At some point during the eighth episode of Mad Dogs—I believe it was between when the bomb exploded and when the chihuahua got its throat cut—I got to thinking: This shit is hard. I don’t mean survival for Cobi, Joel, Gus, and Lex, mind you—I mean writing it. Like Breaking Bad and Fargo before it, Mad Dogs depends on a plot structure of interlocking catastrophes so intricate you’d practically need those robot arms they use to handle plutonium to pull it off. The go-to comparison is dominoes, with one thing falling on top of the next as everything speeds out of control, but that implies a linearity that doesn’t exist here. TV shows like this are like dominoes if and only if occasionally new dominoes spring up from the ground, or drop out of the sky, or materialize from space, or are fired from a drone piloted by the CIA. They’ve got to simultaneously maintain the tension of knowing something bad’s going to happen and wanting to avoid it, the suspense of not knowing something bad is going to happen but suspecting that it will, the shock of having something bad happen completely out of the blue, the plausibility that all these events could conceivably occur (within a TV show or movie, anyway) without knocking you out of the story with their ridiculousness, the raw mechanical skill to make the action plain entertaining, and the emotional stakes of protagonists and antagonists you enjoy watching, if not care about as people. Even to a writer who can see the wires, so to speak, pulling off this feat feels close to magic.

I reviewed episode 8 of Mad Dogs and wrote quite a bit about both the Breaking Bad model of constant-bad-shit-happening TV and the importance of a great villain to genre storytelling.

Remember those episodes of Breaking Bad where the show was less a story than a series of unfortunate events? The ones where no matter what Walt and Jesse tried to do, they were met with a neverending cascade of calamities, each one more unexpected than the last? Okay, yeah, that’s pretty much all the episodes of Breaking Bad. But it fits “Ice Cream,” the seventh ep of Mad Dogs, to a tee as well.

I reviewed episode 7 of Mad Dogs for Decider.

So here is Chamberlain, dining at Downton as have countless men and women before him—only to face a literal eruption of blood from a human body that no one there had predicted or planned for, except perhaps for the stomach ulcer responsible. Is there something being said here about the experience of the real Chamberlain, who believed he’d secured peace for the people of Europe, when he’d unwittingly handed a monster the knife he needed to slit the world’s throat? There’s more to the episode than this of course—Mary gets wind of Marigold’s true parentage, Edith falls in love while she and her new editor invent the thinkpiece, Tom helps Mary get closer to Henry the racecar driver (while, god willing, getting closer to her himself), Thomas and Andy have their rapprochement, Carson is a dick to Hughes, the adventures of Denker and Spratt continue, etc. But I’ll be thinking of the crimson river bursting out of Lord Robert, and how all Neville Chamberlain could do was watch.

I got unexpectedly, or maybe characteristically, worked up about the run-up to the Second World War in my review of this week’s Downton Abbey.

It’s impossible to overstate how refreshing it is to see neither BDSM nor the decision not to participate in it portrayed as a sign of pathology or a relationship in crisis. The Rhoadeses engage in kink for reasons that help them in their real lives, in their marriage, and (one presumes) in just plain getting off; when it looks like one or more of those elements won’t work out, they call it off, no harm no foul. Turning down sex needn’t be a line in the sand, a declaration that one person is right and the other person is wrong, a flashing red light that the romance is dying—it can simply mean you’d prefer to do something else, no big deal. This is a vital side of sexual consent that’s rarely portrayed, as is healthy kink. Who’d have guessed it’d come from this show? Billions has nothing but itself to blame for making that so surprising. There’s a fine line between sleaze and good, clean, smart smut. I’m hoping starts crossing that line in the right direction more regularly.

Why does Billions bury the smart things it has to say about sex under so much stupid? I investigate for the New York Observer.

Without the great Allison Tolman as a stabilizing and unifying presence, “Leslie,”Mad Dogs’ sixth installment, resumes its previously very, very heavily serialized model. As I’ve said before, the show’s episodes increasingly feel less like cohesive (if to-be-continued) units and more like fifty-plus minutes torn off at random from a ten-hour reel. Think of how different the first half of this ep, with its Outbreak/Contagion quarantine claustrophobia and paranoia, feels from the second, with Joel and Cobi cutting and running and communing with beatific locals and tourists they encounter along the way. You could have rolled the closing credits right in the middle and begun an entirely new episode for all their stylistic and thematic continuity.

I reviewed episode six of Mad Dogs for Decider, and had more thoughts about serialization and storytelling.