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.
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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?
"I was irritated by the overall lack of recognition for shows by and about women, especially funny ones." Well said, Meredith. Another striking omission in that category is "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel."
On a more cheerful note, I look forward to future installments in your new venture!
Un Village Francais should have been included. Also Babylon Berlin.