Make More Movies and Shows Like These, Please

They say there’s nothing new under the sun, and today, that expression has jumped the shark.

It’s hard to think of anything more self-referential than American show business in 2023. From movies to television and beyond, everything is a callback to a reboot of a sequel to an adaptation. At 80, Harrison Ford just wrapped a fifth Indiana Jones movie. The best (arguably) show on TV so far this year is based on a video game. Judging by the ongoing and intensifying true crime surge, it seems we can’t even invent our own murder mysteries anymore. Hollywood properties that felt settled and not exactly ripe for franchise mileage are getting zombified anyway — did anyone expect, or ask for, a reboot of Fresh Prince?

Appropriation can be an artful thing. But what does it say about us that virtually all mainstream cultural output now seems based not in imagining, but reimagining? Just as the body of a starving person may begin recycling the energy in its own cells in order to survive, I suppose a culture on its last legs may resort to self-cannibalization so it can keep trudging along.

Why we’re starving, though, is a mystery to me. The past few years have given us pandemic, social unrest, generational economic turbulence. Why hasn’t more come of that? Those who expected a new Roaring 20’s to follow COVID have found that, so far at least, fate has had other things in mind; I, personally, was expecting a pop culture Renaissance and have been similarly disappointed. In response to the trauma of the atom bomb, Japanese cinema conceived of Godzilla, a creative entity that became a global phenomenon and has endured for generations; in the 2020s, we’ve responded to our recent collective trauma with…what? Yet another Halloween movie?

Now for the good news: While franchise fever is definitely a real thing, it’s possible that it only feels as bad as I’ve described it. While I’m not ready to posit we’re on the cusp of that long-awaited Renaissance, there is a steady beat of solid original storytelling coming through our theaters and streaming platforms, as much as it may seem otherwise. And so, to amplify the contributions of filmmakers still conjuring art from nothing other than their own imaginations and lived experiences, here’s an incomplete list of movies and shows released in the 2020s with no franchise connection. As I see it, these works are keeping originality in Hollywood alive, and I hope to see more of them arrive to snap us out of our cultural malaise.

Watch out: Spoilers to follow!

Vengeance (2022)

After years of watching the media milk the culture war dry for ratings and clicks, I didn’t exactly feel primed to watch a whole movie on the subject. But BJ Novak has something to say about the ever-widening gulf between Left and Right, urban and rural in this country, and while I’m not sure it’s never been said before, he says it well in Vengeance, a dark comedy set mostly in west Texas and Novak’s debut as a feature film director.

With a satirical eye trained in equal measure on well-dressed, self-important Manhattanites and downhome country bumpkins, Novak explores themes like grief, confirmation bias, and the elusiveness of truth in a discourse awash in hot takes, contrarianism, and tribalism. Along the way, he’s not afraid to take risks and surprise his audience.

Vengeance is intelligent and hilarious, and though Novak holds his own as the film’s protagonist, he also makes a strong case that he’s even better behind the camera — and at a typewriter — than in front of it.

Beef (2023)

Based on its title and some of its promotional images — Ali Wong’s chic and expensive-looking haircut against a backdrop of a chic and expensive-looking post-modern living room — I expected Beef to be some kind of The Menu-esque commentary on high-end foodie culture. Instead, we get “beef” in the figurative sense, “beef” as slang for interpersonal feuding.

And what a feud it is. After a road range incident in a parking lot — the kind most of us would forget about by the time we got home — Wong’s and Steven Yeun’s characters defile each other’s homes with urine, vandalize each other’s cars, sabotage each other’s high-stakes professional engagements, and almost incinerate each other’s children. And that’s just in the first few episodes — I’ve only watched half of the ten currently available on Netflix, but I’m so hooked I may well have watched the rest by the time you read this.

Based on my admittedly incomplete viewing, I’d describe Beef as a meditation on depression manifesting as rage, and on the ways in which the isolation of contemporary life has us pining for meaningful connection, even if it takes the form of intense, borderline-violent animus. The show takes these themes to absurdist, darkly comedic heights, and I can’t wait to binge the rest of it.

Emily the Criminal (2022)

In the opening scene of The Princess Bride, Peter Falk’s character stokes his skeptical grandson’s appetite for the book he’s about to read to him by rattling off a litany of assurances as to its contents: “Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles,” he promises the boy.

There aren’t any sword fights in Emily the Criminal, but if drama with blades is your thing, there are several box-cutter-to-the-throat incidents that should give you your fix. There’s also genuine suspense, high stakes, and romance based on palpable, believable passion. Peter Falk would approve.

It’s a traditional crime thriller rooted in modern commentary about the injustice of student loan debt — but it delivers that commentary tastefully instead of subordinating the action to an on-the-nose political statement. Its cast is diverse, starring a woman (Aubrey Plaza) and a man of Middle Eastern and North African descent (Theo Rossi), but it doesn’t tokenize or pander. It’s got the feel of a mid-range drama — that wonderful yet all but lost art — despite its small budget of roughly $2 million.

Reservation Dogs (2021 — present)

It takes a special kind of storytelling and filmmaking talent to tease wonder and adventure out of settings most people would describe with words like “blighted” and “run-down.” We saw this in 2017’s The Florida Project, whose 6-year-old protagonists wandered their squalid corner of Orlando, creating their own Disney World in the shadow of a theme park they could never actually access.

