Every once in a while I like to put together a list of all of Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and company’s Hellboy/B.P.R.D./Abe Sapien/Lobster Johnson/Witchfinder/etc. trade paperbacks in the order one should read them. Generally that means “in the order they came out,” though there’s the occasional exception (eg. the most recent Abe Sapien trade came out before the most recent BPRD: Hell on Earth trade but should be read after it). Here’s what I’ve got at the moment.

1. Hellboy: Seed of Destruction
2. Hellboy: Wake the Devil
3. Hellboy: The Chained Coffin and Others
4. Hellboy: The Right HAnd of Doom
5. Hellboy: Conqueror Worm
6. BPRD: Hollow Earth & Other Stories
7. Hellboy: Weird Tales Vol. 1
8. BPRD: The Soul of Venice & Other Stories
9. Hellboy: Weird Tales. Vol. 2
10. BPRD: Plague of Frogs
11. BPRD: The Dead
12. Hellboy: Strange Places
13. BPRD: The Black Flame
14. BPRD: The Universal Machine
15. Hellboy: The Troll Witch and Others
16. BPRD: Garden of Souls
17. BPRD: Killing Ground
18. Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus
19. Hellboy: Darkness Calls
20. Abe Sapien: The Drowning
21. BPRD: 1946
22. BPRD: The Warning
23. BPRD: The Black Goddess
24. Hellboy: The Wild Hunt
25. Witchfinder: In the Service of Angels
26. BPRD: War on Frogs
27. Hellboy: The Crooked Man and Others
28. BPRD: 1947
29. BPRD: King of Fear
30. BPRD: Hell on Earth: New World
31. Hellboy: The Bride of Hell and Others
[31.5 Hellboy: House of the Living Dead]
32. BPRD: Being Human
33. Witchfinder: Lost and Gone Forever
34. BPRD: Hell on Earth: Gods and Monsters
35. Hellboy: The Storm and the Fury
36. Abe Sapien: The Devil Does Not Jest
37. BPRD: Hell on Earth: Russia
38. Lobster Johnson: The Burning Hand
39. BPRD: Hell on Earth: The Devil’s Engine & The Long Death
40. BPRD: Hell on Earth: The Pickens County Horror & Others
41. BPRD: Hell on Earth: The Return of the Master
42. BPRD: 1948
[42.5 Hellboy: The Midnight Circus]
43. BPRD: Vampire
44. BPRD: Hell on Earth: A Cold Day in Hell
45. Abe Sapien: Dark and Terrible & The New Race of Man

I left out the humor collection Hellboy Junior and the superhero-crossover collection Hellboy: Masks and Monsters because they’re not in continuity; arguably neither are the two Hellboy: Weird Tales volumes but they’re at least in the spirit of the thing. I listed the original graphic novel hardcovers Hellboy: House of the Living Dead and Hellboy: The Midnight Circus as .5s rather than factoring them into the list proper primarily out of pique that they haven’t been released in paperback yet; to seriously collect the Hellboy series is to frequently feel actively punished by its publisher. No matter — I think it’s tough to argue that this is anything but the best superhero series, broadly construed, of the young century. It’s often frightening and very sad and a blast to read.

David O. Russell’s American Hustle is best described as…

a) a paperback novelization of a Martin Scorsese movie
b) an SNL skit that blew the week’s wig budget
c) one of those movies with a solid cast and serious-looking art direction on the DVD cover when you spot it in the discount bin at a 7/11, and you look at it and go “whoa, this never made it into theaters? How’d that happen? Must be a story there” and pick it up on a whim and watch it and it’s pretty good, nothing spectacular, you can at least see why Jessica Lange and Cillian Murphy and Morgan Freeman signed on
c) an experiment to see how much of Amy Adams’s breasts we can see without ever actually seeing a whole breast. Oh, sure, Tumblr tells us you can see a single nipple for a single split-second in a single scene, but if anything that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance only emphasizes its ephemerality. Perhaps this — not the “no more fake shit” mantra, not the Abscam scandal, not the long cons that may or may not be being run — is the film’s central metaphor, the areola atop its mammary gland of artifice and fakery. In the end, can you ever, like, really see a breast?

