There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services, and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.

What to watch

“The Entire History of You,” a season 1 episode of the science-fiction anthology series Black Mirror. The story is set in a near-future society where the hot technology is a skull implant that turns memories into first-person video clips, which people can either rewatch themselves or share with others. Toby Kebbell plays Liam Foxwell, a paranoid attorney who obsessively scrutinizes the interactions between his wife Ffion (Jodie Whittaker) and her friend Jonas (Tom Cullen), determined to figure out whether they’re having an affair.

To date, “The Entire History of You” is the only Black Mirror episode without a writing credit for the show’s creator, Charlie Brooker. It’s the work of screenwriter Jesse Armstrong, a British screenwriter who was one of the major creative contributors to two of the 2000s’ sharpest TV sitcoms: Peep Show and The Thick of It. Armstrong recently won an Emmy for writing the HBO drama Succession, which he also created.

Why watch now?

Because Succession’s season 2 finale airs Sunday night on HBO.

Succession is the story of Logan Roy (played by Brian Cox), a ruthless right-wing billionaire media tycoon loosely modeled on Rupert Murdoch. In increasingly poor health, and increasingly beset by political, cultural, and business enemies, Logan has spent the show’s first two seasons wondering which of his children are best suited to take over his business. Will it be Kendall (Jeremy Strong), his doggedly committed but emotionally unstable right-hand man? How about Roman (Kieran Culkin), the impish brat torn between winning his father’s approval and treating his entire life as one big joke? Could it be Siobhan (Sarah Snook), the quick-thinking, well-connected rising star who seems to value social status over her nominally liberal ideals? It definitely won’t be Connor (Alan Ruck), a lifelong playboy who knows nothing about business or government — but still thinks he should be the next president of the United States.

HBO didn’t send this season’s finale to critics in advance, but if it’s anything like season 1, expect jaw-dropping plot twists aplenty. Part of what’s made Succession so addicting is that Armstrong isn’t afraid to pull the rug out from under the Roys on a regular basis. It’s how he toys with the audience’s sympathy: he makes these ultimately terrible characters just likable enough that when they’re knocked flat, viewers cheer for them to fight back. It’s an ingenious approach to a show about mega-wealth and privilege, illustrating how easy it is for ordinary people to develop a rooting interest in powerful folks whose lives and work make the world worse.

Armstrong has finessed this trick throughout his writing and producing career, exploring how even at their lousiest, human beings are more relatable than many may want to believe. That’s definitely one of the tactics he uses in “The Entire History of You,” which presents its hero Liam as cruel and destructive as he pursues his suspicions about his wife’s infidelity, but also shrewd in the way he uses his lawyerly intuition to unpack the layers of meaning in every casual gesture or offhand remark. Even when he’s wrong, Liam’s lack of trust mostly seems reasonable.

Another way “The Entire History of You” resembles Succession (as well as The Thick of It and HBO’s Veep, which Armstrong wrote for in season 1) is in its fascination with painfully awkward group interactions. This has become Succession’s primary organizing principle, sending the Roy clan to a new location or event in each episode, then watching them squirm through meet-and-greets. Similarly, in the opening third of “The Entire History of You,” Jonas makes a wince-inducing spectacle of himself at a dinner party, bloviating about sex and technology while Ffion giggles and Liam seethes.

Who it’s for

Fans of dystopian science fiction and biting social satire.

Like a lot of the best Black Mirror episodes, “The Entire History of You” considers big technological breakthroughs in microscopic detail, looking at how they might affect everyday life. If people could revisit their own memories with perfect recall, what would change? Armstrong imagines a world where airport security scans passengers’ brains to make sure they haven’t met with any terrorists, and where parents tap into their children’s memory chips to check on their babysitters. Rather than swapping pet-peeve anecdotes, friends instead show each other their videos, seeking validation for whatever slights they’ve perceived.

The most provocative element in “The Entire History of You,” though, has to do with the idea that recorded memories could prevent people from misremembering or misrepresenting their own experiences — thereby insuring that the news is more accurate, the justice system is more efficient, and marital arguments are more easily resolved. On the contrary, Armstrong shows Liam and Ffion both editing and shaping and reinterpreting their own memories, until even the happiest moments of their lives become instruments of torture.

Where to see it

Netflix. For more of Jesse Armstrong’s work, Veep and Succession are available on HBO Go and HBO Now; and Peep Show and The Thick of It are available on both Amazon Prime and Hulu.

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.

What to watch

Election, a 1999 political satire directed by Alexander Payne and co-written by Payne and Jim Taylor, adapting Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name. Set in an Omaha, Nebraska high school, the film stars Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick, an energetic overachiever who irritates her smugly idealistic history teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) with her aggressive self-promotion.

