Saved

Social media is the lens for a lot of the show’s biggest bits and even plotlines. It is, just as in life, omnipresent, and so, even as the show spotlights the inherent ridiculousness of the extremely online, it also understands the way social media is a deranging accelerant of everyday problems, and thus a medium of everyday life.

These are all just a bunch of funny jokes about people who are too online, celebrities whose shallow fame exists only by way of the apps, and a contemporary American culture hypnotized by the blue light of screens.

In her book The Drama of Celebrity, the scholar Sharon Marcus argues that celebrity, as we know it, is a cultural phenomenon with three distinct authors. There’s the celebrity, who expresses themself through whatever art or product they make; there are the journalists who write about and photograph and criticize and otherwise construct the celebrity’s public image; and then there’s the public, who contribute devotion and imagination, and money, and love and hate.

There was a time when Marilyn Monroe emerged as an illusion, a trick of the light produced between herself, her studio’s massive press apparatus, and an adoring and vampiric public. Today, anyone can be an illusion like this, if at smaller scale.

The show by no means wants to redeem the industry, but, this season especially, it’s become invested in exposing the lazy nihilism that can come along with seeing the worst in people. If you run into a craven, soulless industry hack in the morning, you ran into a craven, soulless industry hack; if you run into them all day, you are the craven, soulless industry hack.

The Other Two is about identity. It’s a flimsy, fungible thing, and it’s a trap. It’s a point of pride and a point of embarrassment. There’s the real you that we all struggle to find and to express truthfully; there’s the version of yourself that you perform for the public; there’s the version of you that others create in and against their own image.

The man-child. The people who so loved playing characters that they played characters in their real lives, too, without actually transforming themselves into more mature human beings. He knew the cliché about celebrities staying developmentally the age that they were when they became famous. But how is a beloved movie star meant to change the right way? How is he supposed to grow up? How does he meaningfully evolve his life and art without killing his core?

What happens when you deliberately defy the moves that led you where you’d always wanted to go, and try something altogether different? It was a risk. But it made perfect sense. It happens. Your family members start to die. Your elders get replaced by your peers. You pack up your life and plant roots elsewhere. You put down the instrument that made you known and pick up another one instead. You plug it in. Do you hear that? That’s the buzz of something new. Wait till you hear what it sounds like when you strum.