It made sense, to the New York Daily News sports editor, that these guys dominated basketball. After all, “the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartalecness,” not to mention their “God-given better balance and speed.”

He was referring, of course, to the Jews.

In the 1930s, Paul Gallico was trying to explain away Jewish dominance of basketball. He came up with the idea that the game’s structure simply appealed to the immutable traits of wily Hebrews and their scheming minds. It sounds strange to the ear now, but only because our stereotypes about who is inherently good at particular sports have shifted. His theory is not any more or less insightful now than it was then; his confidence should remind us to be skeptical of similar, supposedly explanatory arguments that abound today.

Looking back at old stereotypes is a useful exercise; it can help illustrate the arbitrary nature of the concept of “race,” and how such identities shift even as people insist on their permanence and infallibility. Because race is not real, it is malleable enough to be made to serve the needs of those with the power to define it, the certainties of one generation giving way to the contradictory dogmas of another.

Whoopi Goldberg, the actor and a co-host of The View, stumbled into a public-relations nightmare for ABC on Monday when she insisted that “the Holocaust wasn’t about race.” After an episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert aired in which she opined that “the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people,” she was temporarily suspended from The View. She has apologized for her remarks.

[Adam Serwer: White nationalism’s deep American roots]

I don’t mean to pile on Goldberg here, who I think is struggling with an American conception of “race” that renders the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust illegible. I regard her remarks not as malicious, but as an ignorant projection of that American conception onto circumstances to which it does not apply. In America, distinctions among European immigrants that were once considered deeply significant dissolved in the melting pot, leaving an absence in popular memory that might explain their salience elsewhere, and how someone could be seen as white in America and yet still be subject to persecution based on their “race.”

The Nazi Holocaust in Europe and slavery and Jim Crow in the United States are outgrowths of the same ideology—the belief that human beings can be delineated into categories that share immutable biological traits distinguishing them from one another and determining their potential and behavior. In Europe, with its history of anti-Jewish persecution and violent religious divisions, the conception of Jews as a biological “race” with particular characteristics was used by the Nazis to justify the Holocaust. In the United States, the invention of race was used to justify the institution of chattel slavery, on the basis that Black people were biologically suited to permanent servitude and unfit for the rights the nation’s Founders had proclaimed as universal. The American color line was therefore much more forgiving to European Jews than the divisions of the old country were. But they are branches of the same tree, the biological fiction of race.

In the United States, physical distinctions between most Black and most white people have misled some into thinking that the American conception of race is somehow more “real” than the racial fictions on which the Nazis based their campaign of extermination. Applying the American color line to Europe, the Holocaust appears merely to be a form of sectarian violence, “white people” attacking “white people,” which seems nonsensical. But those persecuting Jews in Europe saw Jews as beastly subhumans, an “alien race” whom they were justified in destroying in order to defend German “racial purity.” The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

Adherence to religious belief was not required to be subject to Nazi persecution, and unlike some prior moments in European history, conversion was insufficient to escape danger. Jewish ancestry was enough, because it was ancestry—a person’s “race”—that made someone inescapably Jewish. In his infamous memoir, Adolf Hitler regretted that, early in life, he’d seen anti-Semitism as persecution of a people on the basis of religious belief, which he thought wrong. He later came to think of this as a Jewish lie to hide the reality that the Jewish people were a separate “race” whose goal was to enslave the rest of mankind. It should not be lost that enslaving all of mankind is a concise summary of Hitler’s own political project.

“Judaism predates Western categories. It’s not quite a religion, because one can be Jewish regardless of observance or specific belief,” my colleague Yair Rosenberg wrote. “But it’s also not quite a race, because people can convert in! It’s not merely a culture or an ethnicity, because that leaves out all the religious components.”

[Read: Are Jews white?]

