Fargo is probably the recent benchmark, but it can also go south, as the 1990 Ferris Bueller spin-off featuring Jennifer Aniston, which almost no one has heard of, can attest.
The TV series, which picks up the action a few months after the film’s end, shifts the perspective from Collin to Ashley , Miles’s longsuffering girlfriend and the mother of their young son, Sean.
Episode one opens on New Year’s Eve in Oakland in 2018, the deeply riven city at night illuminated by fireworks, the air thick with sirens and the promise of violence – and police brutality.
Stick with me and I’ll guide you.” This made me realise that pretty much every film and TV show I had seen about Oakland and the Bay Area was about white people.
But, by the end of the half hour, as she insisted that Ashley marry Miles in jail with a minister who used to be her son’s preschool cook, Hunt had won me over.
“You still working at that little plantation hotel, responding to that little white-privilege bell?” Trish asks her.
It veers from gags about the wounds opened up by gentrification – “We gotta get out of here before the white capoeiraists start singing slave songs!” is a personal favourite – to serious social commentary.
The music video-esque action slows down to a jazz trumpet refrain, the cars lurch round and round and Ashley watches it all unfold in slow-motion with an inscrutable expression.