cringeworthy

Musk's appearances at the rallies were cringeworthy and his speeches were anything but riveting.

But the thing about this syndrome — which, in its more cringeworthy try-hard versions, comes with protestations that “I really don’t think of myself as American” — is its obvious and painful effort to separate the protagonist from those other Americans, the ones we eagerly join the rest of the world in deprecating, deriding and lamenting.

After all, if it weren't for government-funded research, Musk would be an anonymous failson living off his daddy's money, instead of a billionaire competing with Kanye West for the title of the world's most cringeworthy celebrity.

Musk couldn't even get through the speech without a cringeworthy thumbs-up.

Alongside flattering documentary portraits of such figures as Nancy Pelosi, Stacey Abrams and Adam Kinzinger, or furious late-night segments from John Oliver, Seth Meyers and more, the films and TV series created by these production pacts slipped mostly unnoticed into the modern content mill, as ephemeral, and, at times, as cringeworthy as Texts from Hillary, “Joe-bi Wan Kenobi” or tote bags emblazoned with “Notorious R.B.G.”