AMC’s newest British import, the four-part drama The Salisbury Poisonings, is a dystopia with a bucolic English setting, and the disconnect between the two is where the show’s slow creep of horror begins. On an ordinary street, a man and a woman quietly convulse on a park bench. Later, workers in ghostly white hazmat suits swab hastily abandoned cups of tea for signs of contamination. Swans, one police officer reports, are “behaving strangely.

It feels as if the world is on fire—and it is. In the last days of the Trump administration, U.S. government scientists announced that 2020 was one of the two hottest years in recorded history. The other hottest year was 2016: fittingly, the year that the United States elected Donald Trump president, a disaster for the environment as well as democratic norms.

Editor’s Note: With Lori Gottlieb on book leave, Rebecca J. Rosen, the editor of Dear Therapist, begins another month as The Atlantic’s resident “Dear Therapist” archivist, pointing readers to some of Lori’s most beloved columns. Lori Gottlieb continues to work on her book, and I continue to bring you some “Dear Therapist” wisdom in her stead.