This is all true, but Black Americans are not really a “race” either, and the borders of Black American identity can also be difficult to define or agree upon. To some extent, shared history, culture, and ancestry exist, but as the scholars Karen and Barbara Fields write in Racecraft, the very concept of race implies a material reality where none exists. Most American descendants  of the emancipated have white ancestry, and millions of white Americans with African ancestry have no knowledge of it. “Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons,” the Fieldses write, “and is subject to change for similar reasons.”

It is not necessary for race to be real for racism to be real. It is only necessary that people believe race to be real. When people act on fictions, those actions have repercussions even if the underlying belief is false—even if the people know that the underlying belief they are acting on is false. The fact that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the media, of governments, and of financial institutions are untrue does not rob them of their explanatory power for those who choose to believe in them. For Thomas Jefferson to know, somewhere in the disquiet of his own conscience, that slavery was a “cruel war against human nature itself” did not in and of itself grant freedom to those he owned as property.

“The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t—I mean you can tell, they knew he wasn’t—anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man,” James Baldwin wrote in 1964. “For if he wasn’t a man, then no crime had been committed.”

To this, we could add Jean-Paul Sartre’s observation that “if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” Race allows humanity to keep inventing, in language that can bend the most rational minds, groups of people whose supposed characteristics justify whatever cruelty we might wish to indulge.

There are questions about troop numbers, questions about diplomacy. There are questions about the Ukrainian military, its weapons, and its soldiers. There are questions about Germany and France: How will they react? There are questions about America, and how it has come to be a central player in a conflict not of its making. But of all the questions that repeatedly arise about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the one that gets the least satisfactory answers is this one: Why?

Why would Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, attack a neighboring country that has not provoked him? Why would he risk the blood of his own soldiers? Why would he risk sanctions, and perhaps an economic crisis, as a result? And if he is not really willing to risk these things, then why is he playing this elaborate game?

[Anne Applebaum: The U.S. is naive about Russia. Ukraine can’t afford to be.]

To explain why requires some history, but not the semi-mythological, faux-medieval history Putin has used in the past to declare that Ukraine is not a country, or that its existence is an accident, or that its sense of nationhood is not real. Nor do we need to know that much about the more recent history of Ukraine or its 70 years as a Soviet republic—though it is true that the Soviet ties of the Russian president, most notably his years spent as a KGB officer, matter a great deal. Indeed, many of his tactics—the use of sham Russian-backed “separatists” to carry out his war in eastern Ukraine, the creation of a puppet government in Crimea—are old KGB tactics, familiar from the Soviet past. Fake political groupings played a role in the KGB’s domination of Central Europe after World War II; sham separatists played a role in the Bolshevik conquest of Ukraine itself in 1918.

Putin’s attachment to the old U.S.S.R. matters in another way as well. Although he is sometimes incorrectly described as a Russian nationalist, he is in fact an imperial nostalgist. The Soviet Union was a Russian-speaking empire, and he seems, at times, to dream of re-creating a smaller Russian-speaking empire within the old Soviet Union’s borders.

But the most significant influence on Putin’s worldview has nothing to do with either his KGB training or his desire to rebuild the U.S.S.R. Putin and the people around him have been far more profoundly shaped, rather, by their path to power. That story—which has been told several times, by the authors Fiona Hill, Karen Dawisha, and most recently Catherine Belton—begins in the 1980s. The later years of that decade were, for many Russians, a moment of optimism and excitement. The policy of glasnost—openness—meant that people were speaking the truth for the first time in decades. Many felt the real possibility of change, and they thought it could be change for the better.

[Kori Schake: Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is backfiring]

Putin missed that moment of exhilaration. Instead, he was posted to the KGB office in Dresden, East Germany, where he endured the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as a personal tragedy. As the world’s television screens blared out the news of the Cold War’s end, Putin and his KGB comrades in the doomed Soviet satellite state were frantically burning all of their files, making calls to Moscow that were never returned, fearing for their lives and their careers. For KGB operatives, this was not a time of rejoicing, but rather a lesson about the nature of street movements and the power of rhetoric: democracy rhetoric, antiauthoritarian rhetoric, anti-totalitarian rhetoric. Putin, like his role model Yuri Andropov, who was the Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 revolution there, concluded from that period that spontaneity is dangerous. Protest is dangerous. Talk of democracy and political change is dangerous. To keep them from spreading, Russia’s rulers must maintain careful control over the life of the nation. Markets cannot be genuinely open; elections cannot be unpredictable; dissent must be carefully “managed” through legal pressure, public propaganda, and, if necessary, targeted violence.