American Hustle is a fun enough time at the movies, but a pretty preposterous contender for the best the art form had to offer in the year that was. Virtually all of the characters, from Christian Bale doing the film’s second-worst Robert DeNiro impression to Bradley Cooper eating the scenery like Bale must have been hitting the craft services table to Jennifer Lawrence emotionally careening all the way around an inconsistently drawn Perfidious Female, are actors wearing cool costumes and doing funny accents rather than people. There are a couple of exceptions: Adams is pretty good in a role that requires the character to realize she’s only an ersatz femme fatale for two doofuses rather than the real thing — she reminds me of Bilbo Baggins’ self-descriptive “butter scraped across too much bread”; she has a moment in a bathroom stall, a look on her face, that’s the film’s sole genuinely sexy moment. Jeremy Renner works quite well as a politician whose crookedness is really and truly just a matter of constituent services; his character is set in opposition to the film’s entire project of letting sleazy-looking ’70s clothes and tri-state area ethnicity stand in for a thoroughgoing examination of a milieu. I found myself wishing his career arc between this and, say, Dahmer had flowed less through action-hero stuff and more into just disappearing into life’s casualties like he did in those two films.

The film did have one truly memorable scene, the one where it all came together, where Bale and Adams’s con artists and Cooper’s overly ambitious FBI agent and Renner’s hapless mayor and Lawrence’s desperate housewife are all drawn into a party where the sting they’re involved in suddenly balloons into a monstrosity capable of bringing down senators and destroying one of the most powerful organized crime outfits in North America, which is to say one capable of getting them all killed, even as the personal deceptions each of them has been running on one another threaten to crack up in restroom and bar-stool screaming matches. Everyone involved suddenly has so much to do, so much to think about, so much of it disconnected and drawing them in different directions, that you realize how straightforward and inert the rest of the material is. Previous party scenes feel sparse not just because of the bizarrely low-rent number of extras, you know? You just want the rest of the movie to have thought this hard about this stuff. Instead everyone gets a happy ending except the lawman, which is hilarious in a world that spent several months pillorying The Wolf of Wall Street for insufficient opprobrium directed to its scumbag characters. Crime pays!

You know, gang, the dialogue on this show is…less than good. A lot of it is just lame hardboiled cop-show clichés: “Nothin’ is ever over,” “The world needs bad men — we keep the other bad men from the door,” I mean, jesus. The interpersonal stuff is weak too: “Why is there all this space between us, Marty?” Ohhhhh, brother. (That was almost made up for by Marty’s Oscar-worthy performance with his Wile E. Coyote metaphor, but then rapidly undone by a deeply unimaginative sex scene.) It feels like the role of dialogue on formative Great-TV shows The Wire and Deadwood — the way David Simon and David Milch developed their own rhythm and syntax and idioms to have their characters communicate their complicated ideas about and reactions to the dissolution and formation of communities respectively, Simon with simplicity and Milch with filigrees — has been forgotten. Shows that do self-consciously formal, even purple dialogue well, like Boardwalk Empire and Downton Abbey…that just doesn’t get acknowledged as best I can tell. But this thing, with lines like “I don’t think a man can love” or the college-dorm-room exchange about the impact of religious faith on morality or that whole let’s-repeat-the-double-entendre-twelve-times-just-in-case “I just don’t ever want you mowin’ my lawn” argument, is some weird critical cause célèbre. I have nothing but contempt for writing wherein I set myself up in opposition to other critics, but, like…what the heck, man.

That softness seeps into other aspects of the writing, too. When Marty revealed that Rust, on top of his entire library card-catalog of baleful backstory and character traits, also has synesthesia, I actually laughed out loud. Perhaps it’s supposed to feel ridiculous? And when Rust outlined his findings about their killer’s past crime to Marty, why would he save “the victims had the same spiral mark on their back” for last? Wouldn’t that be the first thing you showed, if you weren’t a character in a cop show building to a dramatic reveal? Even Rust’s nihilism, which is so extravagant it retains a certain vim and vigor even at its silliest, is undercut in this episode by the heavy-handed and shopworn decision to juxtapose his grim proclamations about how murder victims are ultimately happy to die with line-dancing flashbacks. (Which is a damn shame, because the idea of a person becoming a homicide detective out of curiosity as to the precise nature of the cessation of consciousness’ link to the physical body is novel and compelling.)

