I try to be a sophisticated TV viewer. I watch as many miniseries as I can, keep up to date with the latest in Prestige TV, and make sure I don't miss out on any sleeper hits. However, I'm also self-actualized enough to admit that I love my fair share of slop. I religiously watch RuPaul's Drag Race, 90 Day Fiancé, and whatever weird reality craze has grasped pop culture.
A busy working mom, played by Sarah Snook, rings the bell of a house to pick up her 5-year-old son from an after-school play date. Her son is not there. Neither is the other boy. And the befuddled homeowner has no clue what is going on. Confusion turns to panic, then fear that her son has been kidnapped. Revealed over eight episodes are the sordid secrets of one of the most dysfunctional extended families in narrative history.
Audiences are generally used to a little bending of the truth with most historical fiction. Matt Damon's character in Air never drove to Michael Jordan's family home before signing the young basketball player to Nike. I doubt that Napoleon ever oinked at Josephine like she does in Ridley Scott's 2023 film, and I don't think random soldiers on the battlefield during the American Civil War in Lincoln were learned to recite the Gettysburg Address by heart.
Guardian journalist Nick Davies appears on the Today programme to promote his 2008 book, Flat Earth News. It is an indictment of the contemporary British press; its sloppiness and corruption. The logic of journalism has been overwhelmed by the logic of commercialism, he tells the host and a glowering Stuart Kuttner, the managing editor of the News of the World. Nowadays, says Davies, so-called reporters are simply passive processors of unchecked second-hand material.
exposing the cracks and toxicity behind the scenes. Last year, Baby Reindeer, a Netflix show about a bartender being stalked by a customer, elucidated something that civilians (those outside the industry, in bartender speak ) don't always understand. It showed, plainly, that "bartending is an office that makes its holder a captive audience in a way that few other jobs do," Rosie Schaap wrote for Punch .