Remember when streaming was supposed to let us watch whatever we want, whenever we want, for a sliver of the cost of cable? Well, so much for that. In recent years, streaming has gotten confusing and expensive as more services than ever are vying for eyeballs. It has done the impossible: made people miss the good old-fashioned cable bundle.Now the bundles are back. Last week, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced that, starting this summer, they will offer a streaming bundle of Disney+, Hulu, and Max. Then, on Tuesday, Comcast said that next month it will introduce a streaming bundle of its own, packaging Peacock, Apple TV+, and Netflix. This bundle, called StreamSaver, will be available only to Comcast’s broadband, mobile, and TV customers. Some smaller mini-bundles already exist, but for the most part, the streaming wars had become a battle royale—no alliances, everyone for themselves. Now the combatants have aligned in two blocs, sort of like the Avengers versus the Justice League—except that, confusingly, Marvel movies (Disney) and DC movies (Max) are now part of the same bloc.It’s not cable, but it’s not not cable either. Streaming hasn’t quite come full circle, but it’s three-quarters of the way around. These bundles are ending an entire era of streaming, with its unsatisfying free-for-all of services. This new era may well be better than the one before it. But the dream of streaming as a cheaper, better version of cable is dead.For a while, it did actually exist. When Netflix launched its streaming service back in 2007, the company pretty much dominated the market without much serious competition. You could watch basically everything with no ads, and for less than $10 a month. Then, beginning at the tail end of the 2010s, all of the big legacy entertainment companies tried to get in on the action. “For much of the past four years, the entertainment industry spent money like drunken sailors to fight the first salvos of the streaming wars,” the media-industry analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in November. The current streaming landscape, despite offering unprecedented abundance, is a nightmare to navigate. To watch entertainment now requires wading through a frustrating array of streaming services: Netflix, Prime Video, and Hulu, yes, but also Peacock, Paramount+, AMC+, and others.But this hasn’t brought in the types of profits that companies hoped for. Last year, Disney, Comcast, and Paramount collectively lost several billion dollars on streaming. Making and licensing shows and movies, it turns out, is not cheap. And people are willing to pay for only so many streaming subscriptions. Even when the new services managed to attract subscribers, they weren’t able to hold on to them; in industry parlance, churn was too high. Streaming services have tried to recoup their losses by raising prices, creating ad tiers, and cracking down on password sharing.Going it alone hasn’t worked, so now they’re teaming up. Neither mega-bundle has announced details about costs, but Comcast’s StreamSaver will be sold “at a vastly reduced price” relative to individually subscribing to all three services, the company’s CEO, Brian Roberts, said during the announcement this week. Packaged together and sold at a discount, each streaming service will make less per subscription, but perhaps collectively they will be more competitive and hold on to more of their subscribers. That’s the idea, anyway.For consumers, these bundles are probably a good thing. There’s a reason so many people rejoiced at the prospect of cutting the cord—but cable was simple. With streaming, keeping track of all your accounts and all your passwords and where to watch whatever you want to watch—that is not simple. And then, just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, one of the services you subscribe to informs you that you’ll have to shell out for the premium tier if you want to watch a certain show or movie. If you can convert three separate subscriptions into a single cheaper one, as the new deals will seemingly allow some people to do, that’s a win.The new bundles don’t exactly restore order and sanity. The array of overlapping options is itself confusing. In addition to the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle, there is also a Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle, which does not include Max. But if you really want to watch sports, you’ll presumably go for the ESPN/Fox/Warner Bros. Discovery bundle, named Venu Sports. And if you’re a Verizon myPlan customer, you can subscribe to a Netflix/Max bundle—even though those two services are part of opposing three-service bundles, as announced over the past two weeks. Making matters even more complicated, some of the bundlers are already themselves bundles. Disney owns Hulu and ESPN. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN and Max. Bundles are bundling with bundles.Even more bundles are likely in the works, and they may save people some money. But they will not resolve the fundamental tension in what people want out of cable, or streaming, or whatever it is that serves them up stuff to watch. On the one hand, we like having everything in one place. On the other, we don’t like paying a lot of money for things we don’t use. Cable satisfied the former desire but not the latter. Streaming, after the fleeting honeymoon period when you could find almost anything on Netflix, satisfied the latter but not the former. With the new bundles, the streamers are trying to strike a balance between the total consolidation of cable and the total chaos of streaming. That new balance may well be superior to the status quo, but the trade-off between having things in one place and paying for things you don’t need will remain. As long as it does, we’ll never feel totally satisfied.

