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    Netflix Prepares to Send Its Final Red Envelope

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    The company’s DVD subscription service is ending this month, bringing to a close an origin story that ultimately upended the entertainment industry.In a nondescript office park minutes from Disneyland sits a nondescript warehouse. Inside this nameless, faceless building, an era is ending.The building is a Netflix DVD distribution plant. Once a bustling ecosystem that processed 1.2 million DVDs a week, employed 50 people and generated millions of dollars in revenue, it now has just six employees left to sift through the metallic discs. And even that will cease on Friday, when Netflix officially shuts the door on its origin story and stops mailing out its trademark red envelopes.“It’s sad when you get to the end, because it’s been a big part of all of our lives for so long,” Hank Breeggemann, the general manager of Netflix’s DVD division, said in an interview. “But everything runs its cycle. We had a great 25-year run and changed the entertainment industry, the way people viewed movies at home.”When Netflix began mailing DVDs in 1998 — the first movie shipped was “Beetlejuice” — no one in Hollywood expected the company to eventually upend the entire entertainment industry. It started as a brainstorm between Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, successful businessmen looking to reinvent the DVD rental business. No due dates, no late fees, no monthly rental limits.Edgar Ramos working at one of the facility’s DVD sorting machines. Despite the reduced staff, this operation still receives and sends some 50,000 discs a week. “I am sad,” Mr. Ramos said. “When the day comes, I’m sure we will all be crying. Wish we could do streaming over here, but it is what it is.”It did much more than that. The DVD business destroyed competitors like Blockbuster and altered the viewing habits of the public. Once Netflix began its streaming business and then started producing original content, it transformed the entire entertainment industry. So much so that the economics of streaming — which actors and writers argue are worse for them — is at the heart of the strikes that have brought Hollywood to a standstill.Even before the strikes, streaming had rendered DVDs obsolete, at least from a business perspective. At its height, Netflix was the Postal Service’s fifth-largest customer, operating 58 shipping facilities and 128 shuttle locations that allowed Netflix to serve 98.5 percent of its customer base with one-day delivery. Today, there are five such facilities — the others are in Fremont, Calif.; Trenton, N.J.; Dallas; and Duluth, Ga. — and DVD revenue totaled $60 million for the first six months of 2023. In comparison, Netflix’s streaming revenue for the same period reached $6.5 billion.Despite the reduced staff, this operation still receives and sends some 50,000 discs a week with titles ranging from the popular (“Avatar: The Way of Water” and “The Fabelmans”) to the obscure (the 1998 Catherine Deneuve crime thriller, “Place Vendôme”). Each of the employees at the Anaheim facility has been with the company for more than a decade, some as long as 18 years. (One hundred people at Netflix still work on the DVD side of the business, though most will soon be leaving the company.)Erik Melendrez, 33, who has worked at the warehouse since he was 18, at one of the automated stations that sorts DVDs.Anh Tran and Mr. Melendrez at a station that sorts returned DVDs. At its height, Netflix operated 58 shipping facilities and 128 shuttle locations. Today, there are five such facilities. A few of them started straight out of high school, like Edgar Ramos, and they can run Netflix’s proprietary auto-sorting machines and its Automated Rental Return Machine (ARRM), which processes 3,500 DVDs an hour, with the precision of Swiss watch engineers.“I am sad,” Mr. Ramos said while sorting envelopes into their ZIP code bins. “When the day comes, I’m sure we will all be crying. Wish we could do streaming over here, but it is what it is.”Mike Calabro, Netflix’s senior operations manager, has been with the company for more than 13 years. He said the unexpected moments of frivolity were a big part of why he had stayed, like the drawings made by renters on the envelopes or the Cheetos dust and coffee stains that often mark the returns, evidence of a product that has been well integrated into customers’ lives.But when asked if he had ever met some of the most active customers in person, Mr. Calabro quickly replied, “No!” In fact, the anonymous look of the facility, which provides a stark contrast to the giant Netflix logos that adorn the company’s other real estate, is intentional. Visitors, it is clear, are not welcome.“If we put Netflix out on the door, we would have people showing up with their discs, saying: ‘Hey, I’d like to return this. Can you give me my next disc?’” Mr. Calabro said.That was the usual transaction with a video rental retailer, but Netflix wanted to make sure customers knew this was something different.“It was a decision we made very early on,” Mr. Breeggemann said. “If they knew where we were, we’d run into that problem. And then it wouldn’t be a good customer experience. We wanted to mail both ways.”Lorraine Segura, a senior operations manager, works with the labels that go on packages. Ms. Segura, who started in 2008, used to rip open 650 envelopes an hour. When automation came, she was one of the few employees who traveled to the facility in Fremont, Calif., to learn how to run the machines. Netflix’s DVD operations still serve around one million customers, many of them very loyal.Bean Porter, 35, lives in St. Charles, Ill., and has subscribed to Netflix’s DVD and streaming services since 2015. She said she was “devastated” that there would be no more DVDs. Ms. Porter was able to use her subscription to watch DVDs of shows like “Yellowstone” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” — episodic television made for other streaming services that would have required her to buy additional subscriptions.She and her husband also watch three or four movies a week and find Netflix’s DVD library to be deeper and more diverse than any other subscription service. She often hosts cookouts in her backyard and invites neighbors to watch movies on an outdoor screen. That is easier to do with a DVD, she said, than with streaming because of internet connectivity issues. And she has become involved with the DVD operations’ social media channel, posting videos, interacting with other customers and chatting directly with the social media managers working for the company.“I’m pretty angry,” she said. “I’m just going to have to do streaming, and I feel like what they’re doing is forcing me into having less options.”To ease the backlash, Netflix is allowing its DVD customers to hold on to their final rentals. Ms. Porter intends to keep “The Breakfast Club,” “Goonies” and “The Sound of Music.” As for the last DVD she intends to watch: She’s leaving that up to fate.“I have 45 movies left in my queue, and where I land is where I’ll land, as there are too many good options to pick from,” she said.The morning’s DVDs being shipped out to subscribers. At its height, Netflix was the Postal Service’s fifth-largest customer. Netflix’s DVD operations still serve around one million customers. The employees have a more sanguine attitude. Lorraine Segura started at Netflix in 2008 and used to rip open envelopes — 650 envelopes an hour. When automation came, she was one of the few employees who traveled to the facility in Fremont to learn how to run the machines and pass that training on to others. Now she runs the floor with Mr. Calabro as a senior operations manager.“I’ve learned a lot here: how to fix machines, how to make goals and hit targets,” she said before leading her team in a round of ergonomic exercises to prevent repetitive stress injuries. “I feel empowered now to get out in the world and do something new.” More

