This auteur TV essay contains spoilers for Top of the Lake, Too Old to Die Young, I’m a Virgo and The Curse. Check out TV reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings, at the VV home page.

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The early days of television were a proving ground for many a revered writer and director — Sidney Lumet, Paddy Chayefsky and John Frankenheimer were among those who cut their teeth in the febrile atmosphere of live broadcasts for the likes of Goodyear Playhouse (1951-57), Kraft Theatre (1947-58) and The DuPont Show of the Month (1957-61). But from the outset, it was understood that television was a transitional medium — this outgrowth of the New York theater world functioned as a shop window where nascent talent was being sold as insistently as washing machines and toothpaste. As television began to develop its own identity in the 60s, it was regarded as a lesser medium — the big screen’s little brother where faded stars and upcoming names plied their trade with formulaic, throwaway material that had no aspirations to cinema’s glamour and gravitas. Sitcoms and soap operas proliferated, while the TV movie became a byword for something that offered a pale approximation of the real thing.

This perception persisted until the economic stakes of cinema were raised to the point where adult-oriented genres and director-driven work fell victim to the demands of the endless tentpole arms race. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when television’s so-called Second Golden Age began; however, by the 2010s, it was understood that Prestige TV had begun to fill the gap left by the demise of cinema’s mid-budget tier. Acclaimed directors like Steven Soderbergh found a refuge from the vicissitudes of film financing by throwing himself into various TV projects, while David Lynch revived his ground-breaking Twin Peaks (1990-91) series for a third season. Working in TV had been shed of the stigma it had carried for so many years; it was no longer seen as a step down, but a more expansive canvas onto which writer/directors could lay out their preoccupations in minute detail. But it equally required the auteur to operate as something akin to a 21st century variant of the Selznick-style polymath, guiding their vision through a process where creative power is ceded and concessions are made at every stage.

Television’s newfound legitimacy opened vistas of possibility for those who had become comfortable within cinema’s rarefied sphere and perhaps began to feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. It was a chance to utilize the medium’s broader canvas in service of a more thoroughgoing examination of thematic concerns. As the number of outlets grew, the medium once again began to feel exciting as it was remodeled to accommodate new technology. The upstart platforms were looking to make their reputations with bold offerings from distinctive cinematic voices. What emerged from this marriage of convenience was an uneasy dance between creative freedom and commercial expectation. Just as the early prestige hits took familiar forms — cop show, gangster saga, prison drama — and tinkered with their tropes, television’s illustrious new intake was intent on dragging the medium deeper into the darkness it had historically ceded to cinema, in pursuit of establishing artistic parity.

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Top of the Lake (2013-17) covers much of the same thematic and stylistic territory as the Nordic noir which gained global prominence with the writing of Steig Larsson and shows like The Killing (2007-12). Like the best of this geographic sub-genre, Top of the Lake features a skilled and tenacious female protagonist coming up against a hostile landscape and entrenched values within a male-dominated system. The landscape in question is Laketop, a small town in New Zealand where Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) grew up and later fled after being the victim of a rape which was never adequately investigated. The protagonist is now a police detective in Sydney — specializing in cases involving children — and has returned to visit her sick mother (Robyn Nevin) when a 12-year-old girl, Tui Mitcham (Jacqueline Joe), goes missing. Prior to her disappearance, the adolescent was found to be pregnant, and Griffin becomes immersed in the life of the Mitcham family, led by its menacing and influential patriarch, Matt (Peter Mullen). At the same time, Matt deals with a dispute over a patch of land called Paradise Valley, where an enigmatic, guru-like figure called G.J. (Holly Hunter) has set up a female “healing retreat.”

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Top of the Lake tries to make a virtue of its contrivances — it has the missing girl, the single-minded detective, the family intrigue, the hidden secrets, the false suspect — but, in the hands of co-creator and director Jane Campion, these generic cliches are freighted with symbolism, taking on the tenor of a metaphorical struggle, situating it within a body of work which sees characters in transit, placed at odds with the expectations of their surroundings. In Campion’s hands, power is reimagined; in the context of Laketop, a pregnant 12-year-old girl alone in the wilderness is the most powerful thing in the world. Tui’s refusal to bend could upend the status quo that is embodied in detective-sergeant Al Parker (David Wenham), who allies himself with the brute force Matt exerts over the community while pursuing Griffin with a series of clumsy romantic passes. In Laketop, everyone is looking for a savior, and for nature’s implacable advance to be rolled back by the force of filial, spiritual or institutional authority. Matt speaks derisively of the police as “the powers that be,” knowing that true control resides at a level that rests below the surface of public probity; it is held as much in G.J.’s abstruse pronouncements as Matt’s belligerent bluster, capturing minds with the promise of paradise; a new Eden free from past restrictions and regrets. Outsiders are drawn to the water’s edge, but the lake is imbued with its own forbidding myth — the legend of the “demon’s heart” that dwells at the bottom. Everything that seems to rise and fall in accordance with a benevolent interdependence is revealed to have been formed in the spirit of violence, vengeance and extirpation.

