Dan Clarendon

Some TV shows start well, finish well, and maintain that quality every season in between — Breaking Bad, The Wire, and Veep come to mind. Other shows, unfortunately, are plagued by seasons that pale in comparison to others. From Game of Thrones’ frustrating finale to Parks and Recreation’s inauspicious start to Community’s “gas leak” year, here are the shows with seasons in need of a do-over...

Have the prices of cable TV subscriptions made you a cord-cutter or even a “cord-never”? Do the recent price increases of streaming TV subscriptions have you searching for a “Cancel Membership” button? The good news is, you don’t have to pay a dime to watch hit movies and TV shows — all you have to do is think FAST. Free ad-supported streaming television — or FAST for short — has taken off recently, with services like The Roku Channel, Pluto TV, and Tubi offering film and TV.

The Disney–Pixar film Inside Out 2 hitting theaters two days before Father’s Day? All too fitting, since the internet has been lusting after Bill Andersen (voiced by Kyle MacLachlan), the daddy of the Inside Out film series, for nearly a decade now.

As a whole, this Battlestar version is revered as one of the greatest sci-fi series of all time. It spun a yarn of resilience, sacrifice, morality, deception, faith, and what it even means to be human, all in the guise of a human-versus-robot battle royale. But that doesn’t mean every episode is a winner.

Lost crashed onto TV screens with a high-concept premise — a disparate group of Oceanic 815 survivors banding together to stay alive on a mysterious island — before evolving into a philosophical rumination on, among other themes, the cost of living and the power of redemption.

It’s not hyperbole when PEN America says that the freedom to read “is under assault in the United States.” In a recent report, the freedom-of-expression advocacy organization found 3,362 instances of book bans in the 2022–2023 school year, with 40 percent of those bans happening in Florida alone.

In 2009, Rachel Crandall-Crocker created International Transgender Day of Visibility as a day of celebration and a counterpoint to the mournful Transgender Day of Remembrance that falls every November 20. Her efforts paid off, as International Transgender Day of Visibility, or TDOV, has become a global occasion every March 31.

Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein died in 1955, but the story of his brain has continued for years now, all because of one man who took the gray matter into his own hands and kept it for decades, even crossing state lines with the brain. What happened to Einstein’s brain? Believe it or not, it was the pathologist who conducted Einstein’s autopsy who just took the brain without permission, as detailed in last year’s documentary film The Man Who Stole Einstein’s Brain.

Hang out on Reddit long enough, and you’ll eventually see transphobic attitudes show up—explicitly and implicitly—in queer communities on the platform. And social media is, of course, a microcosm of a society which some think LGB equality is an acceptable substitute for LGBT equality. One Reddit user recently shed light on transphobia in the gay male population, saying that although he loves being gay and trans, his interactions with cis gay men “[have], by and large, been less than ideal.”

Paria Hassouri and her husband were thousands of miles from home, on vacation in Thailand, when they got a call from their daughter’s school. A teacher told them that Ava, then 13, was questioning her gender identity. During Ava’s coming-out experience, Hassouri educated herself about how best to support her daughter. Other parents are trying to do the same, as children and teens are opening up — sometimes even earlier in their lives — about their placement in a galaxy of queer existence.

Fans’ love for Hogwarts’ witches and wizards need not snuffed by the ramblings of a 50-something cisgender white lady. They have used Vanishing Spells on the woman whose words hurt trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer people around the world. Call it the Fandom That Lived.

On March 13, the American College of Surgeons recommended hospitals across the country minimize, postpone, or cancel all scheduled elective surgeries because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As many hospitals took that advice and shed certain procedures from the books, many transgender people were left with devastating setbacks as gender-affirming surgeries were canceled or indefinitely postponed as the question of which procedures are “elective” looms.

After declaring the violence epidemic against transgender people a “myth,” journalist and self-described “gay conservative” Chad Felix Greene is now attacking the idea of the use of “they” as a singular pronoun and criticizing the APA for endorsing the usage.

Color photography was developed, so to speak, with a definite bias toward lighter skin — a reality cinematographer Ava Berkofsky sought to overcome when she was hired to light season 2 of the HBO comedy Insecure.