I don’t spend a lot of time watching TV, but sometimes I do for fun. If you loved The Office and Parks and Recreation, then here are two new shows that are currently free on Netflix (September 2025).
I normally ignore lawyer shows (and cop/crime shows). But my first recommendation is an Australian lawyer show called Fisk.
Summary: A corporate lawyer must take a job at a suburban law firm after her life implodes in Sydney, and struggles to find her feet navigating grief, money, family, and entitlement.
I have only seen the first three episodes. I have no idea where the story is going, and I love that. Right now Helen has started a new job and is trying to get back on her feet after a divorce. I think it’s safe to say that the character is neurodivergent. The tone reminds me of Ricky Gervais’s The Office (maybe because Australian humor is close to British humor).
Like most Americans, I first discovered Leanne Morgan on Instagram. The real comedian has an interesting story (what Henry Oliver might call a Late Bloomer). So, I was excited when her TV show finally dropped. The first episode might not have hooked me if I didn’t already like her. I thought it picked up as the season went on, and I enjoyed the whole thing. It’s a bit like 30 Rock complete with an appearance by Jack McBrayer.
Satire news shows are, in my opinion, one of the higher forms of art that my country has produced (and an example of our exports). “Meet Tariff Tilly, the perfect replacement for the 37 dolls your kid does not need” from The Daily Show
“Tariff Tilly” builds. There is even a comment on interest rates (addressed in my previous post).
The Chair on Netflix is entertaining and I’d recommend it to EWED readers.
Plot, via Wikipedia: Professor Ji-Yoon Kim is the newly appointed chair of the English department at Pembroke University. The first woman chosen for the position, she attempts to ensure the tenure of a young black colleague, negotiate her relationship with her crush, friend, and well-known colleague Bill Dobson, and parent her strong-willed adopted daughter.
Something I like about the writing is that there is genuine suspense. Going into the last episode, I didn’t know what would happen with the romance or the threat of job dismissals.
The show is funny, occasionally. If you are looking for something easy to watch in 30-minute episodes at the end of the day that won’t leave you too upset, this will work.
Some of the issues they raise deserve serious treatment, but the serious treatment will not be found in The Chair. It’s for Netflix, with binge watching potential. Without offering any spoilers, I’d say they supply the kind of ending that viewers want. You need not overthink it.
I did go see the Barbie movie (last month I had to put up someone else’s blog about it). Kate McKinnon and the Birkenstock choice is my favorite part. You can catch part of that scene in the middle of the trailer.
Here is America Ferrera’s monologue:
It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.
You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people.
You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood…
Movies and Money
The Barbie movie is doing well commercially. So many other special projects, such as the all-female remake of Ghostbusters, flopped at the box office. Barbie and Taylor Swift concert tickets were serving as the primary examples of spending in “Hot Profit Summer“. Congratulations to Greta Gerwig on a huge success.
Barbie has unresolved existential angst, universe portals, mother-daughter conflicts and fight scenes. To that extent, Barbie reminds me of Everything Everywhere All At Once. The big commercial successes within the same decade often share key components. Earlier I wrote about how Frozen and The Queen’s Gambitare similar.
One could write a very serious post about the Barbie movie and the portrayal of female reality. Instead, let’s acknowledge that the movie is fun, just like American life generally. No one needs Kate McKinnon (to survive). We get to watch her on TV because the world is rich now. Not only has child mortality fallen because of economic development, but life has gotten more fun.
I noted this when I reviewed the movie Austenland. The film shows that when an American woman goes to a Regency-era simulation she gets bored.
… afternoons spent on needlepoint projects were not so much painful as boring to the heroine. Boring. Matt Ridley tells us in The Rational Optimist that life in pre-modern England was more miserable than we imagine in terms of health outcomes. An underrated feature of modernity is how much more interesting the world is now that we can read widely and travel and tweet. If you were rich enough to escape endless manual labor in 1810, your options for leisure time were still very limited.
John Maynard Keynes predicted that future people would only work for 15 hours per week. Why, then, did the Barbie dolls (who don’t need money) talk so much about careers? President Barbie and Doctor Barbie seem happy.
Do we keep working past 15 hours a week because it is fun? (Tyler says it is in Big Business.)
Would it be accurate to say that professionals spend less than 15 hours a week on tasks that they truly hate? Maybe striding down a clean hallway to a meeting with coffee in hand is what we like to do? Or is that a strictly American phenomenon?
Interestingly, the human mom character (America Ferrera) does not love her job. She is not President or a Doctor. Would she prefer to be unemployed?
I want to know if the career barbies sell, but I could not find the data. The Guinness Book of World Records indicates that the best-selling Barbie is “Totally Hair Barbie”.
Where is my 600 words on the Barbie movie? I’m trying to get ready for the Fall semester, which includes two classes that I have never taught before. In the university slang, that would be “two new preps.” There is someone out there living my dream of dropping hot current cultural takes on schedule. I’m going to direct you over to Maia Mindel. Along with Adam Minter, she is someone I would love to meet.
