Jenna Scherer writes!

With almost every Studio Ghibli feature NOW AVAILABLE TO STREAM ON HBO MAX, there’s never been a better time to revisit Miyazaki’s classics. We went back to three of the greats –– "KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE" (1989), "PONYO" (2008), and the Academy Award-winning "SPIRITED AWAY" (2001) — for life lessons on what it costs to grow up in a world in flux, and why it’s worth the effort.

ALWAYS PUT IN THE WORK

As steeped in the supernatural as Miyazaki’s films are, it’s clear that he finds just as much beauty in everyday chores. In “SPIRITED AWAY,” 10-year-old Chihiro (DAVEIGH CHASE) is forced to take a job working at an otherworldly bathhouse after the witch Yubaba (SUZANNE PLESHETTE) turns her parents into pigs. Chihiro balks at the responsibility at first but learns about herself by quite literally getting her hands dirty: carrying coal and purging the rot from a “stink spirit” who comes to the bathhouse. In “KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE,” a young witch (KIRSTEN DUNST) leaves home at the age of 13 to discover her path in life, and winds up overwhelmed in the bustling city of Koriko. Though magic is innate in Kiki, where she ultimately grows is in doing effortful things: helping to stoke a fire, or wash a floor, or deliver an item to its rightful owner.

LOVE AND RESPONSIBILITY GO HAND IN HAND

In Miyazaki’s worldview, love — whether it’s romantic, platonic, or familial — means little without a promise to fight for each other’s wellbeing. When Sosuke (FRANKIE JONAS) rescues a magical fish (Noah Cyrus) from certain doom in “PONYO,” the bond between the two is immediate. “I saved her. She’s my responsibility now,” he tells his mom (TINA FEY), with all the earnest severity that a five-year-old can muster. As the boy from the land and the girl from the sea gravitate toward each other, Miyazaki makes it clear that their mutual affection comes with an obligation: Ponyo can only attain her wish of becoming human if Sosuke promises to always care for her.

GROWING UP MEANS LOSING SOMETHING, BUT GAINING SOMETHING GREATER

At the start of “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” magic comes easily to Kiki. She can soar on her broomstick and talk to her feline familiar, Jiji (PHIL HARTMAN), without any thought. But as she comes of age, doubting her purpose in the world and harboring her first romantic feelings for her friend Tombo (MATTHEW LAWRENCE), she loses her ability to fly, and Jiji’s words become inarticulate meows. What Kiki once could do by grace, she has to relearn through effort and intention. “We each need to find our own inspiration, Kiki. Sometimes it’s not easy,” her friend Ursula (JANEANE GAROFALO) counsels her. Kiki may no longer be able to speak the secret language of cats, but what she gains is far more valuable: self-knowledge, and a sense of her place in the world, which allow her to take flight once more.

CHANGE IS INEVITABLE

Nothing is fixed in Miyazaki’s films; oceans rise, gods transform, and children, inexorably, grow up. In “PONYO,” the underwater wizard Fujimoto (LIAM NEESON) wants nothing more than to keep his daughter Ponyo from growing up and coming into her magical abilities, which he fears will upset the balance of the ocean and send the world into turmoil. He literally traps her in a bubble, demanding that she stop transforming into a human and revert to her fish form. “If you could only remain innocent and pure forever,” he laments. But his daughter’s magic — and her desire to join Sosuke on land — are ultimately too powerful for his efforts to curb her, and Fujimoto learns that the best thing he can do for Ponyo is to let her evolve and leave the nest.

NO ONE IS ALONE

“I knew from the start that it wasn’t going to be easy,” says Stevenson, speaking via phone from Los Angeles. “Because this is She-Ra. To have the culmination of her arc be this lesbian love plot is a big deal! And I understood that. But I also felt that it was really important.”

The original She-Ra: Princess of Power was a 1985 Filmation spin-off of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, which itself was based on a line of Mattel action figures. Set on the planet of Etheria, She-Ra follows a band of magical princesses in their rebellion against the Evil Horde, a totalitarian sci-fi regime bent on global domination. Adora is an ex-Horde soldier who joins the rebellion after she gains the ability to transform into She-Ra, a superpowered Chosen One with glowing blue eyes, a mystical sword, and a very cool outfit.

In 2015, when Stevenson, then 23, found out that DreamWorks Animation was looking for someone to pitch a new take on She-Ra, she jumped at the chance. She was already an Eisner Award-winning cartoonist and writer who had made a name for herself with works like her web comic-turned-graphic novel Nimona and the Boom! Studios series Lumberjanes.

“The world [of She-Ra] is so incredibly vibrant, and has so many powerful female characters. It’s this world that has all my interests rolled into one: It’s got the flying ponies and superpowers and all of these things that, immediately, I was like, ‘I want to do this. I want to be the one to do this,’” she says.

While Stevenson’s reimagination of the world of Etheria pays tribute to its predecessor, it includes some key differences. The reboot transforms the musclebound, scantily-clad grownups of the original series into awkward teens in much more practical (but still very sparkly) clothing. In addition to embracing a diversity of races, genders, and body types, the She-Ra reboot fleshes out the characters and their backstories, giving them fully-fledged arcs and complicating the good/evil binary of the original. The princesses of the rebellion aren’t simply heroic, and the soldiers of the Horde aren’t simply villains; everyone’s just a human being (or scorpion person or alien clone or flying horse, as the case may be) trying to make their way in a world that doesn’t offer easy solutions. It’s also, incidentally, really funny.

For Stevenson, it was crucial that the characters felt three-dimensional, and that it was their choices that guided the direction of the storytelling. “The characters all began with a deep personal flaw, and the process of making the show was kind of giving them the room to process those flaws. But we wanted it to feel organic. We wanted the characters to feel like real people that we knew,” she explains.

From the start, She-Ra’s most compelling tension was always between Adora (Aimee Carrero) and Catra (AJ Michalka), Adora’s childhood best friend who becomes her bitterest rival after Adora leaves the Horde to join the rebellion. In the show’s first four seasons, the two continually fight and reconcile and break apart again, their obsession with each other marking them as something more than frenemies.

“It’s a dynamic that I find really interesting: the attraction and the tension between the villain and the hero, especially when they know each other better than anyone. They love each other, but there’s something between them that cannot be overcome,” Stevenson says.

Stevenson always knew that she wanted the relationship between Catra and Adora to be a romantic one; but she had to walk a fine line, because she didn’t know if the studio would give her the go-ahead to put an explicitly lesbian love story front and center. At first, as in Steven Universe, Rebecca Sugar’s radically progressive series that aired its final episodes earlier this year, she steeped the world of the She-Ra reboot in queerness. The show features multiple side characters in same-sex relationships, characters who flout traditional gender roles, and even a nonbinary character (Double Trouble, voiced by transgender writer and activist Jacob Tobia).

Still, Stevenson, herself a gay woman, wanted young viewers to be able to see a queer relationship that wasn’t just incidental, but central to the plot of the entire series. “I’ve loved these stories my entire life, you know? I was a huge Star Wars and Lord of the Rings fan as a kid. But there weren’t a lot of characters that I felt personally represented by,” she says. “We love what makes these stories classic, but we’ve seen them all culminate in the same kind of romance so many times: The hero gets the girl, he gets the kiss, and then he saves the world. And it’s not just [swapping] the man and the woman for two women. You have to actually approach it from a standpoint of: How do you make these stories, at their roots, queer?

“So that’s what I was trying to do — for little queer kids to see that this is normal, that these are stories that can happen and that exist, and that can center them and make them feel seen and understood.”

Whether or not Adora and Catra’s romance would become canonical was in the hands of the studio, and it was a risk Stevenson couldn’t be sure it would be willing to take. So the show played a long game — hinting at a romantic dynamic between the two without making it explicit, for fear of disappointing fans in the end if they weren’t able to deliver. Fortunately, a groundswell of viewer support for a potential relationship between the characters — a phenomenon known in the fan community as “shipping” — allowed Stevenson to make a case to the studio for supporting the story she wanted to tell with She-Ra.

“Just as I had hoped, people started picking up on this tension and getting really passionate about it,” she says. “It was immediately one of the strongest fandom ships right out of the gate. And that was when I finally showed my hand and was like, ‘Look. We’ve got a bunch of people who, just off Season One, are really, really excited about the gay representation in this show. I have been planning for this. And here’s how it needs to end, and not just because I want a moment that everyone’s gonna talk about. It’s the logical conclusion of both their character arcs. They need each other.’”

Finally, after years of hedging their bets, Stevenson and her collaborators got the go-ahead from DreamWorks. “I really wanted it to be so central to the plot that if at any point they were like, ‘Oh, we changed our minds, we want to take it out again,’ they wouldn’t be able to, because it would be so baked in,” she explains. “The temperature is not always right, and depending on what’s happening in the world, not everyone wants to be the studio that sticks their neck out and makes a statement like this. You will get a flat ‘no’ sometimes. But if you bide your time, or you come at it from another angle, that can change. You just have to keep pushing.”

Feedback for the conclusion of She-Ra has been overwhelmingly positive both from critics and fans. Viewer support has been pouring out in the form of social media posts, YouTube reaction videos, and fan art and fan fiction. Stevenson, who first made a name for herself online with Lord of the Rings and Avengers fan art, has been blown away by the support from She-Ra lovers. “That’s how you know that you’re successful at what you set out to do — if people are getting inspired by the stories that you’re telling. I think that that’s the beauty of fan work, is that it’s an evolution of the genre. We take that inspiration and create something new all the time.”

Unfettered by restrictions, the final season of She-Ra is a tightly plotted, character-driven masterwork, featuring a slow-burn redemption arc, a harrowing villain, and a timely message about the power of love and unity against the forces of repression and tyranny. It’s a show about becoming kinder and more open in the face of unrelenting darkness, about banding together to prepare for the worst, but always hoping for the best in spite of overwhelming odds.

