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I May Destroy You (BBC One) | iPlayerSitting in Limbo (BBC One) | iPlayerJeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich NetflixMcMillions Sky DocumentariesStaged (BBC One) | iPlayerDas Boot Sky Atlantic

Michaela Coels new 12-part drama I May Destroy You (BBC One) has already been described as the one thing you have to watch this year. I would find it hard to disagree. Mid-2020, mid-Covid-19, anti-racism protests lacing our news, a temptation might be to retreat from culture wars and goodness knows, thats the kind and gentle option but the first stage of survival generally means opening ones eyes.

Its not an easy watch. Its not a joyous watch. It features rape, heaving, bare-bottomed sex, anger, slums, counselling, slang, mad wigs. It also features humour and says quite everything about Coel, who also stars, that she has managed, somehow, to combine the tale of a grim personal experience with such a valuable exploration of what consent means, and make the whole eventually warm.

It is often infuriating. But Coel has tackled so many subjects around which our generalised prejudices congregate, from recreational drugginess to bloodied tampon-sex to blackness, via the blitherings of mindfulness, the joys of sex and the horrors of sudden distrust, and done it with wit and several nods to the power of friendship. Goodness, but what a rethink to have come out of one drama.

One of the strengths of Sitting in Limbo (also BBC One), which certainly didnt lack for strengths, was the fact that we the audience were never vouchsafed any more information than the real Anthony Bryan (played with just-so weary dignity by Patrick Robinson), whose life was just one of many upended in the Windrush scandal exposed by Amelia Gentleman in the Guardian. We never found out why Anthony, in his dealings with authorities, had to provide his mothers passport details from 1950 or whenever, nor why authorities had quietly destroyed all landing cards, nor how he had found himself in this MC Escher stairway: we were equally confused. (Turned out it had all been a brilliant lash-up by politicians keen on self-promotion. Hurrah! Such fun!) And such a grand story for all those who thought themselves to be British over 50 long, hardworking years until imagine their surprise! An absorbing, rewatchable drama that quietly told loud truths, and wore its anger remarkably lightly.

There is one moment towards the middle of the third of four instalments of Netflixs Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, between the searing testimonies of Sarah Ransome and Chauntae Davies, when you see a brief snapshot of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein together, swanking and preening. There have been more beautiful pictorial encapsulations of the male persona. No one can have been left in any doubt whatsoever as to Epsteins guilt: and yet even incels, the involuntarily celibate of the far right, can not have been left in much doubt as to the nature of the dog turd which was the sum total of Epsteins moral balance. Nor the wit and gumption and, yes, beauty, of all those who came together, hand in hand, to have their final say in court, 18 years on: I almost understand now the concept of closure.

McMillions, the documentary which has been running on Sky Documentaries, came with sprightly fun at a far less brittle tale, that of the Monopoly scam that dogged the burger giant around the turn of the millennium, in which hundreds of millions of fast-food customers peeled back tiny tokens unaware that the only winning tokens had been snaffled by one security chief over the course of a decade. Much more focused and enjoyable than Tiger King, which just went sad and loopy by the end, it was executive produced by Mark Wahlberg and thus had a gleeful sheen of vintage heist to it all.

Arguably about one episode too long, it nonetheless drilled down with panache into the semi-fascinating lives of a staple of American fiction (and presumably life), which might best be termed likable scumbags: the borderline and the barfly, the dandy and the dude, the mobsters molls and the rueful Mormons. None of whom you could truly bring yourself to loathe or even dislike, despite the fact that theirs washardly a victimless crime: the many lost jobs of blameless blue-collar printers and such, the huge knock-on effects ofthe scam on, as ever, the patsies who were least able to afford the fallout from the eventual sting. Never mind the damage to McDonalds reputation. Seriously, do not give a spat rat to that.