But although Putin missed the euphoria of the ’80s, he certainly took full part in the orgy of greed that gripped Russia in the ’90s. Having weathered the trauma of the Berlin Wall, Putin returned to the Soviet Union and joined his former colleagues in a massive looting of the Soviet state. With the assistance of Russian organized crime as well as the amoral international offshore-money-laundering industry, some of the former Soviet nomenklatura stole assets, took the money out of the country, hid it abroad, and then brought the cash back and used it to buy more assets. Wealth accumulated; a power struggle followed. Some of the original oligarchs landed in prison or exile. Eventually Putin wound up as the top billionaire among all the other billionaires—or at least the one who controls the secret police.

This position makes Putin simultaneously very strong and very weak, a paradox that many Americans and Europeans find hard to understand. He is strong, of course, because he controls so many levers of Russia’s society and economy. Try to imagine an American president who controlled not only the executive branch—including the FBI, CIA, NSA—but also Congress and the judiciary; The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Dallas Morning News, and all of the other newspapers; and all major businesses, including Exxon, Apple, Google, and General Motors.

Putin’s control comes without legal limits. He and the people around him operate without checks and balances, without ethics rules, without transparency of any kind. They determine who can be a candidate in elections, and who is allowed to speak in public. They can make decisions from one day to the next—sending troops to the Ukrainian border, for example—after consulting no one and taking no advice. When Putin contemplates an invasion, he does not have to consider the interest of Russian businesses or consumers who might suffer from economic sanctions. He doesn’t have to take into account the families of Russian soldiers who might die in a conflict that they don’t want. They have no choice, and no voice.

And yet at the same time, Putin’s position is extremely precarious. Despite all of that power and all of that money, despite total control over the information space and total domination of the political space, Putin must know, at some level, that he is an illegitimate leader. He has never won a fair election, and he has never campaigned in a contest that he could lose. He knows that the political system he helped create is profoundly unfair, that his regime not only runs the country but owns it, making economic and foreign-policy decisions that are designed to benefit the companies from which he and his inner circle personally profit. He knows that the institutions of the state exist not to serve the Russian people, but to steal from them. He knows that this system works very well for a few rich people, but very badly for everyone else. He knows, in other words, that one day, prodemocracy activists of the kind he saw in Dresden might come for him too.

[From the January/February 2018 issue: What Putin really wants]

Putin’s awareness that his legitimacy is dubious has been on public display since 2011, soon after his rigged “reelection” to a constitutionally dubious third term. At that time, large crowds appeared not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg but several dozen other cities as well, protesting electoral fraud and elite corruption. Protesters mocked the Kremlin as a regime of “crooks and thieves,” a slogan popularized by the democracy activist Alexei Navalny; later, Putin’s regime would poison Navalny, nearly killing him. The dissident is now in a Russian jail. But Putin wasn’t just angry at Navalny. He also blamed America, the West, foreigners trying to destroy Russia. The Obama administration had, he said, organized the demonstrators; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, of all people, had “given the signal” to start the protests. He had won the election, he declared with great passion, tears seeming to well up in his eyes, despite the “political provocations that pursue the sole objective of undermining Russia's statehood and usurping power.”