Stevenson says that she and her team began work on She-Ra in the aftermath of the 2016 election. “The veil was ripped off, and we had to reckon with a world that we hadn’t expected. And that theme of relying on each other and being stronger together became so much more relevant,” she recalls. “I remember writing one script after a particularly bad news day where it just felt like nothing was ever going to be OK again. It’s an episode where Adora realizes that there are supposed to be stars in the sky, and there aren’t any more stars. And as Aimee [Carrero] was recording the lines, she was crying, and we were crying, because we were all experiencing this together — the idea that things were changing in maybe irreparable ways.”

The refrain of She-Ra’s catchy-as-hell power-pop theme song is “We must be strong, and we must be brave.” According to Stevenson, that’s easier said than done; but the whole point of the series is that you have to try anyway. It’s a message that rings especially true at this moment in our world when it seems like everything is spinning out of control, and it’s all too easy to feel helpless.

Following down-and-out antiques truck driver Conway and the fellow travelers he meets along the way, “Kentucky Route Zero” tells a dreamy, devastating story of rural America in the grips of the Great Recession. With a stylish design, thoughtfully crafted dialogue, and a score that’s equal parts electronica and back-porch folk, “Kentucky Route Zero” feels like nothing else out there. And the story of how it came to be is as strange and meandering as the game itself.

Co-creators Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, and Ben Babbitt first met when they were students at the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 2000s. When the trio decided to collaborate on a video game, it was new territory for all of them. “We had hoped and planned in the beginning that this would be, like, a two-year project,” said Elliott, speaking by phone from his home in Kentucky. “We were pretty inexperienced — this was the first game anywhere near this scope that any of us had worked on.”

“Kentucky Route Zero”’s singular flavor is thanks to the tight collaboration between the three — a very small team for any game, but especially one as ambitious as this one. Elliott was in charge of writing, Kemenczy art and animation, and Babbitt music and sound design. After a few years of work, they decided to release their project as a series of episodes in order to get what they’d already built into the hands of gamers sooner. “These games don’t really exist unless someone is playing them, you know? So it’s nice to get them being played by the audience even while they’re in development,” said Elliott.

Once that decision was made, however, “Kentucky Route Zero” began to balloon into a project much bigger than any of them had anticipated. But the time between each act allowed anticipation to build, and for the game to become a cult sensation among indie-loving players.

Coming from the art world, Elliott said that the reach of video games is something that appeals to him about the form. “There’s a huge audience, which is pretty amazing,” he explained. “When we were making these weird, noisy installations and performances, it was great, and we had a small community of people who were interested in that work. But it wasn’t like hundreds of thousands of players the way it is now.”

Elliott said that the trio drew inspiration from influences as diverse as the Chicago and Louisville music scenes, the theatrical set design of Beowulf Boritt, classic 1970s game “Colossal Cave Adventure,” and magical realist novels like Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” But the seed for “Kentucky Route Zero” initially came from Elliott’s fascination with MAMMOTH CAVE, the longest-known cave system on the planet, and the communities that have sprung up around it.

“I was in Elizabethtown, which is pretty close to Mammoth Cave, and I would drive down to Nashville a lot to visit family,” Elliott recalled. “I’d be traveling on I-65, this massive highway running through lots of beautiful hills. It’s a really interesting landscape, especially at night. Mammoth Cave has been a tourism destination for, like, 200 years. And there’s all these tourist traps around it and a lot of haunted houses. I guess there’s just something spooky about caves.”

The other half of the inspiration for “Kentucky Route Zero” was the 2008 financial crisis, which weighed heavily on the national psyche around the time Cardboard Computer began working on the game in 2010.

“That sense of everything falling apart was in our heads when we started working on the project,” Elliott explained.

“We were watching all the people who had bought into these systems just get totally fucked by this house of cards collapsing. And it wasn’t their fault; they were just being exploited. If you’ve ever been in debt — your debt just gets kicked around like a football between these different companies. It’s like none of the reality of where this debt came from matters anymore. That’s the kind of disempowered, lost experience we were trying to evoke.”

That atmosphere of uncertainty hangs like fog over “Kentucky Route Zero,” as the game’s cast of characters navigates abandoned mines and sprawling bureaucracies, crumbling roadside storefronts and memories they’d sooner forget. But there’s a lot beauty and humor to be found too, like when the ceiling of a tavern floats away to reveal the night sky above, or when one floor of an office building is inexplicably filled with grizzly bears. It’s a game about the devastation of loss and uncertainty, but it’s also about finding hope and friendship in unexpected places — whether that friend is an itinerant punk musician or a 30-foot-tall bald eagle.

Though it was conceived with a different global crisis in mind, “Kentucky Route Zero” resonates with our current climate of unease, isolation, and economic anxiety. There’s something soothing about immersing yourself in a virtual world that’s its own kind of out of control, but that does us the mercy of ending.

“If you’re here because of Nanette… why?” she asks her Los Angeles audience early on in Douglas. “What the fuck are you expecting from this show? Because, I’m sorry, if it’s more trauma, I am fresh out. Had I known how wildly popular trauma was going to be in the context of comedy, I might have budgeted my shit a bit better.”

Though nothing since (Douglas included) has quite gone to the places Nanette took us, other innovative stand-ups have been messing with the format in interesting ways since 2018. Gary Gulman experimented with documentary as a means of circling the topic of his depression in The Great Depresh; Jenny Slate meta-critically dissected her own fears about public performance in Stage Fright; Julio Torres utilized tiny objects and a mini conveyer belt to discuss his identity in My Favorite Shapes; and Lil Rel Howery related the story of his uncle’s funeral in a high school gym in Live in Crenshaw. As the diversity of comedians whose work makes its way to the TV-watching public broadens and more stand-up specials get released each year, so too does the format stretch and evolve to accommodate a wider range of both stories and tellings.

Douglas is in many ways a more traditional special, what Gadsby jokingly calls “my difficult second album, that is also my tenth.” But like its predecessor, Douglas is interested in pulling back the lid to see the structure of stand-up; the comic spends the first 15 minutes offering an outline of what we should expect, including “a lecture,” “the joke section” and “a gentle and very good-natured needling of the patriarchy.” (It’s not gentle; more on that later.)

But what might appear at first glance as a list of spoilers is actually Gadsby’s roundabout way of offering insight into how her brain works. Because where Nanette was about the comic unpacking old baggage, Douglas is about a more recent revelation in Gadsby’s life: her diagnosis with autism. Douglas is Gadsby’s attempt to acclimate the audience to her own inner weather system, inviting us into her thought processes and teaching us her own language of personal associations. (She memorably describes a time in school when a lesson on prepositions devolved into a young Gadsby very seriously asking her teacher to explain how a penguin could be related to a box.)

If you’re already a Gadsby fan, odds are you’re very much here for her brand of puzzle-box comedy, the kind that laughs at its own deconstruction. As in Nanette, Gadsby takes aspects of herself that are left of perceived center — her queerness, her femaleness, and, in this case, her neurodiversity — and invites viewers to realign their perspectives. “I’m not here to collect your pity,” she says. “I’m here to disrupt your confidence.”

If this all sounds a little heady for a stand-up special, don’t worry — Douglas is also very funny. Named after Gadsby’s dog but also for a pouch located between the rectum and the uterus in the female reproductive system (don’t worry about it), Douglas covers everything from an awkward interaction at the dog park to Renaissance art to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. A portion of the set in which she tears antivaxxers a new one — and points out that there are probably a sizable number of them in her audience, overlapping as it does with “rich, white, entitled women” — hits in a powerful way in this time when certain people are refusing to wear masks in public in the middle of a pandemic.

Gadsby also devotes plenty of time to eviscerating that cause of so much collective grief, and the font from which most of her haters spring: the patriarchy. Just like in the real world, toxic masculinity lingers in the wings of Douglas: men telling women to smile, the male gaze in art, men (quite literally) asserting their dominance over women’s uteruses. If your reaction to this topic is that you’re tired of hearing about it, Gadsby would shoot back that she’s tired of living with it.

Gadsby spent much of Nanette questioning her own career-long reliance on self-deprecating humor. In Douglas, she lets us in on the way her mind works not to mock or undermine herself, but to revel in the way she, as an autistic person, experiences the world. “There is beauty in the way I think,” she says near the end of the set.

In the wake of the passing of Game of Thrones, TV audiences have developed a taste for morally gray fantasy worlds for grown-ups — the kind where, yeah, there’s dragons and shit, but also everyone makes brutal political choices and has lots of explicit sex. And while The Witcher is the heir apparent to the space left vacant when Drogon melted the Iron Throne down to scrap last summer, it’s nowhere near as thoughtful, complex, or fully realized as Game of Thrones was at its best. But the show still scratches an itch — the kind that can only be reached with a longsword.

For those who haven’t yet drunk deep of the local grog (and if you haven’t, don’t worry, the peer pressure will get to you soon enough), Lauren Schmidt Hissrich’s series, which takes place in a land called the Continent, follows a traveling beefcake (Cavill) who is at once in-demand and shunned by society for his ability to slay monsters that no one else dares take on. There’s also Ciri (Freya Allen), a teen princess who goes on the run after her kingdom is destroyed; Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), an abused farm girl who grows to become a powerful mage; and Jaskier (Joey Batey), a cheeky bard who’s mostly there to provide comic relief and hit singles. Along the way, these four cross paths with corrupt nobles, gross wizards, embittered elves, and people with names like Stregobor and, um… Mousesack.

By turns delightful, tedious, and infuriating, The Witcher is all over the place. The dialogue swings from portentous and highfalutin (“Temeria reeks of secrets. I can sense them.”) to self-consciously silly (“Leave the very sexy but insane witch to her inevitable demise!”) and gleefully vulgar (“You’re a dick. With balls.”). Large swaths of world-building are done without explanation, and entire plot threads are abandoned while others carry on for far too long. One episode will be gloriously unhinged, while the next will be rote and dull. And the less said about The Witcher’s deeply creepy ideas about women’s bodies, the better; at one point, a character agrees to a very graphic and medically unsound magical hysterectomy (yes, you heard right) for the sake of physical beauty.