So how best to enjoy this thing? The final shot — that genuinely frightening slow-motion monstrosity — is the answer. True Detective is best approached and appreciated as a creepy potboiler, with some fun performances. (Give it up for Eli from Boardwalk Empire! Remus, too, by the way — he was the guy on the riding mower.) It’s got a fancier pedigree, but in this regard it’s not a world away from another not-quite-sure-I-get-the-buzz show, The Americans. A great show? Don’t get it twisted. A fun show, if you don’t mind staring at it in wry bemusement, Marty-to-Rust-style? Sure, why not.

PS:

* Okay, so, yes, Anna’s fucked up — her concern for Bates is something to cling to.

* There was quite obviously more to Baxter than meets the eye, from the start.

* Huh, did Gregson cancel his order of the cow because he got the milk for free?

* First Wilde, now Byron — the Dowager shivving major literary figures left and right!

* “Nobody cares about anything as much as you do. ha ha! haha! hahaha!” I haven’t said this in a while, but Lady Violet laughing at her own jokes is the best thing about Lady Violet. I find myself hoping Maggie Smith came up with that on her own.

* Right, okay, so Thomas’s maid is gonna kill ’em with kindness. So much for my theory last season that Thomas was going to find that acting friendly opened enough doors for him that being friendly would be easier to do than not.

* Uh-oh, Edith at the doc. Whatever could the matter be?

* Evelyn Napier’s back! I…don’t know why I got so excited about that, either.

* “The sight of me is torture for her which is torture for me.” Trill shit.

* Very long shot of Bates crying. Man, that was tough. But…I don’t know, Bates is not a character who lends himself to existential terror. Discovering that the woman whose love defines your whole life wants nothing to do with you and won’t tell you why would be horrifying, but his decency and stoicism, and Brendan Coyle’s performance of same, doesn’t allow for plumbing those depths.

* “I don’t want to lose you, Tom.” And with that line, the show at last acknowledges the way that, intentionally or not, it threw the entire weight of its storytelling mechanism behind shipping Lady Mary and Tom Branson, like I don’t think any show has ever done before. That they’ve taken it nowhere up until this point speaks well for Julian Fellowes, in much the same way that taking his time with Mary and Matthew — making them not star-crossed, but simply incompatible, for various reasons, for two full seasons — spoke well for him.

* Here’s what I don’t get about Anna and Bates. Bates finds out Anna was raped. He’s very kind and thoughtful about it, you know, after prying and whatnot, with the exception of declaring of the rapist “he’s a dead man.” Anna’s panic about this exact reaction turns out to have been borne out. But much of their ensuing conversation revolves around how Bates will basically do anything for Anna because she walks on water to him. If she said “John, listen, I know you’re angry, but if you kill this man and go to jail it will kill me, too, so I need your word that you won’t do anything, because it would hurt me terribly,” he’d agree, right? At least as far as the show’s calculus regarding this couple would dictate?

* “You are made higher to me, and holier, because of the suffering that you’ve been put through.” Whoa. That’s…whoa. That’s romance as Christian martyrdom. That’s Bates and Anna, I guess.

* Oh right the footman tried to be a chef.

Below are links to all my extant writing about Battlestar Galactica. (As was the case with Lost, much of the writing I did about this show was done for my old dayjob at Wizard Magazine and has been lost to countless website revamps and ownership changes.) I hope you enjoy it!

Episode 4.0.1-2: Razor
Episode 4.0.3-10
Episode 4.0.11-12
Episode 4.0.12 extra
Episode 4.5.1: Sometimes a Great Notion
Episode 4.5.2: A Disquiet Follows My Soul
Episode 4.5.3: The Oath
Episode 4.5.4: Blood on the Scales
Episode 4.5.5: No Exit
Episode 4.5.6: Deadlock
Episode 4.5.7: Someone to Watch Over Me
Episode 4.5.8: Islanded in a Stream of Stars
Episode 4.5.9: Daybreak Part 1
Episode 4.5.10: Daybreak Parts 2 & 3
Episode 4.5.10 [continued]
Battlestar Galactica: The Plan
Episode 4.5.10 bonus: Lost vs. Battlestar Galactica: The battle of the finales
Caprica Episode 1.1
Caprica Episodes 1.2-6

I have a lot of tumblrs and it occurs to me I may not have mentioned some over here of them in a while, if ever. So here they all are.

The True Black is where I post comics I wrote.

All Leather Must Be Boiled is where I write about A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones.

Bowie Loves Beyoncé is where I post pictures of David Bowie and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.

