Truth, Justice, and Beauty in Film and Television : Taste, Narrative, and the Search for the Good

What is real? What is just? What forms of beauty educate us to see, feel, taste, and care properly? Seth Vannatta argues that contemporary film and prestige television have become central sites for the exploration of philosophical questions.

At a time when the traditional philosophical canon is increasingly distant from everyday moral life, Vannatta shows how popular narrative forms now function as laboratories of ethical reflection, social critique, and metaphysical speculation. They stage conflicts, cultivate sensibilities, and shape the conditions under which truth, justice, and beauty can be recognized, embraced, or missed altogether.

Vannatta’s guiding claim is that the Good continues to structure our moral and intellectual lives, even when it goes unnamed. It appears implicitly in questions of truth, where characters confront the limits of knowledge, sincerity, and self-understanding; in questions of justice, where institutions shape moral responsibility under conditions of inequality; and in questions of beauty, where aesthetic form, taste, and imagination train our moral perception. He uses these three dimensions—true, just, and beautiful— to organize his study.

Drawing on TV shows including Seinfeld, The Good Place, Mad Men, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Wire and films such as Armageddon Time, Taking Sides, Remains of the Day and Get Out, Vannatta explores a range of philosophical branches—ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, metaphysics, and existence— and concepts from gender and race to irony and sincerity.

This timely book treats movies and shows as occasions for philosophical discovery. By educating our moral attention, they reveal the enduring significance of popular culture. Vannatta reveals how film and television, for all their commercial constraints and ideological entanglements, repeatedly shape how we perceive ourselves, others, and the worlds we navigate.