In The Rain‘s storytelling arsenal, group dynamics are its secret weapon. Netflix’s consistently surprising (is that an oxymoron? oh well) post-apocalyptic drama treats its band of six (previously seven) thrown-together young adults not as a collection of types, but as people, capable of making their own decisions but shaped by the response of the group around them, both individually and collectively. Turns out the best way to show off that skill is to focus an episode on the one person who doesn’t fit.

I reviewed episode six of The Rain for Decider. Sexy and sad.

Some shows don’t know their own strengths. Westworld, for example, is the best example of this phenomenon on the air right now. Its creators took Michael Crichton’s old sci-fi horror concept and ported it to a modern-day prestige-TV landscape where they could play up the sex and violence all they wanted, while still having the breathing room to depict the robotic theme-park attractions’ burgeoning self-awareness so slowly that entire scenes can pass featuring completely realistic conversations between “characters” who have no idea their every thought, word, and deed has been preprogrammed. The pulp thrills are right there for the taking; so is the (as far as I can tell) unprecedented experience of watching a work of fiction in which the heroes start out from a position where their interactions no more “real” than your iPhone connecting to your car via Bluetooth. And what does Westworld do? Bury both the juicy and heady stuff in boring puzzle-box narratives, pointlessly shifting timelines, and long boring conversations about What It Means To Be Human—a perennial thematic non-starter, given that all of us have a pretty good idea of what that means every time we wake up in the morning, thanks. There’s a fine show in there, but the show itself doesn’t know it.

The Rain is the anti-Westworld. As its fifth episode (“Have Faith”) amply demonstrates, it knows where its bread is buttered: in the faces and emotions of its cast of characters as they face a horrific world in which only connecting with each other keeps them afloat, and in racing through a series of post-apocalyptic tropes at a pace brisk enough to keep them feeling fresh while making each deviation from the expected path a genuine surprise rather than a “twist” so painstakingly telegraphed that redditors could figure it out months in advance and call it a day.

I reviewed episode five of The Rain for Decider. This one took a tried-and-true staple of post-apocalyptic narratives — the colony of seemingly well-meaning survivors who maybe aren’t so well-meaning — and made something new out of it.

The first bloodbath takes place offscreen. By the time the episode begins it’s already over, in fact. Goaded into brutal action by the lies of Cornelius Hickey, the crew of the Terror and the Erebus have shot five Netsilik men, women, and children to death, adding their bodies to the pile of two already assembled by Hickey himself. After witnessing the savagery with which he assaulted Lieutenant Irving in order to instigate this attack in the last episode, not seeing the killing of the innocent people Hickey framed for that murder feels worse, somehow — worse still because it took place during a moment of genuine bonding, brotherhood, and love between once-rival captains Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames just a few miles away. There’s a dreadful finality to discovering, as they did upon their return to camp, that a crime against humanity is a fait accompli.

So begins one of The Terror’s tightest and tensest episodes. (Which is saying something, that’s for sure.) Indeed, “Terror Camp Clear” has the most straightforward, least spiderwebbed storyline of any installment so far. Written by creator and co-showrunner David Kajganich and directed by Tim Mielants, it takes advantage of the narrowing scope of the story, not to mention the dwindling cast of characters, by keeping the focus squarely on Mr. Hickey’s incipient mutiny, its confirmation by the officers and their trusted associates, and the attempt to put it down and punish its bloody-minded ringleaders. On a show about the slow, grinding, literally glacial nature of death in the arctic wastes, it’s the first time a race-against-the-clock atmosphere has taken hold, and it works beautifully for the contrast.

I reviewed episode eight of The Terror for the A.V. Club. This show is tremendous. So tight, smart, austere, and rooted in fear.

Tempered expectations can be a real blessing where TV drama is concerned. During the first three episodes of The Rain on Netflix, I’ve come to expect a well-acted, exciting, handsomely shot show about young people making their way through a rather lush post-apocalyptic hellscape, with the subgenre’s tendency for cruelty tempered by an appreciation of the value of sweetness and happiness as both the means and end of survival. That’s a long and labored way to say I think it’s pretty good and I’m having a good time watching it. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be reduced to tears sitting on my couch in the middle of the afternoon by the thing. And yet here we are.