In his mind, in other words, he wasn’t merely fighting Russian demonstrators; he was fighting the world’s democracies, in league with enemies of the state. Whether he really believed that crowds in Moscow were literally taking orders from Hillary Clinton is unimportant. He certainly understood the power of democratic language, of the ideas that made Russians want a fair political system, not a kleptocracy controlled by Putin and his gang, and he knew where they came from. Over the subsequent decade, he would take the fight against democracy to Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, where he would support extremist groups and movements in the hope of undermining European democracy. Russian state-controlled media would support the campaign for Brexit, on the grounds that it would weaken Western democratic solidarity, which it has. Russian oligarchs would invest in key industries across Europe and around the world with the aim of gaining political traction, especially in smaller countries like Hungary and Serbia. And, of course, Russian disinformation specialists would intervene in the 2016 American election.

[David Frum: Fox News abandons the GOP on Russia]

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining the extraordinary significance, to Putin, of Ukraine. Of course Ukraine matters as a symbol of the lost Soviet empire. Ukraine was the second-most-populous and second-richest Soviet republic, and the one with the deepest cultural links to Russia. But modern, post-Soviet Ukraine also matters because it has tried—struggled, really—to join the world of prosperous Western democracies. Ukraine has staged not one but two prodemocracy, anti-oligarchy, anti-corruption revolutions in the past two decades. The most recent, in 2014, was particularly terrifying for the Kremlin. Young Ukrainians were chanting anti-corruption slogans, just like the Russian opposition does, and waving European Union flags. These protesters were inspired by the same ideals that Putin hates at home and seeks to overturn abroad. After Ukraine’s profoundly corrupt, pro-Russian president fled the country in February 2014, Ukrainian television began showing pictures of his palace, complete with gold taps, fountains, and statues in the yard—exactly the kind of palace Putin inhabits in Russia. Indeed, we know he inhabits such a palace because one of the videos produced by Navalny has already shown us pictures of it, along with its private ice-hockey rink and its hookah bar.

Putin’s subsequent invasion of Crimea punished Ukrainians for trying to escape from the kleptocratic system that he wanted them to live in—and it showed Putin’s own subjects that they too would pay a high cost for democratic revolution. The invasion also violated both written and unwritten rules and treaties in Europe, demonstrating Putin’s scorn for the Western status quo. Following that “success,” Putin launched a much broader attack: a series of attempted coups d’état in Odessa, Kharkiv, and several other cities with a Russian-speaking majority. This time, the strategy failed, not least because Putin profoundly misunderstood Ukraine, imagining that Russian-speaking Ukrainians would share his Soviet imperial nostalgia. They did not. Only in Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine where Putin was able to move in troops and heavy equipment from across the border, did a local coup succeed. But even there he did not create an attractive “alternative” Ukraine. Instead, the Donbas—the coal-mining region that surrounds Donetsk—remains a zone of chaos and lawlessness.

It’s a long way from the Donbas to France or the Netherlands, where far-right politicians hang around the European Parliament and take Russian money to go on “fact-finding missions” to Crimea. It’s a longer way still to the small American towns where, back in 2016, voters eagerly clicked on pro-Trump Facebook posts written in St. Petersburg. But they are all a part of the same story: They are the ideological answer to the trauma that Putin and his generation of KGB officers experienced in 1989. Instead of democracy, they promote autocracy; instead of unity, they try constantly to create division; instead of open societies, they promote xenophobia. Instead of letting people hope for something better, they promote nihilism and cynicism.

Putin is preparing to invade Ukraine again—or pretending he will invade Ukraine again—for the same reason. He wants to destabilize Ukraine, frighten Ukraine. He wants Ukrainian democracy to fail. He wants the Ukrainian economy to collapse. He wants foreign investors to flee. He wants his neighbors—in Belarus, Kazakhstan, even Poland and Hungary—to doubt whether democracy will ever be viable, in the longer term, in their countries too. Farther abroad, he wants to put so much strain on Western and democratic institutions, especially the European Union and NATO, that they break up. He wants to keep dictators in power wherever he can, in Syria, Venezuela, and Iran. He wants to undermine America, to shrink American influence, to remove the power of the democracy rhetoric that so many people in his part of the world still associate with America. He wants America itself to fail.

