Tag: final season
The Crown’s Finale Shows Why the Monarchy Is Eternal
I’m going to miss The Crown. At its best, it has been alternately soothing, nostalgic, and educational, and even at its worst, it has always been well acted and gorgeous.
Unfortunately, the second half of the sixth and final season is very much The Crown at its worst. These six episodes, released yesterday on Netflix, are an unfocused canter around the paddock of the late 1990s and early 2000s: Prince William turns 18, Prince Charles finally makes an honest
The 15 Best TV Shows of 2022
Television has always been a tether—to other people and to ourselves. In 2022, a year of turmoil and uncertainty, TV has provided something even more essential: a lifeline. Some shows reflected the moment’s surreality back to us. Some made us see other people in slightly new ways. Some offered escapism through larger-than-life story lines. At their best, the TV shows of 2022 revealed human truths through fiction. They made us laugh. They made us think. They offered some refuge from
‘Queen Sugar’ Is the Most Luxurious Show on Television
In the Season 2 opener of the OWN drama Queen Sugar, a teenaged Micah West (played by Nicholas Ashe) is pulled over in his luxury sports car for what appears to be an instance of driving while Black. After he’s released into the custody of his parents, the estranged couple argues in the parking lot. Meanwhile, when Micah’s Aunt Nova (Rutina Wesley) comes to comfort him, she notices that the boy has urinated on himself. “Ain’t nothin’ to be
The Fall of Roe and the Curse of Forced Motherhood
The uterus has long doubled as a political tool. Summoned as a metaphor—for emptiness, for deficiency, for obligation—it has conflated a body part with womanhood, and used the logic of maternal sacrifice to limit women’s lives. Mental stimulation, some 19th-century doctors argued, could harm their reproductive systems. Exercise could, too. We might laugh, today, at the transparency of such tactical ignorance, but our smugness would be premature. The uterus, idealized into a means of degradation, is precisely what the Supreme
‘Bel-Air’ and the Flawed Logic of ‘Black Excellence’
A pair of massive double doors swing open, and a teenage Will Smith (played by Jabari Banks) walks into his aunt and uncle’s palatial Bel-Air home, where a big-dollar cocktail-party fundraiser is taking place. The soulful hip-hop song “A Lot,” by 21 Savage, soundtracks the scene. “How much money you got? (A lot),” the lyrics recite, seemingly narrating Will’s awe as he clocks the material evidence of the Banks-family fortune. “Yo! I got some rich-ass relatives,” he says. This scene
How Issa Rae Built the World of ‘Insecure’
Sitting in a New York City hotel room with a plastic flute full of prosecco and strappy black Manolo Blahnik heels resting near her bare feet, Issa Rae looks like the kind of woman who would have petrified an earlier avatar of herself. If you remember J, the endearingly cringe-inducing protagonist of Rae’s early-2010s YouTube series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, then you know she was a far cry from the woman who now has her face
‘Dickinson’ and the Power of the Anachronistic Period Piece
Emily Dickinson’s life, according to the show Dickinson, had a lot more gay sex and twerking than your middle-school English class would have had you believe. And, from what we now know of the reclusive poet’s life, at least half of that is true.
The Apple TV+ cult hit—now in its third and final season—retells Dickinson’s life by pairing a modern knowledge of her lifelong relationships with a modern set of anachronisms: The 19th-century residents of Amherst, Massachusetts, dance