“What do you think it is about Cassius that makes him able to do things that other men find impossible?” Malcolm X (Michael Ealy) asks Muhammad Ali’s stalwart trainer, Angelo Dundee (Giovanni Ribisi), in Prime Video’s stylistically conventional yet unusually insightful The Greatest. “What spark inside him makes him so different from other people?”

These questions fuel the series, streaming in full on Nov. 4, which finds in the relative newcomer Jaalen Best an ideal young Cassius Clay, a bold boxing phenom on a quest to become the heavyweight champion of the world—and a spiritual journey that will change both his faith and his name. There are reasons to be skeptical of this show. It counts his widow, Lonnie Ali, among its executive producers. (Michael B. Jordan, who played the Ali-esque title character in the Creed movies, is another.) Such projects can default to hagiography. And Ali has already been portrayed many times on screen. But creator Ben Watkins (Cross) doesn’t dodge the tougher aspects of his subject’s life. What justifies this retelling is not only the care he and Best take in recounting what Ali achieved, but also conveying what made him capable of greatness.

The Greatest is bookended by career highlights: the 1960 Rome Olympics, where Ali won gold at 18, and his first heavyweight championship in 1964. That fight, against Sonny Liston, must be his most extensively documented moment. Michael Mann opened his 2001 biopic Ali, starring Will Smith, with an immersive restaging of the match. Regina King’s 2020 film One Night in Miami imagines its afterparty, a meeting of the minds between Eli Goree’s Ali, Malcolm X, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke. In ending where these predecessors begin, the series traces how the upstart Cassius Clay crafted Muhammad Ali, the legend.

Best’s Ali reads as a significantly younger man than the versions in Mann’s and King’s movies. Instead of detracting from his astonishing self-possession, Cassius’ fresh face makes those qualities seem more remarkable. Upon his return from Italy, where he enjoyed a relative reprieve from anti-Black racism, to his segregated hometown of Louisville, Ky., he is again a teenager in his parents’ humble household. He has a mutually adoring bond with his mother, Odessa (Dana Gourrier, excellent), a domestic servant who wants nothing fancier than to give her children a better life. His father, Cash (Omari Hardwick), had dreams of becoming a great artist but settled for painting signs and drowning his disappointment in alcohol and women. Cassius’ younger brother Rudy (Kai Parham) is also a boxer. But any rivalry is outweighed by Rudy’s sincere wish to help a sibling he recognizes as a generational talent.

An 18-year-old rocketing to the top of a lucrative sport is sure to meet many people eager to buy stock in his future. Especially if he is Black and working-class, he’ll be treated as though he owes them something. As he prepares to go pro, Cassius is swarmed by this type. “I knew you had the skill,” one tells the gold medalist. “Wasn’t sure you had the work ethic.” The prejudice underlying this comment would be obvious even if we didn’t see Cassius exhaust himself in training sessions. But he knows he deserves respect, and he refuses to work with anyone, Black or white, who tries to humble him. This can look like arrogance, but it’s also an accurate self-assessment. As Angelo puts it: “You don’t teach Michelangelo how to paint.”

How does a person as systemically disadvantaged as Cassius come to believe so fervently in himself? Watkins offers three compelling explanations, all implied through his behavior rather than overstated via exposition. One is the strength of his will—his innate ability to tune out skeptics and distractions. Another is his mother and brother’s unwavering love, which counteracts the hatred he experiences. Finally, in rare instances when his poise wavers, he can fall back on the rhyming, boasting showmanship he gleans from the flamboyant pro wrestling heel Gorgeous George (WWE alum Chris Jericho, in an apt cameo).

Cassius’ singular personality is thrown into relief by Sonny (Amin Joseph), who is depicted as his antithesis in life as in the ring. An ex-con and abuse survivor, he has internalized every monstrous caricature of Black manhood Cassius actively resists. Even as the champ, with the love and guidance of a canny wife (Erica Tazel), he’s poisoned by self-hatred. Ultimately, he behaves like the beast a racist press makes him out to be. Watkins lets us sit in discomfort, watching Cassius use the same stereotypes (“big, ugly bear”) to taunt Sonny.

