What “Michael” Tries to Show—or Hide
Critics at Large | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.4 • 678 Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“Michael”—a new film, directed by Antoine Fuqua, charting Michael Jackson’s rise to fame—just had the best opening weekend in the history of bio-pics, proving that audiences are still eager to celebrate the King of Pop. The movie also ends, pointedly, before the first in a series of allegations of child sexual abuse that have tainted Jackson’s reputation ever since. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and their fellow staff writer Kelefa Sanneh consider how the unprecedented highs and horrific lows of Jackson’s life and career have made him a prism for modern ideas about stardom and power. Sanneh’s recent Profile of Fuqua details the Jackson estate’s involvement in the production, which resulted in a sanitized portrait of a deeply complex figure. Other works have assessed Jackson’s legacy more critically: the 2019 documentary “Leaving Neverland” lays out, in granular detail, the claims of two of Jackson’s accusers. “It’s just such a dissonance, seeing these two texts in such close proximity,” Fry says. “The thing with ‘Michael’ is, it doesn’t separate the art from the artist. It separates the artist from the wrongdoing entirely.”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“Michael” (2026)
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”
Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous”
“The Action-Film Director Who’s Taking On Michael Jackson,” by Kelefa Sanneh (The New Yorker)
“Quiet on Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV” (2024)
“I’m Glad My Mom Died,” by Jennette McCurdy
“On Michael Jackson,” by Margo Jefferson
“Leaving Neverland” (2019)
Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall”
“Justin Bieber, Pop Music’s Fallen Angel, Rises Again at Coachella,” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)
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| 0:00.0 | You got the first lines. |
| 0:02.0 | Are we doing it now? |
| 0:03.0 | I mean, you're a critic today, so sure. |
| 0:05.0 | You can deliver that shit. |
| 0:08.0 | This is Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm Kellifacenna. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Vincent Cunningham. |
| 0:14.0 | And I'm Nomi Frye. |
| 0:15.0 | Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now |
| 0:19.0 | and how we got here. |
| 0:24.7 | Okay, today is a little bit different. |
| 0:29.1 | We are two-thirds of our usual pawn. |
| 0:30.9 | Our beloved Alex is out this week. |
| 0:36.8 | She will be back next week, not to worry, but we have a wonderful gift for you this week. Our fellow staff writer, Caliphasei, is sitting in for Alex today. |
| 0:41.8 | Hi, Kay. |
| 0:42.5 | Yo, all these years of scribbling away as a critic with a small C, and I'm finally today, you know, for this little half hour, hour we've got together, a critic with a big C. |
| 0:54.7 | Yeah, you are a critic at large. |
| 0:56.3 | And a big, a critic at large C. A critic at large. Man, and you are a gift. She said the exact right. Yeah. It sounds like a hip-hop name or something. Critic at large. You are the critic at large and you write about a lot of things. You write about politics, entertainment, tech, boxing. |
| 1:13.3 | But your big beat, K, is pop music. |
| 1:17.3 | I do love pop music. |
| 1:18.7 | And that's why we wanted you here with us for this episode. |
| 1:21.8 | Because today we're talking about the king of pop himself, Michael Jackson, |
... |
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