Whether beaten down by the stress of the newsroom or spoiled by the truly great television of decades past, I rarely laugh out loud at TV shows any more. It is rarer still that I cry and I laugh at the same show. But this past week, I did both. Lena Dunham, the woman behind what I would call a generation-defining classic, got me good. “Too Much,” Dunham’s new Netflix series, doesn’t feel so much like “Girls” for the next generation, but instead like a series all too necessary for this specific moment.

I rarely laugh out loud at TV shows any more. It is rarer still that I cry and I laugh at the same show.

“Too Much” follows Jess, played by the amazing Megan Stalter, as she moves to London from New York City after a devastating breakup. In London she falls in complicated love with the disarming Indie rocker Felix. Unsurprisingly, Dunham packs a lot of great writing and emotional depth into this 10-episode arc. “Too Much” is a study in duality; both funny and sad, cute and serious, surreal and grounded. While fans of “Girls” will likely spot some references and some familiar faces — the similarities between Stalter and Dunham feel most obvious, and most important.

Driven by a trendy nostalgia for the so-called simplicity of the early-2000s, “Girls” has experienced a recent renaissance. Short clips of the show perpetually circulate on TikTok and the “Girls Rewatch” podcastfamous now for its introductory question, “Girl, what ‘girl’ are you?”, regularly goes viral. Dunham even recently joined the podcast while on her “Too Much” press tour.

But Dunham’s stardom is complicated, and it has been ever since “Girls” debuted in 2012. The success of the show coincided with the proliferation of not just social media, but of instantaneous social media commentary. As Dunham said on the “Girls Rewatch” podcast, “I was always partially tuned into what people were saying. […] It was impossible to ignore — and I knew that people would tell me what it meant to them, but I also knew that there were people that were angry.”

Dunham’s body and willingness to appear nude on “Girls” made people angry, certainly, and she became the subject of years of often unfair and unflattering cultural commentary. Since then, we have seen the rise and the fall of yet another iteration of the body positivity movement. Skinny, ever the patriarchal beauty standard, is always at a societal premium. But for a moment, it seemed like there was an earnest attempt at body inclusion. There was an acknowledgement that skinny was not a moral imperative nor a corollary to health.

But the meteoric rise of weight loss drugs like Ozempic and the shrinking of many formerly plus-size Hollywood stars has rapidly shifted the landscape once again. On social media, certainly, thin is back. Fashion designed with just skinny bodies in mind, like low-rise denim, is back in vogue.

Lena Dunham, though, has never altered her stance or herself. She has become bolder since her days on “Girls.” She takes up more space. She cares less about what anyone thinks or says about her. And whether or not you like her art, you have to admire that attitude in an industry where she has become an increasingly rare outlier. I certainly do.

Lena Dunham, though, has never altered her stance or herself. She has become bolder since her days on “Girls.”

Jess, like Dunham, does not fit standard beauty molds. And, crucially, she is not written just to be liked. She is quirky, negative, histrionic and obsessive. Centering her in a buzzy Netflix project like this feels, if not radical, refreshing. It’s very different from, for example, last year’s much talked about hit “Nobody Wants This,” starring Kristen Bell and Adam Brody.

But Dunham has a warning for anyone who wants to treat Stalter with the same vitriol she experienced, “If anybody has anything to say about any of my actors — I keep my mouth shut on most things these days, but try a b—. I’m not playing around here. It’s the only time that I’m going to be taking my hoops out, ready to fight.”

Ultimately I don’t think “Too Much” is going to dethrone “Girls” as Dunham’s most culturally impactful series. That isn’t the point, though. Women today don’t need “Girls,” they need “Too Much.” Leave it to Dunham to recognize that need, and deliver.

Hannah Holland

Hannah Holland is a producer for BLN’s “Velshi” and editor for the “Velshi Banned Book Club.” She writes for BLN Daily.

In Cathy Park Hong’s autobiographical collection of essays “Minor Feelings,” she explains that “patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality.”

With Season 7 of “Love Island USA” wrapped, we’ve seen a number of painful truths about the prejudices and problematic views in our society reflected on the reality TV stage — including, but not limited to, these contrasting perspectives between white people and Asian people that was so apparent in the many reactions to contestant Close Ortega’s use of an anti-Asian slur in a 2015 Instagram caption.

