Of all the tawdry delights in “Verity” — Michael Showalter’s adaptation of bestselling author Colleen Hoover’s massively popular psychological thriller — the best and most unexpected is how well the film hides its secrets. Now, don’t get me wrong: The movie isn’t exactly garnering Oscar buzz, or even eliciting the fervent “you’ve got to see this!” refrain that followed 2014’s “Gone Girl” around. “Verity” is trashy fun through and through, and doesn’t try to elevate itself past that pulpy baseline. But Showalter and the movie’s screenwriter, Nick Antosca, are skilled in the art of misdirection. They know how to surprise, and they use their trio of actors to do it cleverly.

Take Anne Hathaway, fresh off a string of box-office smashes in “The Odyssey,” “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” “The End of Oak Street” and “Mother Mary.” (Alright, the last one made a few pennies and a nickel, but we can dream.) This year alone, Hathaway has repeatedly proven her versatility, jumping between gun-toting moms, tortured pop stars and struggling journalists. In “Verity,” she plays the titular character, Verity Crawford, the author of a string of hit thriller novels who’s been mysteriously incapacitated after a car accident and can’t finish her final three books.

To complete the series, Verity’s publisher taps little-known writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), who agrees to step into Verity’s place using her copious notes. While Johnson’s elasticity as a performer is a bit more contentious, I’ve always found her choices fascinating — oscillating between rom-coms, superhero films and arthouse horror with the bat of a mascara’d eye. “Verity” is no different, allowing Johnson to move her character between suspicion and warmth with languid ease as she settles into Verity’s Vermont home to work.

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But the key piece to the “Verity” puzzle is Josh Hartnett, who plays Verity’s put-upon husband, Jeremy, with all the unnerving capriciousness a film like this demands. Here, Hartnett’s character exists in flux, somewhere between his old life and a new start. He’s both charming and chilling, expertly using a near-imperceptible shift in expression or tone to keep the audience on their toes. With Hartnett weaving through the entire story, it’s nearly impossible to get a handle on what’s really going on in “Verity.” And that volatility is what makes the film so exciting, even when it goes full-tilt cheesy.

This is nothing new for Hartnett, who’s spent the last few years enjoying a well-deserved career renaissance, following up his role in “Verity” with a starring role in Netflix‘s supernatural thriller miniseries, “Below.” Once the quintessential ’90s heartthrob, Hartnett has parlayed the goodwill from his hunky idol days into something far more compelling. Though he’s always been a great actor, popping up here and there to elevate material, Hartnett has found an artistic sweet spot, using his effervescent charm and boy-next-door-all-grown-up good looks to subvert expectations. Hartnett stands out among the roster of stubborn, uncompromisingly masculine leading men from his heyday, proving that there’s much more to winning over an audience than simply playing into the public’s perception.

For those who have watched Hartnett grow throughout his career, the actor’s keen yet unassuming abilities surely don’t come as a shock. His late ’90s breakthrough in the triple-hitter lineup of “Halloween: H20,” “The Faculty” and “The Virgin Suicides” catapulted him to international fame practically overnight, cementing his place alongside the era’s Tiger Beat celebrity infatuations. The primary difference between Hartnett and his contemporaries, though, was that Hartnett could hold his own on screen. He may not have had the bona fides of someone like Leonardo DiCaprio, but Hartnett’s work was consistent and appealing. He knew how to play the everyman (or everyteenager), caught up in frequently absurd or abrupt situations beyond his control.

That’s not to say they were all hits, of course. 2002’s “40 Days and 40 Nights,” an offbeat rom-com about a Bay Area web designer who chooses to abstain from sex and masturbation for the duration of Lent, is patently ridiculous and more than a little sexist. But that’s also where Hartnett’s appeal lies. He understands how to use his innate magnetism to charm his way through even the silliest scripts, occasionally creating a dissonance between the film and his performances that makes even the duds memorable. 

These days, I can’t say the same about some of Hartnett’s early peers, like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, who, despite rising to fame earlier than Hartnett, never fully figured out how to separate themselves from their reputation. Both Cruise and Pitt have a death grip on their A-List prestige, hyper-aware of how much the world perceives and enjoys their work. That self-awareness has made their late-period work all too stodgy, selecting roles clearly informed by their notable reputations. Take Pitt’s “F1: The Movie” and this year’s “Heart of the Beast,” where Pitt plays hypermasculine characters whose lives, actions and goals are defined by a relentless desire to come out on top. For someone whose notoriety has twice become inseparable from who he’s married to, Pitt’s choice to play gruff loners feels noticeably calculated, keeping an arm’s distance between his work and the audience. 