But it may be the sheer mess of The Witcher that’s the key to its runaway success. (A friend recommended the show to me with the text: “It’s so bad. I really enjoy it!”) For all its Polish roots and mostly British cast, The Witcher offers a mishmash of elements that appeal uniquely to the American entertainment appetite. The series has the feel of a role-playing video game, complete with easily digestible missions, predictable character types, badass fight scenes, and gnarly gore. Geralt is the kind of stoic, itinerant, loner protagonist that fans of Westerns (or, for that matter, The Mandalorian) will eat up. And for all its problematic elements when it comes to depicting women, the show does offer some complex, powerful female characters that at least somewhat fill the void left behind by Cersei Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen.

And even when the plot barely makes sense, The Witcher most certainly knows how to have fun — the kind of fun that involves, among other things, genie bottle-fishing, intersecting timelines, surprise adoptions, giant spider monsters, and falling-through-the-floor-of-a-house sex.

And then there’s that song. My God, that song. Sonya Belousova, Giona Ostinelli, and Jenny Klein’s “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher” has taken up residence in all of our heads, and shows no sign of leaving before the spring thaw. With its catchy melody, dubious rhymes, and eminently belt-able refrain (O’ valley of plentyyyy!), “Toss a Coin” runs where, say, Thrones’ “The Rains of Castamere” merely walked. Before Netflix finally released the song on Spotify a few weeks back, enterprising fans took to YouTube with covers in styles ranging from classical guitar to heavy metal. There’s nothing like an over-the-top musical moment to galvanize the internet.

That probably has a lot to do with the fact that Killing Eve has been trading out showrunners like Villanelle switching designer lewks between murders. The show’s flawless freshman season was under the purview of Fleabag scribe (and, let’s be honest, certified genius) Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who established a singular tone of spy thriller-meets-dark comedy-meets-twisted romance. Emerald Fennell (whose first feature film, Promising Young Woman, is set to debut later this month) took the reins in Season Two, maintaining Killing Eve’s fricative energy and sexual tension, but losing some of its strangeness and stretching the limits of plausibility. Would a high-functioning government organization like MI6 really let a literal psychopath loose within its ranks and just hope it all turns out for the best? 

Season Three has been handed off to Suzanne Heathcote (Fear the Walking Dead), who has the unenviable task of replicating the style and plotting of both of her predecessors. And, at least for the season’s first five episodes, Killing Eve 3.0 is more concerned with sounding the characters’ psychological depths than with building fresh intrigue. The thing is, you kind of miss the intrigue.

When we last left our… well, heroes feels like the wrong word… Eve and Villanelle had both been double-crossed by their bosses, and Eve, fresh off of committing her first murder, rejected Villanelle’s offer to run away together. Villanelle, in turn, delivered on the promise of the show’s title and shot Eve in the back, leaving her would-be paramour for dead in the gorgeous ruins of Rome’s Villa Adriana.

But her name is still in the title, so Eve is back and very much alive at the start of the new season, having traded espionage for a life of slinging dumplings at a Korean restaurant in the London suburbs, trying to get back into the good graces of her husband, Niko (Owen McDonnell), and dodging her former spymaster, Carolyn (Fiona Shaw). Eve is floundering and fading, and, like any good protagonist, believes she’s unique in her suffering. “You don’t know what it’s like when you’ve chosen to destroy your own life,” she says, to which a new character (played by Harlots’ Danny Sapani) replies: “Do not think that you are the only self-loathing asshole in the room, ever.”

Meanwhile, Villanelle, believing that Eve is six feet under, is in Spain breaking hearts and working with a new handler named Dasha (Harriet Walter, an always welcome casting addition). She’s up to her old tricks in a series of outfits both beautiful and bizarre, but three seasons in, Villanelle committing a strange and casual murder feels almost mundane. The surprising thing at this point, frankly, would be to see Villanelle choose not to kill someone.

It’s tricky to have an affirmed psychopath at the center of a TV show (and Villanelle is the more centralized figure than Eve at this point), because it’s hard to make a character with no morality change or grow. For all her magnetic bedlam, Villanelle is an immovable object. In Season Two she was a black hole, pulling everyone else, particularly the smitten Eve, into her event horizon. The drama was never about whether or not Villanelle would evolve, but whether Eve would degrade.

These new episodes see Heathcote digging into the assassin’s inner workings, with mixed results. With Eve nominally in her rearview, Villanelle is on the hunt for something to slake her thirst for novel experiences, and she finds her own past along the way. There’s a lot of introspection this season, whether it’s Eve brooding over her recent mistakes or Carolyn renegotiating her relationship with her job following a series of traumas. It makes for decent television, but it’s nowhere near as interesting a ride as the show was in its prime. Killing Eve is at its best when it’s going completely batshit, and Heathcote’s take is just a few hairs too normcore.

Even when it’s not at the top of its game, Killing Eve is still compulsively watchable, and that’s largely down to its excellent central performances. Oh deepens and complicates her portrayal of Eve this season, working the sum total of the ex-agent’s bad choices into every spilled glass of merlot and facial tic. Comer continues to prove herself one of the most interesting actors on TV right now, her Villanelle funny, unpredictable, and as alluring as she is terrifying, whether she’s stabbing someone with a sharpened tuning fork, or striding into a perfume shop demanding to “smell like a Roman centurion.” The chemistry between these two is the pumping arterial blood of Killing Eve, and the show is at its best when the two of them are in the same room. Shaw’s brittle, powerful turn as MI6 bigshot Carolyn is also a bright spot in a season that, so far, doesn’t give any of these three actors quite enough to do.

In the 10 years since the series’ finale episode, a great deal has changed for the LGBTQ world, from increased mainstream visibility to deeper conversations within the community itself. Enter The L Word: Generation Q, a reboot that picks up where the first series left off, and makes a valiant effort to atone for some of the original’s shortfalls. Helmed by new showrunner Marja Lewis-Ryan (though Chaiken is still involved as an executive producer), Generation Q catches up with three of the main players from the original series while also introducing a handful of new twentysomething characters.

The members of the old gang are now middle-aged and established in life, but as romantically fraught as ever. Bette (Jennifer Beals) is running to be the first lesbian mayor of Los Angeles while raising her teenage daughter Angie (Jordan Hull) and dealing with an infidelity scandal that threatens to topple her campaign; Alice (Leisha Haley) is now the host of an Ellen-esque talk show and struggling to connect with her girlfriend Natalie’s (Stephanie Allynne) ex-wife Gigi (Sepideh Moafi of The Deuce) and their two kids; and Shane (Katherine Moennig), the original series’ resident heartbreaker, has returned to L.A. after a long time away while in the throes of a wrenching divorce.

Then there’s the proverbial Generation Q, which, true to the new series’ stated purpose, represents a vastly more diverse array of human beings. Among the millennial set are Dominican-American Sophie (Rosanny Zayas), who works behind the scenes on Alice’s talk show; her Chilean-Iranian girlfriend, Dani (Arienne Mandi), who does PR for her father’s pharmaceutical company; and their roommate Micah (Leo Sheng), a Chinese-American trans man who’s navigating the dating app scene. (Lizzo’s “Better in Color,” fittingly, plays over the pilot’s opening titles.) Finley (Jaqueline Toboni), a production assistant on Alice, appears to be the lone white person in the group.

As in the first series, the characters populate an insular micro-L.A. where everyone is connected via an elaborate web of coworkers, roommates, lovers, and hookups. Shane becomes Finley’s ad hoc landlord and reluctant mentor, and Dani quickly gets involved in Bette’s mayoral campaign. When the larger world does encroach, it’s often in a threatening way: male television execs who want to make Alice’s show more easily digestible for a mainstream (read: straight) audience; Dani’s father (Carlos Leal), who views his daughter’s same-sex relationship as merely a phase; the angry husband of Bette’s paramour, who publicly confronts the candidate at a press conference.

Generation Q packs a whole lot — probably too much — into its first three episodes, touching on a laundry list of issues ranging from the interpersonal (divorce, parenting, online dating) to big-picture talking points (religion, teen homelessness, the opioid epidemic). And particularly in the overstuffed pilot, the show can take on the artificial sheen of an after-school special, dutifully name-checking every capital-I Issue it can, and virtue-signaling to an exhaustive degree. (In one particularly awkward moment, the line “Rings are just a symbol of the patriarchy!” gets blurted out in the middle of a marriage proposal.) Part of what made the original series fun was its unabashed soapiness; and, at least in its early episodes, Generation Q gets bogged down in its efforts to make sure it’s saying all the right things.

But if that all sounds like way too much, consider that Lewis-Ryan’s series carries a whole lot of weight on its shoulders. Because, even though a lot more TV shows now feature queer female characters than was the case a decade ago, series in which their experiences, or indeed the community itself, are centered are still rare. Still, in the age of shows like Vida, Pose, and Orange Is the New Black, to name a few, Generation Q is less alone in the television landscape than its predecessor was.

And there’s plenty it gets right. Generation Q features a lot of aspects of the queer female experience that The L Word shied away from. For one, physical realities like armpit hair and period blood make their way into sex scenes in a way they never did in the original series. What’s more, people of color and transgender characters (played by actual trans people) are notably centered in a way that feels organic to contemporary L.A. And even though some of the dialogue is stilted, there’s usually enough chemistry, both platonic and romantic, to make up for the script’s shortfalls. (In a particularly sweet scene in which Micah is dealing with the fallout of dating drama, Sophie tells him, “It’s OK to be hurt, and it’s OK to fuck somebody.”)

Perhaps the show’s most interesting and relevant thread concerns a onetime gay bar that has since become a sports bar, to L.A. expat Shane’s dismay. She points out the total lack of lesbian bars in the city, which is true to life; L.A. currently has zero lesbian bars, an alarming fact brought to attention by a pop-up cocktail spot a few months ago. A side effect of society becoming increasingly accepting of LGBTQ people is that dedicated queer spaces are vanishing, particularly those for women — an issue explored in Alexis Clements’s recent documentary, All We’ve Got.  

