Culturally speaking, it can often seem as if Donald Trump is trapped in the early ‘90s, his taste permanently stunted the moment he opened the Taj Mahal Casino (a.k.a. “the 8th wonder of the world”) and left Ivana for Marla Maples.

He loves Les Misérables, which opened on Broadway in 1987. He reportedly believes that “November Rain” by Guns n’ Roses is the best music video of all time, an opinion which proves the adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day. At rallies, he is known to play Sinéad O’Connor’s 1990 hit “Nothing Compares 2 U.” His favorite movies include Goodfellas (also 1990) and Bloodsport (1988). He is preoccupied with broadcast TV, especially 60 Minutes and late-night talk shows, and barely seems aware that streaming exists, even though his wife’s documentary is on Amazon.

Which is why it made perfect sense last week when Freedom 250 announced the lineup for “The Great American State Fair,” a series of concerts on the National Mall this summer to celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial.

The roster was of artists who all peaked before Bill Clinton was elected president: Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice, C+C Music Factory, Young MC, and Poison’s Bret Michaels, among others. It was a nostalgic cavalcade of has-beens and never-were, an extravaganza of where-are-they-nows that would have inspired every seventh grader in the country in 1990 to do the Roger Rabbit in their Z. Cavariccis. (The only group that was missing from the lineup? Peach Pit favorite Color Me Badd.)

But, much like the romance between Brandon Walsh and Emily Valentine, this ‘90s fever dream was doomed from the start. What was touted as a concert series full of “nostalgia, iconic hits, and live performances from some of the era’s most recognizable names,” quickly spiraled into a debacle of comic proportions — Trump’s very own Fyre Festival, minus the catering.

Nearly as soon as the lineup was announced, artists started backing out, claiming they had been misled about the nature of the event, which was organized by Freedom 250, a public-private partnership established by the Trump administration last year (not to be confused with America 250, which was set up a decade ago).

First to bail was Minneapolis funk star Morris Day, who said simply, “It’s A No For Me😎.” Rapper Young MC busted a move out of the concert, saying he had no idea it was a “Trump-backed” event. Martina McBride, the country music star whose 1993 hit “Independence Day” is often mistaken for a patriotic anthem even though it’s about a woman leaving an abusive relationship, also bowed out, saying she was also under the impression the fair would be a “nonpartisan event.”

Most confusingly, Jodie Rocco, a singer who performed on dozens of songs released under the name Milli Vanilli, said the musicians behind the group had never been asked to perform at Freedom 250. Instead, organizers had apparently booked Fab Morvan, the surviving member of the notorious European duo that sold millions of records and won a best new artist Grammy before it was revealed that they were lip-synching to music recorded by other singers in a scheme devised by German producer Frank Farian. (In an email, Rocco said she was actually a “staunch Trump supporter” who objected to the “fraudulent” use of the Milli Vanilli name, not the political nature of the event.)

Even Michaels — a man who broke his nose onstage at the Tony Awards and starred in not one, not two, but three seasons of the VH1 dating show Rock of Love (including one set on a tour bus) — concluded that the fair was beneath his dignity.

“Unfortunately, what was presented to us as a celebration of our country has evolved into something much more divisive than what I agreed to be a part of,” he said in a lengthy Instagram post.

By the weekend, the situation had gotten so bad that even the president couldn’t deny the collective rejection. In a Truth Social tirade, he railed against the “boring,” “overpriced” musicians “who nobody wants to hear,” and suggested canceling the concert series entirely and replacing it with — what else? — a MAGA rally. For his inauguration not even 18 months ago, Trump was able to book artists like Carrie Underwood and Snoop Dogg.

Now, he can’t retain the guy from Milli Vanilli. Morvan initially said he was planning to perform (and actually sing the songs), but by Monday he, too, was out.

“I was there to unite the people, to have them walk down memory lane, celebrate life. It was a way to say, ‘Hey, I’m still here, you’re still here. Let’s have a good time together,’” he said on CNN. “But throughout the week it turned into a circus. I’m not into politics, so you hear it first here: I’m not attending the June 26th celebration.”

Subscribe now

Arguably even more humiliating than the defections were the statements from the few artists who have doubled-down on performing.

Freedom Williams, the guy who once vowed to make dance music enthusiasts sweat until they bled, responded to the controversy with a rambling, seven-minute Instagram video which he apparently filmed while sitting on the toilet. In the N-word-laden rant, which included digressions about vaccines, Muammar Gaddafi, Zionists, and “white capitalists,” Williams said he still planned to perform even though he isn’t a Trump fan. In fact, he said he would vote for “Genghis Khan, Hitler, and motherfucking Ivan the Terrible” before he’d let anyone tell him what to do. (You can read the full transcript of his tirade here, if you dare.)

Vanilla Ice also made it clear that, despite the criticism, he still planned to light up the stage and wax a chump like a candle.

“I don’t even vote, so I don’t even care,” the rapper and home-flipper also known as Robert Van Winkle told TMZ. “I’ll go play for Putin and I’ll play in Iran, if you want. It don’t matter. There’s music fans everywhere.”

Trump’s desire to celebrate the nation’s 250th by time-traveling to 1990 makes some sense when you consider the sorry state of the music business 36 years ago.

Vanilla Ice, whose 1990 hit “Ice, Ice Baby” became the first hip-hop song to reach No. 1 on the Billboard hot 100 and more recently has been used to troll anti-ICE protestors, was a master of what we’d now call “cultural appropriation.” He was a handsome white guy with a goofy haircut who sold millions of records by peddling a sanitized version of Black music to an audience of suburban girls. (And told his detractors to “kiss my white butt!”)

Milli Vanilli was even worse, a particularly egregious example of a powerful white producer exploiting Black artists — an all-too-common pattern in the music industry. As detailed in an excellent 2023 documentary, Farian made a fortune peddling a hoax but faced little of the vitriol that Morvan and Pilatus endured in the wake of the scandal. Meanwhile, the mostly-Black musicians who played on the Girl You Know It’s True album received little compensation or credit for their work.

Then there’s C+C Music Factory, another producer-driven dance pop group accused of lip-syncing. Martha Wash, who recorded key vocals that were used in the group’s hit “Gonna Make You Sweat” filed a lawsuit in 1990 accusing the producers of fraud for replacing her in the music video and album art with the svelter Zelma Davis. (Wash would become what Rolling Stone called “the most famous unknown singer of the Nineties,” contributing vocals to numerous dance hits from the era without being in the videos or album art.)

Instead of celebrating this milestone by showcasing the best in American culture, the Trump administration tried to resurrect some of the worst musical trends of the recent past. As the cancellations continue to roll in, the future of “The Great American State Fair” looks increasingly uncertain. But what’s clear is that Trump has turned the nation’s anniversary into an embarrassing fiasco — and he can’t even blame it on the rain.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

As the people of Los Angeles head to the polls Tuesday to elect their next mayor, they should consider what Lauren Conrad told her roommate Heidi Montag on The Hills nearly twenty years ago.

He’s a sucky person.

Conrad was speaking candidly about Spencer Pratt, who was at the time Montag’s then brand-new boyfriend. She (accurately) believed that Pratt was a manipulative, untrustworthy creep who was trying to sabotage their friendship.

Two decades later, that “sucky person” is now running an alarmingly viable campaign for mayor. Pratt’s home burned down in the Palisades fire last year, a conflagration that killed 12 people, destroyed more than 6000 buildings, and was allegedly started by a disgruntled part-time Uber driver who was mad at rich people.

Pratt, forever a creature of reality television, has leveraged this tragedy for the one thing he thrives on: attention. Soon after the fire, he began lashing out at Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom on social media — where he has millions of followers — and on “The Fame Game,” the aptly-named podcast he hosts with Montag, his wife since 2009. (Naturally, they got married on The Hills.)

On the first anniversary of the disaster in January, he announced he was running for mayor, casting himself as a crusader for truth and his campaign as a mission “to expose the system.”

“We are going into every dark corner of LA politics and disinfecting the city with our light,” he said.

A few weeks later, he released a memoir, The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions of a Reality TV Villain, chronicling his lifelong quest for notoriety and wealth.

What the book does not detail is any interest in public service or improving the lives of everyday Angelenos. Other than a degree in political science from USC that he took more than a decade to complete, Pratt has zero experience in politics. The forty-two-year-old registered Republican and his wife — collectively known as “Speidi” — have spent most of their adult lives going from one reality TV show to the next, with side hustles in music and healing crystals. They made themselves rich by being utterly shameless, then squandered a $10 million fortune on wine, bodyguards, and Mayan Apocalypse preparations. Now Pratt wants to run the second-largest city in the country and manage its $15 billion budget, an idea that’s about as sound as letting a guy who went bankrupt running casinos be president.

In a sane world, Pratt’s “resume” would be a non-starter for anyone pursuing a career in politics. However (as Americans are now all too keenly aware), being a white guy whose sole talents are wasting money, getting his name printed in the tabloids, and convincingly playing an asshole on TV is enough to get elected to the highest office in the land. Twice.

And while Pratt is still a long shot, given LA’s deep-blue demographics, he is faring far better than he should be: According to a poll released Thursday, he has the backing of 22 percent of likely voters, putting him within striking distance of city council member Nitya Raman (25 percent), and Bass (26 percent). If none of the candidates receive more than 50% of the vote, then the top two finishers will compete in a November runoff.

Pratt’s standing has surged since a debate earlier this month, when he put his reality-TV skills to effective use, lobbing catchy soundbites and barbed insults rather than policy specifics. His campaign was also bolstered by an AI-generated ad portraying him as a Batman-esque crusader who directs an angry mob to hurl tomatoes at Mayor Bass (in Joker makeup), Newsom, and Kamala Harris.

Subscribe now

Pratt has clearly borrowed some pages from the Trump trolling playbook, deploying racist attacks against Bass (whom he refers to as “Mayor Basura,” the Spanish word for trash) and calling her supporters “Bassholes.” He has used dehumanizing language to describe the city’s homeless population (calling them “fentanyl zombies” who choose to live on the streets) and stoke fears about “super meth,” a drug that doesn’t exist.

He has made crime a signature issue, pledging to increase the number of officers in the LAPD to more than 12,000 (the current number is about 8,700) without explaining how he’d pay for it. He has also played up his own victimhood, claiming in an ad that he’s been living in an Airstream trailer — even though TMZ reported he has actually been staying at the Bel Air Hotel. In his most significant deviation from Trump, Pratt has said he doesn’t want ICE in the city because, as he told Vanity Fair, “I’ve eaten more Mexican food than any white person in Los Angeles.”

Arguably Pratt’s most Trumpian trait is his ability to capitalize on intense voter anger that transcends traditional right-left politics. He has tapped into a deep well of frustration over the devastating wildfires, homelessness, crime, the steady loss of film and TV jobs to runaway production, and the perception — fair or not — that Bass is not up to the task of steering LA through multiple crises.

Not surprisingly, Pratt has been praised by Joe Rogan, the world’s most enthusiastic booster of mediocre white men, and was also endorsed by Rupert Murdoch’s recently launched West Coast tabloid, The California Post. His most vocal supporters include other chronically thirsty reality TV dingbats like sunscreen truther Kristin Cavallari, Brody “Son of Caitlyn” Jenner, and American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee (whose much older husband is David Foster, Pratt’s mentor and Jenner’s ex-stepdad, information I am ashamed to admit I can recall without consulting Wikipedia).

But Pratt has also won over much of the West Side donor class and business elite, including Lakers’ governor Jeanie Buss, producer and MAGA convert Brian Grazer, Universal Music CEO Lucian Grainge, Power Rangers mogul/Democratic fundraiser Haim Saban, and Nicole Avant, wife of Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos (and former ambassador to the Bahamas under Barack Obama).

Ironically — or fittingly — the constituency that seem least likely to support Pratt’s political ambitions are people who actually watched The Hills. To my knowledge, there are currently no pollsters tracking the opinions of people who spent way too much time consuming MTV docusoaps during the George W. Bush administration, so I can’t offer any hard data. But a quick glance at the Reddit forum for The Hills suggests he is even less popular than Sean Duffy is with Real World fans.

That’s because Pratt was not merely the guy viewers loved to hate on The Hills, he was the epitome of everything wrong with pop culture in the aughts — and with politics today.

Share

Pratt grew up in the wealthy enclave of Pacific Palisades and attended Crossroads School, a haven for nepo babies — experiences that seemingly made the future star of Celebrity Wife Swap believe that fame was his destiny. He left USC early to executive produce The Princes of Malibu, a short-lived Fox reality series starring his best friend, Brody Jenner.

When that was canceled after two episodes, Pratt weasled his way onto The Hills by hanging out at LA nightclubs where the show was filming and striking up a romance with Montag. The docusoap, a spinoff of Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County which premiered 20 years ago this week, followed Conrad as she moved to Los Angeles and pursued a career in fashion.

As soon as he officially joined the show in Season 2, Pratt eagerly stepped into the role of antagonist, driving a permanent wedge between Conrad and Montag, then her best friend. It was all part of a mission to upstage Conrad and make himself (and Montag) the star of the show, and it was alarmingly successful.

For several years, “Speidi” was inescapable. When Montag got radical plastic surgery — undergoing 10 procedures in a single day — it made the cover of People magazine (the Obamas were relegated to a corner). Over the years, Pratt has made it seem that he was willingly playing the role of villain and doing producers a favor by bringing drama to the show. He and Montag have presented themselves as shrewd Warholian performance artists whose entire life is “content.” (Case in point: Montag filed for divorce in 2010, in what she later admitted was a bid to drum up publicity when The Hills was winding down.)

Since the show ended in 2010, Pratt has tried to cultivate a gentler, more woo-woo image as a hummingbird enthusiast and crystal entrepreneur. But he has never reckoned with — or apologized for — his conduct on The Hills, where he epitomized the foul misogyny that permeated celebrity culture in the mid-aughts. He joined the show in 2007, the same year that a mentally unwell Britney Spears shaved her head and attacked a paparazzo with an umbrella. It was an era when celebrity tabloids and gossip blogs feasted on the troubles of young female stars and brutally scrutinized their appearance.

Pratt was an early and eager adopter of this unfortunate Y2K trend: well before he appeared on reality TV, he made $50,000 selling personal photos of a teenage Mary-Kate Olsen which he’d taken from his friend Max Winkler, her ex-boyfriend.

