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There’s a bracing image partway through “Amrum,” a new historical drama from the director Fatih Akin, that has the makings of an antifascist meme. It’s the spring of 1945, and word of the Second World War’s impending end has reached the residents of Amrum, an island off the coast of Germany. The general response to this news seems muted; apart from an outspoken potato farmer (Diane Kruger) who looks forward to the conclusion of “Hitler’s damn war,” the islanders know that their rage against the Nazi regime is, like an illegal radio or extra rations, something best kept to themselves. Hille Hagener (Laura Tonke), a Third Reich true believer, is shattered by grief; cradling her newborn baby, she murmurs, “What kind of a world is this for a child to grow up in?” Her tough-minded sister, Ena (Lisa Hagmeister), sees things with greater clarity. She pulls a photograph of Hitler out of its frame and—here’s the meme-able moment—quietly burns it on the kitchen stove, as if to mark the end of an era and, perhaps, of a collective delusion. Whatever uncertainty the future may bring, Ena knows that the only way forward is forward.

We watch the immolation of Hitler’s likeness and feel warmed, even hopeful. But Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck), the eldest of Hille’s four children, looks on with wide-eyed curiosity and a measure of confusion. He’s the movie’s protagonist; he’s also an angelic-looking young stand-in for the German filmmaker, actor, and novelist Hark Bohm, who died in November, at the age of eighty-six. (Akin and Bohm, who were longtime friends, are credited as co-writers; Bohm was originally planning to direct, but eventually asked Akin to take over.) “Amrum” is a fictionalized memoir of a wartime childhood, in which the remoteness of island life is shown to breed its own specific sufferings and bestow its own strange lessons. The conflict may be at something of a geographic remove—the transfixing sight of warplanes soaring over the beach, or of an airman’s corpse washed up by the tide, comes as a jolting reminder of a distant yet ever-present horror—but its psychological effects prove no easier to shake, especially for an impressionable child.

Put more bluntly, the film is a Nazi coming-of-age story and a drama of deliverance, in which Nanning, a twelve-year-old member of the Jungvolk (basically, a kinder-Hitler Youth), takes his crucial first steps toward throwing off the ideological shackles. They’re not easily cast aside. Nanning’s father, a Nazi officer, is off fighting in the war; his mother, who gives birth the same day that Hitler’s death is announced, sinks into a depression that seems more post-Führer than postpartum. When an exhausted Hille declares “All I want is white bread with butter and honey”—former staples that have now become unobtainable luxuries—Nanning, a good, obedient son, sets out to make his mother’s dream come true. Soon, we are caught up in a boy’s grand adventure, though one that is grounded by a keen understanding of wartime scarcities. Preparing his mother’s meal of choice will require him to barter and negotiate with a baker (Marek Harloff), a beekeeper (Jorid Lukaczik), and a fishmonger, Arjan (Lars Jessen), whose brand of smoked flatfish has become an island currency in itself.

Arjan, a grizzled fellow with mirthful eyes, is one of many locals who quietly expand Nanning’s horizons. The old man once went to New York to make his fortune; so did Nanning’s grandfather and other Amrumers, a revelation that sheds new light on the pride, insularity, and xenophobia of this community, where even German mainlanders are regarded, contemptuously, as outsiders. Nanning, who was born in Hamburg, is bullied by a schoolmate who tells him that he’s no more a native Amrumer than the Polish refugees who have recently arrived on the island. Hille tries to reassure Nanning, noting that they are dwelling in their ancestral home: “Through me, your Amrumer blood goes back nine generations.” Tonke, in a haunting performance, gives these words an unmistakably fanatical chill. Hille’s every thought, word, and deed is governed by an obsession with blood purity. Clinging to her sense of racial and cultural superiority with an ever more unyielding grip, she seems utterly beyond saving. Her children, mercifully, are another story.

Fraught questions of national identity and dislocation have long weighed on Akin, who was born to Turkish-immigrant parents in Hamburg, and who charted the difficult journeys of German Turkish protagonists in his two major international breakthroughs, “Head-On” (2005) and “The Edge of Heaven” (2008). Since then, Akin’s restless streak has sent him all over the map—geographically, dramatically, and stylistically—and although he seldom seems disengaged, he has struggled to retain, or regain, the bristling urgency and jagged formalism that gave his early work its undeniable vitality. He confronted the Armenian genocide in “The Cut” (2014); went after neo-Nazi terrorists in the revenge thriller “In the Fade” (2017); and, most inexplicably, chronicled the life and crimes of a notorious Hamburg serial killer in “The Golden Glove” (2019), a little-seen abomination. My personal favorite of Akin’s films might be one of his most lighthearted: the shambling foodie comedy “Soul Kitchen” (2010), whose culinary concerns give it the slenderest of links to “Amrum” and its bread-and-honey mission impossible.

The new film is both Akin’s strongest and, with its stately, picturesque classicism, his least characteristic work in some time. “Amrum” almost acknowledges as much; it comes billed as “A Hark Bohm Film by Fatih Akin,” an unwieldy yet moving onscreen declaration of joint authorship. But, by dint of its story and its subject, the movie also feels like part of a broader cinematic conversation. It can’t help but conjure the vast range of films that have shown us the horrors of war from a kid’s perspective—a field that has yielded a few masterpieces, including Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood” (1963) and Elem Klimov’s “Come and See” (1985), and, more recently, an underappreciated future classic, Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” (2024). Curiously, and through no fault of Akin’s or Bohm’s, the children-at-war picture that “Amrum” most resembles on its face is Taika Waititi’s “Jojo Rabbit” (2019), the rare film to which I’d admit a grudging, gun-to-my-head preference for even “The Golden Glove.”

Like “Jojo Rabbit,” “Amrum” tracks a young Nazi boy’s reverse indoctrination and moral awakening during the last gasp of the Second World War. (Both films also feature scenes of bunny slaughter, clearly a popular rite of passage for that demographic.) Unlike “Jojo Rabbit,” “Amrum” does not infantilize the audience, trivialize the Holocaust, abuse the music of David Bowie, turn Hitler into a grotesque imaginary-friend caricature, or shy away from the idea that Nazis might, in fact, be terrible people. The two films’ most relevant point of connection might concern their pint-size protagonists, both of whom appear to have been cast for maximal cherubic appeal, as if to short-circuit any qualms we might have about embracing a Hitler Youth in training. Billerbeck, a first-time actor and a superb discovery, is such an immediately likable screen presence that it’s only natural to wonder if you’re being worked over.

Worry not. Nanning is an engaging lead, but he isn’t sentimentalized. He is, like many children, susceptible to the pressures of obedience and groupthink—qualities that can be weaponized under totalitarian circumstances—but he also has sufficient clarity to be horrified when he learns how antisemitism has shaped his own family. His character is, in a way, as malleable and half-formed as the white coasts of Amrum: invitingly sandy beaches that can turn instantly harrowing when the tide rolls in. More than once, Nanning, carrying a precious portion of butter or sugar, must wander into that treacherous tide. In one instance, he’s forced to make a swift, momentous decision about the value of another human life.