There’s a real cognitive dissonance to identity erasure. You can be standing right in front of someone telling them exactly who you are, and they can just look right through you, and intone, like a Westworld robot, “That doesn’t look like anything to me.” Nevertheless, it’s a daily reality for LGBTQ folks, and bi- and pansexual people in particular. (The term pansexuality, which has come into wider use in recent years, intends to explicitly refer to attraction to all genders, not just cisgender people — or, as self-identified pansexual Janelle Monae put it in Rolling Stone last year: “I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker.” However, many in the queer community define bisexuality the same way. You can read more about that conversation here.) Until recently, sexual and gender identities that existed outside the binary have been anathema to mainstream culture — and often, even, to more traditionalist branches of gay culture.

For a long time, people who identify as bisexual or pansexual didn’t have a whole lot of visible role models — particularly on television. But as our understanding of the LGBTQ spectrum has become more diverse and nuanced over time, there’s been a blossoming of bi- and pansexual representation. In the past few years, characters such as Rosa on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, David Rose on Schitt’s Creek, Darryl Whitefeather on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Leila on The Bisexual — to name just a few — have been at the forefront of a bi- and pansexual renaissance on the small screen.

But it wasn’t always this way. Even after television began to centralize gay characters and their experiences — on shows like Ellen, Will & Grace, Queer as Folk, and The L Word — the “B” in that alphabet soup fell to the wayside. Bisexuality was seldom mentioned at all, and if it was, it existed chiefly as a punch line — an easy ba-dum-CHING moment for savvy characters to nose out someone who wasn’t as in the know as they were. On Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw called bisexuality “a layover on the way to Gaytown”; and on 30 Rock, Liz Lemon dismissed it as “something they invented in the Nineties to sell hair products.”

Even some of the earliest shows to break ground for queer representation didn’t factor bisexuality or pansexuality into their worldviews. The designation basically didn’t exist in the gay-straight binary world of Queer as Folk, and was largely seen as a phase on The L Word. Buffy the Vampire Slayer gave many TV viewers their first-ever depiction of a same-sex relationship in 1999 with the Wicca-fueled romance between Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) and Tara Maclay (Amber Benson), but the show too neatly glossed over Willow’s years-long relationship with her boyfriend Oz (Seth Green) as a fleeting step on the way to full-time lesbianism. Or, as Willow succinctly put it in Season 5: “Hello! Gay now!”

Characters who labeled themselves as bisexual were considered to be confused at best and dangerously promiscuous at worst. On The O.C. in 2004, Olivia Wilde’s bi bartender character, Alex Kelly, appeared as a destabilizing force of chaos in the lives of the show’s otherwise straight characters. On a 2011 episode of Glee — a show which, at the time, was breaking ground for gay representation on TV — Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer) savagely shot down his crush, Blaine (Darren Criss), when Blaine mentioned that he might be bi: “‘Bisexual’ is a term that gay guys in high school use when they want to hold hands with girls and feel like a normal person for a change.” By the end of the episode, Blaine assures Kurt that he is, don’t you worry, “100 percent gay.”

One of TV’s first enduring portrayals of nonbinary sexual attraction came with the entrance of Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) into Russell T. Davies’ 2005 Doctor Who reboot. (Davies also created the original U.K. Queer as Folk.) The time traveler swashbuckled into the series to equal-opportunity flirt with the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and his companion Rose (Billie Piper), because, as the Doctor explains, “He’s a 51st-century guy. He’s just a bit more flexible.” Captain Jack went on to feature in his own spinoff series, Torchwood.

Then came Callie Torres on Grey’s Anatomy. Portrayed by Sara Ramirez (who came out as bisexual herself in 2016), Callie had a seasons-long arc that spanned from her burgeoning realization of her bisexuality in 2008 to her complex relationships with both men and women over the years. Callie’s drunken rant from the 11th season would make a great T-shirt to wear to Pride if it weren’t quite so long: “So I’m bisexual! So what? It’s a thing, and it’s real. I mean, it’s called LGBTQ for a reason. There’s a B in there, and it doesn’t mean ‘badass.’ OK, it kind of does. But it also means bi!”

Once the 2010s rolled around, representation began to pick up steam. True Blood’s Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley), The Legend of Korra’s titular hero (Janet Varney), Game of Thrones’ Oberyn Martell (Pedro Pascal), The Good Wife’s Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi), and Peep Show’s Jeremy Usborne (Robert Webb) all were portrayed in romantic relationships on both sides of the binary. But these characters’ sexual orientations were seldom given a name.

In some cases, this felt quietly revolutionary. On post-apocalyptic CW drama The 100, for example, set a century and change in the future, protagonist Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor) is romantically involved with both men and women with no mention of labels. Because on the show’s nuclear fallout-ravaged earth, humankind has presumably gotten over that particular prejudice. On other series, however, not putting a name to the thing seems like a calculated choice. Take Orange Is the New Black, a show that has broken a lot of barriers but steadfastly avoids using the B-word to describe its clearly bisexual central character, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling).

A few years ago, though, tectonic plates began to shift. On Pop TV sitcom Schitt’s Creek, David Rose (co-creator Dan Levy) explained his pansexuality to his friend via a now-famous metaphor: “I do drink red wine. But I also drink white wine. And I’ve been known to sample the occasional rosé. And a couple summers back, I tried a merlot that used to be a chardonnay.”

Bisexuality got its literal anthem on the CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend with “Gettin’ Bi,” a jubilant Huey Lewis & the News-style number sung by Darryl Whitefeather (Pete Gardner) about waking up to his latent bisexuality as a middle-aged man. “It’s not a phase, I’m not confused / Not indecisive, I don’t have the gotta-choose blues,” he croons, dancing in front of the bi pride flag. Darryl’s exuberant ode to his identity felt like someone levering a window open in a musty room — a celebration of something that, less than a decade before, TV was loathe to acknowledge.

For Hulu and the U.K.’s Channel 4, Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behavior, The Miseducation of Cameron Post) cowrote, directed, and starred in a series picking apart the subject, titled, aptly, The Bisexual. In it, Akhavan portrays Leila, a thirtysomething woman coming to a dawning awareness of her bisexuality after having identified as a lesbian for most of her life. The show navigates the tricky territory that bisexuals inhabit when they’re misunderstood — or sometimes outright rejected — by queer and straight communities alike. Akhavan, a bisexual Iranian-American woman, has said the idea for the show came to her after repeatedly hearing herself described as a “bisexual director.” She told Vanity Fair that “there was something about being called a bisexual publicly — even though it’s 100 percent true! — that felt totally humiliating and in bad taste, and I wanted to understand why.”

As Leila shuttles her way between sexual partners and fields tone-deaf comments from friends on both sides of the binary, The Bisexual offers no easy answers. But it also never flinches. “I’m pretty sure bisexuality is a myth. That it was created by ad executives to sell flavored vodka,” Leila remarks in the first episode, unconsciously echoing 30 Rock’s throwaway joke from a decade ago. Except this time, the stakes — and the bi person in question — are real.

The next generation — younger millennials and Gen Z kids in particular — tends to view sexualityas a spectrum rather than the distance between two poles. Akhavan neatly encompasses this evolution in an exchange between Leila and her male roommate’s twentysomething girlfriend, Francisca (Michèlle Guillot), who questions why Leila is so terrified to tell anyone that she’s started sleeping with men as well as women. When Leila tells her it’s complicated because it’s “a gay thing,” Francisca responds, “So? I’m queer.” “Everyone under 25 thinks they’re queer,” says Leila. “And you think they’re wrong?” Francisca counters. Leila considers this for a moment before answering, “No.”

The basics

The High Line stretches from Gansevoort Street to 34th Street in Chelsea along Tenth Avenue, curving west to Twelfth Avenue around the Hudson Yards development at its northern end. Entrances every few blocks along its length lead up to the park. The whole of the High Line is wheelchair accessible, with elevators at the Gansevoort Street, 14th Street, 16th Street, and 30th Street entrances and a ramp at 34th Street. Hours vary depending on the season: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. December 1 through March 31; 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. April 1 through May 31; 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. June 1 through September 30; and 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. October 1 through November 30.

GETTING THERE

Thanks to its length, the High Line is accessible via multiple subway stops and lines. To start at the bottom of the park, take the A/C/E or L to 14th Street and Eighth Avenue; for the top, take the A/C/E or 1/2/3 to Penn Station or the 7 to 34th Street-Hudson Yards. The C/E and 1/2/3 trains make other stops in between. For cyclists, both bike racks and Citi Bike docking stations are situated every few blocks along Tenth Avenue. (Just don’t attempt to bring your bike up to the park itself; bikes—as well as dogs—are forbidden.)

High Line history: from rail to trail

The West Side Elevated Line opened in 1933 as a means for freight trains to pass above the city, after locomotives running at street level became a dicey prospect for pedestrians in the increasingly crowded neighborhood. The trains carried food and other goods along tracks that ran as far south as Spring Street, weaving through and among the many factories that characterized the neighborhood at the time.

As the decades passed in the 20th century, trucks displaced trains as a means of shipping, and the freight lines fell out of use. The southern section of the Elevated Line was dismantled in the 1960s, and the last train ran on the tracks in the autumn of 1980. The ’80s and ’90s saw a slow battle over the fate of the disused space, with preservationists seeking to find a new use for the structure and developers advocating for demolition (another section of the tracks was torn down in 1991). Rudy Giuliani even signed a demolition order in his final days as mayor.

In 1999, Joshua David and Robert Hammond founded Friends of the High Line in order to advocate for a future park along the tracks—which at this point had taken on a rundown beauty, overgrown with native plants and grasses. Giuliani’s plan never took root, and, bolstered by public interest, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council approved zoning and delineated funds for a public park under the stewardship of David and Hammond’s organization and the New York City Parks Department.