Watching Back to Black, the new Amy Winehouse biopic, made me want to look up footage of the late British singer to be reminded of her originality and her liveliness, which no work of fiction could hope to ever fully capture. But in the search process, I ended up staring, for an inordinate amount of time, at Funko Pop dolls. Winehouse has been sold in three versions of the ubiquitous collectible figurines. Each affixes her trademark Cleopatra makeup to the same blank, black eyes that grace the Funkos of superheroes, sports mascots, and various other figures who did not sing songs about oblivion and then die of alcohol poisoning at age 27.To say that Back to Black gives Winehouse the Funko treatment on the big screen would not quite be fair; the movie renders her life with some intelligence, mercy, and painterly craft. But it certainly partakes in the tradition of turning a complex human being into a generic image, defined by superficial traits and tics, for other people to project their feelings upon. No great entertainer ever escapes this fate, but Back to Black should be an occasion to ask why cultural canonization requires such a relentless sanitizing process, and who is served by this sugarcoating.Back to Black begins with the adolescent Winehouse (played by Marisa Abela) at home with her boisterous, working-class Jewish family, singing jazz standards together. The spicy and sad songs she writes in her bedroom soon earn her international stardom—though she’s far less interested in the fame game than in her romance with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), whom the film portrays as a pub-dwelling bad boy who snorts cocaine before breakfast. Her cabbie father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan); her flinty grandmother, Cynthia (Lesley Manville); and her manager Nick (Sam Buchanan) try to steer her toward stability, while paparazzi, industry pressures, and drugs tip her toward destruction. Winehouse’s real-life trajectory was chaotic, but Sam Taylor-Johnson’s filmmaking relays the emotional beats in appealingly direct ways. During Winehouse’s exciting come-up, London’s graffiti pops colorfully in the background; later, as she sinks into drugs and isolation, the city feels dead and desaturated.Abela is a remarkable actor best known for her role on the HBO and BBC banking drama Industry. That show subverts her pageant-worthy poise and winsomeness; she plays a devil disguised as an ingenue. But in Back to Black, she’s playing an ingenue disguised as one of the most caustic and willful pop stars ever. Abela nails many of Winehouse’s mannerisms, though the mouth movements she makes while singing scat vocals do look like something Kristen Wiig would do on Saturday Night Live. The bigger problem is that her version of Winehouse is unshakably sweet and hapless, a puppy dog in smeared eyeliner. Each defiant or self-destructive choice she makes therefore feels oddly under-motivated, even arbitrary.[Read: Is old music killing new music?]This is more the fault of the script than the acting. The film does not really attempt a coherent argument about what forces created such a sui generis artist, or about the ones that drove her to doom. It touches lightly upon various themes of her story—such as the U.K. tabloid industry’s savagery—without saying much about them. The one point of emphasis is Winehouse’s pivotal and intense relationship with Fielder-Civil. Their temporary breakup inspired the lyrics of her breakthrough album, Back to Black, and the best sequence of the film depicts her recording that masterpiece while stunned numb from heartbreak. But the film fails to conjure an on-screen version of Fielder-Civil with any charm, much less a perspective. The viewer is left feeling, as many onlookers at the time were, baffled by the romance.Back to Black’s cast and crew have talked proudly about not portraying anyone as a “villain,” cutting against media narratives blaming Fielder-Civil, Mitch, or anyone else for Winehouse’s struggles. The film wants to be a counterweight to the 2015 documentary Amy, which collaged material from throughout Winehouse’s life to disturbing effect. Some viewers condemned that film for using lurid paparazzi footage of Winehouse at her lowest, and Mitch has said he was portrayed unfairly. But whatever the validity of such critiques, Amy did attempt to place Winehouse’s life within a complex web of cause and effect, personal and cultural. After all, if we are going to re-create a tragedy, should we not try to understand it?Back to Black, by contrast, just makes entertainment out of a saga that was, and should be, excruciating to witness. Winehouse is reduced to a list of traits—beehive hair, jazz inflections, inexorable addiction—that can be easily reproduced in merchandise and licensing for many more years to come. What’s especially jarring is that the film romanticizes Winehouse’s distaste for stardom, careerism, and money itself (“I ain’t no Spice Girl,” she says early on). The image of the iconoclastic, pure artist remains broadly marketable; the ideals behind that image, less so.