On The Hills, he upped the misogyny, spending an entire season spreading an unfounded rumor that Conrad had made a sex tape with her ex-boyfriend. He leaked the story to Perez Hilton, the once-influential gossip blogger known for scrawling ejaculating penises on paparazzi photos of celebrities he didn’t like (and a major supporter of Pratt’s mayoral campaign). Conrad wasn’t the only woman he regularly insulted and demeaned: During his many meltdowns on The Hills, he dismissed his mother-in-law as “just the vagina that brought Heidi to Earth” and called his sister Stephanie a “crazy bitch.”

And as much as Pratt likes to claim he was playing the bad guy for the cameras, he was even more of a villain outside of the show: on his blog, he referred to Conrad using a vulgar slang term for female genitalia (and, as an extra dig, claimed her ex-boyfriends used the nickname for her all the time).

Conrad, the woman Pratt tormented on TV and in the press for years, has gracefully deflected questions about her former nemesis’s run for office. (“I am not a resident of Los Angeles,” she told Jenna Bush Hager on Today.) Pratt, meanwhile, continues to insist the sex tape is real and expresses zero remorse for his behavior toward Conrad.

“If I’m not gonna get elected mayor because I never apologized to [Conrad], I’ll take that.”

So would the rest of us.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Anyone who ever read Lord of the Flies as an adolescent (or otherwise) is hard-pressed to forget its imagery: the conch, the signal fire, the beast in the forest, Piggy’s broken specs. First published in 1954, William Golding’s dystopian novel about a group of British schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island has resonated with readers for more than 70 years.

It has also inspired numerous film and TV adaptations, including a Netflix series released earlier this month. At a time when less-than-faithful literary interpretations are all the rage, this latest version of Lord of the Flies is noteworthy for just how closely it hews to the source material, down to the midcentury wartime setting and famous lines of dialogue.

Written by Jack Thorne and directed by Marc Munden, the four-part drama opens on a lush tropical island where a few dozen prepubescent boys have landed following a plane crash. With no surviving adults to care for them, the children must attempt to govern themselves and establish their own civilization — with disastrous results.

Ralph (Winston Sawyers) is elected leader, with support from the intellectual Piggy (David McKenna), who is focused on practical concerns like shelter and sanitation. They clash with the egomaniacal Jack (Lox Pratt), leader of the school choir, who is more interested in hunting pigs. The ethereal Simon (Ike Talbut) floats between the two groups. Tensions quickly boil over, suggesting that humans, even seemingly innocent children, are inherently prone to violence.

Subscribe now

Thorne and Munden have created an adaptation that feels relevant at a moment of heightened concern about the social and emotional struggles of boys and young men — at a time when democracy is under threat across the globe.

“I would have made this show at any time, but there is something about this moment that feels like it fits Lord of the Flies,” Thorne said in a recent video interview with Munden.

It feels like right and left are unable to see each other anymore, I don’t think this is just about the rise of rise of a powerful right wing. I think this is also about the way that the left wing behaves towards that right wing and the inability of two sides to see each other clearly, and the way in which it feels like it’s easier to be defined by what you hate right now than what you love. It feels like we are in an age where shouting about what you don’t like has become a major preoccupation in a way that is obviously incredibly damaging.

Thorne made small but meaningful changes to Golding’s novel. In the series, unlike the book, Piggy is given a real name, Nicky — a thoughtful gesture that imbues the character (and the young actor playing him) with greater dignity. Thorne also makes judicious use of flashbacks to flesh out the characters’ backstories and show that these boys are very much a product of the society in which they were raised.

Thorne notes that Golding wrote the novel at the dawn of the Cold War — when the horrors of World War II remained fresh in the collective memory. “These are kids that are made by damaged people, that’s why they behave this way on an island,” said the English writer, whose credits include the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. “He writes it with great specificity, and that thing of ‘what we give, they inherit’ feels like a very important lesson to be talking about right now.”

Coincidentally, Thorne was working on this project at the same time as Adolescence, the Emmy-winning limited series which explored similar themes. Released last year, the drama followed a thirteen-year-old boy accused of murdering a classmate and was inspired by real-life incidents of violence in the U.K.

“The deterioration of the society that the boys form on the island is not inevitable,” Munden said. “It’s an accumulation of all these fractures, the hero worship, and all those things that everyone can understand as one’s baser instincts.”

Thorne’s interest in Lord of the Flies dates back to when he was eleven and plucked the book from his mother’s shelf one night when he was unable to sleep. Though it’s unlikely the book helped him get much rest, it was a revelation. “Within about 40 pages, I was like, ‘I’m Simon,’” Thorne recalled. “Those moments in literature, film, or TV where you see yourself reflected back at you are extraordinary.” Later, Thorne reread the book several times as an adult, and was forced to reconsider his connection to Simon and his opinion on Jack, a character he’d always despised.

Thorne’s evolving take on the characters speaks to just how fully formed and deeply human they are. Each embodies a different leadership style: Piggy is pragmatic, empathetic, and concerned with protecting the most vulnerable. Ralph is charismatic and naturally popular but dislikes confrontation. Jack is arrogant and cruel but also offers the boys something in short supply on the island: fun. Simon is the spiritual one, guided by a strong sense of morality and self-sacrifice.

Lord of the Flies is frequently interpreted as a political allegory about democracy versus authoritarianism. It’s tempting to look at the current state of the world and conclude that we live in an era when too many Jacks are in positions of authority, and not enough Ralphs, Piggies, or Simons.

But that’s not really the point, Thorne said: “I think that what the book is about is you need to be part of a collective. One chief is not the answer to any problem, and any society which thinks it is is going to do damage to itself.” Munden thinks that while Piggy would be an ideal “spad” — a Britishism for “special adviser” — none of the characters would necessarily be a great leader in their own right. “They’ve all got their piece of the puzzle that they put together in their society,” he said, “and it could have worked so well.”

Given that there are almost no adults in the series, casting the right young performers was crucial. Remarkably, virtually none of the cast had professional acting experience prior to Lord of the Flies, but they are uniformly superb. (And McKenna is especially heartbreaking as Piggy/Nicky.) Casting directors Martin Ware and Nina Gold “scoured the U.K, seeing thousands of boys and getting them to tell them what they would do if they were stranded on a desert island,” Munden said. On set, the ensemble faced a steep learning curve, but intuitively connected to their characters. “They understood the instincts of those boys, just from the playground, as it were,” Munden said.

Video clip of Meredith Blake interviewing series creator Jack Thorne and director Marc Munden.

Share

Filmed on location in Malaysia, Lord of the Flies is gorgeous to behold, with breathtaking shots of the dense rainforest and turquoise waters, which remind us that terrible human violence is possible even — perhaps especially — in the most stunning natural settings. (It’s reminiscent of The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick’s gorgeous, harrowing 1998 film set during the Battle of Guadalcanal.)

Making the series on actual uninhabited islands with a cast of untrained children was a difficult process, but one that gave Munden and Thorne greater faith in the young people with whom they were working. (In other words, Lord of the Flies did not descend into Lord of the Flies behind the scenes.) Safeguards were put in place to protect the actors who played the “littluns,” the youngest characters in the series. They were kept away from set during the most violent sequences, and unable to hear the older actors chant variations of “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood.”

Rather than going feral, the boys spent their spare time playing silly games in the hotel pool and squirting one another with sunblock. “They understood what they were doing, but they also treated it with great joy,” Thorne said. “If you ask them what they kept from the filming process, it’ll be the moments when one of them ate sand and everyone laughed… They really do give you great optimism, because they’re wonderful.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Ask E. Jean, the poignant yet entertaining documentary about E. Jean Carroll — the colorful advice columnist who beat Donald Trump in court twice — is finally in theaters.

But getting it there wasn’t easy.

The documentary’s journey began in 2019, when director Ivy Meeropol read the New York Magazine article in which Carroll accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room 23 years earlier. The filmmaker was struck by the tone of the piece — devastating, raw, yet full of verve — and reached out to see if Carroll would be willing to participate in a documentary. She received a blunt answer:

“It’a classic E. Jean line,” Meeropol recalled over Zoom this week. “But that just made me want to meet her and get to know her more.”

Carroll had been approached by numerous filmmakers, but was eventually won over by Meeropol’s take: she was interested in creating a complete portrait of Carroll, one that also chronicled her remarkable career as a writer during the heyday of the glossy magazine. They spent a lot of time talking before the cameras started rolling.

“Building trust is no small thing, and I take it very seriously,” Meeropol said. “I am pretty protective of the people I’m making films about…I’m very collaborative. They don’t get to give notes on cuts, but in terms of ‘what should we do together?’, it’s a conversation, not me firing questions at them.”

There were obstacles other than Carroll’s reluctance, starting with two high-profile civil trials in which Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and ordered to pay Carroll a combined $88 million in damages. (Of which he has paid $0, while continuing to appeal the judgments, which may go to the Supreme Court.) While those cases were underway, Meeropol had little access to her subject.

Then came what Meeropol calls “The Trump Effect” — the fear that has taken over much of the entertainment business and made streaming services and film distribution companies reluctant to put their weight behind a project that could provoke the outrage of an increasingly vengeful and instinctively litigious president. Some producers and crew members asked to have their names left out of the credits for fear of retaliation.

Still, Meeropol believed a film about Carroll had appeal. “She’s the documentary character that you dream of — to tell a story like this with someone like her? To me, it was a no-brainer.”

Ask E. Jean premiered at the prestigious Telluride Film Festival last fall, and initial reviews were positive, but they received no offers. Months later, a deal finally seemed to be in the works until the distributor “ghosted” the film, according to Meeropol. “I absolutely felt the Trump effect making this film, on so many levels, in so many instances,” she said. (Carroll was not available to discuss the project because of ongoing legal proceedings.)

The film, which opened in New York City Thursday and will expand across the country over the next few weeks, is drawn from archival footage, videotaped legal depositions, and original interviews with Carroll and her closest confidantes. Ask E. Jean traces its subject’s fascinating evolution from Indiana cheerleader to Montana housewife to professionally fabulous New York City raconteur who hobnobbed at Elaine’s and once worked at Saturday Night Live. Carroll’s eccentric personality shines through as she recalls some of her wild journalistic escapades, like making out with profile subject William Hurt and writing an unauthorized biography of Hunter S. Thompson.

“I was always interested in how her early life was very traditional. She was doing all the ‘feminine’ things,” Meeropol said.

Because of various limitations on the production, Meeropol only spent about five days in total interviewing Carroll on-camera — less time than she ideally gets with her subjects, yet somehow enough. “Sometimes I will interview people for like six hours to get something really good for maybe 10 minutes. This was the opposite. I’d talk to her for two hours, and everything she said was gold,” she said.

Arguably the most revelatory material in the film is the deposition footage in which Carroll describes the 1996 assault — and its long, devastating aftermath. Meeropol obtained the videos, which had not been made public, from Carroll’s attorney, Robbie Kaplan.

Meeropol calls it “the greatest gift” for the film because “I wanted people to experience this through E. Jean.”

In the deposition, Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba bombarded Carroll with a stream of irrelevant, hostile questions: Were you wearing underwear? What about your handbags from that day? Did you wear a bra? What is your highest level of education? Where’d you go to college? What was your first job? What year did they stop taking your article ideas? Have you ever had acting classes?

“It’s this incredible chance for us to see what really happens when someone who’s brought a charge of rape or sexual assault is deposed,” Meeropol said.

Even as she recalls the horrific details of the assault and fields deeply personal, accusatory questions, Carroll is irrepressibly funny. At one point, she is asked how many many men she dated after her second divorce. “It was such a gorgeous array of chaps,” she says, sweeping her hands in dramatic arcs. “Let me think.”

Meeropol also uses footage from Carroll’s cable talk show, also called Ask E. Jean, which aired from 1994 to 1996 — around the time she was assaulted by Trump. On the program, she doled out sage advice that, we now know, she was not always able to follow herself. In one clip, she tells a rape survivor that “the woman who best survives a rape is the woman who doesn’t perpetuate and worsen her misery by adding guilt to it.” (Carroll told friends about the attack, but did not report it to police.)

Subscribe now

Meeropol also unearthed a remarkable clip of Carroll appearing on the 1960s game show, To Tell the Truth, to talk about earning the title of Miss Cheerleader USA. With her trademark wit, she responds to loaded questions from the panelists (e.g. “How did you get the crowd worked up?”)

“What we were doing with a lot of that older archival [material] is showing how insidious the misogyny is,” Meeropol said. “It really delivered in telling the bigger story that we were trying to get at, which is that from the minute we’re born, we are confronted with having to look at ourselves through how men are perceiving us.”

“It’s so deep,” she continued. “And you get to really see all of it play out through this one remarkable person.”

Ask E. Jean also shows how Carroll internalized some of this thinking. As seen in the film, she once called Anita Hill and Paula Jones “wimps” and criticized them for not immediately standing up to their alleged harassers. This attitude even seeped into the pages of her Elle advice column.

“I told women to suck it up and just get on with it. That’s the silent generation,” Carroll says.

But a turning point came in 2017, when she read the harrowing accounts from women accusing Harvey Weinstein of rape and harassment.

“The surge of #MeToo rose up and just swallowed America, and what happened is women started to write to me to ask E. Jean, should they come forward. How can I sit there silent?” she says in the film.

The movement inspired Carroll to go public and confront the trauma of what happened at Bergdorf — a difficult task for someone with such a feisty persona.

“Being vulnerable isn’t easy for her,” Meeropol said. “But that is why the depositions are so powerful — because she couldn’t run away from those feelings. To me, one of the most powerful, poignant moments is when after all of it, she has to admit that she still blames herself.”

For Meeropol, making films that examine political subjects through a personal lens is nothing new. Her first documentary, Heir to an Execution, focused on her grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and executed in 1953, at the height of McCarthyism. “I respond to stories of individuals battling these big power structures,” she said.

More than 70 years later, we are living through another moment of fear and paranoia, when it’s hard to get a political documentary financed and made — much less seen by a wide audience. But that’s the goal for Ask E. Jean.

“We are getting it out everywhere — as many theaters will have us,” Meeropol said. “We’re taking the film all over the country.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

When Stephen Colbert signs off from The Late Show on Thursday after 11 years and 1801 episodes, it will be a loss for comedy fans, for people who believe in free speech, and for the 200 or so writers, staff, and crew members who will be out of a job come Friday morning.