For two such seemingly unrelated subjects, these lengthy televisual explorations had a couple of things in common: first, the doggedly stoic work undertaken by a couple of unremarked south-eastern law enforcement agencies Palm Beach police department, and the teensy Jacksonville FBI. And weirdly, the scam posted up on that Jacksonville wall had precisely the same pyramid-scheme-style structure mild culpability ensuring the secrecy of those recruited on a couple of levels, who then recruited more below them, and so on down the pyramid it spreads and infects as that employed by Epstein with his pyramid of girls. He got them from the less serene side of Palm Beach, poor and thin and young and lucky only in their prettiness, and then they recruited again below until a report happened to chance across the desk of an individual whose duty to self happened to outweigh their duty to greed or self-aggrandisement.

Staged (BBC One) is the latest lockdown drama lockdown dramas being an entire new genre, which Wikipedia will define as a needs-must 2020 phenomenon in which, under the strictures of coronavirus, a rich person is seen questioning their values, a poor person is seen struggling yet being gamely cheeky, and core workers are celebrated. The genre must feature a Zoom-glitch or similar technological embarrassment. And yet Staged was a hugely refreshing addition to the genre, featuring simply a couple of immensely personable actors playing heightened versions of themselves. David Tennant and Michael Sheen, aided hugely by wives Georgia Tennant and Anna Lundberg, are lockdown-rehearsing an unpalatable, 100-year-old absurdist Italian drama, urged and egged on by Simon Evans, who wrote and directed Staged, and gave himself, in fairness, the very worst lines, the lines which those aged eight to 80 will lift eyebrows to and wonder Did he really say that? What a dick.

It is grand fun, even if slight, although I suspect that the good friends Sheen and Tennant are, no matter how inadvertently, auditioning even in lockdown for the next series of The Trip.

For those who underwent series one of Das Boot, das Sky Atlantic reboot of the classic 1981 Wolfgang Petersen film, youll have known what to expect from series two, which launched this week. Far from a faithful, tense, bitterly claustrophobic paean to bravery and sacrifice in a submarine, we got a wider, bowdlerised tale of mutinous good crews with bad beards and bad crews with good beards, and stirring yearnings to have been part of the resistance in La Rochelle in 1942.

And so it goes on. The handsome-but-evil SS is man is still hunting down local Jews, the decent, sad, bespectacled German is still trying to stay his hand, the French are either gorgeous and incompetently brave or possessed of ferret-faced cunning and playing both sides and deserve to die with bats gnawing their cheesy innards, and the one complexity we are permitted a good-guy U-boat boss with, confusingly, a good beard is trying to deliver his tin-can to the Americans, along with the Enigma machine.

If Covid-19 gets us all, I would shudder to think burgeoning 26th-century civilisations might find this under a scrimshawed rune-rock and consider it a documentary of life as lived 1930-2030. Mind you, could say the same about McMillions or Epstein.

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The week in TV: I May Destroy You; Sitting in Limbo; Staged; McMillions; Das Boot - review - The Guardian

In an absurd reaction to the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers list earlier this week, New York writer Andrew Sullivan tweeted "We. All. Live. On Campus. Now." The problem, Sullivan said, was that the list had numerous "radical critical theory books, written by people deeply opposed to the foundations of liberal democracy that were now required reading for employees.

The following day, a thread of tweets arguing that doxxing racist students helped to stop them from attending a university that will allow them to become a racist healthcare worker, teacher, lawyer, real estate developer, politicians, etc. received a similar reaction from Sullivan. This is beyond chilling, he tweeted. Its the logic of purges and cultural revolution and mob justice. It has over 400K likes. Liberal democracy is extinct.

Sullivan and other contrarian thinkers with large salaries and gigantic platforms have spent an inordinate amount of time over the last decade obsessing over what teenagers at collegesBerkeley and Harvard are favoritesare doing on campus, whether thats getting racists disinvited from cushy speaking gigs or caring about intersectionality and social justice more generally speaking. The broad strokes of their argument are that one day the people pushing for their universities to be more inclusive and to not give platforms to racists will graduate from those universities and will become leaders in America and bring their ideologies with them. Sullivan and others say that this will be badbad for free speech, bad for liberal democracy, bad for America, and, most of all, bad for well-paid pundits. America as we know it will be consumed by campus. And that moment, where We. All. Live. On. Campus., is now, when hundreds of thousands of people are protesting Black people being killed by the police (or perhaps it was 2018).

