Reviewed: A Comeback Through an NBA Racism Scandal "Chopped"

One upshot of the current glut of streaming platforms is a flood of programming to fill them: something for every attention span, something to plug every potential gap of viewer inactivity that might render a certain streaming service irrelevant while some other service pulls ahead. And so stories get told and retold. The romantic comedies begin to feel the same. The dating reality shows rely (often successfully, it must be said) on the same dramatic tricks. Another consequence of this, for better or worse, is that the stories being told are pulling from more immediate memory. Yes, of course, there are still the docuseries about the true crime of the nineteen-seventies, or the financial crimes of the nineteen-eighties. But there’s also a wave of salacious retellings such as “White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch” or a scripted drama about the Theranos scammer Elizabeth Holmes, Hulu’s 2022 series “The Dropout.” I am certainly not entirely against the retreading of recent events. When done well (like the aforementioned “The Dropout,” which was buoyed by an award-winning Amanda Seyfried performance), they can serve as insightful digests of not-far-off news stories or, at least, as pleasureful reawakenings of moments that you lived through but barely remember.