Opposition Party

In 2025, television offered a primer in principled dissent.

By Elizabeth AlsopJanuary 22, 2026

• Television

• Cultural Studies

IN THE OPENING SCENE of The Lowdown, protagonist Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) introduces himself to some local businessmen as Tulsa’s resident “truthstorian.” It’s the kind of grandiloquent gesture audiences may have come to expect from prestige TV’s pantheon of self-regarding male personae: from standoffish Don “I don’t think about you at all” Draper to strong men like Tony Soprano and Walter White, at least in his Heisenberg era; from braggadocious Al Swearengen to cop-car philosopher Rust Cohle, whose rambling sidebars on the first season of True Detective might seem to antecede Lee’s Southern-baked conspiracy theorizing, or Saul Goodman, the snake-oil-selling alter ego of Better Call Saul’s Jimmy McGill.

But Lee doesn’t fit this mold. By the end of the season, Lee has proven himself to be a lot of things—impulsive, careless with his own and other people’s safety, sloppy with secrets, a half-assed employer, convinced of his own exceptionalism. But he has also made good on his opening gambit: he is, in fact, a fierce warrior for the truth, and for social justice, which he has—by the finale—helped to at least partially bring about.

Lee, in other words, is not just another in a long line of “difficult men” so much as an avatar of a new type—what one character calls the “white man who cares” (derisively, it must be added; as another character remarks later, “Fucking white men that care, saddest of the bunch”). If Peak TV gave rise to a cohort of charismatic arch-capitalists, out for their own private gain, television during the past year witnessed the emergence of a new cadre of recalcitrant folk heroes, with shows from The Lowdown to Star Wars: Andor, Pluribus, Poker Face, and The Pitt giving us characters driven by conscience and a capacity for uncivil disobedience in pursuit of the public good.

Television, of course, has always had its crusaders for righteous causes. But they’ve generally operated within, rather than outside, the confines of the law. Columbo, Dale Cooper, Fox Mulder, Sarah Lund with her sweaters, and Mare with her hair: all were sanctioned in their justice-seeking by some government entity. The truth was out there, and they were empowered to go after it with the resources of the state.

In 2025, however, prestige series offered up an unrulier crew of extrajudicial truth-seekers—an assortment of renegades, rebels, and dudes, outmatched and mostly underresourced, united by an eagerness to redress systemic wrongs. The fictional enemy might take different forms: alien virus, political corruption, imperial fascism, craven hospital administrators. But across Pluribus, The Lowdown, Andor, and The Pitt, we saw similarly conscientious objectors—protagonists whose principled opposition to authoritarian overreach makes it hard not to see them as symptomatic of a post-Trump, post–Peak TV era, defined by austerity and omni-crisis.

In short, series this year featured characters ready and willing to dissent. On Sterlin Harjo’s The Lowdown, Lee—a bookseller cum investigative journalist—goes up against the state’s powerful political dynasty. Repeatedly beat up, stuffed in car trunks, and, at one point, kidnapped and dragged to the world’s scariest kegger, Lee is undeterred; in the season finale, he gate-crashes a church full of white supremacists. Meanwhile, in Vince Gilligan’s new series, Pluribus, the initially misanthropic lead, romantasy author Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), is stirred into prosocial action by a world-altering, humanity-as-we-know-it-ending event. While the rest of the surviving unbrainwashed humans carry on with shrugging indifference, she mounts a contrarian campaign to repel the suspiciously friendly invading force, eventually attracting a fellow refusenik to her cause: Manousos Oviedo (Carlos Manuel Vesga), a man who would rather cauterize his suppurating wounds with a hot machete than submit to the hive mind.

Operating on a more macro level, Tony Gilroy’s Andor features an entire cast of freedom fighters whose commitment to the anti-imperialist cause is repeatedly tested during the intensified assaults of the second season. And closer to home, the first responders of The Pitt, lead by Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robby—a white man who most definitely cares—dramatized a similarly collective resistance to dehumanizing corporate imperatives: in this case, those handed down not from the Galactic Empire but from a hospital administration more concerned with profits and “metrics” than with patient care.

