will ferrell, kathryn hahn, and paul rudd star in the latest example of “jewface” — The Shrink Next Door — the first three episodes of which released Friday on Apple’s TV+ content farm — is perhaps the most Jewish show currently on air. It is more authentic in its portrayal of Judaism than anything I’ve seen since last year’s adaptation for HBO of Philip Roth’s…

or more accurately to stop dragging its corpse Liberal America, I come before you today, a little bit hung-over from the Emmys, with one simple request: please let Hamilton die. I have just been forced to endure seeing this historically airbrushed monstrosity of Broadway win an Emmy. An Emmy. For…

there was an attempt — Many spoilers for the final season of Brooklyn Nine Nine to follow. In the summer of 2020, I was writing for a nerd interest site called CBR and was assigned to a feature with the headline, “Can Brooklyn Nine-Nine Address This Moment and Still Be Funny?” In it, I argued…

you’re either the boot or the neck — Many spoilers to follow for The White Lotus While the characters of The White Lotus are loathsome to the utmost degree, most of them are clearly capable of at least some introspection, thus rendering moot perhaps the most compelling argument one might make about the white moneyed class: that they…

As millions face homelessness, we can look to small victories from the past year as guides for how we might fight back — As of this writing, the Federal moratorium on evictions, one of the most crucial pandemic relief measures to date, has expired. It expired because both Republicans and Democrats alike decided that the housing rights of millions during a global pandemic and subsequent economic downturn was not of paramount importance. The…

In his new special, recorded alone during the pandemic, Bo Burnham looks late capitalism in the face and laughs until he screams — Bo Burnham, as he reflects in his new special for Netflix, was once nothing more than a bored kid stuck in a bedroom looking for any way outside, and like many millennials now in their early 30s, alighted to YouTube as a medium for escape. In those halcyon, primeval days…

On Blake Bailey, Philip Roth, and the culture of misogyny in artistic industries — Art is always beautiful. Even when it is created out of great pain, even when it depicts or is about suffering, it is not created for us to suffer. If we do suffer from it, we suffer beautifully. We suffer aesthetically. Anyway, this Blake Bailey guy seems like a real…

JK Rowling, generational storytelling, and transphobia — When my ultra-conservative mother forbade Harry Potter to me as a child, in a twist of irony that would not occur for twenty years, she used an argument logically identical to the one its author uses today against trans folk. She told me that Harry Potter, a children’s series about…

More Zack Snyder, less Justice League — What is most notable about Zack Snyder’s Justice League isn’t really the film itself, but the story of its making. It is, ultimately, a redemption story for its creator. Many film productions have been marred by studio interference, reshoots, and the midstream switching of directorial horses, but not since Apocalypse…