The end of The Late Show will also be a loss for anyone who values thoughtful dialogue about religion, theology, and spirituality, and thinks that liberals of faith have an important role to play in contemporary political discourse.

Colbert is a brilliant satirist and comedian who co-created the cult favorite Strangers With Candy, coined the term “truthiness,” and even formed a super PAC in order to demonstrate the absurdity of our campaign finance laws.

He also happens to be one of the most visible practicing Catholics in the United States. On The Colbert Report, which he hosted from 2005 to 2014, Colbert played a blowhard character who liked to claim he was the most famous Catholic in America. Yet the real-life Colbert has arguably become just that, speaking freely about his beliefs without lecturing or proselytizing. He is also among the most politically influential members of the American church, along with Vice President J.D. Vance and the six Catholics on the Supreme Court.

His voice is much-needed at a time when many so-called faith leaders remain cultishly devoted to the president, even as he posts AI-generated images of himself as Jesus Christ, picks fights with the pope, and threatens to annihilate entire countries. Colbert is a prominent Christian who holds the powerful to account, believes in the separation of church and state, and doesn’t claim that God is on his side, politically speaking.

As he told me in 2018, “You’re only going to corrupt the message of Christ by saying that he likes Republicans more than Democrats. Or he likes Democrats who care for the poor more than Republicans who want to cut taxes. Don’t get your politics in my Jesus, please.”

The youngest of eleven children in a tight-knit Irish Catholic family, Colbert faced unspeakable tragedy at the age of 10, when his father and brothers Peter and Paul — the siblings closest to him in age — died in a plane crash. As he recalled on Father James Martin’s podcast last year, Colbert was suddenly home alone with his grieving mother, a daily communicant who urged him to consider his pain “in the light of eternity.” After a brief atheist phase in college, Colbert returned to Catholicism in his 20s and went on to become a Sunday school teacher.

Though his early forays into professional comedy were more silly and absurdist than spiritually profound, that began to shift with the premiere of The Colbert Report in 2005. On the Comedy Central program, he adopted the persona of an ignorant conservative, a la Bill O’Reilly. But the character had two things in common with the man who played him: he was Catholic, and he loved Tolkien.

“I cannot remove that from me anymore than you can remove the marble from a statue,” he told Martin, a Jesuit priest and author who frequently appeared on The Colbert Report to talk about church news and eventually became the show’s official chaplain. (I would link to some of these interviews, but — unfortunately — Paramount, a corporation dedicated to torching its own legacy, purged virtually the show’s entire archive from the web.) There were many times when Colbert’s Christian beliefs were detectable even through the layers of irony, like when he testified in character at a congressional hearing about migrant farm workers.

“Stephen is, in my mind, an especially good evangelist of the Gospels’ emphasis on care for the poor,” said Martin in 2015, when The Colbert Report was winding down (he has since made numerous visits to The Late Show.)

Subscribe now

When Colbert succeeded David Letterman at The Late Show in 2015, he ditched the blustery persona and had to learn how to be himself on camera. It was an awkward transition. The show initially faltered in the ratings, but surged once Trump took office in 2017, and has been the most-watched program in late night broadcast for nine seasons straight. (Ending The Tonight Show’s long ratings dominance.) The turnaround is often attributed to Colbert taking a more sharply political tone. But one could also argue that he thrived once he was able to speak sincerely about his views of the world.

For Colbert, responding to the news requires reflection and self-examination.

“My spiritual practice on a daily basis is trying to understand how I feel about what happened in the world in the last 24 hours,” he said on Martin’s podcast. “I don’t mistake that for prayer, but that deconstruction of the day is like examining your conscience, and you can’t be hypocritical — or rather, it’s best not to be hypocritical — when you’re making jokes about hypocrites.”

In a recurring segment called “Big Questions with Even Bigger Stars,” Colbert and his guests lie on a blanket and ask faux-profund questions while gazing at the sky. But In a genre increasingly dominated by silly games and canned interviews, The Late Show has become something like the Fresh Air of TV. It is a place where celebrities feel comfortable going a bit deeper, as when actor Andrew Garfield spoke about the death of his mother and musician Nick Cave discussed losing two of his sons,. In 2022, pop star Dua Lipa brilliantly flipped the script on Colbert by asking how his faith overlapped with his comedy, creating yet another viral moment.

A quick glance at the most popular videos on The Late Show’s YouTube reveal just how these moments resonate with the public: Among the most-watched clips is a debate over atheism with Ricky Gervais and a conversation with Jimmy Carter about why he prays for Donald Trump. In a recent interview, which CBS refused to air and subsequently went viral, Colbert chatted with Senate candidate James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, about how the religious right has co-opted Christianity.

Crucially, Colbert doesn’t pretend that he has the answer for everyone, and he clearly delights in having lively, respectful debates with non-believers. Even when dealing with someone as smug and condescending as Bill Maher, he avoids being smug or condescending.

As The Late Show winds down this week, Colbert has booked some heavy-hitters, including David Byrne, Jon Stewart, Steven Spielberg, and Bruce Springsteen. Guests for Thursday’s finale have not been announced, Colbert has repeatedly expressed interest in having Pope Leo XIV on the show, and it doesn’t seem entirely impossible that the pontiff might make an appearance.

As of Friday, Colbert will no longer have a regular perch on the country’s most-watched broadcast network. Even as CBS insists the cancellation was a purely financial decision, we should be concerned that such an essential voice is being pushed off the airwaves.

Yet crestfallen fans should also remember what Colbert told Dua Lipa a few years back:

“No matter what happens, you are never defeated. You must understand and see this in the light of eternity, and find some way to love and laugh with each other.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

This is the true story of a transportation secretary and his nine children, picked to live on the road and have their lives taped. To find out what happens when a cabinet member decides to stop being polite (or ethical) and start getting cash: It’s The Great American Road Trip

Once upon a time, it would have been considered uncouth for a cabinet secretary to star in a reality series of any kind — much less one sponsored by major corporations subject to oversight by his department.

But in 2026, apparently, anything goes. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, his wife Rachel Campos-Duffy, and several of their nine children will appear in a YouTube series called The Great American Road Trip. The five-episode series, which launches in June, is ostensibly designed to promote domestic tourism ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary in July. A four-minute trailer shows the family meeting with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, visiting the Liberty Bell, enjoying the rides on a gargantuan cruise ship, avoiding any service that helps the American people, and — of course — hanging out with Kid Rock.

The series has triggered a huge social media backlash. Duffy has been called tone-deaf for going on a free family vacation when gas is averaging $4.50 a gallon, there’s a national shortage of air traffic controllers, and airlines are rapidly going out of business.

In his defense, Duffy says he was not paid for participating in the series and the production costs were covered by a nonprofit called The Great American Road Trip, rather than taxpayers. But this only raises more ethical concerns, since the group’s corporate sponsors include Boeing, Toyota, United Airlines, and other companies regulated (and in some cases under active investigation) by the DOT.

According to a pitch deck obtained by Politico, these companies paid up to $1 million for perks including logo placement in the series, social media mentions, and invitations to VIP networking events. Tori Barnes, the executive director of the Great American Road Trip, is a former lobbyist for General Motors and the U.S. Travel Association.

Duffy responded to the Road Trip criticism on X with his usual bluster:

The radical, miserable left has noticed our awesome Great American Road Trip trailer and they hate it. It’s too wholesome. It’s too patriotic. It’s too joyful. They’re upset because they don’t want you to celebrate America! And they definitely don’t want you to teach your kids civics & patriotism. So they tell lies to undermine the mission.

Playing the token conservative

Duffy was using a playbook (respond to any criticism, no matter how legitimate, by casting yourself as the victim of petty haters) that he has been perfecting since 1997, when he was the token conservative on Season 6 of MTV’s seminal reality show, The Real World, set in Boston.

The following year, he appeared in the spinoff series Road Rules: All Stars, which followed former Real World cast members as they traveled in an RV. While filming the show, he hooked up with his future wife, Rachel Campos, who starred in Season 3 of The Real World (alongside AIDS activist Pedro Zamora).

They were married in 1999, when she was already pregnant with their first child. In 2002, he returned to the MTV fold and won The Real World/Road Rules Challenge, a Survivor-like competition series (that later became known as The Challenge). The same year, he became district attorney of Ashland County, Wisconsin, launching a political career that would take him to Congress and, eventually, the executive branch.

Much like the guy he works for, Duffy owes his political rise to reality TV. Starring in multiple shows on MTV at the height of the network’s cultural influence turned Duffy into a mini-celebrity, giving him the kind of visibility rarely enjoyed by competitive lumberjacks from the Northwoods of Wisconsin. But, just as important, reality TV was an effective training ground for his career in Republican politics, a venue where Duffy learned how to communicate in combative soundbites and play the role of the aggrieved white conservative.

Duffy was selected from a field of 10,000 applicants to star on The Real World, and his thick accent and small-town roots were a selling point for producers. “They said I sound like Fargo,” he said in an interview at the time. One of 11 children in an Irish Catholic family raised in Northern Wisconsin, Duffy had little contact with Black or queer people before The Real World. For six months, he lived in a converted firehouse with six other young people whose lifestyles, backgrounds, and political beliefs differed wildly from his own.

Duffy would later go on to brand himself as a social conservative and pro-natalist, but on The Real World he cultivated a more libidinous persona. In his audition, Duffy said that he hadn’t slept with anyone in three months and that he hoped to meet some “cute girls” through the show. “I’m kinda starvin’ right now,” he told producers. Throughout the season, he flirted with his co-star Montana McGlynn — an ardent feminist — and taped her on a camcorder as she flashed her breasts at him (then watched it over and over). Duffy was also reprimanded for drinking while on the job in an after-school program for kids.

But perhaps the season’s most memorable dynamic was the contentious relationship between Duffy and Kameelah Phillips, a Black Stanford student (who went on to become an OB/GYN). During a dispute over directions, he called her a “bitch.” He also likened her to Hitler because he equated her Black pride with racism. At one point in the season, Duffy suggested their roommate give Phillips a gun so “she can play Russian roulette.” None of this rhetoric damaged Duffy’s reputation: he was back on MTV within months of The Real World finale.

Subscribe now

Duffy was elected to Congress in the Tea Party surge of 2010, flipping what had been a Democratic seat for decades. His bid was boosted by an early endorsement from Sarah Palin (who by then had already abandoned politics to cash in on reality TV herself.) The Duffys spoke in favor of Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention, before many in the GOP had thrown their support behind the candidate. Duffy stepped down in 2019 supposedly to care for a child with health complications, and went on to become a CNN commentator, Fox Business host, and — naturally — a lobbyist before Trump tapped him to head the DOT.

In a 2019 interview, Duffy said that The Real World taught him how to find common ground with people different from himself. “I think that’s an important lesson for all young people, is to give people a chance.” But the 2026 version of Duffy seems to have absorbed a different lesson from reality TV: that being combative will get you lots of screen time. In his frequent cable news hits, Duffy points fingers at his predecessor Pete Buttigieg, and recites familiar culture-war talking points about the supposed danger of DEI and pronouns.

‘Let’s go back to our roots’

With The Great American Road Trip, Duffy is returning to the genre that shaped him — and which has increasingly shaped the country’s political discourse. The series is being produced by Bunim/Murray Productions, the company that created The Real World and numerous other landmark unscripted series. BMP has long touted its inclusive storytelling, with a section on its website listing the causes (#MeToo, HIV/AIDS awareness) it has helped champion through its shows. (Conspicuously absent from the website: any mention of The Great American Road Trip.)

In an appearance on Fox News last week to promote the series, the Duffys emphasized the project’s ties to their romantic backstory.

“Rachel and I actually met on a road trip on a reality show,” Duffy said. “Our motto is ‘To love America, is to see America.’ And there’s so much to see in this beautiful country.”

Campos-Duffy, an on-air personality at Fox News, said Trump encouraged his cabinet members to “do something to celebrate America.”

“Then we started talking about: let’s go back to our roots. Let’s do this one for free. We’ll put it onto YouTube. We’ll let the whole country see it,” she said. “We live in a Pornhub world. This is really wholesome, good family stuff.”

The trailer, released last week, suggests the show will be a slickly produced unscripted sitcom that depicts the Duffys as a relatable family with a dad who makes goofy jokes and a mom who calls the shots. The Duffy kids feature prominently in the preview, which teases an incident that lands one of them in the hospital — yet another ethically dubious aspect of this project. (If you want to know why kids who are too young to sign a contract shouldn’t be on reality TV, no matter how “wholesome” it purports to be, read this.)

The Duffys aren’t the only reality TV veterans to go into careers in conservative media and politics. Podcaster Theo Von got his start on Road Rules, while Spencer Pratt, who is running for mayor of Los Angeles, is still mostly known as the bad guy from The Hills.

From that list, the Duffys are currently the most powerful reality TV conservatives who just can’t quit having a camera pointed at them at all times. And they didn’t get that way by being polite — or, for that matter, by getting real.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Every spring since 1932, tourists have flocked to the city of Natchez, Mississippi, to visit stately antebellum homes and gardens, where women in hoop skirts and men in Confederate regalia recreate a romanticized version of the Old South. The annual rite is known as the “pilgrimage,” presumably because it holds a quasi-spiritual appeal to believers in the Lost Cause.

Natchez, a documentary airing tonight on PBS’s Independent Lens, immerses viewers in a community where competing versions of history play out on a daily basis. Directed by Suzannah Herbert, the film follows a number of locals who make a living in tourism but who tell different stories about the region’s past. (It will also be available to stream on the PBS app and PBS Documentaries YouTube channel.)

Tracy “Rev” Collins is a Black preacher who talks openly about the ugly legacy of slavery and segregation and greets visitors by proudly announcing, “I’m about to violate some Southern pride narratives with truth and facts.” His tours include a stop at Forks of the Road, the former site of one of the busiest slave markets in the Deep South. Rev’s warts-and-all philosophy is a stark contrast to that of David Garner, the white, elderly owner of Choctaw Hall, who shows off the period finery in his well-preserved 19th-century mansion and whose gay identity doesn’t prevent him from going on racist tirades.

