Best of 2025, so far, part two: watching for a post-partisan age

Part Two: Movies and shows I love, that I hope you will, too

This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.

Below, I share with you my favorite post-partisan movies and shows so far this year. But first, a brief digression on why we need stories, what happens in our brains when we watch a story on screen, and why we need to know all about that if we care about cultural repair.

I. A short digression on why we need stories

Every night, after dinner and washing up, I watch something. The television never goes on before then, but it definitely goes on at that point. My eyes are tired and so is my mind. Reading with intent isn’t happening. But I'm still hungry for that little something sweet, a story sorbet to wind down the day.

That’s no surprise: We're all hungry for story, all the time. Evolution demands it. We may think stories exist to entertain us, but that is like saying that sex exists to feel good — when in reality, sex feels good so that humans will exist. Nature wants us to have sex so that we will reproduce and perpetuate the species, and so nature has made sex very sexy indeed.

Stories exist for similar reasons. Stories show us how to live — and they are entertaining because nature wants us to be eager students of survival. Think about it: Without stories, we would have a very limited frame of reference. We would live narrow, solipsistic lives, and we wouldn't share much information at all. Our societies would be stunted. We would waste so much time discovering things other people have already figured out, endlessly reinventing the practical wheel, not to mention the philosophical one. Civilization would not evolve.

With stories, however, we can, without risk, walk through countless worlds and encounter countless kinds of people dealing with countless kinds of problems. The more stories we consume, the wider our scope of virtual experience. The wider our story experience, the more easily we can amass ideas about how best to navigate life, while also painlessly digesting hard truths about how not to live. That's a huge timesaver, not to mention lifesaver. Storytelling is a virtual reality machine that allows us to learn from imaginary lives as if they were our own. When humans invented stories, we basically invented a fast-forward button for swiftly and safely acquiring the wisdom we need to stay alive and live well. We still blunder around and make all sorts of mistakes all the time. That’s the human condition. Still, we do so much better with story than without.

Stories teach without teaching, and they do it on two levels. First, we can learn from characters, who are like crash test dummies for real life. They make decisions that then inform our own, and mistakes that show us what to avoid. Second, we learn from writers, who, in going to the trouble to record and share their thoughts, are giving us a present in the form of their mind. When we read the words of another, the contents of their head take up residence inside our own— even if the writer is long dead, even if they were a very different person, living in a distant time, or a culture very different from ours. The mind-meld of reading is one of the most intimate, if unremarked, forms of communion that there is.

All of this is to say that when stories teach us how to live, they teach us how to connect with others across differences — of time and space, of race, sex and gender, of culture, politics, and belief. Story at its best is inherently a technology for bridging human divides and bringing us together.

Watching TV with Dad and brother, 1973.

II. A second short digression: your brain on story

Researchers at Ohio State University wanted to see what happens when the brain “gets lost” inside a story. So they put Game of Thrones fans in fMRI machines and watched their brains while they read cards with the names of characters — Bronn, Catelyn Stark, Cersei Lannister, Jon Snow, Petyr Baelish. Mixed in: a card with their own name, and cards with friends’ names. Beneath each name was a trait — “sad,” “lonely,” “trustworthy,” “smart,” and so on. If the pairing was accurate, subjects were to say “yes".” If not, “no.”

The results are both unsurprising and extraordinary. Unsurprising: When subjects thought about themselves, their ventromedial prefrontal cortexes lit up. That makes sense, since that area of the brain is linked to thinking about the self. Extraordinary: subjects’ ventromedial prefrontal cortexes also lit up when thinking about characters in the show. Their brains experienced imaginary characters as the self. They were becoming Cersei Lannister or Jon Snow.

“For some people, fiction is a chance to take on new identities, to see worlds though others’ eyes and return from those experiences changed,” says co-author Dylan Wagner. “We see evidence of that in their brains.”

Story collapses the difference between self and other – a phenomenon with huge implications for how we think about change at the individual, cultural, and political levels. People willingly try on new identities through story – which means story opens them to new ways of thinking, perceiving, and being.

A brain on story is an open mind. If the problem of polarization is a hardened us/them mentality, an unwillingness — or even inability — to see those who differ from us as fully human, then story offers us a way to practice, and even acquire, a healthier and more productive way of dealing with difference. Polarization closes minds. Stories crack them open.

The movies and series listed below are all examples of that.

III. My top post-partisan watches of 2025, so far

Adolescence. Everyone, it seems, is talking about Netflix’s four-part series about a thirteen-year-old boy who kills the girl who has been bullying him. People rave about the virtuosity of the production — each episode is a single, extended shot. They rave about the acting — especially that of Owen Cooper, who had never acted before, and whose portrayal of the murderous Jamie is as moving as it is chilling. They rave about how the show exposes how boys are harmed, and led to do harm, by what they see and do online — the gaming, the porn consumption, the misogynistic chat rooms, all that time in the “manosphere” priming them to see girls and women as hateful objects who deserve whatever an angry boy might wish to unleash upon them.