In Cruise’s case, artistry seems to have taken a backseat almost entirely. Over the last decade, Cruise has resigned himself to action stardom, writing death-defying stunts into his contracts. Even with “Digger,” Cruise’s most ambitious project in years, he confines himself to a loud, obnoxious character destined to be written about as a “big swing.” The problem is that “Digger” only feels like a big swing because it’s marginally different from what Cruise has been doing lately. Cruise’s ambition is moot if he’s otherwise resigned himself to crowd-pleasers, making his occasional enterprising choices look even more daring.

Comparing Hartnett to actors like Pitt and Cruise might seem like a stretch. But consider that “Verity” topped last week’s box office by a wide margin, leaving “Digger” and “Heart of the Beast” eating its dust. No doubt this is partially due to Hoover’s extreme popularity, and Hathaway and Johnson’s bankability — those are fair elements to incorporate here. But when it comes to the difference in performance among all three leads, there’s really no competition.

 

Hartnett’s work is dynamic and unsettling, making what could be a forgettable tertiary character into an integral part of the story that viewers hold in the back of their minds, even when he’s offscreen. From the start, when Jeremy runs into Lowen on the street before they meet at Verity’s publisher’s office, Hartnett makes Jeremy’s presence feel dubious. His every motive feels ulterior, and his inevitable simmering romance with Lowen resembles a can of worms that could pop open at any moment.

But that’s Hartnett’s great skill. He understands how to keep viewers vigilant, how to shock them and startle them as soon as they think they know where he’s headed. He doesn’t just subvert expectations; he perverts them, creating characters who appear to have rich inner lives and plenty of secrets that the audience may never fully understand. M. Night Shyamalan’s 2024 thriller “Trap” used Hartnett’s expertise to its full potential, crafting a character who could be both a doting dad and a vicious serial killer at the same time. For Hartnett, shading in a complete picture, warts and all, is essential to making a character believable. It’s an old-school way of thinking for the modern era — a belief that the work should be taken seriously but without ever letting the viewer in on how intensely he’s considering it. With Hartnett, what you see is never what you get, at least not fully. And what a delight it is that this world still holds some surprises for us.

The post Josh Hartnett turned heartthrob fame into a career of risks appeared first on Salon.com.

A fictionalized Sam Bankman-Fried is coming to your TV screen on November 19.

“Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” takes a lot of liberties with the truth. But the most egregious one comes in the last fifteen minutes of the eighth and final episode of this portrait of an axe murderer.

At this point the story has jumped to the 1910s, roughly two decades after Lizzie (Ella Beatty) brutally and famously killed her father, Andrew Borden (Charlie Hunnam), and stepmother, Abby (Rebecca Hall). An older, haunted Lizzie, who was acquitted of the crimes in 1893, prays for forgiveness for committing them, something she never publicly admitted to in real life. She subsequently tells Maggie (Vicky Krieps) — her lover/former housekeeper/accomplice to the murders, at least according to “Monster’s” version of events — that she wants to make her notoriety “mean something.” Then the show immediately cuts to a group of suffragettes who have gathered in Borden’s parlor to sing “The March of the Women,” an anthem among the female pioneers who sought to win the right to vote, and got it in 1920.

That’s right, “Monster” wants us to believe that Lizzie Borden ultimately redeemed herself by becoming an active member of the suffragist movement. If you’re currently scratching your head and going, “Huh, I don’t remember that from the musical ‘Suffs,’” that’s because it’s not in there and it isn’t true. But making it seem like Borden played a small role in the successful pursuit of the 19th Amendment — she even announces the news of its passage to a roomful of elated women — brings closure to the narrative thread that this fourth season of “Monster” commits very hard to pulling: that Borden was a feminist hero unfairly ostracized for unleashing her justifiable anger toward her abusive parents and rebelling against the expectations of an inherently misogynistic society.

Throughout its four seasons, “Monster” has routinely played pretty fast and loose with facts. Co-created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, the latter of whom wrote this entire current season, the series sometimes embellishes details to help its audience empathize with the real-life killers it depicts in fictionalized form. (Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers and Ed Gein have been previous subjects.) But there’s something especially absurd about trying to assert the relevance of Lizzie Borden, a woman best known for slicing up her parents, by suggesting that her name belongs in the same sentence as Susan B. Anthony and Ida B. Wells. When the U.S. is approaching a midterm election in which voting rights are being threatened on multiple levels and reproductive rights will very much be on the ballot, it feels especially galling to be so glib.