We also meet Tracy McCartney, a volunteer who gives tours of Choctaw Hall while dressed up like Scarlett O’Hara, yet also defies the Southern Belle stereotype, and Deborah Cosey, the first Black woman admitted to Natchez’s influential garden club, who pushes her white peers to acknowledge the enslaved people who once labored in their homes.

Even though Natchez was filmed before Trump returned to the White House, it feels particularly urgent at a moment when statues of Confederate generals are being restored, unvarnished depictions of the brutality of slavery are being removed from National Parks, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act has paved the way for a new Jim Crow era in the South.

Subscribe now

The film is “all about history,” Herbert says. “But it’s really about the stories we tell, how we engage with that history, and how people understand our past through our lived experiences.” For many in the community, Southern nostalgia is especially irresistible because it has also been economically beneficial.

“The history that they learned and the history that they believe is now being yanked out from under them,” says a National Park employee in the film. “It’s hard work to come to a point where you’re able to say, ‘The history I learned was a mythological construct that was used to sell tickets.’”

Natchez is devoid of the scholarly talking heads you might expect in a documentary about American history, and is instead rich with allusions to cinematic portrayals of the South, particularly Gone With the Wind. In a sequence that evokes one of the most memorable shots from the 1939 epic, McCartney takes a sunset walk in her period garb, her silhouette dark against the vivid sky.

Says Herbert:

I wanted the film to visually nod to Gone With the Wind, but also to make it a kind of antidote to Gone With the Wind. To this day, Gone With the Wind is still the highest-grossing film, adjusted for inflation, of all time. It has this huge grasp on white-dominant popular culture, and how we think about the South, American history and the Civil War. I wanted to disrupt that, but also pay homage to it.

Cinematographer Noah Collier shot the film using vintage lenses from the 1960s, which “really bring audiences into the fantasy and the allure of it, and show how enticing that is,” Herbert says.

Herbert, who grew up in Memphis, originally envisioned a different type of film: she planned to explore the phenomenon of heritage tourism by embedding herself at a Louisiana plantation over a single wedding season. But during a research trip, she stopped by Natchez — located on the banks of the Mississippi River across from Louisiana — and was unnerved by the experience.

“I was just so struck by the beauty and the fantasy of it all,” she says of the city, which was occupied by the Union for much of the Civil War. “It’s a unique place in that the antebellum structures are so well-preserved, but there was this underlying tension and pain that was right underneath the surface. That dichotomy made me really uncomfortable.”

Herbert eventually realized that discomfort is exactly what made Natchez a rich subject to explore. “Natchez is actually a community grappling with how we tell history,” she says, “and that’s actually so much more complicated and interesting than one specific site.”

Herbert started working on the film in 2022 and spent weeks in Natchez getting to know people before she even considered breaking out her camera. She went on countless tours and observed an array of approaches. In some of the private home tours led by white owners, “It was about what was not said, what was not acknowledged. If slavery was talked about, it was referred to with euphemisms or talking about how the ‘servants’ were happy.” But there were also homeowners who have been trying to engage with the history. “It definitely runs the spectrum,” Herbert says.

Because she’s a white woman, Herbert thinks some residents were more comfortable revealing their true selves to her — including Garner. In the film, he jokes that gay men are the only people with “the money and the taste” to take care of Natchez’s historic homes and also host an LGBTQ benefit at Choctaw Hall. But he also freely drops the N-word while the cameras are rolling.

“Just because he’s been oppressed doesn’t mean he cannot be an oppressor,” Herbert says. “The way he clutches on to his whiteness is so revealing.”

Garner notwithstanding, Herbert is heartened by the changes she’s witnessed in Natchez, where many community leaders “are really working to expand the narrative,” she says. Herbert points to the boom in tourism in Montgomery, Alabama, since the National Memorial for Peace and Justice was opened there. The city “has done an incredible job embracing its past,” she says. It turns out that good history can also be good for business.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Ted Turner, the brash, iconoclastic media mogul, yachtsman, rancher, and philanthropist who ushered in the 24/7 news cycle and forged a cable empire on old movies, reruns, and sports programming, died Wednesday at eighty-seven years old.

Along with his bitter rival Rupert Murdoch, Turner was one of the most influential figures in media over the last half-century, dramatically reshaping how people around the world consume news, sports, and entertainment.

In the 1970s, he turned a small Atlanta TV channel into TBS, the country’s first “superstation.” In 1980, he launched Cable News Network, a.k.a. CNN, which offered round-the-clock programming at a time when the broadcast networks controlled TV news. As cable continued to grow over the next decade and a half, Turner expanded even further with channels including Turner Network Television, The Cartoon Network, and Turner Classic Movies, which — even (perhaps especially) in the streaming era — remains an essential repository for films from Hollywood’s golden era.

In 1996, the Turner Broadcasting System merged with Time Warner in an early wave of consolidation that has continued for three decades. He began to step away from business to focus more on philanthropy, pledging $1 billion dollars to create the United Nations Foundation in 1997, and conservation of the American West, acquiring 13 ranches that are now home to 45,000 bison.

Tributes poured in on Wednesday.

“Ted was a giant, whose extraordinary achievements were only outmatched by his profound generosity and resolve to create a better world,” said UN Foundation President and CEO Elizabeth Cousens in a statement.

Ex-wife Jane Fonda, who remained close to Turner even after their divorce in 2001, shared a moving tribute on Instagram, in which she called him the most competitive person she ever met, after Katharine Hepburn.

“He also taught me more than any other person or school classes, mostly about nature and wildlife….but also about business and strategy,” she wrote. “I loved Ted with all my heart. I see him in heaven now with all the wildlife he helped bring back from extinction…. they’re all gathered at the pearly gates applauding and thanking him for saving their species.”

For better and for worse, Turner set the standard for what it meant to be a modern media tycoon, with countless other billionaires emulating his swashbuckling style and thirst for adventure. As evident in the first sentence of nearly every obituary published yesterday, Turner’s most lingering achievement may be the founding of CNN, a risky programming experiment that utterly transformed the TV news business.

Turner was a man of “singular spirit,” says Lisa Napoli, author of Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News, who spoke to The Contrarian about Turner’s impact. The following is an edited version of our conversation.

Why did Ted Turner get into TV in the first place? My understanding is he was not even a fan — he thought TV was vulgar and corrosive.

Ted’s dad was a very successful billboard salesman, and he unfortunately died by suicide. Ted, as a young man, inherited the billboard company, and found it to be boring. He wanted a challenge, so he bought a radio station. And he found that boring, too. Then he had a chance to buy a UHF television station in Atlanta in the late ‘60s; channel 17. He thought that that would be sexier and more fun. Because it was a UHF station, it didn’t have broadcast content. It was a scrappy local station, and he was buying movies and old TV shows [to air], but he had a public service requirement that he had to have a news show. He didn’t care about the news, but he had to fulfill this obligation. So he had Bill Tush, who was a local announcer, do a jokey newscast. Ted also didn’t understand why the station stopped broadcasting at midnight or one o’clock in the morning, after the last movie. He thought it was a waste of time. So he decided to put the news on late for insomniacs like him and others.

Subscribe now

Fast forward, and technology allowed Ted to float the channel 17 signal around the region and then the country [as the station that became known as TBS]. By this point, he had bought the Atlanta Braves. He was doing something that no one had done before, which was broadcasting a local baseball team regionally and then nationally.

That’s the long answer to why he got into TV. He was experimenting. Initially, cable was just a utility, a way to get a signal to a place that was remote. But then people realized there’s more to it. We can put out more content than the three networks. And that’s when cable as we know it started. He got into the news, because ESPN had just started, HBO had just started, and people came to him and said, “Look, we can bust the triopoly of the three networks by offering a new type of news.”

So the idea of doing news at CNN was more of a business decision. He wasn’t trying to serve a journalistic need?

100%. People were frustrated with the status quo, but it was all purely a business play. He saw an opportunity. People don’t like to talk about it now, because they want to talk about his environmental stewardship and how he changed the news business, which is all absolutely true. But what they forget is how CNN started. It was very, very scrappy.

Do you think he had any sense of where it was going?

He was just experimenting. In those early days, he wanted to plant his flag into this new terrain. It was about a year in that he started to see the power of it, because Fidel Castro pirated the CNN signal. In the earliest days, cable was only in [some places] in the US. It was not in many homes. Fidel pirated the signal, and was tantalized by the idea of 24/7 news, and he sent an invitation. Ted Turner went down to Havana [in 1982] to meet Fidel. He was so dazzled by Fidel, and the fact that Fidel, a world leader, was watching his little cable news channel, that he came back and had this idea that he had to make CNN international.

About a year and a half into CNN’s existence, President Reagan was shot outside the Hilton. The White House press pool up until that point was just the three networks. People called CNN “Chicken Noodle News.” But on that day, Bernie Shaw, the main anchor of CNN, didn’t report things until he could verify them with two sources. That’s when people started to take CNN seriously, and that’s when Ted started to really take it seriously, too. Everybody wants to make it about “CNN is so liberal and Fox is so conservative.” It wasn’t like that at the beginning. Fox didn’t start till 16,17, years into CNN’s existence, neither did MSNBC. It was all a big experiment that wound up changing everything.

Do you think he understood intuitively something about the American public or the global TV audience that proved to be correct?

I wouldn’t say that he understood it. I think he was dazzled by it. He saw the potential of the interconnectivity of the shrunken world. He wasn’t a technologist. It wasn’t like he was an engineer, and he wasn’t a journalist, but he was a visionary, and he saw that there was opportunity there.

You worked at CNN shortly after it launched. What was that like?

I was an unpaid teenage intern for three summers in college. Back then, you literally could just call up and get an internship. Now, I’m sure it’s massively competitive. I was working at a video store and I wanted an interesting summer gig. I called up and they said, “Come in tomorrow.” That’s how I got in. When I got out of college, I worked at that old country club that they bought [as the original CNN headquarters]. All the people who started in the earliest years of CNN, with the exception of some of the frontline talent and the bigger producers, were people with very little to no experience. It’s not like today, where people go and get master’s degrees in communications. I was lucky to be a very teeny little cog in all of that, and I learned so much. How many people on Earth can say that they helped so many people start their careers, for better or worse? TV news is not necessarily the greatest force in the universe. But it’s not his fault. TV news would have accelerated without him, but he accelerated it in a very particular way. I always say that about hamburgers, too. I wrote a book about Ray Kroc. McDonald’s didn’t invent fast food.

As we all know, CNN is at this kind of existential crossroads and may soon be acquired by the Ellisons. How do you think he would have felt about this?

I would only be guessing. I know that he was enormously proud of what he created. I really couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what he or anybody who was working and active and most vibrant at the end of the last century would make of where we are today. Who knew? People speculated about the menacing power that television would have on the world, but a lot of people just didn’t believe that that was the case. If you go back and watch the movie Network and the movie The Candidate, they presaged the world we’re in today. But CNN, in its earliest days, was plain vanilla news.

This is not specific to Turner, but there are a lot of historical events that people point to as the birth of 24-7 news cycle — the first Gulf War, 9/11. Do you see a specific event that really ignited that news cycle in a permanent way?

You’ll hate this answer, but it’s a series of events. It was what I mentioned with the [Reagan] shooting. It was the Challenger space shuttle exploding. It was Tiananmen Square. There was Baby Jessica. It was the Gulf War. All those things that happened were happening in parallel to the growth of cable. It really is like the internet.

It was all happening as that medium was growing. Every time something big happened, it brought more attention to it. Then you have the late ‘90s, when Fox and MSNBC happened, and that really shines a spotlight on CNN. CNN didn’t get politicized quite right away, because it had good stewardship at that point but that was an inflection point. And then the internet, the World Wide Web, that’s an inflection point.

What do you see as Turner’s most enduring legacy?

I hope he is recognized as one of the great 20th century business people. He was a fearless entrepreneur who seized every opportunity in front of him and ran with it. He was a true entrepreneur, and people revere him for giving him their start in the business. His biggest connection was turning TV on 24/7. His second biggest connection was floating that TV signal around the US, and then around the world. He put a lasso around the earth in a way nobody had before. And that’s pretty enormous.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

During a climactic scene in The Devil Wears Prada 2, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) confronts the woman scheming to replace her as the editor-in-chief of Runway magazine.

“You’re not a visionary,” she sneers at her would-be successor. “You’re a vendor.”

It’s a devastating putdown. And it’s a distinction that Miranda’s real-life counterpart, Vogue global editorial director Anna Wintour should have considered before she asked Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his second wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, to be honorary chairs of the Met Gala.

The man who made a fortune selling toilet paper with free two-day shipping sponsoring the biggest event in fashion? Perish the thought.

The star-studded annual fundraiser, which Wintour has overseen for 30 years, is a reliably fun, frivolous spectacle and celebration of outrageous design. But thanks to the Bezoses’ involvement, this year’s event, held Monday in Manhattan, was mired in controversy — and dulled by underwhelming fashion.

Ahead of the gala, a group called Everyone Hates Elon blanketed the city with ads and clever Banksy-style guerrilla art (including projections and bottles of fake urine stashed around the Met, to protest Amazon’s labor practices and its executive chair’s increasingly cozy relationship with Trump. On Monday, labor organizer Chris Smalls was arrested for jumping the barricades at the gala.

Perhaps because of the controversy, a number of A-listers, including red carpet queen Zendaya, were notably absent from the festivities. Jeff Bezos quietly slithered into the gala without talking to reporters or posing for photos outside the museum, leaving his wife to walk the carpet alone.

Even this year’s theme “Fashion is Art,” felt like a downgrade, an attempt to create a basic version of the event — The Met Gala for Dummies.

A few attendees understood the proverbial assignment, like pop star Sabrina Carpenter, who wore a dress made of film from the classic Audrey Hepburn movie Sabrina, and actor Chase Infiniti, whose boldly colored trompe l’oeil gown was inspired by the Venus de Milo. But the event’s nebulous theme meant that far too many guests just threw on some couture and called it a day. (We’ve all been there, right?)

You have to wonder whether all that Amazon money will end up being worth it for Wintour, especially when the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is supported by the fundraiser, is close to being fully-endowed.

Movie synergy

In what is surely not a coincidence, this year’s gala took place three days after the heavily promoted release of The Devil Wears Prada 2, a bummer of a follow-up to the frothy 2006 comedy that taught millions of people the meaning of the word “cerulean.”