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The familiar genre furniture with which Top of the Lake is populated permits for the placement of activist ornamentation. Campion and co-writer Gerard Lee insert progressive commentary at opportune moments, never letting it weigh down plot progression; the form permits for moments of narrative respite in which the writer can expound on the show’s themes. One night in Laketop’s local bar, Griffin is asked tauntingly whether she is a lesbian or a feminist; when the protagonist asks why, she is told that “no-one likes a feminist except a lesbian.” Laketop’s gender expectations are ossified; what it means to be a man or a woman bears the weight of tradition, and those who set out to complicate the clearly delineated roles are at the mercy of the serpent, what Tui’s friend Jamie (Luke Buchanan) describes as “the dark creator,” who “sucks the heart out of people” and “uses people.” But the revenge of youth is at hand; the teens strive to create their own idyll, to exact generational retribution and live on their own terms. The doorways of opportunity lead into the hidden rooms where the ultimate control is exerted, and those who are its quarry seek out a shred of solidarity in a landscape that lionizes conflict and competition. Tui is tracked down by Matt’s army of “bush pigs,” but as the latter character carries the girl’s baby away, ready to inculcate it into the values of his pack, the child lets out a resounding cry of objection which exposes Matt to the pursuing Griffin, sundering historical ties. In a rare moment of candor and clarity, G.J. states that her private “calamity” has rendered her “a zombie,” and Griffin learns that the amelioration of trauma is a grueling pilgrimage to the site of one’s death.

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Too Old to Die Young (2019) is perhaps the clearest distillation of the revanchist spirit which entered the imperial center as the neoliberal order began to strain under the weight of its own contradictions. A collaboration between Nicolas Winding Refn and comic book writer Ed Brubaker, the Amazon miniseries melds American hard-boiled fiction with European alienation to underscore the links between pulp and giallo. It finds a country advancing into rancorous middle age as its youthful dreams fail to reach fruition. There is an apocalyptic tone to its story of two initiates into the underground empires that flourish in the absence of a stable identity. Martin (Miles Teller) is a police officer who dates 16-year-old Janey (Nell Tiger Free) as he rises into the homicide squad and does work on the side for a Jamaican drug lord, Damian (Babs Olusanmokun). Jesus (Augusto Aguilera) mourns the murder of his mother (Carlotta Montanari) while returning to Mexico to learn the ways of the drug cartel with which his family is affiliated. Martin becomes disillusioned with the force and falls under the spell of Diana (Jena Malone), who works with child victims of sexual abuse while conspiring with cancer-stricken ex-cop Viggo (John Hawkes) to murder the perpetrators of the crimes she handles. Jesus finds himself in the grip of an oedipal haunting when he meets Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo), a desert foundling caring for the cartel’s ailing kingpin, Don Ricardo (Emiliano Díez). Through Yaritza, Jesus seeks to recreate the image of his slain mother, whose face adorns every wall of the gaudy mansion where they begin ramping up the cartel’s stateside operations.

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Refn and Brubaker’s universe finds nostalgia collapsing into narcissistic rage, a civilization taking a long look in the mirror and being both disgusted and besotted by what confronts it. The promise of eternal youth and beauty with which the baby boomers seduced the collective unconscious has curdled into the last vitriolic flickers of Western exceptionalism. All that is left are the songs and monuments of a mythic past; odes to wild youth and restless motion, paeans to pop monarchs; the reassuring roar of an American-made machine. Portents of death are everywhere, and protection is sought in the arms of the numerous cartels which operate at varying levels of legality and spin their own esoterica for the masses. There are degrees of capture and limited prospects for advancement within these organizations. Only Jesus rises to the apex, aided by his “High Priestess of Death.” Martin is resistant to the theatrical fascism on offer in the homicide squad; he pursues his side hustle of righteous execution while his lieutenant (Hart Bochner) rants and pantomimes — leading the office in a chant of “fascism,” then following it with a mawkish religious ballad, averring that they should “exterminate ‘em all one by one. Return this country to what is used to be: a shinning city on a hill,” filling his dry erase board with terms like “fascism is goodism,” “democracy is my bitch” and “lock her up!” The police are the most well-resourced cartel, run like a heavily armed frat.

