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Jennifer Coolidge’s comeback has been one of the best feel-good Hollywood narratives in recent years. Since starring in The White Lotus as the lovably loony Tanya, she’s enjoyed the kind of critical acclaim and career resurgence that few actresses in their 60s—let alone those who work mostly in comedies and broke out decades ago—ever do. In the past few months, she’s won her first Golden Globe and her first Emmy. She nabbed nominations at the Screen Actors Guild Awards two years in a row. Entertainment Weekly named her Entertainer of the Year.

The accolades are well deserved; Coolidge’s work in The White Lotus is excellent—sharp and sympathetic, hilarious and heart-wrenching. Yet much of her renaissance has been attributed to her personality. Her acceptance speeches are so unpredictable, and her talk-show appearances so self-deprecating, that her off-screen antics have become the subject of YouTube compilations and The Cut’s tongue-in-cheek “I Can’t Shut Up About …” column. Even her first TikTok was deemed a “cinematic masterpiece.”

Although Coolidge is a hoot to watch whenever she’s handed the mic, her pre–White Lotus work deserves just as much recognition. I’m not talking about the roles for which she’s best known—Paulette in Legally Blonde, Stifler’s mom in American Pie, and Sherri Ann Cabot in Best in Show—though they’re obviously worth revisiting. I’m talking about the roles she herself at the Golden Globes called “little jobs that, like, kept me going” when her career seemed in stasis: the guest turns on sitcoms, the thankless parts in big-screen spoofs, that one scene from Soul Men with Bernie Mac. Together, they prove that Coolidge’s superpower is taking the roles the industry has typecast her in—oversexed, obnoxious women of a certain age—and humanizing them into something more than a mere laughingstock.

[Read: The speeches that saved the Golden Globes]

Her supporting turn in Amazon’s Shotgun Wedding is the latest example. Although the action rom-com about a marriage ceremony that turns into a hostage situation (just go with it) started streaming last weekend, the film was made before the release of The White Lotus Season 1, and it cast Coolidge in a classically Coolidge-ian part. She plays Carol, the eccentric mother of the groom who at one point tries to negotiate with her captors by informing them that she was “Milford, Michigan’s top realtor in 1998 and again in 2007.” In another performer’s hands, Carol would’ve simply been comic relief. The mediocre script positions her as a stereotypical overbearing relative whose sole purpose is to deliver silly one-liners and look funny shooting a machine gun while wearing a floppy sun hat.

But Coolidge makes Carol all that and more by rooting the character’s most ludicrous ideas in fear rather than stupidity, and her oddball whims in years of being overlooked and underestimated. “I’m a mother; I can be upset about a lot of things at the same time,” she says more than once. In one scene, Carol is convinced that the couple have ended up in a ditch; her repeated request for the staff to “check all ditches” sounds not just absurd but truly desperate. Carol, as embodied by Coolidge, isn’t some pathetic, clueless narcissist; she’s justifiably terrified.

[Read: 13 feel-good shows to watch this winter]

Coolidge is a master at making a meal out of scant scenes in lackluster—or, in the case of Shotgun Wedding, fun but forgettable—material. After watching the film and hearing Coolidge’s assessment of her own work during her Golden Globes speech, I revisited some of the projects from that critically maligned period of her career, in the late 2000s and 2010s. Watching them now, it’s striking how Coolidge threw herself into the thinnest roles. In her introduction as “the White Bitch of Gnarnia” in Epic Movie, for instance, she slips out of her sleigh as if she can’t bear to part with it, keeping her body glued to the carriage and letting her feet dangle perilously above the ground for a beat too long. In Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, she takes a one-scene part as a manipulative driving instructor and makes her the scariest driving instructor ever committed to screen, so rageful that the audience can’t help but wonder where the fury comes from.

Meanwhile, on TV, the CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls couldn’t get enough of Coolidge. The show promoted her to a series regular after she elevated Sophie, the titular duo’s sex-obsessed Polish neighbor, from a raunchy fool into a fully realized character. Whenever Sophie stepped into the diner setting of the show, Coolidge made her sound beyond delighted to see the girls, turning the woman from an annoying oversharer into someone who’s just overeager, friendly to a fault. No wonder she became a fan favorite, just as Tanya would years later.

In other words, Coolidge’s greatest feat as a comedic performer is her ability to make the audience share her curiosity and appreciation for her characters, many of whom were written to be the butt of jokes about older women. Some, like Carol, are supposed to be pitiable simpletons. Others, like Sophie, are cringeworthy for having robust sexual appetites. Yet Coolidge knows what people expect of Carols and Sophies, so she doesn’t stop at making the audience laugh with her off-kilter line readings and impeccable timing. She uses her magic to turn objects of ridicule into objects of affection.

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Although we're almost past the point of having the stench of death surround movies when they head directly to streaming, that assessment applies to "Shotgun Wedding," which loads both barrels with Jennifer Lopez, late-replacement Josh Duhamel and Jennifer Coolidge and still fires blanks. The movie arrives in the US via Amazon, but even that invitation is worth declining.

