Hi Contrarians,

Welcome to Issue #2 of Culture Clash, the newsletter in which, every other week, I’ll bring you exclusive interviews, deep dives on what is happening across the cultural sphere, and recommendations for what to read, watch, and listen to next.

If you’ve been anywhere near the internet this week, you’ve probably heard more than you ever thought possible about two celebrity controversies — one involving an American Idol winner and a $15,000 animatronic bird at a twee Brooklyn magic shop, the other involving a schlubby comedian and his thoughts on how women should dress when they’re working out.

Since the Kelly Clarkson vs. the Art of Play discourse has already been exhausted, I’ll focus on the latter.

Over the weekend, comedian Shane Gillis hosted Saturday Night Live for the third time. The thirty-eight-year-old stand-up was hired to star in the sketch comedy show back in 2019, then quickly fired when offensive remarks from his past resurfaced. Getting axed from SNL somehow propelled Gillis and his regular-guy schtick to far greater popularity: in July, he set a record for the largest audience ever for a solo comedian, drawing more than 70,000 people to a show in Philadelphia.

Lorne Michaels, who said he was “angry” that NBC made him fire Gillis in the first place, has since invited him back to host SNL multiple times, with each appearance drawing both strong ratings and heightened scrutiny.

In his monologue Saturday night, Gillis was riffing about his efforts to get in shape when he went off on a tangent about women’s clothing. “I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now. Look, I’m sorry. There’s no other way to describe — have you seen it? The shorts — have you seen the shorts?” he asked, going on to describe a style of butt-hugging shorts worn by a small subset of female gym-goers.

The monologue was an awkward misfire for many reasons, including a pointless story about hanging out in Joe Rogan’s sauna. But Gillis’s decision to take a misogynistic swipe at women, especially at a time when many of us are feeling outraged and deeply vulnerable, was particularly bad. The joke was not only sexist — it wasn’t remotely funny. Numerous celebrities, including Dan Levy and some SNL alumnae, have spoken out critically about the monologue, while Weekend Update co-anchor Michael Che tepidly defended it.

Alas, all this attention and free publicity will probably ensure that Gillis will return to host SNL next year.

Instead of spending more time dissecting one mediocre comedian, I wanted to highlight the work of performers who are a) funny, and b) not prone to using demeaning slurs to describe half the population. Maybe SNL can call up one of these talented comedians the next time they’re looking for a host?

Here are a few suggestions. (Please weigh in with your own!)

Julio Torres, a former writer on The Tonight Show and SNL, is known for his delightfully eccentric comedy (he is the genius behind the “Papyrus” sketch starring Ryan Gosling, easily one of the funniest things on SNL in the last decade). Check out his HBO series Los Espookys and Fantasmas.

Kate Berlant is another comedian known for her absurdist style. As luck would have it, her new stand-up special, Parmesan, premieres today on HBO. You should also check out her collaborations with the equally brilliant John Early, including the special Would It Kill You To Laugh (on Peacock) and the surreal influencer satire Maddie’s Secret.

Jaboukie Young-White first gained notice as a correspondent on The Daily Show and a favorite on pre-Musk Twitter, where he got in trouble for impersonating the FBI and CNN. He is currently on tour in the U.S.

Chris Fleming gained an online following through the web series Gayle, in which he starred as a middle-aged suburban mom. More recently, he starred in a stand-up special, Chris Fleming: Live at the Palace for HBO.

Ziwe blew up during the pandemic by conducting pointed interviews with celebrities on Instagram Live, then moved to Showtime with a variety show that lasted for two seasons. These days she’s still doing her iconic thing on YouTube and Substack.

Gus Heagerty does brilliant, hyper-specific characters on Instagram and TikTok (think: “Long Island Mom moving through something before her son’s game”) and is also on tour right now. Follow him; you won’t be sorry.

Highlights from The Contrarian

• An interview with Julia Loktev, director of the gripping documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile, which follows a group of young Russian journalists forced to flee their country after the invasion of Ukraine. They face peril at every turn, including assassination attempts, while continuing their vital work from abroad. Loktev describes the film as a “living history” chronicling the rise of fascism in Russia. “So much of what happened in Russia is now being echoed in the U.S.,” she said.

• 30 Rock turned 20 this week. Here’s a look at how the absurd comedy turned out to be eerily prescient.

• Musk, a four-hour documentary about the world’s richest (and arguably most powerful) man, is tough but essential viewing. (It’s also expanding to theaters nationwide this weekend.)

• Patricia McCormick, author of the YA novel Sold, talked about having the most banned book of the year in American schools. “I am really quite mystified as to why this book is banned,” she said.