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The inhabitants of this universe still retain the hope of being redeemed by their crusades, to luxuriate in the prospect of their enemy’s suffering; they pray for a cleansing fire that will vanquish the “ultimate evil” and restore the control they feel they once possessed. Everyone must pledge fealty to a vision of the future in which they are part of the elect, while those with true material power sneer from their lofty redoubts. Janey’s father, Theo (William Baldwin), represents America’s most enduring cartel, the anointed 1% whose “cash flow” and “rolodex” ensure a smooth dynastic flow. For Theo, everything is an asset, grist for his handsome portfolio; he boasts of his position in a hedge fund group who “sit around and buy and sell shit,” and wants to buy Martin’s “life rights,” reducing this “red-blooded all-American boy” to valuable IP. Good neoliberal subjects like Theo create the space for mayhem to flourish; they believe they are insulated from the externalities of their investments. But Janey and Theo are both sucked into the vortex of Martin’s soul. Teller’s character is another of Refn’s taciturn protagonists; his inability to communicate signals the erosion of a shared lexicon; he can only expel the bile that fizzes inside him with dramatic expectorations — punctuations of the languid pacing with which Refn detaches one line of dialogue from another. For Martin, vengeance becomes a habit, and Refn takes pains to illustrate just how laborious the exercise of revenge can be. When Jesus tracks down his mother’s murderer, the act of avenging her leaves him hollowed out.

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In Too Old to Die Young, Refn and Brubaker conceive of the future as a series of territorial disputes, a great reordering through violent struggle against the Great Dark Other, a conflict to fuel the infernal space within. This is outlined by Jesus vowing to turn “the whole city into a theme park of pain” and urging his subordinates to initiate “more violence, more rape.” A new regime for a new consciousness: the transition from party to cartel. Jesus states that Mexico is the future “because there’s no law out there, only survival,” a relentless transfer of wealth upwards in the guise of personal freedom. The cult of strength finds its supremacy in the reverence of power and the spectacle of domination and humiliation — embodied in the violent pornography and snake-handling fundamentalism peddled by the Crockett brothers (James Urbaniak and Brad Hunt). Along with the conspiratorial talk radio Viggo listens to, this is the lead in the empire’s water pipes, priming the populace for an eroticized conflagration. Viggo states that “once there was just man and nature,” but there is now nothing left to hunt but each other and “someone has to be there to protect innocence” against new systems of enslavement. Diana makes this clear in Too Old to Die Young’s closing episode, as she stares blankly and prophesizes that “soon violence will become erotic, torture euphoric, as the masses hail public executions, propelled by the wrath of fascism, our identities will be defined by the pain we cause.” This “new mutation” will represent the health of a state whose depredations lend bloodthirsty gusto to moribund existence.

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Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo (2023) is an incendiary piece that stands alongside his debut feature, Sorry to Bother You (2018), in its unabashed radicalism, searing satire and febrile fantasy. Riley has a tremendous gift for building worlds that feel equally outlandish and subversive, taking present conditions and twisting them into animating fables. In this world, Cootie (Jharrel Jerome) has grown to be 13 feet tall, and he’s sequestered in a specially proportioned house built for him by his adopted parents, Martisse (Mike Epps) and LaFrancine (Carmen Ejogo). The young giant is fed on a diet of comic books and TV, and yearns to sample the world it presents to him. But when Cootie meets Jones (Kara Young), Felix (Brett Gray) and Scat (Allius Barnes), he finds that his battery of catchphrases and platitudes are insufficient. Jones is organizing to fight a wave of evictions in their Oakland community, and urges Cootie to take up arms in the class struggle. But the protagonist’s eyes are turned equally by the promise of wealth and romance — Cootie is sought by sundry brands to lend his “angry and powerful” frame to their advertising campaigns, and he falls for Flora (Olivia Washington), who works at Bing-Bang Burger and has superpowers of her own. As the protagonist’s profile rises, he comes to the attention of Jay Whittle (Walton Goggins), a Silicon Valley titan who has refashioned himself into the Hero, a costumed avenger straight from the pages of Cootie’s comics. Whittle senses the possibility of finally finding “an antagonist that my audience will deem worthy of my journey” in the “Twamp Monster,” whose stature soon transforms him into the fearsome “Thug One.”