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On a logical, storytelling level, this development doesn’t even make sense. A few scenes prior to Lizzie’s entry into feminist politics, she realizes the degree to which she has become a public laughing stock and a shameful figure with whom no one wants to be associated. At one point, she actually slaps a young trick-or-treater in the face when she realizes the girl is dressed up as Lizzie Borden for Halloween. The idea that a bunch of women who want to be taken seriously as astute citizens would happily gather in the home of the country’s most famous female murderer, or march for suffrage alongside her, simply does not compute.

This is just one of the ways that “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” attempts to underscore Borden’s significance and influence. As the Ed Gein season did, this one also connects its protagonist to a future murderer inspired by her: Aileen Wuornos, portrayed here with borderline campy intensity by Murphy muse, Sarah Paulson. Wuornos pops up in multiple episodes, including one in which she and her girlfriend Shelby stay at the Lizzie Borden house in the ’80s, when it’s operating as a macabre bed and breakfast. (This never actually happened.) After having sex on the same fainting couch where Lizzie stabbed her father to death (!), Wuornos has a conversation with the ghost of Borden and tells her, “You’re, like, a woman who didn’t take any sh*t.” In an absolutely ridiculous fantasy sequence near the end of this episode, Aileen, Shelby, Lizzie and Maggie dramatically dance together to Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” in the dovecote where Lizzie tended to her beloved birds.

The idea unsubtly conveyed here is that these women are connected by shared, traumatic experiences and resilience in the face of them. Wuornos murdered multiple men after they turned violent while she was working as a prostitute in Florida. During her trial — yes, we get to see some of that in the season finale, because why not? — she insists that she acted in self-defense after being assaulted and raped. Wuornos also was abused throughout her childhood, and so was Borden. In its early episodes, “Monster” depicts the cruelty routinely directed at Lizzie by her heavy-drinking, negligent father and her vile stepmother, who tells her stepdaughter, repeatedly, how useless she is. When Lizzie finally violently chops them up, something that “Monster,” ever infatuated with gore, shows us multiple times, it comes across as an act of self-defense. She’s ultimately acquitted by an all-male jury not because they buy a self-defense plea, but because they don’t believe a woman could be capable of such butchery. Even after unleashing her fury in the most gruesome way possible, Lizzie is somehow still underestimated. In a way, the central argument of “Monster” is nothing more than: “Women: We can kill just as good as men!”

In truth, the experiences of both Borden and Wuornos reflect a reality that existed for women in the 1800s and the 1980s, and still does in 2026: that when women are attacked, society tends to turn a blind eye, which, in some cases, forces those women to resort to extreme measures. If you need a current example of turning a blind eye, look no further than the recently reopened case of alleged gang rape at Cornell University.

 

In a culture that seems more misogynistic with every passing day, the latent rage that burns within so many women — women, by the way, who haven’t resorted to axe-murdering — is a legitimate, real thing, which is why it’s so frustrating to watch “Monster” explore that truth by resorting to telling lies. Those themes come across extremely loudly and very clearly without needing to suggest that when the ladies go to the polls in November, we should whisper a thank you to Lizzie Borden for making it all possible.

“The Lizzie Borden Story” wants us to see Lizzie as the ultimate nasty woman, someone who would have defiantly donned a pink pussy hat had she lived to see Donald Trump get elected. This is not just a stretch; it’s an insult to women who have stood up to their oppressors, and continue to do so, without resorting to violence.

The most honest, self-owning moment in “Monster” is a scene in the final episode where Lizzie visits a bookstore and asks the proprietress to stop selling recently published tomes about her life because “they are full of lies.”

“Miss Borden,” the shop owner says, “I can’t control what’s written about you. And I certainly can’t control the appetite there is to read about you.”

“You’re certainly happy to profit off of it,” Lizzie responds.

“Very much so,” the seller responds. Then she looks into the eyes of her fellow woman and adds: “And you sell well, Miss Borden.”

Based on “Monster’s” popularity on Netflix — it’s been one of the most watched shows on the platform since it debuted in mid-September — Miss Borden still sells well. And the makers of this program are more than happy to reap the benefits of that, even if their story is also full of lies.

The post Lizzie Borden was no suffragist, no matter what Ryan Murphy says appeared first on Salon.com.

The deal brings together two major streaming platforms, Paramount+ and HBO Max, along with networks including CBS, CNN, MTV, TBS, Comedy Central, and Food Network.

Before digesting Zoe Kazan’s seven-part reconsideration of “East of Eden,” I never would have suspected that we, as a society, had been conditioned to misread Cathy Ames, the angel-faced succubus at the broken heart of John Steinbeck’s novel.