The Greatest rarely deviates from the bio-drama template, with its archetypal hero’s journey. But the approach suits this story of a man figuring out who he is and what he values through a noble quest. It’s when the show tries to loosen up, as in boxing montages scored to energetic hip-hop that feel like Gatorade ads, that it rings false. It occasionally struggles to balance complex truths. On the Nation of Islam, it makes clear-eyed distinctions between Malcolm X, framed as a true mentor to Cassius, and the tactics of polarizing Nation leader Elijah Muhammad (Hill Harper). Yet in illustrating why Cassius chooses the Nation’s militance over turn-the-other-cheek Christianity, hurting his mother in the process, it minimizes the Black church’s centrality to the civil rights struggle.

Even so, as it distinguishes Malcolm from Elijah, Odessa from Cash, Angelo from a legion of white guys with dollar-sign eyes, and most of all Cassius from Sonny, The Greatest builds a strong case for integrity as the key ingredient of greatness. A hero of Ali’s magnitude doesn’t just embody that virtue. He demands it from the people who surround him.

Nocturne is everything you would expect from a 21st century prestige crime drama. Adapted from a series of best-selling Scandinavian mystery novels, the Apple TV thriller, premiering with two episodes on Oct. 30, casts a genuine movie star (Liev Schreiber) as a brilliant yet broken detective immersed in a case that has become an all-consuming obsession. The large ensemble represents multiple law-enforcement agencies, victims, bystanders, and a singular alleged serial killer played by an actor on a hot streak (Stephen Graham). Children’s lives are at stake. A risky undercover operation is undertaken. Relationships simmer, until suddenly they’re at a full boil. Collateral damage piles up. Progress is glacial, with essential bits of backstory meted out in stingy flashbacks. Underlying every scene is an atmosphere heavy with dread, as though this sordid scenario has arisen not merely from the brain of one twisted villain, but out of a rot at the heart of society.

It’s a prototypical slow burn. This format, in which one complex investigation spans a season or more, wasn’t new to American TV when AMC’s Nordic noir adaptation The Killing became a sensation in 2011. (In this respect and many others, Twin Peaks, for one, was ahead of its time.) But the convergence of streaming, an ideal venue for binge-friendly serialized storytelling, and an audience for ambitious television that had been growing for more than a decade facilitated its proliferation as a cinematic alternative to the formulaic procedurals that still predominate on broadcast networks. The most acclaimed and discussed mystery shows of the past 15 years—True Detective, Mare of Easttown, Fargo, even Only Murders in the Building—have been, with few exceptions, slow burns. Yet, as Nocturne’s mixed success suggests, the tropes and limitations of the style become more apparent with each new title.

In one welcome deviation from the norm, whodunit seems clear from the beginning. Confined in the bowels of a Pennsylvania psychiatric hospital, the serial killer Jurek Walter (Graham) calmly coaxes an inmate in the adjacent solitary cell into suicide. When a boy thought to be one of his victims, Michael (Landon Valentin), turns up, filthy and feeble but alive, years after he and his sister went missing, a new hunt for the girl begins. Schreiber’s Jonah Lynn, a Philly cop and military veteran who is now retired and a bit reclusive, was instrumental in the original investigation. Michael’s return draws him back in, along with an FBI agent, Saga (Zazie Beetz), who is a surrogate daughter to Jonah. As Quinn, a rigorous colleague from the bureau (Poorna Jagannathan), and the weary local police chief (Bill Camp) lead the search, Saga goes undercover as a patient at the hospital and Jonah goes rogue, to the surprise of no one who has ever worked with him. They don’t just want to find the sister; they want to catch Jurek masterminding violent crimes from his cell, thereby proving he’s coherent enough to rot in a real prison.