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Riley is unapologetic about the propagandist intent of I’m a Virgo, and takes pains to make clear that all art either challenges or affirms the values of the prevailing order, whether consciously or not — the Marvel Cinematic Universe may be studiously apolitical, but it is shot through with the values of the system that created it. Whittle tells his writers at Cannon Comics that “my whole life is propaganda; a righteous propaganda predicated on the rule of law.” Jones represents the other end of this dialectic; her power is that of the oracle, creating immersive, overwhelming explainers of material conditions. Jones outlines “the crisis of capitalism” that fuels falling wages and rising prices — how the demands for endless growth turn every facet of life into a transaction; how capital requires a surplus army of labor to keep workers in line and create the crime which justifies its monopoly on violence. Whittle twists the city to his will, turning San Francisco into an imperium; a gleaming, economically cleansed, impregnable testament to the vaulting ambition of finance capital. But he is beset by the moral rot at the heart of the empire, no less oppressed by the dead hand of accumulation which beats the world into shape. Whittle is locked in a death-drive which necessitates his submission to Joseph Campbell’s archetypes, as much a victim of his illusions as the consumers of his comics.

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Riley attacks the complacency of the reformist mindset which seeks to fashion a more compassionate strain of capitalism. Elijah Wood provides a cameo as a young man who is anti-death penalty but is studying to be an executioner so he can make the process more humanitarian, skewering liberal incrementalism’s search for “practical solutions” which do nothing to ameliorate the underlying problems, but rather signal that those at the heart of policy feel the pain of those they are condemning to death. Riley takes aim at the Black professional managerial class with equal fervor, underscoring that a Black elite remains an elite. This is embodied in Whittle’s assistant, Edwin (Kendrick Sampson), who carries water for his boss and states his faith that “the law applied fairly” will provide “freedom for Black people.” I’m a Virgo is a study of the perils that come with Black visibility — Martisse warns Cootie that “some people are going to figure out how to use you,” and the protagonist’s struggle becomes one of choosing between solidarity and self-interest; the lure of lucrative simplification offered by predatory agent Sam Spiegel (Ari Frenkel) and the “long road” of Jones’s cause. Cootie will become an emblem for something, and he is tracked by competing interests, such as a turtle neck-wearing cult led by Robert Longstreet who proclaim Cootie as “the Polypheme.” The protagonist must decide whether he is content to be a glorified mannequin striking profitable poses, what Martisse describes as “a Sambo in a manger nativity scene,” conforming to someone else’s vision of the future.

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In a degraded cultural terrain, we must look in low places for our existential succor, and so it is with Cootie and his friends, who get their bathetic kicks watching the “Parking Tickets” cartoon show. The revelation can dwell in the least prepossessing vessel, some of the system’s iniquities can be revealed in the crudest of cultural production. The cartoon’s anomic clarity is a narrow shaft of light in a wall of manufactured contention and consent, illustrating that the medium has the capacity to animate and inspire as much as hypnotize and incapacitate. The Hero is a media creation; he is D.W. Griffith’s clansman with VC money backing him; he is capital and the state directed against the citizen. Riley invokes the grim lineage of the 1985 MOVE bombing and the 1969 murder of Fred Hampton to outline the forces arrayed against the strikers, the relentless campaign to quell any expression of dissent. The Hero is a manifestation of the fate that befalls Scat, who is turned away from a hospital because he doesn’t have health insurance, condemned to death for the crime of poverty. The Hero is the avatar for a personal responsibility narrative which creates the Great Dark Other and obfuscates systemic factors; he fights the monsters of fear and division which a perfectly functioning capitalist system generates in abundance. Jones educates Cootie on the need for the people to “democratically control the wealth we create with our labor,” to abjure leaders and the “band aid shit” the system offers. Riley contends that the superhuman ideal functions much like astrological symbology in presenting the veneer of an organized universe with a simplistic determinism, and declares that it is comradely acts rather than phantoms of force which cultivate community spirit. 

