buy gabapentin usa The most haunting line in the new Hulu documentary #SkyKing comes from the man at the center of it. Speaking by radio to the air traffic controllers trying to talk him down, Richard Russell offers a two-word self-assessment: broken guy.

http://servuclean.com/category/janitorial-service/office-cleaners/ He is not wrong. And that’s the point.

In August 2018, Russell, a 28-year-old Horizon Air ground service agent, stole an empty Q400 turboprop from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and flew it over Puget Sound for 70 minutes before crashing on Ketron Island. He had no pilot training.

He had, apparently, nowhere else to go.

Director Patricia E. Gillespie spent five years earning the trust of Russell’s family, making this the first time many of them have spoken publicly.

The result is less a true-crime spectacle than an elegy for a generation of working men who fell through the cracks while America wasn’t looking.

Russell earned $12.75 an hour. He was underpaid, overworked, and desperate for a promotion that wasn’t coming. He wore a shirt to work that read “the sky’s no limit.” Then he proved it.

From the air, he flew toward Mount Rainier, asked for the coordinates of a news-making orca whale, and when told his plane could attempt a barrel roll only if he focused on autopilot, he replied in one word: “Boring.” It is equal parts funny and devastating.

Gillespie handles the never-before-heard ATC audio with care. The documentary features Russell’s childhood best friend Chris, his Horizon Air coworker Andreas, and Colleen, the retired ATC supervisor who managed the situation in real time.

Each voice adds a layer. None of them fully explains him, which is honest. His own mother, Karen, refused to listen to the recordings. “I can’t hear his voice,” she says, “because his voice was very special.”

The one critical reservation: a musical choice near the end tips the film toward the online mythologizing that still surrounds the incident. The memes, the folk-hero status, the Reddit threads that turned a suicide into protest art. It’s a misstep in an otherwise disciplined film.

Unlike typical true-crime documentaries built around spectacle, #SkyKing humanizes Russell and connects his story to the broader despair that many working Americans carry quietly.

It is not an endorsement of what he did. It is an attempt to understand why a man with no flight training could fly a commercial aircraft with uncanny skill, then choose to aim it at the ground.

At 91 minutes, it earns its runtime. The sky was, briefly, no limit. Then it was.

The triumph of One Battle After Another at this year’s Oscars feels less like a fresh cultural event than a familiar American recurrence. 

Fifty years earlier, Network hit the same nerve from a different century. Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film earned 10 nominations and won four Oscars, including Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, Beatrice Straight and Paddy Chayefsky, while turning Howard Beale into the patron saint of televised fury.

Beale’s most famous line, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore,” endured because it was never just about television. It was about a country sick of being lied to, managed, marketed and soothed. 

That was the America of Vietnam, Watergate, inflation and oil shocks. Network understood that public anger was becoming a product before most people had the language for it. Its genius was not merely predicting media vulgarity. It recognized that outrage had become profitable, and that institutions would not calm the country but monetize its panic. 

Now comes One Battle After Another, which just won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Casting and supporting actor for Sean Penn.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is not Network in combat boots, and it is not a lecture disguised as a chase movie. Critics have described it instead as a story of resistance set in a highly politicized world, one that reads as 2020s commentary without reducing itself to slogan or sermon.

That matters, because America no longer trusts sermons, especially political ones.

So does the nation’s mood echo the mood that made Network an Oscar force? Yes, but with one brutal difference.

In 1976, Americans were furious at government and corporate power, yet trust in the media stood at 72 percent.  The press still looked, to many people, like the institution that might expose the rot.

In late 2025, trust in mass media fell to 28 percent, the lowest Gallup has recorded, while trust in government sat near 17 percent and Gallup described Americans heading into 2026 as deeply dissatisfied with the nation’s direction.

In other words, the anger echoes, but the object of distrust has widened. In the age of Network, people thought the system was corrupt. In the age of One Battle After Another, many people suspect everything is.

Network captured a country watching the center fail on live television. One Battle After Another captures a country after the center has already shattered into feeds, tribes and algorithmic paranoia.

One film gave us the rage scream. The other gives us a survival ethic. Anderson himself framed the film’s ending as a fight against “evil forces” and said the goal was to put “common sense and decency back into fashion.”  Howard Beale wanted America to yell out the window. Anderson seems to be asking whether the country can still recognize decency when it sees it.

That may be the real echo between the two films. Both won big when the country felt unsteady, manipulated and hungry for moral clarity.

The difference is that Network arrived when Americans still shared one screen, while One Battle After Another arrives after the national screen has exploded.

The mood is the same rage, but lonelier now.