Cathy has always had her champions, mind you. The internet is laden with Reddit arguments and academic examinations questioning Steinbeck’s portrait of her beastliness. The author himself was conflicted about her, writing Cathy as a dangerous beauty incapable of empathy in his book, yet expressing how dear she was to him in letters to his editor, Pascal Covici. My English teachers and literature professors were probably too tired to parse such nuance, and I don’t blame them.

Besides, Cathy is not an easy empathy object. She killed her parents, drove a man to suicide when she was young, and shot her way out of marriage and motherhood later. She changed her name to Kate Albey but never changed her ways.

Steinbeck never points to a definitive incitement to explain her behavior, instead writing, “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents” to open a chapter devoted to Cathy’s backstory.

When read in the author’s voice, that seems like a conclusive diagnosis. But to hear Florence Pugh deliver it as Cathy’s belief, and the establishing paradigm of Kazan’s limited series, changes things. Once we discover more about Pugh’s Cathy—once we’ve seen her do the horrible acts I’ve listed—her observation that the only true freedom in this world is economic freedom makes more sense.

“For the modern woman,” she adds to that thought, “that presents a problem.” In her time, and in her opinion, a sensible woman’s paths to financial freedom were limited to hoping for a windfall or making one’s fortune off others’ backs as a madam. In other words, you can be forever reliant on the universe’s mercy or merciless in bending it to fulfill your ambition. That doesn’t magically justify Cathy’s criminality. But she isn’t completely wrong, either.

 

 

Central to both Steinbeck’s novel and Kazan’s update is the author’s interpretation of the Hebrew word timshel, which he translates as “thou mayest.” Adam’s servant, Lee (Hoon Lee), who raises the twin boys Cathy abandons, explains that the term expresses free will. It’s a blessing of agency that sounds much easier to accept when you have more options than Cathy.  Besides, she says in the opening scene’s voiceover while clawing her bloodied, broken body across a dirt field toward the home of Charles Trask (Mike Faist) and his brother Adam (Christopher Abbott), “normalcy” is relative: “Everyone is normal to himself.”

Netflix’s Cathy-centered take on “East of Eden” comes before us at a very different time than the one in which Zoe Kazan’s grandfather Elia introduced his acclaimed 1955 film. It arrives in a season dotted with trauma plots serving as gateways to female rage – some well executed, like Hulu’s extraordinary “Furious,” and others slicked in a messy goo of “been there, done that” tropes, a la “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.”

We’re also witnessing, from a distance, the legal perils of Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts labor and delivery nurse tried, on TV, for killing her three children, all under the age of 5, before attempting suicide in January 2023.  Clancy pleaded not guilty, and her trial recently ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury.

The question of why she did what she did may remain unanswered. During her trial, Clancy’s defense argued that postpartum psychosis drove Clancy out of her mind. The prosecution’s argument is simpler and meaner, almost reminiscent of Steinbeck: Clancy’s actions were premeditated, her way of escaping a life she didn’t want anymore. Now Clancy’s lawyers are arguing she should be found not guilty due to a lack of sufficient evidence that she killed her children, and by lack of criminal responsibility due to insufficient evidence she was not in psychosis at the time. Another status hearing is scheduled for Nov. 2.

(Courtesy of Netflix © 2026)

When Steinbeck first introduced Cathy Ames to the public in 1952, and when Elia Kazan brought his version to the screen three years later, we were only allowed the slightest glimpse into her soul. Elia Kazan’s movie, written by Paul Osborn, barely covers the last third of Steinbeck’s 600-page epic. It also omits Lee and focuses primarily on James Dean’s Cal Trask, one of Cathy’s sons, leaving most of her story to secondhand whispers. When a lawman confirms to Cal the rumor that Cathy, known by then as the nearby town’s madam, Kate, shot his father, Cal muses, “He must have done something to hurt her.”

“No, sir,” the man counters. “He gave her everything that any woman could ask for.”

But how would he know? Zoe Kazan’s Cathy, which closely hews to Steinbeck’s original vision, defies easy assumptions about a woman’s wants and needs. Nothing about her, or the way Pugh plays her, is simple.

“East of Eden” parallels the Biblical story of Cain and Abel first through Adam and Charles Trask, then again through Adam’s twin sons Aron and Caleb. Cathy, meanwhile, deciphers the key to life through Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” a story about a girl like her who survives an upside-down world.

Both Steinbeck and Zoe Kazan infer that something happened to Cathy when she was very young. The filmmaker does this through spare imagery: a man baiting a little girl in a blue dress with sweets, coaxing her to follow him into a dark hole that could lead to Wonderland or much darker places. With this, Cathy’s favorite book and her mysterious violation teach her it’s better to be a predator than prey, to be the queen calling for her the heads of her enemies instead of a man’s pawn.