The original film, based on Lauren Weisberger’s roman à clef about her 10-month stint working for Anna Wintour at Vogue, was a shrewd fantasy about life as an ambitious creative professional in New York City — a millennial kid sister to Sex and the City.

It followed Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), an aspiring journalist who lands a job working for Miranda Priestly, the notoriously imperious editor-in-chief of Runway, the fashion-world bible. Directed by David Frankel and written by Aline Brosh McKenna, the film didn’t exactly turn Miranda into the hero of the story, but it did make a convincing case that Andy, for all her idealism, was just as much of a snob as her boss. It also cemented Wintour’s status as a pop culture icon, recognizable to Walmart shoppers and Manhattan fashionistas alike.

Yet for many years — well after the book and movie became massive hits — Wintour could barely mask her contempt for The Devil Wears Prada. (In this 2009 interview with David Letterman, you can see her roll her eyes when asked about the movie, which she curtly dismisses as fiction.) Whether she has mellowed with age or simply realized that it’s an honor to be played by the world’s greatest living film actress, Wintour has since embraced her fictional counterpart. The editor actively participated in the sequel, visiting the set (where she reportedly offered critiques of the floral design), appearing with Streep on the cover of Vogue’s May issue, and starring in a cutesy promo sketch.

The sequel, which was released Friday and made an impressive $77 million at the weekend box office, picks up roughly two decades later, when the once-glamorous magazine business is in tatters. Recently laid off from a job at an esteemed newspaper, Andy is reluctantly lured back to Runway and tasked with rebuilding the magazine’s reputation in the wake of a scandal.

Her one-time frenemy, Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), has left publishing for the supposedly greener pastures of luxury retail — Christian Dior, to be specific. (“Remember when magazines were a thing?” she gloats to Andy.) And she’s now engaged to Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), a recently divorced tech billionaire who has undergone a dramatic glow-up and aspires to fly a rocket ship to the sun. (Any similarities to Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk are surely coincidental.)

The one thing at Runway that hasn’t changed? Miranda remains as frosty and formidable as ever, and is poised to step into an even more powerful position at Elias-Clarke Publications, the magazine’s parent company. But then a sudden leadership brings drastic cost-cutting to the magazine and the-once mighty Miranda finds herself flying coach.

Billionaires aren’t your friends

When TDWP2 went into production last year, many observers wondered whether a nostalgia-fueled sequel would be willing to reckon with the cataclysmic changes to the magazine business since 2006. To its credit, the movie (again directed by Frankel and written by McKenna) is clear-eyed about the dismal state of journalism in 2026.

With one rather notable exception. [*SPOILERS INCOMING*]

In the film’s final act, Benji Barnes prepares to buy Runway, oust Miranda, and put Emily at the top of the magazine. So Andy and Miranda convince Benji’s deep-pocketed ex-wife, Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu), to acquire Elias-Clarke instead — thereby preserving Miranda’s legacy.

Needless to say, this is not the happy ending the film wants us to believe it is.

Subscribe now

In the real world, billionaires are actively shredding journalistic institutions like The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and CBS News. Even if some über-wealthy benefactors, like Laurene Powell Jobs, have been responsible stewards of specific publications, it is (at best) naive for the film to portray a billionaire — even a “good” one like Sasha, who is clearly modeled on Mackenzie Scott — as a journalistic savior.

And Wintour should know as much.

Instead, the editor — who once balked at inviting nouveau riche famous-for-being-famous types like the Kardashians to the Met Gala — has fallen for the same old “good billionaire” ruse.

It began last summer, when Sánchez Bezos was the subject of a truly sick-making Vogue cover story written by Chloe Malle (who became the magazine’s top editor a few months later.)

The puff piece fueled a rumor that Bezos was interested in buying not just Vogue but all of Condé-Nast as a wedding gift for his new bride, a former local broadcast journalist. She denied the rumor in The New York Times (in another fawning profile). But the alliance between Wintour, a major Democratic fundraiser, and the woman who sat in the front row at Trump’s second inauguration, only deepened.

In January, they attended Paris couture shows together while Amazon was laying off 16,000 employees around the world. A few weeks later, the Met quietly announced that the Bezoses would be honorary chairs of the Met Gala (the news was buried on the second page of a press release).

What either Bezos has done for fashion, other than make it easy to order sweatpants in bulk from the comfort of one’s couch, is unclear. But what they have done to journalism, particularly The Washington Post (which won two Pulitzers Monday) is already worse than anything proposed by the soulless McKinsey consultants in TDWP2.

Wintour, the daughter of a successful newspaper editor and one of the most powerful people in publishing, should care about how Bezos and his ilk are dismantling the press in this country.

At least one prominent star appears to. While most of The Devil Wears Prada 2 cast was in attendance Monday night, one person from the cast was noticeably absent: Meryl Streep, who happened to play Katherine Graham in The Post.

Whatever her reason for skipping, I hope she spent the night at home, curled up with a newspaper, magazine, or book she bought at a brick and mortar store.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

If Peter Morgan ever decides to reboot The Crown, this week provided an entire season’s worth of drama.

On Monday, King Charles III and Queen Camilla arrived for a four-day state visit to the United States to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the document that marked the end of British rule of the American colonies. The monarch spoke before a joint session of Congress, dined at the White House, visited the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, checked out a community garden in Harlem, swung by a block party in Virginia, and generally behaved like a true statesman, despite his officially apolitical role.

Charles shares much in common with our doddering commander-in-chief, Donald Trump. Both are philandering septuagenarians with strong opinions on architecture. Both are currently grappling with uncomfortably close connections to Jeffrey Epstein (though only one has moved to make amends for it). And both have been dogged by questions about their health — including what the heck is going on with their hands.

But the differences between these two aging nepo babies were more evident this week, when Charles, a man who doesn’t even squeeze his own toothpaste out of the tube, came off as more down-to-earth and more in tune with the ills facing the world than the wannabe king in the White House.

The unstated (yet unmistakable) purpose of Charles’ visit was to smooth the recently frayed “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and its erstwhile colony. In that regard, it was a smashing success. Charles, a man not exactly renowned for his charisma, wowed Congress, delivered an uproarious royal roast at Tuesday’s state dinner, and flattered Trump with his mere presence. At the tender age of seventy-seven, it seems that Charles has finally stepped out of his late mother’s shadow and found his voice on the world stage.

Subscribe now

The king arrived two days after a shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, a destabilizing act of political violence that Trump — who is now in full-blown Louis XIV mode — immediately seized upon to make the case for his $400 million ballroom. By contrast, Charles, who could personally spring for at least two of those gilt ballrooms, has pushed to streamline the monarchy and cut back on royal spending. And unlike Trump, he hasn’t put his face on any passports.

Trump, meanwhile, behaved with his usual boorish ignorance, doing everything in his power to embarrass the country and make us wonder if British rule was really so bad after all. In his welcome remarks, Trump sounded racist dog whistles by praising the “Anglo-Saxon courage” that ran through the veins of the American colonists. He later cut in front of Camilla in a receiving line, then violated royal protocol and basic dignity by sharing what Charles supposedly said to him in private regarding Iran.

The nadir arrived when the White House account tweeted a picture of Charles and Trump with the caption “Two kings.”

It was pure rage bait, designed to antagonize the millions of Americans who’ve turned out at explicit #NoKings protests across the country over the last two years. And it only emphasized the fact that this week Charles, an actual king, made a more forceful case for liberal democracy than the supposed leader of the free world has ever done.

Speaking before Congress, Charles — a direct descendant of King George II — celebrated the “bold and imaginative rebels” who founded the country. He praised the leadership of presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. He described the relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. as one of “the most consequential alliances in human history.”

Charles peppered his 30-minute speech with subtle digs at the MAGA worldview. He urged “unyielding resolve” in defense of Ukraine and spoke about the importance of NATO. He encouraged members of Congress to ignore “the clarion calls to become ever more inward-looking.” And he drew a standing ovation — from Democrats — when he noted the principle, rooted in the Magna Carta, “that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” (Subtext: you need to rein this guy in — or else!)

Either Trump didn’t pick up on the jabs, didn’t perceive them as such, or didn’t care. During a photo op Thursday, the president pointed at Charles and called him “the greatest king in my book.” (It’s not clear who else was in contention.)

A reporter then asked Charles what he thought of “the Trump renaissance here in DC — all the improvements?”

“Ah,” said the king. “We shall see.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Just as he did last fall, Donald Trump is responding to a horrific act of political violence not by calling for sensible gun laws, but by… trying to get Jimmy Kimmel taken off the air.

The shooting at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner Saturday night has left an already rattled nation feeling more unsettled than ever.

Naturally, the president and first lady took the opportunity to rehash a decade-old vendetta against Kimmel, a long-time Trump critic.

While investigators were busy looking into the alleged shooter and his possible motivations, both Trumps took to social media to call for the host’s firing because of a joke he made last week on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

On Thursday, two full days before the WHCD, Kimmel staged a fake roast on the show. Standing at a podium, he cracked jokes like the ones that used to get told at the WHCD every year before everyone (including the Washington press corps) became terrified of political comedy.

“Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow,” Kimmel said.

This was obviously a crack about 1. Trump’s age and visibly declining health (the bit also included a punchline about the poorly disguised bruise on Trump’s hand); and 2. Melania’s apparent disdain for her husband.

But who needs context when selective outrage is so much easier to understand?

On the platform formerly known as Twitter, Melania claimed that “Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country.” She also said the comedian, who recently extended his contract at ABC, “shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate…Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”

The president also weighed in via his preferred platform, Truth Social, saying that while he “normally would not be responsive to anything” Kimmel said (LOL), this time the comedian had gone “beyond the pale.”

“Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC,” Trump wrote.

Karoline Leavitt also mentioned Kimmel Monday in a lengthy diatribe about dangerous political rhetoric (which, naturally, made no mention of the various times in the last few months that her boss has celebrated the deaths of his critics or called for the destruction of an entire country).

Subscribe now

Trump loyalist and FCC chair Brendan Carr, spurred to action by fast-tracked complaints from a conservative legal group, managed to get Kimmel yanked off the air for a few days in September. On Tuesday, the FCC ordered Disney to submit to early reviews of its broadcast TV licenses, a process which will inevitably put more pressure on ABC to punish Kimmel.

This time around, though, Trump’s attempt to silence dissent seems less likely to work (even if his lackeys are hard at work).

Disney and ABC have so far made no comment, and the conservative station owners who denounced him last fall have also been silent. Kimmel was on the air Monday night across the country and, for his part, appears entirely unfazed by Trump’s latest round of attacks.

He even repeated the quip that provoked Trump’s ire, explaining that it was “a joke about their age difference and the look of joy we see on her face every time they’re together…. It was not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination, and they know that I’ve been very vocal for many years, speaking out against gun violence in particular.”

He continued, “I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject. I do. And I think a great place to start to dial that back would be to have a conversation with your husband.”

Kimmel probably has good reason not to take the drummed-up outrage too seriously. Last time this happened, about 4 million people canceled their Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions in protest, and the comedian was quickly reinstated. His return episode, featuring a 28-minute monologue about the importance of free speech, generated a record audience.

Share

At the time, a large majority of Americans opposed government attempts to get shows canceled.

That was six months ago, when Trump’s approval rating was still above 40% and gas was less than $4 a gallon. More recent attempts to apply political pressure to late-night comedians have also backfired, like the time Colbert was blocked from airing an interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico that subsequently went viral.

The president’s problem — or at least one of them — is that his poll numbers are only tracking downward, and there are only so many late-night hosts left to silence. Sooner or later, he might want to consider a new tactic.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian.

In 1989, Kirk Jones was an aspiring filmmaker working as a runner for a London production company when he saw a BBC documentary called John’s Not Mad, which profiled John Davidson, a Scottish teenager with a severe case of Tourette Syndrome.

“I’ve never forgotten it,” Jones says. “I was just devastated that this young man, who appeared to have an ordinary life and was doing everything right, was suddenly saying things that were not in his control. He was told that he was crazy, he would end up in an asylum, he would end up in prison…I thought, if I ever get the opportunity to make films, this is an idea that I’d really like to look into.”

More than thirty years later, Jones finally got his wish. I Swear, which arrives in North American theaters today, tells the inspiring, frequently devastating story of how Davidson became an advocate for people with Tourette’s, a disorder that causes involuntary sounds and movements, known as tics.

The journey begins in the 1980s, in the small town of Galashiels, Scotland. John (played as a teenager by Scott Ellis Watson and as an adult by Robert Aramayo), a gifted student and athlete, starts having mysterious facial spasms and blurting out offensive words against his will. The adults in John’s life, with no understanding of the condition, assume he is being impudent; his overwhelmed mother even makes him eat dinner on the floor.

Things become so dire that John attempts suicide. His circumstances improve when he is taken in by Dottie (Maxine Peake), the mother of a school friend. A mental health nurse with a seemingly infinite reserve of compassion, Dottie helps John find a job at a local community center and adjusts his medication. But the setbacks persist: John gets arrested more than once and is nearly beaten to death after insulting a woman on the street. John ultimately finds purpose as an advocate, educating the public about the disorder. As his boss Tommy (Peter Mullan) puts it, “I don’t think the problem is Tourette’s. The problem is we don’t know enough about Tourette’s.”

Anchored by Aramayo’s deft performance, I Swear pulls off a tricky balancing act, finding the absurd comedy in Davidson’s story without turning him — or his condition — into a punchline (unlike countless pop culture depictions of Tourette’s). The tone is established in the film’s opening scene, in which John receives an honor from Queen Elizabeth II, only to exclaim, “Fuck the Queen!” (The monarch is utterly unfazed.)

Subscribe now

As a filmmaker, Jones has specialized in heartwarming comedies like Nanny McPhee and Waking Ned Devine. After thinking about Davidson’s plight for many years, Jones finally reached out to him via Facebook in 2022. Their correspondence led to an in-person meeting, where the reality of Tourette’s became clear to Jones: Davidson greeted him at the door by shouting, “Let’s have sex!”

“He was saying a lot of things which were inappropriate, but after about 15 minutes, I could see that he calmed down,” Jones recalls. “There’s a very clear relationship between John’s anxiety and the level of tics. Sometimes I’ll call John and we’ll have a Zoom for half an hour. Not one single tic — not physical, not verbal — because he’s comfortable. He knows me.”