“Mr. M” sees Tracy as emblematic of a strain of prissy privilege, deleterious to the great American experiment. Chris Klein plays affable, dim jock Paul Metzler, whom McAllister encourages to enter the race for class president against Flick. Jessica Campbell plays Paul’s lesbian sister Tammy, who becomes the spoiler. Election examines the simmering desperation of one middle-aged Middle American teacher, while also commenting on how even the least important political campaigns can devolve into shallow posturing and mudslinging.

Why watch now?

Because the Election-esque series The Politician is now available on Netflix.

Co-created by Glee producers Ian Brennan, Brad Falchuk, and Ryan Murphy — a team that’s worked in various combinations on the TV series Scream Queens, American Horror Story, American Crime Story, Pose, Popular, and Nip/Tuck, among others — The Politician stars Tony-winning Broadway actor Ben Blatt as Payton Hobart, an upper-class Santa Barbara teen hoping to use a high school election as a springboard toward his larger political goals. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Payton’s doting mother Georgina, while Zoey Deutch is Infinity Jackson, a sickly classmate Payton names as his running mate, to court a sympathy vote.

The Politician is the first project Ryan Murphy has produced under a lucrative multiyear deal with Netflix. Before the first season even went into production, it had been greenlit for season 2. On the continuum of Murphy’s shows, The Politician has more in common with Scream Queens and Glee than Pose or American Crime Story. The series comments on the superficiality of modern politics, but in a way that’s colorful and cartoonish, with a broadly comic take on privilege and popularity, not bogged down by wonky real-world details. 

Election isn’t exactly a docudrama either, but while its characters are also comical (and rooted in stereotypes), the movie is predominantly about the daily grind of middle-class existence. Payne and Taylor let each of their main characters tell their part of the story via overlapping narration to illustrate the distance between their self-image and their actual behavior and also to mitigate the bitter undertones of McAllister and Flick’s voices with the relative sweetness of the Metzler siblings.

This story, though, is mainly about Mr. M, who teaches the same tedious facts every year, then goes home to his wife’s bland dinners and his secret stash of pornography. McAllister has a lot of options about morality and ethics, but his firmly held convictions don’t keep him from inviting his wife’s best friend to sleep with him — and at an American Family Inn, no less. Payne and Taylor are simultaneously empathetic toward and critical of a man who overestimates his own importance, interfering with a meaningless election in hopes of saving the world from Tracy Flick.

Broderick gives a wonderfully nebbishy performance, and the filmmakers do a fine job of using visual cues to define the smallness of his world — like the recurring image of his automatic seat belt, slowly wrapping tightly around his body every time he gets into his car.

Who it’s for

Political junkies and Reese Witherspoon fans.

 

Every week, Noel Murray’s Cut the Crap column recommends a single film or show to stream and provides a pocket education on one director, subgenre, movement, or moment in pop culture history. From evil doll movies to alternate-reality stories to Game of Thrones pre-history, the extensive Cut the Crap archives will teach you new things about culture’s past while cutting through the mountain of new releases to find one relevant thing that’s worth watching.

Witherspoon had a strong start to her career, giving a handful of well-received performances when she was still in her teens and early 20s. Election showed off her knack for comedy and for playing larger-than-life, often unapologetically brash characters. Her ferocious Tracy (whose printed last name, “FLICK,” looks pointedly rude in certain typefaces) is a lonely soul with a megalomaniacal bent, for whom the American education system is less about accumulating knowledge and more about running up the score on her transcript.

Payne and Taylor, meanwhile, have fun mocking the drudgery of high school and the pointlessness of high school elections. Mr. M imagines the ritual as an exercise in democracy: it’s the freedom to choose between apples and oranges, he says, as he draws both fruits on a chalkboard as featureless circles. When Paul then astutely notes that his fondness for either apples or oranges varies depending on the day, that’s a funny, pointed metaphor for the fickleness of the American electorate.

Where to see it

Tubi and Vudu are both currently streaming Election for free (with commercials). It’s also worth seeking out Payne and Taylor’s 1996 debut feature, Citizen Ruth, which satirizes the abortion debate via the story of a wastrel (hilariously played by Laura Dern) who becomes a national cause célèbre after she gets pregnant. It’s not available through any of the subscription or ad-supported streaming services, but most digital retailers offer it to rent or buy.

Software magnate Bill Gates is one of the most famous people in the world, but the public barely knows him. Gates has been a household name for decades for two reasons: he was the face of Microsoft during an era when the company’s products became ubiquitous, and, perhaps more notably, he’s very, very rich. Yet, he’s never been the kind of celebrity whose personal life and political opinions are splashed across the tabloids and social media. And unlike the late Steve Jobs — his contemporary and occasional rival — Gates is rarely discussed in terms of some ineffable mystique.