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Kurt Vonnegut’s observation that we are who we pretend to be has never seemed more apposite, and could serve as the tagline for Nathan Fielder and Bennie Safdie’s Showtime collaboration, The Curse (2023). It tells the story of Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher (Fielder), a married couple who are using the money Whitney’s family has accrued as notorious “slumlords” to gentrify the benighted New Mexico neighborhood of Española, and document the process in a reality show which will present them as ethical actors with a philanthropic intent to enrich the community, creating eco-friendly “passive homes” which will attract upscale buyers into the area. Asher observes that Española will be “the neighborhood no-one saw coming, because we invented it.” In this attempt to turn the community into a lucrative TV construct, Whitney and Asher must deal with the local Pueblo Indian tribe, whose Whistling River casino Asher had previously worked at, refining the “circadian lighting” designed to create a facsimile of natural light and keep gamblers at the slots. The show’s director is Asher’s boyhood friend, Dougie (Safdie), who is keen to spice up what he regards as a worthy but lifeless conceit by contriving conflict and tension.  Dougie tells Asher to give money to a little girl, Nala (Hikmah Warsame), selling cans of soda in a parking lot, but when the stunt doesn’t go as planned, Asher finds that life stops conforming to the simple formula for wealth and success he and his wife had contrived.

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The Curse charts the various reality tunnels in which its characters exist, which serve to insulate them from confronting the actuality of their true intentions. The “TV magic” which frames life according to the designs of those whose interests are being served becomes so persuasive that everyone buys into the fantasy. Everyone is willing to play their part in propagating the illusion that will be sustained for as long as there is profit to be derived from the landscape. The locals become props, their struggles are absorbed into Whitney and Asher’s grand narrative. The coffee shop and jeans outlet which the protagonists’ subsidize offer the illusion of something substantial and long-lasting, but Española is merely a backdrop for the “Green Queen” and her court jester to project the moral efficacy of their brand. Whitney conspires with Dougie to humiliate Asher in the interest of the show’s dynamic, taking pains to depict him as the clown which Whitney’s father, Paul (Corbin Bernsen), urges him to be. Everyone is trapped by the version of themselves they offer for the world’s consumption. Asher cannot live up to masculine ideal which the culture sells, and he is content to be an appendage to Whitney’s ambitions, clinging to her indestructible self-regard. Asher becomes obsessed with the TikTok trend which Nala imitates by placing a “tiny-curse” on him, but he fails to realize that the actual curse is all around him; he is doomed to live within Whitney’s realm, as is everyone who comes into proximity with the unspoken power she exerts, the gravity of generational wealth.

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Whitney offers a chilling portrait of power speaking with a whisper. She represents the refusal of those who occupy the upper stratum of society to confront deep-seated structural problems on anything but the most superficial and self-serving level. Whitney recites the language of social justice while expanding her portfolio with merciless focus; her luxury houses are conspicuously blank, reflecting nothing but themselves, obliterating all that surrounds them to strike a perfidious harmony. Whitney’s life is one of moral offsetting, obscuring the psychic toll of the material damage she does by striking a socially conscious affect; she typifies a life ruled by symbols and gestures, appropriating the language of the marginalized. Whitney would prefer to be judged by the rectitude of her words than the reality of her actions, but no amount of conciliatory language can overcome the fundamental power relations that underwrite her interaction with everyone who serves her vision. Whitney strolls through the community she is slowly reshaping, driving the displaced into the hands of her parents’ squalid projects, refusing to see her role in perpetuating the cycle of inequality. The credibility of the art world is coveted through Whitney’s patronage of native artist Cara (Nizhonniya Austin), who becomes her most sought-after acquisition. Whitney leverages her wealth to buy Cara’s compliance, sensing the artist’s inability to refuse her financial overtures and recruiting Cara as another accomplice — the perfect cultural cover for an ideological project. Cara doesn’t have the privilege of maintaining her integrity, speaking to a paradigm in which the notion of “selling out” is no longer on the agenda for a generation which has grown accustomed to precarity. Cara is bought so cheaply — $20,000 to act as the show’s “native consultant” — and must prostrate herself before Whitney, conversing with her as a “fellow artist” and extolling the aesthetic virtues of her houses.

