Ross Anderson

On September 9, 2014, Apple users found an unrequested gift in their iTunes: a new U2 album. Songs of Innocence was supposed to jump-start a new wave of engagement with Apple’s music products, introducing their enormous user network to it for free. And it worked: Apple announced that it was “the largest album release ever.” But just because something’s free doesn’t mean people will use it. The following Monday, Apple released instructions for how to remove the album. Bono has subsequently, and repeatedly, apologized. Five years later, in March 2019, Apple announced its entrance to the streaming game: Apple TV+.

It’s December 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and Kara Swisher has invited Jason Kilar, CEO of Warner Bros onto her New York Times podcast, Sway. Kilar has just announced that his company will be breaking its theatrical windows, simultaneously releasing their full slate in cinemas and on their streaming service, HBO Max. Swisher sees him as the first CEO pushing ahead into an obvious streaming future, without cinemas. In Swisher’s words: “I’ve said movie theaters are dead men walking… their bad popcorn, their idea of innovation is a comfy seat; this [COVID] is just accelerating a trend that’s already been happening.” Her argument is simple: why spend the money to go out, and bring the family to a cinema, when you can watch it in your living room?

There’s a quote often but falsely attributed to Oscar Wilde that reads: “Everything is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” It’s universal truth, but the attribution to Wilde is not incidental. It’s a line that could only come from a gay man. Certainly, there are boudoir power dynamics between men and women, but they’re directed outward; at somebody whose attraction comes necessarily through their difference from yourself. But to love men, as a man, is a constant form of self-evaluation. As Daniel Mendelsohn best captured in The Elusive Embrace: When men have sex with women, they fall into the woman. She is the thing that they desire, or sometimes fear, but in any event she is the end point, the place where they are going. She is the destination.

Is The Idol a stunning piece of trash, or a trashy masterpiece? Whatever the answer, the HBO show, debuting Sunday, is sure to make an impression. It’s set to be 2023’s Spring Breakers; a lurid spectacle of Hollywood by blacklight, as Lily-Rose Depp’s Britney-inspired pop vamp Jocelyn falls for a manipulative cult leader, played by musician The Weeknd. And critics hate it. They cry it’s “toxic,” “grim, gross and vulgar,” “degrading and hollow.” The Idol is the latest show from Euphoria’s Sam Levinson, and fills the prestige 9 p.m. slot previously occupied by the high-brow Murdoch satire Succession. Succession was subtle, witty and emotionally rich, and became a perennial obsession of the writerly class.

Falling for Christmas has a ridiculous logline: “Newly engaged, spoiled hotel heiress gets into a skiing accident, suffers from total amnesia and finds herself in the care of a handsome, blue-collar lodge owner and his precocious daughter in the days leading up to Christmas.” The Netflix romp is notable only as it marks Lindsay Lohan’s return to a genre that made her famous. “It’s such a refreshing, heartwarming romantic comedy and I miss doing those kinds of movies,” Lohan told Netflix, in earnest, while describing her character as, “Extravagant. Temperamental. Glamorous.” You could build a campy slasher flick or porno off such plot scaffolding; none would be great cinema. And yet Falling for Christmas is more complicated than that. Why?

The first season of The White Lotus opens with a coffin being loaded onto a plane. In the second, a beachgoer discovers several bodies bobbing like croutons in the topaz Sicilian sea. Each season of HBO's hit series is set in a fictional, titular hotel chain whose recreationally wealthy guests spat to pointless deaths — the perfect framing for an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery. Instead, showrunner Mike White uses the form for rollicking melodrama that blends an absurdist comedy of manners with a class satire. As a viewer, you can vicariously enjoy a luxurious getaway while relieving your envy by mocking those who can actually afford it.