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      How Shane Gillis Both Plays to and Mocks Red Staters

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      The comic’s savvy approach fits into the evolving meaning of conservatism and has resulted in hugely popular stand-up specials, like “Beautiful Dogs” on Netflix.At the start of his new special “Beautiful Dogs,” Shane Gillis, a bulky comic with the mustache of a Staten Island cop, announces that America is the best country in the world and that all the others suck. His crowd roars. Then he says he’s only been to three other countries and when he boasts about his home abroad, they ask about mass shootings.“There’s really not a good comeback,” he says, shifting from swaggering to struggling, then exclaims, using a profanity: “What, are we going to give up our guns like a bunch of gay guys?” His tone flattens into resignation: “No, we’re just going to have shootings all the time.”This opening bit, which celebrates and satirizes rah-rah American jingoism in the style of “South Park,” encapsulates the Shane Gillis experience. It’s got the amiable idiot swagger, plus the trolling offensive spin. Then there’s the satirical overlay that subverts the perspective. It’s dumb and smart, cocky and self-mocking, homophobic but relentlessly self-aware.Since getting fired from “Saturday Night Live” in 2019 after videos surfaced of him using Asian and gay slurs on a podcast, Gillis has built perhaps one of the fastest growing comedy careers in America. His debut special, released on YouTube in 2021, racked up a staggering 14 million views, and he’s the most popular podcaster on Patreon with more than 71,000 paying listeners. “Beautiful Dogs,” his second special, has been lodged in Netflix’s Top 10 most popular shows since the streamer released it on Sept. 5. He regularly sells out theaters. Don’t be surprised if he becomes an arena act.Getting fired paid off. It made Gillis a martyr to some, and he was savvy enough to embrace those fans without tediously obsessing over cancel culture. He has said he understood the criticism of his comments, offered a halfhearted apology, then doubled down on lumbering through the china shop of cultural sensitivities. A comic who tells the crowd he has no female friends isn’t looking to appeal to everyone.There’s an element of shock jock to his persona. Onstage, his bits are more controlled and agile than they seem, and he’s skilled at winning fans in unexpected places. Speaking in an admiring 2022 New Yorker profile of Gillis, the comic Jerrod Carmichael, who came out as gay in his last special, called him one of the few truly funny comics working today. “His material still feels dangerous,” he said.Gillis, a 35-year-old former football player from central Pennsylvania, often holds the microphone with two hands, more like a singer than a stand-up. His attitude is less telling you the truth about the world than stumbling through the mess of his thought process. His appearance telegraphs rumpled ordinary guy, not polished entertainer. And he speaks to crowds as if he were messing around with friends. Few comics do more with the word “dude.”To fully understand his success, you must use a word taboo in certain comedy circles: conservative. Many comics who rail against cancel culture tend to flinch at that one. Call Joe Rogan one and you will hear umbrage and a list of his liberal policy positions. And look, no one likes to be pigeonholed. But there is a political valence to Gillis’s comedy and the way it fits into the evolving meaning of what it is to be right wing.Being conservative in the age of Trump is not as much about opinions on free markets or foreign policy anymore; now it can mean projecting a certain attitude, alternatively nostalgic and contemptuous, fixated on the supposed oppressiveness of liberal norms and bluntly giddy about transgressing them.That posture sits comfortably in the comedy scene. It’s no accident that two prime-time hosts on Fox (Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld) cut their teeth doing comedy, of sorts. Part of the reason Gillis is such a phenomenon is clearly political. (The title of the special is a Trump quote.)Right-wing media adores him. The Spectator called his success a major turning point in the resurgence of comedy. But unlike comics who are primarily animated by caricaturing and picking apart the left, Gillis lands a broader crowd by focusing on an affectionately mocking insider perspective of the half of the country that voted for Trump (which isn’t to say he did, though there’s no question he finds the politician hilarious).There are MAGA-like identity politics at the center of some of his bits, as when he describes the story of the first baseball game played by Jackie Robinson not as a civil rights landmark but as the moment when white people stopped being cool. “I know what I look like,” he says. “I got the body type of the guy who says, Let’s look at the rest of the body cam footage before jumping to any conclusions.”His last special lovingly poked fun at his “Fox News dad,” who goes to bed angry every night. In “Beautiful Dogs,” he describes himself as a bit of a history buff, which he calls a sign of “early onset Republican.” He levels with his audience: “If you’re a white dude in your 20s and 30s and can’t stop reading about World War II, it’s coming, brother.”The assumptions here are that being a Republican makes you a beleaguered outsider. He compares the pull of it to that of a person turning into a werewolf. “I’m not a Republican, but I can feel it,” he says. “It grows.”Gillis, who lives in New York, regularly works clubs here, and there’s a way that his comedy is pitched as an explanation of a red state sensibility for a blue state audience. Some of this can feel forced and far below his intelligence, tipping over into Larry the Cable Guy territory.He uses a hack sexist line, only to draw attention to how bad it is. His punchlines about porn cover well-trod ground, and his contrarian joke about terrorists is similar to the one that got Bill Maher fired from his ABC show after Sept. 11. Gillis can get stuck in his own bubble, drawing some familiar or easy laughs. His new special has more sex jokes than his last, some about his own grossness (“coughing during sex is funny”) and others about the hopelessness of being competitive with the Navy SEAL who previously dated his girlfriend.His most ambitious bit in the new hour involves a trip to George Washington’s Mount Vernon during the racial upheaval of 2020. He describes the absurdity of the historical re-enactors, but also the gruesome detail of the slave quarters, mapping how he vacillated between hero worship of our first president and denunciation of our country’s original sin.Not unlike his opening bit, Gillis moves back and forth on his feelings about our country through the narrative of Washington, his military exploits, his lore. “I was trying to be cool and liberal and hate him,” he says. “Couldn’t do it.”Interestingly, he includes a joke that is identical to one John Oliver recently told mocking the idea that we are more divided than ever by bringing up the Civil War. Of course, in the 19th century, we couldn’t express our dislike for one another as easily. But what hasn’t changed is that people remain curious about those different from them, even those they dislike or hate. It may be human nature or strategy. (Know thine enemy.)Partly people watch Shane Gillis for the same reason some liberals binge Fox News — to see how the other half thinks. More

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      ‘Wrestlers’ Is Greg Whiteley’s Latest Underdog Tale