Superheroes Lose is where I post pictures of defeated superheroes.

Cool Practice is where I write about the intersection between music and “coolness.”

Badge is where I post about police brutality/overreach/overkill in the United States.

Comics Democracy is where I reblog comics with over 10,000 tumblr notes.

Fuck Yeah, T-Shirts is where I post pictures of good t-shirts and the people who wear them.

Additionally I created two tumblrs to host things I wrote at my former dayjob: this one contains all my webcomics-related writing, and this one contains all my writing about genre culture I was interested in as a kid.

* Anna a woman alone, isolated against the sky outside the Abbey. Why subtle when you can spectacle?

* “I always think there’s something rather foreign about high spirits at breakfast.” Tell me about it, Lady Violet.

* The relationship between Isobel and the Doctor is one of my favorites on the show because of its politesse. “I’ll think about it,” she says of one of his attempts to persuade her back into business as a health advocate at the hospital. Then she adds “I will — I promise.” A promise to him and to her. lovely.

* “Don’t be transparent, Mama. It doesn’t suit you.” Throughout this episode Lady Mary’s Dowager comes out.

* Wait, Branson slept with thirsty maid? How did I miss that? Oh, right, the rape scene.

* “I am already full of regrets. There is nothing but regret in me.” The Irish can be exceedingly bleak. No, seriously, fabulous line. This is a well-written show, if you like to hear complex sentiments elegantly expressed, which I do.

* “It’s immoral to react in such a jealous and selfish way.” “If we only had moral thoughts, what would the poor churchmen find to do?” You see what I’m saying? That’s a funny Dowager line, but it’s also an exchange in which Isobel isolates and upbraids an emotion inside her she dislikes but feels nonetheless. You really don’t get that on TV very often — everyone’s either straightforward or deceitful. Few people are at the usual low-grade war with themselves that we all are.

* “I hope you find a way to make friends with the world again.”

* “Being a family means welcoming new members, isn’t that right Braithwaite.” Lady Cora can always be counted on for all-too-apt obliviousness.

* Say what you will about the conservatism of Downton Abbey and Julian Fellowes, but having Lord Robert refer to having doctors’ offices outside of hospitals as potentially creating “a nation of hypochondriacs” is not meant to make this position sympathetic.

* “Ivy moves so fast for a beginner, don’t she?” It’s fun to see Daisy take a crack at someone, but I still just could not care less about this footman/kitchen maid love quadrangle.

* “The woman you loved loved you.” “But it doesn’t change anything.” “It changes you, from where I’m looking.” Again, a complex set of ideas about interpersonal relationships expressed elegantly. And by Hughes and Carson, no less!

* An exception to this rule, and to my ears an appropriate one, is the bluntness with which Anna describes how being raped makes her feel, which of course is where this episode, and the season, and possibly the series, was going to rise and fall. “I’m not good enough for him. Because I think I must have somehow made it happen. I feel dirty. I’m soiled.” These are concepts that we learn about, if we’re lucky, in books and articles and essays designed to introduce them only to tell us “no, this isn’t true.” But Anna doesn’t have that. She can’t, and doesn’t need to, come up with some mellifluous way to reinvent the wheel about these feelings. She just comes out and says them. Mrs. Hughes tries her best to bat them down, but they’re snubnosed and strong.

* “Better a broken heart than a broken neck.” Perhaps Anna’s focus on Bates’s reaction is designed to show us her side of their mutual selflessness. Perhaps it’s designed to indicate she’s more comfortable worrying about him than she is dealing with how she feels about what happened to her. I think either is valid.

* Gillingham’s alright I guess.

* What a weird voice on that jazz singer!

* Cousin Rose dancing with a……………………

* LOL, leave it to the Irishman to punch downward in the social standings! This is as depressing here as it ever is.

* “I will find out” sez Bates. This is…less than romantic, dude!

* “Jeez, Mrs. Hughes.” That’s what my notes said, and I’m not sure why. But boy, is she a mover and a shaker this season! Oh wait, now I remember, it’s that Branson went right to her, of all people, to confess his dalliance, which I’m still not sure happened or not. Tom, she’s got enough on her plate right now.

* Gillingham pops the question after a whirlwind four-day courtship. “He’s dead, and I’m alive.” This is…less than romantic, dude!

* “You fill my brain.” Okay, that’s better.