Considered individually, these series might not appear to have much in common. But collectively, this commitment to dramatizing defiance reflects a shared ethos, and perhaps a desire to see reflected on screens—if not in our courts or in Congress—something other than compliance: to watch someone, in the face of intensified suppression and state-sanctioned violence, actually do something. It’s not hopecore, exactly. But in a political and media moment dominated by half-truths and mushy bothsidesism—in which MAGA has cornered the market on the Quiet Part Out Loud—watching characters closer to the left engage in righteous line-holding isn’t not inspiring.

In 2025, then, it was not only cinema, as Sam Adams pointed out, that celebrated resistance; it was television too. That many of the characters who care were, in fact, white men (and women) suggests a slightly delayed reaction to the uprisings of 2020, as if serial television was just now starting to metabolize the lessons of Black Lives Matter and the attendant liberal guilt. TV isn’t praxis, but a decade after Trump’s first election, popular culture appears to be scrambling a response to the threats posed by what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have called “end times fascism.” Like in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, there’s a literalism to the politics of Andor, Pluribus, and The Lowdown that suggests an interest less in allegorizing than in educational broadcasting, in finding ways for the revolution, in some form, to be televised.

After decades of charismatic monsters, TV’s creators seem newly interested in rising to—and writing for—the political moment. Rather than defaulting to moral ambiguity, shows like The Lowdown, Pluribus, Andor, and The Pitt, which just returned for a second season, seem newly interested in melodrama’s capacity to produce moral legibility, and intent on pursuing ethical questions, not just puzzle-solving epistemological ones.

In the process, they seem to reckon with TV’s fetish for bad masculinity. Watching corrupt men do their thing on-screen hits differently in a time of actual monsters; it’s less fun binging fictional evil when we’re subject to so much ghoulishness in real time. It makes a certain kind of sense, then, that television is mustering an opposition party. Lee, Carol, Cassian Andor—you may not like them especially (and people, it turns out, really do not like Carol). But that’s beside the point. As anyone who has organized knows, you don’t need to find someone “sympathetic” to stand in solidarity with them.

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If critics have hypothesized previous ethical turns in television, the moral dilemmas taken up by this year’s series felt less hypothetical than directly responsive to our Whac-A-Mole political reality, in which every week brings some fresh new threat to democracy. Andor, of course, was already widely seen as a show that spoke to—and even provided political education about—our current historical moment, in which “the pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it.” (RIP Karis Nemik!) And that was before the moment in the second season when Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) delivered a speech to the Galactic Senate about the genocide on the planet Ghorman, which functioned as a barely veiled commentary on Gaza. “The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss,” Senator Mothma intones.

Using Disney money, Tony Gilroy and his writers deliver not just a cutting analysis of our own degraded media environment but also a case for truth-telling as essential anti-fascist tactic. As political philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò recently observed, “to keep functioning, a society must discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities.”

If a democracy is only as strong as its capacity to disambiguate between fact and fiction, it’s revealing that so many of the past year’s TV protagonists have been defined by their ability to call bullshit. On Poker Face, amateur detective Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne)—a “human lie detector” to Lee’s truthstorian—shares with her Lowdown counterpart not just a Dude-like stoner energy but a reflexive allergy to untruths as well. “Bullshit!” she can’t stop herself from exclaiming. (It’s a quality she shares with Lee’s teenaged daughter, Ryan Kiera Armstrong’s Francis, “a great bullshit detector” who becomes her dad’s de facto girl Friday.) “This is bullshit. You know this is bullshit,” Robby tells the hospital’s administrator on The Pitt. “And if you don’t, then we are all in trouble.”

In Pluribus, Carol’s distaste for doublespeak takes on a comic edge, expressed in her refusal to accept the bland niceties of the alien others. In one scene, a member of the newly formed hive mind insists, under questioning, that they find Carol’s fiction just as “wonderful” and “crowd-pleasing” as the works of Shakespeare. “No offense, Larry,” she replies, “but, uh, I think you’re bullshitting me.” Even though, technically, the hive can’t lie, they can certainly obfuscate. This leads to moments both comic (“That is not John Cena!” Carol explodes at one point, presented with his smiling facsimile) and disturbing—as in the finale, when Carol discovers that Zosia (Karolina Wydra), her alien “chaperone”-turned-lover, has in fact lied by omission, by failing to disclose the aliens were working, against Carol’s will, to harvest stem cells from her frozen embryos. Meanwhile, Carol’s fellow traveler, Manousos, sets a new bar for militancy when he rejects the kindly entreaties of the entity identifying as his mother. “You’re not my mother,” he responds calmly: “My mother’s a bitch.”

