Somewhere among my family’s mementos there is a photo, which I will make certain you will never see, of me in the early ’80s, wearing a goofy smile, a prodigious bush of hair and a T-shirt with the block-lettered slogan, “ANTI-PREPPIE.”
“Orange Is the New Black,” finishing its seven-season run on July 26, was big. Big in its reach (presumably, though actual viewing figures for Netflix series are still an occult mystery). Big in its influence, as one of the first genuinely original programs in the new medium of streaming. Big in its ambitions to represent faces and situations that had been left off TV screens.
The HBO limited series, from the British writer Russell T Davies, is about a lot of ideas: runaway technology, European nationalism, the failure of liberal democracy. But its overarching idea, driven home by its pell-mell narrative, is, “Man, there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on these days.”
(Critic’s Notebook): You can’t miss the peak of Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Texas Senate campaign in HBO’s “Running with Beto.” Maybe you’ve already seen it, on your phone or in a Facebook post: O’Rourke responding passionately to a question about NFL players taking a knee to protest racism and police brutality.
(Critic's Notebook): One of the hallmarks of a past generation’s nature documentaries was the animal-in-peril scene: the cub hunted by the jungle cat, the fledgling teetering at the edge of its nest.