These are big goals, and they might not be achievable. But Putin’s beloved Soviet Union also had big, unachievable goals. Lenin, Stalin, and their successors wanted to create an international revolution, to subjugate the entire world to the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat. Ultimately, they failed—but they did a lot of damage while trying. Putin will also fail, but he too can do a lot of damage while trying. And not only in Ukraine.

The Hulu miniseries Pam & Tommy could have had a fascinating focus. We see glimpses of it in the first minute, on a grainy TV screen where Jay Leno (played by the comedian Adam Ray) is interviewing Pamela Anderson (Lily James). “Speaking of sex, and I have to ask,” Leno says, throwing his hands up and down in the faux-innocent shrug of someone just asking questions. “The tape.” The audience audibly inhales. Anderson, whom James imitates in uncanny fashion—the protruding tongue, the hands perched nervously on crossed legs, the slightly hunched posture—plays similarly dumb. “What tape, Jay?” she breathes. Leno casually twists the knife. “What’s that like?” he says. “What’s it like to have that kind of exposure?” The camera zooms in on Anderson’s pained face as she grapples with her response.

The choice to mediate our first glimpse of Anderson through multiple screens is, perhaps, telling; it has a distancing effect that keeps her at arm’s length. Pam & Tommy is an eight-part miniseries about how an intimate home movie—made by Anderson and her then-husband, the rock star Tommy Lee, on their honeymoon—became the first viral celebrity sex tape. With the Leno scene, the show suggests sensitivity for Anderson’s plight (the tape was stolen by an irate contractor and sold online without her consent). Then it abruptly changes course. The scene that follows, set one year earlier, shows a carpenter, Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen), trying to focus on construction work in a Malibu mansion as Anderson and Lee (Sebastian Stan) go at it loudly upstairs. This is how the series really sees Anderson: Woman Victimized by the Culture, but also Woman Unabashedly Banging Her Heart Out.

Pam & Tommy, notably, hasn’t been sanctioned by Anderson, who has ignored all attempts by the series’ writers and stars to get in touch with her, and who is reportedly appalled by yet another distillation of her life and career down to the moment when she was most appallingly exploited. In response, the show’s lead director, Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya), has said that reclaiming Anderson’s narrative was part of the point of the series—that the people involved “absolutely respect [her] privacy” and wanted to use the series to change the “perspective of what happened.”

Erin Simkin / Hulu

Really? I don’t necessarily doubt the good intentions of the showrunners, Robert Siegel and D. V. DeVincentis, and their show—in moments—does succeed at communicating the ordeal Anderson endured and the many different forces that colluded in her suffering. But you’re not respecting her privacy when you re-create a sex tape that was stolen and viewed by hundreds of millions of people without her permission. You aren’t reclaiming her narrative on her behalf if she insists that she doesn’t want you to do so. The show’s creators would be better off just stating the truth: They wanted to tell Anderson’s story because it’s a good story, and its revelations have deeply informed the mess of celebrity and internet culture that we wallow in today. Even the fact that she resisted participating in the show is telling: What Anderson wants for herself has always mattered less than the desires she incites in others.

Critiquing Pam & Tommy as a single, unified work is hard because it’s such an awkward hybrid of genres and ideas. Based on a 2014 Rolling Stone story about Gauthier, the contractor with a grudge who accidentally introduced revenge porn to mainstream America, it’s equal parts caper, raunch comedy, romance (“the greatest love story ever sold” is the tagline), and cultural analysis. A scene in which Lee converses with his puppetized penis (voiced by Jason Mantzoukas) is ripped right from his memoir but feels derivative of Big Mouth. Meanwhile, an episode about a legal deposition Anderson gives while suing Penthouse—written by Sarah Gubbins (Shirley, Better Things) and directed by Hannah Fidell (A Teacher)—straightforwardly parses all the ways Anderson was ritualistically humiliated in the ’90s for daring people to look at her.