The title of Davis Guggenheim’s three-part Netflix documentary Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates (which debuts on Friday, September 20th) speaks to its subject’s opacity. What makes one of the world’s wealthiest people tick? What formed him? How did he come to dominate a fiercely competitive industry so thoroughly that the US government sued Microsoft under antitrust statutes?

Guggenheim gets into all that… sort of. Over the course of nearly three hours, Inside Bill’s Brain covers the basics of Gates’ life: his childhood, education, Microsoft stewardship, marriage to his wife Melinda, and the charitable foundation they co-manage.

At times, though, it seems like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is this doc’s real subject. Each episode of Inside Bill’s Brain focuses on one of the foundation’s major initiatives: improving sewage conditions in developing countries, eradicating polio, and developing a cleaner, safer form of nuclear power. Each of the three parts shifts rapidly between interviews, biographical material, and fly-on-the-wall footage of the Gates team’s philanthropic missions. Guggenheim eschews traditional transitions, and instead jumps from subject to subject, even when there’s no clear connection between them.

The point, apparently, is to replicate Bill Gates’ thought processes. Having spent most of his adult life (and even some of his teenage years) juggling multiple complicated projects, Gates doesn’t have the kind of mind that functions in neat, straight lines. At one point, Melinda even laughs at this series’s title, saying that her husband’s brain is as cluttered and chaotic as the cheap apartment he once shared with Paul Allen when the two were building Microsoft.

Guggenheim’s approach is frequently frustrating. The director has multiple worthwhile stories to tell here, which may explain why Inside Bill’s Brain is being released as a series rather than as a feature film. (Another reason: Netflix seems to favor the multipart format over a single movie.) But whenever one of those stories starts to build some narrative momentum, the doc skips to another, and then to another, and then back again. Inside Bill’s Brain often feels more superficial than it actually is because it switches topics so freely.

Given what the series’s title promises, viewers may also be disappointed that so much of Inside Bill’s Brain is about his charity work, not about his life, personality, or beliefs. But that really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone familiar with Guggenheim’s other documentaries. He won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, his film about former Vice President Al Gore’s efforts to educate the world about climate change. He also made Waiting for “Superman” about the flaws in the American public school system, and He Named Me Malala about Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel-winning Pakistani advocate for women’s rights. Guggenheim has a history of using his work as a form of social advocacy.

He isn’t turned off by wonky details, either. Inside Bill’s Brain risks losing its audience with its first episode, which keeps the Gates biography to a minimum, and instead dedicates a lot of its run time to various designs for better public toilets that are meant to improve the water supply in poorer villages and neighborhoods. The episode demands some fascination with plumbing and a high tolerance for images of fecal matter — both in graphic video footage and in the animated illustrations Guggenheim uses throughout the series.

If Netflix subscribers only have time to watch one Inside Bill’s Brain episode, they should pick the second, which comes closest to doing some “decoding.” The scenes dealing with Gates’ philanthropy largely take a back seat to reflections on the most significant decade of his life. In the 1970s, he and his high school classmate Paul Allen began making money with their programming skills and started talking about plans to develop software for the burgeoning personal computer market. Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975, worried that if he waited until after he graduated to launch Microsoft, he’d arrive too late.

Part two of Guggenheim’s documentary gets into Gates’ preternatural drive to succeed, which, in the early years of Microsoft, had him memorizing license plate numbers in the company’s parking lot to track who was staying late. (A veteran of those days recalls the running joke that Microsoft jobs were “part-time” because employees could choose which 12 hours of the day they wanted to work.) Gates’ obsessive work habits eventually drove a wedge between him and Allen, and the obvious regret he has about how that friendship ending provides some of Inside Bill’s Brain’s more emotional moments.

The third episode could’ve used some of that emotion. The more biographical moments in part three deal with how Bill and Melinda met and married and how Gates handled accusations that he’d turned Microsoft into a monopoly. The billionaire is much more guarded in this set of interviews. He comes to life more in the episode’s other scenes, which have to do with potentially revolutionary ways of generating cheap energy.

In the end, Guggenheim fails to reconcile his competing agendas: to take an up-close and personal look one of this era’s most important cultural figures and to tally all the ways Gates is trying to leave a lasting, positive legacy. It doesn’t help that the director puts so much of himself into the doc, making his conversations with Gates seem like two amiable acquaintances shooting the breeze, rather than like a journalist pushing hard for meaningful answers.

Inside Bill’s Brain does have some fleeting insights into who Gates is and what he’s accomplished — again, mostly in episode two. But there’s a moment in the series where Guggenheim and Gates talk about the latter’s periodic “think weeks” where he goes off the grid with a stack of books and tries to open himself up to new ideas, largely unrelated to his daily work. A more focused version of this docuseries, with the same title and intentions, might’ve started here. Left alone with his thoughts, who is Bill Gates? Maybe someday, a better documentary will answer that question.