Opinion | The New Pop Culture Optimism

This shift helps explain the HBO drama “Mrs. Fletcher,” which concluded its first season earlier this month. Its depiction of an inclusivity-driven college campus through the eyes of Brendan (Jackson White), who stands in stark contrast to the rest of his peers, gives the impression that the power imbalance has tipped significantly in favor of the more open-minded.

In the third episode, Brendan makes an awkward joke about planning to surf during a tsunami during a lunchtime chat about climate change with a few of the school’s football players. Instead of laughing along, they look at him weirdly, and one of them quickly restarts the discussion, as if Brendan hadn’t said anything at all.

In the penultimate episode, he has sex for the first time with Chloe (Jasmine Cephas-Jones), a girl he’s been flirting with since he got to school. In the middle of the act, Brendan begins to choke her, and she breaks off the encounter by punching him. He insists she was “into it,” but she shoots him down quickly. “No I wasn’t,” she says. “You didn’t even notice I was there.” She refuses to see him again, and her friends prevent him from trying to contact her.

The elimination of prejudice, at least in these movies and shows, isn’t limited to young characters. On “Schitt’s Creek,” which begins its final season in January, the absence of anxiety over a character’s sexuality feels like a reprieve. For the show’s co-creator, Dan Levy, who stars as the pansexual character David Rose, this was a deliberate decision. “I wanted to show a projection of our own world that was kinder,” he told Entertainment Weekly, “show how much people can grow and the capacity with which people can love when they are not fearing for their lives.”

There are occasional drawbacks to indulging in this fantasy. As Alison Wilmore wrote in Buzzfeed last spring, the premise of “Booksmart” ignores the role class plays in the life of high schoolers. If Molly and Amy’s peers still managed to get into schools like Stanford while being hard partyers and underachievers, it seems likely the reason stems from nepotism, wealth or even, perhaps, bribery.

But it’s easy to understand why more creators are drawn to this kind of projection, now. In an episode of the educational series “Master Class,” the showrunner Shonda Rhimes explains that she considered the political climate while creating “Scandal”; the reason she felt comfortable depicting Washington as full of “monsters” and “metaphorical monsters,” she said, was because “we were in the midst of the glow of ‘Yes We Can,’ Obama White House.”

On the flip side, she continued, the optimism at the heart of “The West Wing” — the successful bipartisan compromises, for one — flourished during an era when the atmosphere was much darker and pessimistic.

In any given political moment, viewers will turn to Hollywood for an escape, and right now, it seems, is when many of us want that diversion to err on the side of hopefulness. For the most part, this is a good thing. As the saying goes, you can’t be what you can’t see.

Aisha Harris (@craftingmystyle) is a staff editor and writer in the Opinion section, where she covers culture and society.

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