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      When Greg Whiteley was 19 he ventured from his hometown, Bellevue, Wash., to spread the word of the Mormon Church on Navajo reservations in the Southwest. At first he would come in hot, as the kids say, eager to knock on doors and proselytize.“Frequently the thing I’d ask was, ‘Do you have time to hear a message about Jesus Christ today?’” he recalled during a video interview earlier this month from his Southern California home. “And the answer 99 times out of 100 was, ‘No, I do not have time for that.’ I think I spent the first months of my mission talking at people, and it was a very discouraging experience.”Gradually, however, he learned to shut up and listen. “I was amazed at how quickly people would disclose the most vulnerable things at a doorstep within 90 seconds of meeting them,” Whiteley said. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he was preparing himself for a successful career as a documentary filmmaker.Today, Whiteley, 53, is best known for creating, producing and directing immersive, off-the-beaten-path underdog sports docu-series for Netflix, including “Last Chance U,” “Cheer” and his latest, “Wrestlers,” which premieres Wednesday. All are notable for what they are not: manipulative, sensationalist, opportunistic.“Wrestlers,” premiering Wednesday on Netflix, explores Ohio Valley Wrestling, a scrappy company that has nurtured several famous wrestlers.NetflixWhiteley finds subjects that offer maximum access and editorial control. “It’s really hard to get that from the New England Patriots,” he said. In other words, this isn’t “Hard Knocks,” the HBO series that purports to offer revealing behind-the-scenes stories from N.F.L. training camps. For “Last Chance U,” which premiered in 2016, Whiteley focuses on individual community college football and basketball teams. In “Cheer,” the subject is a Texas community college cheerleading squad that happens to be a national dynasty. And for “Wrestlers,” Whiteley and his 20-person crew descended upon Ohio Valley Wrestling, a scrappy, underfunded professional wrestling company, with a passionate, blue-collar fan base, based in Louisville, Ky. Famous O.V.W. alumni include John Cena and Paul Wight (who wrestled as Big Show), but the company has maintained an authentic little-guy personality.“Wrestlers” is vintage Whiteley. He identified a few dynamic lead characters, including Al Snow, the fiercely dedicated, disarmingly thoughtful former W.W.F. and W.W.E. wrestler and current minority owner and day-to-day manager of O.V.W., who sees wrestling as a means of telling great stories preferably for television; Matt Jones, the aggressively opinionated O.V.W. co-owner and sports radio personality, focused on touring and keeping the company afloat financially; and HollyHood Haley J, a rebellious (and often irresponsible) young wrestler who is one of O.V.W.’s most popular performers and drives Snow mad with her propensity to smoke weed on the gym premises.Whiteley and his crew settled in and familiarized themselves with the rhythms of the operation. Perhaps most important, he quickly established that he wasn’t trying to burn anyone or manufacture the gotcha moments that fuel reality TV, which those on both sides of the camera are adamant that “Wrestlers” is not.HollyHood Haley J, a brash young performer, emerges as one of the stars of “Wrestlers.”Netflix“There was a great deal of trust,” Snow said in a video interview from his home office. “Professional wrestling as a whole has always been a very closed, very secular business, never open, especially not to the general public and especially not in this manner. It was a tough decision for me to let this happen and be involved in it. But meeting Greg I really got the idea and the impression that he was going to treat it with respect and he was going to be honest.”The trust is largely a byproduct of Whiteley’s patience. He doesn’t push things, preferring instead to burrow in and hang out and get to know his subjects; “Wrestlers” was shot over a period of three and a half months. His ideal is to disappear, or at least create the illusion that he has. He wants his three camera teams constantly rolling film — unless his subjects tell them to stop, in which case they generally do. This, in turn, reinforces the trust level. He tells stories by spending countless hours with his characters, not by asking hot-take questions about drug abuse and romantic problems (both of which are present in “Wrestlers”).Al Snow, a former W.W.F. wrestler, oversees Ohio Valley Wrestling.NetflixSnow, who in the series likens himself to Kermit the Frog presiding over “The Muppet Show,” emerges as a sort of tormented showbiz impresario. He’s like a Broadway director in an old Hollywood musical, agonizing until the final curtain goes down, at which point he starts agonizing anew. The primary tension in “Wrestlers” simmers between Snow, the professional wrestling purist, and Jones, the entrepreneur focused on the bottom line. It doesn’t seem like the most obvious angle, but Whiteley has a gift for finding gold in the unobvious, in this case a conflict outside the ring that turns into a battle for the soul of O.V.W.“Credit to Greg, he sniffed that out,” said Adam Leibowitz, a producer who has been working with Whiteley since “Mitt” (2014), Whiteley’s documentary portrait of Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful bids for president in 2008 and 2012.“When you’re presented with a project like this, you think it’s going to be about funny wrestlers and their crazy costumes and their personalities,” Leibowitz continued. “Yes that’s great, and that’s a part of it. But for all of us, it was the tension between Al and Matt that really made this show super interesting, to have this almost Shakespearean battle between these two completely different personalities over this little gym.”Whiteley traces his patient approach not just to his missionary work, but also to a lesson absorbed from an old-school master of cinéma vérité. He first encountered the work of Frederick Wiseman as a film student at Brigham Young University. Then, when Whiteley was making “New York Doll,” his 2005 documentary about the New York Dolls bassist Arthur (Killer) Kane, he saw Wiseman’s “Public Housing,” an epic look at a Chicago housing project. He was struck by how Wiseman would wait a few beats after a question was answered, a process that often yielded some of the film’s most unguarded moments. Whiteley tried the approach with Kane, at one point asking if he was nervous about an upcoming reunion concert. No, Kane insisted, of course not. Then he stared straight ahead saying nothing, looking very nervous.Whiteley’s approach is to spend countless hours with his subjects and try to disappear into the background.Julien James for The New York Times“I’ve never quite had Wiseman’s courage to let situations breathe for as long as they’ll breathe,” Whiteley said. “But I do know I let them breathe longer than I would have had I not seen ‘Public Housing.’ And some of my favorite moments that we have ever filmed have occurred because we’re not cutting yet. Just stay on this moment.”He also likes to zoom in on characters who don’t seem to be trying out for the camera. For instance, he was fascinated by the swagger and authenticity of HollyHood Haley J, whose real name is Haley Marie James and who wrestles with and against her mother, Amazing Maria (Tina Marie Evans James). Haley, for her part, didn’t seem to care much about the project, even blowing off scheduled interviews.“I had an attitude at times, and Greg handled me very well,” Haley said in a video interview from her home in Louisville. “It was all new to me, especially them following me around. I’d try to run and hide and get away from everyone. And then here comes Greg with the camera.”Whiteley is always after what is real, which in this case sets up a rich irony: a painstakingly authentic look at an endeavor often derided for being fake. But for all of their veracity, Whiteley’s projects also make for fine drama, generating high real-life stakes, off the field as much as on, that go well beyond famous athletes winning big games and matches. None of the wrestlers in “Wrestlers“ are getting rich. The kids in the various iterations of “Last Chance U” are just hoping to catch on with a four-year college, or merely graduate and get a decent job. These are very human stories about people just trying to get by.Whitely wouldn’t have it any other way.“We really only have one gear as a company,” he said. “Let’s just tell the true story.” More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in September