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Other news from the culture front:

• In a statement released Wednesday, Faber announced it would no longer be able to sell novels by Sally Rooney in the United Kingdom. One of the best-selling and most acclaimed writers of her generation, Rooney has vowed to donate proceeds from her books to Palestine Action, which has been designated a terrorist group by the U.K. government. (The U.S. recently followed suit.) Faber is therefore unable to pass along the earnings from future book sales in the country, which it described as an “unconscionable” situation. “We remain the proud publisher of her remarkable body of work, which we will continue to sell in other territories,” said Faber.

• In other Irish news, Mark Zuckerberg was roasted online this week for his apparent inability to enjoy a pint of Guinness like a normal person. Ironically, the viral clip of the Facebook co-founder barely masking his distaste for the bitter stout got far more attention than The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to The Social Network, which flopped at the box office last weekend.

• This week, Lena Dunham announced that she’s bringing Girls back to HBO for a limited, five-episode run a decade after the series finale. The revival will reunite Dunham with original cast members Zosia Mamet, Jemima Kirke, and Allison Williams. Much like what happened the last time HBO brought back a generation-defining comedy about four women in New York City, fans are both excited and apprehensive.

• This weekend marks the premiere of You Can See Everything, the wild Elizabeth Holmes documentary that’s getting rave reviews — or so I’m hearing. (I’m avoiding reading anything about the movie until I get the chance to see it for myself.)

• Also in theaters this weekend is Once Upon a Time in Harlem, an absolutely spectacular documentary chronicling a 1972 gathering of artists and writers from the Harlem Renaissance. I’ll have a piece about it next week.

Thanks for reading! Culture Clash will be back in two weeks.

Hi Contrarians,

This is Meredith Blake, culture columnist for The Contrarian. Welcome to the very first edition of Culture Clash!

I’ll be with you to follow the internet discourse wherever it leads and deliver it straight to your inbox every other Friday. The Culture Clash newsletter will bring you exclusive interviews, deep dives on what is happening across the cultural sphere, and recommendations for what to read, watch, and listen to next. I’ll bring you all the news from the intersection of politics and pop culture, along with occasional musings on hot-button issues, such as the latest elimination on The Great British Baking Show.

If you’d like to opt out of these newsletters or change what you get in your inbox from The Contrarian, you can manage your email preferences on your account page.

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Speaking of The Great British Baking Show, it’s one of only a few reality shows included on the New York Times’s recently published list of the 100 Best TV shows of the 21st Century. As I see it, the whole purpose of ranked pop culture lists is to make everyone on social media very angry — excuse me, to inspire “engagement” — and this list has certainly done that.

While I cannot quibble with the decision to put Breaking Bad at No. 1, and was happy (if not exactly surprised) to see some of my favorites, like Fleabag, Succession, and Mad Men, in the top 10, there were also some unfortunate omissions. Given the enduring popularity of true crime, I was a little surprised that there were almost no docuseries on the list — not even The Jinx, which helped get Robert Durst convicted for murder, or O.J.: Made in America, a TV show that was so good, Oscar voters were forced to pretend it was a movie. I wish there had been some recognition for Call the Midwife, a heartwarming show full of cute babies and capable nurses that was essentially a fifteen-season advertisement for socialized medicine. What’s not to love about that?

I was irritated by the overall lack of recognition for shows by and about women, especially funny ones. No love for Transparent or Orange Is the New Black, trailblazing dramedies that defined the experimental ethos of the early streaming era? No love for Derry Girls, a raucous sitcom about growing up in the shadow of sectarian violence? Or for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the show that brought us the all-time banger, “Let’s Generalize About Men”? What are we even doing here, folks?

The good news: there’s still plenty of TV to be discovered and debated. As the weekend approaches, I look forward to checking out East of Eden, Zoe Kazan’s revisionist adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel her grandfather, Elia Kazan, made into a movie 70 years ago. But for now, I am going to amuse myself by rewatching this clip of New York City firefighters calmly freeing a boy who got his head stuck in a fence — easily the most riveting thing I’ve seen this week.

Inside The Contrarian

This week, I wrestled with the legacy of one show that is most definitely not on the NYT’s list: To Catch a Predator, the pedophile-hunting Dateline spinoff that became a cultural sensation in the mid-aughts and is now the subject of Primetime, a movie starring Robert Pattinson as host Chris Hansen. The film, which the real-life Hansen has denounced, is a box-office hit and especially popular with Gen Z, suggesting there’s something about this tawdry chapter in TV history that speaks to the current moment. Could it be the overwhelming sense that we’re stuck inside a crass programming experiment hatched by NBC twenty years ago? Maybe!

