The Canceled As Character Study

In Tár, Barbarian, and Glass Onion, there's pleasure in watching celebrities fall.

- Alison Willmore

IT'S EASY TO FORGET, now that all meaning has been wrung out of the term, that cancellation is a joke about television a reference to dropping someone from your life the way a network might drop a failing sitcom from its schedule. And it's TV, always more agile in reacting to real-world developments, that's been the chief source of stories about characters getting canceled as the term became a refrain in culture-war fodder. Procedurals like The Good Fight and Law & Order have centered cases on fap-happy comedians and slur spouting professors, while sci-fi shows like Black Mirror and The Orville have presented tortured allegories about people getting killed by hashtags or lobotomized at the behest of a downvoting public. And that's just on an episode level. Series like Hacks and Alaska Daily built callouts into their very premises, citing them as the impetus forcing their disgraced heroines to start over in humbling new gigs. When Apple got into the streaming game in 2019, its flagship offering was the star-driven The Morning Show, a sleek drama taking place in the aftermath of the firing of a famous news anchor who was not unlike Matt Lauer.