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      Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of September’s most promising new titles.(Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)‘Wrestlers’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 13Greg Whiteley, the co-creator and director of the popular Netflix docu-series “Last Chance U” and “Cheer,” tells another story of small-time athletes fighting to keep their dreams alive in “Wrestlers.” Set in and around a Louisville, Ky., gym, the series follows the veteran star Al Snow and the die-hard performers of Ohio Valley Wrestling, who are working to boost business after their new bosses have given them just a few months to increase revenue. As with Whiteley’s other shows, “Wrestlers” features up-close and exciting sports footage alongside intimate slice-of-life scenes and confessional interviews, as these people who love the history and traditions of regional professional wrestling share their hopes and dreams.‘El Conde’Starts streaming: Sept. 15The daring Chilean writer-director Pablo Larrain — best-known for his offbeat 2016 biopics “Neruda” and “Jackie” — puts his own peculiar spin on the life of Augusto Pinochet in “El Conde,” a black-and-white gothic horror film that reimagines the dictator as a depressed vampire, enduring an audit of his crumbling estate. Jaime Vadell plays Pinochet, who in this movie has been alive since the time of the French Revolution and has kept hanging around long after everyone has assumed he died. Larrain fits some actual history into this picture, but for the most part he uses satire to critique the lingering vitality-sapping effects of Pinochet’s tyrannical reign.‘Love at First Sight’Starts streaming: Sept. 15Based on the Jennifer E. Smith novel “The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight,” this romantic dramedy stars the vibrant young actress Haley Lu Richardson as Hadley Sullivan, who is reluctantly on her way to London to attend her father’s wedding when she gets seated on the plane next to Oliver (Ben Hardy), a charming math whiz heading home for his mother’s memorial service. When the two are separated after landing, they have an eventful and emotional day of meeting family obligations while also trying to find each other again. Jameela Jamil plays multiple characters and also narrates the film, using Oliver’s nerdy number-crunching as a prompt to keep the audience updated on the ever-shifting odds that these two likable kids will be happy together.‘The Saint of Second Chances’Starts streaming: Sept. 19Bill Veeck was one of Major League Baseball’s maverick innovators, spending much of his life coming up with creative and sometimes controversial ballpark promotions to draw fans and make money. The documentary “The Saint of Second Chances” — co-directed by Jeff Malmberg and the Oscar-winning Morgan Neville — is about Bill’s son Mike, whose initial attempts to follow in his father’s footsteps were derailed by his part in the Chicago White Sox’s notorious 1979 “Disco Demolition Night,” which ended in a riot. Narrated by Jeff Daniels — with re-enactments that have the actor-comedian Charlie Day playing Mike — the film covers the younger Veeck’s big comeback in the ’90s, when he found ways to bring fun back to baseball and to his own life by running the independent minor league team the St. Paul Saints.‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’Starts streaming: Sept. 27Fresh off the critical and commercial success of his film “Asteroid City,” the writer-director Wes Anderson makes his Netflix debut with “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” an adaptation of a Roald Dahl story. Clocking in at around 40 minutes — a bit too long to be a short film and not long enough to be a feature — the movie stars Benedict Cumberbatch as a smug gambler who become fascinated with the rumors he has heard about a man who can see without using his eyes. As always, Anderson has enlisted an impressive supporting cast, including Ben Kingsley, Dev Patel, Richard Ayoade and — as Dahl himself — Ralph Fiennes. This project also reportedly relies even more than usual on Anderson’s penchant for overtly theatrical effects, as the characters tell stories within stories while often remaining on a single stage.Also arriving:Sept. 7“Dear Child”“Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight” Season 3“Top Boy” Season 3“Virgin River” Season 5, Part 1Sept. 8“Burning Body” Season 1“Rosa Peral’s Tapes”“Selling the OC” Season 2“Spy Ops” Season 1“A Time Called You” Season 1Sept. 12“Michelle Wolf: It’s Great To Be Here”Sept. 13“Class Act” Season 1Sept. 15“Surviving Summer” Season 2Sept. 21“Sex Education” Season 4Sept. 22“Song of the Bandits”“Spy Kids: Armageddon”Sept. 26“The Devil’s Plan” Season 1“Who Killed Jill Dando?”Sept. 27“Encounters” Season 1“Forgotten Love”“Street Flow 2”Sept. 28“Castlevania: Nocturne” Season 1“The Darkness within La Luz del Mundo”Sept. 29“Nowhere” More

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      Stream These Great Movies Before They Leave Netflix in September