I also talked to celebrated writer Salman Rushdie and his wife, poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, about Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, a documentary filmed in the wake of the horrific 2022 attack that nearly killed him. The author, who famously lived in hiding for nearly a decade because of a fatwa on his head, feared he would never return to writing after the assault. But, as Rushdie told me, the traumatic experience has instilled him with a renewed sense of creative urgency: “‘Don’t waste your time’ is really my motto now, because when you’re given a second chance at life…what do you do with it?”

Today, Contrarian favorite Alan Light has a fantastic interview with Tom Morello, a founding member of Rage Against the Machine, the rock group known for its radical politics. There’s been a lot of discussion lately about what responsibility, if any, artists have to speak up on issues like the war in Gaza. But Morello sees performing as a kind of organizing. ‘“With every show that I’ve played over the last 35 years,” he says, “you create a little bit of the world you’d like to see one day in that room. You make people feel that it’s possible, and feel a celebration of resistance and a commonality in the audience.”

In Other News

—The corporate behemoth created by the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. has a name, which David Ellison announced on X Friday. The CEO shared a video celebrating the merger that opened with a shot of the Titanic — a ship that was considered too big to sink. 🚨Metaphor alert! 🚨

—A bakery in New York City is charging $60 for a loaf of rye bread, and a lot of people are mad about it.

—Clear eyes, full hearts, we’re old: Friday Night Lights is 20.

—Tom Cruise’s new movie Digger is getting such terrible reviews that the studio has taken out ads that essentially say “F the critics.” Will the bad press derail his quest for a competitive Oscar?

In 1381, thousands of outraged laborers, farmers, and common folk from across the English countryside marched to London to protest the extreme new taxes placed on the lower classes to fund overseas wars. They besieged the city, breached the Tower of London, and killed several royal officials before the rebellion was quelled by fourteen-year-old King Richard II.

The event, which came to be known as the Peasants’ Revolt, grew out of the social and economic upheaval wrought by the Black Plague. Although it ended in crushing defeat, the event is widely taught to British schoolchildren and has inspired other mass movements over the centuries.

It is also the subject of The Uprising, a film opening Thursday starring Andrew Garfield as a 14th-century everyman who leads a spontaneous rebellion against the out-of-touch ruling class of medieval England. It was written and directed by Paul Greengrass, who specializes in fact-based historical dramas with an urgent, documentary feel (Bloody Sunday, United 93, Captain Phillips).

Though it’s set more than 600 years in the past, The Uprising explores themes that are decidedly of the moment: wealth inequality, populist anger, government corruption, and declining faith in institutions. Greengrass was inspired to write the film during the COVID pandemic, feeling that the story of the Peasants’ Revolt would resonate with contemporary audiences. “Thousands of ordinary men and women set out for London to tear down a world they believed was rigged against them, in favour of the rich and powerful,” he wrote in the film’s production notes. “Sitting down to write the film, that didn’t feel like distant history to me. More like our possible tomorrow!”

The Uprising is one of many films coming this year that will channel rage at the ruling class — from aristocrats draped in ermine cloaks to chainsaw-wielding tech oligarchs and ruthless media tycoons.

Early September marks the unofficial launch of awards season, with film festivals in Telluride, Toronto, and Venice that set the tone for the months of Oscar-wrangling ahead. The mood this year seems decidedly critical of the billionaires who increasingly dominate our political and cultural lives.

Two of these projects premiered early this week, sparking enormous online chatter.

Musk, a nearly four-hour portrait of the SpaceX CEO and MAGA crusader, premiered Tuesday in Venice, where it received a lengthy standing ovation. Directed by Alex Gibney, one of the most acclaimed documentarians in the business, the film attempts to understand how Musk was able to acquire such a fortune or wield such extraordinary influence. It features interviews with numerous people who were once close to Musk, including his father Errol Musk, his first wife Justine Musk, and Ashley St. Clair, the mother of his 13th child (who said she declined to sign a $40 million NDA last year).

Gibney isn’t afraid to challenge powerful, litigious organizations (like the Church of Scientology). It remains to be seen if Musk can do any permanent damage to the recently-minted trillionaire — or, indeed, if anything can. But Musk is already slamming it as worse than dogshit, which is a clear sign that Gibney has probably struck a nerve. It arrives in theaters October 16 — roughly two weeks before Election Day — and will stream on HBO Max early next year.