Construction began on the High Line in 2006, and the first section—which went from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street—opened three years later. The remaining segments of the the park debuted over following five years (most recently, the Rail Yards in 2014). The modern High Line boasts rotating public art exhibitions and food and gift vendors along its length, and weaves in and amongst glossy new developments.

BUILDING THE HIGH LINE

The High Line was a collaborative effort between James Corner Field Operations, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, and Piet Oudolf. Building the park required stripping the old railway down to everything but its bones, and creating an entirely new landscape—DS+R calls this “agri-tecture”—that functions as a park, pathways, and gathering spaces all at once.

Before the High Line was the High Line, it was an untamed space, and some of the wild feeling remains—particularly when it comes to the landscape architecture, which emphasizes native plants. One section, the Interim Walkway, remains in its previously uncultivated state.

THE FUTURE OF THE HIGH LINE

Despite its seemingly limited space, the High Line still isn’t finished growing. A new area of the park is slated to open on a spur over 30th Street this summer. Called the Plinth, it will serve as a gathering space and a dedicated showcase for art installations. The debut exhibition is Brooklyn sculptor Simone Leigh’s “Brick House,” a monumental 16-foot-tall bust of a black woman that will be visible from the street below. The Spur and the Plinth will provide a rare open space along the long, narrow High Line.

THE FUTURE OF THE HIGH LINE

Despite its seemingly limited space, the High Line still isn’t finished growing. A new area of the park is slated to open on a spur over 30th Street this summer. Called the Plinth, it will serve as a gathering space and a dedicated showcase for art installations. The debut exhibition is Brooklyn sculptor Simone Leigh’s “Brick House,” a monumental 16-foot-tall bust of a black woman that will be visible from the street below. The Spur and the Plinth will provide a rare open space along the long, narrow High Line.

I’m here—now what?

If you need a respite from the bustle of the park—or just want to duck indoors—there’s plenty to see and do along the High Line.

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

Its architecture integrated with the south end of the High Line at 99 Gansevoort Street, the Whitney is home to one of the largest collections of 20th- and 21st-century American art in the world—more than 22,000 pieces in all by artists ranging from Louise Bourgeois to Keith Haring to Andy Warhol. Though the museum has been around since 1931, the current building opened in 2015. The Whitney is legendary for its Biennial, which displays works by contemporary artists every two years; the next Biennial runs from May through September 2019.

CHELSEA MARKET

You’ll find just about any food option you can dream up at Chelsea Market, a sprawling indoor food hall just east of the High Line at 75 Ninth Avenue. Occupying an entire block, the building was once home to the National Biscuit Company (a.k.a. Nabisco) factory; the Oreo cookie was invented on this spot. Today, 35-plus vendors have set up shop inside—everything from restaurants and grocers to clothing stores and bookshops. It can get crowded along the walkways, but it’s worth a visit for a fudge milkshake from Creamline a lobster roll from Cull & Pistol—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

CHELSEA PIERS

But all that background noise grew to a roar with the release of the TV version of Tidying Up, which lifts Kondo’s methods off the page and puts her, quite literally, into the homes of American families with way too much stuff in their closets (and garages, and wreck rooms, and kitchens… and…). And across the nation, viewers are following suit by KonMari-ing their own living spaces — so much so that thrift stores are finding themselves overwhelmed with donated items. At this current chaotic, maximalist moment in American culture, when the powers that be are focused on “more” and “how fast?”, what is it that’s drawn viewers so readily into the arms of Kondo’s gentle, precise aesthetic?

Maybe it’s that, at a time when all the news is about what’s going irreversibly wrong — what’s spinning out of control, which ally our president is alienating, what chunk of ice cap is falling into the sea — Tidying Up offers us something that is rare as rubies: problems that have solutions.

In each of the show’s eight episodes, Kondo and her translator, Marie Iida, drop in on a house or apartment that is, in one way or another, beguiled by objects. The family of the hour explains their relationship to their stuff and what they hope to achieve, and give Kondo and Iida a tour of rooms in various states of material upheaval. No matter the scale of the disarray — from a drawer full of power cords to a den full of Christmas nutcrackers — Kondo greets it with a buoyant, contagious delight. “I love mess,” she declares in Tidying Up’s intro, and it seems like she genuinely does.

After Kondo “greets” the home in question (a typically solemn moment where she kneels on the floor, silent, with head bowed), she talks the family step by step through the tidying process, a holistic practice that involves dividing items by category and conscientiously disposing of things that don’t “spark joy.” The now-ubiquitous phrase is a creative interpretation of the Japanese word tokimeku, which roughly translates to “heart aflutter.” If the idea of thanking your old hoodie before you consign it to the donation pile rubs you the wrong way, consider that the KonMari method is rooted in Shintoism, which holds that spiritual energy is present in everything around us. (As a teen, Kondo worked as a shrine maiden at a Shinto shrine.)

It’s Kondo’s gentle insistence on the inextricability of material objects from our emotional connections to them that is key to the series’ appeal. Unlike many home makeover shows, which take a dispassionate approach to disposing of the old and busted in favor of the new hotness, Tidying Up is based around the idea that feelings and anxieties are at the root of our decision-making about the things we choose to trash or treasure. The homes that Kondo visits are packed to the rafters with more than anyone could possibly need, but there’s generally a clear line between what’s getting squirreled away and what the people who are doing the squirreling cherish and/or fear. In the fourth episode, for example, a recently widowed woman is less interested in going through her own things than those of her late husband. In another, a husband chides his wife for her clothes hoarding, but is reluctant to deal with his own small mountain of baseball cards.

Consequently, the tidying process becomes a kind of couples’ or group therapy session for the people that belong to the stuff, leading to revelations large and small. Unsurprisingly, the women in the couples (most of the duos represented in the season are heterosexual) tend to assign themselves the lion’s share of the responsibility for whatever initial state of untidiness the house is in. “I feel like I’m to blame, cause I’m the mom,” one woman bluntly states in the third episode. “The mom is supposed to make home home.” Whether it’s the show’s intention or not, Tidying Up tends to balance out some of the unfairly gendered responsibility for cleaning.

The results at the end of each tidying session lack the wow reveal moment of, say, Queer Eye or Trading Spaces. Kondo doesn’t transform people’s homes for them; she gives them the very modest tools they need to do the transforming themselves — and DIY is never gonna look as fancy as Bobby Berk’s budget would furnish. What we’re watching when we watch Tidying Up isn’t the deus ex machina we’ve come to expect from American home-improvement shows, but rather everyday humans using their own modest powers to take responsibility for their own shit.

None of this, incidentally, makes for particularly compelling television. But that’s beside the point. The show has a kind of cumulative effect on the brain, like snow falling on a fallow field. First you’re confused, then charmed, then a little bored, and next thing you know, you’ve organized all the cabinets in your kitchen and your sock drawer looks fucking incredible.

As with any major news about a beloved franchise, last year’s announcement that our hero would be transforming from Peter Capaldi into Jodie Whittaker (along with a new showrunner, Broadchurch scribe Chris Chibnall) was met with equal parts euphoria and derision. But the proof is in the pudding, and Whittaker’s long-anticipated debut, “The Woman Who Fell to Earth,” is an episode rooted solidly in the Who tradition while also offering something deliriously new.

After six seasons under showrunner Steven Moffat — who delighted in the kind of “timey-wimey” plotting that would leave your head spinning — the character’s mythos had become so convoluted as to be indecipherable to new or casual viewers. The latest series mercifully hacks through that jungle of backstory to bring us a fresh start. New to this universe? No worries — so is the Doctor.

Freshly regenerated and separated from her TARDIS (that’s the blue police box that can travel through time and space and is bigger on the inside, for those just joining us), Whittaker’s Who crash-lands on Earth clad in the tattered, oversized clothes of her predecessor. She’s a bit confused and still cooking, brand-new-body–wise. “Why are you calling me madam?” she asks one of the first humans she meets. When she find out it’s because she’s a woman, she widens her eyes in surprise and delight. “Am I? Does it suit me?”

But never mind that, because the lady has got extraterrestrial bad guys to fight ASAP — in this case, an electrified tentacle-y creature and a goth Power Ranger-looking dude menacing greater Sheffield. It wouldn’t be Doctor Who without some jerks threatening Great Britain, or without a scrappy, endearing human or four to join the Time Lord in her heroics.

The new crop of companions breaks the usual mold of “plucky young woman looking to have an adventure.” This time, it’s a quartet: local teen Ryan Sinclair (Tosin Cole); policewoman-in-training Yasmin Khan (Mandip Gill); Ryan’s nan, Grace (Sharon D. Clarke); and her husband, Graham (Bradley Walsh). Together, they help the addled but very game Doctor find her bearings, craft a shiny new sonic screwdriver, and take down the threat of the week. (It’s a testament to the new series’ spirit of inclusivity that this group includes three actors of color.)

Fittingly, said villain is toxic masculinity personified: a gravelly-voiced alien (Samuel Oatley) who hails from a planet where they hunt and kill random innocents for sport in order to rise up the ranks; as a fun, gross bonus, the guy wears the teeth of his victims as face jewelry. When the Doctor wins the day and turns his own DNA-melting weapons against him, she tells him: “You had a choice. You did this to yourself. Go home.”

It’s one of several lines in the episode that function both within the plot and as a message to skeptics and haters. “Don’t be scared. All of this is new to you, and new can be scary,” she tells Graham, and later, in a crane-top showdown: “We can evolve while still staying true to who we are. We can honor who we’ve been and choose who we want to be next.” It’s all a bit on the nose, sure, but you could argue that this is a moment — in a show whose occasional heavy-handedness is part of its charm — when everyone’s noses need a good poking.

Because, well, let’s get personal here: As a Who fan ever since Christopher Eccleston first grabbed Billie Piper’s hand and shouted, “Run!” back in 2005, I’ve been enamored of the Doctor’s particular brand of heroics. You know the drill: brains over brawn, godlike powers married to self-deprecating wit, searing curiosity, hidden darkness, endless wonder and a determined compassion for even the most monstrous of creatures.