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      This month’s losses for U.S. subscribers include some of the most beloved titles and characters ever to grace a screen.The titles leaving Netflix in the United States are a real smorgasbord this month, from genre movies to children’s fare to two of the most beloved Oscar winners in cinematic history. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Colette’ (Sept. 12)You may think you know what you’re getting when you click “play” on a period literary biopic starring Keira Knightley — but the director Wash Westmoreland is delightfully uninterested in hewing to expectations. This is no ordinary period literary biopic, because the French writer Colette was no period literary figure; she was an ahead-of-her time scribe and an unapologetically bisexual hedonist whose lust for life made for especially lively prose. Knightley is clearly having a good time subverting her prim-and-proper persona, while Dominic West is deliciously doofy as the man who brings her out of her shell before receding into her long shadow.Stream it here.‘Annihilation’ (Sept. 29)The writer and director Alex Garland is a rare creator of science fiction who truly seems interested in the “science” piece of the puzzle; unlike many of his contemporaries, who use the tools of futuristic fare as window dressing for mediocre action and adventure, he crafts films of ideas, approaching the possibilities of future technologies and alien interactions with contemplation and intellectual heft. Like his “Ex Machina” before it, this adaptation of the novel by Jeff VanderMeer is also as interested in character as it is in genre (if not more so), focusing on a biologist (a fine, and occasionally ferocious, Natalie Portman) who is investigating a possible alien life force while also grappling with the recent death of her husband (Oscar Isaac). Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson round out the cast.Stream it here.‘Clear and Present Danger’ (Sept. 30)Harrison Ford’s second outing as Tom Clancy’s venerable hero Jack Ryan is a tense, well-crafted geopolitical thriller. Newly appointed as the C.I.A.’s acting deputy director, Ryan uncovers a scorcher of a secret: a covert war, conducted by intelligence operatives against a Columbian drug cartel, authorized at the top levels of the U.S. government. Willem Dafoe, Joaquim de Almeida and the “Mission: Impossible” favorite Henry Czerny are among the evil-doers, while James Earl Jones returns as Ryan’s boss and confidante. Ford’s “Patriot Games” director, Phillip Noyce, also returns, a director so deft at putting together a suspense sequence that he manages to generate nail-biting tension with a scene about deleting some files.Stream it here.‘Lawless’ (Sept. 30)The director John Hillcoat and the musician-turned-screenwriter Nick Cave reunited after the triumph of “The Proposition” (2005) for this 1930s crime film with a phenomenal cast, including Jason Clarke, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce and Mia Wasikowska. Cave’s story, adapted from the historical novel “The Wettest County in the World” by Matt Bondurant, concerns the bootlegging Bondurant brothers (Clarke, Hardy and LaBeouf), who find their business interests threatened by a crooked U.S. Marshal (Pearce) and a rival bootlegger (Oldman), among others. The period costumes and settings are stunning, and the sprawling cast meshes nicely; Hardy is especially strong as a man of few words but furious fists.Stream it here.‘A League of Their Own’ (Sept. 30)This 1992 smash, directed by Penny Marshall, is based on the true story of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, formed in 1943 to help keep the national pastime going while World War II pulled male ballplayers out of the majors. Geena Davis stars as Dottie Hinson, star catcher of the Rockford Peaches, and Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan, the former baseball star and current drunk who coaches the team when he’s sober (which is infrequent). With able support from Jon Lovitz, Madonna, Lori Petty, David Straitairn and many more, this one is smoothly assembled, sensitively acted and riotously funny.Stream it here.‘Nanny McPhee’ (Sept. 30)A decade after winning the Oscar for her screenplay adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility,” Emma Thompson returned to the typewriter to pen the film version of a slightly less venerated literary property: the “Nurse Matilda” children’s novels, by the British author Christianna Brand. But it doesn’t feel like slumming; Thompson invests her screenplay with all the winking wit you would expect, and she absolutely goes for broke in her performance of the title role, a kind of warts-and-all Mary Poppins. The director Kirk Jones orchestrates the chaos with a sure hand.Stream it here.‘Rocky I-V’ (Sept. 30)The first five films of the Rocky franchise — starring, written and sometimes directed by Sylvester Stallone — vary wildly in style, quality and critical and commercial reception. But taken together, they create a fascinating portrait of mainstream American moviemaking from the late 1970s to the early ’90s, as the modest, character-driven drama of the 1976 original slowly but surely gave way to the montage-heavy, jingoistic bombast of “Rocky IV” from 1987. But for better or worse, each film offers its own pleasures, from the specificity of Stallone’s dialogue to the richly played supporting characters (particularly Talia Shire’s Adrian and Carl Weathers’s Apollo Creed) to the crowd-pleasing closing bouts.Stream “Rocky” here, “Rocky II” here, “Rocky III” here, “Rocky IV” here and “Rocky V” here.‘Star Trek’ / ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ (Sept. 30)When J.J. Abrams was announced as the director of a newly rebooted series of “Star Trek” films, he was still best known for his television work. The decision smacked of some desperation; after several “Star Trek” television spinoffs and numerous big-screen resurrections, what could anyone (let alone a not-yet-proven filmmaker) add to the mythos of the original “Enterprise” crew? But Abrams’s inaugural 2009 entry was an absolute treat, a sleek, well-cast popcorn picture that reinvigorated the original characters and story while also playing appropriate tribute. The 2013 follow-up, “Into Darkness,” is less successful but still an entertaining diversion, particularly for Benedict Cumberbatch’s take on Ricardo Montalbán’s villainous “Khan.”Stream “Star Trek” here and “Star Trek: Into Darkness” here.‘Titanic’ (Sept. 30)The 1912 sinking of the Titanic luxury cruise liner remains a source of fascination (and tragedy) in American culture, thanks in no small part to the long shadow cast by James Cameron’s 1997 Oscar winner and box office champion. It’s the kind of film that can be described only as “old fashioned”— not as a slam but simply as a statement of fact. Cameron so deftly mixes spectacle and special effects with poignant human interest (thanks primarily to the warmth and chemistry of its stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) that one is legitimately reminded of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” It’s a throwback epic, and its appeal has proved timeless.Stream it here.‘Warm Bodies’ (Sept. 30)We’ve seen no shortage of zombie horror in the 21st century, from “28 Days Later” — written by the aforementioned Garland — to the “Dawn of the Dead” remake to the (paradoxically) unkillable “Walking Dead” series and its many spinoffs. But we haven’t seen very many zombie rom-coms, which makes this 2013 charmer from the writer and director Jonathan Levine (“Long Shot”) all the more commendable. Adapting the novel by Isaac Marion, Levine tells the story of R (Nicholas Hoult, later of “The Great”), a zombie who falls hard for the still-living Julie (Teresa Palmer). Well, every relationship has its issues.Stream it here. More

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      ‘One Piece’ Review: Netflix Tries to Translate the Anime Magic (Again)

