Pop Culture Diary: This Week's Reviews, Reads and Roundups: 'Eno,' 'The Prisoner,' 'Little House on the Prairie,' More

What I've Been Into:

"Eno." After a theatrical run in 2024, this documentary about musician, producer, artist, thinker Brian Eno is now streaming on the Criterion Channel in the same "generative" format used in theaters. A computer program is used to randomly create a "new" film each time it's screened/streamed, drawing from 30 hours of interviews and 500 hours of film footage.

The sequence I viewed held together quite well as a documentary, charting — although not necessarily in chronological order — key chapters in Eno's life. This included his 1970s work with Roxy Music, his production collaborations with David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2; his own music and art projects; his love of the English countryside and his concerns about climate change, and his career as a public speaker, in which he shares his thoughts regarding the his broad range of interests.

Not only did the viewing provide me a look at Eno, what's he done and what he's like, it, in itself, functioned as a work of art, challenging my assumptions and opening me up to new perspectives and possibilities.

An example of this was a scene of Eno musing about his daily routine. Like many of us, he tended the start the morning with breakfast, the news and his email correspondence. But he came to the realization that all of these activities constituted "input." He was sucking up information and getting caught up in it, rather than channeling his energy into "output" — creating or thinking about something new rather than consuming. It was a window into how any of us can examine our routines and break out of them in order to do, or become, something new.

I'm looking forward to seeing "Eno" again, for the first time.

Reads:

Via AV Club: The Prisoner didn't just predict the next 60 years of TV—it predicted the next 60 years, period.

The surreal new reality of Pluribus, the trapped survivors of Lost, and even the existential dread of Twin Peaks owe a debt to the show’s general refusal to explain nearly anything. But the canonization of The Prisoner gave the show a reputation built more on what it inspired than what it actually is.

And what The Prisoner is—as made apparent by the remastered version of the series that’s now streaming on Criterion Channel—is immediately fun and thematically ahead of its time. It’s not just a show that taught future TV creators it was okay to be weird; it’s a show that speaks to the issues of 2026 even more than it did to those of 1967: the way we trade personal information like currency, or the pervading sense that we’re all pawns in an unwinnable game. The Village’s web of cameras, listening devices, and informants was once mere metaphor for the ways governments and other institutions surveilled, trailed, and harassed marginalized communities, revolutionaries, and anyone else the powers that be deemed “subversive.” Today, they’ve been literalized, commodified, and normalized by Palantir, Ring, and Citizen—it’s a wonder none of these torment nexus peddlers has adopted the villager’s ominous parting gesture, “Be seeing you,” as an advertising tagline. It’s long been said that you need to watch The Prisoner to really “get” shows like Lost, From, and Twin Peaks. It might be truer to say that you need to watch The Prisoner to understand life in the 2020s.

Via the BBC: The 1970s "Little House on the Prairie" TV series wasn't as joyful and wholesome as we tend to remember.

By the show's final seasons, however, its depiction of hard-hitting issues began to veer into actual horror-style storylines. One especially grim two-parter from the seventh series saw a 15-year-old girl being kidnapped by a masked man, and then, it is implied, sexually assaulted, resulting in her becoming pregnant. The episode, called Sylvia, shows her father punish her and she is shamed by other Walnut Grove residents; then her rapist returns and she dies in an accident trying to escape him. Dr Elizabeth Erwin, co-creator and editor of Horror Homeroom – a website which analyses works of horror through critical theory – recently wrote an article about this particular episode in which she argued that "[its] premise is something straight out of a horror movie" and that it "meshes together elements from a variety of horror sub-genres, most notably Giallo – a highly stylised Italian horror subgenre – and slasher".