Why The Hottest Prestige TV Trend Is Self-Loathing Of The Rich And Powerful

If the pop culture offerings of 2022 that garnered the highest accolades share only one quality, let’s call it self-loathing. It’s not just self-loathing. It is a recoiling on itself at the highest level of the privileged class.

How many weeks was it in a row? “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” The most watched Netflix movie? This movie — a TV-movie really, since it showed in theaters for just one week — is about the endless, requisite betrayals and falsities that buttress the foundation of adulation and riches. It’s almost as if some glitch in the AI made a flick aimed right back at the executives and stockholders that plugged it in, all of them just hangers-on to somebody else’s brilliant idea. And then they laughed at themselves, chugged a bottle of Jared Leto’s 9 percent ABV hard kombucha, and slept the sleep of the dead.

It’s not just “Glass Onion,” Which calls itself a “mystery” But he relies too heavily on rewinds, resets to earn this moniker. Take critics’ streaming darling “The White Lotus,” After trying to make the existential bleaknesses of wealthy white American leftists look good, it managed to sink into its own misanthropy in December.

The Sicily setting sure is pretty, and it’s probably on purpose that the only winners in this story are a couple of pricey hookers, who between the two of them, in various combinations, slept with three of the five American men (that the show cares about) hanging around at the titular White Lotus resort. Three of those men have been married. One of them is at the resort along with his wife. (One of the other, natch) He is currently in trouble with his spouse for not keeping his pants clean. But that’s what you do, Mr. Big Money McDorfus’s wife seems to say: You make accommodations. It’s your way of making up for it. Maybe you fool around with the other married guy, your husband’s college pal, because maybe your two spouses already did the same.

Pretty bleak stuff, which it’s meant to be. Nobody can trust anyone. Love is a transaction. In “Glass Onion,” The same goes for friendship. The entire band of self-described “friends” “disruptors” It is revealed that grifters are all that remain, each trying to maintain their status in the tech and fashion worlds. “influencing” These are the days. Their flowy skirts or macho tattoos won’t cut it if they’re not in with the next big thing. And who cares if the next big thing is a faux-green energy source that (as one character says) couldn’t just blow up the world but could “literally blow up the world?” Someone did not accidentally poison a pianist before he could sex up a prostitute. That was the best joke. “The White Lotus” Could be wrung from the moldy rags of its plot.

Here’s where maybe the bleakest