Like Carol and Manousos, Lee, Robby, and the Andor ensemble are repeatedly confronted with versions of the same message: resistance is futile, so you might as well swallow the bullshit. At one point in The Lowdown, Francis goes to see a local antiques store owner who—like many of Lee’s less righteous partners in crime—finds her father’s inexorable commitment to the cause exhausting. Lee is probably “out somewhere acting like a hillbilly Indiana Jones,” he mutters. “That’s not to say that the truth isn’t important […] but it’s not worth getting hurt over.”

Isn’t it? Ultimately, these shows all come down on the side of resistance. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t clear-eyed about the difficulties of holding out. As Mark Harris noted on Bluesky, Pluribus is a show that “says something new about the seductiveness of giving in/up and who’s cut out for the misery of resistance.” Very few people, it turns out—maybe not enough. Near the end of the season, even Carol wavers, seduced by Zosia’s charms and a life of soft pleasures. It’s not until she is reminded of the price of capitulation that she gets back with the program. “You win, we save the world,” Carol says as she returns to Manousos, in the final lines of the first season, bringing nothing less than an atom bomb as collateral.

In short, resistance isn’t futile, but it’s also not easy. (Or pretty—these shows do the actors’ vanity no favors, and the characters they play are beat down and exhausted, and often look it.) Midway through The Lowdown, Peter Dinklage shows up as Lee’s similarly eccentric but far more cynical friend, Wendell, who has lost patience with Lee’s idealism. “You turned into one of those people […] who doesn’t fucking like anything!” Lee yells. “And you are one of those guys that thinks they can change the world!” Wendell fires back. It feels like a battle for the soul of prestige TV, or maybe a passing of the guard: from the amoral opportunists of series past to the impassioned agitators of series present, and, perhaps, future.

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All this world-changing and -saving comes at a cost, then, and not just to the characters. The Lowdown is particularly attentive to the harms that may be incurred by self-appointed saviors, and the fact that caring—especially when white people do it—can be a liability. It’s a short journey, in other words, from folk hero to “self-righteous cracker,” as one character calls Lee. If Hawke brings to the role the inspired zeal of his performance as John Brown in The Good Lord Bird (2020), here, Lee’s radical fervor leads not just to positive change but also, inadvertently, to the murder of Arthur, the Osage elder played, in his final performance, by Graham Greene. When does the cause turn into private crusade? Altruism give way to ego? Or, as one of The Lowdown’s more nakedly self-serving characters asks, “If you do something good and it ends badly every time, is that really good?”

But as these series acknowledge the excesses of principled action, they are never fatalistic about its impact. Which is to say, they show characters not just fighting one battle after another but also winning some of them. Lee rights historical wrongs; on Andor, the Rebels suffer losses, yet they score victories too. And between the ER docs of The Pitt, who knows how many lives have been saved? As Robby’s colleague tells him, in the season one finale, “You rocked that shit down there tonight.”

Cumulatively, these series, like One Battle After Another, might be seen as the stuff of progressive fantasy. They offer visions of the world that could be dismissed—much like, say, a certain recent New York mayoral run—as unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky. But given their concern with recognizable struggles, against challenges like manufactured austerity and AI, these shows might qualify instead as what José Esteban Muñoz, via Ernst Bloch, called “concrete utopias”: those that exist in the realm not of “banal optimism” but of “educated hope.”

Across these radically divergent fictional worlds, characters work, with others, to organize resistance efforts that look a lot like ours: they push to protect civil rights; to safeguard freedoms of speech and the press; to retain input into how, and by whom, their lives are governed. An abortion plotline in The Pitt—in which an underage girl is nearly forced into unwanted parenthood—may not seem to have much to do with Carol’s speculative predicament in Pluribus. Then again, if the aliens’ dominion is dependent on overriding her bodily autonomy, maybe it does.

In telling versions of the same story of anti-authoritarian resistance, then, popular culture in 2025 wasn’t just playing out a fantasy. Instead, it provided much-needed counterprogramming to the downbeat, dystopian imagery that has dominated screens for decades. However grim, the past year has produced fictions whose rhetorical dispositions seem closer to hard-won hope. If we fight, they suggest, there’s a chance—maybe a good one—that we are going to win.