A slow burn can only be as compelling as the personalities and ideas its pace affords it time to explore. Creator Rowan Joffé and his cast, adapting the Joona Linna novels by Lars Kepler (a pen name of Swedish husband-andwife team Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril), do craft a few fascinating characters. Beetz’s Saga is a spookily canny mix of actor, detective, and daredevil, inhabiting her cutesy-until-she’s-not patient persona so fully, you might start to doubt she’s fully faking it. Graham weaponizes the soft masculinity that he wielded so movingly as the horrified father of a homicidal teen incel in Adolescence. It’s his cunning performances of compassion that set Jurek apart from the typical thriller psycho and make us believe he has the capacity to pull off logistically inconceivable feats of cruelty. Rory Culkin adds tension as Karl, a sensitive hospital worker whose anger at the way superiors use him as a pawn leaves him vulnerable to Jurek’s manipulation.

What happens outside the institution isn’t nearly as gripping. Strong actors like Camp, Jagannathan, and Chrissy Metz, who plays Michael’s mother Ida, are saddled with underwritten characters. Everything we know about Jonah—that he’s brooding, single-minded, and willing to break rules in pursuit of justice—is a cliché of the genre, as is his odd-couple partnership with the stiff but well-intentioned Quinn. I got the sense, around the season’s midpoint (seven out of 10 episodes were provided for review), that Joffé was holding some of these characters at arm’s length in order to shock us with revelations about them later. But the extended delay in supplying basic context about Jonah, in particular, comes off as too much of a contrivance. It also distances us from the show’s implicit questions about whether laws and protocols enable (or prevent) justice, and how people like Jonah and Saga should weigh the rewards of dangerous, personal missions against the threat of harm these crusades pose.

Nocturne’s small-town Pennsylvania setting is guaranteed to earn it comparisons to Mare of Easttown and its spiritual sequel, Task. Beyond the dutifully adopted (and, to my ears, pretty accurate) accents, though, it lacks the specificity of those shows, both created by area native Brad Ingelsby, with regard to the region and its people. It doesn’t have the same curiosity about or patience in depicting the characters’ lives outside the Jurek case, either. Viewers got invested in Kate Winslet’s Mare because we got to watch her try to keep up with her precocious teenage daughter and endure the harsh words of her judgmental mom. (It didn’t hurt that said mom was played by Jean Smart.) As Robbie in Task, Tom Pelphrey had space to show us a criminal who was also a lonely, newly single father desperate to provide for his beloved children.

As any connoisseur of the hundreds of crime serials TV has produced since The Killing can tell you, there are only so many murder plots. But there are as many unique characters as there are human beings on planet earth. A slow burn that doesn’t make use of such a rich source of fuel is apt to fizzle out.

When it comes to representing the famous and addicted, Hollywood seems to know only two stories. Both begin with a passionate talent who longs to make an impact on the world. Then, as no less an expert on this subject than Courtney Love memorably put it, they get what they want and they never want it again. Afflicted by affluenza or impostor syndrome or the newfound knowledge that success can’t heal their internal wounds, they escape into substance abuse. It’s only in their final chapters that the two narratives diverge. Some lucky souls hit rock bottom, get clean, and live happily ever after. The rest die young.

It would be easy to slot Matthew Perry, the Friends star who died from ketamine and drowning in October 2023, into the latter category. But in the intimate three-part Netflix documentary The One About Matthew Perry, director Mary Robertson (Quiet on the Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV) honors his memory by resisting that simplistic binary. Yes, addiction (and a cadre of enablers who are now serving time for their roles in his death) killed Perry at 54. It’s also true that he spent more than 25 years surviving it, fighting to act and write and enjoy his friendships and make his family proud and fall in love. Instead of hiding that struggle, he used his fortune to aid others in their recoveries and his platform to advocate for a broader understanding of addiction as the illness that it is.

Robertson captures all of this in straightforward, chronological order, through emotional interviews with family and longtime friends, as well as Perry’s own startlingly frank reflections in media appearances and his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. The absence of major celebrities, whether by design or otherwise, limits the fond platitudes. In their place are vivid behind-the-scenes anecdotes and candid memories of who he was offscreen—the ambition, charm, humor, and magnanimity, but also the pain he was capable of inflicting on those who loved and needed him. His sister Mia Perry Bowick, a psychotherapist, is the most insightful presence, embracing grief and ambivalence as she ties her big brother’s highs and lows to early family dynamics.