We see it again in Reservation Dogs, the FX/Hulu series created by Sterlin Harjo currently looking ahead to its third season. Set on a native reservation in Oklahoma, the show brings us into the lives of its characters as they get swept up in capers, dabble in crime, and experience mysticism and legend through the eccentric figures in their ecosystem. The result is an ordinary if not blighted setting that nonetheless feels magical, and a show that makes the case that economic status ultimately has little to no bearing on the richness of a community.

While laced with criticism of America’s colonial past and present — and rightly so — it avoids defining its characters by their disenfranchisement, instead giving them unique ambitions, flaws, personalities, multifaceted interpersonal relationships, and plotlines through which to play all of them out. These characters — mainly a group of teenagers reckoning with approaching adulthood, the recent suicide of a peer, and a growing awareness of, and hunger for, life outside the reservation — spill over with emotion and conviction. And they’re an absolute joy to root for.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022)

I’ll be honest, and I swear this isn’t just contrarianism for its own sake: This movie didn’t hit for me the way it did for other people. The constant, high-octane bouncing between realities, the rushing from one dreamlike image and aesthetic to the next, underscored, for me, the value of the one thing this movie lacks: restraint. In other words, filmmakers Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert put everything on the bagel, to the point that, after a while, the whole two-hour glitter explosion ceased to have much impact. After seeing it twice, I’d give it a solid B, which, compared to the fervent adoration it’s earned across the critical and public spheres, feels like a pan.

But I have to give it to them: They went for it, they did something nobody else seems to be doing right now, and they got audiences everywhere raving over a truly original story. The leading cast’s performances are great. And I definitely got choked up during that scene in the parking lot with Michelle Yeoh and Stephanie Hsu toward the end. I’m not a monster.

Atlanta (2016–2023)

Atlanta doesn’t give a damn about the conventions of genre or the expectations of the typical viewer. One episode will present a straightforward 21st Century comedy plot; the next will make a hard, unabashed turn into the surreal (See: Earn spending four days locked in a yawning concrete room waiting to take a meeting with D’Angelo and responding only with the annoyance of an inconvenienced customer); and the one after that will present a standalone vignette completely devoid of any of the show’s characters, settings, or storylines. While it’s ostensibly a comedy, by its fourth and final season it dawned on me that I’d been watching a show that arguably fit into the Southern Gothic revival that has lowkey been playing out over the past few years, with uncanny set pieces, ghastly figures, and color-rich cinematography that reminded me of the miniseries Sharp Objects or the first season of True Detective.

This being a list of original stories in the 2020s, Atlanta, which debuted in 2016, is maybe a controversial inclusion from a technical standpoint. But I couldn’t leave it off — especially since it was in the 2020s, during its final two seasons, that its originality really hit its heights. Following the exploits of four friends in its titular city, the show took more and more risks and underwent stunning artistic evolution. All the while, it remained a hilarious and pointed celebration of American Blackness amid a white society that can’t stop fetishizing and exploiting it.

Tár (2022)

It’s hard to say that Tár, Todd Field’s drama about a renowned orchestra conductor whose career and status are upended by sexual assault allegations, is exactly cinematic. Instead of high suspense set to a sweeping score, we get cold, sterile cinematography and esoteric, hyper-realistic dialogue. It’s a story that may have worked just as well as a novel or even, were it based on real events, a long-form celebrity profile.

Tár is not based on real events. It is, however, an original work of fiction that explores a very real and highly charged issue in our culture, and does so with a lack of partisanship that feels almost defiant. The film presents cancel culture neither with the Right’s pearl-clutching hysterics nor the Left’s “it’s not even a real thing” hand-waving. It’s arguably more interested in the ways in which ego can blind a person to their own fallibility and misdeeds than in making any firm moral judgment of its protagonist, or of whether cancel culture matters. Lydia Tár is neither martyr nor monster. Instead, she’s a deeply flawed, complicated individual. Just like, you know, most of us.

If you pulled one thing from the intro to this essay, it may have been that Millennials have finally aged into their boomerdom. Here’s a thirty-something writer opening with a few hundred words on how they don’t make ’em like they used to. I hope it’s now clear that my intention has been to send a markedly different message: that there are, in fact, plenty of filmmakers still making them like they used to, and that it’s on us to reward their ambitions and ask for more.

Moreover, that the only aspect of how movies and television “used to” be that I really fret about is the originality aspect. In most other areas, I’m glad things have changed. The growing prevalence of Black stories, queer stories, and immigrant stories, for instance, is a welcome departure from the white- and heteronormative conventions of filmmaking throughout history. I’m not advocating for the proliferation of films that simply have new characters but are otherwise hard to distinguish from the films I grew up with; such a film would be hardly more original than any franchise property.

Any return to more original filmmaking cannot just include an originality of character and plot; it must also include an originality of form and subject matter. This is a huge part of what makes certain pieces on this list — Atlanta challenging the conventions of form and evolving its genre, Emily the Criminal and Tár taking on the specific concerns of our time — so effective.

The movies and shows on this list prove that our culture hasn’t been sapped of original, bold, creative, and challenging cinema. We still have it in us; we just have to want it.