Today's Liberal News

Sophie Gilbert

MomTok Is the Apotheosis of 21st-Century Womanhood

If you’re interested in modern beauty standards, the social value of femininity, and the fetishization of mothers in American culture, Hulu’s recent reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a rich, chaotic product. I watched the entire series in a couple of days, gasping and Googling, shriveling inwardly every time I caught a glimpse of my haggard self in the mirror compared with these lustrous, bronzed, cosmetically enhanced women.

Why The Bear Is So Hard to Watch

For all the time The Bear spends gazing at its protagonist, Jeremy Allen White’s seraphic, tormented chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, I’m hard-pressed to say what its third season has imparted about him that we didn’t already know.

Hacks Goes for the Jugular

In 2014, six months before she died, Joan Rivers made a triumphant return to NBC’s The Tonight Show, marking the first time she’d been featured on the show since the 1980s. Regal in black sequins and an obscene amount of emeralds, she carried a doughnut pillow with her as a visual gag and proceeded to reduce Jimmy Fallon to hysterics with jokes about her aging vagina. When Fallon broached the subject of her long absence, she briefly broke character. “I was banned for 26 years,” she said.

The Story That’s Holding Taylor Swift Back

The year was 2006. Popular music was, for women, a pretty desolate landscape. Songs such as “My Humps” and “Buttons” served up shimmering, grinding strip-pop, while dull, minor-key objectification infused “Smack That,” “Money Maker,” and similar tracks. In the video for “London Bridge,” the singer and former child star Fergie gave a lap dance to a silent, immotive King’s Guardsman, barely pausing to lick his uniform. For “Ms.

Is This the End for Bluey?

This article contains spoilers for the Bluey episode “The Sign.”
A few weeks ago, I found myself, fairly late at night, Googling Is Bandit Heeler depressed? This is, I admit, a ridiculous thing to wonder about a cartoon dog, but what can I say? The vibes had just been off for the patriarch of Bluey, Disney+’s wildly popular show about a family of Australian Blue Heelers. In “Stickbird,” something is clearly bothering Bandit, to the point where he’s grouchy and detached on a family vacation.

Let’s Never Do This to Edith Wharton Again

Edith Wharton’s unfinished 1938 novel, The Buccaneers, occupies much of its second half with the unhappy marriage of Annabel, an innocent American aesthete, and the Duke of Tintagel, a small, easily slighted man whose life’s passion is repairing clocks.

Russell Brand Wasn’t an Anomaly

In the summer of 1999, when I was 16 years old, I remember walking to a train station in West London from a babysitting job when a 40-something man in a Range Rover pulled up, told me he was on television, and then announced to his young son (also in the car) that I was “Daddy’s new girlfriend.

An Absurdly Unrelatable Show Has a Relatable Moment

This article contains spoilers through Season 2 Episode 10 of And Just Like That.And Just Like That, like no other show in our admittedly depleted television universe right now, is simultaneously a riot, a rout, and an utterly chaotic melange of small-scale storytelling and high—but-literally-am-I-high—fashion.

Will We Remember Succession or Ted Lasso More?

This article contains spoilers through the series finales of Succession and Ted Lasso.Succession ended on Sunday with a series finale whose title, like the three season finales before it, was taken from a John Berryman poem, “Dream Song 29.” Before the episode aired, there was widespread speculation about whether the poem alluded to any particular revelation.

The Most Compelling Female Character on Television

The last time we saw Happy Valley’s Catherine Cawood, she was trying—and quite magnificently failing—to capture one of her police-force colleagues, the nebbishy John Wadsworth, who’d finally been implicated in the murder of his lover. The pursuit is a bleak comedy of errors: Directed by her superiors not to pursue John down train tracks, Catherine mutters “bollocks” and follows him anyway. The pair end up on a bridge in relentless rain.

Succession Finally Did It

This article contains spoilers through the third episode of Succession Season 4. He is … not risen?I think? For three-plus seasons, Logan Roy has ducked and weaved his way past near fatalities—a hemorrhagic stroke, multiple corporate coup attempts, a congressional investigation, a troublesome UTI, a collapse in the Hamptons—like a hirsute, cashmere-clad Road Runner. Hostile board meeting? Meep meep. Attempted patricidal veto under the Tuscan sun? Fuck off.

The Real Succession Endgame

This story contains spoilers through the first episode of Succession Season 4.Who is Logan Roy, really? What can we say definitively about him now, at the beginning of the fourth and final season of Succession, that we couldn’t have easily observed at the show’s start? He’s irascible. He hates his children. He “loves” his children.

Nora Ephron’s Revenge

In the 40 years since Heartburn was published, there have been two distinct ways to read it. Nora Ephron’s 1983 novel is narrated by a food writer, Rachel Samstat, who discovers that her esteemed journalist husband is having an affair with Thelma Rice, “a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed.

The Calamitous Lies of Adulthood

In Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults, the narrator—an adolescent girl named Giovanna—begins her story by recounting the time she heard her father tell her mother “that I was very ugly.” This statement is technically untrue, and an introduction to the novel’s tricky manipulations. What she actually overhears her father say is that she’s “getting the face of Vittoria,” his estranged sister.

The Erudite, Absurd White Lotus Finale

This article contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of The White Lotus.In an interview with NPR’s Fresh Air last week, the writer and director Mike White suggested that his hit HBO series The White Lotus had less in common with most prestige TV dramas than with the network shows of his youth: Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, Laverne & Shirley. I appreciate his lack of pomposity, but this is total stronzata, as one of the artichoke-wielding di Grasso women might say.

Whose Midlife Crisis Is It, Anyway?