In their early conversations, Jones quickly saw the dramatic potential in Davidson’s story — and his particular experience of the disorder. (Contrary to the popular myth, most people with Tourette’s do not involuntarily shout obscenities.)

“When I talked to John about Tourette’s, I realized it was the most potent mix of humor and emotion,” Jones says. “I said to John, ‘Would it upset you if I recognized the humor?’ He said, ‘My life has been the most tragic and the most hilarious that you could ever imagine.’ When he said that, I thought, ‘That’s it. This is my next film.’”

Davidson ultimately became an associate producer and reviewed multiple drafts of the script. Jones even considered having Davidson play himself in the final 20 minutes of the film, but ruled it out following an unsuccessful test shoot.

“After 45 minutes, John was exhausted, having to remember where to stand, remember where the camera was, try and remember his lines,” he says. “I think if John was here now, he would say it was nothing short of a disaster.” Jones also consulted with medical experts about potentially casting an actor with Tourette’s, but says he learned that “it is nothing short of cruel and mentally damaging for someone with Tourette’s to fake Tourette’s in someone else,” in part because of the risk of developing new tics. (About 30 people with Tourette’s do appear in the film, many in background roles.)

Instead, Jones cast Aramayo, a virtual unknown who’d had small parts in Game of Thrones and Mindhunter. He was able to pick the best actor for the role, rather than the most famous, because he decided to finance the film himself. (Jones opted to go it alone when a potential investor asked him to reduce the level of swearing in the script.)

Aramayo never auditioned or submitted a screen test, because the actor was wary of doing a superficial impersonation of someone with a complex neurological disorder. Instead, he spent several months conducting research — spending time with Davidson and other people with Tourette’s. “I didn’t see Rob’s performance until day one on set, and it was just the most wonderful, magical production for the fact that everyone had creative freedom,” Jones says.

Released in the UK last fall to wide acclaim, I Swear won three BAFTA Awards in February, with Aramayo beating Oscar nominees including Leonardo DiCaprio and Michael B. Jordan for the lead actor prize.

But the stunning triumph was overshadowed by an incident in which Davidson involuntarily yelled the N-word while Jordan and his Sinners co-star Delroy Lindo (both Black) were onstage. Even though the show aired on a two-hour delay, the BBC did not remove the audible slur from the broadcast. (It did, however, edit the words “Free Palestine” from a winner’s speech, supposedly for length.)

Share

The incident sparked a heated conversation about racism, disability, and whether people with Tourette’s use the condition as an “excuse” to say vile things. (Here is an excellent interview with a Black Tourette’s advocate, who explains why that is definitely not the case.)

The blame has mostly landed on the BBC and BAFTA for failing to ensure the odious slur was removed from the program, thereby causing additional pain for Jordan, Lindo, Davidson, and everyone else involved. The BBC later ruled that the incident, while unintentional, represented a “clear breach” of its own editorial standards.

The excruciating ordeal underscored the central lesson of I Swear: Because people with Tourette’s cannot control their condition, education, awareness, and thoughtful accommodations are essential.

As Jones said in the aftermath of the event, “The overriding irony is that this is the reason why we made the film in the first place.”

Luckily, this message has not been lost on the people who have seen I Swear.

“I’ve now seen the film playing in Canada, America, the U.K., throughout Europe — subtitled, dubbed — and everyone is able to follow the film,” Jones says. “They laugh when they’re supposed to laugh. They cry when they might cry. It’s heartening that different cultures, different languages, different parts of the world are all in sync from a human perspective.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

No one likes having their things stolen — least of all world-famous pop stars.

But Madonna, who made a triumphant surprise appearance at Coachella over the weekend only for the vintage costume she wore on stage to go missing, should probably embrace the apparent theft as a sign of her enduring cultural relevance, 43 years after the release of her debut album.

If people are stealing your looks — literally or figuratively — it means they still care.

The Queen of Pop turned up on Friday night during Sabrina Carpenter’s set at Coachella, the annual music festival/influencer gathering in the Southern California desert. The stars — born four decades apart but sharing a cheeky, sex-positive sensibility — teamed up to perform two of Madonna’s most enduring bangers, “Vogue” and “Like a Prayer,” as well as a new song “I Feel so Free,” from her forthcoming album, Confessions II.

Even if the iPhone-wielding zombies in the crowd couldn’t be bothered to just let go and freaking dance dance dance, the intergenerational collaboration was both a thrilling acknowledgement of Madonna’s profound influence on today’s female pop stars and a vivid reminder of her remarkable longevity. (She first performed at Coachella 20 years ago in support of Confessions on a Dance Floor, the disco-influenced album many Madonna-heads consider her crowning achievement.)

In a career spanning five decades, the habitual provocateur has never been afraid to drive people crazy, whether it’s the pope, George W. Bush, or executives at Pepsi. But as a sixty-seven-year-old woman and mother of six, Madonna’s most subversive act may be her insistence on sticking around.

Madonna’s continued ability to shape the culture is particularly remarkable when one considers the tragic fate of many of her contemporaries. The Coachella appearance kicked off a week when the Holy Trinity of ‘80s pop stars — Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Prince — are all in the news, though for vastly different reasons. Tuesday marked the 10th anniversary of Prince’s death from a fentanyl overdose, a grim milestone that his estate commemorated by releasing the demo of “With This Tear,” a song he wrote for Celine Dion. For fans desperate for material from Prince’s storied “vault,” it was a welcome development.

Friday brings the release of Michael, a sanitized Jackson biopic that was produced by his estate and does not address the child molestation allegations against the late singer. Critics have called it a “ghoulish, soulless cash grab,” yet Michael is quite likely to make a ton of money at the box office, such is the power of Jackson’s fandom (and their collective denial). The film is part of a multi-pronged effort to rehabilitate Jackson’s reputation and make his already lucrative music catalog more palatable to advertisers.

Madonna, Prince, and Jackson defined the Golden Age of MTV and ascended to global stardom because they understood that the images they cultivated were as important as they music they performed. All three were born within a few months of each other in 1958 and grew up in religious households in the Midwest — experiences that shaped their art and fueled their work ethic. But the connections run deeper than demographics. Prince and Madonna briefly dated circa 1985 and collaborated on the Like a Prayer album (Prince co-wrote the duet “Love Song” and played the guitar intro on the title track). Their relationship grew more strained in the ‘90s, and for years they publicly lobbed insults at each other — but made up by 2011.

Madonna never recorded music with Jackson, but she did bring him as her date to the Oscars in 1991 — the year she did a Marilyn Monroe-inspired performance of “Sooner or Later.” (If she was trying to steal attention from her ex, Warren Beatty, it worked.) During her Celebration tour in 2023 and 2024, Madonna paid tribute to both artists in a way that asserted her place alongside them in the pantheon of pop music greats.

Prince and Jackson are now gone — as are George Michael, Whitney Houston, and too many of Madonna’s peers, while the legal entities that control their assets are also furiously trying to control their legacies.

As chronicled in this excellent piece in The New York Times Magazine, Jackson’s death in 2009 enabled a posthumous comeback that probably would have been impossible had he kept living and behaving in bizarre, possibly criminal ways. By the time he died from an overdose of sedatives administered by his personal physician (who was later found guilty of involuntary manslaughter), Jackson’s public image was arguably lower than it had ever been. The once-beloved star’s reputation was hopelessly damaged by numerous child molestation allegations, a decade-plus of erratic behavior, and disastrous interviews. Jackson died while preparing for a concert residency he hoped would pave the way for a comeback.

Instead, his estate orchestrated his return to good graces, releasing a hit concert film This Is It and producing a successful Broadway musical about his life. The 2019 docuseries Leaving Neverland, which follows two young men who claim they were groomed and sexually abused by Jackson as children, convinced many viewers that the Thriller superstar was, in fact, a predator.

His estate sued to get it permanently pulled from HBO Max in 2024.

It has since been hard at work on Michael, which underwent extensive reshoots to remove any mention of the child sexual abuse allegations. Directed by Antoine Fuqua, the film ends in 1988, when Jackson was still primarily known as a dazzling generational talent and not a baby-dangling weirdo, and is a clear attempt to crystallize a younger, less problematic version of MJ in the public imagination. (Anyone interested in a biographical portrait of Jackson that recognizes his musical genius while fully considering the allegations against him should instead listen to the podcast Think Twice: Michael Jackson.)

Prince died in 2016, seven years after Jackson. His passing came as a greater shock, as he was known for maintaining a healthy lifestyle — abstaining from booze, cigarettes, and even meat. In private, however, he was struggling with opioid addiction. Fans longing for insight into Prince’s art or his mercurial personality will not be getting that from his estate, which has been zealous about rehabilitating his legacy. It managed to kill a Netflix docuseries directed by Ezra Edelman (O.J.: Made in America), which featured extensive footage from the artist’s personal archive. The nine-hour series, which Edelman spent nearly five years making and was called a “cursed masterpiece” by the New York Times, delved into the artist’s many contradictions, highlighting both his unrivaled musical gifts and his darker personal life, including allegations of physical and mental abuse. It is unlikely the public will ever see the film.

Subscribe now

Years after her contemporaries left us, Madonna continues the shape-shifting that has defined her career since she was an East Village scenester dating Jean-Michel Basquiat. She’s tried her hand at acting and directing. She’s rebranded as an enlightened earth mother, a radical revolutionary, an English gentlewoman, and a disco diva. She’s done truly remarkable things, like raising awareness about AIDS at a time when the disease was rampantly stigmatized. And she’s also done things that even her most ardent supporters — cough-cough — would consider cringeworthy. (Seriously, enough with the grills.) She is not above trying to burnish her own legacy. Back in 2023, Madonna was planning to direct a biopic about herself. As of last year, she was working on a biographical limited series with filmmaker Shawn Levy. (Can we just get a dishy memoir instead?)

Unlike Prince’s admirers and Jackson’s most feverish stans, Madonna’s have the privilege of grappling with their hero’s complexities in real time.

Consider one semi-recent example: In 2023, she showed up at the Grammys with a visibly puffy face, likely the result of a cosmetic procedure gone awry, and was dragged across the internet for the mortal sin of trying to look younger. (Of course, had she shown up looking like an actual sixty-four-year-old, she would have gotten dragged, too.)

Madonna responded with her typical brash defiance.

“I look forward to many more years of subversive behavior — pushing boundaries [and] standing up to the patriarchy — and most of all enjoying my life,” she said. “Bow down, bitches!”

We’re all bowing now.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian.

Back in 2012, Aaron Sorkin created a TV show called The Newsroom. Set behind the scenes at a fictional cable news network, the HBO drama followed a band of producers and correspondents led by blowhard anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) as they covered real-life news events from the recent past, like the death of Osama bin Laden and the Deepwater Horizon spill. He used actual news, “because it was just going to take us too far away from reality,” Sorkin said in 2012.

The show was divisive, and journalists mostly hated it. Many of The Newsroom’s detractors felt that Sorkin, with the convenient benefit of hindsight, was lecturing actual reporters on how they should have done their job. It was canceled in 2015, before Sorkin got to offer his take on Trump’s rise to power (or the media’s role in it).

Nearly a decade and a half later, another ambitious TV drama is attempting to tackle the news in something close to real time — but doing so in a way that’s both more dramatically compelling and politically astute.

The Pitt, which wrapped its second season on HBO Max Thursday, is set in the perpetually overcrowded emergency department at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, a teaching hospital with a fitting nickname: “The Pitt.” Attending physician Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, a grizzled veteran played by Noah Wyle, oversees a band of sharp-tongued residents and medical students.

Created by R. Scott Gemmill, the series is a clever hybrid of E.R. (on which Wyle starred for over a decade) and 24: each season follows the staff and patients at the Pitt over a single 12-hour shift (that inevitably runs into overtime), with each episode dramatizing a single hour in the life of the emergency room. The show’s real-time structure drives home the relentless, grueling nature of emergency medicine. Patients come and go constantly, and are not always heard from again. Often, they die.

The show blends an old-fashioned broadcast format (i.e., longer seasons with less downtime) and the edgier sensibility of a streaming series (including lots of bloody viscera, coarse language, and the occasional closeup of an engorged penis). This unique mix has enabled it to become that rarest of things in the fractured cultural landscape of 2026 — an Emmy-winning critical darling that is also a broad-based hit.

But what is perhaps most remarkable about The Pitt is how viscerally it captures what’s ailing the country right now — both literally (measles, addiction) and figuratively (racism, income inequality). The series uses an underfunded emergency room as a microcosm for American society writ large, exploring how vast cultural and political forces affect the wellbeing of ordinary people and the medical professionals who care for them. It’s no accident that The Pitt is set not in Chicago, LA, or New York, but in a famously scrappy post-industrial city in a pivotal swing state.

Subscribe now

Season 1 dramatized issues like vaccine hesitancy, abortion restrictions, and post-COVID burnout in the medical profession. Season 2 has leaned even further into the topical commentary, with seemingly ripped-from-the-headlines stories about ICE, sexual assault, Medicaid, and more.

For The Pitt’s creative team, the goal has always been authenticity, not didacticism. “The fastest way to get people to turn the channel is if they feel like we’re preaching to them or we’re being dogmatic,” Wyle said last year. (The actor is also a writer and executive producer on the series.) “What we wanted was accuracy and realism. We wanted to just be presentational with what emergency rooms look like.”

The Pitt was originally envisioned as a spinoff of E.R., following an older, possibly wiser version of John Carter, the character Wyle played in the beloved NBC drama. When that idea hit a legal snag, Wyle and company overhauled the premise, imagining a timely series that would grapple with the enormous strain on medical professionals in the wake of COVID.

Dr. Robby offers the starkest example of this psychological trauma. In Season 1, which takes place five years to the day after he made the agonizing decision to remove his COVID-afflicted mentor from life support, Robby experiences a panic attack. Over the course of Season 2, his mental health deteriorates even further. In the finale, a nearly suicidal Robby breaks down in tears while swaddling an abandoned infant. But Robby is not alone in his despair: Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa), The Pitt’s straight-talking charge nurse, briefly leaves the job after getting brutally assaulted by an angry patient.

This season is set in the near future on July 4, 2026 — an ideal backdrop for contemplating our national malaise. Numerous patients show up at the hospital in star-spangled attire or Revolutionary garb, lending to the overall impression/reality that America and its people are not well. While no one utters the president’s name, they don’t have to. This season paints a vivid portrait of the destruction and chaos wrought by the Trump administration and the MAHA movement.

