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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Few things are more satisfying than watching a show pull off a clever and high-octane episode. For those looking to revisit some greats, our writers and editors answer the question: What do you think is a perfect episode of TV?

The following contains spoilers for the episodes mentioned.

“The Panic in Central Park,” Girls (streaming on Max)

Maybe this is the former theater critic in me coming out, but the thing I love most is when a television series tells a complete story in miniature—a stand-alone short that puts a particular dynamic or relationship or cast member front and center. Girls, which revolves around four friends in New York City, has always been brilliant at this, and never more so than with “The Panic in Central Park,” a Marnie-centered episode that deals with the particular moment in young adulthood when fantasy becomes untenable.

“The Panic in Central Park,” like the best Girls episodes, is written by Lena Dunham and directed by Richard Shepard. It begins with Desi mournfully reproaching his “cruel” new wife, Marnie, for declining to go get a scone, ends with her asking for a divorce, and riffs on film history, romance, and codependency in between. The high-strung Marnie, out on a walk to clear her head, encounters her ex, Charlie, who’s almost unrecognizable. He whisks her away on a whirlwind New York City adventure involving a consigned red cocktail dress (Millennial Williamsburg’s answer to Pretty Woman), a fake identity, Italian food, a rowboat in Central Park, a robbery, and—finally—the revelation that Charlie is addicted to heroin. A sadder, wiser Marnie walks home barefoot, having accepted the idea that no one is going to save her. The episode is beautiful and incisive about the allure of the stories we wrap ourselves in and the power of shaking them off.

— Sophie Gilbert, staff writer

***

“If It Smells Like a Rat, Give It Cheese,” Survivor: Micronesia (streaming on Hulu and Paramount+)

If I could erase my brain in order to watch anything for the first time again, I would do it for the penultimate episode of Survivor: Micronesia. The 16th season of the reality game show is famously one of the best, and this episode is why. Watching it is like witnessing Alex Honnold climb El Capitan without ropes—except instead of sheer athleticism in the face of seemingly impossible odds, you’re seeing how master manipulators exploit social dynamics to get what they want. It’s the Olympics for those who prefer politics or gossip to sports.

People who haven’t watched Survivor often assume that it’s about “surviving” the wilderness, but it’s always primarily been about surviving human nature. Driven by power and social capital, the show has more in common with Game of Thrones than Naked and Afraid. Explaining exactly what happens in this episode would be like explaining an inside joke; you need to watch the whole season to get why it hits. Just know that it features Red Wedding–level of gameplay, setting the bar high for how far people will go to get ahead.

— Serena Dai, senior editor

***

“C**tgate,” Veep (streaming on Max)

Unlike a perfect movie, a perfect episode of television does not need to surprise you or make you cry. It just needs to move your beloved or loathed characters through the formula in an especially excellent way. But the element of surprise may be why I remember “C**tgate” so many years later. In this episode of Veep, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) orchestrates two tasks that are both impossibly monumental and petty. She has to decide if she is going to bail out a bank owned by her current boyfriend, and she must find out who on her staff called her a “cunt” so loudly in public that it was overheard by a reporter.

These interweaving plots alone would make a perfectly satisfying episode. What makes it golden are two of the funniest, most unexpected subplots in Veep’s run. One involves a focus group for the bumbling White House liaison Jonah Ryan, now running for Congress in New Hampshire, who is workshopping an ad. The second is a surprise announcement by Selina’s daughter, a recurring sad sack who can never get her mother’s attention. Guess who she’s dating?

— Hanna Rosin, senior editor

***

“Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” The X-Files (streaming on Hulu)

If you’re seeking out a perfect episode of TV, the richest cache to search is the “case of the week” entries of The X-Files. The show wove an elaborate arc about aliens on Earth but saved most of its best material for the smaller stuff. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” written by Darin Morgan, is a gothic short story, following FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they investigate a murder with the help of a tetchy local psychic named Clyde Bruckman (Peter Boyle).

This being The X-Files, Mulder is immediately taken with Bruckman’s clairvoyance, while Scully is skeptical—but Morgan’s script resolves each of Bruckman’s predictions about the future in clever, tragicomic ways, reinforcing Mulder’s belief while also finding ways to affirm Scully’s cynicism. It’s funny, dark, and beautifully acted—particularly between Anderson and Boyle—with an elliptical plot structure that feels wonderfully complex even by today’s TV standards.