The German Society for Nature Photography (GDT) just announced the winning images in its annual members-only photo competition, selected from more than 8,000 entries in seven categories, including Birds, Mammals, Other Animals, Plants & Fungi, Landscapes, and Nature’s Studio. Contest organizers were kind enough to share some of the winning and honored photographs with us below.To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.

More than a decade after watching it, I still get twitchy thinking about “White Bear,” an early episode of Black Mirror that stands as one of the most discomfiting installments of television I’ve seen. A woman (played by Lenora Crichlow) groggily wakes up in a strange house whose television sets are broadcasting the same mysterious symbol. When she goes outside, the people she encounters silently film her on their phones or menacingly wield shotguns and chainsaws. Eventually, trapped in a deserted building, the woman seizes a gun and shoots one of her tormentors, but the weapon surprises her by firing confetti instead of bullets. The walls around her suddenly swing open; she’s revealed to be the star of a sadistic live event devised to punish her repeatedly for a crime she once committed but can’t remember. “In case you haven’t guessed … you aren’t very popular,” the show’s host tells the terrified woman, as the audience roars its approval. “But I’ll tell you what you are, though. You’re famous.”“White Bear” indelibly digs into a number of troublesome 21st-century media phenomena: a populace numbed into passive consumption of cruel spectacle, the fetishistic rituals of public shaming, the punitive nature of many “reality” shows. The episode’s grand reveal, a television staple by the time it premiered in 2013, is its own kind of punishment: The extravagant theatrics serve as a reminder that everything that’s happened to the woman has been a deliberate construction—a series of manipulations in service of other people’s entertainment.The contrast between the aghast subject and the gleeful audience, clapping like seals, is almost too jarring to bear. And yet a version of this moment really happened, as seen about an hour into The Contestant, Hulu’s dumbfounding documentary about a late-’90s Japanese TV experiment. For 15 months, a wannabe comedian called Tomoaki Hamatsu (nicknamed “Nasubi,” or “eggplant,” in reference to the length of his head) has been confined, naked, to a single room filled with magazines, and tasked with surviving—and winning his way out, if he could hit a certain monetary target—by entering competitions to win prizes. The entire time, without his knowledge or consent, he’s also been broadcast on a variety show called Susunu! Denpa Shōnen.Before he’s freed, Nasubi is blindfolded, dressed for travel, transported to a new location, and led into a small room that resembles the one he’s been living in. Wearily, accepting that he’s not being freed but merely moved, he takes off his clothes as if to return to his status quo. Then, the walls collapse around him to reveal the studio, the audience, the stage, the cameras. Confetti flutters through the air. Nasubi immediately grabs a pillow to conceal his genitals. “My house fell down,” he says, in shock. The audience cackles at his confusion. “Why are they laughing?” he asks. They laugh even harder.Since The Contestant debuted earlier this month, reviews and responses have homed in on how outlandish its subject matter is, dubbing it a study of the “most evil reality show ever” and “a terrifying and bizarre true story.” The documentary focuses intently on Nasubi’s experience, contrasting his innocence and sweetness with the producer who tormented him, a Machiavellian trickster named Toshio Tsuchiya. Left unstudied, though, is the era the series emerged from. The late ’90s embodied an anything-goes age of television: In the United States, series such as Totally Hidden Video and Shocking Behavior Caught on Tape drew millions of viewers by humiliating people caught doing dastardly things on camera. But Tsuchiya explains that he had a more anthropological mission in mind. “We were trying to show the most basic primitive form of human being,” he tells The Contestant’s director. Nasubi was Tsuchiya’s grand human experiment.The cruelty with which Nasubi was treated seems horrifying now, and outrageously unethical. Before he started winning contests, he got by on a handful of crackers fed to him by the producers, then fiber jelly (one of his first successful prizes), then dog food. His frame whittles down in front of our eyes. “If he hadn’t won rice, he would have died,” a producer says, casually. The question of why Nasubi didn’t just leave the room hangs in the air, urgent and mostly unexamined. “Staying put, not causing trouble is the safest option,” Nasubi explains in the documentary. “It’s a strange psychological state. You lose the will to escape.”But the timing of his confinement also offers a clue about why he might have stayed. 