So Nussbaum doesn’t fixate on Tony Soprano’s brand of aggrieved male antihero, directing her attention — and ours — toward the women, especially Carmela and Dr. Melfi. She also knows that to make the case for shows like “The Good Wife” and “Jane the Virgin” as more durable than fleeting pleasures, she has to show us that they’re doing something beyond pinging the dopamine centers of the brain. She describes how “Jane” has an “unusual optical density” that gives it a creative, manic energy; “The Good Wife,” in her telling, turns out to be a sly, subversive condemnation of capitalism.

This is confident, dauntless criticism — smart and spiky, brilliantly sure of itself and the medium it depicts. But as appealing and seductive as it is, it lugs some of its own baggage too. Nussbaum reacts to a gendered cultural hierarchy by deploying the weapons of that hierarchy against it: a certain combativeness, a bold swagger. It’s a feminism steeped in the toughen-up language of cultural libertarianism. Writing in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein story, she herself wrestles with this legacy in a long, bravura essay that asks, “What should we do with the art of terrible men?”

Woody Allen, Roman Polanski and Louis C.K. are the main terrible men in question, but even more than her searching considerations of their deeds and their art, what strikes me most is the moment she turns her critical lens on herself, conceding that the #MeToo movement stirred up an “ugly awareness” of how she had subconsciously absorbed the myth of male genius even as she consciously tried to resist it.

Nussbaum candidly describes the attitude that helped her flourish in her own career: “If you act like a polite associate editor in a beige cardigan, your voice will be small. If you pretend you’re Norman Mailer, you can take up some space.” #MeToo and the work of the comic Hannah Gadsby revealed to her how such assumptions allowed the conversation to continue to revolve around men, structuring it in their terms and according to their twisted priorities. Mailer was crassly contemptuous of women and so determined to “take up some space” that he stabbed his wife. Could it be that a polite associate editor in a beige cardigan might not be so bad after all?

“My old method had been the sociopath’s approach,” Nussbaum writes. “Treat the artist and the art as separate.” It’s a harsh light on a standard critical truism, and even though Nussbaum doesn’t entirely “cancel” or “delete” her old method — one of the most exhilarating aspects of the essay is how she treads a line that’s fine but also forceful — she’s clearly open to trying out new ones.

As ardent as Nussbaum’s critical responses are, she also knows that art and our judgments of it aren’t necessarily chiseled in stone; there’s a contingency that can be inevitable and even potent, should we choose to accept it. In 2014, she skewered the portentous first season of “True Detective” with a perfect line that’s still scathing but reads rather differently now, five years later: “The show has got so much gravitas it could run for president.”