Required Watching

Baz Luhrmann has made six feature films. Every single one is about the same thing — a person of extraordinary natural talent trapped inside a world that wants to commodify and contain that talent, expressed through maximalist visual language and music as emotional truth. EPiC, his first documentary, is the purest version of that argument he's ever made — because this time the subject is real, the footage is found, and the most interesting creative decision Luhrmann has ever made was to get completely out of the way. This episode makes the case for EPiC as the best thing in Luhrmann's filmography, explains why that's the argument his entire career was building toward, and asks what it means that the most maximalist director alive found his greatest work in restraint.

Ten days. Ten episodes. This is the one where everything lands. Kokuho is a fictional film about a kabuki performer that tells the truth about what becoming an artist costs. EPiC is a documentary that refuses to be a documentary and presents Elvis at the peak of his powers with no mediation. The 2022 Elvis biopic has Austin Butler giving a career-defining performance inside a form that couldn't contain what it was trying to say. Three films about extraordinary artists. Three completely different formal approaches. And a structural argument about why the biopic — the most commercially reliable form for telling stories about artists — is almost constitutionally incapable of telling the truth about them. This is the synthesis.

In October 2025, I was alone in Hiroshima. I wandered into a kabuki theater not knowing what kabuki was, and watched a performance of Princess Takiyasha. I didn't speak the language well enough to follow the dialogue. I followed every second of it anyway. Months later I watched Kokuho — Lee Sang-il's three-hour epic about kabuki's bloodline system, the outsider who transcends it, and what it costs — and something clicked. This episode is about the film, the director who made it, and the specific irony of Japan's highest-grossing live-action film of all time being made by someone Japan has never fully claimed as its own.

Everyone came to Bong Joon-ho through Parasite. Which means almost everyone is watching his career backwards — and missing the blueprint. Memories of Murder, his second film, contains every formal and political move he would spend the next seventeen years refining. This episode goes deep into the film most Western audiences still haven't fully understood: the political satire hiding inside the procedural, the tonal architecture that makes you laugh and then takes the laugh away, the final shot that became more devastating in 2019 than it was in 2003. And the specific things you miss when you watch this film without the cultural context it was made in.

Yesterday's episode made the case that Western TV pilots lie — that they're persuasion documents built for commissioners rather than honest first chapters built for audiences. Today is the answer. J-drama structures its first episode like a complete short film — establishing emotional register before plot, tone before event, the specific texture of who these people are before anything happens to them. This episode explains the structural reason why, what it produces in the shows that follow, and why it creates a fundamentally different contract between audience and story.

The TV pilot has one job: make you come back. The problem is that job has become structurally disconnected from the show that follows. Pilots front-load everything — spectacle, mystery, emotional hook — in ways that make for compelling first hours and then have nothing left to sustain the series behind them. This episode makes the structural case for why the pilot format is lying to you, which pilots told the truth, and what the ones that lied reveal about how Western TV gets made.

Shoplifters won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2018. The reviews were glowing. The words "found family" and "poverty" appeared in almost all of them. And most of them described a film that is significantly less interesting than the one Kore-eda actually made. This episode makes the case that Western criticism landed on the warmth and missed the argument — and that the argument, which is cold and specific and directed at the Japanese state, is the reason the film is essential.

The British film industry produces diversity reports. It has standards, targets, tick-box initiatives, and annual announcements about progress. And the structural situation for Black filmmakers — in development, in commissioning, in creative control — has barely moved. This episode isn't another recitation of the numbers. It's about what the numbers can't capture: the specific texture of how exclusion works in a system that has learned to perform inclusion without delivering it. And what it looks like to decide not to wait.

Somewhere in the British TV development process, the logline became the product. Not the story. Not the characters. The pitch. The elevator concept that sounds clean in a commissioning meeting and then struggles to hold together past episode two. This episode makes the case that British TV has built a development culture that selects for ideas that are easy to explain — and what that's costing us in the actual television being made.