[Read: Where sex positivity falls short]

The first episode hardly features Anderson at all. It’s focused on the conflict between Gauthier—like so many Rogenite heroes, an endearing naif whose interests include marijuana and masturbation—and Lee, who’s hired him to manifest a project the rock star has envisioned as a “fucking futuristic, state-of-the-art love pad 2000.” Lee is an unexploded bomb. The puppeteer Frank Oz once said that Animal, the frenzied drummer he performed as on The Muppet Show, could be summed up in five words—drums, sleep, sex, food, and pain—and the same goes for Stan’s portrayal of Lee, with trunkfuls of pharmaceuticals thrown into the mix. The Mötley Crüe drummer is heavily tattooed, priapic, and … surprisingly sweet? To watch Pam & Tommy after living through the tabloid coverage of their relationship—the beach wedding, the hepatitis, the kids, the breakup, the domestic abuse, the jail sentence, the reunions—is to feel uncomfortably like you’re rooting for them, these crazy kids who take endless baths, are dying to have a family together, and don’t have sex until their wedding night (four days after their first date).

Their downfall, though, is inevitable. After Lee fires Gauthier and waves a shotgun in his face, Gauthier, an “amateur theologian,” decides that karma is taking too long and cooks up a revenge plot. He cases the Malibu home for several weeks, breaks in one night, and steals a safe, which contains cash and jewelry, numerous guns, and an unmarked video tape. That tape, he discovers, contains an explicit home movie filmed on a yacht during Anderson and Lee’s honeymoon. He shows the tape to a porn director he knows, Milton “Uncle Miltie” Ingley (Nick Offerman, in fine sober-unhinged form), who immediately appraises its value. “This is so private,” Ingley says. “It’s like we’re seeing something we’re not supposed to be seeing … which is kind of what makes it so fucking hot.”

The pair’s efforts to monetize the tape allow the show to make broader points: The series positions the Anderson-Lee video as not just a debauched tabloid frenzy, but a moment that actually changed the world—a fracturing of established mores in American life (about privacy, sex, celebrity, commerce) at the hands of the internet. Here was a new, unregulated marketplace without any standards or legal precedents. The porn industry at the time required signed releases to sell videos of adults engaging in sexual intercourse; the internet meant that Gauthier could sell the tape he’d stolen without restriction. But it meant that anyone else could too. What had been a business was now suddenly a free-for-all for anyone with an explicit video and an agenda. (Siegel, Pam & Tommy’s co-showrunner, seems intrigued by historical turning points in American capitalism—he wrote the script for The Founder, the story of how Ray Kroc ruthlessly turned McDonald’s into an incomparable business empire.)

Naturally, this shift was bad news for women. The way Pam & Tommy tells the story doesn’t so much reclaim her narrative as manipulate it to draw bigger conclusions. The major beats of her life story are there: her “discovery” at a football game, her first audition for Playboy, her elevation to icon status via a prime-time beach soap and a strategically tailored red bathing suit. James looks so similar to Anderson in some scenes that the lines between truth and fiction seem to wobble a little. And the English actress captures what may be the heart of Anderson: She describes herself, in one early scene, as just “a good Christian girl from small-town Canada,” and she’s resolutely sweet and courteous to almost every person she meets. But in Pam & Tommy, Anderson comes to represent more than herself—she’s an avatar for every woman who’s ever been slut-shamed or abused, or who’s ever suffered a loss too poignant to bear. She’s a foil for men like Gauthier to have their own moments of revelation. “Oh man, I feel terrible for women,” he tells his ex-wife (Taylor Schilling), a character patently created for these kinds of discussions. “They gotta deal with us.”

