Critics’ Conversation: A Gloomy Small-Screen Spring

DANIEL FIENBERG With the second Trump term crossing the threshold of what has been an, um, “eventful” first 100 days, TV viewers find ourselves back in a familiar position: Are we turning to television for escapism or for provocative examinations of The Way We Live Now?

More and more, I’m feeling a blurring, an inability to escape into things that were once blissfully brainless. RFK Jr.’s doom crusade to turn autism into some kind of amorphous epidemic has cast a shadow over the most effective arc in the 48th season of Survivor: the inspiring friendship between Eva, the show’s most publicly identified contestant with autism, and Joe. Top Chef took its production to Toronto for what initially looked like a celebration of Canadian identity and culinary tradition, only to sacrifice specificity and reduce Our Neighbor to the North to something eerily close to, as Trump says, our “51st State.” The return of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, an HBO show about discomfort, has gained currency from an aviation-themed plotline that emerged in the middle of a mini-panic about recent flight-related disasters.

It’s everywhere. Disney+’s Star Wars series franchise has gone from the family-friendly frivolity of Skeleton Crew to the second and final season of Andor, a show about revolution in which the alien creatures are giving political speeches, and even a family wedding is saturated in “Eat the Rich” excess. FX/Hulu made a sex comedy that was really about death (Dying for Sex), while Hulu made a gay sitcom that, because of the passing of co-star Linda Lavin, became a meditation on mortality (Mid-Century Modern). Even a show that was already mostly about death (and mushrooms) has become even more about death — specifically one major death — in its second season (HBO’s The Last of Us).

Am I hypersensitive or is subtext becoming text up and down the dial?

ANGIE HAN I’ve found it very difficult to watch Andor and not notice the parallels to the rise of fascism in the real world. Or to watch The Rehearsal and not think about the gutting of the FAA. Or to watch Netflix‘s Adolescence and not fret about the rise of the manosphere.

Disney+’s Daredevil: Born Again centers on a literal criminal getting elected to public office. Netflix’s Black Mirror is back trying its best to hit too close to home. Even Apple TV+’s hilarious The Studio provokes some depressing reflections on the dire state of Hollywood, which probably really is two weeks out from announcing a Kool-Aid franchise.

I’m sure not everyone watching these shows thinks of them in this way — the fact that every new Star Wars release comes with a fresh cycle of discourse about whether the franchise is too “woke” now, or whether it’s actually always been political, is evidence that plenty of people are capable of completely compartmentalizing their entertainment diet from their news diet. But I’m clearly not alone. So I find myself wondering what we’re getting out of watching stuff like this, that reminds us of the very stuff you’d presume we’d want to escape.

I think when I’m watching these shows (or stuff like Dying for Sex that focus on more intimate tragedies), it just feels nice to have my own fears or worries affirmed and reflected, but with the safety rail of a narrative to give them shape, momentum, purpose. When the unimaginable befalls Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us, we presume it’s at least in service of the larger plot, a grander theme or a payoff down the line. There’s no such guarantee in real life.

In that sense, I guess these shows still count as escapes of a sort for me — even if they’re not ones as overtly soothing as Netflix’s empty but picturesque Ransom Canyon or the streamer’s differently empty and differently picturesque The Four Seasons.

FIENBERG In this moment of arbitrary tariffs and plummeting 401(k)s, banal conspicuous consumption has begun to feel insidious in its own way. The friends in Tina Fey’s The Four Seasons go on four elaborately planned group vacations every year, even though there’s no evidence any of them actually like one another. Must be nice! At least Your Friends and Neighbors recognizes that the idle rich are so unsympathetic these days that they deserve to be the victims of petty larceny, provided the cat burglar in question is as gruffly charming as Jon Hamm.

While it’s been easy to project our current reality onto spring’s fictional small-screen offerings, it doesn’t feel like audiences are embracing actual real-life stories right now. HBO produced a third installment of the seminal Eyes on the Prize franchise, chronicling evolutions in the Civil Rights movement since the late ’70s and proposing recipes for fomenting revolution today, but most people aren’t aware it exists — much less that it’s essential viewing. And there wasn’t any buzz around Alex Gibney’s The Dark Money Game, a two-part HBO docuseries that managed to be meekly repetitive and yet, in its own way, useful for understanding how the erosion of campaign finance regulations has contributed to every ethical lapse in our political system.

HBO indeed barely acknowledged The Dark Money Game, and who could blame them? It’s easier to sell the Andor version of the same lecture, which comes equipped with TIE fighters, sympathetic androids and the looming threat of a soon-to-be-operational Death Star. The only thing more powerful than The Force, in fact, may be the Netflix algorithm, which combined with widespread critical acclaim to drive countless viewers to a four-hour drama about a murderous British boy and the society that failed him. Or maybe we’re all just like Seth Rogen’s character in The Studio and love a good oner.

So Angie, what hasn’t been filling you with despair this spring?

HAN Three words: North of North. Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and Stacey Aglok MacDonald’s Inuit coming-of-quarterlife comedy (released by Netflix in the U.S. and the CBC and APTN in Canada) is one of those sweet surprise discoveries that can make this job so fun: a low-key gem starring no one incredibly famous, with no marketing campaign I’m aware of, that has nevertheless turned out to be one of the most straightforwardly likable things I’ve seen this year. Despite being set in literally the Arctic, its mood is all warmth — toward the community and culture it’s set in, and toward the lively cast of characters anchored by the winsome Anna Lambe. It’s not so rosy-eyed as to avoid sadder, harder topics entirely (the painful history of residential schools is brought up more than once, for instance). But if you’re looking for a small-screen escape, this one’s about as sunny as they come.

Elsewhere, I’ve been enjoying the latest season of Max’s Hacks. Even if the love-hate dynamic between Ava and Deborah has become predictably cyclical, the chemistry between Hannah Einbinder and Jean Smart never gets boring — and besides, there’s still plenty of fresh blood in the form of new characters like Randi (Robby Hoffman, who, between this and Dying for Sex and her marriage to The Traitors‘ Gabby Windey, is having a hell of a 2025). And I’ve been as surprised as anyone to find myself taking solace in (a heavily fictionalized version of) the White House, in the form of Uzo Aduba’s quirky comic murder mystery, The Residence.

What’s been sparking joy — as we were saying I swear not that long ago — for you?

FIENBERG Same three words: North of North. It’s distinctive and charming, and Lambe is a total star. Do I wish it was just a hair funnier? Perhaps, but likability goes a long way, and this fusion of Northern Exposure, Reservation Dogs and Schitt’s Creek is a sweet, but not cloyingly sweet, corrective to so much of what’s dark and brooding in the world and on TV.

I also really enjoyed Hulu’s crime comedy Deli Boys, which is probably too violent to count as “escapism”; the lead performances by Saagar Shaikh and Asif Ali are very amusing, while the frequently underused Poorna Jagannathan is having a blast as the deliciously vicious Lucky. Give me this version of Philadelphia mayhem over the glum Long Bright River or Dope Thief any day.

And the third episode of this season’s The Rehearsal? Not to oversell it, but it may be the funniest, weirdest, most head-scratching episode of TV ever made — a perfect complement to our absurd moment, if not a distraction from it.

HAN It feels somehow like both, doesn’t it? It begins with an actual, serious issue — airline safety — and then mutates into something several orders of magnitude more insane than anything you, an unsuspecting viewer who is not Nathan Fielder, ever could have imagined. I loved every cuckoo-bananas moment of it. But if that sense of being rapidly unmoored from any recognizable reality doesn’t feel like 2025, I don’t know what does.

This story appeared in the May 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.