Through its many incarnations, the show has imagined a universe of infinite possibility, so it seemed nuts that the Doctor would be limited to resurrecting as a series of white guys. Not that the 12 men who’ve captained the TARDIS haven’t been frequently brilliant, but like many other women who love Doctor Who, I’ve been waiting for the day when that Time Lord regeneration glow would fade to reveal a different sort of face than the ones we were used to.

It’s a truth multiversally acknowledged that the Doctor is always the smartest, most capable person in any given room. And the value of seeing a woman in that position, after five decades of alien mansplaining, cannot be understated. The real world is miles behind, but as far as speculative fiction is considered, we have the sci-fi equivalent of a female president.

Whittaker (who’s best known for her previous work with Chibnall on Broadchurch) absolutely owns the part from moment she leaps into the frame. Like every Doctor, she’s a ball of frantic energy and one-liners, commanding the room by thoroughly flustering and out-talking everyone else in it. But she also brings something else to the table that sets her apart from her male antecedents: emotional availability. Take the way she describes the experience of regeneration: “There’s this moment when you’re sure you’re about to die. And then … you’re born! It’s terrifying.” Previous incarnations drew power from shoving their true feelings down deep; Whittaker’s version airs them in the open, and is no less formidable for it.

Worst: Michael Che and Colin Jost’s bland hosting job From the moment they walked out to deliver the opening monologue, Che and Jost looked vaguely uncomfortable, as if someone had just farted and they were standing in the stink-cloud. Their low-key, above-it-all “Weekend Update” formula didn’t translate to the Emmys stage; everything was delivered with an air of bored detachment as they plodded through stilted jokes about the #MeToo movement, the primacy of Netflix and Roseanne Barr’s self-immolation. “With the amazing contributions from everyone in this room tonight, I think we can keep television going for another five, six years tops,” Jost quipped at the end of the intro. It didn’t reallllly sound like a joke.

Best: ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ makes history The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s title heroine would be the first to tell you that being a woman in comedy is frequently a thankless business, but last night’s ceremony proved there are at least a few things that have improved since the 1950s. Amy Sherman-Palladino‘s period piece about housewife-turned-stand-up comedian cleaned up, nabbing five wins including Best Comedy and Best Actress in a Comedy for its uber-talented star, Rachel Brosnahan. Remarkably, Sherman-Palladino became the first woman to net a double Writing and Directing win in Emmy history. (“My panic room’s gonna be so pretty!” she declared, hoisting her twin statuettes.) Though it’s only one season old, Mrs. Maisel came out of the gate a fully-formed spitfire of a show — and it more than earned this freshman sweep. 

WTF: The Emmys go light on big issues Ever since the 2016 election rocked the world on its foundations, pretty much every major awards show has worn its politics on its sleeve (or pinned to its lapel, as the case may be). But with a few exceptions — like Ryan Murphy citing hate crime statistics in his American Crime Story speech, Evan Rachel Wood rocking a blue ribbon and Rachel Brosnahan encouraging women to vote in the midterms — politics and social issues were not a major point of discussion. The #TimesUp movement, which is currently making major waves in the TV industry, was barely mentioned; diversity, while it was much joked about, was never seriously grappled with. The T-word (you know the one) wasn’t uttered once all night. All of which isn’t to say that awards shows have to get political. But in the wake of Oscars, Golden Globes and past Emmys ceremonies that were charged with moments of awareness, the 2018 ceremony felt a little toothless. Are we all just really tired?

Worst: ‘Game of Thrones’ wins big for weak season Look. We’ll be the first to say that when Game of Thrones is running on all cylinders, full dracarys ahead, it’s one of the most thrilling things on the small screen — a full complement of gut-wrenching dramatics, whizbang action sequences and Queen of Thorns side-eye. But this latest truncated season was D.B. Weiss and David Benioff’s water-cooler fantasy series at its worst, resting on the good faith the show has built up over six previous seasons to trot out a series of episodes that were, frankly, just kind of dumb. So we rolled our eyes a bit when the series nabbed the most Emmy noms this year (22!), and even more when it won Outstanding Drama in a year when there are much more interesting things going on (many of which weren’t even nominated). Even the show’s creators looked nonplussed as they accepted Thrones’ third win in the category since 2015. Yawn. Wake us up when the ice dragon gets to Winterfell.

WTF: Jeff Daniels goes on a horse rant Plenty of actors talk about their costars at length in their speeches — but Jeff Daniels took it to a whole other level. When he accepted the Supporting Actor in a Limited Series statuette for his turn in Netflix western Godless, the actor didn’t care so much about making sure to thank all the right people as he did about … talking about horse stuff? Yeah, we were also confused. He spent most of his time at the podium descanting on all things equine, encouraging young actors not to lie about their horseback-riding abilities at auditions and recalling his harrowing experience with his steed Apollo. “He was Jeff Bridges’ horse on True Grit, and I felt he was making unfair comparisons,” Daniels quipped. Apollo apparently threw him three times, breaking his wrist in the process, to which the actor responded by hoisting his Emmy with the now-healed joint. Living well is the best revenge, we suppose.

Best: ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ gets a long-awaited win The Reality Competition Series category has historically been one of the Emmys’ dullest, with the same few shows (The Amazing Race, The Voice and Top Chef) winning year after year since its inception in 2003. It’s about damn time that the statuette went to VH1’s (formerly Logo’s) genuinely groundbreaking RuPaul’s Drag Race, after a whopping 10 seasons and counting on the air. Reality shows aren’t generally a space known for enacting anything like positive change, but with its fabulously inventive queens and policy of radical acceptance, the show has proven itself to be a force for genuine good in the world — not to mention a plain ol’ good time. RuPaul accepted the award “on behalf of the 140 drag queens we have released into the wild,” and, we’d like to think, the generation of LGBTQ kids who have 140 high-profile role models. Can we get an amen?

Best: Claire Foy wins for ‘The Crown’ For our money, there wasn’t a more fierce category this year than Lead Actress in a Drama. The field boasted past winners Elisabeth Moss (The Handmaid’s Tale) and Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black), repeat nominees Keri Russell (The Americans) and Evan Rachel Wood (Westworld), plus fierce category newcomer Sandra Oh (Killing Eve). And while pretty much any of these heavy hitters deserved the win, we’re quite chuffed it went to Claire Foy for her nuanced, luminescent star turn in Netflix’s The Crown. All depth and no flash, Queen Elizabeth II isn’t an easy role to take on — but Foy’s performance is painterly in its precision. “I dedicate this to the next cast,” she said in her speech, passing the royal vestments on to Elizabeth-in-the-wings Olivia Colman. To which we say: Long live the Queen.

Best: Regina King’s heartfelt speech “Oooh! Regina King!” presenter Leslie Jones exclaimed with delight when she announced the winner for Lead Actress in a Limited Series in Netflix’s Seven Seconds. King may already have two Supporting Actress Emmys under her belt (for American Crime in 2015 and 2016), but that didn’t stop her from being endearingly shocked and flustered over her win for her searing turn in Veena Sud’s crime drama. From the look of total disbelief on her face when the winner was announced to her dumbfounded admission that she’d just cleaned lipstick off her dress, King provided one of the night’s rare emotional moments. “Thank you. This is amazing. I wanna curse right now,” she declared, and we don’t blame her. Sadly, the systemic racism that Seven Seconds tackles was reflected in the fact that King was one of only a handful of non-white honorees (along with Thandie Newton and RuPaul). Take note, Emmys.

The Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club was founded in 1999 with a two-pronged mission: to raise awareness and advocate for the environmental disaster area that is the canal, and to provide public access and engagement with the waterway itself. This was back before the Environmental Protection Agency deemed the Gowanus a Superfund site in 2010, and before the surrounding neighborhood became the gentrification hotbed it is today, bristling with craft cocktail bars and pricey new apartments.

Today, the Dredgers has evolved into a thriving volunteer-run nonprofit, operating out of an airy boathouse at 165 Second Street. Originally their home base was in the same location on the undeveloped end of Second Street, but they were forced to temporarily relocate to make way for the construction of the 365 Bond luxury apartment complex. Now, ironically enough, they’ve moved into the development’s ground floor.

In addition to running regular by-donation canoe outings and neighborhood tours, the organization advocates for the canal itself—a waterway that has plenty of interest but few champions. Which is how I found myself clambering into a tomato-red canoe on a sunny Sunday afternoon, with the oily, fishy, briney stench of the canal rising around us.

Our guide/skipper for the journey is Brad Vogel, captain of the Dredgers and executive director of the New York Preservation Archive Project, a nonprofit whose mission is to document the city’s historical preservation efforts. Vogel joined the Dredgers in 2016 in pursuit of his lifelong love of canoeing and kayaking, which has taken him from the marshes and rivers of Wisconsin to the bayous of New Orleans all the way to the fetid waters of the Gowanus. “Finding a spot like Gowanus, where I could go out canoeing at 6am on the canal and then still make it into work in Manhattan, was the best of both worlds for me,” he says.

I’ve unwittingly picked a time that is both the most gross and most fascinating to ride the sludgy waves: low tide, the morning after a thunderstorm. When it rains, sewer water overflows into the canal, bringing with it the contents of the neighborhood’s flushed toilets—which would explain all the condoms and tampon applicators floating past.

But it’s also when the water level is low enough to expose the antique wooden bulkheads that flank parts of the canal, dating back to the 1860s, when the canal was first shaped from the creeks, salt marshes, and millponds dotting the area. Normally wooden structures this old wouldn’t have survived the ravages of time, but they’ve been preserved thanks to the toxicity of the canal; according to Vogel, it’s been so polluted for so long that the shipworms that usually eat away waterside wood couldn’t survive the environment.

The Gowanus has been a dumping ground for Brooklyn’s more unsavory output from the very start, tucked as it is in a valley below more elegant, higher-elevation brownstone neighborhoods. In the 19th century, pretty much every heavy-polluting industry you could think of set up shop along its shores: sulfur works, coal gasification centers, tanneries, and concrete plants, to name a few. A century and a half later, their combined output has coalesced into the putrid “black mayonnaise” that has settled along the bottom of the canal like a malediction.

