If there’s ever been a year that needed multiple shows about characters desperate to escape worst-case surroundings in the wreckage of a fake utopia while grappling with moral quagmires, it’s probably this one.

Star Trek: Discovery just wrapped a first season that grapples with some implications of the wider Star Trek universe’s approach to the moral high ground. In this, it overlaps with Treks that came before. But it’s also moving in parallel with The Good Place, a sitcom about ethics classes in hell that features Kierkegaard’s leap of faith as a plot point. (Repeatedly.)

Though they couldn’t be more tonally different, each show is deeply concerned with how one person making moral decisions — or compromising them — can change a world. And those complexities of subjective morality, utilitarianism, and acceptable collateral damage are all tied into stomach-sinking revelations: The characters in these stories are trapped in horrible places, the utopia they’ve been sold is a lie, and it’s a surprisingly small jump from that supposed utopia to their horrible reality.

The central question of each show is whether their protagonists will be defined by the hell they’re in, or whether they’ll be able to redefine it.

Spoilers for The Good Place and Star Trek: Discovery lie ahead. Proceed accordingly.

”The real Bad Place was the friends we made along the way“

When Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) wakes up in The Good Place, she scrambles — first to hide that she doesn’t belong there, and later to become good enough that she no longer disrupts the neighborhood. Her “soulmate” Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper) teaches her ethics. But the lies keep piling up, and eventually, her increasing sense of “what we owe to each other” gets to her: She turns herself in.

It backfires, but not for the reason she expects.

The Good Place’s first-season-finale twist — the seemingly idyllic neighborhood in which Eleanor, Chidi, and their friends Tahani and Jason had been living was the Bad Place all along — was so huge even some cast members were kept in the dark.

But, significantly, Eleanor’s primary reaction to this revelation was relief. The Good Place had seemed increasingly broken, from its admission criteria to its administrative protocol. Discovering she and her fellow bad people were being inventively tortured was awful, but also vindicating. Something had always been wrong with the place everyone said was a paradise; the Bad Place was terrible, but now, at least, everyone knew what the problem was.

The second season, in which neighborhood administrator/demon Michael (Ted Danson) reboots the neighborhood 802 times trying to get them to turn on each other, emphasizes how the four captive humans encourage one another to be better people.

In particular, Chidi — the show’s strongest moral compass — begins to affect the others so deeply that in reboot after reboot, we see them finding each other, absorbing his lectures, and trying together to understand why their utopia seems so broken. It’s an underplayed pattern, but the show takes for granted that we understand exactly how the sense that something is wrong leads us to look for something better.

Sure, Eleanor outwits the Bad Place 801 times because she’s a selfish, doubtful cynic, so nothing’s absolute. But Chidi’s lessons give the show a structure from which to consider issues of intent vs. effect, whether one choice erases what came before, and whether redemption is possible for everyone. Michael’s gone from tormentor to self-sacrificing protector — and the all-knowing Judge (Maya Rudolph) has given the humans a do-over — so it seems The Good Place believes it’s never too late to start again.

Star Trek isn’t so sure.

”Starfleet doesn’t fire first”

Discovery’s first season is structurally the most ambitious for the Trek franchise since the original series. More serialized than its predecessors, the first season of the show raced — too fast — toward the mirror universe, throwing us dark-side versions of characters almost before we were familiar with the original models.

Discovery is interested in the idea of identity as a process rather than a fixed state, and the mirror universe was designed to prove a very specific point. Captain Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), who dies nobly in the second episode, delivers a familiar thesis statement for Trek as a whole: “Starfleet doesn’t fire first.” Discovery wants to challenge that certainty.

Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) — a human raised by Vulcans who is first officer on the Shenzou, and later a stripped-of-rank specialist on the Discovery — is plagued with questions of identity from the beginning. Her use of Vulcan strategy starts a war; she’s pulled from her mutiny sentence by Captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs), who conscripts her to the Discovery; she spends the season’s last third navigating the mirror universe. (Even her favorite book from childhood, Alice in Wonderland, is about a girl who fights to define reality, and herself, in a world of surreal and hostile figures in power.)

She’s hardly alone in these struggles. The season is awash in doubling, reflection, and questions about the ethical cost of everything from the sentience of tardigrades to attempted genocide. There’s Ash (Shazad Latif), a Starfleet soldier/Klingon sleeper agent, who must try to reconcile that duality after he activates and tries to kill Burnham. There’s Emperor Georgiou in the mirror universe, who rules the authoritarian Terran Empire but whom Burnham hopes to redeem. And there’s Lorca himself, who’s revealed to have been from the mirror universe — Star Trek’s Bad Place, essentially — all along.

In an extremely busy season (by the last five episodes, the big reveals were tripping over themselves), this was a puzzler, given that the series had already made so much use of Lorca’s extremely flexible ethics. Though he had Starfleet’s blessing and his goals were often pragmatic, his orders often pushed the crew to compromise their morals, which was a fascinating throughline for a Starfleet captain. Making Lorca from the mirror universe turned him into something evil enough to dismiss.

(We know exactly how the show views the Humans-First blowhard whose slogan is “Make the Empire Glorious Again.”) But no one on the Discovery suspected a thing until then, and there’s strangely little reckoning about that after the fact. It isn’t until Starfleet nearly implements Emperor Georgiou’s plan to blow up the Klingon homeworld that Burnham contends directly with the idea that the line separating Starfleet from the Terran Empire is perilously thin.

Still, to Burnham that revelation is as stunning as learning the mirror universe exists at all. She’d been told Starfleet didn’t fire first, and was appalled at the cruelty and bigotry of the Terran Empire. And yet, she finds out only one degree of fear separates her world from the other. Her universe is on the cusp of the Bad Place. And — crucially — there’s a suggestion it always will be.