— David Sims, staff writer

***

“It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” Grey’s Anatomy (streaming on Netflix and Hulu)

I’ve previously written that after more than 20 seasons, it’s time for Grey’s Anatomy to come to an end. But in its early days, the series was responsible for some of the most memorable episodes of television: The second season’s two-part storyline, “It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” demonstrated the show’s mix of humor and drama at its best.

Colloquially known as the “bomb in the body cavity” episodes, they tell the story of a patient who comes in with live ammunition in his chest. At the same time, the show’s powerhouse resident Dr. Miranda Bailey goes into labor, and two other characters perform surgery on her husband, who crashed his car on his way in. In the midst of some very suspenseful plotlines, the dialogue explores the relationships among, and vulnerabilities of, the characters in a beautifully human way. On a show that’s known for putting people in harm’s way, this pair of episodes focuses as much on the emotions as on the drama: the fear of losing someone you care about, and what it really means to be in love.

— Kate Guarino, supervisory senior associate editor

***

Season 2, Episode 10, The Mole (streaming on Netflix)

The Season 2 finale of Netflix’s reboot of The Mole is made perfect if you first watch all of the other episodes. The show’s formula is simple: 12 people collaborate on Indiana Jones–style missions to earn money for a prize pot, but one of them is a “mole” hired by the producers to sabotage the other contestants. Elimination isn’t based on your performance in missions. It’s about how accurately you identify the mole, according to your answers on a quiz given each round.

What results is sumptuous chaos, set among abandoned buildings and real explosives that make you wonder what the release form for this show must look like. Everyone is pretending to be the mole (to mislead others) while testing their fellow players (to figure out who the mole is) and still, somehow, trying to collect money for the prize pot. Oh, and did I mention that Ari Shapiro of All Things Considered fame is this season’s host?

I won’t spoil the finale, but it involves minefields and three equally mole-like characters. There’s not a single weak link in this episode, and if you correctly guess who the mole is, you’ll have bested much of the internet.

— Katherine Hu, assistant editor

***

“Chocolate With Nuts,” SpongeBob SquarePants (streaming on Paramount+)

At about 11 minutes per segment, SpongeBob SquarePants doesn’t have much room to play around with. But its best episodes use that brevity to their advantage, stuffing in visual gags, one-liners, callbacks, goofy voice acting, and witty repartee. “Chocolate With Nuts,” from the third season, is the greatest example of the show’s “run out the clock” ethos: SpongeBob and his best friend, Patrick, become chocolate-bar salesmen to achieve “fancy living.” Their ensuing door-to-door journey introduces them to a cavalcade of bizarre Bikini Bottom dwellers, including a seemingly immortal, shriveled-up fish and a man who feigns “glass bones” syndrome in one of many efforts to dupe the boys into buying chocolate from him instead.

More than most episodes of this kids’ cartoon, “Chocolate With Nuts” threads the needle between the juvenile hijinks and some more adult themes: the empty promise of the good life, the uphill battle of entrepreneurship, the fallacy of “trust thy neighbor.” That headiness is all conveyed through SpongeBob’s elastic face and Patrick’s gobsmacking vacuousness—the best way to explore any nuanced concept, in my view.

But the primary reason I have been rewatching this episode for more than 22 years now is its unassuming density. SpongeBob is wonderfully breezy, but its hidden strength is how layered each joke is: I laugh at different things every time—a certain line delivery, a certain facial expression—and impulsively repeat its most memorable quotes. “Chocolate,” says the pruned old-lady fish, wistfully. “Sweet, sweet chocolate. I always hated it!”

— Allegra Frank, senior editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The anti-social century The army of God comes out of the shadows. The agony of texting with men

The Week Ahead

September 5, a drama film detailing an ABC Sports crew’s efforts to cover the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in Munich (in theaters nationwide Friday) Season 2 of Severance, a sci-fi series about a corporate employee who agrees to surgically “sever” his personal life from his work life (streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday) The JFK Conspiracy, a book by Josh Mensch and Brad Meltzer about the first assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Jackson Gibbs

Parents Are Gaming Their Kids’ Credit Scores

By Michael Waters

Several years ago, Hannah Case decided to examine her personal credit history. Case, who was then a researcher at the Federal Reserve, hadn’t gotten her first credit card until she was 22. But as she discovered when she saw her file, she’d apparently been spending responsibly since 14.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The reason The Brutalist needs to be so long The payoff of TV’s most awaited crossover What to read when the odds are against you September 5 captures a crisis becoming must-watch TV. The bizarre brain of Werner Herzog The film that rips the Hollywood comeback narrative apart

