It's pretty rare for us to spend much time on something with no redeeming qualities at all, but it's also pretty rare to come across something as devoid of redeeming qualities as The Briefcase.
The new CBS series dumps a pile of money on two financially strapped families and shows you an hour of their inner struggle to decide whether to be "bad" (by keeping the money to meet the needs of their own families) or "good" (by giving the money away to the other family). The class politics were laid out in an excellent piece by Margaret Lyons over at Vulture, but my Pop Culture Happy Hour co-conspirator Stephen Thompson and I were so profoundly bothered by this show that we sat down to air our ids about it, the better to get on with better, classier television, like The Bachelorette.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