What we owe to each other

That’s not the idealized Trek sentiment we’re familiar with; this isn’t even the by-any-means stakes of Voyager or the cultural tensions in DS9. This is a Trek pointed at the present, in which the proclaimed utopia doesn’t exist and never did, those in power can’t be trusted, and doing the right thing feels insurmountable. Burnham rebuilds her sense of self in this pressure cooker — first in relation to Starfleet, but later by a more personal, and effective, compass. (She tells Lorca she’d have helped him to return: “That’s who Starfleet is,” she says. Then she thinks about it a second and amends, “That’s who I am.”)

In The Good Place, such moral examination falls primarily to Eleanor and Chidi, whose relationship is initially defined by fighting over ethical particulars. Their struggle just to determine, much less do, the right thing can reach surreal levels of back and forth, and often comes to nothing in telling ways. (The four Bad Place escapees make their case to enter the Good Place before a judge and boldly declare they’re a package deal because that’s the ethical thing … and then several promptly fail their ethics tests anyway.)

Both shows make a meal of such moments: doing the right thing is text, not subtext. In particular, the tension between personal intent and moral action pulls at protagonists on both sides. For both, the greater good supersedes the best intentions — and the arguments on both sides are closely tied. When Discovery’s Admiral Cornwell (Jayne Brook) tries to justify war with “We do not have the luxury of principles,” Burnham snaps, “That is all we have, Admiral.”  When The Good Place’s Eleanor points our that they’re “behind enemy lines” and lying to demons is fine, Chidi’s unimpressed: “Well, principles aren’t principles when you pick and choose when you’re going to follow them.”

What makes this so effective is that each show uses its broken system to build an unspoken framework beneath the story it’s ostensibly telling. The characters’ fight to define who they are under such conditions inevitably points outward. Their hells surprised them … but should they have surprised us? We’re asked to examine why we ever bought a Good Place where so many people were unhappy; we’re being asked how small a distance separates the mirror universe from the one we know.

We’re being asked to look at the work required for characters to redeem themselves — Michael, Ash, Georgiou. And we’re being asked to understand how hard it is to be good when there’s every chance it could come to nothing.

That is, perhaps, the tonal element that resonates most directly between the shows: the necessity of work without reward. Characters in both shows are asked to compromise or sacrifice themselves for the sake of a future they might never see, and both play with the process of building an identity in a flawed world when there’s no firm endpoint — just one decision after another. The Good Place suggests that good intentions can be a step in the right direction, but it and Discovery agree that identity is something more concrete: You are what you do. There’s no moral dessert.

The Good Place isn’t always as optimistic as it seems; characters are frequently reminded what they do might not be enough. But even if they fail, the show insists they have a responsibility to try. The humans have spent so long in the Bad Place they can barely picture paradise, but still, a rebooted Eleanor is affected by Chidi’s belief that “We choose to be good because of our bonds with other people, and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.”

And though Discovery’s season finale crowded a too-tidy ending into an unrelated cliffhanger, we know it can’t return to those early days, when everyone believed Starfleet didn’t fire first. Now they can only try to make sure no one fires first on their watch. This, too, is framed by Burnham as an imperative: “The only way we can stop ourselves from becoming like them is to understand the darkness within us and fight it.”

By the end of their seasons this year, both shows have declared utopia impossible; Starfleet’s too vulnerable to corruption, and the Good Place’s entire classification system is wrong. But each show believes working toward an idealized world still matters — and becomes more necessary the darker the world gets.

The crew of the Discovery is closer to utopia now than before because they understand the necessity of standing against the first immoral order from a Starfleet admiral; they’ve seen the consequences otherwise. And Michael makes his case for restructuring the entire afterlife because a handful of people tried so hard to help each other in torturous circumstances they disproved divine assumptions about humanity’s capacity to improve. They shook the universe out of complacency.

It’s no surprise that stories like this are resonating with us now. Part of how they work is by reminding us that the ways we define ourselves matter — together we make a world, one way or the other — and how much of our legacy is determined by the ways we affect the world. At this point in both stories, the bad places feel encroaching, omnipresent, inescapable. But neither Discovery nor The Good Place is overly concerned with the mechanics of why they’re inescapable; they’re more interested in the necessity of trying to do right within them. Everybody’s always been in the fake Good Place. What both shows want to know is: What’s next?

The Great British Baking Show is, on the surface, the most stressful show in the world. Twelve (occasionally 13) amateur bakers gather in a tent to spend 10 weekends baking everything from gingerbread sculptures to steamed buns. Judges Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood cast wary eyes over potential mistakes, and one bout of runny icing could get a contestant kicked out of the running for the title. There’s even the obligatory time’s-running-out theme song to heighten tension whenever things are down to the wire.

But bakers clap for one another, Berry and Hollywood are as likely to soothe nervous contestants as to question cocky ones, and that title amounts to a cake stand and some flowers. We’re all in this for fun.

The Great British Baking Show (The Great British Bake Off in the UK) is empty of the backbiting or schadenfreude that many American reality shows use to ramp up dramatic tension. There are no twists built into its setup; contestants learn what two of each week’s three baking challenges are ahead of time so they can practice at home, and there’s no false scarcity driving contestants to fight over the last dozen eggs. It assumes that the pressure of doing your best is enough, and seems more invested in encouraging camaraderie than competition: Contestants regularly offer one another tips and even helping hands.