Thanks to the EPA and the Dredgers’ tireless advocacy, the arduous process of removing the 11-foot-deep sludge is finally underway. We paddle past the Fourth Street Turning Basin, the area of the canal beside Whole Foods, where a pilot program spearheaded by the EPA and PRPs (Potentially Responsible Parties) is dredging the bottom and loading the black mayo onto barges. The barges then travel downstream to a spot beneath the Ninth Street Bridge, where it gets dewatered, mixed with concrete, and shipped out to a landfill in Pennsylvania. If the process works, they’ll begin implementing it in other parts of the 1.8-mile waterway starting in 2020. The full clean-up process is expected to take a decade or more to complete.

The past and present jostle against each other on the canal. Broad-leafed empress trees grow along the bulkheads, their seedpods transported here during the 19th-century in shipping containers, where they were basically used as packing peanuts. We pass a modern waterfront park, a parole center, 19th-century warehouses, an asphalt plant, generator barges, coworking spaces, a homeless encampment, and the rising skeletons of luxury residential buildings under construction.

The waterfront, such as a it is, is in contention and may soon be reshaped by rezoning. The Department of City Planning has spent nearly two years studying how a zoning framework would best be implemented, holding a series of meetings with residents, elected officials and developers alike. The study came away with priorities including, among other things, more green space along the canal, infrastructure that accounts for rising sea levels in the low-lying neighborhood, and more affordable housing to factor into new residential developments.

Vogel, who lives in Gowanus, is a regular attendee of zoning meetings, and he’s wary of the city’s desire to turn the area into the next hot neighborhood, to the potential detriment of residents. “The question that’s always left in the room is, well who actually asked for this change to begin with? Who’s here that actually wants this? People sort of react to it as if it’s a foregone conclusion,” he says. “My worry is that the development is going to be oblivious to its surroundings and not conscious of the preexisting place.”

The Dredgers are as committed to preserving the culture of the neighborhood as they are to its environment. Its membership encompasses people from a wide variety of backgrounds, from outdoor enthusiasts and preservationists like Vogel to educators, water testers, and local artists and writers. The organization has partnered with the likes of the Brooklyn Book Festival to put on a sunrise reading of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves from canoes floating beneath the Carroll Street Bridge, and Make Music Brooklyn to present concerts on the water. They also collaborate with the NYU Tandon School of Engineering to develop specialized marine robots to monitor pollution in the canal.

“Our whole mission is to get people out engaging with the waterway,” Vogel explains. “Because if you’re not, it’s really hard for you to be an effective and strong advocate. People need to have some kind of relationship with the water to care about it. That was for a lot of people the handle, because why would you want to have a relationship with a polluted canal?”

Foul and stinky as it is, there’s a strange, wonderful kind of splendor in skimming along the canal. It’s oddly mesmerizing to watch my paddle slice through the rainbow slick of coal tar on the water’s surface, and to drift by the remnants of 19th-century docks and rusted-out barges. We see silver crabs dart in and out of holes in the bulkheads, a school of minnows flash by beside the canoe, a lone coconut floating incongruously in Gowanus Bay, at the south end of the canal.

And at the crest of the #MeToo wave, when more and more women are telling their stories and refusing to be silenced or disavowed, Gadsby’s frank admissions and admonitions feel more vital than ever. It seems less like coincidence than conversation that fellow lesbian comedian Cameron Esposito released her special Rape Jokes,which centers on her own experience with sexual assault, around the exact same moment – the time has never been more ripe for women and queer people to reclaim and reframe their own stories.

Having just finished an extended stage run of Nanette in New York City (her final in an 18-month global run that saw her win Best Comedy Show at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe), Gadsby is back home in Melbourne and ready to take a well-deserved break. But first, she hopped on the phone to discuss the overwhelming reaction to this groundbreaking set and to explain why, even after everything, she still loves stand-up. (This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

What were the origins of Nanette? She started out as being a really, really angry little blast. For the past 10 years, I’ve been writing one-hour shows. So it started [out] the same: Time to write another hour … what the hell am I going to talk about? Who’s my audience? That was one of the main questions I was asking: Who am I speaking to? And that was starting to get really kind of a difficult question for me to answer. As a human being, I don’t know how to connect to any sort of broad audience, you know? I don’t have a family or a past that looks like what most people have. So the connection between the personal and the political really informed what Nanette was. Donald Trump got elected and my grandmother died – those two things provided an emotional flashpoint for me.

So what audience did you ultimately have in mind when you were writing the show? Me … and me only. I really was writing as though I was throwing a grenade and I fully expected for the show to seal me off in the margins. I am so shocked and overwhelmingly stunned. It’s become bigger than me. And I’m happy for that.

Did you initially conceive Nanette as a more traditional comedy special, or was that turn in the middle part of the plan from the beginning? From the beginning. I was quite exhausted of this generating new material year after year after year. But I knew that the show that I was looking to write would be dismissed critically as being just a one-woman show – because I’ve seen it happen before. And then I thought, well, that’s a bad idea, to just jump down on it like that. I mean, nobody ever accuses men of doing one-man shows. They just do them. So I just thought, “Oh, fuck it. I’ll do it.” [Laughs]

Even though the show interrogates and criticizes the form, it’s also itself an incredible piece of stand-up. How did you go about building the structure of the show? One of the first building blocks was the story at the bus stop [about a time she was assaulted]. My comedy has always been built around storytelling, and one of my favorite tricks is the callback –  where you layer in a joke or a story, then you keep referring back to it. And the audience is going, “Oh, we’re all becoming part of the in-crowd!” It’s a really great tool to create a communal atmosphere amongst strangers. So that’s really the fundamental block that I began with: I want to show people what I’ve had to do in order to make my story funny by using this tried-and-true method – not to elevate the laugh, but to really pull the rug.

You also talk a lot about the power that storytelling has, and what’s it been like to reexamine your own stories. Comedy has given me quite a privilege, because in order to define my personal life for comedy, I’ve been given the opportunity to interrogate my story. There’s a lot of stories we tell ourselves that we’ve set in stone when we’re quite young, and they remain with us all our lives. But I wouldn’t listen to me when I was 20. What the hell did I know when I was 20? A lot of the stories that we tell ourselves are really immature versions of events, but we build so much of our understanding of the world out of it. And I think it’s worth rewiring your stories that you set when you were immature.

You’ve performed Nanette all over the world, from Australia to the U.K. to America. Do audiences respond to it differently depending on where you are? You know what’s extraordinary? No. The response has been the same, in a very positive and connective way. It put people in shock. I’ve only just emerged from an extended run in New York, and I’ve been touring nonstop for 18 months … I’ve done maybe over 250 shows. And I think it’s going to take me a long time to really understand what I’ve done, both for myself and artistically.

What have reactions to the special been like from the comedy community? One of the things that I’m most happy is that comedians – particularly my peers who I know to be comedy nerds – have just taken my deconstruction of the art form and thanked me, engaged with me. I was a bit concerned I might have upset people, you know? Because I really do tear comedy a new asshole. And comedy is a lot of people’s lives. It’s certainly my life. I did it for personal reasons, not to destabilize other people’s faith and belief and love of the art form. And ultimately, I think stand-up comedy has developed such an amazing platform for people to tell their story from their perspective.

What is it about stand-up that makes it such a useful platform? There are no gatekeepers to comedy. You can be from a low socioeconomic background like myself. There’s no way I could get into theater; there’s no way I could have busted through to such a large audience in any other art form. Absolutely not. I’m not cut from the right cloth. So I think that’s what’s magnificent about stand-up.

In Nanette, you talk about how self-deprecating humor stopped serving you after a while, particularly as a performer from a marginalized background. Do you think there’s an alternative to that style? I can’t imagine that I’ll ever completely step away from self-deprecating humor. I actually think it’s a great way to communicate, particularly if you are onstage with a microphone – you are in a position of power. But I personally felt like I needed to assert my power first. Because I am a really good performer; I do know my way around a joke, I do understand how the world works. [But] I thought, well, why am I undermining myself before I let people know that I’ve got this all up my sleeve? I think there’s a place for it, but it should part of a voice, and there should be more flexibility in approach.

The work of British actor/writer/showrunner Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag), Killing Eve stars Grey’s Anatomy O.G. Sandra Oh as Eve Polastri, a bright, disillusioned MI5 security operative in London whose job involves less intrigue and more paper-pushing. Enter Villanelle (Jodie Comer), a manic pixie dream assassin who’s as charming as she is psychopathic and happens to be cutting a bloody swath across Europe. The two find themselves embroiled in a game of cat-and-mouse that’s part Spy vs. Spy, part quasi-erotic obsession. Any subtextual examination of the ways that women are toxically – and in some cases, lethally – underestimated by the men around them is, of course, not the least bit coincidental.

Considering that Waller-Bridge’s background is in theater and comedy (Fleabag began life as a one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe), penning a gritty espionage thriller seems like an odd career jump. But it’s exactly the comedian’s knack for writing irreverent, character-driven farce that gives Killing Eve its particular umami. And then there’s Oh, best known for her 10-season turn as genius heart surgeon/extra-salty best friend Cristina Yang on Shonda Rhimes’ ABC medical drama. She’s a compulsively watchable actor – expressive and complex, blending wry wit and deep pathos – and fans have been waiting for Oh to sink her teeth into a part this juicy ever since she departed Grey’s in 2014.

In Eve, she may have found the role of her career. The intelligence-agency grunt even shares some DNA with Dr. Yang: Both characters are brilliant yet awkward, eminently capable but also a few steps removed from their fellow humans. Oh plays the MI5 operative a person cursed with zero poker-face game, a hilarious liability for a spy. But what she lacks in guile she makes up for in determination, to the consternation of her fellow agents. (“Don’t be a dick, Eve!” her coworker shouts, in regards to one of her poorer life choices.) The woman is a highly capable hot mess, the kind of unlikely hero who’s always just on the edge of moral ruination.

