Showtime

If you’re a Paramount+ or Showtime subscriber, there’s a decent chance that you spent at least some of the Thanksgiving break watching the first two episodes of The Agency, the Michael Fassbender-fronted espionage drama that the company has invested a huge amount of money in. Based on the cult French series The Bureau, starring Matthieu Kassovitz, it’s a grim and self-consciously serious piece of drama, low on explosive shootouts and one-liners and high on tortured scenes of introspection, as Fassbender’s deep-cover operative, codename Martian, is brought in from the cold by his CIA superiors to their London outpost, only to realize that he has not been entirely honest as to a tortured romantic liaison that he went through in Africa.

Showtime’s latest docuseries follows the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump Super PAC, during the end of the 2020 campaign as the organization blew up in notoriety. The series displays the shallowness within modern day American politics. What starts as a hero’s journey, with former Republican consultants disavowing the racism of the GOP, proves to be more of a Greek tragedy as one-by-one they ultimately become everything they claimed to hate. The show centers around Lincoln Project co-founders — Reed Galen, Jennifer Horn, Mike Madrid, Ron Steslow, Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson — as well as principal members of the organization such as Keith Edwards, Sarah Lenti, Conor Rogers, Stuart Stevens and Ryan Wiggins.

When the Oscar-winning actress Viola Davis was recently asked by the BBC how she felt about the poor reviews she has received for her performance as Michelle Obama in the new Showtime series The First Lady, she was not coy in her response. "Critics absolutely serve no purpose," she replied. "And I’m not saying that to be nasty either. They always feel like they’re telling you something that you don’t know. Somehow that you’re living a life that you’re surrounded by people who lie to you and 'I’m going to be the person that leans in and tells you the truth.' So it gives them an opportunity to be cruel to you." The writer Brendan Behan once described a critic as being like "a eunuch in a harem.