I reviewed the very sad fourth episode of The Rain for Decider.

There’s no denying it now: “Billions” belongs in a special class of dramas — “The Americans,” “The Leftovers,” “Halt and Catch Fire” and even the era-defining “Breaking Bad” — that skyrocket upward in quality from one season to the next. In fact, I think the last of those is the best series with which we can compare “Billions” at this point. “Billions” is the new “Breaking Bad,” with white collars instead of blue meth.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Billions, which I think was the show’s best, for the New York Times.

Westworld frustrates because it doesn’t seem to recognize its own strengths. Hint: They don’t lie in lines of clichéd dialogue like “We ain’t so different, you and I,” or in raga-fied instrumental cover versions of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” (as heard in the opening sequence, ugh), or in a predictable cliffhanger in which a samurai attacks Maeve’s group when they arrive in Shogunworld. The whole point of the park it has the potential to be anything, but winds up being something awful, because that’s human nature. That’s rich territory to explore, but the show’s still wandering in circles.

I reviewed episode three of Westworld Season 2 (the one with India in it) for Rolling Stone. I think it’s pretty clear this is not going to turn into a good show, which makes its few flashes of…brilliance is way too strong a word, but interest, at least? more frustrating.

What a pleasant—and unpleasant—surprise Episode 3 of The Rain turned out to be. Set primarily in the devastated city of Copenhagen, where our band of seven survivors grows closer to one another while realizing just how far gone much of the rest of humanity has gotten, this installment both embraces the tropes of post-apocalyptic life-on-the-road narratives and thoughtfully avoids many of the pitfalls that plague such stories. It proves that the series is capable of facing ugly truths about human nature without functioning as a backdoor endorsement of that ugliness—all with a running time of just 36 minutes and change.

I reviewed episode three of The Rain for Decider. Here’s where the show really started to impress me.

The first episode of The Rain was 46 minutes long. This one is a cool 37. In the words of Tuco Salamanca, tight tight tight! Narrative economy is at a premium in this day and age, whether it’s the end of days or not. And if the show’s second installment lacks the premiere’s breathless pacing, at least it doesn’t overstay its welcome as it slows things down.

The problem facing the series at this stage in its eight-episode opening season is pretty straightforward. Now that it’s established its rain-delivered armageddon, cemented the roles of its protagonists Simone and Rasmus in its creation and possible cure, and (most importantly) abandoned the little underground world of two that made their situation so unique, can it still hold our interest as it retreads the familiar ground of so many post-apocalyptic stories before it?

I reviewed the second episode of The Rain for Decider. It’s the shakiest, insofar as it has to go through all the usual maneuvers described above, but I was impressed by how un–Walking Dead it managed to be nonetheless.

Written by series co-creator Jannik Tai Mosholt and directed by Kenneth Kainz, The Rain’s series premiere is the most breakneck work of sci-fi worldbuilding I’ve seen since the pilot episode of Lost. It’s a smart play. The high-speed opening distinguishes the show not only from the usual Netflix-bloat pacing problems, but also from the traditional way in which post-apocalyptic narratives dole out information about the stakes and the threat a little bit at a time. The show seems to assume that yeah, we’re familiar with how these kinds of stories operate, and we can dispense with the formalities and get right into the good stuff.

I reviewed the first episode of The Rain, Netflix’s surprisingly good new Danish post-apocalyptic drama, for Decider. Much more on this show to come.

Let’s talk about silence. I mean, the Jennings family certainly does this week, and how can we go wrong following their example? Elizabeth discusses it in the context of Rififi, the classic French crime movie by blacklisted American director Jules Dassin. She watches the film in an attempt to ingratiate herself with one Jackson Barber, a handsome young film buff who works for Senator Sam Nunn, a key player in the arms-reduction negotiations she’s spent the season trying to undermine. The movie features a heist sequence that clocks in at something close to half an hour without a single word spoken. You can see how this would appeal to Elizabeth, who knows how these kinds of things work—and to The Americans, which has worked out so well in large part by following in its footsteps.