(Courtesy of Netflix © 2026)

Cathy Ames is a complicated symbol, as the countless people who glommed on to Clancy’s case want her to be. Viewers accustomed to crime stories about perpetrators whose behavior is explained, perhaps even justified, by what they survived may see Clancy as another alleged trauma plot come to life—a sum of biological and social hazards, as Elizabeth Bruenig wrote in The Atlantic.

“And some elements of it seem inarguably true, such as the idea that Clancy’s psychiatric care was woefully uncoordinated,” Bruenig added. “But this theory also has the odd effect of making Clancy the star of her own murder trial, for whom the viewer at home may be encouraged to root, which risks eliding the gravity of what she did.”

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We must be clear that differences between the entirely fictional Cathy and Clancy, a real and suffering person, are vast. But if the best fiction can also be instructive, maybe the last moral of Kazan’s “East of Eden” can help us hold multiple truths at once. Cathy’s reasons for doing terrible things may be understandable, even relatable, while the transgression remains unforgivable. A person may even warn us by crying for help or, as Cathy does, advising those on the verge of falling into her trap to turn back.

“You’re so kind to me, and I’ll only ever bring you trouble,” she purrs when it’s clear that Adam is smitten with her. But he refuses to listen and marries her anyway. When Cathy discovers she’s pregnant, she warns him that she’s going to leave the first chance she gets, even attempting to self-administer an abortion with a knitting needle. Not to worry, a kindly male neighbor assures Adam — her maternal urges will kick right in after the babies are born. They do not.

Instead, Cathy makes good on her many cautions, leaving her wailing infants and bleeding husband behind for a new life and a fortune earned by cunning, a con and poison. But for a few twists of fate, she could be any of us. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Pugh’s exquisite, gorgeously brutal rendition leads more of us to her defense.

“East of Eden” is streaming on Netflix.

 

The post Netflix’s “East of Eden” asks if we’ve misread its monster appeared first on Salon.com.

In 1971, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo set up a fake prison in the basement of a building at Stanford. Twenty-four male college students were selected at random to either be guards or prisoners. Zimbardo hired real police officers to "arrest" the students so that the experiment felt more real. — Read the rest

The post Netflix is remaking the Stanford Prison Experiment as a reality show appeared first on Boing Boing.

Five episodes into Netflix’s “A Different World” sequel, Hillman gets a bomb threat. This is a very real part of life for students at historically black colleges and universities, but that doesn’t make it any less frightening. Everyone gathers at The Pit, including Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison) and Freddie Brooks (Cree Summer) — who are Hillman faculty now  — to talk it out. One student expresses shock at being targeted at a place they chose because they thought they’d feel safe. Another wonders if it’s an inside job.

The person who best sums up the moment is Dwayne’s daughter, Deborah (Maleah Joi Moon), when she says, “It’s all so exhausting. We go to their institutions, they punish us. We try to build our own; they destroy it. We mess up, they use it against us. What is even the point of trying?”

Right now, that statement could and will be read any number of ways.

There’s the threat itself, which echoes similar ones against HBCUs in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s shooting last September. It also recalls 2022, when more than 30 HBCUs were hit with comparable incidents between January and mid-March.

Deborah could just as easily be critiquing the Trump administration’s vacillation between defunding educational opportunities for minority students, citing the DEI boogeyman, and infusing HBCUs and tribal colleges with millions in cash. Great for those higher-learning institutions, but targeting minority grant funding elsewhere ensures, particularly at the Ivies and Big 10 schools, less diverse undergraduate populations at places that weren’t racially or economically diverse in the first place.

To know “A Different World” as it was is to anticipate that this 2026 visit to Hillman, a fictional HBCU, must contend with these real-world concerns. But, returning to the episode in question, what’s just as vital is how its students deal with this crisis. When the waiting becomes almost too much, Deborah starts humming a few bars of a familiar song. More join in, and soon everybody is singing along, dropping the tension enough to relax a little.

A few breaths later, the lockdown ends. Everyone resumes their business, carrying with them the lesson of never sacrificing their spirit even while living in a state of constant vigilance.

 

 

Expecting the modern, single-camera version of “A Different World” to recapture the multi-camera original’s magic is unreasonable. Read the title, read the room. The 2026 version of “A Different World” comes to us not on a traditional broadcast network, but on a streaming service, where Norman Lear’s return to “One Day at a Time” became a loving chronicle of a Cuban American family’s life. It also adapted Justin Simien’s indie flick “Dear White People” into an in-your-face comedy revolving around the Black experience at an Ivy League college.

