Jesse Singer articles

For years, these films were treated as common knowledge. They played on TV, sat on shelves, and came up in conversation without explanation. Boomers didn’t recommend them—they assumed you'd seen them. Millennials, meanwhile, grew up just far enough removed that the assumption could no longer be assumed. And the result is a long list of “classic” war movies that quietly (and sadly) skipped an entire generation.

Johnny Lewis rose to fame on the hit series Sons of Anarchy, playing a character surrounded by chaos and violence. Off camera, his life followed an even more troubling path—one marked by documented instability, court warnings, and missed intervention.

Ryan Grantham wasn’t a celebrity—but he was recognizable. Over more than a decade, he appeared in films and TV shows that millions of people watched. His career wasn’t flashy or headline-making. But what followed would make headlines around the world.

To viewers, Elizabeth Montgomery looked like she had it all. On Bewitched, she smiled through chaos and made every problem disappear. But the woman behind the magic was carrying fractures most fans never saw—and the fantasy hid a life quietly unraveling long before it ended.

For years, Rusty Hamer felt safely permanent on American television. On Make Room for Daddy, he became the version of childhood viewers trusted and assumed would always be there. What audiences saw was a happy, funny son. What they never saw was how completely things collapsed once the cameras stopped.

Some movies are a chore. The pacing is off. The writing is clunky. The ideas are better than the execution. You spend most of the runtime wondering who signed off on this. And then the ending hits—and suddenly you get it. These films didn’t magically become good, but their final moments were strong enough to justify sitting through the rest.

On Family Feud, Richard Dawson felt different from every other game show host on television. He leaned in. He joked quietly. He made contestants feel seen. The kisses, the suits, the confidence—it all suggested ease and control. What audiences couldn’t see was how much of that ease was carefully constructed, and what it was covering.

Science fiction didn’t suddenly get smart in the streaming era. Long before prestige budgets and moody synth scores, TV writers in the 60s and 70s were already wrestling with identity, free will, surveillance, and the quiet terror of technology. Today’s “original” sci-fi often feels fresh—but only because it’s standing on some very old shoulders.

The 1970s didn’t just produce legendary rock music—it produced legendary lies. Fans repeated these stories for decades, rarely stopping to ask if any of it was actually true. Spoiler: a lot of it wasn’t.