Elizabeth talks about silence again with her son Henry, in a painful phone conversation the pleasantries of which reveal long-standing estrangement between her and the child she didn’t bother recruiting. Henry complains about having to read Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s treatise on the virtues of quiet contemplation. “It’s important literature, apparently,” he verbally eye-rolls; critics of this show’s slow-burn approach no doubt know how he feels.

Yet Henry picks up on something hidden inside Elizabeth’s strategic silences: pain that she’s struggling, in vain, to cloak in small talk. “She was asking about school and the weather,” he tells his father Philip about the call. “It was weird, because she doesn’t really call me? We barely ever talk, but all of a sudden she’s calling from a business trip and asking me about English class.” He concludes with a casual observation that hits her husband like a Mack truck: “I don’t understand why she’s so unhappy.” She never said a word to that effect, bur her silence spoke volumes.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The Americans (from a couple weeks back) for Decider.

Moment 20 | Tywin’s Heirs

Tywin Lannister only has two sons, one of whom is sworn to the Kingsguard and the other of whom he hates. Why has he never attempted to father more heirs? That’s the question facing Sean & Stefan in the latest BLAM mini-podcast, available exclusively for our $2-and-up Patreon subscribers. The answers involve both in-story considerations and the meta-quirks of writing. Sean is also forced to say the words “the old Tywin two-pump,” so there’s that to look forward to. Click here, subscribe, and enjoy!

(Click here to purchase this episode’s theme song.)

Julia Gfrörer has launched a new collection of t-shirts and other garments and items called Choleria, featuring some of her favorite medieval and early modern prints. The store is also full of information on the meaning, context, and artist behind each design. Go.

SPOILER WARNING

“Horrible From Supper” is the latest exercise in crystalline near-perfection from The Terror, written by Andres Fischer-Centeno and directed by Tim Mielants (who’ll be helming the remaining three episodes as well). If you’re reading this fresh from watching the episode, Mr. Hickey’s murderous dementia at the episode’s climax is no doubt lodged in your head like a knife (sorry). Rightly so. Like the death of Sir John Franklin earlier in the season, this is one of the most singular and memorable outbreaks of violence on television I’ve seen in a very long time. The staging and buildup are impeccable, with Hickey leading a fellow member of his hunting party off to his death in the far background while their commander, Lt. John Irving, receives potentially life-saving sustenance from a group of Netsilik travelers, his back to the danger behind him. It’s not merely the murder that shocks, it’s Hickey’s demeanor: First found crouched over the body of his victim, he leaps up shirtless and wild, stabs Irving over and over like something straight out of a true-crime podcast, then crouches and gazes around with an unintelligible mix of ecstasy and wariness in his eyes. The music, by the late composer Marcus Fjellström (god what a loss that is), uses clanging bells and distorted vocal samples; it’s dissonant and off to the point of being hard to listen to, like being trapped with a murderer inside the coda to “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The buzzing, clanging music and Hickey’s mannerisms evoked a similarly awful scene from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; the running figure of Lt. Irving combined with Fjellström’s core reminded me of an inverted Unedited Footage of a Bear (which, if you haven’t seen it before, hoo boy); the beach-like setting gave me flashbacks to a scene from Under the Skin that bothers me so much I’m not even going to link to it. But the overall effect is so rooted in the strength of Adam Nagaitis’ deceptive performance as Hickey, the wide-open gray-white void of the landscape as captured by Mielants and cinematographer Frank van den Eeden, and the decision to cut out the sound of the act itself, that the overall effect is utterly unique. The brief coda that follows, in which the Hickey we’ve come to know and love first boards the ship and it becomes clear he’s killed the real Hickey and stolen his place, hit me like the second shot of a double-tap execution.

I reviewed last night’s fantastic episode of The Terror for the A.V. Club.