For Anderson, maybe the fact that she’s less a person in the show than a collection of tropes and stories animated into a whole is some consolation. But I doubt it. The more we rely on these narratives of ’90s revisionism to confront the flaws in our own past thinking, the more responsibility we have to wonder who’s being served in the process. Is it right to take a painful invasion of privacy that was turned into mass entertainment and turn it into mass entertainment again, even if the motivations have changed? Have they changed? I enjoyed this show. It made me think about Anderson differently—as someone who’s survived extraordinary victimization and typecasting and who’s managed to redefine how she’s perceived. (Whether steadfast defender of Julian Assange trumps Baywatch babe depends on your worldview, I guess.) But the series, which so often feels like it’s trying to atone for our old mistakes, seems intent on pointing out ethical transgressions while looking right past the notable void at its own core.

In 2019, a 60-year-old Emma Thompson explained her sudden career renaissance. She had spent her youth playing romantic leads, but once she turned 40, she said, she could fill such roles only “in a pinch.” The offers became more limited, the parts smaller: a batty clairvoyant in the Harry Potter series; a wronged wife in Love Actually; the voice inside Will Ferrell’s head in Stranger Than Fiction. Then another decade passed, and the opportunities became interesting again. Hallelujah! In the past five years alone, Thompson has played a High Court judge in The Children Act, an uptight television host in Late Night, and the British prime minister (twice).

Thompson had experienced what we might call “the dry decade.” The midlife plight of women in Hollywood was immortalized in an Amy Schumer sketch that achieved instant cult status when it aired six years ago. Three actresses are enjoying a picnic in a wooded glade, celebrating one of their number’s “Last Fuckable Day.” The women around the table—Patricia Arquette, Tina Fey, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus—are all attractive, smart, and funny. But that doesn’t matter. They’re over the hill in Hollywood’s eyes. Fey notes that eventually, women realize that the poster for their movie is “just, like, a picture of a kitchen.” Louis-Dreyfus adds that such films have “these very uplifting and yet vague titles, like Whatever It Takes or She Means Well.”

In 2012, two economists from Clemson University analyzed the gender balance of American films from 1920 to 2011 and offered a more wonkish take on the phenomenon. Overall, they found that men accounted for two-thirds of all roles in mainstream movies. For starring roles, however, age is everything. At 20, women play four-fifths of leads: Hollywood is very interested in them at their nubile prime. Fast-forward to 40, and that statistic is reversed. Men utterly dominate the juiciest parts. The male-female gender split then hovers around 80–20 until, well, death.

[Read: When Hollywood’s power players were women]

For the few women actors who come out the other side of the dry decade, the rewards can be mixed. No longer able to portray ingenues, brides-to-be, or manic pixie dream girls, or be the Avengers’ diversity hire (sorry, Black Widow), older actresses graduate into the other popular category open to women: hags and harpies. Meryl Streep once described the parts she was offered after 50 as women who were “gorgons or dragons or in some way grotesque.” Sure enough, Thompson’s late-career roles also include the Baroness in Cruella, Goneril in a TV-movie version of King Lear, and Miss Trunchbull in the upcoming musical adaptation of Matilda. Monsters, one and all.

But biology, it turns out, needn’t be destiny. A new generation of actresses has discovered an answer to the dry decade, and is showing the rest of us what we’ve been missing—stories that capture the fullness of women’s lives.

To understand the problem (and because the experience is always pleasant), consider Tom Hanks. He might be “America’s Dad,” but his career represents a type of ageless versatility long afforded by the film industry—to male actors. In his 30s, Hanks wooed Elizabeth Perkins in Big, Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle, and Robin Wright in Forrest Gump. (I am excluding Beasley, the dog from Turner & Hooch, from this analysis, though IMDb sadly records that Beasley never worked again.) Hanks’s next decade was anything but dry. In his 40s, he played an FBI agent in Catch Me If You Can, a Mob enforcer in Road to Perdition, Woody in Toy Story, and a man stranded on a deserted island in Cast Away, among other roles.

But what about his female co-stars? Their 40s were not exactly dazzling. At 41, Meg Ryan jettisoned her sweet, goofy image in In the Cut, playing an English teacher drawn into a sexual relationship with a potential serial killer. The critical reception dwelled on the film’s erotic atmosphere, and Ryan’s onscreen nudity was greeted as an unwelcome surprise. She has since said that the film marked a “turning point” from which her career never recovered.