He chooses wisely, and you sense, by the movie’s end, that he’ll keep doing so. “Amrum” ends on a freeze-frame closeup of Nanning’s face, a visual gesture that immediately invokes one of the greatest of semi-autobiographical dramas, François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” (1959). But, unlike Antoine Doinel, that film’s troubled young hero, Nanning is smiling. He has not broken with his mother, as Antoine does, but he has come to a healthy understanding of her and her limitations. He is, no less than Antoine, a product of a failed system—and “Amrum,” without spelling out how, leaves us with little doubt that he will outlive it. ♦

The photographer Emmet Gowin has travelled the world to make extraordinary aerial views of landscapes ravaged by man and nature, but his most well-known and influential photographs were made closer to home. Some of the earliest of these images, many previously unprinted and retrieved from his files during the pandemic, are included in his new book, “Baldwin Street: Photographs 1966-1994,” named for the dead-end road in Danville, Virginia, where his wife, Edith Morris, lived when they first started seeing each other. Gowin was born in Danville, in 1941, just a mile away, but by the time he and Edith met, in 1960, he was living in another part of town, where his father was the minister of a Methodist church. They married in 1964, and their extended family—farmers, mill workers, housewives, clergy, many of them living in houses nearby—became what he called “my first true subject.”

“Baldwin Street” opens with a statement from Gowin noting, of Edith’s extended clan, “I admired their simplicity and generosity and thought of the pictures I made as agreements. I wanted to pay attention to the body and personality that had agreed out of love to reveal itself.” Many of the black-and-white photographs that follow are as casual as snapshots, but they’re far from simple documents. They’re often posed, without feeling formal. Children dart into the frame. A sitter’s attention skitters off. A group disbands. Gowin isn’t in any of these pictures, but his presence—loving, amused, amazed—defines them, giving the work a lovely intensity, a glow. You sense that, in the moment, there was nowhere else Gowin wanted to be than on this lawn, in this kitchen, with these people. And what a pleasure it is to be there, too.

Gowin is present as a commentator throughout the book. The longest text appears opposite a portrait of his father, whom he refers to, with striking formality, as Pastor Gowin—a tall, white-haired man with glasses, a tie, and suspenders, holding a bucket that he used for collecting figs. “That’s probably in his last year or two,” Gowin notes. “Mother had just died. It totally humanized him, in the most beautiful way. It pulled the rug from under him, too, when he did not have her stability and her moral clarity.” With his comments, and one from Edith (Gowin’s mother “was a much more gentle person, a much more spiritual person”), the photo becomes a portrait of a marriage.

But the marriage that remains at the heart of “Baldwin Street” is the one between Emmet and Edith, whom he refers to as “my guide and informant in all things.” Here, in the first decades of their marriage, every new portrait feels like an offering, a tribute. She’s naked in only one of the photographs in the new book—topless, in a pair of grandmotherly underpants—but her frank nudity would later become one of Gowin’s key subjects, a slippage between public and private that gave his work an edge of Southern eccentricity—not gothic, not Faulknerian or in the high-strung Carson McCullers mode, but with all the familial push-and-pull of an Anne Tyler novel.

Yet there’s very little drama in Gowin’s pictures, and any plot is sketchy or buried. The elders here are generally all of a piece—stoic, patient, dressed as simply and modestly as possible. Four sisters, Fannie, Bernice, Gertrude, and Edith’s mother, Reva, pose in loosely fitted housedresses that they made themselves from pretty printed gingham fabric that they wove in the cotton mill. It’s a fashion photograph with no designer labels. Not surprisingly, the children in Gowin’s pictures are the ones who set off the sparks. One of them, Amy, a blond child with limp ponytails and a thin dress that looks like it might have been stained, stands outside a porch door, her fists balled up, mouth open, angry or unhappy or both. Another girl, Donna Jo, apparently naked on a back-yard lawn, holds several small, round pieces of fruit, still on their leafy branch, clasped to her chest like a trophy. Gowin notes, “It is just the incarnation of Eve with apples.” It’s one of the most remarkable images in the book, and one, among many, that makes us aware of Gowin’s influence on Sally Mann.

On their own, the pictures in “Baldwin Street” remind us of the pleasure of looking and the rewards of being alive to the world. But again and again Gowin’s words, at once spontaneous and sincere, let us tap into the vivid spirit behind his camera’s canny eye. One brief caption, opposite an image of Edith and four children playing “crack the whip” on a summer lawn, sums it up: “On days when things were happening, I might be taking seven, eight rolls of film in one huge deluge of wanting to see.”

On the first Saturday of Coachella, Justin Bieber started his concert by looking down at a camera on the floor of the stage. If you were watching the show at home, on a laptop or a TV screen, via Coachella’s live stream on YouTube, he was, for a moment, looking you dead in the eye. If you were out in the Coachella Valley, near Palm Springs, where young people flock annually to get loud, hear their favorite tunes played live, hallucinate in group settings, and herald the coming of summer, you saw Bieber’s gaze emanating from a pair of huge screens. Either way, before things had really gotten going, the pop star was already acknowledging the fact that the “liveness” of his performance was a subtly shifting, always mediated, geographically expansive quality. He was in California, but also, if you wanted, in Albuquerque or Seoul or the South of France. If you could meet his gaze, outside or in bed, you were in some sense right there with him, humming along.

He was singing a song called “All I Can Take”—a distressing title that offers to catalogue, down to the most minute speck of experience, the limits of the singer’s patience, or of his sanity. In reality, though, the song’s lyrics are downbeat but vague, held together by a loose emotional logic. “These symptoms of my sensitivity,” Bieber sang. “There’s things that I can’t change: Lord knows I’ve tried. Ooh baby, we can leave it all behind.” It’s a love song, sort of. Maybe it narrates a moment after the singer has already had more than he can “take,” when he has finally decided to use romantic love as a fugitive vehicle, speeding him away at high velocity from the details of overwhelming everyday life.

Bieber’s stage was large, roundish, and mostly bare, with a hilly ridge around the edges. It was populated by neither background singers nor a band. It looked like a catcher’s mitt that had been flattened and truncated, or a diorama of a desert with the suggestion of many mountains surrounding it. He was alone, except for a thin lectern holding an Apple laptop. In its minimalism, chic or shabby, depending on your perspective, the stage looked a lot like the setup for Bieber’s recent performance at the Grammys, where he appeared naked except for a pair of socks and some baggy boxers, played the electric-guitar part for his song “Yukon” until he’d successfully recorded and looped it, then sang plaintively, unhelped by the company of other bodies or the excitements of, say, pyrotechnics.

Bieber, the former child star who, now past thirty, often gestures at a deep well of discontent, is currently in a stripped-down, melancholy, D.I.Y. phase. A guy who gets famous in the music business at such a young age—Bieber was barely a teen-ager when the world came to know his high, clear voice and innocent face—can’t help but be labelled a product, furnished with beats and lyrics, and made to play a part. Now Bieber wants us to know that he’s got his own ideas, his own artistry, his own bad mood. The only way to get the message across is to raze the usual clutter of spectacle.

In 2024, he posted a picture of himself placidly crying, a pair of tears running trails down his face. Sources claimed that at an Oscars after-party this year, he had a conspicuous altercation—maybe even physical—with the R. & B. star Usher, who, back in the day, claimed to be his mentor and chief booster. Bieber has had clashes with the paparazzi, and has sent ambiguous messages over social media hinting at his sorrow. Rich and famous though he is, life for Biebs ain’t been no crystal stair, and now he’s willing to risk boring or confusing us to make sure we know it.

For the first few songs at Coachella—all of them coming from his two latest albums, “SWAG” and “SWAG II,” released within two months of each other last year—Bieber wandered around the stage alone, sometimes ascending the gentle ridges on the outer ring. He wore a big, boxy, pinkish hoodie and ballooning pants that cut off at the shins: slouchily stylish, stuff picked out from the fanciest but loneliest bedroom in the world. His voice was in its usual form, bright and buoyant, but with a new heaviness that has creeped in with age. He often avoided the highest notes of the songs, letting a backing track do that airy work while he carved out choir-like lower harmony parts. These are his gifts: a fluid voice and a sterling ear. He’s never lost in a song and never seems nervous in the slightest. The guy’s a pro.

He didn’t offer much banter between songs, except some fairly bland expressions of gratitude to the rabid audience, which, by the camera’s evidence, was full of emotional fans mouthing each of his lyrics. “Wow wow wow wow,” he said softly, without the vocal emphasis that so many “wow”s would imply. “To be up and close and personal with you guys, man: this is special. This is a night I dreamed about for a long time, so to be here is amazing.” He didn’t sound so amazed.

Bieber had stepped onto a smaller stage, more sharply circular than the first, and two acoustic guitarists came to sit on either side of him, flanking him like twin cherubs attentive at their harps. They eventually glided into a song called “Glory Voice Memo.” In the recorded version, the audio quality is scratchy; the song is more an improvised sketch than a fleshed-out composition. It’s a straightforwardly religious tune with bluesy themes:

Well I been used,
And I been beaten down,
I been let down, stalled out.

The peak is a kind of praising howl:

“I’m begging You for mercy
Please Lord, would You lead me?
So, I reach out
Singing glory
Singing glory
To the King.

Bieber has always been outspoken about his faith. (Speaking of being “let down,” his public father-son-like relationship with the popular former Hillsong pastor Carl Lentz—the emergent sort of new-agey, vaguely hip-hop motivationalist who struts his way through the sermon wearing skinny jeans and aviator glasses—petered out after Lentz was caught having an alleged affair.) After having played the sadboi for a while, crooning about love across a chasm of alienating grief, now he was the heart-on-fire, born-again penitent. A ring of lights far behind and above his head looked like a tasteful bracelet, or a halo. Another song he sang was called “Everything Hallelujah.”

Hearing this explicitly devotional detour in his set offered another way to interpret Bieber’s voice. Although he has tried on many personas—the yearning teen (“Baby”), the wised-up loverboy (“Love Yourself”), or the ongoing turn as a heartbroken artist hoping to show himself once and for all—he has in many ways always been, at least on the level of style, a Christian-contemporary-music artist. You can’t think of a C.C.M. song—the best ones featuring intensifying, drone-like repetitions and an undertone of intermingled ecstasy and sorrow—that wouldn’t be improved with a guest verse by Bieber. He’s got a great vocal range, but seldom strains or goes gritty or risks cracking the glass surface of the song.

Part of why “SWAG” and “SWAG II” are such interesting albums, suggesting a whole forest full of hidden pathways for Bieber’s career, is that their spare, sometimes harsh production plays in interesting contrast to Bieber’s stubbornly smooth delivery. Even when he’s talking his biggest shit, professing to be “bad,” the larger implication is that it’s been a journey, a conversion in reverse. He’s pop music’s fallen angel, always threatening to rise again.

The guitars disappeared and Bieber was alone again. Now he approached the altar of his laptop. What intimacy! Maybe you have a friend like this, who convenes six or eight people at a time in her living room, YouTube on the TV screen, just to play music videos, first new ones that she’s discovered, then, gradually, a bevy of oldies that turn the screening into a dance party. In our new day of algorithmic individuality, it’s hard to really know a person better than this.

Teasingly, Bieber started to play his own videos, going back and back into his early catalogue. “I feel like we gotta take you guys on a bit of a journey,” he said. Soon, he was watching the homemade videos of cover songs that made him famous: Chris Brown’s “With You,” Ne-Yo’s “So Sick.” He looked up at the huge onscreen version of his younger self with an air of something like astonishment. “Was I really that little?” he seemed to be thinking. He kept looking back and singing along, sometimes taking the octave below his long-gone young-boy soprano’s high notes, sometimes flitting into harmonies that made the old songs sound sadder.

There was a camera affixed to the laptop; between songs, you could see his face as the computer must—big, inquisitive, hungry for history. He looked like a live streamer, his screen a collage of revealing former moments.

The concert was a kind of four-act scheme—obvious loneliness, public revelation, private reminiscence, and then . . . what? That’s the big question about Bieber. He has been open about struggles with his mental health, has floridly thanked his wife, Hailey, for sticking with him through the worst depths, has turned the by now cliché trauma of child stardom into a compelling portrait of inner unrest. But what’s next? He’s got a whole life yet to live, more songs to sing, unless this recent foray into a kind of pop performance art is a way of saying goodbye. I doubt it.

Suddenly there were lots of other presences onstage, arriving in waves—the singer-songwriter Dijon, one of his closest collaborators on the “SWAG” series; the Afro-pop eminences Wizkid and Tems, to sing a remix of Wizkid’s song “Essence”; the singer and producer Mk.Gee, shredding on a guitar. The stage was awash in purples and pinks, psychedelic with the promise of exciting company. Suddenly Bieber was dancing around, trading fun glances with his fellow-artists, finally gesturing toward the usually obvious fact that a concert might also be an uncomplicatedly good time.

Bieberchella, as it’s been called, was wistful, intriguing, and soon quite controversial. Lots of people online are calling it a lazy way to deliver a show for which Bieber was paid a reported ten million bucks. (He plays again on the second Saturday of the festival.) But to my eye, it was also strangely fertile with ideas about pop performance in an isolated age. Maybe the last bit, the part with all the friends showing up, was the first tendril of a big question: Having emptied out the party—the great commons of a mass-media audience—how do you start it up again? ♦

As recently as a week or two ago, Vice-President J. D. Vance was talking like a man who felt that the odds were in his favor. He’d flown to Hungary to attend a campaign rally for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the most Trumpian of European leaders, and, before leaving, he told reporters at the airport how kind the Hungarian people had been to him. Asked about the war in Iran—the day before, Donald Trump had threatened to destroy the country’s “whole civilization”—Vance suggested that Iran’s insistence on its “right” to enrich uranium might actually represent an opening for a deal. As he put it, “I thought to myself, you know what? My wife has the right to skydive, but she doesn’t jump out of an airplane, because she and I have an agreement that she’s not going to do that, because I don’t want my wife jumping out of an airplane.”

The days that followed were a bleak reminder that whatever rights Vance may think he has—to his dignity, to his faith, or to his position as the MAGA heir apparent—are contingent on the agreement he made to subordinate himself to Trump. And the President doesn’t seem to mind if Vance humiliates himself running errands. Indeed, Trump has treated a new ballroom as more important to his legacy than his Vice-President is.

Vance had barely wrapped up in Hungary before Trump dispatched him to Pakistan to negotiate with the Iranians. Vance, an Iraq veteran, had reportedly opposed the war, and Trump had not been subtle about wanting to implicate him in its progress. That round of talks fell apart after twenty-one hours, an event that was followed, in quick succession, by Orbán’s defeat; Trump’s attack on Pope Leo XIV, who had condemned civilization-destroying (“WEAK on Crime”); and the President’s posting of a now notorious A.I.-generated image of himself as a robed Christ figure.

Trump deleted that post, claiming that he’d thought the image showed him as a doctor. Vance told Fox News that the President had taken it down because “a lot of people weren’t understanding his humor.” Was an element of the President’s humor insulting the Pope right after Vance had announced that his new book, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” would be out in June? Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, after the success of his first book, “Hillbilly Elegy”; in that period, he was pursuing a venture-capital career, backed by Peter Thiel. (In 2022, Vance was elected to the Senate, from Ohio.) Vance has said that his faith was inspired by St. Augustine, but, again, his pact is with Trump. He was promptly put to work telling Leo to stay out of Trump’s way and to be careful when he spoke about “matters of theology.”

Vance, whose wife, Usha, is expecting their fourth child, might have seen this coming. The plight of Vice-Presidents, with their ill-defined role, is well known, and it is not the first time that Trump has debased someone who serves him. It’s not even the first time that Vance has been deployed to downplay a blasphemy-themed A.I. image. Last May, soon after Pope Francis died, Trump posted a portrait of himself as an enthroned Pope. At the time, Vance said, “As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes and not fine with people starting stupid wars that kill thousands of my countrymen”—a reminder of how the Administration’s goals have morphed. Trump, who once demanded a Nobel Peace Prize, started a war of choice in Iran, inflicting damage that a deal can’t undo.

The American right, too, is in a shifting, querulous state. Last week, at an event in Athens, Georgia, for Turning Point USA, the organization that Charlie Kirk led before his assassination last September, Vance acknowledged that “this Iran thing” had been divisive. Republican opponents of the war, still a minority in their party, according to polls, are a heterogeneous group. Some regret Trump’s bypassing Congress. Many working-class red-state voters—for whom Vance’s right-populist brand is designed—seem dismayed by the spike in gas prices and the neglect of problems at home. There are manosphere anti-interventionists (Joe Rogan, Theo Von). Meanwhile, in a very loud corner of MAGA world, inhabited by Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the pressing question is how the “Epstein class” managed to corrupt Trump, bending him to its will and Israel’s. And there is talk, apparently in earnest, about the Antichrist. The situation is one of ideological ferment, rather than a reversion to some Romneyite center.

The Turning Point event was meant to feature Vance and Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow. She cancelled at the last minute, citing unspecified threats to her safety. Onstage, Vance spent ten minutes complaining that certain people doubted Erika’s grief; he decried them as “full of shit” and insufficiently focussed on “left-wing networks of violence and terrorism.” Many in the audience would have guessed that he was referring to Candace Owens, a podcaster with nearly six million YouTube subscribers, who was once a key figure at Turning Point. She has been pushing cartoonish claims groundlessly linking Erika to a supposed vast conspiracy related to her husband’s murder. For what it’s worth, Owens is against the Iran war. (She has also raised doubts about Vance, in part because of his ties to Thiel.)

Trump reportedly enjoys asking associates whom they see as his heir: Vance or the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio? But, if Vance’s bumpy ride is any indication, the G.O.P. field may get both wider and weirder, with a primary that puts the Party’s internal resentments on full display. Still, it would be wrong to view Vance as simply an object of scorn or even pity—devout J.D., an ideas man who just wanted peace and maybe a promotion. He is the same opportunistically malleable demagogic provocateur who, during the campaign, got Trump worked up about migrants allegedly eating cats and dogs. He hasn’t shed his affinity for the Viktor Orbáns of the world. Trump recently named Vance “fraud czar,” with a focus on “CROOKED DEMOCRAT POLITICIANS.” He is building a network of big donors. He may yet be President.

Vance does have a noteworthy power as Vice-President: only he can initiate the process, under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, for removing a President deemed unable to discharge his duties. (The Cabinet and Congress also play a role.) The idea that he might do so is, for now, a fantasy. But another aspect of his constitutional role is that the President can’t fire him. So Trump will still have Vance to kick around, whether either of them likes it or not. ♦

The other day, my editor, knowing that I’d received preview screeners for the third season of the HBO drama “Euphoria,” asked me how the show was looking. “Well, you know,” I said. “It’s the usual: a subtle exploration of the intimate relationships between a group of close friends.” Then we both laughed. Psych!

“Euphoria,” which premièred in 2019, had been on hiatus since its second season ended in 2022. But the lengthy break in its production—chalked up, variously, to the Hollywood strikes, the death of one of the show’s stars, and the rumored tensions among some of its young actors (and also between them and the show’s creator, Sam Levinson)—has done nothing to dilute the essence that has distinguished the series from the very beginning. If anything, that essence has been amplified. “Euphoria” is a big, vulgar, carnivalesque thing—an extreme, often-disgusting vision of a rapacious, pitiless America where everyone is fighting for scraps before Empire finally collapses and God turns off the lights. If you’re looking for finely drawn characters who change, develop, and form strong and meaningful bonds with one another in a conventional sense-making way, you’ve arrived at the wrong place. But if you’re here, instead, to shriek and laugh and shiver at the spectacle? Well, then, come on in.

I’ll admit that I might be overstating the nihilistic unfeelingness of “Euphoria” in its first two seasons. It began, after all, as a teen show (based on an Israeli series of the same name from the twenty-tens), and though it portrayed the kind of terrifying kids whose knowledge of Schedule II drugs and kinky sex could rival that of the most hardened Larry Clark subject, there was still some malleability at play, even some hope, which suited its protagonists’ youth. Rue, played by the former Disney child star Zendaya, was the show’s opioid-addicted narrator, serving as a tour guide to her and her friends’ life in the fictional Southern California suburb of East Highland. There was Nate (Jacob Elordi), a hot, rich, violent jock; his wrong-side-of-the-tracks girlfriend, Maddy (Alexa Demie); her frenemy, the Barbie-esque, desperate-for-love Cassie (Sydney Sweeney); Cassie’s sister, the uptight Lexi (Maude Apatow); Rue’s friend and sometimes lover, the arty trans girl Jules (Hunter Schafer); and a sympathetic drug dealer, Fezco. (Angus Cloud, who played the character with a rare soulfulness, died of an overdose in 2023.)

In between the high drama and extreme situations that these often-numbed-out kids found their way into—rough sex, vicious girl fights, armed drug deals, operatically hellish withdrawals—there were interludes of quiet and introspection. And even though “Euphoria” was never a show that dealt with characters’ psychology that deeply or consistently, it had some moments of real feeling. (Rue’s struggle with addiction and the pain it causes her family made for some of the first two seasons’ most moving scenes, perhaps thanks to Levinson’s own experience as a teen drug addict who has managed to achieve sobriety.) Visually, too, “Euphoria” had something of the lava lamp about it, all shadows and sparkle and swirling, glinting lights. The show’s suburban teen environment was less “The O.C.” and more “Carrie”—a space of trippy, oozing, horror-fantasy—and the much-talked-about makeup looks of its girl protagonists added to this impression. Dripping glitter, shimmering adhesive crystals, dramatic slashes of eyeliner and smudges of eyeshadow—there was a playful, shifting experimentalism here, to signal the young characters’ changeability and ingenuity. (When I interviewed the show’s head makeup artist, Doniella Davy, back in 2019, she told me that the looks she devised for the show were about “unbridled self-expression.”)

Season 3 transports us five years after the events of the second season, to a new stage in our protagonists’ lives. Rue and the gang are now adults in their early twenties, and, as she deadpans at the top of the first episode, “A lot of people ask what I’ve been up to since high school. Honestly? Nothing good.” Indeed. So-called real life has now begun, the characters have hardened with it, and the series, too, feels as if it’s clicked into its final, hardened form: a thrilling, disturbing horror show, delivered with a sneer and a smile, and portraying a world where money is the only thing worth caring about.

Rue has been unable to repay the extraordinarily large sum of money that she owes the suburban drug boss Laurie (Martha Kelly), and so she begins working for her as a mule, travelling down to Mexico, where she swallows gumball-size balloons of fentanyl, helped down the gullet with a hefty squeeze of K-Y Jelly, and shat out into a sieve once back in Cali. Cassie and Nate, meanwhile, are engaged to be married, living in what Rue describes as a “right-wing suburban bubble.” Like Rue, Nate is in debt, owing money to shady figures who have sunk funds into the construction business he took over from his pervy father, Cal. (Eric Dane, who, in another tragic loss, recently died of A.L.S.) Now, he’s focussed on the development of Sun Settlers, “the premier end-of-life transition facility in California.” (It’s a clutch financial opportunity, Nate explains to a prospective investor, because “a boomer dies every fifteen seconds.”) Cassie is trying to become social-media famous, suggestively flashing her all-American assets online in a variety of fetishy costumes (a puppy dog, a pacifier-sucking baby). Her aim is to make enough money to afford the fifty-thousand-dollar wedding floral arrangements that Nate is reluctant to cough up the dough for. (When pressed to sign off on Cassie’s racy new career, Nate reluctantly agrees, making her promise that she won’t show “those”—her boobs—and her “pretty face at the same time,” a vow she almost immediately breaks.)

Jules, meanwhile, has become a sugar baby, dropping out of art school to live a life of brittle luxury in a downtown L.A. penthouse, paid for by a wealthy plastic surgeon, who is enamored of her “poreless” skin—the result, he presumes, of her transitioning before puberty—and who tells her that her breasts are “near-perfect.” (When she questions the hedge, he clarifies that “anything can be improved.”) And Maddy is an assistant at a talent-management company who sees opportunities in the growing market of OnlyFans starlets. “We can imply nudity,” she reassures one model who’s reluctant to go full porn. “Sideboob, underboob, camel toe, a little ass cheek, feet. . . . We’ll build it up, a toe at a time.”

Everyone, in other words, can be sold—or can sell oneself—for parts. The body is not a source of strength or pleasure or play but a site from which to grab as much power as one can and hold on to it for dear life. (To use the characters’ beauty looks as an indicator again, the overdefined porn-star lips and power-bitch winged eyeliner the characters wear in the most recent episodes are hardly about self-expression, but about something else entirely: As Doniella Davy told Harper’s Bazaar earlier this month, “The motives for the character’s use of makeup in season three are to largely make money.”)

When Rue meets one of Laurie’s customers, Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a strip-club mogul fond of cowboy hats and the American frontier as an organizing metaphor, the everything-is-for-sale theme is amplified further. “Pussy? That thing between your legs? Got a mystic power,” he tells her. “So, I figured I’d stand me right by some pussy with my cash register. Ka-ching!” Rue takes to this teaching like the Torah, ogling the girls grinding for bills with a fervor that mimics that of a religious revelation. The strip club—“fully nude, always lewd”—is, she imagines, her “little slice of heaven,” and by the start of the second episode, she has secured a new job there.

There’s been some talk recently about the rightward turn in American entertainment, engineered to cater to Trump’s America. Taylor Sheridan’s TV shows (“Yellowstone,” “Landman”), the sexed-up Texas drama “The Hunting Wives,” and even reality series like “Members Only: Palm Beach” and “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” all flirt with MAGA aesthetics and politics. Levinson certainly likes to poke fun at performatively woke ideology: this season, Lexi is an assistant on a nighttime soap, whose showrunner, played by Sharon Stone, explains self-importantly to her writers that if they “get [Episode] 712 together,” they might even affect “what [viewers] do at the ballot box.” He also skewers any number of liberal positions, from gun control to feminism. Rue, who sells arms to some of Alamo’s clients, cheerily assures us that most of the weapons she’s peddling are “headed to Mexico.” And between Cassie’s photo-shoot shenanigans—Sweeney herself, of course, has become a right-wing fan favorite—and the many, many male-gaze-centered strip-club scenes, this season is Levinson’s most “Girls Gone Wild”-coded yet.

But unlike, say, Sheridan, who is interested in offering the down-home, traditional values of the Southwest as a positive alternative to coastal-élite liberalism, there’s no real upside to the debauched, unbridled world that Levinson presents. What Rue thinks might be her little slice of heaven actually becomes much closer to hell: a stripper named Tish overdoses on the traces of fentanyl in a dose of ecstasy she takes—likely the very same fentanyl Rue brought in her guts from Mexico to repay her debt; another stripper, spiralling into addiction after Tish’s death, is sent by Alamo to a dubious rehab facility, which looks more like a trafficking hub. In the season’s third episode, Cassie and Nate finally marry, and their technicolor suburban fantasia—fifty-grand floral arrangements and all—descends (spoiler here!) into a nightmarish bloodbath, when one of Nate’s lenders comes to exact his revenge, pounding Nate’s pretty-boy face into a pulp against the couple’s gaudy yellow carpet as Cassie shrieks self-pityingly. No happy trad wife she.

The hysterically, cartoonishly violent look and tenor here is very Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” meets Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers.” And indeed, this season is the show’s most cinematic yet, with Levinson trying on different American auteur hats, taking us from epic, John Ford-like vistas of the American West, against which Rue is dwarfed on her drug-smuggling missions, to Michael Mann-style images of Los Angeles at night, overlooked by Jules’s penthouse, all set to a score composed by Hans Zimmer. Just as these directors did, each in his own way and in his own time, Levinson is looking to engage with what America is, exactly. And let me tell you: right now, it’s really not looking great. ♦

We’re home. My daughter and I collapse into the apartment at the end of a winter Saturday, hauling groceries, boots trailing snowmelt. We have conquered the day; we have ventured out, gone roller-skating, completed our errands. Now it’s dark and I need to throw together some dinner.

My daughter enters the kitchen and stands there listlessly. “What can I do?” she says.

“That’s the whole question of life,” I say, putting water on to boil. It’s my stock answer, and this is my stock dinner, pasta.

She does the seven-year-old’s version of an eye roll, drawing out the word “Mom.” I suggest several activities she loves, but she rejects them all; she has a particular activity in mind. “What can I do?” means “Trance me with a screen.”

Here we are at the familiar crossroads, a place crowded with judgments, temptations, past failures. Though marked by the technologies of our moment, this crossroads, as the scholar Hannah Zeavin reminds us in her fascinating book “Mother Media,” is not a new one. For almost a century, since the dawn of mass screen entertainment, society has passed through waves of panic over media’s effects on children, which have often coincided with panics over the effects of various kinds of mothering. Mother, Zeavin writes, especially since the postwar period, has been understood as a medium herself, a transmitter to her child of wholesome or dangerous impressions, and part of a mother’s job has been to screen her child from “screen time”—a term popularized in the nineties and reflecting that period’s anxiety about the phenomenon of the child being raised by television.

Fair or not, the steady increase in the average child’s screen time over the past fifty years has been associated in the public imagination with women’s increased presence in the workforce, and with the thinly spread single mother. The ideal mother, a figure who continues to haunt us, is “always on,” always fully present and attentive to her child. Her use of screens as a surrogate for herself, to pacify and occupy her child, signals a lapse, and she had better choose her replacement wisely.

I was raised by television in more than one sense. First, like many in my generation, I was stamped so indelibly by screen media in my formative years that even now snippets of dialogue and advertising jingles surface inexplicably in the churn of my consciousness: “Inconceivable!”; “She could be a farmer in those clothes”; “When pizza’s on a bagel you can eat pizza anytime!” Most facts I learned in school have biodegraded into oblivion; these fragments hang around like microplastics.

Second, my mother recently retired after a thirty-seven-year career as one of the writers for “Sesame Street,” regarded by many as the gold standard of children’s television. We were a PBS household—no cable—and my mother’s main requirement for my screen time, while I was still under her jurisdiction in that department, was that the media be non-pandering, ideally speaking to adults as well as to children. A good kids’ show should, in the parlance of the “Sesame Street” writers’ room, “work on two levels.” Watching “Sesame Street” with my sister and me during our toddlerhood, my mother was struck by its deft integration of early childhood curriculum, egalitarian values, A-list guest artists, and sophisticated spoofing of other media. Watching with us was what inspired her to seek employment there.

I wish I felt inspired by the offerings on this streaming service my daughter and I are now staring into. There are so many options, so many shows; they seem to be tumbling into the room from teeming conveyor belts of fine purple pixelation. (Yes, I could plop my kid in front of great cinema. I’m sure many parents do, and aren’t we delighted for them. But there are times when she rejects out of hand anything that was not made for her own generation, like she can smell the demo targeting is past due.)

The C.G.I. of it all is a profound bummer. Even a halfway decent—if not educational—show, Netflix’s “Spirit Riding Free,” about three sweet best friends and their trusty horses saving the day on a comfy, race-blind frontier, is foiled in its occasional charm by the perfect low-poly uniformity of the trees, their cuboid green overstory threatening to engulf us in an element thinner than air. And the eyes. What lasting impressions are our children taking from all these empty eyes staring at them?

Is mere aesthetic shittiness grounds for disqualification? Mere mediocrity? My ex-husband and I, who live apart and share custody of our daughter, occasionally clash in our standards, but mostly we agree. It’s easy to agree, since the bulk of this stuff is real sinister garbage: those gee-whiz police dogs bounding “yip” into the cockpits of clean, new munitions. Even when the ethic of a show is not implicitly authoritarian, it is usually as empty as the eyes. A class of tweens at the “Unicorn Academy” must—what must they do? Be themselves! Be themselves harder!

“Be yourself,” sings a character in “Chunky Chimp,” a vapid kids’ movie to which Bandit Heeler, a dog, has taken his two daughters in the Australian cartoon “Bluey,” a now fully merchandized global phenomenon which as of this writing is the most-streamed show in the U.S., and which, to the dismay of many parents, quit while it was ahead. (“I always said I wouldn’t keep making the show if I thought I couldn’t make any new season as good as the last,” its creator, Joe Brumm, wrote to fans in late 2024, announcing the end of the series.)

Why, Bandit’s daughter Bluey asks him during a bathroom break at the movie theatre, is Chunky being told to “just be yourself”? What does that mean?

“Look,” Bandit says cheerfully, “It’s just monkeys singing songs, mate. Don’t think too hard about it.”

The moment, a wink to parents subjected to so many singing monkeys, is also a mark of how far in its dust “Bluey” leaves the rest of contemporary children’s programming. This show, which still prompts belly laughs from my daughter and me even after countless rewatches, meets and surpasses my mother’s bar. It does more than speak to parents and kids together; it is, in the eyes of many parents, a work of art, moving not only in its content but in its respect for our children’s discernment and integrity. In my house, it has become something like a co-parent.

“Bluey” invites us into one of the coziest television families of all time, the Heelers—Bandit, the father dog; Chilli, the mother dog; and their daughters, six-year-old Bluey and four-year-old Bingo, each of whom proceeds through the world, as we all do, in accordance with their own distinct style of play. Play is “Bluey” ’s organizing principle, and the show’s world bends to the logic of play. If Bluey uses a wand of asparagus to transform her father into a walrus, her father will behave exactly like a walrus until released from the spell. She must really mean the spell, though. The laws of play in “Bluey,” which, it is hinted, are better observed in the Heeler family than in most others, are that it be fun, flexible, and, most important, faithfully committed to. Once you’re playing a game, you must play within the rules, and play must take precedence over everything, including professional responsibilities. In the rare case that Chilli or Bandit begs off playing with their girls because they have work to do, they soon relent; work can wait.

If the Heelers excel at turning domestic life into a form of play, what makes this play possible is their family’s absolute security, its durability against anything life might throw at it. Toughness is a recurrent theme; when Bluey and Bingo balk at their parents kissing despite having gross morning breath, Chilli laughs and says, “If you’re gonna belong to someone, you better toughen up.” In the show’s culminating—and uncharacteristically cheesy—scene, Bandit marshals a great burst of strength to pull a “For Sale” sign from the ground outside the family home, preserving the Heeler hearth. If play is the show’s law, the infallible resilience of family structure is its moral core. We might say that “Bluey” ’s all-encompassing game of make-believe, the premise of all its play, is the fantasy of an unbreakable family, complete with ever-attentive parents. Let’s pretend!

Bandit and Chilli’s symphonic parenting is bittersweet to behold, at least for an unpartnered mother who might heretofore have heartily congratulated herself for simply getting us to the roller rink rather than spending the day toggling distractedly between screens and meals and unfinished art projects at home. Much ink has been spilled on the inferiority complex this pair of married dogs has given mere mortal caregivers—“I’m begging you,” "Kate Allen Fox writes" in McSweeney’s, “on behalf of a beleaguered nation of exhausted parents. Stop”—but what is their effect on younger viewers? Watching my daughter transfixed by and transported into the Heeler home, I wonder if, when the credits roll and she returns to our own familiar dyad, she experiences any sort of withdrawal. In “Bluey” ’s world, the word “divorce” is never uttered, but the show does have a token child of separation: Winton, the class clown and semi-pariah who fits the stereotype of the clingy, maladjusted product of a broken home. Winton’s classmates often avoid him, even run from him, on account of his being what Bluey calls a “space invader”; he’s always getting up in everyone’s grill. At one point he announces that his dad is “lonely all the time.” (At the end of the series, the writers pair Winton’s dad off with the mother of terrier triplets, the only other confirmedly single parent on the show, “fixing” the problem of separation.)

If screens are commonly enlisted to fulfill a care function, becoming a substitute family member, they are also early transmitters in our kids’ lives of what a “family” looks like. I don’t want to suggest that “Bluey” should have engaged in self-conscious demographic box-checking that might have been antithetical to its spirit of play. But choices, however incidental, about what kinds of domestic arrangements are shown and not shown on hugely popular children’s programs must strike their audiences in some kind of way. Is my daughter getting the message that divorce makes for annoyingly needy kids and sad parents? Might “Bluey” ’s traditional-family idyll cause children in any other kinds of circumstances to feel more alone than they might otherwise? What is the responsibility of such shows when it comes to representing marriage, parenting, “the family”?

In the nineteen-fifties, television had been touted by the likes of the parenting luminary Benjamin Spock and the prominent psychoanalyst Erik Erikson as potentially beneficial to children, but by the late nineteen-sixties the bloom was off the rose. TV had by now taken on the aspect of a public-health crisis; in 1972 the Surgeon General issued a report on its dangers not unlike the warning about cigarettes. As always, anxiety about screens was mixed up with judgments about “good enough” maternal presence, with the single mother, the working mother, the poor mother understood as especially reliant on TV to bridge her absences, producing the Gen X trope of the “latchkey kid.” This was a time when kids’ programming largely consisted of Saturday-morning cartoon fare: Road Runner flattening Wile E. Coyote with an anvil, Tom the cat getting a face full of dynamite. Absorptive, addictive, violent (and by then near-universal, with televisions flickering in ninety-five per cent of American homes), TV was officially a bad mom.

“Sesame Street” came onto the scene in 1969 with “a new set of questions,” Zeavin writes in “Mother Media”: “If television could miseducate, could it also be harnessed for good? . . . Could formal education exist on television?” With federal funding from the Head Start program, which aimed to redress inequity in early education, “Sesame Street” brought an unprecedented level of research to its work, engaging consultants like Chester Pierce, a psychiatrist and professor of education best known for coining the term “microaggression.” The father of a three-year-old daughter at the time “Sesame Street” first aired, Pierce was deeply concerned about how Black kids were being affected by media designed for “the universalized white child,” as Zeavin puts it. In 1965 the Moynihan Report had shored up the cultural phantasm of “the white family” by casting Black families as fatally incomplete, dominated by single mothers. “Sesame Street,” Pierce said, had not only an opportunity but a responsibility to counteract racial bias by addressing itself to Black children, depicting Black characters, Black leaders, Black life. When it débuted, “Sesame Street” was celebrated by many for its pioneering diversity—and was initially banned in Mississippi for showing kids of different races playing together.

“Sesame Street” ’s standing as a beloved cultural institution is, to my mind, well earned. Like all great children’s media, the show understood that nothing could be more philosophically serious, socially consequential, or deserving of close study than that ingenious technology for integrating reality we call “child’s play.” The “Sesame Street” Muppets gave millions of children, including me, an emotional education, making uncomfortable feelings—Grover’s crazed fear, Cookie Monster’s raging desire, Elmo’s helpless unknowingness—sites of play, and giving children a chance to be soothers and sources of wisdom to furry, bug-eyed ids. The show also distinguished itself in its willingness to tackle complex social and existential realities. In addition to exploring—both metaphorically and directly—racism, ableism, and other forms of prejudice in many episodes across many decades, “Sesame Street” was one of the earliest kids’ shows in the United States to grapple with mortality. In a famous 1983 episode written by Norman Stiles, the human cast member Gordon comes upon Big Bird walking backward with his head between his knees, looking pleased with this new perspective. “Why are you doing that?” Gordon asks. “Just because,” the Muppet placidly replies, capturing, in two words, the absurdist wisdom of the child at play. Later, Big Bird brings the adult cast members a portrait he has made of the grocery-store owner Mr. Hooper, a beloved original cast member played by Will Lee, who had died of a heart attack some months earlier. Big Bird wants to give Mr. Hooper his drawing; where is he? The show could have recast Mr. Hooper after Lee’s death, or invented a story about his character moving away. Instead, haltingly, some with tears in their eyes, the adults explain that Mr. Hooper is dead, which means he’s gone forever. “Why does it have to be this way?” Big Bird cries. “Give me one good reason!" The adults exchange uncertain looks. Finally Gordon steps forward. “It has to be this way . . . because,” he says, echoing Big Bird’s earlier explanation for doing a funny walk. “Just . . . because.” The most fundamental “Why?” leaves the grownups at a loss, and the reasoning they reach for is the child’s.

But “Sesame Street” also received criticism from some for claiming to speak to all children without reflecting the economic realities of many of their lives. (Zeavin relays an unforgettable take on Oscar the Grouch from the feminist activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes: “That cat who lives in a garbage can . . . should be out demonstrating and turning over every institution, even Sesame Street, to get out of it.”) Urie Bronfenbrenner, the founder of the Head Start program, lamented that the show, in failing to reckon with poverty, “disappeared through a manhole” the actual pain of childhood.

Looking back from our era of so much blankly enthused C.G.I. fizz, it’s striking, and gratifying, to hear someone complain of a kids’ show, even a great one, not being painful enough. To what extent can the nonrepresentation of pain cause pain? And how do we, as parents, decide how much pain to screen out and how much to allow into the frame?

In a 1981 episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” Fred Rogers raises the subject of divorce with a delivery man who becomes flustered and leaves. “I guess that’s something he doesn’t like to talk about,” a slow-walking, slow-talking Rogers says to his viewers, but “it is something that people can talk about.” In an intimate closeup, he explains that divorce is not the child’s fault, that divorce is a grown-up thing, that parents who don’t love each other anymore still love their children.

In another episode in that same season, Rogers introduces his friend Jeff, a wheelchair-bound child who explains that when he was a baby, he had a tumor that “broke the nerves to tell my hands and legs what to do.” In what must be the most moving few minutes of children’s television in history, Jeff and Mr. Rogers sing a song together called “It’s You I Like.” “The way you are right now, the way down deep inside you . . . not your fancy chair; that’s just beside you.” The two then discuss what to do when you feel blue. Jeff’s worries, Rogers explains to the camera after seeing his young friend off, are different from the worry that one’s parents might separate. It’s a juxtaposition that puts the latter, of all the misfortunes beyond a child’s control that a child’s soul shines through, into a certain wide-angle perspective, showing young viewers that kids face many kinds of struggles, and normalizing them.

Discounting a bizarre 1941 “Looney Toons” episode in which Daffy Duck’s wife takes him to court, no American children’s show had taken on divorce before this; Rogers was way ahead of the curve here. More than a decade later, in 1992, “Sesame Street” shot a story line about the divorce of Mr. Snuffleupagus’s parents, but after a test screening upset some preschoolers, producers pulled the episode. Its writer, Norman Stiles, who also wrote the “Farewell, Mr. Hooper” episode, later remarked that the team “felt safer” dealing with death than with divorce.

It would take “Sesame Street” twenty more years to address divorce in any substantive way, and even then it did so not on the show proper but in a 2012 DVD special produced by Sesame Workshop’s “Outreach” program. (“Sesame Street” also lagged in depicting other kinds of non-traditional family structures, not showing an openly gay couple until 2021.) In creating the 2012 divorce special, the writer Christine Ferraro tried to learn from the 1992 episode’s treatment of time. Where Stiles had shown the trauma of divorce in Snuffy’s present frame, Ferraro set it in the past, flashing back to the separation of the fairy puppet Abby Cadabby’s parents from a present in which she has adjusted to it. Abby used to have “a lot of big feelings” about her parents’ divorce, she tells us, but now she can confidently assure kids that everything will turn out O.K. This rendering of separation as an established premise to which a kid has at least begun acclimating is, I have noticed, a common approach.

One notable exception is the 2024 Netflix flop “Spellbound,” which takes a presently unfolding divorce as its main subject. The film is about a princess whose parents have been transformed into monsters (“like, actual monsters”), a shameful secret she must keep from her kingdom as she tries to figure out how to magic them back to their former, happily married human selves. The film’s standout song, “The Way It Was Before,” is no ice-castle power ballad but a poignant expression of the desire to go back in time. But there is no going back. The solution, in the end, is for the princess’s parents, voiced by Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem, to admit that they’re unhappy together and move forward into a new normal: separation is the spell that releases them from monstrosity.

It’s an apt metaphor, in a movie that tries to allow some of the real anguish of marital breakdown to seep through the candy-colored sheen of its animation. The princess’s monster parents are enormous, violent, and non-verbal, and only interested in their daughter when she brings them cake. They have no memory of who she is or of their former selves, and their gradual recovery of language has a nightmarish quality; at first, they babble like helpless babies, literalizing a toxic relationship’s loss of communication as well as a child’s feeling of being responsible for her parents’ coherence as a couple. The princess’s initial anger when the monsters finally transform back into humans and tell her they need to split up is rawer and more explosive than one generally sees in kids’ films.

The problem with “Spellbound”—which is the same problem I have encountered in my search for kids’ shows about divorce—is that, despite cameos from greats like Nathan Lane and Tituss Burgess, it’s not very good; the songs are middling, the plot sputters. Beggars can’t be choosers, so we watch it anyway. I appreciate, at least, the opportunity to reflect aloud on a rough analogy of my family’s circumstances. My daughter appreciates John Lithgow as a purple hamster.

Thinking about Norman Stiles’s comment that it felt “safer” to depict death than divorce, I was reminded of an episode from “Bluey” ’s first season: Bluey and Bandit are walking near their house when they come upon a badly wounded bird. Nestling it gently into a shoebox, they carry it to the vet, and learn, after a short wait, that the bird has died. Flummoxed, Bluey continues to check with her father about the meaning of this event. Is he sure the bird is gone? It’s definitely not coming back? Arriving home, she enlists her mother to pretend to be the vet in a reënactment of the experience. Chilli, who assumes that her daughter wants to play out a happier ending, announces that the bird has survived. No, Bluey wants the bird to die again in the game.

Divorce, to a child, is a kind of death, especially if she is old enough to have memories of parental togetherness. Where is the family unit that existed before? It is nowhere. Two roads have diverged in a wood, and she must find a way to take them both. Instead of the finality of bereavement, she faces—at least in cases of shared custody—a cryptic renewal. In a way, she meets her parents as though for the first time; they may have two distinct styles of homemaking, enforce different rules, serve her different kinds of food. She meets herself anew as well, noticing that with Dad she becomes, however subtly, a different child than she was with Mom, and vice versa. She may deploy different strains of her humor to make each laugh, press different buttons to make each angry. Transitions between the two parents (and selves, and lives) are widely considered one of the toughest aspects of divorce for a child—sites of recurrent loss and awkward morphing.

My co-parent and I remained close friends after separating, and so the family continued to spend time as a trio. I had thought this together time would comfort our daughter, showing her that although her parents lived apart, we would always be a family. But this was not her reaction. Her father and I would be hanging out in his kitchen, catching up on each other’s news, and our daughter would come in and begin, while giddily laughing, to separate our bodies, pulling one this way and the other that way. Or she would command us to go to separate rooms, or order one of us to leave the house. She seemed to be seeking some kind of mastery over her new circumstances not only by reënacting separation in various small ways but by enforcing it absolutely. The peas must not touch the potatoes. When she was with Dad, she seemed to delight in hiding from Mom’s face on the phone; when she was with Mom, she hid from Dad.

Clouded as I was by guilt and alarm, it took me some time to recognize that my daughter was processing the death of her parents’ marriage through a kind of play, testing its nature and meaning, experimenting with repeated exposure and outcome control. I was so used to regarding play as light and fun, it hadn’t occurred to me to think about how intuitively kids—and all of us—“play” with pain.

After talking with my daughter, I ended up revising my disappointment in “Bluey” ’s treatment of separation. As we were watching the second season again on my laptop in bed, I asked her whether she thought the show should include more about divorce, and she surprised me by saying that she considered Winton, Bluey’s classmate whose parents are separated, to be one of the show’s main characters, and a lovable one at that. We arrived at a scene in which Bluey is pretending to pilot a helicopter, flying her classmates wherever they want to go. Winton wants to go to his dad’s house, but he doesn’t know where it is. “I know he doesn’t live with my mum,” he says. The two kids search for his dad’s pool, and Bluey drops Winton from the sky into the deep end. It’s a quick exchange, easy to overlook, but it’s part of a larger sequence about the adaptive nature of good play; almost any circumstance that arises might be incorporated, including—and perhaps especially—a painful or confusing one.

“Things pop up that you can’t control,” Chilli says to Bluey in this same episode. “You just have to go with it.”

As a busy parent who stands weekly (O.K., more like daily) at the “What to Watch” crossroads, I continue to hope for children’s shows and movies as brilliant as “Bluey” which more closely reflect my daughter’s reality to her. In the meantime, I did find one that helped reflect it to me. The short film “Split: The Early Years” splices together candid interviews with twelve children of divorce, offering a glimpse into their various modes of processing the event. One child describes trashing his mother’s room when she first told him about the separation. Another says she has learned to meditate when anxious, yet another that she found it helpful to write down difficult feelings and then decide whether to keep the paper or rip it up.

After watching “Split” by myself, I went back and forth about whether to show it to my daughter. This was a “mother as medium” conundrum; what should I protect her from, and what could I let in? The children in “Split” express sadness, confusion, feelings of powerlessness, but also warmth, humor, and breathtaking wisdom. “Nobody’s perfect,” a floppy-haired boy who looks about eight years old rasps to the camera, “Nothing is perfect. Even if they make the most roundest circle in the world, it’s never perfect.” In the end, I decided to show my daughter the film. She was riveted, and I had the thought, while we heard from these children, many of whom were around her age, that when it comes to playing with pain, kids may have more to teach her than grownups do.

Of course, if you don’t have time to sit down and watch with your kid, and if darkness is coming on and dinner needs making and e-mail needs answering and nerves are wearing thin, you could also just say “Screw it” and press Play on what my daughter, sitting beside me on the couch as I write this, is watching, even if the story is, to paraphrase the literary critic Harold Bloom’s assessment, cliché-ridden, character-less, and depressingly dumbed down. “Harry Potter” may or may not be all those things, but, either way, at least here the perfect mother to whom we might be tempted to compare ourselves is, as writers of classic children’s tales have always known she should be, safely dead. ♦