Heroes and Scoundrels — that’s the title of a 2015 book that examines the representation of journalists in popular culture. Looking at movies, television, plays, novels and comics, authors Joe Saltzman and Matthew Ehrlich suggest that the image of journalists often veers between very good and very bad.

Journalists are either impossibly virtuous and noble or shamefully scurrilous and self-serving. They’re either public servants or a public menace.

Recently, however, with the economic pressures on legacy journalism, the decline of local outlets, and the rise of misinformation and disinformation amid a new media universe, we’ve seen the development of a new pop-culture category, a kind of beleaguered, in-between classification that views journos as a little hapless, a bit hopeless and just barely hanging on.

That’s certainly the vibe you get with the new mockumentary comedy series The Paper (currently streaming on StackTV), in which the sweetly peppy, impossibly earnest Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson) struggles to turn around a dying newspaper in the American Midwest.

Long Story Short, the new adult animation show from BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, works.

The series (with a 10-episode first season now streaming on Netflix) works because it’s hyper-specific. It works because it’s universal. It works because it’s silly. It works because it’s profound. Like the much-loved, much-rewatched BoJack, Long Story Short is occasionally uneven but its ultimate effect is hilarious and tender and sad all at once.

The show introduces us to a liberal, middle-class Jewish family in California — mother Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein from House), father Elliot Cooper (Mad About You’s Paul Reiser), and their three children, Avi (Ben Feldman from Superstore), Shira (Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson) and Yoshi (Max Greenfield from New Girl), who all go by the last name Schwooper. (Naomi and Elliot have elected to smoosh rather than hyphenate. Maybe this will catch on.)

We follow the family’s story — stories, really — by switching out perspectives and hopscotching across decades, as the parents age and the siblings grow up and have children of their own.

When it comes to streaming options, we are living in an age of abundance. That sounds good, right?

But so much of this content is merely meh. This flood of middling series and movies, this glut of take-it-or-leave-it entertainment can lead to viewing inertia. The search for something truly compelling can feel so exhausting and overwhelming that decisions often get made more by the gravitational pull of the couch than by anything actually happening onscreen.

Amidst this purgatory of TV that’s not quite bad enough to give up but not quite good enough to truly hook you, streaming content can stand out by being great. By being original, intelligent, well-crafted — you know, all that hard stuff.

Or, in what feels like a depressing confirmation of the crappiness of our 21st-century attention economy, it can stand out by being absolutely, excruciatingly awful.

Outrageous (now streaming on BritBox, with new episodes dropping on Tuesdays) is the story of the Mitford sisters, six aristocratic Englishwomen whose lives overlapped with a who’s-who of 20th-century history in a fashionable flurry of weddings, divorces, betrayals and scandals.

Some cultural commentators have attempted to explain why Mitford mania is still relevant today by comparing the sisters to the Kardashians, which is catchy but misleading. Yes, both sibling sets have a knack for grabbing tabloid headlines and a talent for picking terrible men.

But if one is really looking for relevance in Outrageous, the most relatable scene for many 2025 viewers might be the Christmas dinner where the Mitford girls’ mother (Anna Chancellor) tells them to stop arguing about Hitler and just pass the Brussels sprouts.

What really makes the Mitford saga so crushingly current is its collision of ordinary family life (well, sort of ordinary — the Mitfords were an eccentric lot) with polarizing politics. Coming of age in the 1930s, in a world that seems on the verge of violence and collapse, the sibs take up entrenched and irreconcilable political positions, testing their sisterly bonds and taking the “let’s agree to disagree” stance to its absolute limits.