Alone, this sort of hysteria is insignificant and also expected of Sullivan, who has spent years promoting and trying to legitimize racial science and declaring war on those who arent interested. It's part, though, of a larger wave of right-wing liberal and conservative writers warning that the American public is undergoing an authoritarian turn. State forces violently suppressing protests sparked by state violence isn't the concern here, nor is the president attempting to designate antifascists as terrorists. No, it's the specter of the campusan imagined site of oppression in the reactionary mind where free speech goes to die.

Never mind that its students who are bravely in the streets fighting against actual state authoritarianismmarching in the hundreds of thousands nationwide, storming and burning down Minneapolis 3rd Precinct (which one survey shows the majority of Americans think was justified), and creating an autonomous zone in Seattle spanning six city blocks that features an occupied Seattle police precinct along with vehicle barricades and armed protesters standing guard. Never mind, for that matter, that what's happening isn't the result of people avoiding uncomfortable ideas but of engaging with them and taking them seriously enough to take action in the name of a better and more just societyprecisely what liberal education and liberal democracy hold as an ideal. What matters is that the "campus" has taken over, and that this is bad.

If this campus is now everywhere, its worth taking stock of who seems terrified of it, and why. So far, it appears to be no one facing any type of oppression.

Take the staff revolt sparked by Tom Cottons New York Times op-ed "Send in the Troops" among staff over whether the fascist screed shouldve been published. Times op-ed editor and columnist Baris Weiss warned of a "civil war" between "the (mostly young) wokes [and] the (mostly 40+) liberals that resembled the "campus culture wars." Many have mocked her, Sullivan and other conservative thinkers for obsessively writing about campus, but this uprising at the Times, she said, proved her right all along. "This was always why it mattered: The people who graduated from those campuses would rise to power inside key institutions and transform them." Weiss casts radical studentsor former onesas the real authoritarians for engaging in the marketplace of ideas by debating the merits of an article written by a sitting United States senator advocating for the actual deployment of the military against Americans exercising Enlightenment-era rights. (The original position that led to the Times soliciting this op-ed was that the troops should kill them.)

In Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff's book The Coddling of the American Mind, the fear that grips the reactionary mind is described as safetyism"a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns." For some, safetyism is an ever pervasive threat; for others, coronavirus ended this Age of Coddling, for some reason.

Clearly the young people in the streets facing down violent cops are not overly concerned with their safety. Nor are journalists risking their jobs to protest against their employers publishing government propaganda.The people who seem most obsessively concerned with being protected from ideas that challenge their worldview, in fact, seem to be coddled writers and thinkers who are worried about the safety of their social status as protests and calls for systemic upheaval and justice echo across the land.

As Moira Weigel wrote in her review of Haidt and Lukianoffs book, their arguments are obsessed with balancing acts that do little other than "signal the distance between the authors and the partisans of identity who are too emotional to think clearly." They profess to be concerned with an ideological climate that stifles free expression, but in practice express concern over little other than the rules of the discourse. They want an atmosphere in which ideas can be freely debated; if anyone takes an idea seriously, though, it is held as evidence that no such atmosphere exists. The argument is an endlessly recursive argument about what it means to argue, the cri de coeur of a message-board user endlessly crying out for moderators to enforce the First Amendment written across the pages of America's best-paying and most influential publications.

Take Sullivans comparison of doxxing to the Cultural Revolution; the same comparison is made by Lukianoff and Haidt, who compared "witch-hunts" on college campuses to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but are more honest about their argument. "As historical events, the two movements are radically different, they wrote, most notably in that the Red Guards were responding to the call of a totalitarian dictator, who encouraged them to use violence, while the American college students have been self-organised and almost entirely nonviolent." And yet they shared some similarities, the author maintain, in that "both were movements initiated by idealistic young college students." What does this mean, ultimately? Nothing!

