2025 Marks Pop Music’s Gilded Age
Embracing craft alongside vulnerability in the 2020s, pop music reaches the apex of its powers in 2025 by reveling in its own glamorous facade.
Television
Features, reviews, interviews, and lists about television, covering the latest as well historical topics.
Dance Moms’ Ferocious Appetite
In the aftermath of the 2008 stock market crash, Dance Moms helped feed America’s ferocious appetite for cruelty.
The Best TV of 2025 You May Have Missed
These best TV shows you may have missed include a show that’s ludicrously funny, one filled with scattershot mayhem, one that’s brutal and macabre, and a surreal comedy.
The ‘Shōgun’ Series Is Like a Beautiful Car with No Engine
James Clavell’s Shōgun is about profound transformation through understanding, but FX’s Shōgun is just a spectacle of surfaces with no meaningful drive.
3 Unsettling 2025 TV Shows You Shouldn’t Miss
Sci-fi philosophy, shocking history, and metafictional puzzles dominate these unsettling yet weirdly intriguing TV shows.
Video Killed the Podcasting Star
Everything, it seems, is becoming a video podcast these days, but perhaps not everything was meant to be seen.
Pantheon’s House of High-Tech Mirrors
The post-human speculative sci-fi series Pantheon asks, can humanity recognize itself in its digital reflection?
‘The Lowdown’ Finds Hilarity in the Lowest Places
At turns a twisty whodunit, historical drama, tender family comedy, and farcical urban safari, The Lowdown overwhelms, but never wears you down.
When Celebrity Spouses Go Off-Script
Fan obsession over celebrity spouses mirrors anxieties about our performative selves in the age of influencers.
‘Zero Day’ Disconnects Our Worst Fears
Technological uncertainty and our fears about mishandling the truth run through the disconnected cables of the political cyber-thriller Zero Day.
Reviews/Feature Sub Head/Featured: Top of Home Page/Features/Film/Film Feature/PopMatters Picks/Television
‘Israel Palestine on Swedish TV’ Is an Urgent History/Not History Lesson
Despite its flaws, Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 is a meticulously detailed study of conflict and hauntingly foreshadows the current moment.
Star Wars: Rebels’ Strategist in the Shadows
Star Wars: Rebels‘ blue-skinned Thrawn is a fictional echo of what America needs in these times: cultural intelligence, emotional control, and long-term thinking.