For more economics of Barbie, Jeremy wrote “Barbie Dolls and Women’s Wages“. “… the gains for women in the labor market since the introduction of Barbie are large and worth celebrating.”
For more on film, I did list some thoughts and links for Oppenheimer.
Here is the Box Office Mojo report on 2023 American theater sales, as of August 2023. In less than a month, Barbie reached #2! And Oppenheimer is doing well for a serious historical movie.
Even though I had already heard that it will disappoint high expectations, I wanted to be in on the conversation. I’m going to link the film to some other posts and ideas.
I can see why Tyler was disappointed. However, if you don’t go in with those high expectations, it still is a thoughtful period piece. It’s more interesting than the next Marvel installment.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons
Though it almost drowns in the unwieldy plot, this is a movie about talent. Hitler was alienating and killing Jews in Germany, which affected the kind of talent mobilized on both sides of the war. There are several explicit references to antisemitism and motivation among physicists. Matt Yglesias observes, “They beat Heisenberg to the bomb — in part because Niels Bohr refuses to help the Nazis…”
I had written about talent and wars earlier, also concerning World War II but a different kind of doctor. “In 1939, Keynes had hired János Plesch, a Hungarian Jewish doctor who had relocated to London after fleeing Nazi persecution.”
How to manage talent becomes the challenge once brilliant scientists have been recruited to Los Alamos. The scientists did coordinate their activities enough to succeed in making the bomb, but some of the drama hinges on their rebellions against Oppenheimer. Now that machines are becoming smart, this ties into a previous post about managing artificial intelligence. “A question this raises is whether we can develop AGI that will be content to never self-actualize.”
Yet another theme of the film is the Communist movement in America in the 1930’s. I have studied this through the biographies and essays of Joy Davidman. Davidman was a committed member and then left the Party, as did several characters in the film.
And yet another tiny theme was women scientists on the project. There is a woman who complains that she was asked to be a typist even though she went to Harvard for science. Oppenheimer briskly puts her on one of the scientist teams. It goes by fast. I felt like the director was saying, “If you went to see Hidden Figures, here’s a 20 second recap of Hidden Figures for the people who like that, NEXT!” This is an example of hurrying everything in order to stuff 8 movies into 3 hours. The Advanced Placement Program® (AP) has a blog on “Women Scientists of the Manhattan Project” I know from my research on getting people to code, that women today study AP Computer Science at a considerable lower rate than male high school students.
It’s time to revisit American Girl Dolls and the Saturn V rocket. The trending topic among millennials is the new “historical” American Girl doll who lives in the year 1999.
Previously, I blogged about the historical Courtney doll from 1986 in “Complacency and American Girl Dolls.” I used Courtney’s accessories to illustrate stagnation in the physical environment (within rich countries) of recent decades. Courtney has a Walkman for playing cassette tapes and she has an arcade-style Pac-Man game to entertain herself. I pointed out that ’80’s Courtney had to be given the World War II doll Molly just to keep life interesting.
What do Isabel and Nicki have a decade later in 1999?
They have a personal CD player and floppy disks. It’s cute and the toys will sell. However, it does not seem like innovation has introduced many new capabilities. Isabel can listen to music through her headphones and be entertained on screens, just like Courtney could.
Isabel eats Pizza Hut and has dial-up internet access. There is no sense of sacrifice or expanding the frontier. The world was settled, and history had ended.
What counts for adventure in 1999? Shopping vintage clothing. Just like Courtney, Isabel revisits the past to get a sense of purpose or excitement.
This is Isabel’s diary. Having nothing to do besides look at clothes from past decades, she obsesses over status. Presumably “Kat” complimented her hat in person. Facebook didn’t start until 2004, so Isabel is not worried about “Likes” in social media.
So, what did I do with my kids for their school break on Presidents’ Day? We went to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center to see the Saturn V rocket.
You watch a romantic comedy to feel good. I was tired at the end of last week, so “Wedding Season” Netflix looked like it might be funny. I was not expecting that the protagonist would be an economist.
First, how was the movie? The first half was somewhat entertaining. The second half is too sappy and long for me.
This movie is one of the few movies I know that is just unironically set in New Jersey. There were no jokes about Jersey or Shore folk. New Jersey is where immigrant families from India are making dreams come true. The dialogue about immigrant Indian culture, including arranged marriages, was interesting.
You know the trope about a character becoming rich because they inherited money from an estranged uncle? In Wedding Season, the guy becomes unexpectedly rich from Facebook stock.
Second, how was economics portrayed?
Here is the plot summarized by Wikipedia
Asha is an economist working in microfinance who has recently broken off her engagement and left a Wall Street banking career behind to work for a microfinance startup in New Jersey. Asha’s mother Suneeta, concerned for her future and against the advice of her husband Vijay, sets up a dating profile through which Asha meets Ravi.