We’ve seen a number of painful truths about the prejudices and problematic views in our society reflected on the reality TV stage.

As Hong elicits, Asian people have often had their feelings diminished and made to accept that racism against them is normalized, so when Ortega was removed from the show following the resurfacing of her Instagram posts with the slur, I admit I was surprised. The move seemed to indicate a shift in the normative culture, that what has historically been accepted in the past, would no longer be tolerated.

For once, the Asian community was validated in their experiences of racism, the kind that is often reduced to a “casual form”: the pulling back of eyelids, the mocking of a native language, and of course, getting called a slur that has its origin in targeting Chinese people during the Chinese Exclusion Actthe first U.S. law to restrict immigration based on nationality.

Which is why the irony speaks for itself, as Ortega, who is of Puerto Rican and Mexican descent, claimed in her apology video that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been called on her family in the backlash of her being bumped from the show.

“I had no idea that the word held as much pain, as much harm, and came with the history that it did or I never would have used it,” Ortega said. “I had no ill intention when I was using it.”

Turns out, some of the people calling her out for using the slur didn’t know the origins of it either. Calling ICE on a Hispanic and Latino household and sending death threats to a person who used a slur is not productive nor will it encourage growth. Both cases, the use of an ethnic slur and the threat of deportation, are anti-immigrant sentiments that feed into the same type of hate and racism that plagues so much of our society.

Throughout this season of “Love Island,” other contestants’ problematic views have surfaced, too. After the first episode, contestant Yulissa Escobar was abruptly removed from the villa, with no official explanation from the show, after clips surfaced of her using racial slurs on a podcast.

Another contestant, Austin Shepard, was called out online for his pro-Trump TikTok reposts and bombshell TJ Palma was found to be following Andrew Tate on Instagram.

On the island, the contestants live in a bubble, an alternate reality where the goal is to focus on one thing and one thing only: finding love without the usual distractions of everyday life and society. All the typical aspects of life such as work and school are removed with the intention to create an “ideal” atmosphere — but what happens when the “outside world” leaks through the cracks?

This season, more so than in seasons past, has shown some major flaws in the imagined utopia. After contestant Hannah Fields was voted off in episode 18, she was asked on a podcast why she didn’t explore a connection with TJ, to which she responded, “I can kind of clock when me and somebody have different opinions on things that I just don’t waver on… and I knew there was multiple people that were like that.” Many fans interpreted this to mean that they differed in political views. While there is no official rule that contestants are not allowed to talk about politics, if these conversations are happening, they are certainly not being aired.

There was another, more subtle instance in which the complexities of politics presented themselves in the show. During the “Stand on Business” challenge, Amaya Espinal, one of this season’s winnerswas verbally berated by Shepard and two other male contestants, before contestant Bryan Arenales stood up for her. Shepard, a 26-year-old pool technician, said, “Do you not understand what a chance to air stuff out is?” — a moment that any minority can identify as a microaggression from a mile away.

Reality shows are often perceived to be a form of mindless entertainment, which usually includes a passive agreement to avoid politics.

It was her future partner, Arenales, who ended up defending her. “Coming from a Hispanic household, calling someone ‘babe,’ ‘mi amor,’ that’s just how we talk.” The Boston (more specifically, Everett) native demonstrated a level of cultural humility that was previously missing on the show. This was a defining moment in the season, in which viewers finally saw two contestants connect on more than just a physical level for once.

Reality shows are often perceived to be a form of mindless entertainment, which usually includes a passive agreement to avoid politics. People like to consume shows like “Love Island” because they aren’t intellectually demanding. But as it becomes more evident how deeply ingrained politics is in society and identity, it becomes harder to avoid it.

The truth is, everything is political, and even on a show as heavily sanitized as “Love Island,” the underlying cultural and political factors may have complicated the dynamics — but they also made the watching experience more interesting. And somehow along the way, this example of lowbrow media has became an anthropological study in human interactions in our politically charged reality that we viewers can’t escape, even if we want to.