This whiny preeningironically, it's exactly what the campus is accused ofcharacterizes the overall line of argument. Sullivan is a prominent member of a group of scientific racists who regularly bemoan the natural social consequences of airing racist drivel publicly. Weisss warnings were publicly revealed to be fabricated by numerous colleagues who disputed her narrative, calling it "brazenly careerist and self-serving" and a "willful misrepresentation" of largely unified internal opposition to publishing Cottons op-ed. There is reportedly a Bret Stephens policy at the New York Times, a double standard which allows Stephens to drone about the virtues of free speech (and join Sullivan in advancing race science nonsense) but while constantly whining or complaining to higher-ups about any writer or editor that voices criticism of his ideas.

When Stephens, another campus culture hand-wringer, failed to get a professor at George Washington University fired for insulting him, he wrote an embarassing column trying to paint the joke as anti-Semitic. When the professor invited Stephens to a debate at GWU, Stephens canceled because the debate wouldn't be closed to the public. All of this looks much more like safetyism than reading critical theory books or fighting an authoritarian police force.

In a convincing case as to why safetyism doesnt even exist, Inside Higher Ed's John Warner wrote that "if you examine those who wield the charge of safetyism against others, they are always in positions of superior power accusing those without power of disrupting some important principle, a principle that protects the status quo." His critique also lines up with Weigels, which points out that these people enjoy the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination and insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads.

It's hard to take seriously powerful, privileged people who insist that the marketplace of ideas can solve racism and sexism. It's even harder to do so when they insist that participants in the marketplace of ideas who follow the power of ideas they find convincing are behaving illegitimately. It's still harder when those whose entire project is pushing the idea that debateendless, endless debateis the way to improve the country rule out protests and uprisings as effective forms of debate. That protests inspired by and enacting ideas and ideals have been successful now and in the past (e.g. the 1960s protests and riots) does not hinder these people from making their arguments. Instead, thought leaders like Jonathan Chait use phrases like politics is a matter of life and death to make the case that nobody is entirely right, and that nothing should be done.

These thinkers are correctly labeled by Weigel as "right liberals" who, from "their safe space of TED talks and thinktanks and thinkpieces" create cultures and belief systems where the safety of valuing ideas you disagree with becomes a sacred value in theory, and where in practice disagreement is taken as a sort of violence, undermining the entire project of disagreement and debate which is held to be so sacred. Their position is exactly what they accuse their critics of, and as a result, their hysteria is founded in something real: They actually are being left behind by a society and by generations that are taking seriously the ideas they pay lip service to.

The campus, as envisioned by the reactionary mind doesnt exist. But the protests do. The uprisings do. The CHAZ in Seattle does. As right liberals and conservatives are forced to watch more protests and occupations grow and succeed, theyll slink back into their safe spaces. Theyll insist that their opinions be respected. Theyll demand that we engage in balancing acts to save liberalism"acts calibrated to preserve power, privilege, bigotry, and ignorance, and even liberalism itself.

We should see this for what it is: the coddling of the American pundit. And we should reject it.

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The Coddling of the American Pundit - VICE

A new chapter in the online culture wars has been opened as Gen Z, fed up with Boomers conflating them with their apparently loathsome forebears, the Millennials, have risen up with some truly savage memes.

It was only a matter of time, and now the uprising has begun after Millennials appear to have made the critical mistake of picking a fight on two fronts, managing to simultaneously piss off both Boomers and Zoomers with their avocado toast, Harry Potter obsession, and general whining.

Several Zoomers, those born in the late 90s and early 2000s, hit out at people who think that Harry Potter movies are a personality trait and unironically utter cringeworthy phrases like, ugh I hate adulting.

All they do is drink wine, post cringy 90s kid meme, talk about tech start-up and lie, said one TikToker, not pulling any punches.

Millennials were apparently caught unawares, almost choking on their kombucha, by the blistering broadside from their plucky TikToking, Fortnite-loving descendants.

Though others just took it in stride, having grown accustomed to being the internets favourite punching bag.