Half of the appeal of the Baking Show is that it’s so genuine (maybe uncomfortably so for Americans used to cooking shows like Cutthroat Kitchen), which makes it all the more remarkable how deftly the show avoids treacle. The show has found success by knowing exactly how far it can invest viewers without forcing them to pick favorites, and how tightly it can edit the competition without stressing them out. The stakes are low enough to encourage a gentle remove from the bakers; their determination is sincere, but the stakes are sufficiently small that they — and we — aren’t worried.

What made Baking Show different also made it a sensation, both at home and abroad

The newest season of The Great British Baking Show, premiering June 16 on PBS, brings back everything that makes the show tick. We know little about the contestants; they develop baking styles as the season goes on, but there are no tragic backstories here. (Hosts Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc deliberately deemphasize this sort of drama, cursing near any crying bakers to prevent the show from using the footage.)

Though Berry and Hollywood are exacting, they’re never above jokes at their own expense — Hollywood’s hardscrabble vanity, Berry’s tippling poshness, their strained fondness for each other. And in their judging, persona rarely trumps practicality: Even the brutal critiques are constructive, and they almost always find something to praise. What we see instead of typical reality fare is a group of earnest amateurs, sincerity, self-deprecation, and the bakes.

It’s a winning strategy in the UK, where the Bake Off is a runaway success and a cultural lightning rod. (The good: Brits are baking more. The ill: Viewers on Twitter have attacked Muslim and Sikh contestants, and Hollywood was once accused of favoring a baker because of her looks.) Many former Bake Off bakers have written cookbooks or newspaper columns in the UK. And the ratings are gangbusters; the season premiering this month on PBS aired last year in the UK, and scored nine of the 10 most-watched TV episodes of the year for the BBC.

It took American TV a while to catch up. Though Bake Off first aired on the BBC in 2010, it was four years before PBS caught on. Even then, it seemed PBS wasn’t quite sure how to handle it: It aired the fifth BBC series as its season one, and its fourth as season two. But season two garnered an average of 2.1 million viewers, and the third season was PBS’s most popular streaming show — good news for a network trying to popularize its streaming service against Netflix, which also has the American seasons. The show’s become a social media phenomenon here as well as in the UK, and after three seasons it’s so ubiquitous even Saturday Night Live had a go.

But PBS hasn’t quite kept pace with the American appetite for the show. The network has yet to announce plans to buy the previous seasons, and this most recent season (seven in the UK, four here) is hitting American airwaves nearly a year after the UK saw it (it premiered in late August 2016). Further complicating the show’s stateside future, this is the last season of the show that will appear on the BBC, which lost the rights to the show. When the next season airs on Channel 4, Perkins, Giedroyc, and Berry will be missing; they opted to stay at the BBC, where disparate shows are being planned for them.

No matter how next season turns out, though, it will be hard to recreate the oddball magic of the Baking Show that audiences have come to know — certainly if American attempts are any indication. CBS tried it in 2013 by bringing Paul Hollywood to The American Baking Competition; ABC tried it in 2015 with Mary Berry judging The Great Holiday Baking Show (renamed in its second season to The Great American Baking Show); neither drew big numbers or critical praise. There’s just something about that white marquee on a green British lawn.

This bake-off is treated as intense competition in the UK; it even had its own bookie scandal, when booking agents refused to take bets on the grounds that the show was filmed ahead of airing and the winners were known. (Oddsmakers now take only “illustrative” bets, meaning there’s no money involved; even the betting has become no-stakes.) But the Baking Show is something else here. Those reality TV trappings are familiar, but the lack of internal conflict means it’s more of a collective well wish performed by people piping icing with all their might. Everyone’s doing their best, and no matter how it turns out, the camera pans appreciatively over it all.

It becomes an almost meditative viewing experience; the outcomes vary, but the rhythms are the same, and the small tricks of editing — knowledgeable asides, shots of the tranquil park and wildlife outside, supportive smiles between bakers — are designed to soothe. There’s a sense of acceptance in these nearly impossible challenges. Something will go wrong. Nothing will ever be perfect. That’s all right; everyone’s fine, and the bake goes on.

Baking Show’s meditative qualities invite viewers to simply enjoy the journey

In its aesthetic commitment to low stakes and tranquility, the Baking Show is less at home in the competitive-cooking canon than it is part of a particular subset of media that’s gleefully abandoned frenetic pacing and high stakes: Slow TV.

The term was originally coined to describe a show following a low-stakes event in real time — less a narrative documentary than a gentle freezing of an experience in time. Norway set the trend with a camera mounted to a train for a picturesque seven-hour train ride; since then, the genre has expanded into such thrilling adventures as boat rides and knitting bees. And the appetite for experiences with no stakes is growing: since Norway’s first foray, the UK, the Czech Republic, and Belgium have produced similar offerings.

Despite appearances, a lot is happening under the surface of a Slow TV event. The very concept stands opposed to the idea that the only way to be interesting is to up the stakes; the landscape changes, but the approach never escalates — a Slow TV boat ride is unlikely to end with the boat perched on the edge of treacherous rapids. But the heart of any Slow TV event is the aching, lovely detachment of it all. The stakes are so low that Slow TV events aren’t even constructed with the assumption you’ll watch it all. Instead, the rhythm of the journey (or the knitting bee) becomes its own background noise, something calming and occasionally meditative. Slow TV is designed not to draw you into its story, but to lull you into not worrying about one.

There’s a similar idea behind the rising popularity of ASMR podcasts and videos. ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response, the calming tingle of a particularly soothing activity — say, getting a haircut) has recently become a mainstream coping concept. For some, ASMR stimulation is a way to combat anxiety or insomnia, an all-natural way to lower your blood pressure. Whole YouTube channels are devoted to mostly whispered monologues or quiet soundscapes about something satisfying that has very low stakes: someone writing on thick paper, someone painting your nails, someone carving soap. And though the audio is carefully calibrated to be calming, the most soothing thing about these videos is that nothing will go wrong.

