When a Hapless Villain Somehow Takes Down a Presidency

In 2009, John Rogers, the creator of the crime drama Leverage, wrote a blog post describing how an episode of the show had come together. In it, he noted one of the things he’d learned from fans: They loved the moments when the show’s core team simply chatted about their cases—the thrill of watching smart people being smart together. “Competence porn,” the show’s writers began calling it, and the coinage caught on. The comforts of competence help explain the appeal of films like The Martian and shows like Ted Lasso; they also give a soft rebuke to the pyrotechnic individualism so common in American pop culture. Competence, recast as entertainment, is humble. It is team-oriented. It is also, in its way, a challenge, because it will ask its audience to realize the same thing its characters must: A superhero isn’t coming to save us. We’ll have to do the saving ourselves.