Television Needs to Stop Yelling at Me

My controversial entertainment opinion this week: The Bear is no longer a food show. It is a beautifully acted hostage situation where everyone has access to knives. The first two seasons made chaos feel urgent; lately, the series sometimes mistakes emotional suffering for a personality.

That does not mean everything should be pleasant. I enjoy a little artistic distress, preferably with subtitles and a snack. But if a story wants me to care, it needs more than screaming, crying, and a soundtrack that sounds like a record store falling down the stairs.

Benny’s Picks

Ripley — Netflix. This is what stylish television looks like when it remembers that silence can be scarier than shouting. Andrew Scott’s Tom Ripley is a human smudge on a beautiful postcard, and every frame feels like it was composed by someone who would judge your curtains. It is slow, cold, and absolutely worth the investment.

Shōgun — Hulu. Yes, it is popular. Annoyingly, it is also excellent. The show understands that power is often a room full of people saying nothing while one person quietly realizes they are doomed. Watch it for the political maneuvering, stay for the most stressful meals ever filmed.

The Substance — Mubi, rental platforms. This movie is not subtle. It grabs subtlety by the throat, dunks it in fluorescent goo, and asks Demi Moore to dance on its grave. But the grotesque excess has a point: our culture wants women to be young forever, sexy forever, productive forever, and somehow still available for brunch. It is disgusting, hilarious, and much smarter than its exploding anatomy suggests.

James by Percival Everett — bookstores and libraries. A reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that gives Jim the interior life Mark Twain’s original kept at arm’s length. It is funny, furious, and so elegantly constructed that you may find yourself recommending it to people who did not ask. This is the rare “important” novel that does not feel like homework wearing a turtleneck.

Skip It

The latest season of The Bear. Keep the performances, the food, and roughly 40 percent of the episodes. The rest can go in the walk-in freezer. A show about making dinner should not leave me feeling like I just survived a workplace mediation conducted inside a siren.

Sleeper Pick

Hundreds of Beavers — rental platforms. It is a nearly wordless black-and-white slapstick epic about a drunk applejack salesman battling homicidal beavers. That sentence is not a typo; it is a dare. The movie looks like a lost video game designed by a lunatic and has more invention in ten minutes than most franchise films manage in two hours.