With all due respect to Chandler Bing, Perry’s greatest contribution was his vulnerability, even when the image of him it exposed wasn’t flattering. In its honesty, this documentary continues that work.

Correction, Oct. 27

The original version of this story misstated the last name of the series' director. She is Mary Robertson, not Mary Robinson.

This article discusses the full third season of Nobody Wants This.

Joanne and Noah are going to make it. Two seasons of so many highs and lows, will-theys and won’t-theys, makeups and breakups had gotten a bit repetitive. So it comes as a relief that Season 3 of the Netflix romantic comedy Nobody Wants This all but guarantees us Kristen Bell’s formerly secular sex podcaster and Adam Brody’s hot rabbi will live happily ever after. With Joanne taking conversion classes, the couple checks off commitment milestones in quick succession: cohabitation, then engagement, and, in the finale, an unplanned exchange of wedding vows after the bride emerges, officially Jewish, from an ocean mikvah. It’s a lovely, duly earned culmination of their interfaith courtship. But it raises the question of where the show can go from here. 

The season’s other main storyline—and sole substantive source of conflict—suggests that creator Erin Foster and her co-showrunners, Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan, are staking its future on the relationship between Joanne’s erratic, underachieving sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe), and Noah’s eccentric, underachieving brother, Sasha (Timothy Simons). Morgan is fresh off her latest ill-advised romance, an ethically dubious relationship with her ex-therapist (Arian Moayed) that imploded at their engagement party. Sasha is separating from his wife, Jackie Tohn’s Esther. (This is her choice, probably because writers remain sensitive following complaints about the portrayal of Jewish women in the first season and wanted to avoid making hot, blonde Morgan the cause of the split.) And so the best buddies, who’ve been flirting since Season 1, are finally single at the same time. But is it actually a good idea for the show to bring them together, as it briefly does in the second half of this season? I’m of two minds about that.

What the Morgan-Sasha romance has going for it is the unlikely, off-kilter yet undeniable chemistry between Lupe and Simons, which has somehow surpassed even the electric connection of Bell and Brody’s soulmates. (Let’s take a second to appreciate the versatility of Simons, whose other great performance was as Veep’s toxic West Wing staffer Jonah, a character who would never be attractive to anyone.) Morgan is a brash, blunt, benignly self-absorbed icon in her own mind who also, in her darker moments, fears she’ll never get her life together. Awkward, self-deprecating Sasha is genuinely dazzled by her. For a guy who sacrificed his youth to marriage and fatherhood, she represents all the fun he never got to have. And because they’ve never seemed like viable partners for each other, they have a better rapport than either could manage on a date with someone who’s more their type. “Act the way you act with me,” Morgan advises Sasha as he apprehensively delves into the apps. “You should pretend that you’re talking to me every time you talk to anyone, because I bring out the most charming side of you.” She’s conceited, as usual, but she also happens to be right.

The most refreshing aspect of their friendship is their mutual honesty. So it was clever of Foster, Konner, and Kaplan to make that the driver of their storyline this season. When Sasha fills in for Joanne on the sisters’ podcast, his banter with Morgan is, of course, gold. He explains how he has used the Let Them theory to make peace with professional setbacks—then she calls B.S., and goes on to improvise her own Make Them theory, a pure expression of her aggressive approach to getting what she wants. The episode goes viral. Morgan starts to see a future for herself as a self-help author. Sasha is there to encourage her to dig deeper when her early attempts at writing fall flat. And she can be counted on to inform him that his “lucky shirt” is not exactly the chick magnet he imagines it to be. Yet they also frequently build each other up. 

