Verity or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 

Despite the film’s efforts to reframe its heroine with modern complexity, a certain emotional distance lingers.

How powerful can a story be when it is stripped to the bare essentials of just a room, a handful of people and raw human voice?

The Bluff unravels its mystery slowly, opening on the capture of a ship captain named Bodden (Ismael Cruz Córdova) and the swift execution of his entire crew. Then, viewers are treated to a tranquil British settlement in the Cayman Islands in the 1850s, where a mother bakes a coconut birthday cake for her son in a house suspiciously rigged with makeshift tripwires and burglar alarms. As it turns out, that mother is Priyanka Chopra’s quick witted and resourceful ex-pirate Mrs. Ercell Bodden, and her husband’s captors are on the way to the island to hunt her down for abandoning them and stealing their loot. The pirates of the Libertas land on the beaches of Cayman Brac, and the scenes that follow show a Viking-esque slaughter of half the island.

The cancelling of these series is being blamed on the writers' strike and low viewership, but it's just the latest example of the industry's lack of appreciation for stories about queer women.

When you first hear that there is a series on Netflix where the lead character’s wife dies from cancer and he becomes dangerously suicidal, you wouldn’t immediately assume that it’s a comedy.