But that show relied on the specter of white ignorance to serve as a cultural contrast, whereas “A Different World” is, as the title promises, almost entirely centered on Blackness – and with it, Black joy.

(Eli Joshua Ade/Netflix © 2026)

To those wondering what this show has to contribute 39 years after its 1987 premiere, and following the returns of “Roseanne” and “Will & Grace,” “Full House,” and “That ‘70s Show” (reborn as “That ’90s Show“), that should be enough.

Presumably, explaining Black college life to an audience that almost elected Howard graduate Kamala Harris to our nation’s highest office — and that views her fellow alumnus Ta-Nehisi Coates as one of Black America’s representative voices — is less of a requirement these days. 

Even so, “A Different World,” being a spinoff of “The Cosby Show,” faced different backroom hurdles before its executive producer Debbie Allen got her long-sought greenlight. The holdup is precisely what you think it is. Although Allen and the original series’ head writer, Susan Fales-Hill, shaped the show into the version considered a sitcom classic, Bill Cosby’s creator credit tainted its reputation. The comedian is accused of sexually assaulting dozens of women and was convicted in 2018. That conviction was overturned in 2021 because of a non-prosecution agreement struck with a previous prosecutor. (Cosby continues to maintain his innocence.)

Now that it’s back and under the guidance of “Grey’s Anatomy” alumna Felicia Pride, I can almost guarantee there will be right-wing media commentators crowing, “Who’s they?” while trying to paint this sequel as an extra-woke version of the original.

Doing that would betray their ignorance of the show’s legacy, especially the five seasons that Allen captained. At a time when other sitcoms occasionally tackled social issues in “very special” episodes and “The Cosby Show” hewed to its namesake star’s dedication to respectability politics, “A Different World” regularly confronted harder topics.

Author and professor Brittney Cooper explains what that means in a 2013 Salon story, where she remembers Dr. Huxtable’s eldest daughter Sondra naming her adorable twins Winnie and Nelson after anti-apartheid revolutionaries Winnie and Nelson Mandela in 1988, when they were mainstream political celebrities. Two years later, Hillman student Kimberly Reese (Charnele Brown) agonized over whether to reject a scholarship funded by a company linked to South Africa’s apartheid regime, which was a political act.

None of it felt forced to anyone who sees the college experience as one of political and social awakening. But even “A Different World” hit its limits when it plunged the audience inside the Black folks’ shock and despair after the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. That decision likely led NBC to yank the plug despite its high ratings, Fales-Hill admitted to Vanity Fair. It’s easy to say that was a different time, except we know that isn’t true.

On the contrary, this return to “A Different World” simultaneously reminds us of how far TV has regressed since the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The original’s success paved the way for a surge in shows centering Black life in America, including “Living Single,” “Moesha” and “Martin.” It also brought HBCU culture and traditions like step competitions into Middle America’s living rooms.

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Still, this generation of “A Different World” viewers needs to be spoken to in ways beyond the cultural lingua franca of online posting and situationships, which the first season does well. Deborah Wayne and Ron’s son Shaquille (Cornell Young IV) are in one of those, following in the footsteps of Dwayne and Whitley. But under the constant watch of phone cameras and gossip that travels at the speed of social media feeds, they face greater pressures.

(Daniel Delgado Jr/Netflix © 2026)

Within that on-again-off-again tension crackles an exuberance reflected in the whole ensemble, an array of determined smiles and easy joking that momentarily pushes aside those ever-present societal shadows — including the very real possibility that Hillman might close. 

But as Freddie points out to her students, that cliff has always been there. “Black learning spaces have always been seen as dangerous,” she tells her students, “not just because of what students do, but because of who you might become.” Maintaining their joy, then, is seen as both an educational priority and an act of resistance. That’s worth reviving, too.

“A Different World” is streaming on Netflix.

 

The post A homecoming for “A Different World” appeared first on Salon.com.

“Dear White People” could not have asked for a better concluding coincidence than the parallel between this season’s show-within-a-show “Big House” and the current cycle of “Big Brother,” the CBS reality show it parodies.

The 23rd round of “Big Brother” is set to be the first in the show’s existence in which a Black player will win. This is all thanks to The Cookout, an alliance of Black players who secretly agreed to stick together near the top of the season expressly to achieve that purpose.

Reactions to The Cookout have fallen along predictable lines, with an offending slice of the “Big Brother” viewership boo-hooing about this alliance’s supposedly racist underpinnings. This intentionally ignores all the prior seasons’ history of treating racism as a sideshow attraction and white players excluding people of color with a regularity you can set your watch to.

