In TV series, Silicon Valley “entrepreneurs” and their startups are no longer heroes but villains. The same media that created the ideology of “changing the world” and the myth of “good” technology monopolies, now rebukes and satirizes it. Underneath the ideological turn is, unsurprisingly, the reorientation of capital towards militarism and the Green Deal.
The European bourgeoisie has been testing a new discourse on the working class for some years now. The simple denial of its existence, overwhelming since the 1990s, was already becoming insufficient before the pandemic. A new message was needed. The broadcasting of “Le temps des ouvriers”, a documentary originally commissioned by the Franco-German channel Arte, throughout last year in practically the whole EU, provides us with a clue as to the shape of the new discourse we will be bombarded with in the coming years.
In Argentina but also in Spain and half the world, the germs of fascism are widespread, but not where the media usually focus on. The xenophobic and homophobic gangs are dangerous, indeed, but just by themselves they are not going to control, subdue and mobilize the neighborhoods. It is quite a different matter when the state itself generates autonomous, “grassroots” structures to mediate access to basic necessities and “social justice” plans to “build the people.”
“The Bite” is the first series to deal, under the guise of a zombie comedy, with the gritty realities of the management of the Covid pandemic.
The entertainment content on TV is scarce and not very comforting this season. We discuss a close-up look at the USA of precarity (Tiny House Nation, Netflix); Alejandro Amenábar’s first series (La Fortuna, Movistar); and the most incompetent reading imaginable of Asimov’s “The Foundation” (Foundation, Apple TV).
HBO aired the day before yesterday the penultimate episode of “The White Lotus,” a light-hearted but unsettling series that, against the least promising backdrop, depicts the intimacy of class relations and ironizes the dominant ideologies of today’s US bourgeoisie.
Bosch’s season 7 was released by Amazon Prime this week. The final one. As current as the Covid, it provides meaning to the previous six installments and teases us on where the cultural shift in the U.S. is headed.
Netflix closes the season with its first Icelandic series, Katla, a matrioshka of references to earlier works that nonetheless manages not to be a pastiche…. even if unsuccessful in its critical examination of European opinion and culture.
There exist advertisements which condense an era with far greater economy than any novel or film. The ad for Ford’s F-150 Lightning, Ford’s iconic vehicle for the Biden’s Green Deal is, by the same token, a promotional ad for precarious living rather than a celebration of green comfort, a Nomadland to insert into big-league matches and Superbowls rather than a sales pitch. But Biden has gone a step further: the Green Deal’s pick-up is also the symbol of a looming new war economy.
HBO kicked off the broadcast yesterday of Mare of Easttown, a crime series starring Kate Winslet which promises to be the best of the season but is splitting US critics into two camps.
The main entertainment platforms have anticipated it well and with their spring 2021 releases they offer us a good dose of escapism. Of course, well seasoned with the most rancid and reactionary elements of their ideological arsenal.
Apple TV begins broadcasting the second season of Servant. In the first one, Tony Basgallop and Night Shyamalan tried to take that storytelling format we call a series in a new direction. The result brought them to the limits of tolerable representation within the current ideology. Servant was not only the best production of 2019, but it also showed the best possible way of telling stories… to date.
Our review of the most relevant TV series of November.
Roadkill is the political series of the season on the BBC. The narrative is built on the wake of the «House of Cards» of the nineties, but without the Shakespearean histrionics and the overdose of cynicism of the original model. In fact, Roadkill is one of the few political series that encourages real political reflection.
It has taken 30 years for us to see the strategy of the German bourgeoisie for what it was, a “true crime”.
Four series two from Delhi and two from Mumbai, which reflect some of the contradictions of Indian capitalism and enrich our perspective.