TV’s Top Shows Are Flirting With Disaster

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Even if everything were going smoothly in the world, the scenes recently of a tsunami rolling across the Pacific to Hawaii and then to the West Coast of the U.S. would have been unnerving.

After all, to the many of us who watched Paradise, Hulu and ABC’s smash hit this year, that is exactly how the world ends — or, at least, nearly all of the world that doesn’t manage to escape to the tech-enabled mountain city where Sterling K. Brown is guarding a president. Watching the show this spring we, already drenched in general fears of climate change, were suddenly thinking about an extremely specific event that had not occurred to most of us before. And now, that event was rolling across our news screens.

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Television and reality have been colliding in improbable ways these past few months. The big Emmy contenders always have a socially relevant show here or there, but has there ever been a torrent like this one?

Environmental catastrophe, toxic masculinity (Adolescence), presidential overreach (Andor), health care costs (The Pitt), mass shootings (The Pitt again), income disparity (The White Lotus), AI job displacement (The Studio, and maybe Severance, if that is what in the name of Sam Altman it’s doing) — worries that have already overwhelmed social media are now everywhere we look in entertainment as well.

These are jittery times, and scripted television has responded with an unusually jittery set of offerings. This is what happens when you cross the upmarket TV boom of the past two decades with social worries worse than any point in a half-century.

The White Lotus star Carrie Coon, who starred in maybe the most topical of them all, as a restless lawyer watching all of these disparities at a Thai resort, captured the moment well.

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“Welcome to late-stage capitalism,” she says sharply when I ask her about the matter. “It’s crushing everybody. And art is reflecting life and helping us consider it.”

She continues: “AI as an existential threat, the tragedy of Medicaid, the demonization of immigrants — it’s the responsibility of entertainment to present real-life issues, even if it sometimes has to be delivered with laughter. But when we see a theme or a trend in our art, we would do well to pay attention.”

Rising health-care costs are never far from many of our minds — the millions of people soon to be kicked off Medicaid but also plenty of us who thought, naively, that the well-insured would never need to worry. And so it goes on The Pitt, where Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) pleads for more resources from hospital administrator Gloria Underwood.

Big Tech machinations come right to the fore of Severance and its Lumon headquarters. We have no idea what murky business they’re doing over there, but then, do we have a much better sense of what Google and OpenAI are doing? These are not abstract concerns in real life, and now television is making them even more intimate.

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Maybe that’s why one of the signature shows of the season is Bill Lawrence’s Shrinking — an entire series dedicated to anxiety. And the most fitting moment on that show came when Luke Tennie’s Sean, a veteran struggling with PTSD, seems at risk of letting his anxieties overwhelm him. Harrison Ford’s grizzled therapist Paul looks at Sean and wisely advises him, “Say, ‘Bring it on. I love pain.’ And then finally, the cloud will spit you out into the light, feeling like you’ve conquered something.” He may as well have been talking directly to us.

Whether these shows predicted or just channeled real-life concerns in a way matters less than the effect they have. Television is now a place where we go to see our anxieties mirrored back to us.

And, sometimes, to seek a path out of the mess.

After all, in Andor, a rebel alliance pushes back against an emperor. In White Lotus, a one-percenter spends the season skulking around in a haze as he slowly realizes he’ll pay for his crime. In Adolescence, toxic masculinity is literally jailed and put on trial.

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Perhaps no moment this season felt more cathartic than on The Studio, when Ice Cube yells “Fuck AI” to cheers of a Comic-Con crowd upon the realization that a corporate executive is about to use the technology to put human laborers out of jobs.

Whether his moment of protest would ultimately make a difference — whether any of the resistance laid out in these shows really dispatches the demon — was largely left unaddressed. Television this season wasn’t trying to offer realistic solutions. It was just trying to give us a hug.

And when life is that worrisome, that may just be enough.

This story appeared in the Aug. 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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