Before The Cookout only one Black person made it to any Fiinal Six over the past 11 seasons, as Reality Blurred’s Andy Dehnart reports in his concise breakdown of the team’s extraordinary run. Now that “Big Brother” is down to its final three candidates the gender breakdown becomes a fascinating factor, since the choices are between two men, Derek Frazier and Xavier Prather, and a woman, Azah Awasum.

Obviously “Dear White People” creator Justin Simien and showrunner Yvette Lee Bowser did not think such a turn was possible, although the show’s parody, “Big House,” ends up crowning a Black champion who wins by force, and whose victory is itself a part of the farce.

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Representing the Netflix show’s fictional Ivy League school Winchester University in “Big House” are Colandrea “Coco” Conners (Antoinette Robertson), the Black student community’s embodiment of assimilationist striving, and her best white friend Muffy Tuttle (Caitlin Carver).

Muffy is the walking representation of clueless white girl privilege, the type of girl who means well but can never entirely understand why her Black friends are so upset over the state of the world. She and Coco have their ups and downs but always find a way back to each other. Nevertheless, taking part in “Big House” snaps their bond as the gameplay breaks down, predictably, along racial lines manipulated into the storyline by the show’s producers. One of the first casualties of the season is the other Black woman, who the white kids and producers goad Coco into betraying.

What goes down inside “Big House” isn’t central to the fourth and final season of “Dear White People,” but it fulfills the same purpose as previous seasons’ shows-within-the-show by becoming a metaphorical mirror to the main theme. In this last season the Armstrong-Parker students are in their senior year and finding themselves with a surfeit of choices, many of them forcing characters to weigh their integrity against guarantees of career success, fame and for some, huge paydays. It’s also a 1990s-style musical building toward a theatrical production that is, yes, a 1990s-style musical.

The storyline leaps between the future and the core ensemble’s senior year, when the honor of producing Winchester’s traditional Varsity Show falls to Armstrong-Parker House for the first time. An opening scene from the future (where, sorry to say, the pandemic is no longer a societal bug but a feature) hints that creating the show leads to a falling out between Sam (Logan Browning) and Lionel (DeRon Horton). Others, including Troy (Brandon P. Bell), merely fall out of touch.

The exception to this is Sam’s friendship with Joelle (Ashley Blaine Featherson), still going strong after graduation. This is worth noting in the context of Coco’s future, where she holds political office but doesn’t appear to have many friends.

Structuring the entire season around pop interludes has proven to be a polarizing, at least among critics. Such the case with musicals: people either love them wholeheartedly or tolerate them in doses.

But if you follow the original urging by Giancarlo Esposito’s narrator, and watch closely from another angle, the melodic approach makes sense.

“Dear White People” draws its season-long arc from contemporary conversations about racism and race relations in America. That’s been the case since Simien’s 2014 independent film of the same name, from which the first season recycles and expands core characters, story and structure.

Subsequent seasons build upon Simien’s original critique of mainstream culture’s devotion to the convenient myth of a post-racial America, with Season 2 questioning our devotion to legacy and the third presenting cautionary tales about hero worship. But the show’s focus on how white audiences perceive Black people and how that view contributes to the way they’re treated by their peers, by law enforcement and political and social systems, remains constant.

It’s the reason “Dear White People” treats the fourth wall as permeable, with characters frequently cutting their eyes in the direction of the camera as a silent inquiry, acknowledging they know we’re watching and hoping, perhaps, that we’re seeing situations as they do.

The description for this technique is Brechtian, named for playwright Bertolt Brecht, and a term Future Lionel drops and defines both for the audience’s edification and Sam’s. (He also shades Sam for getting so far in her filmmaking career without knowing this technique’s proper definition.) Lionel applies the term to a project they’re mapping, but it also explains the finale season’s creative direction.

Brechtian technique and epic theater are intellectual concepts one would most likely learn about at a place like Winchester, so of course it guides “Dear White People” from Esposito’s narration to the musical numbers that define this cohort’s senior year.

Even if the series never mentioned the term, the show parodies bring attention to its principle of calling attention to the viewer and questioning our objectivity. Mainly, though they’re simple, edgy satires designed to give the students a reason to be in community.

In Season 1 the show’s “Scandal” parody “Defamation” is must-see TV for Armstrong-Parker House residents, transforming the dormitory common room into a neutral, welcoming space.

This changes in the second season when a fire forces the historically Black hall to integrate. During gatherings to watch the drama’s “Love & Hip Hop” equivalent “Traphouse Tricks,” the “Empire” spoof “Prince O’ Palities,” or “Dereca: Set Me Straight,” white students treat the Black characters in these shows as comic stereotypes, making their Black peers uncomfortable.

