We live in a cynicism-poisoned society.

That much is easy to see, even if it comes off as a loaded statement. It’s not even that people WANT to be cynical, just that in this terminally online age, it’s scary to put yourself out there and be genuine. If feels as though we’re always supposed to be on our guard, lest anything we say be used against us.

And this even extends towards the frivolous: such as the media we enjoy. People assign a great deal of weight to the movies we watch, the TV shows we binge, the books we read. Sometimes, there’s a discussion to be had (for instance, hey, maybe don’t spend money on J. K. Rowling stuff while she uses that money to actively fund bigotry and discrimination!), but most of the time it’s much simpler. Art is by its nature subjective. We like what we like!

Though if you prefer this version of The Dark Tower to the books, you’re dead to me. (Kidding. Mostly.)

We all look for different things in the art we consume, in the stories we tell, because variety is– to quote a cliché phrase– the spice of life. There’s no one right way to tell a story, and thank goodness! The world would be a lot less interesting if there was.

Moreover, movies and TV shows are the products of a lot of very talented people’s hard work. Even if the whole is less than the sum of its parts, the parts should be worth recognizing. Yet according to modern online discourse, things are either Bad or Good with nothing in between (unless they’re called “mid,”which now just means Bad). There’s no room for nuance, no space to talk about the movies that do some things really well, even if there’s a lot to be gained by asking, “Why does X movie work for me while Y movie doesn’t?” I’ve been frustrated about this for years.

Then I thought, oh right, I have a website.

So with that in mind, I hope to begin a regular series of posts here soon which I’m going to call the Silver Linings Defense Force. With these posts, I hope to look at movies and shows (but mostly movies) that for one reason or another were critically maligned, torn apart by audiences, or straight-up flopped at the box office, and ask the question: Where did they go right?

I hope to see you there.