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Trump’s sentencing made no one happy. Trump is right that Pax Americana is over, Charles A. Kupchan argues. Why “late regime” presidencies fail

Photo Album

A man watches as flames from the Palisades Fire close in on his property in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Ethan Swope / AP)

The Palisades Fire grew quickly in California, burning many structures and sending thick plumes of smoke into the air. These photos show parts of Los Angeles scorched by the wildfire.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

If there was any place in America where President Joe Biden’s economic agenda ought to have won him votes, it would have been Lordstown, Ohio. A September CNN article noted that, thanks to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, “a gleaming new 2.8 million-square-foot manufacturing plant symbolizes something that has been fleeting in recent years: hope.” Biden was bringing well-paid union jobs in the cutting-edge battery industry to a struggling region long written off as the Rust Belt.

But if Biden was expecting the community to reward his efforts, he was sorely disappointed. In 2024, the county in which Lordstown is located shifted toward Trump by six percentage points compared with 2020, the second-highest swing to Trump of any county in the state.

Lordstown offers a test case of a political theory that has not only guided the Biden administration’s economic policy but also sought to explain the past several decades of American politics. The theory holds that Donald Trump’s 2016 election represented a voter backlash against “neoliberal” economic policies that had impoverished people in the heartland, who in their desperation turned to a populist outsider promising to smash the system that had betrayed them.

From this analysis, it naturally followed that if Democrats abandoned neoliberalism, they could win back the working class and become competitive in more of the country. A post-neoliberal party would curtail free trade, ratchet up enforcement of antitrust and other regulations, run a high-pressure economy with rising wages even at the risk of higher inflation, support labor unions categorically, and subsidize manufacturing employment to reindustrialize hollowed-out areas left behind by globalization—all of which Biden ended up doing.

On the substance, Biden’s economic agenda has registered some meaningful successes. The hot labor market raised wages; union organizers at a handful of companies, such as Starbucks and Amazon, have made breakthroughs; and the administration’s public investments in chip production and green energy have built up strategic domestic industries. As a political strategy, however, post-neoliberalism has clearly failed. Biden’s popularity dropped to catastrophic levels in his first year and never recovered, leaving his successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, unable to escape his gravitational pull. If rejecting neoliberalism for four years did nothing to pull working-class voters away from Trump, perhaps Trumpism was never a revolt against neoliberalism in the first place.

Some Democrats have responded to the disaster of 2024 by insisting that the way forward for the party is to keep doing what Biden did, but louder and more insistently. In fact, Trump’s reelection ought to call into question the whole foundation upon which the strategy was constructed.

People tend to believe that events with profound consequences must have profound sources. The shock of Trump’s 2016 victory led many Democrats to search for an origin story that matched the scope of such a traumatic outcome. A belief took hold, especially on the party’s economic left wing, that working-class voters had revolted against an economic order perpetuated by Democrats and Republicans alike. In this telling, every president since at least Ronald Reagan had governed in the service of corporations and wealthy elites, at the expense of ordinary Americans and “left behind” places. After all, Trump had pulled off his surprise Rust Belt sweep while denouncing free-trade deals and intermittently posing as an enemy of Wall Street. Defeating him would consequently require reestablishing a full-fledged populist program rather than the warmed-over variety of the Clinton and Obama years.

This theory always contained fatal flaws. The Democrats had maintained a coalition divided between business and labor since Franklin D. Roosevelt—who also established the modern free-trade order. The recent versions of the two parties did narrowly agree on a handful of policies, including the virtues of globalization, but starting with the Reagan era, they had grown more divided, not more united, on economics. Barack Obama had bailed out the auto industry, regulated Wall Street, and redistributed hundreds of billions of dollars from the rich to the poor. Even Bill Clinton had engaged in bitter showdowns over taxes and spending. The notion that Clinton and Newt Gingrich, or Obama and Paul Ryan, were partners with a shared ideology that could be usefully defined by a single term ignores almost everything that happened during these years. It is a measure of the incoherence of “neoliberalism” that the term can be, and has been, applied as an epithet to almost anything: Paul Krugman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, public-employee unions, Beatles fandom.

[John McWhorter: When people were proud to call themselves ‘neoliberal’]

What’s more, the 2016 election’s shocking outcome can be adequately explained by any one of a number of perfectly mundane causes: Hillary Clinton’s drawbacks as a politician, Democrats’ leftward moves on social policy, the difficulty that incumbent parties have winning a third straight term, the mainstream media’s fixation with the email scandal, James Comey’s last-minute intervention to reopen the FBI investigation into it.

Still, the narrative that neoliberalism was to blame took hold widely—including, most fatefully, during the Biden administration. Even though Biden had served as Obama’s vice president, and won the nomination in large part because Democratic voters looked back on that partnership with fondness, he filled his administration with staffers who believed that Obama and Bill Clinton had failed the working class. The administration’s policies accordingly departed in ways that those post-neoliberal theorists deemed especially important. Biden supported organized labor almost unconditionally, even in policy areas that conflicted with other liberal priorities; pulled back on unfettered free trade; gave policy-making roles to lawyers over economists; and appointed crusading reformers to the top antitrust-enforcement positions. Perhaps most important, the administration saw its subsidies for green energy and chip manufacturing not merely as targeted responses to market failures but as the core of a new industrial policy that would restore prosperity to large swaths of America.

Triumphant headlines such as “Biden Is Getting Ready to Bury Neoliberalism” and “Why Neoliberalism Is Finally on the Way Out” celebrated the populist left’s newfound influence. “The Biden administration has explicitly disavowed all aspects of neoliberalism, including the assumptions about free trade and the alleged efficiency of outsourcing, the lack of support for trade unions, and the bipartisan contempt for industrial policy,” Robert Kuttner wrote in The American Prospect in 2023.

As recently as this past fall, the Biden administration and many of its supporters continued to insist that his post-neoliberal policies constituted a genuine revolution in American politics and economic life—a return to the Democratic Party’s New Deal–era identity as the champion of the working class.

That conviction helps explain why Biden felt entitled to a second term and why, once he finally abandoned his candidacy, he chose to pass the baton to his vice president rather than an outsider who could more credibly distance themselves from his politically toxic record. “I think one of the arguments that get made, you have the most successful presidency of any president in modern history, maybe since Franklin Roosevelt,” he said last July, by way of explaining his reluctance to drop out of the race after his disastrous debate performance.

This belief also explains why much of the party’s left wing—including Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and Ro Khanna—lined up behind him, even as members of the party’s centrist wing fought to replace him as the candidate. “He’s been the best president of my lifetime, and we have his back,” Omar told The Washington Post. One of Biden’s final gambits to retain the nomination was a vow, apparently influenced by Sanders, to expand Social Security benefits and eliminate medical debt during the first 100 days of his second term—as if pushing the “Populist” button even harder would finally cause the public to wake up and realize all the positive change that Biden had wrought.

In reality, Biden presided over the most unpopular Democratic presidency since Jimmy Carter’s. In November, working-class voters of all races, the very constituency that Biden’s anti-neoliberal turn was supposed to court, deserted the party. Perhaps hoping for Roosevelt-size majorities was a bit ambitious, but Biden’s sweeping, historic changes ought to have had at least some positive directional impact for the party. Unless, that is, the post-neoliberal theory of politics was wrong all along.

Rather than considering that possibility, however, many of the post-neoliberals have strained to explain why the theory is still sound despite its apparent real-world failure. These explanations fall into a few main categories. Some leftists have tried to pin the blame for the election result on Harris’s decision to run toward the center once she became the nominee. Harris did embrace a more overtly moderate message than Biden, and gave less attention to his populist economic themes. But Harris performed better in swing states, where voters were inundated with her campaign messages, than she did in the rest of the country. This strongly suggests that Biden’s record was pulling her down, and that her centrist campaign themes made her more popular, not less.

Another defense holds that Biden’s successful policies simply haven’t produced political rewards yet. “The 40-year damage of neoliberalism to the living standards and life horizons of working Americans was so profound that three years of modest improvement was far from FDR-style transformation,” Kuttner argued in a postelection Prospect essay. “Many of Biden’s initiatives will take many years to bear fruit.” The outgoing president has sounded a similar note. “It will take years to see the full effects in terms of new jobs and new investments all around the country, but we have planted the seeds that are making this happen,” he recently argued in a Prospect essay under his name.

It’s true that most of the spending in Biden’s major infrastructure laws is still in the pipeline. But these delays are themselves a result of Biden’s post-neoliberal ideology, which insisted on attaching a long list of social criteria to its projects, while failing to enact legislation to speed up the permitting process. In any case, industrial policy is just one piece of Biden’s allegedly transformational agenda. Other elements—including on trade, labor, and fiscal policy—have taken immediate effect. None of these actions has shown any sign of helping Biden politically. The president’s stream of actions to forgive student debt did not produce higher support among young voters, his unwavering deference to labor unions did not yield more support among union members, and so on.