Julie Huynh

Julie Huynh is an BLN digital platforms intern and student journalist at Boston College.

Los Angeles is a city under attack. Spurred on by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s outrage that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not been deporting enough people, ICE agents have been sweeping through the city, often clad in full military attire like a conquering army. Photographs and videos document ICE’s “arrest first and ask questions later” approach on a daily basis.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Maame E. Frimpong ordered ICE to stop “conducting roving patrols without reasonable suspicion and denying access to lawyers.” She refused to be taken in by the Trump administration’s fog of deception and disinformation. “The federal government agrees: Roving patrols without reasonable suspicion violate the Fourth Amendment and denying access to lawyers violates the Fifth Amendment,” she wrote. “What the federal government would have this Court believe — in the face of a mountain of evidence presented in this case — is that none of this is actually happening.”

Frimpong’s ruling should be required reading for every American. She modeled the kind of resistance that is essential in the face of the administration’s concerted attack on facts, truths and common sense. Her “believe what you see, not what they say” response sets an example for all Americans who wish to resist an authoritarian takeover in this country.

The Courthouse News Service reports that, at a hearing held Thursday, the government wanted the judge to believe “that the ICE raids were sophisticated operations, based on surveillance and information from other law enforcement agencies targeting specific individuals.” According to CNS, lawyers for the Justice Department argued that ICE could “also stop and question other individuals there who they suspected were immigrants without legal status….” That would be acceptable, a DOJ lawyer argued, based on the “totality of the circumstances.”

The government offered these claims against the weight of the evidence and out-of-court statements. In an appearance last week on Fox News, the administration’s border czar Tom Homan included “physical appearance” in the list of things that ICE takes into account during their patrols in Los Angeles. At the Thursday hearing, the American Civil Liberties Union argued that ICE was engaging in racial profiling, targeting members of the Hispanic community and ignoring people of European ancestry who might be in the country illegally. “The evidence is clear that they’re looking at race,” Mohammad Tasjar, an attorney for the ACLU of Southern California, told Frimpong. Even a lawyer for the government acknowledged that “agents can’t put blinders on.”

During the hearing, as The New York Times reported, the judge “was skeptical of the government’s assertions that it was not violating the constitutional rights of people and that agents were stopping immigrants based on ‘the totality of circumstances,’ rather than relying on race.”

That skepticism was reflected in the 52-page opinion the judge handed down one day later. Frimpong wrote that the migrants who filed suit were likely to prevail in their claim that ICE had no legitimate basis to stop and detain most of the people caught up in its military style operations in Los Angeles. She found that the ICE operation constituted a “threatening presence” that left people fearful that they were being “kidnapped.” The judge ordered that, when conducting such operations, the government must stop relying on factors such as race, ethnicity, speaking Spanish, speaking English with an accent, presence at a particular location, or type of work.

This judge’s insistence that reality does in fact matter is particularly important.

Frimpong seemed particularly disturbed by the government’s failure to “acknowledge the existence of roving patrols at all.” As she put it, “the evidence before the Court at this time portrays the reality differently.” She also noted that the government had failed to provide any evidence that what ICE is doing could pass constitutional muster, despite “having nearly a week” to do so.

This judge’s insistence that reality does in fact matter is particularly important in the face of an administration that time and again demands Americans accept whatever it says.

In the immigration context at least, that ploy seems not to be failing. A recent Gallup poll found that 79% of respondents say immigration is “a good thing” for the country versus just 20% who say it is a “bad thing.” Just a year ago, those numbers were 64% and 32% respectively. The percentage of Americans who want to see a decrease in immigration also sharply declined, from 55% in 2024 to 30% today. And 62% of Americans now disapprove of President Trump’s handling of immigration.

Judge Frimpong’s determined refusal to be deceived by the administration’s smoke and mirrors and her rebuke of ICE’s “roving patrols” shows other members of the judiciary — and the rest of the country — that the White House’s rationalizations of its immigration policy deserve not a shred of deference. It should serve as a wake-up call to all of us and a reminder of the damage the administration’s anti-immigrant crusade is doing to our constitutional order.

Austin’s saps

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. The views expressed here do not represent Amherst College.