Each faces more disappointment as the season goes on. Morgan blows a meeting with a publisher (Poorna Jagannathan, in her third of four high-profile TV role this year. Hey, I’m not mad about it). Sasha tries to force a connection with a woman who gets confused when he mentions the social contract. So they’re both in a tender place when Morgan impulsively invites him to accompany her to New York, where she’s been booked to talk Make Them with Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live. The season’s seventh episode is almost entirely devoted to the trip. That it is such a pleasure to, er, watch what happens between them is a testament to the power of great characters to reinvigorate old genre tropes. From the shopping montage where Sasha buys Morgan a dress, Pretty Woman style, to her earnest speech as they walk the High Line, to the false starts that end with them in bed, familiar rom-com beats feel exciting because of the affection we have for these two. Morgan’s epiphany that, “When I was younger, I always fell for people I wanted to be seen with. And now I think I just wanna be with someone who sees me,” could be a Carrie Bradshaw koan. It hits, though, because it’s so true to her character arc.

But what’s the endgame for Sasha and Morgan? Presumably in order to save some material for Season 4, Nobody Wants This pulls them apart just hours after their hookup. Sasha awakens to a note that says Morgan has hopped on an earlier flight home. There, she crashes out in bed, resigned to the impossibility of a long-term relationship with her future brother-in-law. When it dawns on Joanne that her sister is serious about Sasha, she gives Morgan her blessing. Yet by the time Morgan tracks him down and delivers another big monologue (“I don’t wanna half-ass you”), he’s decided he can’t endure her avoidance so soon after Esther left him. Then he sleeps with Esther, who’s dating a rich guy a full generation her senior (Steven Weber), laying the groundwork for an absolutely disastrous encounter between Joanne’s and Noah’s families at the mikvah.  

No end to the season could have been more apt than Joanne and Noah pledging their eternal love while, in a gorgeous beachfront rental just steps away, their parents and siblings tear each other apart. And, again, the scenes Sasha and Morgan share have become some of the most exhilarating of the show. But Nobody Wants This has always been better with isolated situations and screwball dialogue than it is with big-picture plot. With that in mind, I worry it’s written itself into another corner with this relationship. A Season 4 love triangle, with Sasha forced to choose between Esther and Morgan, could only lead back to the same old referendum on Jewish women. If the two Jewish brothers did both end up with the two gentile sisters, that would make its own, somewhat discouraging statement on the latter issue. 

Even if you can get past those implications, it’s hard to imagine Morgan and Sasha’s long-term romance arc going anywhere worthwhile, narratively speaking. We’ve already seen the culture clash, the parental pushback, the conversion drama. Are we going to do the same thing all over again, with the same abrasive mother-in-law, brief breakups, and tearful reunions—except with lower stakes because Sasha isn’t a rabbi? I’m not saying nobody wants this. I just need to be convinced. 

This article discusses all six episodes of Netflix’s The New Stanford Prison Experiment.

For decades now, scholars have argued over what—if anything—we should have gleaned from the Stanford Prison Experiment. That it was unethical to place two dozen male college students in a university basement repurposed as a prison, designate a few of them guards and the rest prisoners, and encourage the former to discipline the latter, was apparent by the time its mastermind, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, ended what was supposed to be a two-week exercise after only six days. As the extent of Zimbardo’s manipulation came to light, the 1971 study lost credibility in academic circles, even as its pop-cultural legend kept growing. Fifty-five years after it was conducted, perhaps the only definitive conclusion to draw from the Stanford Prison Experiment is that the Stanford Prison Experiment is not worth repeating.

But just try telling that to the reality-TV machine, let alone a platform currently at work on the third, all-celebrity season of a competition series that cheerfully (and, of course, non-lethally) recreates the horrors of its international hit anticapitalist battle royale thriller Squid Game. The New Stanford Prison Experiment, Netflix’s take on a project that was always more convincing as improvisational theater than as scientific research, isn’t even television’s first crack at Zimbardo’s study. The BBC got there first with The Experiment, in 2002, whose earnest attempts to correct for the original’s missteps yielded a more nuanced, if still inherently flawed, look at authority. That the Netflix version of what can now be best understood as a reboot of a famous franchise feels less like social psychology and more like a high-concept season of Big Brother is no surprise. What’s most perplexing is its choice to incorporate female participants in a limited way—and its failure to make any real sense out of what they bring to the experience.

