Rhoda Feng

Especially in its latter half, “Bimbo” traverses the gap between the very online and the very not online with exuberant intelligence. Earworm and Bookworm have a lovely number about who they are in their private realities, when no one’s looking at them. For a show about pop stardom and fandom, it has a surprising amount to say about oblivion — and our inalienable right to it.

In rare moments, N/A waves at the HBO series Hacks and intermittently gives the impression of wanting to become a play about an established woman begrudgingly learning from a promising protégé (and vice versa). We can almost hear Deborah Vance in N’s tea-kettle complaint that she has never been on the cover of Time magazine whereas her predecessors “got multiple covers—both men, both chased out of town with their tails between their legs!” Yet the mentor-mentee dynamic is short-circuited by bumper-sticker speeches that are as off-puttingly vague and vatic on the page as when spoken aloud. “Know your friends. Know your enemies. Know the difference.” “This is a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party.” “You are the face of a movement that would render us a permanent minority.” Who had voiced these koan-quotes? In their abstract amplitude, the utterances could have been made by either N or A—or anyone at all.