Vida offers one of the best TV portrayals of gentrification

Slate

"One of the vanishingly few TV shows about L.A.’s Latino population (nearly half the city’s residents), Vida is caught between the urgency of solidarity and the difficulty of achieving it," says Inkoo Kang. She adds: "Confronting gentrification has been the focus of some searingly great art in the past few years. Last year’s Blindspotting and this summer’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco—both set in the Bay Area—made for exceptional indies by capturing, via formal inventiveness, the sense of loss that gentrification so often engenders. Shows as different as High Maintenance, Insecure, The Last O.G., and One Day at a Time have tackled the issue too, often to poignant effect. But Vida stands out still—for its exploration of how people of color can also be complicit in gentrification as well as for questioning the authenticity policing that Manichean reductions of gentrifying forces often become."