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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.

people aged 60 and over lead active social lives and value internal, psychological strengths. Aging Americans use technology: 84 percent of respondents report that they use the internet to read news, social network sites or other information on a weekly basis, despite only 29.1 percent of on-screen characters engaging with technology. On screen, one third of seniors pursue interests in hobbies and 38.5 percent attend events, while in reality, they are more than two times as likely to engage socially with friends or relatives on a weekly or monthly basis. The top five traits respondents rated as most important to aging successfully were self-reliance, awareness, honesty, resilience and safety. In film, seniors are rarely depicted as the masters of their own stories or destinies.

Yolangel Hernandez Suarez, vice president and chief medical officer of care delivery at Humana said: “As a health care company, we’re committed to helping aging Americans defy stereotypes and take steps to achieve their best health. That’s why it’s important to note that, according to our findings, seniors who report being optimistic about the aging process also report better health. As a boomer myself, I can tell you that being optimistic about my future helps me make healthier choices every day.”

There are clear gaps between the way Hollywood sees older people and the way they see themselves. Humana, the health and wellness company, surveyed 2,000 people 60 and older about whether they felt they were depicted accurately in movies and, explained Dr. Yolangel Hernandez Suarez, “the answer was a resounding no. They thought themselves to be more healthy in mind and body, more connected, and more savvy than they were portrayed in film.”

52.6 percent of the movies that featured senior characters also included comments that the researchers interpreted as ageist. Many of those comments were spoken by other characters to older people, but in a number of movies, older characters made self-deprecating or diminishing comments about their own age.

Throughout the series, Amy frantically maneuvers to sell her plant business, Kōyōhaus, to Jordan Forster (Maria Bello), CEO of a big-box chain and casually obnoxious Asia-phile. Through Jordan and Amy’s various interactions, it is apparent that Jordan sees Amy as an Asian plaything to be acquired alongside her business—from the constant stream of racially-inflected quips, to overly-familiar touching. But on Amy’s part, she seems to have constructed both her business and personal brand for maximum appeal to the kind of white person that carries an orientalist appetite.

It doesn’t escape me that Japanese culture has long been fetishized in the West as being the upper echelon of Asian refinement. Kōyōhaus is Asianesque without cultural substance, engineered to let consumers feel cultured simply through a purchase, not unlike Jordan herself, who is willing to pay $150,000 to buy a chair from Amy called “tamago” (Japanese for “egg”) without even bothering to learn how to pronounce it correctly.