Calling attention to our love affair with problematic entertainment is precisely what these joke shows are supposed to do, hand in hand with entertaining us. In case that point isn’t apparent, the third season’s in your face clones of “The Handmaid Tale,” “Queer Eye” and Simien’s exaggerated minstrel figure Mista Griggins set it off in neon.

“Big House,” then, is a fitting last act to the in-story metatextual lineup. Instead of existing in tandem with the lives of Winchester students it absorbs one of them, Coco, into its terrarium. Nobody can look away from what happens.

The fact that Coco’s character is on a reality show that takes place inside a season where everyone else spontaneously bursts into song is uniquely absurd. At the same time, it all makes sense.

Antoinette Robertson and Caitlin Carver compete on “Big House” in “Dear White People” (Lara Solank/Netflix)

Out of everyone at Armstrong-Parker, Coco is the one who is most concerned with how she looks, how she’s perceived and how many people are watching her at any given moment. She goes to ridiculous lengths to insert herself in white spaces early in the series, but as she’s matured her experiences with white students at Winchester and her own people make her more ruthless and obsessed with setting herself up for long term success. That give her the edge in “Big House.”

At first she assumes a nice girl persona to avoid being painted as another aggressive, unapproachable Black woman. But another Black girl who could be her twin enters the house, and that woman has a British accent, which in Coco’s mind places her one step closer to whiteness.

Out of self-preservation Coco throws in with Muffy, assuming her white college friend will save her come election time. (Hmm, why does that sound familiar?) She doesn’t . . . but a production-inserted twist does, because the self-serving persona Coco creates is too good to let go.

Discussing his parodies with Vanity Fair in 2018, Simien pointed out how they fit the show’s overall exploration of “the dichotomy between the roles that we play and who we really are. And the thing that conditions us is our culture and the things that we watch on TV.”

With that in mind, let’s return The Cookout and examine why the team’s success on “Big Brother” feels like a true victory, whereas the win scripted for Coco is, by intent, hollow. Start with the reason this Black contestant bloc came to be on “Big Brother” in the first place, which was the result of CBS’ 2020 diversity pledge that its reality show casts would henceforth include at least 50% Black, Indigenous and people of color representation.

That merely got folks in the door. Without making the choice to act with an eye toward achieving a goal history indicates none could fulfill on their own, we wouldn’t be looking at an all-Black final three heading into the season-ending episodes. It goes back to what Cookout compatriot Tiffany Mitchell said when the alliance initially formed in July: “Everything is not about the game.”

Derek agreed with her, saying “It’s not! We’re here to also change the culture. Think about the year we just had.”

Some of this conversation is self-serving strategy, since winning on “Big Brother” and similar competition shows that employ social elements requires people to display loyalty to other players until that loyalty has outlived its purpose.

Still, it’s telling that Derek, the man who spoke about playing for a purpose greater than himself, also prevented the final three from being a complete sausage fest. Azah went into Thursday’s eviction episode outnumbered three to one by her male housemates, but Derek voted to save her – a move Xavier claimed as a product of his manipulations.

The how and why of it matters less than the knowing the outcome places a Black woman within reach of $750,000 for the first time “Big Brother” history.

Coco also secures the “Big House” crown, which comes with a portion of fame she parlays into a political career. But at the friends’ future reunion she forlornly admits she wishes she had the luxury of, as others describe it, doing one project for “them” – i.e., to pay the rent – and one for personal fulfillment.

“‘Big House’ was the last time I let them be generically powerful white people,” Future Coco says very sadly, “But it was for them.”

The last players standing at The Cookout have no such reason to hang their heads, which makes me wonder whether Coco’s meta debut would have turned out differently if they had showed up on CBS even a year or two earlier. But while this may not be the last time “Big Brother” has a non-white winner, The Cookout is likely a one-time phenomenon.

Whereas “Dear White People” and its in-show satires gaze at issues that existed before the series and will be with us years from now, asking through punchlines and meaningful stares at the audience whether the questions the title poses will ever be answered to everyone’s satisfaction.

“Dear White People” is currently streaming on Netflix. “Big Brother” airs Sundays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 8 p.m. on CBS, and also streams on Paramount+.

The post “Dear White People” visits the “Big Brother” Cookout via a pointed parody of reality show racism appeared first on Salon.com.

Good news today for fans of Hawaiian shirts and punching Bruce Lee: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino's action-packed movie about movies, is getting a sequel.

I know what you're thinking: Tarantino hates making sequels! He'll insist to this day that Kill Bill is just one movie! — Read the rest

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