The television series Fleishman Is in Trouble begins upside down, with the camera soaring over an inverted Manhattan skyline—squat brick buildings in the top half of the frame, hazy blue sky below. It’s an appropriately destabilizing introduction for a show that’s constantly pulling the rug out from underneath us. The series is untrustworthy, in the best kind of way: It withholds and obscures and implies until it doesn’t.

The Exquisite Pain of Monogamous Life

Being really, honestly surprised, especially these days, can feel thrilling—which is what makes Mammals, the new Prime Video series from the Tony-winning playwright Jez Butterworth, so hard to write about. There’s a revelation at the very end that turns the entirety of what we’ve just seen on its head; rewatching the first few episodes after that, which I did, was a bracingly new experience.

TV’s Last Truly Unbothered Show

On an atypically sunny morning in April, an octogenarian actor rested her eyes on a black leather couch in an Airbnb in Blackpool, a seaside town on England’s northwestern coast known for its risqué postcards and dilapidated Victorian grandeur. The house, whose aesthetic fell somewhere between canary-yellow cheer and acid comedown, was in fact filled with grandmotherly women, immaculately groomed, swaddled in beige knits, drinking tea and waiting for their close-ups.

No One Performed Britishness Better Than Her Majesty

There’s an episode of—please bear with me here—the children’s animated television series Peppa Pig in which Peppa, the fearless porcine queen of toddler hearts everywhere, meets another queen, one who lives in a palace and wears a crown, and might be, one of Peppa’s friends suggests, “the boss of all the world.” At first encounter, this queen sits on a throne, knitting; she speaks in clipped, commanding tones.

The Glaring Flaw at the Heart of House of the Dragon

This article contains spoilers through the first episode of House of the Dragon.While I was parsing how I felt about House of the Dragon, HBO’s lavish, sweeping new entry in the Game of Thrones universe, I came across an interview given to the Daily Mail by an alleged “Hollywood executive” connected to the series.

How Should Feminists Have Sex Now?

When the activist and writer Ellen Willis published “Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution” in 1982, the preposition in her title underscored an uncomfortable truth: The sexual revolution had come and (mostly) gone and left women largely unsatisfied. On the one hand, the ’60s and ’70s had ushered in real, tangible gains. Contraception and abortion had been legalized; the stigmas surrounding casual and extramarital sex had lessened.

Stranger Things Isn’t TV. It’s Something Else.

This article contains light spoilers through the fourth season of Stranger Things.Somehow, even thousands of viewing minutes in, my synapses numbed by a cinematic universe so squelchy that it induces visceral anxiety, I still don’t really know how to feel about Stranger Things. It’s hard to even say exactly what it is. TV watchers today are accustomed to streaming works that coalesce, murkily, somewhere between film and television.

The Problem of English Identity

The week I saw Jerusalem, the West End revival of Jez Butterworth’s extraordinary 2009 play, London was still cleaning up after a days-long ruckus celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, the 70th anniversary of her reign. In my neighborhood, tattered bunting clung weakly to lampposts and gathered dirt under car tires at the side of the road. I picked bits of plastic flags and ice-cream wrappers out from my window boxes.

The Calamity of Unwanted Motherhood

The protagonist of Penelope Mortimer’s 1958 novel, Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting, is a 37-year-old housewife named Ruth, who is sliding into a madness of midlife suffocation and despair. Alone in her kitchen early in the novel, Ruth drinks gin and tentatively confesses to an imagined listener the source of all her angst. When she married Rex, her trivial bully of a husband, at 18, she was three months pregnant with their daughter, Angela.

Sympathy for the Movie Star

When the writer and director John Morton first heard—via a call from his agent—that the French comedy Call My Agent was being adapted in Britain, it struck him that there were two directions in which the series could go. The French show has drawn a cult following on Netflix over the past few years for its droll, charming portrayal of Parisian film agents and the movie stars who plague and sustain them.

The Cruel Twist of Russian Doll

This article contains spoilers through the second season of Russian Doll.In a much-discussed essay for The New Yorker late last year, the critic Parul Sehgal analyzed the recent ubiquity of the trauma plot; the reliance, in books and on television, on stories that define characters by their pain, their guilt, the weight of their suffering.

Marilyn Manson Told Us What He Was

One of the visual conceits of Phoenix Rising—a new two-part HBO documentary about the actor Evan Rachel Wood’s allegations of abuse at the hands of the rock musician Marilyn Manson—is a series of animated sequences that portray Wood as a cherubic, Alice-like doll and Manson as a macabre monster whose darkness infects and imprisons her. It’s a curiously heavy-handed choice, as though Wood’s raw testimony weren’t enough.

The Show That Made Single Motherhood Into Art

Over five seasons of television, Pamela Adlon’s FX series, Better Things, has been a tribute to keeping on when you can’t anymore, and to all the people—many of them women—who carry their families because no one else will. The show is about, Adlon told me in her gravelly drawl over Zoom last month, “this woman who constantly almost gets her foot in the door, but then the door closes, and it’s funny, and it doesn’t kill her.

When Work Is a Terrifying Dystopia

Many people’s experience of work over the past two years, amid a global pandemic, has been one of invasion: Their job has infiltrated the personal sphere, colonizing space that used to be distinct. Apple TV+’s new series Severance jarringly reverses this impression. The show’s setup imagines a complete split between work and life, a “severance” between one’s professional and private selves.

An American Age of Greed Should Have Been Perfect TV Fodder

The Gilded Age made its debut on HBO on January 24, which is also the writer Edith Wharton’s birthday—a detail that’s hard to ascribe to coincidence. Not only does the drama borrow Wharton’s milieu of 1880s New York City, but the show’s creator is also a self-proclaimed Whartonite.