Comment on Shonda Rhimes’ Latest Project Seeks to Challenge Beauty Stereotypes

Amy Winehouse wrote songs that cut to the core of heartbreak, and sang them in a voice as supple and sturdy as raw silk. In her short lifetime she earned millions of fans, a number that has only increased since her death from alcohol poisoning in 2011, at age 27.

Sam Taylor Johnson’s hotly anticipated Amy Winehouse biopic, Back to Black, was contested by the late musician’s fans from the day it was announced. For some, it felt too soon following Winehouse’s untimely death in 2011; for others, a musical drama invited the possibility of caricature at best and exploitation at worst. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Fresh in the mind of Winehouse fans was Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary, Amy, which shed light on her on-and-off romantic relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, who introduced the young singer to hard drugs, and her father, who has disputed the film’s depiction of him as greedy and uncaring.

The British director Sam Taylor-Johnson has taken on some ambitious characters in her films. Some of them (John Lennon in Nowhere Boy) were real, some of them (Christian Grey, the tortured bondage enthusiast in Fifty Shades of Grey) were fictional, and at least one of them (James Frey, the author of the not entirely truthful addiction memoir A Million Little Pieces) were somewhere in between. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But her latest subject may be her most formidable.

Though the third and latest season of Bridgerton is, for all intents and purposes, about the blossoming romance between old friends Colin Bridgerton and Penelope Featherington, let it also serve as an affirmation that the best Bridgerton in the ton is Benedict. In the Bridgerton universe, Benedict, the handsome and good-natured second-born son of the Bridgerton brood, is effectively the Prince Harry to Anthony’s Prince William, the “spare” to the heir.

We often talk casually about childhood, girlhood, young adulthood, as if they were monolithic experiences; it’s only when they are reflected back at us, especially in the movies, that we see how many different shades of childhood there are, as distinctive as the individuals soldiering through them. In Andrea Arnold’s tender, bracing Bird—playing in competition at the Cannes Film Festival—12-year old Bailey (Nikiya Adams) lives with her father Bug (Barry Keoghan, of The Banshees of Inisherin and Saltburn) and older brother Hunter (Jason Buda) in a squat in Kent, the kind of down-at-the-heels house that should be depressing but somehow isn’t. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The walls of Bailey’s bedroom are painted with vines and leaves; butterflies occasionally enter through the open window for a visit.

What if the millennials of Broad City had kids? In Babes, that show’s co-creator Ilana Glazer stars as Eden, a woman who gets pregnant and leans on her lifelong bestie Dawn (Michelle Buteau), who has two kids of her own, as she prepares for motherhood. Together they endure gigantic amniocentesis needles, unexpected leakages, and pregnancy-related horniness.