In the beginning of the movie, Asha pitches microfinance to investors from Singapore. Asha tries to convince them using graphs and statistics. The investors turn her project down.
Microfinance was hyped in the 2000’s. I believed, so I became a Campus Kiva Representative as an undergraduate. I convinced teens in my dorm to pool our dollars to sponsor a loan for a woman in a poor country. Since then, economists have done empirical work to show that microfinance is not as effective as we hoped (see work by 2019 Nobel Prize Winners Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee). The filmmakers either do not know the latest research or they don’t care. The pitch is still as emotionally appealing as it was when I heard it for the first time 15 years ago, so it makes for good movie scenes.
The irony in Wedding Season is not only that Asha succeeds in getting bankers from Singapore to invest in microfinance but also how she goes about it.
I have written three blogs on the TV show Severance this summer. My newest post is up at the Online Library of Liberty.
I discuss how job perks are portrayed in the show. The bosses in the show are creepy and we come to find out that they are totally evil. Given the way everything feels in the show, you could come to the conclusion that perks are generally manipulative and false. Someone implied that in an op-ed published by the NYT.
My argument is that free adults can use “perks” to motivate themselves and each other to do the right thing.
We are all just trying to get that dopamine, in the short term. Should people only feel happy when they are doing drugs or playing video games? Should bosses not be allowed to create a fun moment at work?
Trivial gifts and prizes must be cheap, so that their cost does not start to outweigh the benefits of incentivizing things we should be doing anyway. Finding ways to make a responsible life exciting is in fact the key to maintaining our liberty. Most people do not want to be martyrs. They want life to be fun.
The following tweet shows the character Dylan and his performance prize.
— OutofContextSeverance (@SeveranceOutof) June 24, 2022
Behavioral scientists have documented lots of quirks in human behavior. We aren’t solely motivated by our (real wage) salaries to produce effort. The good news is that we are capable of self-reflection. We can make these quirks work for us. Lots of successful people will promise themselves a small reward at the end of the week if they accomplish something hard.
Perks aren’t all bad at work, but, on the other hand, Severance could make you more alert to genuine manipulation that is out there.
Watching Severance prompts good questions. Who are you? (That’s the opening line of the show.) What are you doing with your life? Whose purposes are you serving?
I liked the show because it has great characters, funny moments, and it gets you thinking. If you watch the show, don’t take it too seriously. Ben Stiller is a co-director. The man (the genius) brought us Zoolander (2001).
One give-away that this ain’t the new 1984 is a plot hole concerning how the main character Mark decided to sever himself and join the evil corporation. According to the show, his wife died and he was so sad that he quit his job as a history professor after three weeks of feeling sad. I know a lot of academics. History professors have worked too hard and too long to quit their jobs after three weeks of feeling sad. Take everything with a grain of salt from these writers. Mark’s general lack of executive control is at odds with the backstory that he once obtained a job as a history professor.
Severance is described as science fiction but it clearly takes place in the United States of America. For one thing, a “senator” has a role. For another thing, the work schedule is pretty American. This is a funny video on how Europeans view the American work schedule:
What Finland thinks an American workday looks like
I have no idea how far down the rabbit hole the writers will feel like they have to do in Season 2. Will there be a role for a POTUS?
The second blog was posted to EWED: my thoughts about relating Severance to Artificial Intelligence.
A question this raises is whether we can develop AGI that will be content to never self-actualize.
And, back in May, OLL ran my first blog about Severance and drudgery.
The first line in the show is, “Who are you?” Themes about identity and purpose are explored alongside the thrilling hijinks of the prisoner innies. Outie Mark has nothing except his personal life to think about, which in his case is tragic. Innie Mark has nothing but work. Neither man is happy or complete.
To tell me you need me? I see that you’re bleeding You don’t need to show me again But if you decide to, I’ll ride in this life with you I won’t let go ’til the end
So cry tonight But don’t you let go of my hand You can cry every last tear
These are the lyrics to the song sung by Lady Gaga in the closing credits of Top Gun: Maverick. This song has been on the Billboard Top 100 chart for 6 weeks. The film TG:M is on its way to breaking a billion dollars worldwide at the box office this year. People (millions of people in every demographic all over the world) want to see Tom Cruise, playing himself (j/k), save the day. At the end of the movie they expect you to want to cry, and then Lady Gaga tells you to just let it out.
The only bit of acting that was hard to believe in the movie was the guy who was trying to play the arrogant jerk. The writers were trying to inject some drama with his lines, but the whole cast was so good-hearted and earnest. These folks seemed about 2 meters from heaven, and I don’t just mean because of flying at high altitudes.
After seeing TG:M in theaters this weekend, I watched the original 1986 movie (free on Amazon Prime right now) for comparison. The locker room banter in TG1 seemed more genuinely mean-spirited. That was back when bullies were bullies and no one was afraid of getting canceled?
Economist Writing Every Day 