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There was a time, not so long ago, when you actually had to show up at a concert to get ripped off. Scalping, the process of buying tickets for cheap and reselling them to desperate fans, usually on the day of a show, used to be limited to crowded stadium entranceways and sidewalk waiting areas.

These days it all happens on Ticketmaster. As fans of Taylor Swift know best, America’s leading online ticket peddler is a mess: Late last year, the site buckled under the pressure of presale demand for the megastar’s Eras Tour. When a bot attack overwhelmed the site, many fans were left in the lurch, forced to turn to secondary markets with markups in the tens of thousands of dollars. In a congressional hearing this week sparked largely by that fiasco, just about everyone ganged up on Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment. “I want to congratulate and thank you for an absolutely stunning achievement,” Senator Richard Blumenthal told Live Nation’s president and CFO, Joe Berchtold. “You have brought together Republicans and Democrats in an absolutely unified cause.”

The Swift debacle may have had the precise kind of universal appeal to unite Congress on this issue—the site’s partial crash provoked widespread outrage—but even if this is an edge case, Ticketmaster represents a product that’s fundamentally unsatisfying even when it works. An interface that should be minimal and clear is mired in confusion, and plagued by automated scalpers that snap up tickets faster than real, human customers can check out. Considering Ticketmaster’s size and value, you would expect something smoother: Live Nation now controls much of the American market for live events and tickets; to encounter this multibillion-dollar chimera of an events-promotion firm, venue-management business, and ticketing platform isn’t really a choice, in 2023, as much as a demoralizing inevitability. Even putting aside all the problems that come with Ticketmaster’s enormous market share, the site’s basic consumer experience has begun to feel rickety. If customers have nowhere else to go, why bother changing things?

Buying tickets to a Taylor Swift concert will probably put a dent in your wallet, but it shouldn’t—to quote Swift’s own assessment of the situation—feel like going through “several bear attacks.” In the best-case scenario, customers would feed money into the system and receive their tickets without much hassle. That’s not the reality for many consumers. Take the biggest problem people seem to have with Ticketmaster: hidden fees. In some instances, fans end up paying an additional 60 or 70 percent of a ticket’s face value—charges with opaque names that pop up at the last second. That fees are high is one thing; that customers don’t even know what these fees are for, or that they don’t necessarily know they’re coming, is another. Even when Ticketmaster is ostensibly doing its job, purchasers are likely to come away overloaded. (In an emailed statement, Ticketmaster professed full support for “upfront all-in pricing” and said that it has “invested over $1 billion in capital to improve the Ticketmaster system.”)

But Ticketmaster’s woes don’t end with fees. Sales of all types have been plagued with bot attacks for years. Taylor Swift presale tickets involved a kind of anti-bot verification system, but as Berchtold admitted during the hearing, bots got in anyway. This was an issue even before Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation in 2010—bots, which can snag tickets within fractions of a second and artificially inflate prices for any sort of live event, are something this industry can’t seem to beat. The problem is compounded by long wait times: Fans might end up queueing hours and hours for a ticket that not only is out of reach, but is funneled straight into the resale market, where brutal markups await. In the case of the Swift tour, fans who didn’t make it onto the presale list didn’t have any customer experience at all—Ticketmaster canceled the public sale when it realized it didn’t have enough tickets left to sell.

During the hearing, Berchtold tried to claim that Ticketmaster dominates the market because of the quality of its product, but these confusions are as much a result of poor design as extractive business decisions abetted by the company’s disproportionate power in the marketplace. The CEO of the corporate rival SeatGeek, who was also at the hearing, said, “We don’t know who has the best product, because there is not a competition.” (SeatGeek is not perfect either: The company apparently charged one woman 14 times for Swift tickets she never even purchased.)

Despite what Live Nation’s president seems to want Congress to think, the company now finds itself in this position largely because of its market dominance. It’s true of many businesses, but particularly those that offer some kind of tech solution: As competition wanes, the product itself stagnates. Because no other company poses a serious threat to Live Nation’s market share, it has no financial reason to invest greater resources into solving its bot problem, or to reinforce its infrastructure to be able to handle millions of concurrent requests.

At a moment when much of the discourse around tech monopolies has to do with the social, political, and economic power they’ve come to exert over the past two decades, it’s easy to forget about the evolution of the products themselves. Google—the internet search tool, not the company—hasn’t changed all that much over the past 15 years, because it hasn’t really needed to; it’s still the search tool of choice for the majority of information seekers, even if the site isn’t quite as effective as it used to be. That Amazon has figured out one-day delivery makes for a better consumer experience, but search results are now cluttered with ads and intrusive product recommendations.

Though it can feel as intractable as a utility company, Ticketmaster is still mostly a functional business. But it shouldn’t wait to reveal hidden fees until the moment of purchase, and it certainly shouldn’t leave its infrastructure this vulnerable to outside manipulation. The biggest ticketer should expect the most traffic, and it should protect its tech accordingly. These are basic asks of a product that’s in many ways stuck in the past. If only Ticketmaster had a reason to listen.

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