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      Remember the live-action, English-language “Cowboy Bebop”?With “One Piece,” Netflix repeats history, and there isn’t much evidence that it paid attention to what happened the first time around.“Cowboy Bebop” was a cult-favorite Japanese animated series that fetishized cool American jazz and film noir and Hollywood westerns, and in 2021 Netflix returned the cultural homage by making an American live-action adaptation. It wasn’t a disaster, but it quickly fell from sight.“One Piece” is a remarkably endurable manga and anime franchise — more than 500 million books sold, 1,073 television episodes and counting — that applies a slapstick, Buster Keaton-like visual energy to an adventure story with roots in Hollywood swashbucklers and musicals like “Captain Blood” and “The Crimson Pirate.” So once again Netflix has been moved to produce an American live-action remake, whose eight episodes premiered on Thursday.The original “Cowboy Bebop” and “One Piece” are very different creatures, but they have something important in common: They are propelled by style. Texture, composition, sound and movement engage us and trigger our emotions; the moody revenge plot of “Bebop” and the rousingly affirmative coming-of-age story of “One Piece” are just serviceable scaffoldings.There’s no reason a live-action version of either anime couldn’t find its own distinctive style. But neither of these shows managed it; if anything, they seem to have avoided the attempt. To an even greater extent than the Netflix “Cowboy Bebop,” the Netflix “One Piece” feels bland and generic. It may satisfy fans of the original who are happy to see events more or less faithfully replicated, but most of the verve and personality of the anime are gone, replaced by busyness, elaborate but uninteresting production design and — a sign of the times — an increased piety regarding the story’s themes of knowing and believing in yourself.Set in a fantastical world made up mostly of ocean and patrolled by colorfully named pirate crews, some of them made up of fish-men, “One Piece” centers on a young wannabe pirate named Monkey D. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy). Pursuing his childhood dream of becoming king of the pirates and finding a perhaps mythical treasure called the One Piece, he gradually gathers a crew of young misfits like himself, with unhappy pasts and missions that define them: to be the world’s greatest swordsman, or to locate a (perhaps mythical) seafood paradise.From left, Emily Rudd, Iñaki Godoy and Mackenyu form part of a crew of misfits driven by personal missions.NetflixIn addition to unnaturally high spirits and an utter refusal to take no for an answer, Luffy is defined by his ability to stretch his limbs across long distances (handy when throwing punches) and to absorb punishment, the results of eating a forbidden fruit that made his body rubberlike. This bit of comic inspiration by the character’s creator, the Japanese artist Eiichiro Oda, makes Luffy physically and psychologically congruent — he is elastic and indestructible in every way.The series does a more than creditable job of recreating Luffy’s rubbery abilities, and Godoy (a Mexican actor who appeared in the Netflix series “Who Killed Sara?” and “The Imperfects”) is a decent match with the animated character in look and temperament.But there’s not much beyond that for him to play, and the same goes for the rest of the cast, which includes capable performers like Mackenyu as the swordsman, Roronoa Zoro, and Taz Skylar as the piratical chef, Sanji. Depth of writing isn’t make or break amid the carnival atmosphere of the anime, delivered in 20-minute dollops of sensation, but the thinness of the characterizations becomes much harder to ignore in the more deliberate, more ordinary Netflix telling, with the story reshaped into hourlong episodes.That reshaping — the eight episodes correspond to roughly the first 45 episodes of the anime — was surely a major effort, and it would be understandable if there wasn’t a lot of time or energy left over for actually reimagining the material for live actors and constructed sets. The show’s developers and showrunners, Matt Owens and Steven Maeda, were able to wrestle the story to a draw. But they don’t capture the corny, goofy spirit of the anime, and without that the generalities about living your dream and making way for a new generation just sit there gathering dust.The fates of “One Piece” and “Cowboy Bebop” are, perhaps, a likely consequence of big-box streaming. Taking a show that has found a fanatical following and remaking it with the widest possible audience in mind means making it for no particular viewer at all. More

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      ‘One Piece’ Creator Hopes Live-Action Series Will Defy ‘a History of Failure’

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      On Thursday, an eight-part adaptation of Eiichiro Oda’s pirate comedy-adventure “One Piece” will make its Netflix debut. The stakes are high: Millions of fans want to see if the showrunners, Matt Owens and Steven Maeda (whom Oda describes as “‘One Piece’ superfans”), succeeded in converting the beloved manga and anime series to live-action. Although some viewers over 30 may not recognize the title, “One Piece” is one of the most popular entertainment franchises in the world.Since July 1997, when it began appearing in the Japanese manga magazine Weekly Shonen Jump, “One Piece” collections have sold more than 516 million copies worldwide. An animated TV series notched its 1,000th episode earlier this year, and there have been numerous TV specials, light novels and video games; fans discuss “One Piece” trivia on countless websites. The 15th theatrical feature, “One Piece Film: Red,” was the No. 1 box-office hit in Japan in 2022, outdrawing “Top Gun: Maverick.”Netflix held the fan screening in Santa Monica, Calif. The “One Piece” franchise is enormously popular, with more than 516 million books sold and numerous anime series and movies released.Yuri Hasegawa for The New York TimesOda is extremely private — he does not allow his face to be photographed, if he can help it — but he talked about “One Piece” in a rare interview from Los Angeles. Speaking through the interpreter Taro Goto, he discussed the origins of “One Piece,” casting its hero for TV, and the film that changed his mind about live-action adaptation. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.When it comes to adapting a phenomenally popular manga and anime series like “One Piece” to live action, what do you have to keep in mind?A live-action adaptation of a manga doesn’t simply re-enact the source material on a one-to-one basis: It involves really thinking about what fans love about the characters, the dynamics among them — and being faithful to those elements. A good live-action show doesn’t have to change the story too much. The most important thing is whether the actors can reproduce the characters in a way that will satisfy the people who read the manga. I think we did it well, so I hope audiences will accept it.Colton Osorio, left, and Peter Gadiot in “One Piece,” premiering Thursday on Netflix.NetflixYou’ve said you wanted to be a manga artist since you were in elementary school. How did “One Piece” begin?I set out to draw the manga I wanted to read when I was young. When I started, I had to draw things that didn’t exist to get attention. There were plenty of heroes who fight the demons and save the world; the market was saturated with that kind of story. I wanted to do something different but relatable. I understood that I had been supported and helped by a lot of people to get to where I was, so friendship became a central theme.The hero of the story is Monkey D. Luffy (it rhymes, appropriately, with “goofy”), who is determined to become King of the Pirates by finding a fabulous treasure known as the One Piece. Luffy is warmhearted, upbeat and ferociously devoted to his friends, but he’s no matinee idol. How did you design him?I knew I wanted to write a pirate manga, and just drew from instinct the kind of young boy I imagined in the role. As the adventure continued, I realized that various kinds of pirates would appear, so I decided to give Luffy a face that would be very easy to draw. Later, when I had to give autographs and needed to sketch Luffy, it was easy to do.“One Piece” includes strong female characters like Nami, played in the series by Emily Rudd. (With Mackenyu Arata, center, and Iñaki Godoy.)NetflixSomething that sets “One Piece” apart from many adventure manga is the powerful, capable women in the story, including the archaeologist Robin and Nami, the navigator.There are many strong women in the world of “One Piece” — women with intelligence like Robin, or with abilities like Nami. There are even attractive and strong women among the enemy pirates. In the manga I read as a kid, there was always a point where the heroine existed just to be rescued. That didn’t sit well with me; I didn’t want to create a story about women being kidnapped and saved. I depict women who know how to fight for themselves and don’t need to be saved. If a moment comes where they’re overpowered, their shipmates will help them out, and vice versa.As a boy, Luffy ate the accursed gum-gum fruit and it turned his body into rubber, allowing him to deliver fantastic stretchy kicks and punches in fights. Isn’t he better suited to animation than to live action?When I first started, I didn’t think there was any point in drawing a manga that could be remade in live-action. But when I saw the movie “Shaolin Soccer,” it felt like a manga-esque world brought to life. I changed my mind. I realized times had changed, and there was technology available that could make a live-action “One Piece” happen. So I shifted to finding the right partner to bring the manga to life.Actors have portrayed Luffy and his crew in stage shows and even in a Kabuki play. But attempts to adapt popular anime into American live-action movies and series have generally been unsuccessful, as in the widely panned “Ghost in the Shell” (2017) and the short-lived “Cowboy Bebop” (2021). Did that worry you?Various manga had been made into live action, but there was a history of failure; no one in Japan could name a successful example. Would fans of “One Piece” — and viewers who don’t know the manga — accept it? Perhaps it was time to search for the answer. Thankfully, Netflix agreed that they wouldn’t go out with the show until I agreed it was satisfactory. I read the scripts, gave notes and acted as a guard dog to ensure the material was being adapted in the correct way.Oda said casting Luffy was the biggest challenge. “I didn’t expect to find anyone quite like Iñaki Godoy,” he said.NetflixLuffy is not the brightest doubloon in the dead man’s chest, but he’s an endearing character: He’s impulsive and happy-go-lucky until some villain threatens his friends or menaces someone weaker — then it’s a fight to the finish. Was he difficult to cast?I thought the biggest challenge was going to be finding somebody to play Luffy — I didn’t expect to find anyone quite like Iñaki Godoy. When I first created Luffy, I drew the most energetic child I could imagine: a normal child on the outside, but not at all normal on the inside. Iñaki was just like the person I drew; he felt absolutely natural. Before I saw the first cut of the show, a lot of my notes were based on how the manga Luffy would act. But after seeing Iñaki’s performance, I was able to shift gears and give notes on how the live-action Luffy should act.The live-action “One Piece” uses more extensive dialogue than the manga or the animated series, which focus more on the visuals.In a manga, the more dialogue you put in, the less space you have to draw, so I cut the words as much as possible. But when people actually talk, the conversations are different. In live-action dramas, there’s always a lot of dialogue. If the characters spoke in real life, their speeches would have the natural feel that’s in the scripts. I’m very happy about how that turned out.Over the last 26 years, you’ve drawn thousands of pages of the manga as well as magazine covers, book covers and posters. You still draw in ink on paper; have you ever considered switching to digital?Everyone is drawing digitally now and it’s not that I’m not interested in it, but for some reason readers tend to take that work a little lightly. I enjoy the experience of drawing by hand, and I expect I’ll continue using hand drawing for the duration of “One Piece.”You’ve spoken with enthusiasm about the possibility of a second season of the live-action series, and “One Piece” collections continue to appear on best-seller lists around the world. When you started Luffy’s saga back in 1997, did you ever imagine it would run for more than 25 years?I never thought “One Piece” would last this long: When I began, I imagined it might run for five years. But it was my first time doing something serialized, and I found that as I kept writing, the characters took on lives of their own. Before I knew it, they were writing the story for me, and it just kept going. More