Equally as magnetic is Comer as Eve’s nemesis/co-protagonist, Villanelle. Though she’s a staple on British TV (Doctor Foster, The White Princess and My Mad Fat Diary), the 25-year-old actor is a relative newcomer to U.S. screens. It’s a tricky part to pull off; think of how easy it is to play a psychopathic killer as little more than a cipher, and how many performers have relied on that trope. But Comer’s Villanelle is a chillingly relatable monster, with an allure that’s one part Tatiana Maslany’s Helena in fellow BBC America series Orphan Black, part Jean Seberg in Breathless.

Villanelle takes as much fulsome pleasure in a murder well-performed as she does in eating a good meal or picking out a perfect outfit. In one memorable scene, Villanelle leisurely asks her latest target who designed his silk bedspread right before stabbing him through the eyeball. By the end of the episode, she’s bought one for her own apartment.

Together, Oh and Comer share a crackling chemistry, one that situates them in a gray realm between bitter enemies and would-be lovers. A twisted dinner scene between Eve and Villanelle in the show’s fifth episode, where the two size each other up as they warily share reheated leftovers in the former’s kitchen, is almost painful to watch – a homicidal cringe-comedy seduction. It embodies everything Killing Eve does best all at once: dry wit, razor-wire tension, sex appeal and the looming threat of violence, all centered on a half-eaten shepherd’s pie in a Tupperware container.

It’s weird details like that pie, writ large by the story’s attention to them, that gives Killing Eve its unique texture. Waller-Bridge understands that for us to be invested in what happens to these characters, we need to see their quirks, not just the peril they’re put in. And that extends beyond the two main charcters to most everyone in the show, whether it’s MI5 boss Carolyn’s (Fiona Shaw) muttered aside about a rat drinking from a soda can or Eve’s work BFF Bill (David Haig) recalling his polyamorous youth over unpacked suitcases.

Jessica Jones is part of Netflix's stable of Marvel superhero shows, sharing a fictional Manhattan with Daredevil, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Punisher and the team-'em'all-up crossover series The Defenders. Adapted by Melissa Rosenberg from Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos' comic book series, Jones stands out from the rest. Jessica is a hardboiled P.I. in the tradition of Sam Spade and Rick Deckard (and, more vitally, Veronica Mars). She takes cases for money rather than any high-minded moral reasons, and she's only interested in her superpowers inasmuch as they help her to do her job. No spandex bodysuit or high-concept alter ego for this gal – just a beat-up leather jacket and a defiant sneer. As for the show itself, Its visual and narrative aesthetics derive less from typical superhero blockbusters and more from 1940s film noir. It isn't afraid to go dark.

In the show's first season, Jessica faced off against Kilgrave (Doctor Who's David Tennant), a mind-controlling supervillain who raped her and forced her to commit murder while she was under his influence. She was aided by a small but loyal band of allies: her adoptive sister Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor); her neighbor Malcolm Ducasse (Eka Darville); her erstwhile lover Luke Cage (Mike Colter); and her morally gray lawyer Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss). Flush with power, crippled by insecurity and literally able to bend the world to his will, Kilgrave served as a chilling avatar for toxic masculinity. He did his level best to unravel Jessica's world (talk about gaslighting); the only way she could be free of him in the end was to snap his neck. Kilgrave set out to possess and destroy her. In some ways, he succeeded.

That was back in November 2015, when Donald Trump's campaign for president was but a distant cloud on the horizon, Harvey Weinstein was still quietly ensconced in power and threats to women's welfare, at least superficially, seemed a lot less dire than they do now. With Jessica Jones, Rosenberg tapped into that aquifer of women's very real rage and anxiety bubbling just below the surface. Now, in 2018, it's become a roiling sea, whipped into frenzy by naked sexism at the highest levels of government and the exposure of sexual predators and inequality at every level of society. In other words, it's the perfect moment for Jessica to come roaring back to the screen, fists swinging and bullshit meter set to "fuck right off."

Rosenberg (who's also an executive producer) is committed to telling feminist stories both onscreen and behind the scenes. Pointedly, all 13 episodes of Season Two are directed by women, a bold and inclusive move that follows in the footsteps of Ava DuVernay's Queen Sugar. The impressive roster includes Uta Briesewitz (The Deuce, Orange Is the New Black), Minkie Spiro (Better Call Saul, One Mississippi) and Rosemary Rodriguez (The Walking Dead, The Good Wife).

If the first season was about surviving deep trauma, Season Two is about what comes after: namely, anger. Rosenberg examines feminist rage from a variety of angles, through Jessica but also through the women around her. The big bad is less clear than it was in Season One, because it's everywhere and nowhere. Our heroine must delve into the murky origins of her super strength, which she'd rather not know about; and Trish reckons with a figure from her days as a teenage TV star, an all-too-real monster straight out of a #MeToo exposé. Meanwhile, Hogarth grapples with dire news that causes her question everything about her life.

All three women wrap themselves in armor – Jessica via detachment and alcoholism, Trish via her reputation and sense of control, Hogarth via wealth and power – that will feel familiar to any woman coping with simply trying to exist in a world that fears and marginalizes them. Jessica Jones asks the complex question of what happens when the coping mechanisms we build up over time, like thick skin growing over a blister, stop serving us.

But Jesus, Mary and Kierkegaard, does this show work magnificently – less like a well-oiled machine than like a marvelous Rube Goldberg device, astonishing and delighting dedicated viewers with a “How the hell do they keep pulling this off?” spirit of inventiveness. Created by Michael Schur (Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Office), The Good Place – whose second season finale aired last night – has established itself as one of the single best shows on TV today: slyly intelligent, relentlessly creative, existentially profound and consistently laugh-out-loud funny.

The sitcom began its first season with a cozy (if more metaphysical than most) set-up: Eleanor Shellstrop (Bell) finds herself in a cheery waiting room only to discover that A) she’s dead, B) she’s in "the Good Place," which is basically Heaven sans the religious associations, and C) they've got the wrong gal. In life, Eleanor wasn't what you'd call the charitable, love-your-neighbor type, especially not the kind that her immortal overseer, Michael (Ted Danson), seems to think she is. She was actually, well, kind of a dick. It seems that, thanks to a bureaucratic mix-up, she's taken the place of another, far more generous person named Eleanor Shellstrop. Having found herself in a pastel-colored, preppily cheerful afterlife where everyone around her is unbelievably upstanding and no one can ever swear ("Ashhole!"), this afterlifer must find a way to con the world into believing that she's the saint they imagine her to be. Otherwise, it's off to the Bad Place and your run-of-the-mill eternity of torment.

A less daring showrunner might have spent years teasing out this premise, with Eleanor's heavenly assigned soulmate, moral philosophy professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), schooling her in basic ethical principles. Then she tries to put them into imperfect practice, there are lots of shenanigans and screw-ups, yadda yadda yadda. But by the end of the first season, Schur and company instead served up the most delicious twist since Ned Stark lost his head on the steps of Baelor: The Good Place was the Bad Place all along! Our heroine comes to the realization that Michael is actually a demon who has set up the show's central quartet – Eleanor, hand-wringing Chidi, jealous socialite Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and dim-witted would-be DJ Jason (Manny Jacinto) – to torture each other by being thrown into situations that ping their deepest anxieties. To quote Eleanor, “Holy motherforking shirtballs!”

And with that grenade hurled into the very heart of its premise, The Good Place went from sweet and intriguing sitcom to one of the most clever and brilliant experiments in modern television. Season Two has been a high-wire walk into a sea of fog, with each episode's conclusion prompting the question: Where the hell do we go from here? It's a joy to watch the series pull off the trick every week, outdoing itself with each subsequent foray into the possibilities of its ever-expanding world. In "Dance Dance Resolution," the season's third episode, Michael reboots his tormentee's memories hundreds of times in a dizzying montage in which Eleanor realizes over and over again where they actually are. (And surely there's no tidier visual metaphor for life in modern America than Bell holding a bunch of balloons while standing in a field of cacti, shouting, "This is the Bad Place!")

In the course of the season, Michael eventually abandons his repeatedly failed gambit and joins forces with the humans to con the rest of the disguised demons in the neighborhood into believing that he's actually pulling it off. Halfway through the season, The Good Place has quite literally dismantled its own setting: The lovingly realized neighborhood where the show has taken place up until now folds in on itself and winks out of existence as our antiheroes head off to parts unknown. Think Nancy Botwin burning down Agrestic in Season Three of Weeds, but on a far, far bigger existential scale.

While the circumstances of the show change from week to week, our anchor is the ways in which Schur and his team track not only the characters' individual growth, but also the ways in which they grow together. The Good Place is blessed with one of the most comedically talented ensembles in television, from seasoned pros Danson and Bell to Jamil, who made her acting debut in this show. But Schur's true secret weapon is arguably Upright Citizens Brigade alum D'Arcy Carden in the role of an all-knowing celestial A.I. named Janet. This "Busty Alexa," as one person dubs her, gets some of the best one-liners in a show packed with them, and perfectly encompasses the comedy's delicate blend of bright, jokey innocence and deep, brainy pathos.

And what viewers might hardly even clock as they take in the clever setups, abundance of background puns (a partial list of the afterlife's restaurant choices: Sushi and the Banshees, From Schmear to Eternity, Panna Cotta da Vida, I Tought I Saw a Puddin' Vat) and sitcom hijinks is that the show is also taking on the most profound questions of human existence: Is morality fixed or relative? What does it mean to be good – and is true goodness even sustainable in a world that often rewards selfishness and avarice? And, as Michael asks Eleanor rhetorically in the Season Two finale, "What do we owe each other?" Going into its third season, the series has once again reshuffled all its cards: Eleanor, Chidi, Jason and Tahani are back on earth, having sidestepped their deaths in an effort (overseen by Michael) to see if they can live up to the potential they discovered in the afterlife.