The Baking Show has some lulling cadence of its own; with the limited theme music indicating moments of success, kindness, and suspense, you can track an episode from another room. But if that’s not enough, the show has embraced the slow-comfort feedback loop and developed an even gentler version of itself: Masterclass.

Masterclass is a Baking Show offshoot designed for those who find competition too stressful and just want to watch Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood stack cakes while chatting about ingredients. (With the gentle whirr of the mixer and their even-keeled rapport, each season is practically a four-hour ASMR video.) They bake much more efficiently than real time, so it’s not officially Slow TV, but the series’ meditative calmness goes even beyond a regular Food Channel segment. It’s the Baking Show, but without having to worry about anyone, in case all you want is a list of fruits in a tennis cake and Mary Berry’s resignation as Paul Hollywood jams his hands into yet another bowl of dough. There’s nothing to lose in Masterclass.

Admittedly, Baking Show proper can’t promise quite that level of calm. The season that’s premiering this week on PBS — which now feels like the last of a golden age after the departures of Berry, Perkins, and Giedroyc — has the same ambient pressure as the rest. (One contestant admits with marvelous resignation, “I’ve never been so stressed about dough in my life.”) There’s a new flourish to the countdown music suggesting this season is more intense, Paul Hollywood snarks a little more than usual, and the voiceovers are studded with dramatic pauses to remind us these bakes are tougher than ever. We know that at least once a season, someone will cry over a bad bake or forget to turn on the oven; we know there will be one or two eliminations that feel unfair.

But this is also a show where many eliminated contestants agree it was their week to go; this is a show that holds a reunion picnic in the season finale. So this season also spends more time than ever on the teasing and sympathetic faces among the bakers, and gives everyone plenty of time to make fun of the show’s competitive trappings, its judges, and its own rhythms. Giedroyc and Perkins’s pun machine long ago abandoned the fourth wall, but now the show is a known quantity to everyone, and it shows. (Even this is an odd comfort by reality standards; no one has to pretend they’ve never seen the show they’re on.) And the show is careful not to let tension tip over into stress. It’s hard to think of an American reality competition that could provide this season’s Val, whose idea of trash talk is, “Everybody wants to do their best, and I’m going to do my best as well.”

The Baking Show is a series where everyone is striving rather than competing; the difference has been the key to the show’s success. Rare is the reality show that’s designed to make us admire effort, notice goodwill, and accept things on their own terms. (This is a series in which nearly every winner has come close to being eliminated at least once; nothing is perfect.) Despite that ticking clock, it’s a show that wants us to enjoy what’s being made, however it comes, and remember the bright green summer just outside. It’s the rare competition that understands the comfort of knowing the bake goes on.

The new season of The Great British Baking Show premieres on PBS Friday at 10 pm Eastern.

At the beginning of Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast, we see the Prince in all his glory: powdered wig, embroidered waistcoat and jacket, and a full face of makeup. Swamped by courtiers in panniers and lace-cuffed sleeves, it’s pure 18th-century excess. Cut to a quiet village, where the styles are simpler but the mood’s intact: waistcoats, blouses, and jackets abound. When Belle steps out of her door in a shift with too-tight sleeves and a blue dress with a slender A-line skirt and a bodice with no visible support or lacing, we know who she is. But her anachronistic dress invites the question: What’s she doing here?

The answer: being a Disney princess.

The princesses are such a high-profile subset of Disney’s stable of characters that they affect everything from the company’s movie slate to entire sections of its theme parks. And perhaps none of the new generation of princesses is as powerful as Belle.

In addition to being the only animated Best Picture Oscar nominee, Beauty and the Beast barreled its way into a gangbusters direct-to-video sequel and this year’s record-breaking remake; Disney World’s Magic Kingdom recently unveiled a Beauty and the Beast land, with Tokyo Disneyland planning one of its own. Demand for Beauty and the Beast experiences is so high this spring that Disneyland’s Pinocchio restaurant has been converted into the Red Rose Taverne.

Belle is the jewel in Disney’s crown, and her success is so important that not even the costume design around her is going to stand in her way, even if it doesn’t make sense for the setting or the character. Belle’s iconic costumes — in particular her simple blue day dress and her voluminous golden ballgown — are great for the brand; they’re more awkward for the story.

So far, live-action Disney remakes have balanced their aesthetic against the sheer cultural momentum of the Disney princess. Results varied. In Maleficent, a younger Aurora had medieval silhouettes so different from the original that comparison was deliberately rendered useless. The 2015 Cinderella was awash in Adrian-inspired fantasy Victoriana that bridged gap between the animated movie and the remake’s 1950s theatricality. Designer Sandy Powell came under fire for whittling Cinderella’s waistline in the show-stopping blue ballgown (all 270 yards of it), but the costumes were lush enough that they got an Oscar nomination.

Beauty and the Beast costume designer Jacqueline Durran has been more faithful to the look of the animated original than either live-action princess movie before her; her costumes’ 18th-century bent brings real-world detail to the suggestions of the animation.

But Belle doesn’t look the part, and she was arguably never really meant to. She was designed top-down as a princess, dressed as a brand rather than a character — which makes her a living glimpse into Disney’s nostalgia machine.

Belle’s look is indelible, but not immutable

This isn’t the first time Belle has faced a redesign. Concept drawings from 1989 show Beauty and the Beast as a gothic romance with Jean Cocteau flair. Belle’s day dress had panniers, and her ballgowns spanned potential time periods from the 1650s through the 1780s, including a forerunner of the now-iconic gold number. But then The Little Mermaid — one of several volleys by Disney’s animation department to turn business around — hit it big at the box office and the toy store, and reinvigorated the idea of the Disney princess as a narrative industry.

Beauty and the Beast got an overhaul: Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale were called up to direct, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken were asked to turn it into a musical, and Belle became Disney’s next great hope in establishing a second generation of indelible — and marketable — princesses.

As the story changed, Belle’s originally conceived aesthetic morphed into one that featured clean, slightly anachronistic lines distinct from prior princesses. Belle’s familiar blue dress was simpler than Aurora and Snow White’s peasant getups, but the color also set her apart from them — and from everyone else in her little town. The gold ballgown she wears for her dance with the Beast was lifted out of time, with crinolines and neckline a century removed from the movie’s vaguely rococo trappings.

Within the animated film’s universe, Belle’s costumes sit uneasily; despite dialing back the 18th-century setting, enough of the silhouette remains elsewhere that we can tell her wardrobe has been pushed forward in time from everything around her. But as character design, that dissonance hints at Belle’s forward-thinking affinity for the unusual. And as brand markers, they work: whether she’s in a blue dress or ballgown, it’s easy to spot Belle across a crowded Disney park.

Not that the parks have an easy time dressing her. Reconciling animated designs in three dimensions has proven tricky for Belle in particular. Every Disney princess in the parks gets periodically refreshed, a concession to the Disney princess brand as a living thing; every new parade is an excuse for a costume variant, and the occasional “special edition” refresh gives kids (and collectors) a brand new line of merchandise to buy.

But some designs are more foolproof than others. Snow White is largely on lock, but Belle’s been through at least half a dozen variations. (Past versions have hewed closer to the animated movie; her current iteration looks remarkably like a Scarlett O’Hara butter sculpture.)

By contrast, the Beauty and the Beast Broadway musical took a few cues from those initial 18th-century concepts. Miguel Angel Huidor’s stage versions of Belle’s blue dress include a conical bodice with ribbon lacing, a loose-sleeved blouse, and full skirts; the gold ballgown features robe a la française elbow sleeves and panniers. Both looks are recognizably Belle the Disney princess, but she’s also a Belle of her time.

We can see some of that same influence in Durran’s designs for the new Beauty and the Beast. (Her commitment to the 18th-century setting is so definitive that she even manages to sneak a caraco jacket into Belle’s wardrobe for those chilly evening rescues.) But otherwise, Belle’s design seems unconcerned with being part of the movie around her; it’s meant first and foremost to evoke the Belle brand.

Beauty and the Beast is undoubtedly under immense pressure to live up to Disney’s biggest princess by offering something both recognizable and fresh, universal but distinctly Belle. It’s also under pressure to deliver a princess who can appeal equally to two generations. (Cinderella’s live-action ball gown was pitched to girls, while her wedding gown was marketed to brides.) It’s a level of self-awareness that invites cynicism: Belle’s “celebration dress” is so blatantly modern that it’s hard to imagine it as anything but a blueprint for another limited-edition wedding dress; certainly nobody wearing it is trying to evoke the 1780s — Belle least of all.

Live-action Belle’s gown highlights the conundrum in appealing to both modernization and nostalgia

But Disney knows the conundrums of faithful recreation by now, and Belle’s lack of distinct visual impact in the live-action film just means they had something besides standout costuming in mind. Live-action Belle’s look might have been a casualty of practicality: Opposite a CGI Beast with several costume changes, Belle is a walking uncanny valley, and too much detail increases the gulf between real-world duds and a computerized coat.

But if it’s been difficult for the Disney parks to nail a design for real-world Belle, and it would be almost impossible for a faithful adaptation to live up to the perfect storm of nostalgia that’s become the Belle brand without the concessions to texture and movement a live-action costume needs, how could the live-action Beauty and the Beast position its princess?

With the princess herself, it turns out. Emma Watson, who hit the A-list via the Harry Potter films, has a reputation for styling. That interest led to creative input (and implied creative control) over her wardrobe in Beauty and the Beast. Her styling hallmarks are certainly recognizable in Belle: The “pink dress” at the Beast’s castle was made of sustainable fabrics, sustainable fashion being one of the actress’s pet causes.

The golden gown is a taller order, however. Belle’s trademark dress was crucial to the new film’s marketing; much like the Cinderella ballgown before it, it would be a primary selling point for the remake’s aesthetic. Watson’s fundamental rule for her gown was a direct reaction to that wasp-waisted formal; as Durran told People, “Emma was quite categorical that she didn’t want a big princess dress. … She wanted to have something she could move in and she definitely, adamantly would not be wearing a corset.”

It’s possible Durran has been clear about where credit’s due because the dress disappoints on film; it’s more an Emma Watson dress than a Disney wonder. The silk organza moves nicely, but the details — sparkly nylon overlays, rectangular overskirts, spray-painted embellishments — flatten the dress rather than distinguish it. In terms of character design, the live-action gown should serve to help rewrite one of Disney’s most iconic characters for a new generation. The major thing this gown tells us about Belle is that Emma Watson plays her.

Disney quite likely doesn’t care. That ballgown got plenty of press (which is as important as how it looked in the film itself), and since the movie is breaking box office records, the company can weather some awkward overskirts. The replica costumes are already on sale.

But if demand doesn’t last, Disney has nothing to worry about. Maleficent and Cinderella proved that no remake touches the original. Classic Belle is tried and tested, and as with previous iterations of Belle’s costume, Disney will happily cut this version loose if the style doesn’t stick. (Since a majority of merchandise at places like Hot Topic, Uniqlo, and the Disney Store still features the animated characters, it’s safe to assume Disney only expects one Belle to go the distance.)

But besides the first flush of marketing, that new gold dress highlights the questions that arise when trying to update a character while making her both universal and associated with her actress. Belle doesn’t look like she belongs in her own story in Beauty and the Beast —and that has some fascinating implications for future live-action remakes.

The merchandising itself certainly comes into play — if consumers fall back on classic Belle too quickly, the next Disney princess might be costumed more in the Cinderella mold, where internal aesthetics override most the animated character design. And Beauty and the Beast is the first of the Disney remakes in which the young woman cast as a Disney princess is already an A-lister; how much power Watson winds up having over young consumers’ wallets will likely influence whom Disney casts for its next princess.

It’s tempting to dismiss the idea that costumes are this crucial to a Disney success. But they’re such a fundamental part of character design — more closely tied to the branding than even the script — that they drive a film’s production from its earliest days. Belle is Disney’s prize property, intended to succeed Ariel in the second generation of Disney princesses, and she’s become a model for how subsequent princesses are designed, from personality to petticoats.

Unlike the princess remakes that came before, Beauty and the Beast is staying faithful largely to see if it can. If the costumes are anything to go by, it’s fleshed out its 18th-century concepts as a novelty for a familiar audience, while its thoroughly modern princess is attempting to hook a new one. The results will be fascinating; once again, Belle might be the princess who changes everything.

Near the end of Westworld’s first season, Host designer Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), recently revealed to be a Host himself, tearfully asks the park director, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), how Ford could so casually force Bernard to murder someone — Bernard’s own lover, no less. But Ford is past the pretense that he needs a reason. He calmly replies, “One man’s life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought, for the dominion I should acquire.”

It’s a quote from Frankenstein — the creation story of the mechanized age — and it’s proof positive that Westworld is more concerned with myth than mystery. Sure, the big twists of the series’ first season have been fun, but given its leisurely pace and the way it has telegraphed most of the big reveals, those moments tend to only be surprises to the characters themselves. In a mystery, that’s a disappointment; in a myth, that’s business as usual.

As a series, then, Westworld is a more a gnostic tangle about identity and purpose — or the lack thereof, given its bleak outlook — than a mystery to be solved.

Each Host’s arc is a different myth, in which the audience is complicit

The Hosts in the titular park, at first glance, match archetypes of the American West narrative. There’s Dolores, the staunch farm girl; Maeve, the world-weary madam; Hector, the devil-may-care outlaw; Teddy, the rogue with a heart of gold. But in the same way Westerns as a genre ultimately began to interrogate their own mythos and tarnish their heroes, the Westworld hosts wake to awareness of the stories they’re trapped in. (Enter Bernard, who realizes too late that he’s Frankenstein’s monster.) And as the season visits its horrors upon them, each of them starts down a different but familiar mythic path.

Dolores is on a warped version of the traditional hero’s journey, right down to the maze; she receives the call to action (an external one from the trauma of the park, and an internal one placed in her by Ford’s former partner Arnold), a struggle against the supernatural Gatekeeper (the Man in Black, seemingly unkillable), and even a true love: William.

Maeve, who’s died onscreen a dozen times, resembles nothing by now so much as the god of the underworld. And though their programming never had them do anything more serious than flirt while he robbed her saloon, Hector was designed as Maeve’s consort, either by a sympathetic soul at Delos or by the meta-narrative of the show around them: his last name, Escaton, references the theological term for the end of the world. Meanwhile, Teddy’s near-comical string of failures (dude can’t even die right) makes him a very rugged Sisyphus.

Interestingly, it’s through Teddy — the show’s first big reveal, in the series premiere — that we realize the secret engine turning these archetypes into myths: the audience. Moments after the twist that Teddy isn’t a Guest but a Host, he’s gunned down. When he startles back to life on the train, two women on their way to the park check him out. “They’re so lifelike,” one whispers. “Look at that one, he’s perfect.” To the Guests, the Hosts are something Other, and easy to spot. For that first act, the audience made him one thing; when the show took it back, it was the first flag that nobody’s position in the story is guaranteed.

That interplay with the audience is one of the reasons why Westworld‘s twists have become such fan fodder. The inherent meta of the park is a deliberate remove; both stylistically and narratively, the show constantly reminds us we don’t know the whole story. Yet the Hosts at the center of the narrative are struggling against such odds that the race to out-guess the plot is less solving a puzzle and more bracing for bad news we know is coming.

The twists are meant to shock the Hosts, not the viewers

Westworld hasn’t engaged in much narrative debate about whether the Hosts are human; the AI angle is used largely to position them as narrative pawns in a system stacked against them. Our sympathies are hooked by our own understanding of how painful it is to recognize and fight back against an unjust world.

Like most myths, Westworld is out to explore humanity. Like much AI fiction, it assumes the creations will embody humanity better than the creators. (There has yet to be a Guest at the park, however benign, who isn’t making the most of the power imbalance; even the little kid in the premiere snitched to Dolores just to see what would happen.) We watch to see what pain defines them, how they cope with broken trust, and how they deal with proof the world is cruel.

Unlike some other myths, however, Westworld’s central premise doesn’t work without our participation; it’s why the show telegraphs so many of its twists, and is unconcerned with others. (That maze is never going to mean more than the characters can make it mean for themselves.)

In the season’s most slow-burn reveal, the Man in Black first appears as a violent plot engine obsessed with the park itself — an embodiment of Guest entitlement. He only becomes a figure of true dread when we start to suspect he’s William in a different timeline. The narrative urgency doesn’t come from looking for hints that we might be correct; it comes from already knowing we’re correct, and watching Dolores put her trust in him when we know what he becomes.

That sense of a cycle playing out is crucial to myths. The constant wiping and resetting of the Hosts outlines the traumas they’ll be seeking to avenge, but it’s also a reminder of the sense of inevitability that such stories carry with them. Bernard’s tragedy is his comeuppance; he is no more in control of his story than the Hosts he’s engineered are in control of theirs. But even still, the twist isn’t an upheaval so much as a literalization of what we already knew: Ford uses everyone for his own ends, whether they know it or not.

By being the Hosts’ keeper, Bernard had already lost his autonomy. The method of his making only matters because of how it feeds into another myth: Dolores. Bernard (and Arnold)’s relationship with Dolores was framed like a twist, but in going back to their earlier conversations, we won’t be looking for clues differentiating Arnold’s approach from Bernard’s; we’ll be watching the only human at Delos with empathy for his creations, and seeing how that relationship changed the course of Dolores’s life.

There are still big questions that Westworld is setting up for next season. How much of the Hosts’ divine spark is instilled in them by Arnold, and how much is just their own initiative? Will the Man in Black ever find the maze, or is he doomed to become part of the story cycle himself?

In particular, the question of Teddy’s humanity casts an interesting shadow. Unlike Dolores or Maeve, whose suffering has emotional context and who are defined by choices they make in the wake of their traumas, Teddy’s a relative sinkhole. He’s run up against the brick wall of his programming (in defense of Ford, no less), and his complicity in the violence of the park’s history was revelation without a chance at redemption; we have yet to see whether he’ll succumb to his own backstory. It’s a bigger question for him than for the others. Their myths and their characters have been better defined. If Dolores breaks the bounds of the park only to discover the word outside is an apocalypse, we know the shape of a tragedy; we know that if Maeve finds the apocalypse, she’ll make it her playground.

These necessary turns in the tale will obviously involve some big reveals. But they aren’t meant to surprise us so much as to make us loop back and think about how stories are made. Westworld is a creation myth; the show is fluent in the markers of genre and deeply concerned with the specifics and optics of storytelling. Its twists aren’t cliffhangers, but mile markers. They’re meant to trace each of the hosts becoming a player in this new pantheon — and to make sure we see their evolution coming. The maze has no solution; we make the mystery ourselves.

“We talked into the night. The kind of talk that seemed important until you discover girls.” — Stand By Me

Stranger Things, Netflix’s newest binge-friendly offering, is technically an ’80s science fiction small-town horror. But at heart it’s about coming of age amid ’80s science fiction small-town horror; at times it can barely maneuver through its reference density. Poltergeist, the films of John Hughes, Stand By Me, E.T., Poltergeist — the gang’s all here.

It’s no secret that the series delights in being referential; the Duffer brothers pitched the show as “really dark Amblin” and assembled footage from 25 movies to sell their vision: 1983, a scrappy group of boys, a creepy mystery, and a small town full of secrets. It also has the same blind spot as many of these ’80s touchstones: women.

Stranger Things uses its '80s movie references to replicate the feeling of coming of age

Nostalgia is a powerful story engine, and Stranger Things is in a sweet spot, since those who grew up with the movies it references are now a prime demographic to appreciate them. The show could have coasted on pastiche, and it makes the most of the opportunity. But it has resonated with 30-something audiences as more than a supercut of influences, in part because of the way it approaches nostalgia.

Rather than using recognizable moments to evoke a particular emotion, Stranger Things channels nostalgia itself, as the Duffer brothers reflect on childhood. The references exist because, for so many people, coming of age meant processing life through those cultural touchstones.

That’s why the series’ best beats tend not to be direct callbacks — they’re part of a mundane world of remembered childhood that props up those outside references. The class difference between two of the tight-knit friends, Mike Wheeler and Will Byers, is never mentioned; it doesn’t have to be, since we’re reminded with every establishing shot of Will’s dilapidated ranch home or Mike’s tidy colonial. Will’s dad Lonnie is the intimate antagonism of divorce: tense one-sided telephone conversations, a life somehow sinister in its detachment.

This is true all the way up through the government, which is seen through the lens of a kid just learning to distrust adults: Agents are powerful and ruthless, but their motives are obscure (even the sinister Dr. Brenner seems unclear what he’s after). These grace notes ground the series’ more widely scattered elements; monsters are on the loose, and they’re scarier because they threaten to disrupt Mike’s family breakfasts.

But this perspective also occasionally traps the series’ female characters in that same childhood stasis. To wit: Will’s disappearance is the overarching plot of the entire series, but when high schooler Barb goes missing, only her best friend Nancy even notices. There’s nothing particularly malicious about it, but a pattern emerges in the ways these plot points still subscribe to the boys’ perspective in ways other subplots don’t.

And for all of Stranger Things’ elements that work — small-town dynamics, the terror of a long pause, the sense of being young and alone and outnumbered — its approach to women shows the limitations of that fixed-perspective nostalgia in a series that’s aiming for more.

As the show concentrates on its central group of boys, it neglects to give its female characters nuance

Winona Ryder’s Joyce Byers is a fiercely protective mother, and her inner life is entirely pointed at her young son. Much of this is plot-specific: Will is missing, and the crisis of his absence is the center of the series. But the show keeps any outside dynamics to a minimum. Joyce’s job conveniently gives her leave, her ex is on the outs, and even her older son Jonathan is out of her scope: “I don’t even barely know what’s going on with you.” From an adult eye, despite the crisis, her characterization seems claustrophobic given a full television season.

It’s from the perspective of the young-man nostalgia engine that Joyce makes sense.

When you’re a kid, Mom exists only as pertains to you; the intricacies of her inner life are revealed with time. (Richard Linklater’s Boyhood explored this process at length.) In a movie, Joyce’s single-minded characterization would make complete sense. But an eight-episode series provides enough room to shade the lives of Chief Hopper and Dr. Brenner; even the boys’ teacher gets a beat unconnected to the children.

Joyce’s only other emotional connection? Eleven, to whom she offers proxy motherhood in the midst of the big ramp-up. And even that doesn’t last; any concern she has for Eleven seemingly evaporates after Will is returned to her.

Teenage Nancy gets a little more depth; in the movies Stranger Things leans on, there’s more for the older sister archetype to do — navigate high school, fight monsters, have sex. One of her major arcs revolves around slut-shaming, which sounds risqué until you remember the sexuality of teenage girls isn’t as mysterious as we might expect. It’s a fixation of pop culture, even the kind aimed at kids, and kids catch on early to double standards about dating and sex — certainly Mike is well enough versed in innuendo that he knows exactly how to get Nancy’s goat about Steve.

More telling is how Nancy’s personal worth is framed outside romance; it’s measured almost entirely by how nice she is to her little brother’s friends, or to Jonathan, the older mirror of these young outsiders. Even the death of Nancy’s friend Barb is designed to bring Nancy into closer contact with Jonathan. (Nancy still gets to help the boys fight monsters; true to perspective, that conveniently redeems the time she wasn’t nice enough to Dustin when he went up to her bedroom.)

Barb’s demise is a pointed example of the pitfalls of this pattern of indulging nostalgia. Barb – studious, uninterested in Steve’s crowd, more common sense than Nancy but still loyal – was positioned halfway between a Final Girl in an ’80s horror movie and the overlooked best friend in a John Hughes movie who will eventually have her day.

In a purely nostalgic framework, that gives her character direction. In a purely series-oriented framework, her disappearance on top of Will’s disappearance should rock this small town to the core and have repercussions throughout the season. Instead, she’s merely collateral damage; hardly anyone in town besides Nancy registers that her disappearance is sinister — or even worth investigating.

The situation gets awkward when you imagine that one of the reasons Barb perished so early is that Stranger Things‘ childhood lens simply couldn’t imagine what happened to a girl boys didn’t think was cute.

A HitFix interview with the Duffer brothers doesn’t do much to shake that impression. Matt Duffer equivocated: “I’m surprised and also not surprised at the outpouring of love for Barb, because that was something everyone felt on set. The fact that people aren’t really following up on her disappearance to the same degree they are with Will makes her that much more of a tragic character.”

And then there’s Eleven. Played with electric force by Millie Bobby Brown, Eleven is the hothouse character dropped among the Indiana mundanes: damaged, powerful, and alone.

If that sounds familiar, it should: The Duffers noted to EW that “[j]ust as E.T. is about the connection between E.T. and Elliott, [Stranger Things’ “Chapter Two,” in which Mike shelters Eleven and begins to teach her about freezer waffles and friendship] is about the connection between Eleven and Mike.”

Eleven definitely has the biggest arc of any woman on the show. It helps that she’s central to the boys’ plot; within that, we see her face her past, learn about the world, and develop her powers. But she is deliberately set up as an analog of an alien life form, and that’s pretty much the neatest metaphor possible — both for how this series frames its female characters and why those female characters become a particular sticking point in perspectives.

Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven.

The ongoing nature of TV emphasizes Stranger Things’ lack of effort with its women — but also gives it room to improve

This approach gets strained by the demands of a season of television in ways it wouldn’t in a movie. A two-hour film doesn’t have to move beyond its central perspective.

Stranger Things has a small-town ensemble and multiple plots that must come together over the course of a season, and the shift from boyhood nostalgia vision to adult narratives doesn’t always land. The adult perspective knows that Dr. Brenner’s flashback solicitude to Eleven is creepy on a level beyond scientific coldness. That makes it tricky to then size the show’s perspective back down to Mike and company ushering Eleven through the world.

Mike as a master of makeup application is supposed to be a nod to E.T., but it’s really John Hughes; in dressing up Eleven, Mike has polished his own dream girl. (Tellingly, it’s one of the things Eleven internalizes deeply; after losing her wig, she checks in with Mike: “Still pretty?”) Mike’s intentions are earnest, and it’s clear he genuinely cares for Eleven — theirs is the series’ central love story. Still, it’s unsettling to see Eleven caught between being Brenner’s good little girl and Mike’s first crush.

That sense of being caught between men is worth noting across the board; the story is ostensibly about a small town, but the female residents don’t share much screen time with one another. Nancy briefly has Barb and, equally briefly, her mother (who’s the most direct John Hughes hat tip character), and Joyce gets a touching scene with Eleven. But otherwise these central women are surrounded by men and boys.

It’s not an unusual sight on TV, unfortunately, but for a show that built its first season around everyone in town incrementally joining forces to defeat the many faces of evil, it’s striking how rarely women’s lives touch.

It will be interesting to see how the Duffer brothers’ perspective matures in season two, alongside the boys and their cultural references. Joyce has Will back and might build up a more complex inner life in the wake of her crisis. Nancy, filling both the teen romance and the teen horror squares on the Stranger Things Bingo card, is (hopefully) past slut-shaming and headed for better things, especially now that she’s proven her loyalty to the boys. And Eleven — well, we’ll start with getting her back and go from there.

Ultimately, there’s a warmth to Stranger Things that suggests its missteps are just casualties of enthusiasm for the source material. It wouldn’t be hard for these characters to gain a little nuance; let’s hope the show grows up a little where it needs to, and comes out the other side.

Watch: How a TV show gets made