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      Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone.

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      Many of us stream shows and movies with the subtitles on all the time — and not because it’s cool.“What did he just say?”Those are some of the most commonly uttered words in my home. No matter how much my wife and I crank up the TV volume, the actors in streaming movies and shows are becoming increasingly difficult to understand. We usually end up turning on the subtitles, even though we aren’t hard of hearing.We’re not alone. In the streaming era, as video consumption shifts from movie theaters toward content shrunk down for televisions, tablets and smartphones, making dialogue crisp and clear has become the entertainment world’s toughest technology challenge. About 50 percent of Americans — and the majority of young people — watch videos with subtitles on most of the time, according to surveys, in large part because they are struggling to decipher what actors are saying.“It’s getting worse,” said Si Lewis, who has run Hidden Connections, a home theater installation company in Alameda, Calif., for nearly 40 years. “All of my customers have issues with hearing the dialogue, and many of them use closed captions.”The garbled prattle in TV shows and movies is now a widely discussed problem that tech and media companies are just beginning to unravel with solutions such as speech-boosting software algorithms, which I tested. (More on this later.)The issue is complex because of myriad factors at play. In big movie productions, professional sound mixers calibrate audio levels for traditional theaters with robust speaker systems capable of delivering a wide range of sound, from spoken words to loud gunshots. But when you stream that content through an app on a TV, smartphone or tablet, the audio has been “down mixed,” or compressed, to carry the sounds through tiny, relatively weak speakers, said Marina Killion, an audio engineer at the media production company Optimus.It doesn’t help that TVs keep getting thinner and more minimal in design. To emphasize the picture, many modern flat-screen TVs hide their speakers, blasting sound away from the viewer’s ears, Mr. Lewis said.There are also issues specific to streaming. Unlike broadcast TV programs, which must adhere to regulations that forbid them from exceeding specific loudness levels, there are no such rules for streaming apps, Ms. Killion said. That means sound may be wildly inconsistent from app to app and program to program — so if you watch a show on Amazon Prime Video and then switch to a movie on Netflix, you probably have to repeatedly adjust your volume settings to hear what people are saying.“Online is kind of the wild, wild west,” Ms. Killion said.Subtitles are far from an ideal solution to all of this, so here are some remedies — including add-ons for your home entertainment setup and speech enhancers — to try.A speaker will helpDecades ago, TV dialogue could be heard loud and clear. It was obvious where the speakers lived on a television — behind a plastic grill embedded into the front of the set, where they could blast sound directly toward you. Nowadays, even on the most expensive TVs, the speakers are tiny and crammed into the back or the bottom of the display.“A TV is meant to be a TV, but it’s never going to present the sound,” said Paul Peace, a director of audio platform engineering at Sonos, the speaker technology company based in Santa Barbara, Calif. “They’re too thin, they’re downward and their exits aren’t directed at the audience.”Any owner of a modern television will benefit from plugging in a separate speaker such as a soundbar, a wide, stick-shaped speaker. I’ve tested many soundbars over the last decade, and they have greatly improved. With pricing of $80 to $900, they can be more budget friendly than a multispeaker surround-sound system, and they are simpler to set up.Last week, I tried the Sonos Arc, which I set up in minutes by plugging it into a power outlet, connecting it to my TV with an HDMI cable and using the Sonos app to calibrate the sound for my living room space. It delivered significantly richer sound quality, with deep bass and crisp dialogue, than my TV’s built-in speakers.At $900, the Sonos Arc is pricey. But it’s one of the few soundbars on the market with a speech enhancer, a button that can be pressed in the Sonos app to make spoken words easier to hear. It made a big difference in helping me understand the mumbly villain of the most recent James Bond movie, “No Time to Die.”But the Sonos soundbar’s speech enhancer ran into its limits with the jarring colloquialisms of the Netflix show “The Witcher.” It couldn’t make more fathomable lines like “We’re seeking a girl and a witcher — her with ashen hair and patrician countenance, him a mannerless, blanched brute.”Then again, I’m not sure any speaker could help with that. I left the subtitles on for that one.Dialogue enhancers in appsNot everyone wants to spend more money to fix sound on a TV that already costs hundreds of dollars. Fortunately, some tech companies are starting to build their own dialogue enhancers into their streaming apps.In April, Amazon began rolling out an accessibility feature, called dialogue boost, for a small number of shows and movies in its Prime Video streaming app. To use it, you open the language options and choose “English Dialogue Boost: High.” I tested the tool in “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” the spy thriller with a cast of especially unintelligible, deep-voiced men.With the dialogue boost turned on (and the Sonos soundbar turned off), I picked scenes that were hard to hear and jotted down what I thought the actors had said. Then I rewatched each scene with subtitles on to check my answers.In the opening of the show, I thought an actor said: “That’s right, you stuck the ring on her — I thought you two were trying to work it out.”The actor actually said, “Oh, sorry, you still had the ring on — I thought the two of you were trying to work it out.”Whoops.I had better luck with another scene involving a phone conversation between Jack Ryan and his former boss making plans to get together. After reviewing my results, I was delighted to realize that I had understood all the words correctly.But minutes later, Jack Ryan’s boss, James Greer, murmured a line that I could not even guess: “Yeah, they were using that in Karachi before I left.” Even dialogue enhancers can’t fix an actor’s lack of enunciation.In conclusionThe Sonos Arc soundbar was helpful for hearing dialogue without the speech enhancer turned on most of the time for movies and shows. The speech enhancer made words easier to hear in some situations, like scenes with very soft-spoken actors, which could be useful for those who are hearing-impaired. For everyone else, the good news is that installing even a cheaper speaker that lacks a dialogue mode can go a long way.Amazon’s dialogue booster was no magic bullet, but it’s better than nothing and a good start. I’d love to see more features like this from other streaming apps. A Netflix spokeswoman said the company had no plans to release a similar tool.My last piece of advice is counterintuitive: Don’t do anything with the sound settings on your TV. Mr. Lewis said that modern TVs have software that automatically calibrate the sound levels for you — and if you mess around with the settings for one show, the audio may be out of whack for the next one.And if all else fails, of course, there are subtitles. Those are foolproof. More