1998, when the comedian was first confined, was a moment in flux, caught between the technological innovations that were rapidly changing mass culture and the historical atrocities of the 20th century. Enabled by the internet, lifecasters such as Jennifer Ringley were exposing their unfiltered lives online as a kind of immersive sociological experiment. Webcams allowed exhibitionists and curious early adopters to present themselves up for observation as novel subjects in a human zoo. Even before the release of The Truman Show, which came out in the U.S. a few months after Nasubi was first put on camera, a handful of provocateur producers were brainstorming new formats for unscripted television, egged on by the uninhibited bravado and excess of ’90s media. These creators acted as all-seeing, all-knowing authorities whose word was absolute. And their subjects, not yet familiar with the “rules” of an emerging genre, often didn’t know what they were allowed to contest. Of Tsuchiya, Nasubi remembers, “It was almost like I was worshiping a god.”In his manipulation of Nasubi, Tsuchiya was helping pioneer a new kind of art form, one that would lead to the voyeurism of 2000s series such as Big Brother and Survivor, not to mention more recent shows such Married at First Sight and Love Is Blind. But the spectacle of Nasubi’s confinement also represented a hypothesis that had long preoccupied creators and psychologists alike, and that reality television has never really moved on from. If you manufacture absurd, monstrous situations with which to torment unwitting dupes, what will they do? What will we learn? And, most vital to the people in charge, how many viewers will be compelled to watch?Some popular-culture historians consider the first reality show to be MTV’s The Real World, a 1992 series that deliberately provoked conflict by putting strangers together in an unfamiliar environment. Others cite PBS’s 1973 documentary series An American Family, which filmed a supposedly prototypical California household over several months, in a conceit that the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called the “dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV.”But the origins of what happened to Nasubi seem to lie most directly in a series that ran on and off from 1948 to 2014: Candid Camera. Its creator, Allen Funt, was a radio operator in the Army Signal Corps during World War II; while stationed in Oklahoma, he set up a “gripe booth” for soldiers to record their complaints about military service. Knowing they were being taped, the subjects held back, which led Funt to record people secretly in hopes of capturing more honest reactions. His first creative effort was The Candid Microphone, a radio show. The series put its subjects in perplexing situations to see how they’d respond: Funt gave strangers exploding cigarettes, asked a baker to make a “disgusting” birthday cake, and even chained his secretary to his desk and hired a locksmith to “free” her for her lunch break. “With the candid microphone, we are at the beginning of the Age of the Involuntary Amateur,” one critic wrote in 1947. “The possibilities are limitless; the prospect is horrifying.” Sure enough, a TV series soon followed.For all that critic’s revulsion, Funt was earnest about the potentially revelatory power of his shows. He was seemingly influenced by two parallel trends. One was a sociological school of thought that was trying urgently to analyze human nature following a wave of real barbarities: the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin’s great purges. The other was an interest in art that captured the contours of real life, in an outgrowth of the naturalist movement that had come out of the late 19th century. Émile Zola, one of its practitioners, argued in The Experimental Novel that fiction writers were essentially omnipotent forces dropping characters into realistic situations to consider how they might respond. Literature, he argued, was “a real experiment that a novelist makes on man.”The invention of television, as the academic Tony E. Jackson has argued, offered a more literal and scientific medium within which creators could manipulate real human subjects. This was where Candid Camera came into play. Funt’s practical jokes—setting up a subject in an elevator in which every other person suddenly turns their back to him—tended to consider the nature of compliance, and what humans will go along with rather than be outliers. Candid Camera was considered so rich a work that Funt was asked to donate episodes to Cornell University’s psychology department for further study.Funt was also highly influential to Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist who turned his Yale studies on conformity into a documentary titled Obedience. The Milgram