Viewers also rage about what’s not on the screen — specifically, the fact that the show doesn’t devote meaningful time to the victim. We learn her name —Katie — and that she had bullied the boy who killed her, that she had herself been bullied before that, that she began bullying Jamie after he asked her out. But there are no flashbacks that allow us to meet her, and we never get her side of the story. She’s not just dead, she’s erased. That bothers a lot of people, and reasonably so: Jamie kills her because he can't really see her as human, and the show replicates that logic when it refuses to allow her to become a fully realized character.

All of these things contribute to the power of Adolescence. I confess, though, that the thing that impressed me most about the show, the thing that keeps me thinking about it, is something else entirely. What I loved about Adolescence is the way it meditates on the problem of attention — not just in telling a story about a boy who kills a girl for cruelly rejecting his attentions, but in telling that story in a way that cultivates and compels our own capacity to pay attention. We are, after all, living in an age of intense digital distraction — by some accounts, we’re spending upwards of a third of our waking hours, and hence years of our lives, mucking about online. It’s not making us more caring creatures. It’s not making us better at being human. We are implicated in the failure of empathy that led Jamie to do what he did.

The conventional wisdom about television drama is that each episode juggles a number of storylines at once. We toggle back-and-forth among them, B- and C-stories vying with A-stories for our attention. This is just “how it’s done.” And yet, it’s also the storytelling version of task-switching, which is not how the brain likes to work: task-switching is exhausting, and it scrambles our cognition; it drains our energy while ensuring that we can’t think straight. Steady focus, by contrast, makes for a much more productive, much more peaceful brain — not just when we are at work, but when we are on story.

So: every episode of Adolescence is a single shot, meaning that every episode brings us into real time with the characters at moments of enormous crisis, takes us deep into the wild vacillations of emotion we undergo when we are panicked, confused, enraged, terrified, and reduced to rubble by grief. In this manner, the structure of the show offers an antidote to the problem it poses: What are we to do when life gets really hard and people get really ugly? The answer is right there in the rhythm of the watching: we lean in. We focus. We stay with the difficulty. We don't run. We don't retreat into our phones. We don't lash out in violence. We live the moment. We are present for it. We are witnesses: wide-eyed, implicated, unflinching, changed by what we see.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. I am often reluctant to watch film adaptations of favorite novels — and this was one of my very favorites when I was small. Casting directors can't compete with the casting imagination, and often a film doesn't have a chance with a viewer who has loved the book it is based upon. For that reason, I hesitated to watch The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Dallas Jenkins’ 2024 adaptation of Barbara Robinson’s classic 1972 novel.

I needn’t have worried. The movie turned out to be absolutely wonderful. It recreates the charm and humor that appealed to me as a child: I had thought the feral Herdman kids were absolutely hilarious, even as I felt their hardship, and felt, too, the hardship they brought to others. There was something about their absolute contempt for rules and manners – their unembarrassed ability to be exactly who they were – that hit me right where I lived. All of that was there in the film — and there was more, too, a wise, good layer added by writer Platte Clark, especially for the parents who would inevitably be watching the film with their kids.

I won't issue any plot spoilers, but I will say that the film is exquisitely attuned to the fact that bullying and ostracism are not confined to the playground, and are not things that we automatically grow out of when we get older. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is deeply interested in how adults play the same mean-spirited exclusionary games that kids do — and are every bit as in need of perspective and improvement as the kids whose moral education is in their care. That's a complex thing to do in any film, especially in a film that is aimed at a young audience. It was a beautiful thing to watch — moving, inspiring, and motivating.

Gaslight. This is the 1944 Oscar-winning George Cukor film — based on a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton — that gave us a language for a particular style of emotional abuse in which one person manipulates the other into questioning their own hold on reality. The manipulation takes place over time, gradually, and is extraordinarily damaging. It's also very common. And, amazingly, humanity had no way of naming it until Patrick Hamilton provided the perfect metaphor: in his story, a young wife notices the gas lights in her home dimming and flickering for no apparent reason. Her husband tells her she's imagining things. But she knows she sees them! But she also knows she couldn't possibly be seeing them! After all, why would her loving husband lie to her? She unravels from there: she has been gaslit.

The film marks an important moment in the history of human emotion, which is also the history of our ongoing obtuseness about human emotion, and our struggle to find ways to talk about it. Gaslight was ahead of its time, and in many ways it feels quite fresh even now. And it is absolutely worth watching, and worth thinking about in light of — in gaslight of? – our present moment. After all, what is polarization but a war of perception between two sides that want to annihilate the other by casting them as crazy and evil? Gaslighting is a weapon of political polarization. It’s time to recognize it in the moment and do better.

IV. Your turn!

I could go on. But I'd rather stop here and invite you to share in kind. What are you watching and loving these days? Please feel free to drop a note in the comments. Together we can help one another find incredible, inspirational stories that point us toward a post-partisan world.