* “You’re very persuasive.” “Then be persuaded.” Even warmer!

* “Take as long as you need.” Oh brother.

* Wow, Mrs. Hughes is Sherlock Holmes!

* “You can’t force me,” sez Edna of taking some kind of primitive pregnancy exam. Oh yes I can, says Mrs. Hughes. This is a troubling conversation to have given the concurrent rape storyline.

* Edna’s out, much to my surprise. This show moves quicker than Ivy!

* Edna reads Thomas, and vice versa. Glorious.

* “Edith’s about as mysterious as a bucket.” Lady Mary out-Dowagers the Dowager!

* “I don’t dislike him.” “Ooh, what a recommendation.” Violet on the comeback trail!

* Whoa, Edith and Gregson getting their fuck on!!!!

* “It’s good for you to be reminded you once had a heart, and it’s to reassure the staff that you belong to the human race.” IS THAT MRS. HUGHES’ ENTRANCE THEME I HEAR?

* “The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end, that’s all there is.” -Carson. Again, this is a very well-written show! And this may be close to its raison d’etre?

* Glad to see a Robert/Bates scene. “My goodness, that was strong talk for an Englishman.” Bon mots for everyone!

* “Matthew fills mine, still, and I don’t want to be without him. Not yet.” Lady Mary letting Gillingham down relatively easy, given the stridency of his “he’s dead and I’m alive.”

* “I’ll never love again as I love you in this moment, and I must have something to remember.” Yes, it’s been quite a long weekend!

* On the other hand, Kissing someone you know you will not be with, just to feel good? Ah, that’s romantic as hell. Erotic, even.

* Jesus the sunlight on their silhouettes after Mary jilts Tony, talking to Tom and Robert in the foyer, goddamn. And then Rosamund and Edith, streaks of red against dark color, sitting in that room. This show is a marvel to look at and listen to.

* “You may find yourself feeling very sorry later” says Rosamund to Edith regarding sleeping with Gregson. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Is this why we had Tom and Edna’s short-lived pregnancy storyline — for foreshadowing?

On the list of True Detective‘s influences and inspirations, I’m guessing This Is Spinal Tap doesn’t even crack the top 200. I mean, the mother of all mockumentaries presents occultism and alcoholism as basically awesome instead of corrosive to the soul, and nobody dies a horrible untimely death. (Well, unless you count the drummers, and it’s not like the band does.) Yet in watching this second episode of HBO’s instant-hit crime drama, two quotes from Tap played on a constant loop in my head. (And no, despite Alexandra Daddario’s nude scene, neither was from “Sex Farm.”)

The first comes when the band is presented with the heavily censored album cover for their magnum opus Smell the Glove: “There’s something about this that’s so black,” says guitarist/philospher Nigel Tufnel, “it’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.” That sentiment is inescapable practically every time Matthew McConaughey’s depressive Detective Rust Cohle opens his mouth – never more so than when he explains to Gilbough and Papania, the detectives interviewing him about a mysterious copycat killing in the present day, the lessons he took from the death of his two-year-old daughter. “I think of the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this…meat. To force a life into this thresher. As to my daughter, she spared me the sin of being a father.” This is the most profoundly nihilistic TV-drama dialogue since the starmaking debut of Richard Harrow on HBO’s frequently equally bleak Boardwalk Empire, during which he explained to his newfound friend Jimmy Darmody how the trenches of World War I cured him of his love of reading: “It occurred to me: the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don’t.”

What’s more, Rust has just revealed that his history as a cop involves committing murder — the execution of a junkie who’d dosed his infant with crystal meth, a killing that doomed Rust to a lengthy deep-cover narco stint, a shooting, and the psych ward. It was only calling in the various favors owed him by Texas police – no doubt for other, undisclosed dirty deeds on their behalf – that enabled him to secure a supposedly sanity-preserving gig as a homicide detective here in Louisiana. Cohle even got some visually stunning acid flashbacks and hallucinations as a parting gift. Dude makes Vic Mackey look like Joe Friday.

Which is where the second quote comes in: “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.” C’mon, True Detective, you’re laying it on a little thick here, aren’t you? Rust’s an alcoholic insomniac pill-popping flash-backing divorced institutionalized murderer with a dead daughter? Was there some kind of “sad backstory bingo” being played in the writers’ room? And was it played before or after the round involving cop-show clichés? If the angry captain, the disapproving father-in-law, and the hooker with a heart of gold had a single line of dialogue between them you couldn’t predict a split-second before they said it, like Bill Murray playing Jeopardy! in Groundhog Day, you may want to have some neurological testing done.