experiment, conducted in 1961, asked members of the public to inflict fellow subjects with electric shocks—faked, unknown to them—when ordered to do so by an authority figure. Inspired by the 1961 trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and the experience of his own family members who’d survived concentration camps, Milgram tweaked the Candid Camera model to more explicitly study how far people would follow orders before they objected. As the film professor Anna McCarthy has written, Milgram paid particular attention to the theatrical elements of his work. He even considered using recordings of humans screaming in real, rather than simulated, pain to maximize the authenticity of the subject’s experience. “It is possible that the kind of understanding of man I seek is an amalgam of science and art,” Milgram wrote in 1962. “It is sure to be rejected by the scientists as well as the artists, but for me it carries significance.”This studied interest in human nature continued in PBS’s An American Family; its presentation of ordinary life up close, the anthropologist Margaret Mead once argued, was “as important for our time as were the invention of the drama and the novel for earlier generations—a new way for people to understand themselves.” Throughout the later decades of the 20th century, television was similarly fixated on exposure, although shock value quickly took priority over genuine curiosity and analysis. During the ’90s, on talk shows such as The Jerry Springer Show and Maury, people confessed their most damning secrets to anyone who cared to watch. Series including Cops and America’s Most Wanted offered a more lurid, voyeuristic look at crime and the darkness of human nature.[Read: The paranoid style in American entertainment]By the time Tsuchiya had the idea to confine a man to a single apartment to see whether he could survive the ordeal, the concept of humiliation-as-revelation was well established. “I told [Nasubi] that most of it would never be aired,” the producer explains in The Contestant. “When someone hears that, they stop paying attention to the camera. That’s when you can really capture a lot.” As an organizing principle for how to get the most interesting footage, it seems to stem right from Funt’s secret recordings of people in the 1940s. Tsuchiya appeared to be motivated by his desire to observe behavior that had never been seen before on film—“to capture something amazing … an aspect of humanity that only I, only this show, could capture.” And extremity, to him, was necessary, because it was the only way to provoke responses that would be new, and thus thrilling to witness.The reality-show boom of the early 2000s was intimately informed by this same intention. When Big Brother debuted in Holland in 1999, it was broadly advertised as a social experiment in which audiences could observe contestants under constant surveillance like rats in a lab; the show was compared by one Dutch psychologist to the Stanford prison experiment. (Another called the show’s design “the wet dream of a psychological researcher.”) The 2002 British show The Experiment even directly imitated both the Stanford setup and Milgram’s work on obedience. But although such early series may have had honest intentions, their willingness to find dramatic fodder in moments of human calamity was exploited by a barrage of crueler series that would follow. The 2004 series There’s Something About Miriam had six men compete for the affections of a 21-year-old model from Mexico, who was revealed in the finale to be transgender—an obscene gotcha moment that mimics the structure of Candid Camera. Without a dramatic conclusion, a nonfiction series is just a filmed record of events. But with a last-act revelation, it’s a drama.Contemporary audiences, blessedly, have a more informed understanding of ethics, of entrapment, and of the duty of care TV creators have to their subjects. In 2018, the British show Love Island spawned a national debate about gaslighting after one contestant was deemed to be manipulating another. There’s no question that what happened to Nasubi would trigger a mass outcry today. But reality TV is still built on the same ideological imperatives—the desire to see people set up in manifestly absurd scenarios for our entertainment. The Emmy-nominated 2023 series Jury Duty is essentially a kinder episode of Candid Camera extended into a whole season, and the internet creator known as MrBeast, the purveyor of ridiculous challenges and stunts, has the second most-subscribed channel on all of YouTube. What’s most remarkable about The Contestant now is how its subject managed to regain his faith in human nature, despite everything he endured. But the ultimate goal of so many contemporary shows is still largely the same as it was 25 years ago: to manufacture a novel kind of social conflict, sit back, and watch what happens.