entity almost entirely dedicated to generating profit off of the dissemination of regime-backed ideology. Unless you have the bliss of complete ignorance, you should be well…