[Rogé Karma: Reaganomics is on its last legs]

And although many of the administration’s infrastructure investments remain stuck in the planning stage, some of them, such as the new Lordstown factory, have come online, bringing jobs with them. These projects offer localized mini tests of the hypothesis that delivering concrete benefits will lead to political support.

In an October story for The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann described visits to five places on the receiving end of Biden-enabled investment: Fort Valley, Georgia; Menominee, Michigan; Kokomo; Indiana, and Manitowoc and Milwaukee, in Wisconsin. “If you squint, you can see the outlines of a new post-neoliberal Democratic coalition,” he wrote. “Fast-growing clean-energy industries—wind, solar, batteries, hydrogen, electric vehicles—could join Hollywood and Silicon Valley in supporting the Democratic Party.”

In fact, every one of the counties Lemann visited wound up voting for Trump at a higher level in 2024 than it had four years earlier.

The pro-Trump swings were small, ranging from 0.1 percent to 3.5 percent—well below the national average. One could spin this as evidence that Biden’s domestic build-out had brought some marginal benefits—fractional gains concentrated in areas that were chosen as the staging grounds for gigantic national expenditures. But we are talking about small local shifts, obtained via many billions of dollars of federal investment. That is not a scalable national strategy.

Biden’s defenders also insist that his otherwise winning policies were simply overwhelmed by the headwinds of inflation, which felled incumbent parties around the world last year. But letting down your guard against inflation is, in fact, a key tenet of post-neoliberal doctrine. A 2020 strategy memo from the Hewlett Foundation, a major proponent and funder of post-neoliberal thinking, argued, “If economic developments over the past decade show anything, it is that there is greater headroom for spending without causing undue inflation,” and that the task was to focus on bringing down unemployment “without worrying about inflation quite so frantically.”

Supporters of Biden’s ambitious spending—I was one of them—were clear that events would prove out this doctrine’s soundness, or lack thereof. “If there were any doubt that Joe Biden’s economic proposals represent a big break with the policies of the Obama and Clinton Administrations, the debate about Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan dispelled it,” The New Yorker’s John Cassidy wrote in February 2021. “The only definitive way to find out whether the inflation threat is real or chimerical is to pass the $1.9 trillion package and see what happens.”

Inflation was always going to be a problem that Biden had to deal with. He dealt with it less effectively because the post-neoliberal argument that inflation either wouldn’t rise, wouldn’t last, or wouldn’t matter politically carried the day. Ignoring fears about inflation was a sound policy choice before the pandemic-induced price spike, but a dogmatic one after it. Biden’s inability to alter his course was a direct consequence of the ideological rigidity that his advisers embraced.

Finally, there’s the excuse that Biden’s policies would have been popular if only he hadn’t been too old and inarticulate to sell them properly to the public. “Biden wasn’t up to the kind of explanatory duties that the presidency requires—much less a presidency that was advancing landmark economic policies to benefit workers and consumers,” The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson wrote. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy has made a similar argument. “One of my frustrations is that President Biden and Vice-President Harris didn’t lead their economic messaging by talking about their break with neoliberalism,” he told New York magazine shortly after the election. “So the policy was really good. I just don’t think the rhetoric always matched the policy.”

[Chris Murphy: The wreckage of neoliberalism]

A great deal of evidence from political science suggests that presidential rhetoric has little ability to change public opinion, so the expectation that better speeches would have led to dramatically different outcomes is far-fetched. Even if that were not the case, the emphasis from post-neoliberals on rhetoric as a driving force of history is deeply strange. The whole point of their theory was to explain Trump’s rise as a proletarian revolt against neoliberal immiseration. Now that neoliberalism has supposedly been overthrown, we’re told that the crucial dialectical stage was for the president to deliver West Wing–quality inspirational speeches? What kind of materialism is this?

The theory that Trump’s popularity was a reaction against neoliberalism had an irresistible attraction to progressive elites. For the labor movement and other parts of the economic left, it supplied a political rationale for policies they’d long supported. For social-issue progressives, it implied that they had no need to compromise with the socially conservative positions held by working-class voters; all Democrats needed to do was address people’s “real” material concerns.

Public policy, of course, is not just about winning elections; it’s about improving people’s lives. Some of the policies Biden implemented are worth preserving on the merits. The blue-collar workers of Lordstown may well be in a better position than they were four years ago. But the electorate’s diffidence in the face of these measures is bracing. The notion that there is a populist economic formula to reversing the rightward drift of the working class has been tried, and, as clearly as these things can be proved by real-world experimentation, it has failed. It turns out there’s more to popularity than populism.