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      This Netflix Anime Uses Alt-History to Explore Gender Norms

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      “Ōoku: The Inner Chambers” tells a complex love story in an alternate-reality Edo Japan in which an illness upends gender roles.Gender is a trap. The binary is a lie. And flexible sexual politics can lead to real change.That’s some of the subtext in the fascinating Netflix anime series “Ōoku: The Inner Chambers,” which tells a complex love story in an alternate-reality Edo Japan in which an illness upends society’s gender norms and expectations.The show’s story, adapted from a popular manga that also spawned several live-action series and movies in Japan, is framed as a historical record of how this alt-Japan and the shogunate came to be.When the shogun, the last male heir to the Tokugawa clan, dies from an aggressive strain of smallpox that targets young men, he is secretly replaced by an illegitimate daughter, Iemitsu, who is taken to the palace and raised as a man. (Iemitsu is based on the real-life shogun of the Tokugawa clan with the same name; “Ōoku” cleverly builds up its world from select real historical characters and events.)As the male population dwindles and the economy fails, Iemitsu lives a life secluded in the palace with the ōoku, or the “inner chambers,” where thousands of beautiful men live as concubines for her. Forced to present herself as a man, Iemitsu grows into a brutal, violent misogynist. And although Iemitsu wants to live her life as a woman, she also resents her body; a few years into her reign, she is a victim of sexual assault, and a subsequent miscarriage debilitates her with rage and grief. She struggles to find her place within the limitations of the gender binary. Her manhood and womanhood are never in service to her understanding of her own identity; whether she’s passing as a male ruler or having a child to secure the Tokugawa bloodline, her actions must always be in service to the shogunate.Then a handsome monk, Arikoto, is abducted and forced to forsake his sacred vows so he can become the groom of Iemitsu’s bedchamber. Arikoto eventually becomes content with his lifetime sentence in the ōoku and falls in love with Iemitsu, who softens under Arikoto’s patient affections.Abduction, coercion, abuse, assault: Arikoto and Iemitsu’s romance isn’t exactly a Hallmark love story. Arikoto is not the traditional gallant prince; he is deeply dedicated to his life of chastity and charity until that life is upended and his spirit is broken in the ōoku. Nor is Iemitsu the lovely damsel; she’s embittered by the ways her station has dictated how she must see and use her body.But the most affecting moment in the love story between her and Arikoto is when they realize their love for each other while both in drag. Iemitsu doles out gendered punishments to the men around her: She gives the grooms of the ōoku women’s names and demands they dress up as women for her entertainment. But when she sees Arikoto, who isn’t shamed but instead embraces his femininity while dressed as a beautiful woman, she is dazzled by his fairness and grace. They hold each other, him as a woman and her as a man. The difference between their gender expression and biological identity is irrelevant; they are two people who have come to an understanding based not on gender but on love.What could have easily been a more traditional love story is instead an intriguing look at how two people are forced to negotiate their ideals, their identity, their politics, their relationships — sexual and platonic — and their position in a government hierarchy as the expectations of them as man and woman, as consort and shogun, bear down on them.The show also ventures beyond the ōoku to depict how different strata of society respond to the decreasing male population. Women adjust to being the workers and breadwinners. Lords who have lost their sons to the epidemic force their daughters to pass as their male heirs but then resent them for learning, perhaps even enjoying, stereotypically masculine activities like horseback riding and swordsmanship. The remaining young men, considered too valuable and fragile to work, are expected to stay home and lounge. For money they may prostitute themselves to women desperate to be impregnated.At first the series seems to be leading us in the direction of a completely gender-swapped society, but in one episode the voice-over narration declares outright: “It wasn’t that the status of men and women was reversed. To be precise, men ceased to do anything besides father children. Including child-rearing and house chores, all the labor in the world was placed on women’s shoulders.”So even though the shogun is a woman, she is still surrounded by advisers who are men. Though women keep the economy afloat with their labors and the realm going with their child-rearing, the men retain their titles and social superiority, reaping society’s rewards even as they are rendered impotent in every non-procreative sense of the word.“Ōoku” isn’t so fantastical that it completely sloughs off the ways gender and sex dictate how individuals live in a society, often for bad. Antiquated notions of gender roles are so entrenched, the show suggests, that society is determined to preserve them even as they become less and less feasible.So perhaps “Ōoku” can just serve as a thought exercise, particularly for Americans right now, as transgender rights and women’s rights are under threat: What might it look like when we decide our notions of gender no longer serve us? That may be the real love story waiting to happen. More