New Girl’s Jessica Day always quietly believed in herself, but over the course of the show we got to watch her find her own kind of strong, quirky confidence. It wasn’t always an easy road – while she never lost her positive demeanor for long, she definitely had to deal with her own fair share of ups and downs. But no matter how much the world tried to drag her down, she always found a way to come out on top and turn it into a great lesson for herself and her friends. So let’s take a look at Jess’s confidence journey and see what she has to teach us!

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The leadup to the new year is often filled with a range of emotions, from joy to dread, anticipation to full on anxiety. And there’s one New Year’s Eve tradition that can pull all of these emotions together at once – getting a kiss as the clock hits midnight. A superstition with a surprisingly long history, it’s become the way to greet each new year for many, but that doesn’t mean that things always go as planned… Let’s take a deeper look at the pressure to get the perfect midnight kiss, the variations that have arisen over time, how even securing that smooch doesn’t mean things will play out the way you had hoped, and how this tradition is changing today.

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From writers to singers to actors and beyond, there’s long been a trope that creatives are so filled with passion and emotion that they just can’t help but spread their love around... Sometimes this takes place in acknowledged, consensually open relationships, but often it seems to come through cheating – cheating that they then often find ways to put into their art for all to see. Of course, people of all kinds can and do cheat, but artists have spearheaded this trope to some degree in the popular culture because they keep making art about them doing it. So… why do artists seem so obsessed with this rather destructive form of love (and telling us all about it?)

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❄️Romantic comedies set around the holidays have been criticized for being formulaic, but their big problem isn't that they replay beloved tropes, it's something deeper (that they have been actually working to fix! Kind of...)

Romantic comedies are a beloved genre any time of year, but they’ve got a particularly strong hold on the holidays. From classics like Love, Actually and The Holiday, to modern hits like The Merry Gentlemen and Hot Frosty, these movies are generally very formulaic escapism that promises the audience an amusing love story unfolding during the happiest time of the year. With that being said, even fans have started to notice and comment on how glaring some of the genre’s problems still are even today. So let’s take a closer look at how holiday rom-com’s longtime dedication to old-fashioned messages about gender roles and lack of representation held the genre back, and how it’s finally changing to meet the times and we’re getting even better, more enjoyable rom-coms as a result!

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Go to http://ro.co/take to find out if you’re covered for free. || Nightbitch is a searing, painful portrait of motherhood – where the titular character just happens to lose herself so dramatically in parenthood that she winds up turning into a dog. It was a hit book in 2021 and has been adapted for the screen by Marielle Heller, with Amy Adams in the lead role. So, does the film live up to the gritty, surrealness of the book? And what does it really have to say about the experience of trying to hold onto your own individual personhood while being consumed by motherhood and societal expectations? (And could this finally be Amy Adam’s Oscar moment?!) Here’s our Take!

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The eyes are the windows to the soul, and on screen, from blue eyes to brown eyes to green eyes and beyond, the color that adorns those eyes can tell you a lot about the soul within. So, let’s take a deeper look at what each eye color has come to represent on screen, and how that’s changing!

Watch the visual episode here: https://youtu.be/6f9wpdNcoFY

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The Godfather Part II was released fifty years ago – and in the half century since it and the first film debuted, they’ve influenced film and television in innumerable ways. This story of a mafia family, and one initially reluctant member’s blood-soaked ascendancy to the top of the empire has continued to draw in audiences with its sprawling, epic nature and deep intimacy and drama because at its core is a tale that remains relevant, even all these years later. One of its most compelling modern echoes is found in Succession – another story of a powerful scion in a changing world and the family members vying to take his place. Connecting these two threads across time allows us to really analyze the true danger that lurks in the dark heart of greed, and how it consumes everything and everyone in its path.

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Being around family can be a lot of fun, but… it can also be very chaotic. And what time of year does that chaos really start to heat up? The holiday season, of course! It's a feature of so many hilarious episodes of our favorite shows, from Friends to Modern Family to Blackish to Brooklyn Nine-Nine and beyond (and some very *stressful* ones, like The Bear and Heartstopper), to some of the most beloved holiday movies, like Home Alone, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and more! This on screen trope arose from a real life issue to many of us can relate to: when the family comes together, chaos ensues. Let’s take a closer look at the Holiday Family Chaos trope to unpack why, at its core, it’s actually surprisingly heartwarming and encouraging.

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With siblings, there’s usually the responsible older child, the gets-away-with-everything younger child, and then… there’s the middle child. Born too late to be the first born and too early to be the baby of the family, middle children often get stuck in a kind of limbo – loved but… forgotten or ignored, no matter how much they might try to make themselves an equal part of the family. Being the middle child can lead to one becoming a bit of a black sheep, their outcast nature at home bleeding out into the rest of their life. Many middle children on screen are actually the geniuses of their families (a surprisingly pervasive subtrope!) And, even given all of their struggles in childhood, middle children can actually have a good shot at ending up the most well adjusted adults out of their siblings. It’s time to give middle children their moment in the spotlight – so let’s unpack this trope!

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Susan Mayer was Desperate Housewives’ ‘anchor character’ – the everywoman who show creator Marc Cherry designed to be loveable and relatable. But although on paper Susan was inoffensive, there was something about her that audiences loved to hate. Over the course of eight seasons, the Housewives met with murder, fraud, bribery and so much more – so… what exactly was it about Susan, a seemingly innocent girl next door type, that made her the show’s unintentional villain for so many?

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