Aware that the televised resurrection of a notoriously inhumane experiment was bound to draw scrutiny (the mere announcement of the show’s existence touched off a wave of incredulity), the producers of the six-episode series take pains to make both their safety precautions and their high-mindedness visible. Instead of a retrofitted academic building, the inmates are sequestered in a real housing pod of a Georgia correctional facility. The 30 voluntary participants are said to come from all walks of life, though what we find out about their backgrounds is generally limited to hometown, racial identity, and line of work. According to executive producer Jane Lipsitz, each “underwent psychological screenings prior to entering the experiment.” There’s a safe word any of the participants can, and some do, use to leave the roleplay early.

The appearance of legitimacy is further reinforced by a panel of three experts who provide commentary on what’s happening in the pod. Michael Cantrell, who brings 30 years of experience working in federal corrections, games out the results of the guards’ strategies. Journalist Trymaine Lee, who has covered stories ranging from Hurricane Katrina to the power of the Black electorate, was presumably tapped to bring insight into big-picture issues such as race, violence, and the justice system. But the show keeps the experts’ interjections so brief that he’s rarely afforded more than a quick sound bite. Filling a limited version of the host role is Alison Wood Brooks, a behavioral scientist on the faculty of Harvard Business School. It’s she who introduces the series with a speed-run summary of Zimbardo’s study and its “ethical breaches,” as well as the true but comically vague observation that “in today’s world, the study of power couldn’t be more relevant.” So, Brooks says, it seemed like the right time to retry the experiment in hopes of more accurately answering its original question: “Does power corrupt?”

It doesn’t take long to notice that only three of the 30 participants are women—and all of them join the five men selected as guards. It’s not hard to guess why there are no female inmates. Correctional facilities are segregated by sex. Throwing men and women together in close quarters for 14 long, monotonous days is a recipe for uncomfortable, sexually charged interactions, if not full-on harassment or assault. Of course, similar dangers exist in single-sex environments. Abuse of power seems particularly likely when male guards are put in charge of female prisoners, yet precisely this dynamic is the reality in many American prisons. I suppose untrained, inexperienced guards might be expected to pose a greater threat. But you would think that the same safeguards put in place to protect participants’ physical and mental health could be extended to enable a truly coed experiment. (The show doesn’t have much to say about the existence of transgender, nonbinary, or even queer people behind bars.) 

The architects of New Stanford might’ve avoided all of the above and still meaningfully included women by running parallel exercises in separate pods. Instead, they only examine the behavior of three women—a number so small, it precludes any claim of representativeness—in positions of authority over men. One of them, Laura Berens, is the CEO of her own business and thus presumably comfortable in a leadership role. Shavonnah Jefferson, whose background as a security guard also seems relevant here, has no trouble asserting herself. “You have to speak up,” she says. “Because if you do not, people will run you over.” Yet only Kiana Gaona, a young, devoutly Christian social media manager elected head guard by her shiftmates, gets much screen time in early episodes. Professing to believe in gender equality despite her choice to submit to her husband, she’s a bit erratic. She makes the extreme decision to give an outcast inmate a position of power, then veers dramatically in the opposite direction, punishing him and a fellow dissident with 23 hours of confinement to a cell for talking about a rebellion.

It’s these scheming inmates and the two male guards who initially claim control of their respective shifts who dominate the show for most of the season. There’s an interesting, if under-analyzed, contrast between the latter men’s leadership styles. Chris Lee, a prototypical new-school executive, wants to wield influence by inspiring his charges, while Chet Hudson, an oil rig supervisor, likens his new job to breaking horses. The resulting inconsistency fosters a bit of unrest. But it’s only after an extremely reality TV plot twist in which Lee, Hudson, and their fellow male guards switch roles with the most rebellious prisoners that a truly telling storyline emerges. Hudson, who as a guard had been the strongest proponent of a strict hierarchy, starts saying things like: “When people unite, no matter what, they’re in control of the power.” Then he makes a big deal of leaving the experiment early, claiming that he has nothing to learn from being a prisoner. For a certain kind of person, one that’s really having a moment right now in American politics, inequality only becomes a concern once they lose their place at the top.