Neither Elizabeth Perkins nor Robin Wright fared well in the film industry, either. But they did have success elsewhere—and this is where the story of the dry decade takes an intriguing turn. Perkins spent her mid-to-late 40s on Showtime’s Weeds, as the lead character’s narcissist neighbor, Celia—and earned three Emmy nominations for the role. At 46, Wright started playing Claire Underwood in House of Cards, and by the final season had graduated from first lady to president.

Perkins and Wright were among the first wave of women to benefit from the golden age of television. Since then, the streaming wars have created a huge demand for new dramas, and the increased opportunities are obvious. In her 40s, Reese Witherspoon has starred in Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere, and The Morning Show. (As a bonus, the last of these also rescued Jennifer Aniston from a film industry that never quite seemed to know what to do with her.) The HBO remake of Scenes From a Marriage gave 44-year-old Jessica Chastain a role every bit as challenging as an Ibsen heroine. At 46, Sandra Oh began playing a weary spy locked in a deadly pas de deux with a glamorous assassin in Hulu’s Killing Eve. And at the same age, Kate Winslet undertook one of the standout roles of her career, as Mare Sheehan, the stoic detective in HBO’s Mare of Easttown.

Compared with the dead ends that Ryan, Perkins, and Wright encountered in traditional Hollywood, the trajectory for female stars is thriving on the competition among HBO, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and others. A glut of roles now combine the personal and the professional, offering a chance not to be pigeonholed as “the wife” or “the mom”—or, conversely, the career woman free of domestic responsibilities. Think about the dry decade: It has amounted to a desert of roles between love interest and empty nester, as Hollywood has struggled to incorporate the challenges of motherhood into narratives about women engaged elsewhere too.

[From the December 2009 issue: Double-X films]

The 2010 film Salt, about a CIA spy accused of being a Russian sleeper agent, is a notorious example of the basic motherhood problem. Originally intended for Tom Cruise, the script was rewritten for its eventual star, Angelina Jolie. That entailed one big change: Edwin Salt was a parent; Evelyn Salt was not. “If a woman had a child, I think it would be very hard for us not to imagine her kind of holding on to that child through the entire film,” Jolie said at the time. “Which is strange—but I think audiences would allow a man to have a child and the child [could] be with the wife back at home.” (When making Salt, Jolie herself was a working mother of six children, including 2-year-old twins.)

Television series are hungry for plotlines, and their cast lists spread like tree roots as seasons progress, giving women new room to grow. In stark contrast to the narrowness of Jolie’s role in Salt, Keri Russell transitioned from her late 30s into her 40s as Elizabeth Jennings on The Americans, navigating the identities of mother, travel agent, and Soviet spy. In The Queen’s Gambit, deft touches filled out the portrait of Beth Harmon’s alcoholic adoptive mother, Alma, played by Marielle Heller, who had recently turned 40.

In accommodating characters who are mothers, without that being their only identity, television has brought new tensions and texture to established genres. Where male detectives have tended—to the point of cliché—to be troubled, maverick loners, Olivia Colman’s Ellie Miller found her investigations complicated by her own family turmoil and deep links to the local town in the British crime show Broadchurch. Kate Winslet’s Mare Sheehan is similarly embedded in her community, at the center of a loving, chaotic, and grieving clan in the kind of suburb where everyone has secrets and everyone is trying to cope: with addiction, with loss, with something as mundane as America’s lack of affordable child care.

The wide-angle lens of television invites immersion in a pivotal midlife decade that—for anyone juggling a career, children, and aging parents, as well as their own compromises, regrets, and unfulfilled ambitions—is anything but dry. “I always imagined I’d be a cop,” Mare tells a younger police officer. “It’s the life around me I didn’t expect to fall apart so spectacularly.”

This article appears in the March 2022 print edition with the headline “Women of a Certain Age.”