Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
In the summer of 2016, strangers started showing up at a condo in Anaheim, California, expecting sex. A Craigslist ad had invited them. A woman there, it said, wanted to act out a rape fantasy, and any resistance she put up was part of the game. The men were real. The ad was not. … Read more
A few days ago I wrote a preview of this docuseries, and I ended it with a question. Not whether Michael Jackson was guilty or innocent — a jury answered that in 2005 — but a harder one: how did a trial that ended in acquittal on every single count become culturally remembered as … Read more
On May 13, 2026, the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned Alex Murdaugh’s double murder convictions in a unanimous 5-0 ruling. On May 18, Netflix started filming a documentary about it. On May 30 — twelve days later — that documentary was streaming globally. That timeline is the story. Not just the Murdaugh story, though … Read more
The Michael Jackson biopic that dominated box offices earlier this year made a choice that everyone noticed: it told the story of the music, the performances, the rise, and mostly stepped around the trial. That choice was a commercial calculation as much as a creative one, and it worked. But it left something unresolved, … Read more