Cinema Scope

Exit, Pursued by a Fox

ppended to his year-end Twitter list of his favourite movies of 2019, Barack Obama included a short but well-curated list of “TV shows that I considered as powerful as movies”: a holy trinity comprised of HBO’s , Netflix’s , and the second (and reportedly final) season of the BBC’s —a series which, perhaps coincidentally, featured a sequence in its inaugural episode of the perplexingly named title character (played by the show’s creator, writer, and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge) stealthily masturbating to one of the then-POTUS’ speeches as her partner sleeps. However, if a degree of favourable bias may be detected in Obama’s selection, the endorsement’s impact was negligible given that ’s cultural cachet has grown to dizzying dimensions since the first season aired in 2016. Following the smash success of both and (which Waller-Bridge also created and executive produced), her voice performance as the franchise’s first “woke” droid in (2018), and a high-profile commission to touch up the script of the latest Bond film, Waller-Bridge was featured on the cover of the August 2019 with the proclamation that “The Future is Phoebe.”

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