CORPORATE streaming TV seems to be engulfed in a never-ending chasing of its own tail as its programming attempts to more frantically flee any form of social reality, even as that reality becomes more desperate for those working and middle-class viewers living it.

Digital companies use the programming to simply present the virtual world as an ever-expanding source of the abundance so sorely lacking in the actual lives of workers.

Take Amazon’s The Peripheral, part working-class Southern rural woman’s struggle, a la Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, but the larger part, and the inducement for the series, is that same woman roaming freely through time and space in her online gaming life not unlike Westworld or the much better, because also critical of that dichotomy, Ready Player One.