One of the most discussed storylines involves ICE agents who show up at PTMC with an injured detainee, causing staff and patients to flee in panic, and a nurse is taken into custody. Robby eventually confronts the masked agents. “Patients come in here for help because they’re either sick or injured,” he says. “Documented or undocumented, they have a right to emergency care.” (Another immigration-related subplot concerns a young woman forced to drop out of college to care for her little brother because their parents have been deported to Haiti.)

The prescient ICE storyline was filmed shortly before the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. “We had been asking ourselves a lot of questions about how realistic this is, or not. And then, by the time we shot it, we’re like, ‘Oh, my God, yeah, okay.’ So we were pretty mild,” executive producer John Wells recently told Deadline.

HBO executives were reportedly concerned about the storyline and whether it was “balanced” and edits were made. Even though Wyle said “the negotiation was being driven by political reasons,” he was ultimately happy with the “more restrained” version of the story viewers saw.

ICE is hardly the only malevolent force in the world of The Pitt. Another pivotal arc this season followed an uninsured diabetic man who has been rationing his insulin. He falls into the “coverage gap,” making too much to qualify for Medicaid but unable to afford private health insurance. Panicked about incurring a massive amount of medical debt, he flees the hospital before completing his treatment — only to turn up at the hospital again, in much worse shape, a few hours later.

Share

Another prevalent theme is the widespread mistrust of the medical establishment. Already exhausted and demoralized, the doctors and nurses of The Pitt often have to care for people who are openly hostile to their profession. There are strident anti-vaxxers suing the very doctors who saved their child’s life. There’s a self-proclaimed health nut with liver failure caused by an overdose of turmeric supplements. And there’s even a pregnant woman with life-threatening preeclampsia who is determined to have a wild birth.

Worst of all, no one with political power is doing anything to bolster the public’s faith in the medical profession; quite the opposite. While discussing the turmeric case with a colleague, second-year resident Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) says the woman should have checked with her doctor about a safe dosage, or consulted a reputable source, like the CDC website.

“Oh wait, I forgot,” she says sarcastically. “It’s now a medical toxic waste site.”

If only she were wrong.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Last month, Amy Goodman hopped on a last-minute flight from Mexico City to Los Angeles to attend the Academy Awards in support of Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Arnaud, an Oscar-nominated short documentary about a former colleague who was killed in Ukraine. She showed up at the Dolby Theatre in casual attire, and immediately caught the attention of a sharply-dressed man in a three-piece suit.

“He yells to me across the room, ‘You are brave!’” Goodman recalled recently. “And I said, ‘Oh, thank you. Do you know Democracy Now?’ And he said, ‘What’s Democracy Now? I’m talking about what you’re wearing.’”

“Within an hour,” she says, “ I hightailed it out of there in my high-tops.”

Goodman is not usually the type to hightail it out of anywhere, no matter how hostile the terrain. The host and executive producer of Democracy Now! has spent the last three decades asking tough questions of those in power, from oil executives in Nigeria to chronically evasive White House officials. Her fearless work as a journalist is now the focus of Steal This Story, Please!, a documentary currently in select theaters.

Directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal (whose credits include such essential documentaries as Trouble the Water and The Janes), Steal This Story, Please! weaves together highlights from Goodman’s career, including her on-the-ground coverage of a massacre by the Indonesian military in East Timor in 1991 and her legendary grilling of Bill Clinton on election day in 2000.

Released at a moment of unprecedented media consolidation, the film shows just how prescient Goodman was when she launched Democracy Now! in 1996, pioneering a model of independent journalism that many others have since emulated. The program receives no corporate or government funding, currently airs on 1,500 public TV and radio channels worldwide, and just marked its 30th anniversary. (The Boss even showed up to celebrate.)

Steal This Story, Please! also looks at the life experiences that shaped Goodman, particularly her upbringing in a politically engaged Jewish family that thrived on debate (they argued with each other through letters printed in her brother’s homemade newspaper). Goodman says Judaism taught her that “the way you deal with the world is with intense curiosity and not being afraid to stand by your principles.”

After college, Goodman dreamed of becoming a producer on The Phil Donahue Show. Instead, she landed at WBAI, the progressive New York radio station, where she carved out an essential beat covering the people and places too often neglected by corporate media.

Goodman, Lessin, and Deal recently spoke to The Contrarian about making this documentary and its timely message about the importance of independent media.

The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How did this project originate?

Deal: Our friend Karen Ranucci, who had worked with Democracy Now! years ago, proposed the idea to us. For us, it was a no-brainer. The only question we had was will Amy, who is so outward-facing, allow us to make it about her? But Amy said yes, and we’re super grateful that she did, because this film gave us something meaningful and purposeful to be doing in a really difficult time in our history.

Amy, you’re used to telling other people’s stories. Was it hard for you to be the subject of someone else’s story and cede that control?

Goodman: I am very private, but I really thought it was worth the price, because the message was about the importance of independent media. Carl and Tia are masters, both as archivists and as artisans of the craft of directing. I just thought it was too important to pass up this chance.

Lessin: Like any documentary participant, Amy was definitely hesitant. Even when she said yes, I think she was still taking a leap of faith, as anyone would, especially someone who knows how to edit and understands that we’re compressing 30 years into 90 minutes. We had final cut, which probably was very hard for Amy, because she is in control of her program from soup to nuts. But she was really gracious and very generous not only with her time, but also with her incredible stash of field tapes and film footage.

It strikes me that revisiting some of this might also have been difficult for you, Amy, particularly the massacre in East Timor in 1991, where you were beaten and witnessed the death of hundreds of people.

Goodman: I live with that every day. East Timor is one of the great genocides of the late 20th century. A third of the population of East Timor was killed by the Indonesian military — armed, trained, and financed by the United States. I survived that particular massacre where more than 270 Timorese were killed — November 12, 1991. In the United States, [East Timor] is hardly known, and yet we’re connected to them through the barrel of a gun. The only way to deal with it is to keep reporting on it and to keep challenging those in power who are making it possible.

You launched Democracy Now! 30 years ago, just after the Telecommunications Act had just been passed and there was a lot of concern about media consolidation. Did you ever expect it could get this bad?

Goodman: We’ve been talking about the corporate media and the danger of corporations running newsrooms for decades. There was always resistance. I’ll never forget Charlie Rose saying, “What do you mean, independent media? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Now those very people who back then were saying, “What are you talking about?” are the ones who are feeling so much pain, and they, too, are sounding the alarm. We can’t sound it loud enough. Independent media is essential to the functioning of a democratic society.

I’ll give one example just from the last few weeks. It looks pretty clear that the US hit this girls’ school in southern Iran, and more than 170 people were killed, the vast majority of them school girls. We had a Washington Post reporter [on the show] who had done an analysis of this whole thing, except that she wasn’t a Washington Post reporter anymore. A week or two before, she had been laid off. Jeff Bezos, the billionaire tech bro who founded Amazon, takes over The Washington Post. They adopt the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” and he cuts a third of the newsroom, [including] almost the entire Middle East Division, and the US attacks Iran.

Lessin: That was the very same week they put the Melania doc in theaters. Who paid for the Melania doc? Amazon. It was an obscene price tag — $40 million for the film, much of which went into the pockets of the Trumps. So not only was it a bad movie, essentially a commercial about Melania Trump and her fashion sense, but it was basically a bribe to the Trump administration. I think that says it all, yeah, this is where they’re putting their money.

Carl and Tia, media consolidation has also made this a difficult moment for documentary filmmakers. I wonder what challenges you have faced getting your films made and seen?

Deal: It’s never been easy for independent storytellers in the US. Even when we did have public broadcasting money, there wasn’t a lot there. We knew at the outset of this film that we were going to have to do this on our own. We’ve developed and grown a grassroots campaign to support the release of this film. Our campaign right now is all about getting the film seen and trying to maximize its impact. We’re using the theatrical release to organize fundraisers in a lot of the major markets for these [television and radio] stations that are suffering right now.

Lessin: Just a small handful of corporations determine what gets made and what gets distributed. They also determine on what terms, and what they’re paying for these films. As Directors Guild members, we’re seeing the steady erosion of money for our craft. It’s affecting the entire creative community, not just people like us who make these political documentaries.

Goodman: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was so important for well over half a century. As the media was becoming hyper-commercialized, it was the activists who said that we need to have a nonprofit public space to ensure quality programming. So the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was established. Now the Trump administration has eviscerated it. We’re no longer talking about CPB. We’re talking about CBP: Customs and Border Protection. Rural stations and Native American stations [are] going to feel the brunt of this. Many are going to close right at a time when we need local media to show what’s happening in our communities. It is a serious crisis.

I was really struck by one of the core themes of the film, which is the influence of Amy’s Jewish upbringing on her work.

Goodman: It’s just who I am. My grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi. My great-grandfather on my father’s side was a Hasidic rabbi. As I say in the film, my whole life was infused with those stories — the family members who survived and the family members who didn’t. It was inculcated in me: never again, for anyone, anywhere. I was always amazed, going to Hebrew school, why would people who weren’t Jewish stand up for us, hide kids in barns, put people in their attics, risk their lives to protect Jews? I was so struck by that. That [idea] of “never again, for anyone, anywhere” infuses everything that I do. I thank my parents for teaching me that.

Lessin: I didn’t know Amy’s background before I got to know her through this film. It helped me find a connection with her, because my grandparents were also Eastern European immigrants. My mother was born in Poland in 1933 and came to this country in 1941 with my grandparents. My grandfather was an Auschwitz survivor, and on my father’s side, my grandmother came from the same shtetl as Stephen Miller’s [family].

We’re making this film at a time when Judaism has been hijacked. Our grief around the Holocaust, and maybe even around October 7, has been hijacked by these right-wing forces. We’re telling a different story about Amy’s righteous commitment to social and economic justice. That is not in spite of her Jewish upbringing, it’s because of it. Her extraordinary reporting about Palestine and Israel is not in spite of her Jewish heritage. It’s exactly because of it.

Amy, the film opens with this incredible scene of you trying to get a comment from a Trump official, chasing him up multiple flights of stairs until you are out of breath. We see you put yourself in harm’s way repeatedly throughout the documentary. Where does this determination come from?

Goodman: It’s just following the tenets of good journalism, chasing the story. If someone won’t answer, persist.

​​Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian.

Ready to speak up for the first amendment and block this acquisition? Go to https://blockthemerger.com and click “Take Action” for ways to help stop the merger.

Subscribe now

The letter, available in full here, reads:

This transaction would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries—and the audiences we serve—can least afford it. The result will be fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world. Alarmingly, this merger would reduce the number of major U.S. film studios to just four.

The signatories include Jane Fonda, Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo, David Fincher, Ben Stiller, Bryan Cranston, Jason Bateman, Kristen Stewart, Yorgos Lanthimos, Adam McKay, Alan Cumming, and Rose Byrne.

“Competition is essential for a healthy economy and a healthy democracy,” the letter says. “So is thoughtful regulation and enforcement. Media consolidation has already weakened one of America’s most vital global industries—one that has long shaped culture and connected people around the world.”

The letter expresses support for California Attorney General Rob Bonta and his colleagues in other states who are considering legal action to stop the merger: ”We are grateful for their leadership, and stand ready to support all efforts to preserve competition, protect jobs, and ensure a vibrant future for our industry, for American culture, and for our single most significant export.”

Warner Bros. Discovery, a conglomerate that was formed via another giant merger just four years ago, was put up for sale last fall.

Netflix beat Paramount in the initial round of negotiations, announcing in December it would acquire Warner Bros. for $82.7 billion. Crucially, that offer did not include CNN. In late February, Netflix announced it was backing out of the deal, leaving Paramount the victor.

Warner Bros. shareholders are scheduled to vote on the potential merger on April 23.

The deal would:

• Merge two of Hollywood’s remaining five major studios into a single corporate behemoth.

• Likely result in thousands of job cuts across an industry that has already faced huge merger-fueled cutbacks.

• Give the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which already tried to turn CBS News into Fox News Lite and owns 15% of TikTok, total control over CNN. Larry Ellison has reportedly discussed with White House officials making specific personnel changes at CNN.

• Give the Ellisons — who already control a major portfolio of TV channels including CBS, Comedy Central, and MTV — power over a slew of other channels, including Turner Classic Movies, HGTV, Food Network.

• Lead to fewer movies and TV shows getting made, particularly those perceived as creatively or politically risky — like One Battle After Another and Sinners, both produced by Warner Bros.

• Almost certainly impact the creatively risky and political provocative programming at HBO, including satirical shows like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. (As David Ellison’s company Skydance was finalizing its acquisition of Paramount last summer, CBS abruptly canceled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.)

• Give investors from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, who are helping back the $110 billion Paramount bid, possible influence over entertainment and news coverage.

Meredith Blake is The Contrarian’s culture columnist.

On Friday at around 5 pm PT, Artemis II is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego, bringing an end to the 10-day mission in which four astronauts traveled to the dark side of the moon and journeyed farther away from the Earth than any other humans in history.

In an increasingly fractured media landscape, the Artemis II mission has been a rare unifying event. It is historic not only because of the many milestones reached by Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen. It is also remarkable because of how it has brought together so many people who would otherwise be scrolling through different timelines and consuming entirely cultural content. A year ago, Katy Perry, Gayle King, and Lauren Sanchez Bezos were (justifiably) mocked for their brief, vanity-driven mission to the edge of space in service of a private company. By contrast, the past 10 days have been a celebration of what’s possible when the government invests in science.

Since taking off last week, Artemis II has also produced some of the most awe-inspiring images in recent memory. There’s the moon eclipsing the sun. Earth setting over the cratered surface of the moon. The aurora australis glowing over the Indian Ocean. The terminator line — yes, that’s actually what it’s called! — dramatically enveloping the planet in darkness. Along with these majestic tableaus, there were humanizing moments, like the jar of Nutella that floated perfectly into frame during a livestream of the mission, just minutes before Artemis II broke a record set by Apollo 13 56 years ago. (Even the most accomplished scientists in the world occasionally crave nutty sweetness.)