Some took matters into their own hands, returning fire over criticism of living conditions in their one bedroom apartments, warning Zoomers that the horror of the housing market, which could get a lot worse in a post-coronavirus depression, still awaits them.

Alliances apparently formed naturally, as the meme offensive raged across Twitter.

Some peaceniks called for unity against a common foe, but for now it appears their cries fell on deaf ears, ruined by listening to mumble rap or whatever.

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Every generation can agree, Millennials were a mistake: Shots fired as Gen Z rips 90s kids on TikTok - RT

Cardinal George Pell was released from prison after 400 days Photo: AFP

As New Zealand spent more than two months in various forms of house arrest, glued to the 1pm Jacinda and Ashley show, it seemed like the world had stopped. A global pandemic; new words in the lexicon coronavirus, lockdown, bubble, social distancing, team of five million. And the ever-present hand sanitiser.

But other things did happen while we were colouring in the Easter Bunny and making cardboard poppies.

Today on The Detail, Emile Donovan and Sharon Brettkelly take us through some of those events - national and international - that flew under the radar.

In New Zealand the most dramatic and the only event to kick Covid-19 off the front pages was the sudden guilty pleas of Christchurch gunman Brenton Tarrant. On March 26, the day after we went into level 4, he admitted 51 charges of murder, 40 charges of attempted murder and a charge of engaging in a terrorist act. A lawyer working with some of the victims families suggested that, while possible explanations for the move were speculative, terrorists often sought a sense of self-importance and attention to their cause that the pandemic had removed.

Less prominent was the resignation of Young ACT vice-president Ali Gammeter, saying shed been the victim of sexual harassment and her complaints were being ignored by the party. Soon afterwards an investigation was announced.

Also, the government revealed the details of the cannabis referendum, which New Zealand will vote on at election day. Unlike the other referendum on September 19, on euthanasia, the cannabis result is non-binding.

Royal New Zealand Air Force plane arrives in Port Vila with relief supplies bound for Vanuatu islands affected by Cyclone Harold. Photo: Hilaire Bule

As we went into lockdown Australia was still burning. News of the bushfires died down with the flames but another major climate event hit in relative silence the third major coral bleaching event of the Great Barrier Reef in five years, and the worst of the three.

Also in Australia a bombshell over the jailed Catholic archbishop, Cardinal Pell. On April 7 he was freed from prison after spending more than 400 days behind bars, after the High Court unanimously found his conviction for child sex abuse was unsafe and should be overturned. He said culture wars and anti-Catholic sentiment could have played a part in the decision of Victoria police to pursue charges against him. Now journalists could face charges over their reporting of the case. However, the legal counsel for the alleged victim in the case says she has at least eight other civil claims ready to go against Pell.

Israel elected a new government; Turkey and Russia announced a ceasefire; two big cyclones hit, Harold in the Pacific and Amphan in India, which killed 128 people.

And as if a plague hitting the world wasnt enough, to Africa, Asia and the Middle East came pestilence. Locusts decimated crops. The US meanwhile was hit by Murder Hornets yes, thats right, Murder Hornets.

The world's smallest dinosaur, encased in amber Photo: Xing Lida / CC BY-ND

But the best story you may have missed scientists found the smallest ever dinosaur fossil, in Myanmar. Its a tiny bird with teeth, trapped in amber for 99 million years. You see, lockdown could have been worse.

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What happened while you were sleeping in? - RNZ

Of all the arguments the history of slavery and racism has provoked, the spats about the comedy shows of the 2000s appear the least significant. Given the severity of the crisis that is upon us, surely its a distraction to worry away about the decision by the BBC and Netflix to pull Little Britain because its stars blacked up. Yet as we enter a global depression that the World Bank predicts will push 100 million people into extreme poverty, as unemployment in our corner of the globe heads towards 4 million, as food banks creak and charities collapse, the petty censorship raises a question of the utmost urgency: how will western societies respond to mass poverty?