Although the men’s role reversal remains the dominant drama, the shakeup also puts a new spotlight on the women, who are reassigned to an all-female shift. They quickly settle on Berens as head guard, citing her leadership experience. (It’s worth noting that neither of the two Black guards, Jefferson and Nicholas Washington, are shown to be considered by their peers for head guard.) “The female shift gave me an opportunity,” Berens reflects. “Obviously, the guys on my shift weren’t treating me super equal.” Unfortunately, this isn’t obvious based on the footage we’re shown, and it certainly doesn’t explain why Berens, the sole woman on her original shift, joined the majority that elected Hudson head guard. Regardless, she proves to be the most competent leader in the experiment, striking the right balance between firm rules and humane treatment. Her best moment happens when the shift made up of rebellious ex-prisoners loses control and she steps in to quiet the inmates and advise her counterpart to protect his guards.

Aside from the self-evident notion that some women make strong leaders (and some men weak ones), it’s hard to know what the takeaway from the introduction of an all-female shift is supposed to be. Maybe because they really do all respect women in positions of authority, or more likely because they don’t want millions of people watching them act sexist on TV, the inmates barely adjust their behavior when Berens’ team walks in. Another probable reason for their compliance is that they’re so intent on antagonizing the ex-inmate shift, which many feel is being rewarded for bad behavior. The women don’t come into the pod with the same baggage.

The expert commentators don’t really help make sense of the situation. When it comes to the gender issue, they could’ve supplied context about differences in how men and women typically wield authority or how men tend to perceive women in power. Maybe they did and that footage didn’t make it into the final edit. Either way, we see a lot of the experts noting that the all-female shift is fascinating without digging into specifics. The closest we get to synthesis comes from Berens. “I guess I really did have 22 men listening to me,” she marvels, attributing her success to kindness, humor, and mutual respect. “What if there are more women leaders who can lead in this type of way?” This is a subject far older than this Lean-In-era epiphany, yet New Stanford stops short at gesturing faintly in the direction of conversations that could theoretically be had.

The series’ shallow approach to gender doesn’t just weaken its depiction of the three female participants. It also neglects to acknowledge the explicitly gendered aspects of the male hierarchy, with its charismatic, physically strong leaders and smaller, less socially adept outcasts. In that sense, New Stanford replicates an ancient form of patriarchal bias that casts men as the norm and women as an atypical other. Maybe it’s silly to criticize something as inherently unserious as a reality show for failing to internalize the lessons of The Second Sex. But this particular reality show tries to justify its controversial existence by proclaiming its seriousness with regards to psychology, philosophy, and current events. So it seems fair to judge it by those lofty ambitions.

To that end, it isn’t only gender that the series glosses over. Racial disparities occasionally surface—one Black inmate justifies his obedience to authority by explaining that for his community, fighting back might result in an “accidental shooting”—yet go largely unexamined. Anyone hoping for timely debate over the purpose or efficacy of the criminal justice system is bound to be disappointed. By the time the guards are dismissed, in the finale, so that the prisoners can take responsibility for their own fates, the whole “experiment” feels like a bait-and-switch. New Stanford wants to reel in viewers with the notoriety of the original study and the promise that hot buttons will be pushed. But then, perhaps because the producers are afraid to alienate any segment of Netflix’s diverse audience, it shrinks from every opportunity to make meaning out of what happens in that housing pod. And so, as different as the two exercises are, this latest Stanford Prison Experiment becomes as pointless as the first one.

The protagonist of Phony, a delightfully genre-defying Hulu series best miscategorized as a thriller, is the kind of teenage boy any mother would brag about. Played by Sam Nivola, who’s best known for portraying gentle sons of privilege in The White Lotus and The Perfect Couple, Sonny Cooke is that one kid everyone in school knows and likes. He’s as comfortable with the jocks as he is with the theater set; his friendly, nonjudgmental presence sets his peers at ease. You’d think this would be especially tough to achieve when your mom, Connie Britton’s Ellen, is the principal, but if anything, the proximity of a single parent with whom he shares a fierce bond adds to his ease. “I actually love high school,” he narrates over a montage of happy moments that opens the show. “I know what people need to hear, and people trust me with their sh-t.”

