Bourdain embodied the “masculine” chef: stoic, expert, and weathered through abuse. This ideal is present throughout pop cultural understandings of the commercial kitchen, represented on television series, movies, and reality tv. Most recently they’ve found themselves demonstrated in Christopher Storer’s The Bear.

There’s plenty to recommend about Scott Pilgrim Takes Off — paparazzi ninjas, veganism-based superpowers, someone punching a hole in the moon — but its most surprising element is how it takes a bold and unexpected stand against the idea of a protagonist as a narrative necessity.

We like to gentrify sci-fi a little, suiting the genre up and setting it to work on blueprints for the future, to imagine an alternative into which we can escape. In doing so, we forget the genre’s capacity for derangement.

SBS’s New Gold Mountain sets out to recover the history of the Gold Rush from the marginalised perspective of Chinese settlers but instead reinforces the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. Although celebrated for its multilingual script and diverse representation, the mini-TV series ignores how the settlement of Chinese migrants and their recruitment into colonial capitalism consolidates the ongoing displacement of First Nations peoples.

It’s hard to draw a line in the sand when you’re not sure where you are standing. Once Fielder has you in this moral logjam, it is difficult to disengage—and here lies the genius of The Rehearsal. If Fielder is the only one who knows where things really stand, then this not only affords viewers enough doubt to forgive his actions, but also any complicity of their own.

Without consent, no matter the quality of the art, there is no justification for playing the audio recording of somebody’s rape: not for audience experience, nor for sympathy, nor for entertainment. Nelson’s evidence belongs only in a court room, and only as long as it can spur action, in the hands of people willing to turn outrage into protest.

Mainstream archetypes of femininity, while altered by the marketability of white girl-boss feminism, remain bastions of the gender binary. The psyche is divided: in the masculine corner is dark angry strength, in the feminine is soft emotional vulnerability. In contrast, the women in Killing Eve are violent and desiring, in touch with their Shadow-Beast.

If the ABC is truly interested in accurately representing our lives, then it must let us talk without cisgender interference. For us to be able to achieve equality, there must be aspect of our existence deemed too unpalatable for a cisgender audience.

The Secret Life of Us did away with decades of self-conscious representations of Australia as an alienating, unpleasant and quite frankly embarrassing place to spend one’s twenties. Instead, posited a city where its new generation of inhabitants feel comfortable. For many young viewers, the show reflected real life—unmagnified, unfiltered and uncynical.

Despite the distance between the rich South Korean cultural context of the show and my Anglicised middle-class upbringing in Australia as an Eurasian woman, Squid Game depicts my own reality. As the show’s creator Hwang Dong-Hyuk said, ‘we are all living in a Squid Game world.’ It is this TV show more than many other works of media that understands and articulates the gambler’s experience, the human experience, under neoliberal capitalism.

I’m suggesting that to watch Succession well, we should start by thinking about how its representations are mediated. This is to determine Succession’s mode of representation by thinking carefully about how its style interacts with the thematic conceit of the show, which is to do with information media, and a billionaire American family.

In The White Lotus, the pursuit of absolution becomes a form of self-actualisation. Shame affirms these characters—both in how they respond to it, and how they attempt to elicit it in others. But this is an ability reserved to them precisely because of their circumstances. Privilege, we learn by the show’s end, offers a limitless supply of tools through which to both invoke shame and resolve it.

Ultimately, both Sweet Tooth and Sexy Beasts present an intensely domesticated version of the chimera: one that is familiar and human enough to not open any epistemological holes. The fictional human-animal hybrid has a lot of promise, but it seems there’s a long way to go before we are ready to look closely at what the animal means for our sense of self.

What distinguishes a doctor from a scientist or a textbook is their figuration in culture, their supposed ability to incorporate something more artful than scientific into the treatment, and their manner at the bedside. It’s for that reason we can say that the doctor presented as ‘Dr Death’ is indeed monstrous – but monstrous in the most doctorly way. Monstrous inasmuch as what is doctor in him has grown malignant.

Ultimately, we must question whether we should be satisfied that Burnham has contributed to the discourse on self-surveillance or whether we should examine why it had to be a straight white cis man to do it. Burnham stepped inside a reality that non-men have never had the privilege of being outside of.

In essence, Can’t Get You Out of My Head argues that the twentieth and now the early twenty-first century are haunted by the ghosts of the ideological and revolutionary dead. As the Soviet Union collapsed, its dissolution heralded as the ‘end of history’, the dreams of the revolutionaries lived on not as shaping forces but merely spectral presences, phantasmal reminders of a time when alternatives appeared possible.