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The mantra of neoliberal capitalism is constant reinvention — if you’re not satisfied with your present identity, you can cast if off and assume a new one. This injunction lends itself to a degree of instability and perversity in the pursuit of a winning public persona. The characters in The Curse work their way through a mammoth wardrobe, trying on costumes as they attempt to flee their past selves. Reality TV allows for a presentation of life that is infinitely malleable, telling its audience they can become anything they want if they have the will (and resources) to make their dream a reality. But like the casino, it is a controlled environment, manipulating your emotions to keep you engaged, selling glamour and victory. Whitney and Asher’s Tesla passes through the streets of Española like a Galleon bringing the worst excesses of capital looking to amuse itself, creating its own logic as it strips the losers of their humanity. The conquerors need to believe that they are bringing enlightenment, that they are “good people,” and so contrive philanthropic acts which ultimately redound to their social credit. Nala’s family members are squatting in a vacant house that Asher has purchased, and they become mascots for the virtue of the focal couple, who allow them to continue living there. When Asher decides that he is going to gift the house to the family, he and Whitney expect the scene to play out like something from their show. But the family’s patriarch, Absher (Barkhad Abi), refuses to play the grateful recipient of their largesse and cleaves to the financial implications of their decision, unpicking the convoluted ritual and leaving the dutifully recorded moment in tatters.

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In The Curse, life is reduced to a desperate pursuit of the perfectly encapsulating moment, something that can stand in for a shortfall of social agency. Stripped of any possibility of achieving tangible political gains or meaningful progress, abstract indicators are invested with undue significance and influence. One of the most telling scenes involves Whitney and Asher having a moment of genuine intimacy and fun, then trying to recreate it for Instagram. Whitney insists that “it’s exactly us” as they try to recapture the spontaneity, but the moment is gone and cannot be retrieved. They do, however, stumble upon a real moment when Whitney’s phone captures the argument that follows, but this unflattering angle will not be shared, failing to conform with the constructed personas they offer to the TV network and tech platforms. The Curse feels like a challenge to the lack of self-awareness that drives contemporary discourse, contending that to dwell within one’s own reality tunnel engenders a hyper-vigilance and sensitivity to any external shock. The show chooses to condemn its protagonists on their own terms — for example, Whitney says earnestly that “colonialism is an ongoing process” — and leaves them exposed to the complexity they had so assiduously sought to keep at bay, guided by a faulty frame of reference that results in the agonizing slippage between self-perceptions. The loss of a solid context leads to overlapping boundaries and drives misunderstanding; what is funny and what gets obscured as everything occurs simultaneously. The desire for absolute transparency and constant visibility warps the surface of life into a funhouse mirror, a grotesque enlargement of our most conspicuous traits. The artifice of the form bleeds into life, expressions of sincerity are impossible to separate from the postures of the studiously curated self.

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Fielder and Safdie’s creation may be the closest television has come to emulating the surrealist dissection of bourgeoise propriety found in Buñuel, the doomed revelry of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), or the dizzying psychodrama of Roman Polanski, played out in the ersatz world of reality TV and social media. We see characters dancing on the edge of their own extinction, trapped in customs that no longer carry any weight, staring at the wasteland on the other side of the moment. The Curse is a synthesis of sensibilities which points toward the emergence of a new form, one capable of mediating between fractured and antagonistic realities. The current predicament of Peak TV is comparable to the dying days of Old Hollywood, where those in control of the industry were no longer sure of what their new audience wanted and decided to play it safe with a slew of overblown productions. The slow collapse of the studios created the space for a new generation of filmmakers to break through and redefine the mainstream. Far from breeding innovation, the streaming wars have led to a general flattening, as platforms deluge viewers with generic fare whose only objective is to inflate watching hours. Whitney and Asher’s show in The Curse never finds its way to “actual TV” and is trapped in an online netherworld where it must compete with hundreds of similar shows as fuel for the algorithm. The conditions are ripe for the ascension of more dissenting voices from cinema’s gutted mid-tier, bringing personal perspectives to the increasingly insipid proliferation of “content.”

D.M. Palmer (@MrDMPalmer) is a writer based in Sheffield, UK. He has contributed to sites like HeyUGuys, The Shiznit, Sabotage Times, Roobla, Column F, The State of the Arts and Film Inquiry. He has a propensity to wax lyrical about Film Noir on the slightest provocation, which makes him a hit at parties. The detritus of his creative outpourings can be found at waxbarricades.wordpress.com.

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