Also opening on October 16 is You Can See Everything, a wild documentary about another tech entrepreneur with delusions of grandeur: Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

You Can See Everything premiered in a surprise screening Sunday at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the film has a runtime of nearly three hours and was made in secret over three years, beginning just a few weeks before Holmes reported to prison in Texas in March 2023 to begin serving an 11-year sentence on federal fraud charges.

Fielder — creator and star of the exhilaratingly strange docu-comedy The Rehearsal — reportedly even moved in with Holmes, her husband Billy Evans, and their two young children. A trailer that dropped on Monday plays more like a preview for a horror film than a documentary. It shows Holmes and Fielder sharing an intense conversation about her reputation for dishonesty.

“I’m always being real,” Holmes assures Fielder, her eyes wide and unblinking as her newborn coos in the background.

There have been quite a few Holmes-centered projects over the last decade, including Gibney’s documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and The Dropout, the limited series starring Amanda Seyfried. But You Can See Everything seems likely to shed new light on the disgraced billionaire girlboss who was reportedly plotting to launch a new and improved version of Theranos as she prepared to go to prison.

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The Social Reckoning, a quasi-sequel to The Social Network, opens October 9. Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, the film looks at the leak of internal documents in 2021 showing that Facebook executives were well aware of the platform’s damaging effects on young people. This time around, Zuckerberg will be played by Jeremy Strong, because Jesse Eisenberg, who originated the role, apparently no longer wants to be associated with the character. “He doesn’t like kids coming up to him in airports with business cards that say ‘I’m CEO, bitch’ for him to sign,” Sorkin recently said.

If that somehow hasn’t sated your thirst for tales of craven billionaires, on December 11 comes Ink, a drama about Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of The Sun tabloid in 1969 which marked the dawn of a lurid new era in British journalism. Directed by Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire fame, it’s based on the stage play by James Graham, a screenwriter and playwright known for his sharp takes on British history.

And on Christmas Day there’s Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (played by Andrew Garfield). The movie co-stars Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, was dropped by Amazon shortly after the company signed a $50 billion deal with OpenAI, and was finally picked up by Indie distributor Neon after several other companies passed on the project.

The anti-corporate sentiment has even seeped into summer family fare. In the recently released Coyote vs. Acme, which blends live action and animation, Wile E. Coyote sues Acme for making defective products that have impeded his efforts to catch Road Runner. The film has fared well at the box office and received near-universal acclaim from audiences and critics, but the fact that it even received a theatrical release counts as a small victory against corporate avarice. Under the guidance of CEO David Zaslav, Warner Bros. shelved the project three years ago in order to claim a $30 million tax write-off — a move that star Will Forte said filled him with “white hot anger.” (It was saved by another distributor that will easily recoup its investment.)

Evidently, Forte is not alone in his rage. 2026 may go down as the year when filmmakers finally decided to confront the billionaires who’ve swallowed up their industry and driven it to the brink of extinction.

But will any of these projects lead to change? In this day and age, do movies still have the power to shift public opinion the way that social media algorithms now do? Will anyone who doesn’t already despise Musk, Altman, or Zuckerberg go see these films?

And if they do, will they walk away thinking ‘these guys are rapacious scoundrels’ — or will they admire them as high-flying heroes with lifestyles worth emulating? It may be naive to assume these films — most of which are directed by white male auteurs over the age of fifty — are necessarily critical of their subjects, rather than sympathetic to misunderstood visionaries. Indeed, according to an early reaction from the BBC, Ink portrays Murdoch as “a fearless rebel who takes on the patronising snobs of England’s outdated elite.” Yikes.

Plenty of movies, TV shows, books, and plays feature media moguls and tech titans, but their collective impact has been minimal to non-existent. The Social Network came out 16 years ago, when Mark Zuckerberg was worth a mere $4 billion. He’s now worth more than $200 billion. Rupert Murdoch has weathered numerous devastating exposes and scathing fictionalized portrayals, but at ninety-five-years old, he remains as untouchable and politically influential as ever. (Holmes appears to be the exception, in that her downfall was hastened by a Wall Street Journal investigation.) Even Citizen Kane did nothing to damage William Randolph Hearst while he was still alive (though it wasn’t hailed as a masterpiece until long after he was dead).

This year’s anti-elitist movies may not lead to immediate change. But they do suggest that the entertainment industry, after a period of deafening silence following Trump’s 2024 victory, feels increasingly comfortable indicting the powerful.

As Andrew Garfield said at a recent screening of The Uprising, “I hope there’s some awakening that people feel; that we all feel like our own struggles are being reflected in the struggles of these characters from a distant time and place…And I hope that if any billionaires watch it, they’re scared shitless.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian