There are many major figures currently having their films or television programmes financed and shown by Netflix who could be defined as anti-woke, or at least politically ambiguous. Ricky Gervais’ sitcom After Life gloried in the shocking tirades against decency fired out by its protagonist, just as Gervais himself takes delight in outraging contemporary mores on the stand-up comedy specials that appear on the service. 

Similarly near-the-knuckle laughter can be found in the Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin sitcom Grace and Frankie, to say nothing of the uproarious Michael Douglas show The Kominsky Method, which poked fun at everything from the sexual mores of septuagenarians to the hypocrisy of the evangelical Christian right. 

And the same can be said of its dramatic offerings, too. Few would describe The Crown and Squid Game – entirely and wildly different in every other regard – as remotely woke in their preconceptions. The former, notably, is one of the few major period-set dramas to have eschewed colour-blind casting over the past few years, and the latter… Well, it’s Squid Game, a mad, chaotic fantasia of pain, violence and black comedy. Social justice doesn’t really come into its purview, except as a source of ironic humour.  

From a lowbrow perspective, the director Michael Bay and the comedian Adam Sandler have both been given vast budgets and full creative control to produce work that could most charitably be described as unsophisticated in its social and moral approach – although in the interests of fairness, Netflix also acted as the international distributor for Sandler’s career-best performance in the tense jewel-heist drama Uncut Gems.