And it’s not like Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart fares a whole lot better. About the only thing saving his adultery storyline from the seen-it-all-before file is how berserk over-the-top it gets, from a nude scene that feels gloriously gratuitous even when Daddario’s character Lisa is still wearing her polo shirt to a locker-room confrontation in which Cohle threatens to break his hands during a dispute over the precise odor of the vaginal secretions on his face. Even the case itself, with its big, Hollywoodified crime scenes and Gothy defaced churches, comes across like something you’d see in a ho-hum Batman comic trying too hard to be creepy.

Yet in much the same way that Marty keeps telling his interrogators that Rust, for all his faults and quirks, was still a damn good detective, there’s something that seems solid under True Detective‘s bleak bluster. For one thing, its pacing is downright perverse, and I mean that in the best way. We don’t find out about Rust’s bloody record as some big last-minute reveal – he just drops it in casually about halfway through the episode, in an interrogation scene we’re witnessing through a videocamera. Similarly, we know all sorts of things about how the 1995 case plays out – they rescue a bunch of girls in the woods, they catch the killer, they work happily as partners for another seven years – that your average show would treat like season-ending payoffs. By continuously telling us where it’s going, way way before we’d expect to find out, True Detective ironically makes itself much tougher to predict.

Then there are the character dynamics around which you’d expect a show with the star power of McConaughey and Harrelson to revolve – subtle, sharp, and engaging. One moment, Marty can shake his head in disbelief and disgust over Rust saying he has no idea whether his own mother is alive; the next, he can react with genuine sympathy and sadness when he finds out Rust lost his daughter in a car accident, a trauma he triggered by obliviously inviting the guy over for a family dinner. You can see  the roots of their solid partnership and its eventual dissolution.

Writer Nic Pizzolatto and director Cary Joji Fukunaga are also quietly telegraphing the team’s relative effectiveness as cops. Today, Marty seems much more together than Rust – he’s a blowhard, yeah, but he stuck with the system and rode it into a successful retirement, and he’s being given star treatment as a witness while Rust’s relegated to some wood-paneled file room. But take note: Marty’s a full episode behind his former partner in figuring out that the detectives interrogating them are trying to “jam someone up.” He also seems not to be fully aware some of Rust’s dark spots: “Rust had about as sharp an eye for weakness as I’ve ever seen,” Marty relates, which is true as far as it goes, but a funny thing to say about a guy who’ll get information out of people by beating them with toolboxes. That’s a weakness, I guess, sure!

Of course, it’s also possible Marty’s covering up for Rust, trying to pull one over on Gilbough and Papania – which leads to a mystery I’m more intrigued by than the Yellow King and his antler-wearing victims. In a series called True Detective, which is so far delving hella deep into the foibles of the two cops who could conceivably be its title character, is a similar dynamic going to play out between the two detectives who are working their case in the here and now? Do either of these guys carry with them secrets like Rust’s, resentments like Marty’s? Do any of the four have anything to do with the killings they’re all ostensibly trying to solve? Throw in a slight but palpable sense of the hurricanes that have haunted the region (Rita destroyed the original casefiles; Andrew shut down the school where a missing girl once went), and a series of striking visuals (a night drive that wouldn’t look out of place in a Ryan Gosling movie; a contrast between the burned-out church and the birds, trains, and clouds that keep on gliding past it, leaving its sins hidden) and the blend’s still a heady one. Maybe that angry captain had it right: I’ll give True Detective a few more weeks, but goddammit, they’d better deliever.

I reviewed the series premiere of HBO’s new anthology-format crime drama True Detective for Rolling Stone. It’s the Spin̈al Tap album cover of hourlong quality dramas — NONE MORE BLACK — but Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson are awfully watchable in it. I’m not sure that’s enough at this point, but we’ll see.

I reviewed tonight’s Downton Abbey for Rolling Stone. That was a disturbing episode. Can a show like this take the weight? That’s what I try to figure out.

Back in black: I reviewed the Season Four premiere of Downton Abbey for Rolling Stone. I enjoy writing about this show a great deal.

Over at Rolling Stone I ask exactly that. Excited to be covering the show for RS again this season.