After the crash of 2008, they punished the victims. Britain under David Cameron and Nick Clegg slashed benefits, targeting children who had shown their unworthiness when they failed to find rich parents who could raise them in comfort. The northern states of the EU justified leaving Spaniards, Italians and Greeks to suffer by characterising them as lazy southerners who had to learn that hard work comes before the siesta.

Even third-rate art can anticipate the future. In Little Britain and shows like it, you could sense the coming vindictiveness. They werent encouraging racial hatred but class hatred. What was meant to titillate viewers about Desiree DeVere, played by David Walliams with blackface and a fat suit, wasnt just that she was black, but that she was obese and as common as muck.

Television was reflecting the belief of millions that their money was going to scroungers

The idea that this grotesque figure thought herself a beauty was laughable. Another character pretended to be disabled to get sympathy, but jumped out of his wheelchair when no one was looking. A third ran a fat-fighters group while showing no awareness of how ugly her own greed was. After years of a Labour government redistributing wealth, television was reflecting the belief of millions that their money was going to scroungers, who faked disabilities and grabbed benefits so they could buy junk food and stuff it into their foul, fat faces.

Critics said as much at the time, thus passing a test that everyone caught up in our culture wars ought to set themselves. The cry from the right that were judging the past by the standards of the present can be as historically illiterate as the cry from the left that Britains history is irredeemably racist. Contemporaries we can admire and learn from contested the East India Company, slavery and empire. And in its small way the punitive turn in comedy of the 2000s was contested as it happened too.

Whereas wealthy media executives once sought to investigate poverty or arouse anger against it in documentaries and dramas such as Cathy Come Home or Boys from the Blackstuff, I wrote in 2008, now they commission programmes that laugh at it.

Thats not to excuse todays censorship. Comedians, like everyone else, have the right to punch up, punch down or punch themselves in the face (an option a few of them should exercise more often). Broadcasters are hiding an uncomfortable truth about Britain as they purge their archives. They and the talent they commissioned didnt mock the grasping poor because they were lying to viewers there are benefits cheats, after all, and, from Falstaff on, the fit have always found the fat risible. Nor were they trying to brainwash the audience with rightwing propaganda. The broadcasters of the day were merely operating in the entertainment market and giving a large section of the audience what it wanted. The BBC and Netflix now think that expunging the past will please the market of the 2020s. Puritans are only happy when someone is being silenced and doubtless they will be pleased. I suspect serious people will not be as happy. They will understand that the censorship of light entertainment trivialises their cause and allows their opponents to paint them as enemies of freedom.

The worst of it is that we ought to be thinking about why the response to the 2008 crash turned into a catastrophe. Sweetening history, tidying it up as if broadcasters are schoolteachers and we are vulnerable children, is not only repellent in itself, it stops us understanding the folly that led to a disaster.

Any account of what needs to be done to avoid the destitution of large parts of society must begin with confronting the prejudice that poverty is the fault of the undeserving poor. The young need to go to and stay in universities and further education colleges until the storm passes or find work on local authority job creation schemes. Higher education and councils will need to be seen as deserving of public money, if they are to help them. The Resolution Foundation and other leftish thinktanks are telling the government that the private sector on its own will not be able to revive the economy fast enough. They are proposing that the state should bail out depressed regions in their entirety and that the emergency increases in universal credit benefits, introduced in April, should become permanent. Readers who believe the Tories are evil disaster capitalists will be surprised to hear that they are getting a fair hearing, although whether this government has the competence to act on what ministers are hearing is another matter. Meanwhile, readers who believe the electorate will not cheer on a government if it turns on the victims forget the lessons of the recent past and the unshakable prejudices the 2000s displayed.

In Europe, recessions have been mean times. Voters have elected leaders who have held the poor responsible for their poverty and encouraged the hatred of foreigners for stealing jobs and sponging off welfare states. I dont think it will happen this time, but I wont pretend to be certain. If the idea of blaming a slump caused by a virus on its victims sounds absurd, it was equally absurd to blame a slump caused by the financial system on benefit claimants. But the right managed it after 2008 and can manage it again.

Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist

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Blacking up was of a piece with 'comedy' that dealt in contempt - The Guardian