Please Read the Goddamn Room – Thoughts on the Purge TV Series and the Purpose of Pop Culture

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I do not want to rehash the history of The Purge film series. I don’t really want to talk about the context in which the original was made, or how the sequels managed to expand on the premise leading to this series. I haven’t watched any of these films, nor do I have any intention of seeing them. I desire very specific things from my pop culture. One of those specific things is some semblance of escapism. By that, I mean some semblance of hope in what is very easily the weirdest, darkest timeline that could possibly occur in all the multiverse.

My fatigue is very much politically-driven, and founded on desperately wanting me and mine to survive the harrowing current circumstances. So much so when I saw trailers for The First Purge, I’ll be honest I barely blinked.


But when USA announced The Purge TV Series, I started screaming “read the goddamn room.”

In argumentation, the term ‘Kairos’ refers to the timeliness of the argument. Where ‘Logos’ appeals to logical, ‘Pathos’ to emotion, and ‘Ethos’ appeals to authority; ‘Kairos’ appeals to The Now. Pop culture lives and breathes on kairos in how its material relates to the present moment. This is what I imagine The Purge TV series is trying to appeal to. The high tension resulting in a dark take on a Swiftian proposal of ultraconservatives taking power and controlling population by legalizing murder for a day. This idea percolated into the public conscious sometime in 2014, but four years later, the landscape is very, very different.

This may be a little too timely.


Media does not exist in a vacuum. Media is a byproduct of the environment it was created in. Media is a reflection of the time it was created. Media is inherently political. The stories we choose to tell and the people choose to tell these stories are inherently politically charged. This is why representation on screen matters. This is why representation off-screen matters. The content we create helps shape the narrative.



When Battlefield V features women on their cover and Redditors go berserk, that is a political act. When Warner Bros runs a disclaimer of “The cartoons you about to see are a product of their time” in front of old, racist animated shorts, that is political. When the head developer of the The Division 2 tries to claim that games, where players take up the mantle of covert sleeper agents activated in order to overthrow a corrupt government, is somehow not political, it is still a political statement. Choosing to remain in neutral in a time of great tension is a political stance. To quote Desmond Tutu:

”If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”



The headlines this past June hurt. They hurt a lot. I don’t blame anyone who stays off of social media because it’s a constant barrage, a sensory overload, a satirical farce that has somehow manifested into reality. Honestly, I’m surprised The Onion is still in business because you never thought you’d see headlines like these.


When a plot synopsis reads like the roadmap of a presidency that we actively see unfold every day, it stops feeling like satirical horror and more like a reinforcement that our concerns for our survival are just fictional. It normalizes this notion even more. The Purge franchise is guilty of all of this. Of finding ways to justify how it all ends, and how it all makes sense. The box office numbers from 2013, 2014, and 2016 don’t exactly lie. It is indeed a hit franchise.

The responsibility of a good storyteller, however, is not just telling a good story but know when to tell it and why you’re telling it. What’s the point of a series telling us murder is bad when we as a society are doing that and so much worse. Remember when HBO tried to launch Confederate? Yeah, The Purge is an equally-messed up idea in my opinion.

The problem is not that this cuts close to home, but it does not cut deep. It treats this notion like it is a benign blemish when it is a tumor — malignant, and malicious. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts, a slow bleed-out. Horror is supposed to challenge our perceptions. Instead, The Purge TV series is just another series of paper cuts, of faux extremity that got us here in the first place. This is from the network that brought us Psych and Burn Notice and Mr. Robot: shows that challenged us in some way. Now, we have this dark and edgy miniseries that asks “you know murder is bad, right?”

I know that is murder is bad. I know that that The Purge is the extremist conclusion of an ultra-nationalistic, fear-mongering policy. While this is a small wound in the grand scheme, it’s small wounds and tiny concessions that got us here in the first place.

USA, could you maybe read the goddamn room?

USA Network, you should too.

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  • Mikkel Snyder

    Mikkel Snyder is a technical writer by day and pop culture curator and critic all other times.

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