That’s before one anxiously anticipated night upends Sonny’s pleasant life. Driving to his girlfriend Chloe’s (Mahaela Park) house, with plans to have sex for the first time and a blue vibrator in tow as a sort of talisman against performance anxiety, he crashes into an eerie pond. When he awakens in the hospital a week later, banged up but healing, the woman who greets him looks slightly yet decisively different from the mother he knows better than anyone. (Britton’s subtle transformation is rendered, quite effectively, through a combination of makeup and visual effects.) No one else seems to notice the change. They chalk up Sonny’s insistence that this new Ellen is a phony to the lingering effects of his accident. He fights with his skeptical best friend, Vogel (Maliq Johnson), and drifts toward outsiders Mallory (Grace Brennan), a junior-high love interest who’s back in class after years of being homeschooled by evangelical parents, and her geeky cousin, Weldon (Colter Lee), who are bored enough to help investigate.

With its cliffhangers and deceptions, Phony has the bones of a thriller. But since a big part of the mystery is whether Ellen’s new face is the result of a crime, some supernatural occurrence, or truly all in Sonny’s head, it can’t lean on the overused conventions of any particular thriller subgenre. Instead, its comedy-veteran showrunners, creator Nick Paley (Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, Broad City) and Anthony King (The Afterparty, Rooster), give their half-hour series the vibe of a coming-of-age dramedy, albeit a decidedly uncanny one. There’s a lot of humor, often of the awkward-adolescent variety, in the characters, performances, and dialogue. “I decided to go vegan when I found out that cows have best friends,” Chloe rambles to Mallory, in a stiff early interaction. “And then I saw this cow get its head cut off.” A party that spans most of a midseason episode recalls the shambolic outdoor rager in Dazed and Confused, with groups of kids intoxicatedly yapping and clumsily flirting. 

That this atmosphere feels natural—grounding Sonny’s crisis in the real social world of teens’ funny, stressful, horny, mundane, phone-mediated daily lives—rather than painfully quirky, is a testament to the show’s delicate execution. People have idiosyncrasies. Sonny and Chloe call each other Bobo; his mom used to cook him a dish they refer to, without expository intervention, as Chicken Nummers. The school counselor (Kelvin Yu) is a frustrated musician, and his faux-casual attempts to get students to listen to his record are played for laughs, but he’s not just a joke. In fact, Paley and King almost always resist tired tropes. Nothing would be easier than a Chloe-Sonny-Mallory love triangle straight out of every teen drama ever. But that’s not the way these relationships are written. The characters are too specific to disappear into clichés.

Because Hulu provided half of the eight-episode season to critics (and because only a monster would put a spoiler of that level in a review even if they did have access to the information), I don’t know how the mystery of Ellen and her doppelgänger is resolved. While early signs do point to an explanation more compelling than, say, it was all just a dream, I’m pleased to say that, midway through, the possibilities still seem endless. I don’t think I’d be too upset about an anticlimax, anyway. The vividness and humor Phony finds in the school community makes the process of getting to the big reveal a pleasure in itself. As is watching Britton and Nivola, the prototypical TV mom and son, alternately playing into and against their respective types.

Besides, there’s a perceptive story of self-discovery unfurling in the background that may prove to be more important, thematically speaking, than what became of Ellen. Sonny’s conviction that his mom is a fake destabilizes his personality and habits enough to illuminate how he’s been faking it, in a social sense. So eager is he to make others happy that he shifts views depending on who he’s talking to and worries about Chloe having a good first sexual experience to the exclusion of valuing his own. “I don’t even have strong opinions!” he insists. The idea that growing up means developing a self distinct from the person other people want you to be isn’t new to the coming-of-age canon. Yet here it’s approached from an angle, and with a degree of perceptiveness, that I didn’t see coming. In our rigidly genre-bound times, when few shows that call themselves thrillers surprise us in any way, Phony is something genuinely new on TV.