These pictures are so powerful they’ve been able to evaporate our collective cynicism in an era when rampant AI fakery, endless CGI imagery, and distorting Instagram filters can make us question the very real beauty of the world around us. (The Artemis II astronauts could probably get a lucrative side gig teaching normies how to take better pictures of the sunset on our smartphones — the struggle is real!).

Yet it’s difficult to think about the Artemis II mission, and the indelible imagery it has produced, without also thinking about what’s going on down here on Earth — specifically, the fact that while a handful of American and Canadian astronauts were making history in outer space, Donald Trump was bringing our home planet frighteningly close to the brink of nuclear war. On Monday, April 6, Artemis II completed a lunar flyby, capturing never-before seen images of Earth and the moon. The very next day, Trump threatened a country of 90 million people with genocide.

Photographs that left us feeling humbled by the scale and beauty of the universe, and unified in our shared humanity, also became terrifying reminders of our vulnerability to the whims of an increasingly unhinged narcissist.

Subscribe now

This contrast became glaringly obvious when the president made a congratulatory call to the Artemis II crew members that turned into a nonsensical, self-obsessed diatribe about his friendship with Wayne Gretzky. (At least he didn’t say anything about Arnold Palmer’s penis?) Whether they were stunned into silence, or simply didn’t want to engage with a guy openly waging war on science, the astronauts said nothing in response to Trump’s soliloquy about “the Great One,” leaving the supposed leader of the free world hanging for more than a minute — the dead air a void as potent as any black hole. The moment went viral, prompting a million social media jokes about how it’s impossible to escape Trump, even in space.

As deliciously funny as the moment was, I hope that the other images of the week are the ones that linger in our collective memory, and perhaps spur us into action to preserve our precious spinning orb (and its inhabitants). Other photos from space have done just that. “Earthrise,” taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William A. Anders in 1968, emphasized the planet’s relatively small and finite scale, and has been called the most important environmental photograph of all time. Taken four years ago by astronauts onboard Apollo 17, “The Blue Marble” became a symbol of Earth Day and a galvanizing image for the environmental movement. It’s encouraging, then, that these pictures were taken in a turbulent moment much like this one.

Christina Koch, one of the Artemis II mission specialists, recently spoke about her time on the International Space Station and the (literal and figurative) perspective it gave her on life on Earth.

The thing that changed for me looking back at Earth was that I found myself noticing not only the beauty, but how much blackness there was around it, and how it just made it even more special. It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive. We evolved on the same planet. We have some shared things about how we love and live that are just universal, and the specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized when you notice how much else there is around it.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

Usha Vance recently launched a podcast called “Storytime with the Second Lady.” It’s possible you missed this news, given how much has been going on lately. But in an interview with NBC News, Vance described the podcast as “an advertisement for reading… a way of getting people to think about books again, as a form of entertainment that they can turn to instead of all sorts of other things.”

In each episode of the podcast — which, like most podcasts these days, is really more of a YouTube show you can half-watch while doing other things — Vance briefly interviews a celebrity guest, who then reads a children’s book aloud. In the premiere, Vance reads Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit and talks about her family’s love of books. In subsequent episodes, former NASCAR driver (and MAGA enthusiast) Danica Patrick reads Cars, the book version of the popular Pixar movie, while author and paralympian Brent Poppen shares his book Playground Lessons, about a boy in a wheelchair. The set is decorated with Lego sculptures by the Vances’ children, a fake bookshelf backdrop, and a small, random assortment of actual books (including the decidedly Canadian Anne of Green Gables, Mickey: Get Ready For Fun! and A White House Alphabet).

The three episodes released so far have garnered an average of about 6,000 views each, and seem unlikely to ignite a newfound passion for reading among the nation’s school children. At first glimpse, Vance may be more charismatic than her husband, but so is your average corpse; on-camera, she is wooden and tightly wound, clearly better suited to the world of corporate law than to her newfound role as a would-be children’s TV host. Ms. Rachel, she most definitely is not.

One of the weirdest parts of the show is that, so far, it features no actual children, which will likely make it a tough sell with the young audience Vance is trying to reach. I showed the first episode to my seven-year-old, the ultimate critic, who quickly asked, “Do I have to watch this whole thing?” (I would share the public’s comments from YouTube, but unfortunately they are turned off.)

Think of Storytime with the Second Lady as Reading Rainbow, minus the 1980s PBS production values, the star power of LeVar Burton, the cheerful presence of actual children, or the range of captivating books selected by experienced educators.

But the real failure of Storytime is political, not aesthetic. Vance told NBC that she was inspired to create the podcast because, as the mother of three children (with a fourth on the way), she was troubled by declining literacy rates in young people: “This is really a long-term trend, not just a pandemic-related thing, and it’s worrisome.” She also cited her longstanding interest in education, which dates back to college, and the influence of her parents, who are college professors.

Subscribe now

One problem with that aspiration: the administration her husband enthusiastically helps lead has actively sought to undermine the issues Vance purports to care about. The Trump White House has tried to defund and dismantle the Institute for Media and Library Services, which provides federal funding to museums and libraries across the country (including many in rural areas). It has defunded PBS, imperiling a wide array of free educational programming for kids. It has used executive orders and federal legislation to pressure schools into banning supposedly “objectionable” books. And it has taken steps to abolish the Department of Education.

Thankfully, not all these efforts are succeeding. Just this week, the American Library Association was able to stop the White House from decimating the IMLS. But the administration’s efforts so far indicate “not only an indifference to libraries, reading and information, but I would say, an antagonistic view toward [public] storytimes, people finding jobs, and learning new languages,” among other library offerings, said Sam Helmick, president of the ALA, in a phone interview Thursday.

“We should be reminding the public that readers are leaders…. If we want to be a robust and competitive but also secure nation, deep literacy skills are essential,” Helmick continued. “I’m not seeing any moves [by Trump] to increase access to after school programs or early literacy development, or even to regulate the price of e-books, which would help the American public access information more equitably.”

Rank hypocrisy is nothing new for members of the Trump-Vance administration and their spouses (see: Byron Noem), but there is something particularly galling about the apparent ease with which Vance has embraced the MAGA agenda. The daughter of academics and immigrants from India who have championed diversity on campuses, she resigned from her job at one of California’s most prestigious law firms to campaign for her husband, who has gleefully vilified immigrants, academics, career-oriented women, and members of the legal establishment — everything she represents. Just this week, Usha traveled with J.D. to Hungary, where he urged voters to save Western Civilization by voting for fellow immigrant-hater Viktor Orbán and used a tortured and alarmingly specific analogy about his wife jumping out of a plane to make a point about the war in Iran. (I think? No one is quite sure what he was trying to say, including — one might assume — the vice president himself.)

Vance’s interview with NBC News is mostly a tedious snoozefest, loaded with softball questions about family life and anecdotes about shopping at Costco that are supposed to make the Second Lady seem relatable to the average soccer mom. At no point does correspondent Kate Snow bring up the administration’s multi-pronged attacks on libraries, literacy, and early childhood education. (Or, for that matter, its attacks on countless other programs that benefit children and mothers.)

But it’s worth watching, if only for one moment, when Vance’s carefully controlled veneer cracks for a fleeting instant.

At one point later in the conversation (about 2:45 in this version), Snow awkwardly broaches the subject of the Second Lady’s apparent political conversion: “In 2014, you were a registered Democrat. You’re now clearly a Republican. You voted for your husband for Senate. That’s public knowledge. I wonder if you feel fully comfortable in the universe that you’re in now?”

Like a briefly malfunctioning robot, Vance blinks repeatedly, tilts her head to the side, and asks in a near-whisper. “What do you mean? I’m curious.” Of course, she knows exactly what Snow is asking — and why.

Her response is both polished and studiously vague. “I was myself in 2014. I can be myself today, and I feel very comfortable in that world,” she says, noting that her sometimes idiosyncratic views are tolerated inside Trumpworld because “everyone knows that I really care greatly about J.D.’s success.”

Share

As much as she’s trying to avoid saying anything at all, Vance is actually telling on herself here, indicating that she cares more about her husband’s rise to power — and, by extension, her own — than about being consistent in her personal values or politics. With her gray-streaked hair and lack of visible cosmetic enhancements, Vance might not look like your average MAGA acolyte. But politically speaking, she is all in.

Childhood literacy would be an ideal cause for Vance to champion, if only she were also willing to confront her husband’s destructive policies. Instead, she’s done the last thing the world needs and launched yet another podcast.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

“Love for your country is not about putting up a flag,” says Pavel “Pasha” Talankin in Mr. Nobody Against Putin. “It is not about singing the anthem, either. It’s not about exploitation and propaganda. Love for your country means saying ‘We have a problem.’”

Talankin is a teacher at a primary school in Karabash, a small town in Russia’s industrial heartland known for its copper-smelting plant — and not much else). He’s also the subject of Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which was filmed over a two-year period beginning in 2022. The documentary offers a chilling glimpse at life inside Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, as the country undergoes a swift and sweeping process of militarization.

Talankin loves his hometown and its gray Soviet buildings, and he is equally beloved by his students, who see his classroom as a safe space for expressing themselves. But things begin to change after the outbreak of war, when Talankin is assigned to film daily activities at the school and upload the footage to a government portal. The process is supposed to ensure that the school is complying with a mandated curriculum of pro-war propaganda.

Instead, the material has been used to create one of the most unsettling, darkly absurd documentaries in recent memory. Directed by Talankin and David Borenstein, Mr. Nobody Against Putin looks at how Russian schools are becoming places for ideological indoctrination rather than education, in accordance with Vladimir Putin’s adage that “commanders don’t win wars, teachers win wars.”

Through Talankin’s eyes, we watch as an ordinary community is transformed by the regime’s propaganda. We see students goose-stepping through the corridors and listening obediently to teachers who command them to “love your motherland out of obligation, like you love your mother.” Self-sacrifice is glorified above all else, and there are few opportunities other than the military: young people fresh out of school are conscripted into the war, enticed by the promise that — should they die — they will have flowers on their tombstones for centuries.

Talankin grows increasingly troubled by what is happening in his community, and eventually decides to flee the country. Mr. Nobody Against Putin won the Oscar for best documentary feature last month, a testament to how its themes resonate well beyond Russia’s borders.

The project dates back to 2022, shortly after the outbreak of the war, when Talankin was introduced to Borenstein, an American filmmaker living in Denmark. “He was depressed. He felt so trapped in the system,” Borenstein recalled in a recent interview.

They began speaking regularly via encrypted communication channels, and Talankin would share footage from inside Karabash, with the idea of making a film that captured the reality of life for ordinary Russians at a pivotal moment in history.

The material Talankin sent was so compelling that, after a few months, Borenstein asked him to sign on as the film’s co-director, as well as its subject. The footage reminded Borenstein of How to With John Wilson, the sublimely weird HBO docu-comedy filmed (largely) on the streets of New York with a small camera. “It was just him walking around town, on a really cheap camera,” he said. “I found what he was doing was actually really inspiring me.”

Extensive measures were undertaken to ensure the safety of everyone involved in the project (including an unnamed cinematographer working in Karabash). An early chunk of the money from the BBC went to security consulting. “We developed a protocol for filming and transferring data safely through encrypted servers,” said Borenstein.

They also made editorial decisions that were, at least initially, motivated by security —like telling the story from the perspective of a single person rather than multiple characters. “The idea of centering it around Pasha was the best decision for the film. But in the beginning, it also was a security measure,” Borenstein explained. “We can’t evacuate everybody from Russia, so this film really has to focus on one character who is willing and able to make that sacrifice. And that was Pasha.”

Subscribe now

The film consciously subverts the cliches of the “inspirational teacher” movie, with Talankin as the beloved instructor who eventually becomes estranged from his own students, rather than inspiring them to greatness. “Internally, we’ve been calling it Navalny meets Mr. Holland’s Opus,” Borenstein said.

The filmmaking process gave Borenstein an unfiltered look at life inside Russia as the war was raging. Borenstein recalls a “history lesson” taught by a representative of the local ruling party, Pavel Abdulmanov, that was filmed just a few weeks after the invasion. “He says, ‘If you don’t love your country, just get out. You’re a parasite’ to these 10-year-old kids in his class,” Borenstein recalled. “This was really early on, so the whole world was talking about Ukraine, and here I was looking at this really privileged footage from within Russia that provided so much insight into this insane, full-scale invasion that the whole world was trying to wrap their head around.” (Abdulmanov, who also expresses admiration for Stalin’s inner circle and their “interesting jobs,” is later named teacher of the year and wins a luxury apartment.)

Every day or so, Talankin would share new footage, and every day or so, “I saw how this school was shifting and changing,” Borenstein said. “I started to feel like I was this weird alien observer, in this small school that was on the other side of the world.”

Throughout the filming process, Borenstein encouraged Talankin to open up on camera. The film is dotted with confessional-style interviews in which the teacher shares his perspective on the political situation at home. Increasingly disturbed by what’s going on at home, Talankin begins to lash out — at one point playing Lady Gaga’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” during a patriotic ceremony. “My goal was bringing him out as a character, and then figuring out a way to universalize his takes on Russia,” Borenstein said.

The goal was “to have this not just be a film about Russia, but have it be a universal film about democratic backsliding, about how we lose our country, about how complicity and apathy result in terrible situations,” Borenstein said. “I was really interested in finding any way to bring those themes out in the story.”

At the Academy Awards last month, Borenstein made one of the night’s most memorable speeches. On a night when few other winners directly addressed the political climate in the United States, Borenstein minced no words:

Mr. Nobody Against Putin is about how you lose your country. And what we saw when working with this footage, it’s that you lose it through countless small little acts of complicity. When we act complicit when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities. When we don’t say anything when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume it. We all face a moral choice. But luckily, even a nobody is more powerful than you think.

Borenstein had prepared some remarks ahead of time, but mostly spoke off the cuff onstage at the Dolby Theatre. “I knew I wanted to say something that drew a parallel between Russia and the United States,” he said. Throughout the making of the film, the creative team regularly discussed the similarities between what was going on in the United States and what had already happened in Russia, particularly in the early years of Putin’s reign.

Borenstein’s Russian colleagues rejected comparisons between the U.S. and Russia, “because the United States right now is transforming at a quicker pace than Russia did in the first years of Putin’s rule,” he recalled them saying. “That just underlines the importance of pointing this out, because there’s a point where it gets so far that it becomes much more difficult to resist.”

Watch at Kino Film Collection, or in select theaters.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian