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By 1983, Tom Arndt was a few years into a project that consumed most of his life: creating a photographic portrait of American culture. He had lived through the hippie era, and at the dawn of the nineteen-eighties he thought he detected something new. Arndt had travelled to New York to photograph the 1981 ticker-tape parade that celebrated the release of American hostages held in Iran, which had coincided with the Inauguration of President Ronald Reagan. He told me that he remembers thinking, “This is a new kind of patriotism. This is not anti-Vietnam protests, or the generation that I was part of. This is balls-out ‘God Bless America.’ ”

Arndt decided to follow the national mood wherever it led, making portraits that found a home not in the world of journalism but in that of fine art, on the walls of galleries and museums. He returned to the Midwest, where he had grown up, and set about documenting the lives of farmers, homeless people, Holocaust survivors, politicians. He was living in Minneapolis when he heard about something interesting happening in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn, in the suburb of Bloomington, and decided to drive over with his cameras, a pair of Contax RTSIIs. A television-news crew captured the scene. “The lure of the movies drew them in droves,” the reporter said. “They were all hoping to land an extra role in a new movie called ‘Purple Rain,’ starring Prince, the Minneapolis rock star who has achieved national prominence.”

“Purple Rain,” the film and the associated album, arrived the next year; combined, they established Prince as something more than a mere rock star. He was suddenly a national obsession, a polarizing figure who was transformed, over the decades, into a consensus favorite. Especially since his death, a decade ago this week, he has come to be widely and rightly regarded as one of the greatest figures in the history of popular music. But, on that day in Bloomington, Arndt encountered not a frenzied mob but a calm and quiet group, eager to be photographed by the people working for the film-production company, and willing, in some cases, to be photographed by him. (Arndt was careful to tell everyone that he had no connection to Prince.) He shot portraits for a few hours and then went home, feeling that they hadn’t turned out terribly well. “I did my best, and I didn’t think much of them,” he said. “If I had a delete button, I probably would have erased them—that’s why I’m grateful to be shooting film.”

He added the negatives to his voluminous collection and kept working, and didn’t even think to print contact sheets until last year, when he found himself curious about his afternoon among the “Purple Rain” hopefuls. He’d shot mostly closeups, emphasizing the faces and deëmphasizing the clothes, in hopes that the portraits would look timeless. But, when he looks at the images now, he is struck by how vividly they evoke 1983. “They are specifically anchored in that moment,” he said.

A number of Arndt’s subjects appear to be trying to dress like Prince, though this is not an easy assignment. On the record sleeve of his 1978 début album, “For You,” Prince poses shirtless in bed, with an acoustic guitar and his hair teased into an afro, like a seductive folk singer. But, in the years that followed, he borrowed from punk and New Wave, mixing jackets and trenchcoats with frills and lace and lingerie, slipping between styles and identities. The critic Nelson George, in an insightful and provocative book, “The Death of Rhythm & Blues,” published in 1988, wrote that not everyone enjoyed Prince’s slipperiness, and suggested that, by emphasizing racial ambiguity (for instance, through his “consistent use of mulatto and white leading ladies” in films and music videos), Prince “aided those who saw blackness as a hindrance in the commercial marketplace by running from it.” Nowadays, of course, no one questions Prince’s place in the pantheon of Black musicians, but in order to appreciate the magnitude of his imagination and his influence it’s important to remember how controversial he once seemed, and how confusing.

Arndt tried, above all, to be respectful of those young people gathered in the parking lot. “There were kids who were just in their underwear, and I didn’t photograph them,” he said. But his image of a young woman in hot pants, wielding a whip, captured the exuberant spirit of dress-up that predominated that day. The words “Prince” and “Purple Rain” evidently summoned forth a wide range of aspiring actors, and a wide range of styles; taken as a whole, they constitute a jumbled-up tribute to a performer who loved to keep people guessing. To one guy, dressing the part meant a sleek, light-colored sports coat. To another, it meant a fresh Jheri curl and a popped-collar jean jacket—state-of-the-art R. & B. mixed with old-fashioned rock and roll. One woman epitomizes punk chic in a beret and a spiked necklace. Two others are carefully layered and accessorized, perfecting the kind of theatrical eighties glamour that more or less disappeared with the end of the decade.

At one point in the afternoon, Arndt entered the hotel to find a bathroom, and bumped into Prince himself, accompanied by his bodyguard Charles (Big Chick) Huntsberry, who made Prince look even tinier than he was. But mainly he remembers the afternoon as a low-key get-together, despite the fashion. He has watched “Purple Rain” more than once, and never recognized anyone from the parking lot, which felt less like a would-be movie set and more like a local hangout. “I think that these portraits are very Minnesota,” he told me. “It’s not that they’re humble. They’re just quieter. If this was in Brooklyn, this casting call, it would be different.”

One night in August, 2024, I sat on my bed in Los Angeles with three laptops and an iPhone, hoping to buy tickets for the Oasis reunion tour—the band’s first live venture since it abruptly broke up, in 2009. As it neared 1 A.M., I got in position, hovering my fingers over track pads. I’d selected a different tour date on every device, thinking I’d have better luck if I spread out the requests across several cities. When Ticketmaster’s website spit back my place in the queues, two of them (Manchester’s Heaton Park and London’s Wembley Stadium) appeared unquestionably hopeless, judging from the tens of thousands of people ahead of me. The queues inched along in the course of a few anguished minutes. Then seat maps miraculously popped up on two devices: I had somehow wriggled my way through thousands-strong lines for the tour opener in Cardiff, Wales, and the then final date in Edinburgh, Scotland. Desperate, I attempted to snap up four reasonably priced seats in either stadium, barely registering where I was clicking. I’d select seats and hit “checkout,” as fast, it seemed, as humanly possible, only for the site to tell me that they were no longer available. With every second that elapsed, my chances of securing anything tanked further.

Emotional whiplash is a feature, not a bug, of the modern ticket-buying experience. In recent years, purchasing concert, theatre, and sporting-event tickets has morphed into a byzantine humiliation ritual, with opaque fees—“service,” “order processing”—often tacking on up to twenty per cent more to base ticket prices. As the cost of living and inflation have surged, these types of live events have increasingly become playgrounds for élite V.I.P. experiences, with ordinary people shelling out the equivalent of a rent payment to catch a glimpse of their favorite artist.

Exasperated fans have long directed their ire at the ticketing platforms themselves, particularly Ticketmaster and Live Nation, two live-entertainment-industry behemoths that merged in 2010, when Live Nation, a concert promoter, artist manager, and venue owner bought the ticket-sales site Ticketmaster. The corporation’s management arm represents hundreds of artists, including some of the biggest stars on earth, and offers musicians incentives which include performing at the venues it owns. Reports indicate that it also commands exclusive contracts at fifty-three out of sixty-eight of the largest arenas in the U.S., which, in 2022, raked in eighty-three per cent of gross revenue across all arenas in the country (more than $2.4 billion). Every road, it seems, leads back to Live Nation-Ticketmaster.

Last Wednesday, the jury in a federal antitrust case found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster had operated as a monopoly, a decision that vindicated long-suffering ticket buyers. “I can’t wait for the judge to get hit with a $45 ‘Verdict Convenience Fee,’ a $30 ‘Gavel Processing Fee,’ and an $80 ‘Digital Print-at-Home Ruling Surcharge,” a Reddit user cracked. (After the verdict, Live Nation said in a statement, “The jury’s verdict is not the last word on this matter. Pending motions will determine whether the liability and damages rulings stand.”) But the verdict also confirmed something that fans were already intimately acquainted with: dysfunctional ticketing systems exploiting their passion. Therein lies the paradox: these maddeningly bureaucratic platforms have tapped into a business so lucrative—the creation of high-profile communal rites—that it literally has no bottom.

Surprisingly, even as consumers are made to jump through more and more hoops by ticketing platforms, they appear willing to further open up their wallets. The sadism of this dynamic surfaced during a shocking moment in trial proceedings last month, when attorneys presented exchanges between Live Nation employees: ticketing workers boasted about how live-entertainment fans were “so stupid” to pay the astronomical fees that the corporation had set for events. “Robbing them blind baby,” one wrote in an internal Slack message. “That’s how we do.” (In the trial, Live Nation argued that these were private, “irrelevant” remarks and thus should be excluded as evidence in the proceedings.) Last year, Live Nation raked in $25.2 billion in total revenue—as much as a nine-per-cent jump from 2024.

Ticketmaster was founded, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, as a computerized seat-locater and ticket generator, and went on later to share a cut of its discretionary “service fees” with regional venue promoters, as a way to secure their business. In 1991, Ticketmaster had become a big enough player that it acquired Ticketron, then its fiercest competitor. Ten years later, it hashed out a ticketing deal with the broadcasting company Clear Channel; in 2005, Clear Channel’s entertainment unit spun off as Live Nation. (The Wall Street Journal described how Live Nation was “widely viewed as a drag on the parent company’s performance.”) Ticketmaster’s contract with Live Nation expired in 2008. But, rather than competing with each other, the two joined forces. The Department of Justice cleared the way for the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger the following year.

In 2010, during one of the heavyweight speeches that the SXSW music conference, in Austin, Texas, often presents as part of the festival, Christine A. Varney, the former Assistant Attorney General for the D.O.J.’s antitrust division, stressed that the government had rigorously investigated the Ticketmaster-Live Nation deal before green-lighting it. “I understand that people view Ticketmaster’s charges, and perhaps all ticketing fees in general, as unfair, too high, inescapable, and confusing,” she said. “I also understand that consolidation has been going on in the industry for some time, and the resultant economic pressures facing local management companies and promoters. Those are meaningful concerns, but many of them are not antitrust concerns. If they come from a lack of effective competition, then we hope to treat them as symptoms as we seek to cure the underlying disease.”

In 2017, the BBC program “Backstage Pass” followed the former Oasis band member Liam Gallagher around at a few of his solo shows. One video clip showed Gallagher—a shaggy Gen X-er known for his crotch-forward gait and penchant for wearing parkas zipped up practically to his eyeballs—preparing himself a cup of tea backstage. In Oasis’s nineties heyday, Gallagher explained, he had four people to make his pre-show tea, including “a little geezer doing the kettle.” Not so much anymore. “No one buys records these days,” he said. “Now you gotta do it yourself . . . ’cause these fucking little smartasses download fucking tunes for nish,” meaning zilch. Pausing briefly to continue stirring his drink, he added, “Then they wonder why there’s no real rock-and-roll stars around.”

Gallagher’s profane monologue went viral on account of its absurdity—four people on payroll to brew a single cup of tea? But the rocker’s screed contained a truth, one that has substantially shaped the contemporary ticket-buying panopticon. After listeners drifted away from buying physical releases such as CDs and vinyl, starting in the two-thousands, touring has become a critical means for artists to earn their incomes.

A sobering Citi report noted that in 2017, the same year that Gallagher raged about his tea, the music industry generated forty-three billion dollars in revenue, of which artists saw only twelve per cent, mostly from touring. Citing a Billboard report, Business Insider noted that U2, the most handsomely paid group that year, saw about ninety-five per cent of their income come from touring in 2017. Present-day streaming giants such as Spotify pay cents per stream—a pro-rata system that overwhelmingly benefits the artists raking in the highest number of total listens. The rise of streaming has compounded the importance of touring for artists—if groups can afford to tour at all.

The iridescent glare of social media has further turbocharged the concert industry’s dominance. In general, fans posting online, in 2026, has become a smorgasbord of aspirational boasting, in a turn away from a more modest form of life-style exhibitionism once derided as “humblebragging.” And the ubiquity of posts that take viewers on experiential journeys—such as “come with me” videos popularized by influencers on TikTok—has accelerated the feeling that one doesn’t exist in the world, digitally speaking, if one isn’t physically present at Justin Bieber’s Coachella set and documenting it on one’s phone.

We are living in a post-COVID culture, and since the world began reopening for mass gatherings in 2021, fans’ desire to partake in experience-driven travel has fuelled the demand for live events. In turn, the live-music industry has rocketed to revenues greater than anyone had imagined.

Back in my West Coast bedroom in August, 2024, I continued wrestling with the Ticketmaster seating charts. Why was I willing to go to such lengths for a concert lasting two hours? Yes, I yearned to be walloped by Oasis’s meaty nineties riffs, but that didn’t explain my demented inclination to put myself through this stress. Rather, I had become possessed by the impossibility of this cultural landmark—in which the two feuding Gallagher brothers had decided to finally quash their rivalry and perform shimmering music together again. The chance to witness the reunion had stoked my worst impulses: an irrational fear of missing out, a willingness to overextend myself financially, a penchant for annoying my then fiancé—now husband,—by adopting the band’s familiar turns of phrase (i.e., “maybeh,” “Biblical”).

Suddenly, Ticketmaster prompted me to enter my credit-card information. I had less than five minutes to choose the Oasis gig in Cardiff or Edinburgh. Considering the Gallagher brothers’ infamous history of holding grudges, I wasn’t entirely optimistic that the band would be able to stay together through Edinburgh, but they could probably keep it together for the début. Cardiff it was. Five hundred and thirty-four dollars later, four tickets for the inaugural show at Principality Stadium landed in my inbox. I dashed off a text to my brother, a fellow Oasis head, that I’d secured us and our partners four tickets to see them in a year’s time: “We’re going to the first gig lads!!!!!!”

I had bested truly dubious statistics: fourteen million people worldwide had tried to snag tickets for this tour. This outsized interest in Oasis had prompted Ticketmaster to employ “dynamic pricing,” which increases fees commensurate to real-time demand. (Oasis later said that they hadn’t consciously opted into dynamic pricing, and that it created an “unacceptable experience” for fans; when they announced dates in the U.S., South America, and Asia, the band’s team said that dynamic pricing would not be employed for those shows.) I was struck by a variable response to gouging: dynamic pricing had sparked a far bigger outcry abroad than in the U.S. If anything, other Americans I spoke with seemed pleasantly surprised with the cost of Oasis tickets across the pond versus what they’d pay closer to home, not unlike Swifties travelling for the European leg of the Eras Tour for a fraction of the price. Navigating extortionate ticketing systems in the name of experience has, apparently, become routine.

Efforts to curb Ticketmaster extend back to the nineties, when the grunge band Pearl Jam took on the ticketing platform in an effort to keep service fees down to ten per cent, on tickets costing no more than eighteen dollars. Ticketmaster, wanting to charge more, refused; Pearl Jam, then one of the highest-grossing bands in the U.S., cancelled their tour, a partnership with Ticketmaster. The band filed a complaint with the Justice Department alleging that Ticketmaster had acted as a monopoly, with little recourse for those trying to operate outside of it. Pearl Jam did not win the fight, but their case illuminated Ticketmaster’s behind-the-scenes tactics, particularly the exclusive contracts that make up the backbone of its business model.

Other artists, including Bruce Springsteen, have tussled with the concert leviathan. In 2010, Ticketmaster settled a Federal Trade Commission complaint alleging that the platform had used “deceptive bait-and-switch tactics” to drive Springsteen fans away from Ticketmaster’s face-value offerings and instead to its resale site, TicketsNow, which sold tickets at up to four times the original price. (Customers were refunded these inflated surcharges, and its secondary-resale sites were disbanded.) In 2022, several Swifties filed lawsuits against Live Nation, including one alleging that the company had allowed bots to crowd the general ticket sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, thus prohibiting fans from buying face-value tickets. (Ticketmaster cited a “staggering number of bot attacks” and unprecedented demand as the reasons for the snafu.)

The U.S. government then opened an investigation into the Swift ticket disaster, efforts which, in part, set the stage for the present-day antitrust trial. Thirty-nine states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government joined a lawsuit claiming that Live Nation had elbowed out practically all its competitors and stuck consumers with higher fees, going on to command eighty-six per cent of the total market for live entertainment. Live Nation disputed these charges, but conditionally settled with the D.O.J. in March, agreeing to pull back on service fees and pay a fine of two hundred and eighty million dollars. But the states decided to move forward with the trial, thus resulting in last week’s verdict.

Music-industry advocates and the public reacted with elation. “This is incredible legitimacy added to what I think a lot of people have thought are just a bunch of hippies and hipsters shouting about the corporation for the past year,” Scott Mohler, the executive director of the Maine Music Alliance, said in an interview with NPR. What comes next is murkier. Assuming the verdict stands, the parent company will likely have to pay damages, and perhaps divest from exclusive ticketing contracts at various venues. Yet the states’ ultimate goal—to dissolve Live Nation and Ticketmaster altogether—feels like a steep ask in a regulatory climate that’s historically friendly to such giants. The company has said that it intends to contest the decision. The pending March settlement, which would also involve the company divesting from up to thirteen U.S. amphitheatres, was described by Stephen Parker, the executive director of the National Independent Venue Association, in an interview with Rolling Stone, as not “even significant enough to call it a slap on the wrist.”

Moreover, it seems doubtful that the resolution will meaningfully bring down ticket prices, at least in the short term. Nothing about touring is becoming less expensive, and numerous past victories have not led to long-standing structural reform. In late March, the Guardian reported that, after a December, 2024, crackdown from the Federal Trade Commission stipulating more transparency behind unexpected “junk fees,” tacked onto hotel and live-event ticket charges—like Live Nation’s processing fees—Live Nation instead adjusted other fees to “offset the revenue loss,” according to a 2025 e-mail that Ticketmaster sent to an arena in Arizona. Yet scores of working- and middle-class people, perhaps spreading out payments across various credit cards and “buy now, pay later” services, continue to buy tickets.

For my part, I saved for nearly a year to travel abroad for the Oasis show. The more responsible move would have been to go down to the record store and pick up, say, Oasis’s LP “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory,” going for a small percentage of what I paid for a ticket. Then again, I wasn’t thinking of that in Wales, my voice cracking as I howled along with thousands of other fans to the rapturous anthem “Supersonic”: “I’m feeling supersonic, give me gin-and-tonic / You can have it all, but how much do you want it?” ♦

The latest in the Trumpite series of proposed oversized buildings—the previous one being a ballroom where the East Wing of the White House once stood, a project that a federal judge temporarily halted last Thursday, until an appeals court put his preliminary injunction on hold on Friday—is a so-called triumphal arch, though exactly what triumph so needs an arch is unclear. Standing at two hundred and fifty feet high, presumably for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it would be more than twice as tall as the Lincoln Memorial, views of which it would block from its proposed site, near Arlington National Cemetery—where it would also overwhelm the simple graves of the fallen soldiers.

The plans for the arch were preliminarily approved last week by the Commission of Fine Arts, which is now completely inhabited by Donald Trump’s appointees, the previous members having stepped down or been fired for the crime of competence last year. The arch, designed by Nicolas Charbonneau, who leads Harrison Design’s Sacred Architecture Studio, in Washington, D.C., will feature a Las Vegas-style overload of gilded iconography, including a winged Lady Liberty, eagles, and, unusually for an American monument, lions. (Why not Siegfried and Roy’s tigers?)

When asked by a reporter last year whom the arch would be for, Trump said, “Me,” so, really, it might more properly be called the Arch of Trump. But there is, as always with Trump, a great deal of defiance and sheer Rodney Dangerfield-style obnoxiousness implicit in the plan. It is an act of mischief as much as of monument-making. It is a very arch arch.

Yet, bizarrely, given Trump’s recent, loud contempt for France’s military spirit and his assaults on the French for refusing to arrive, late and unconsulted, in his war on Iran, his arch is modelled on Parisian examples. The most famous of these, the Arc de Triomphe, which was originally Napoleonic in impulse but was very long-winded in execution, is only the largest. There is a better, far more handsome example of the type in the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, between the Tuileries and the Louvre, which is an actual Napoleonic monument, having been completed during Napoleon’s reign. The four ancient bronze horses that he stole from St. Mark’s Basilica, in Venice—which the Venetians had previously stolen from Constantinople, where they had been in residence after being taken earlier most probably from somewhere in classical Greece—once stood atop it, but they had to be returned after Napoleon’s fall, a roundelay of looting that perhaps suggests the dubious nature of all such triumphs.

The Arc de Triomphe that everyone knows sits on the Étoile, now called the Place Charles de Gaulle, and, though it was originally commissioned after the successful Napoleonic battle of Austerlitz, in 1805, construction on it was halted for a long time by the not insignificant fact that Napoleon had started losing battles about as decisively as they have ever been lost. Only decades later, when the agony of those defeats had abated a little and had been replaced by some retconned glory, which brought Napoleon’s body back to its current tomb in the Invalides, was the arch completed, as a consolation prize for disgruntled imperialists. Both these arches, along with a few others in Paris, were, of course, based on Roman examples, of which the still surviving Arch of Septimius Severus is the most imposing, celebrating now forgotten Roman victories over Parthia—an empire that was partly located, rather notably, in what is now Iran.

But what’s really wrong with Trump’s arch isn’t something that is always wrong with victory arches but, rather, something that is always wrong with all the architecture of autocracy. It lacks the modesty of intelligent self-scruple; it is not the style but the scale that is most objectionable. It would be the largest such structure in the world, and its bigness is its point. It may be noted that Hitler wanted to build an arch in his imagined new Berlin, his “Germania,” also modelled on the Arc de Triomphe, and also bigger than any other arch, and also big for the sake of bigness alone.

There is all the difference in the world between the sublimation of self into a heritage and the amplification of the ego into a monument. In the center of Rome today, the gigantic glaring white monument to Victor Emmanuel II is almost universally regarded as a kind of kitsch joke, not because he wasn’t, in his way, an admirable king, who presided over the unification of Italy, but because the implicit insecurity of the then newborn Italian state is so evident in its appearance. (It even includes winged figures like the one that appears on the top of the Trump arch.) Bombast is as evident in architecture as it is in speech. If you really believe in something, including yourself, you don’t need to sing its praises quite so loudly.

The difference between classical choices and arbitrary colossalism is as important as the distinction between political premises and policy differences, and just as easily gets confused. With Trump, the scale and the haste and the egotism with which a thing is approached is not a side issue. It is the issue that capsizes all others. There is an uncrazy argument to be made for calling for the removal of the brutal Iranian regime. But there is no uncrazy argument to be made for choosing to go to war without a plan for the day after. There are uncrazy, if unsound, arguments for protectionist tariffs, but none for a policy of tariffs by tantrum. In the same way, when it comes to designing public buildings, there is a reasonable case to be made for classical grace but no rational case to be made for gigantism for its own sake, and for triumphalism without a triumph. “Me” is not a funny answer to a question of purpose. It is a graceless one. But Trump’s urge is toward gigantism, not grace. This is as true about his ballroom, which would measure some ninety thousand square feet, as it is about the proposed arch. It is, simply, un-American. It is even, in its derivative way, un-French, since the Parisian instances are, at least, right-sized for their place and their purpose. If it were ever to be built, future generations would dream of its demolition. Its injury to the democratic spirit is too large to contemplate, and would be too hard to look past, even from a distance. ♦

For many years, Libby Gelman-Waxner, then an assistant buyer in juniors’ activewear, moonlighted for Premiere magazine and Entertainment Weekly as the world’s most beloved and irresponsible movie critic. Now she’s been coaxed out of retirement to make her mark in online criticism, at the urging of her close personal friend, the novelist and New Yorker contributor Paul Rudnick.

As a deputy associate in designer activewear at Amazon, specializing in distressed-denim-with-stretch, I keep my eye out for cultural trends. My new favorite genre is Rich White Women with Emotional Problems in Peril on Streaming Shows. Examples include Nicole Kidman as a successful romance novelist with a shady past in “The Perfect Couple,” Nicole Kidman as a beautiful therapist married to a questionable man in “The Undoing,” Nicole Kidman as an abused wife with beachfront property in “Big Little Lies,” and Nicole Kidman as a possibly unethical therapist in “Nine Perfect Strangers.” Kidman is fabulous in all of these projects, because she’s always impeccably dressed, deeply charismatic, and sometimes seems to change wigs in the middle of an onscreen conversation.

While Kidman rules the field, up-and-comers include Julianne Moore as a wealthy cult leader in “Sirens,” and Clare Danes, who’s played a tormented C.I.A. operative in “Homeland,” a tormented lesbian memoirist in “The Beast In Me,” and a tormented show-biz agent in the truly great “Fleischman Is in Trouble.” Danes is an extraordinary actress who welcomes the most visceral challenges and the most harrowing breakdowns—she’s the grittier Bette Davis to Kidman’s shimmering Joan Crawford.

Here are the rules of these shows: first of all, the leads must own a stunning second home in either a Hampton or on Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, along with an expansive place in Manhattan. There must be many rooms in these residences, with Nancy Meyers-esque open-concept kitchens, bedrooms with tufted headboards, bathrooms the size of Pfizer laboratories with dressing areas, and, of course, wraparound decks and columned porches with stunning views of assorted oceans and harbors. It’s only possible to cope with a splintering marriage and ungrateful, cross-addicted children if there’s at least one cupola with a winding staircase, overlooking a pea-gravel drive with enough square footage for a fleet of BMWs. I don’t want to see anyone suffer in a studio apartment or even a colonial. In “The Watcher,” Naomi Watts, as a gifted ceramicist, is renovating her estate, which may be haunted, presumably by someone Martha Stewart beheaded because the topiaries were ragged.

Next, our leading ladies must have attracted the dreamiest if often corrupt husbands, played by the likes of Hugh Grant, Kevin Bacon, Bobby Cannavale, Liev Schreiber, and Alexander Skarsgård. These handsome galoots may cheat on their spouses or worse, but this allows the women to smolder in drifting chiffon. Their children are either troubled or spoiled, and remain largely interchangeable—they exist to not appreciate their stunning, tightly wound moms. (“You have plenty of time for your millions of followers, but not even five minutes for me!”) If a child is under ten years old, they will be coddled and protected from danger, like homeschooled Birkin bags. The women rarely have close friends, only rival hostesses and often down-market sisters. In “The Better Sister,” Jessica Biel reckons with the slutty, drunken Elizabeth Banks invading her Hamptons abode, while in “Sirens,” Julianne Moore copes with a pop-in by the slutty, drunken Meghann Fahy (one of her many staff members’ siblings). These bad girls serve as foils, waking up at 7 A.M. after blurting long-buried family secrets and passing out on the manicured lawn. Banks and Fahy are sensational, and both get to smoke even after they’ve been told not to because the smell might infest the chintz drapes in the breakfast room.

The plots of these shows usually center on a murder, which occurs not so much to end a human life as to inconvenience our star, who must postpone a brunch or a media event to conceal an inconvenient corpse. Bloody, mutilated bodies are often discovered as our heroines are returning alone, after midnight, from a museum fund-raiser, causing them to kneel in an evening gown to ascertain the victim’s identity, and then burn their now blood-stained Dior. During the next few days, they are forced to speak with various detectives, who are either jealous townies, grizzled veterans, or potential new love interests—I’m not sure why Dick Wolf hasn’t done a “Law & Order: Amagansett.”

Plot twists abound, abetted by wardrobe changes from riding attire to peignoirs, as the women receive mysterious, threatening texts from unknown sources, causing the actresses to attempt to furrow their unlined brows and snap at their nosy neighbors: “Abigail, I need you to go home now.” It’s understood that there’s nothing more difficult than being a successful editor, therapist, or author, even with a stash of pill bottles in a wicker basket beside an opulent floral arrangement. These modern-day warrior goddesses are being tested by lesser creatures, including personal assistants pressuring them to finalize dates for Paris or Ibiza (“where you can finally take some time for yourself”).

The final, climactic episode of each show will include past crimes exposed (“I was an escort—your mother was a paid escort!”), homicides avenged (“Did you really think you’d get away with strangling our child’s nanny once she’d rejected you?”), and scores settled (“Yes, detective, I shot my husband, and there’s not a jury in the world that’ll convict me—at least not a jury with any women on it.”). The conclusions can be glamorously ambiguous, as our dames stride from their shingle-style mansions and board hulking S.U.V.s, to ferry them to the ferry to the mainland, and from there to a private jet, for a future free of sneering spouses who’ve been suitably handcuffed.

You may be asking, “But, Libby, you’re an accomplished woman of Manhattan—do these stories represent your life?” Let me respond by saying that my life is exactly like these shows, only with crumpled bags of sweet-and-savory popcorn in every room, and me occasionally wearing stained sweatpants to retrieve FedEx boxes from my apartment-building lobby. I’m hopelessly addicted to these shows because they’re upscale soaps with A-list casts and art direction to die for. Plus, there’s usually a loyal housekeeper insisting, “You look so beautiful, Miss Catherine. Would you like me to stay late tonight? It’s no problem.” The rich folks are besieged by scandals and unwelcome trips to the local precinct, but the women are rarely guilty of anything other than poor judgment in third husbands, and they emerge vindicated, with their book sales intact. This is satisfying because in a real world gone genuinely mad, we need to keep our Oscar winners safe and well lit.

These shows are the current equivalent of what were once called “women’s pictures,” meaning tales with richly developed characters, complex story lines, and few intergalactic laser battles. (The warfare is limited to face-offs between younger mistresses and proud matriarchs in waterfront restaurants.) In other words, these programs offer actresses real opportunities as well as scenes in which they’re seated at their dressing tables putting on diamond earrings while coping with a situation involving a DNA test. I like to think that when Kidman or Danes encounter unknown callers on their phones that they hope it’s me, sending them memes of Emmy Awards in a new category called Best Waking Up with Hair Perfectly Arranged on the Pillow. Without these shows, I’d be left only with all those docudramas about serial killers, where nobody ever places crystal pitchers of freshly squeezed juice and platters of toast points on the quartz-topped kitchen island. ♦