Monsters

Unleash the kraken! And the dragon, and the Other, and the wight, and the giant, and the direwolf, and the FrankenGregor, and the giant turtle, et cetera. Sean and Stefan tackle the monsters of Ice and Fire — the ones that aren’t human, we mean — and their roles in the setting, the narrative, and the overall project of ASoIaF. Consider it our Walpurgisnacht Special!

DOWNLOAD EPISODE 74

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When I asked critic Sean T. Collins about Completely Unnecessary Travel, he cited Hulu’s The Path as another egregious offender. “Virtually every scene was someone just popping over to someone else’s place, often [requiring] a multiple-hour drive, to have an angry confrontation that lasts a minute,” Collins said. Tom Hardy’s Taboo also falls into the trap. As the critic described to me: “Hardy’s character would walk through waist-deep London horseshit just to grumble at someone he was pissed at for as long as it takes to sing ‘God Save the King’ and then split.”

Did things used to be this way? Perhaps as television has gotten more ambitious, the CUT problem  has gotten worse. The major shows from the 1990s and early 2000s had strategies to prevent this type of conundrum. The friends on Friends lived near one another and had a coffee shop they frequented. The same is true of Seinfeld. The women on Sex and the City visit each other’s apartments, but also meet at restaurants and make use of their landlines.

Smartphones present another challenge. As a 2016 article in The Verge on how TV shows and movies handled texting pointed out, as phone calls have been supplanted by various types of text messaging in everyday life, they’ve necessarily been phased out of entertainment, too. Even when phone calls weren’t out of date, they lacked a certain dynamism. Filmmakers are still searching for the right way to represent short-form written communication on screen. It doesn’t look right or feel right. Phones are difficult to dramatize. It is hard to act a text message.

There have been some novel solutions: The Mindy Project had their actors read texts out loud when the messages popped up, and it sorta-kinda worked and it sorta-kinda didn’t. There wasn’t much verve in their vocalizing.  On Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the characters just describe the text they’ve received to other characters. Jane the Virgin finds a middle ground, overlaying music with the sounds of keyboard clicks and letting viewers read the messages themselves. This is the most natural of all the options, but still leaves something to be desired.

The main problem seems to be that, all of the emotional drama of texting comes from the anticipation of getting a text, which comes from the passage of time. That’s even harder to represent in the space of a TV show.

So what are writers left with? “You can view it as an obstacle or an opportunity,” Collins said. “Filmmakers are always going to have a hard time resisting putting two actors in a room together, and rightfully so, since it’s where so much of the magic of live-action filmmaking and theater comes from.”

I spoke with Study Hall’s Bradley Babendir for his piece about a quirk of current TV drama: moving people unrealistic distances in order for them to have relatively brief conversations. It’s a fun article that attempts to figure out when this technique does and doesn’t get used by filmmakers productively. Check it out!

If there’s one place where we can come together in these divided times, surely it’s to appreciate a show that gives us opening scenes like the one this week: Axe and Wags, sitting at a table with cloth napkins draped over their heads, faces obscured, “for two reasons,” as Wags puts it: “to keep the aromas from escaping, and to hide this shameful and depraved act from God.”

“Well, if there were a God, I think He’d know,” comes Axe’s reply — in a room lit with enough candles to fuel a decent-sized pagan sacrifice. There’s no immediate explanation, no follow-up whatsoever until the final 15 minutes of the episode, but the tone is set for one of the best episodes of “Billions” in recent memory. It’s the simple pleasures that bind us, you know?

I reviewed last night’s fantastic episode of Billions for the New York Times. The tone is very different, but can absolutely put Billions in the same class as The Leftovers, Halt and Catch Fire, The Americans, and Breaking Bad (which started off fun but broad) in terms of shows that just skyrocketed upward qualitatively year over year.

That said, all the usual caveats apply. The return of Logan and Young William and the debut of James Delos add even more assholes to a cast of characters full to bursting with them. Despite the stamp of co-creator Jonathan Nolan and Mad Men vet Carly Wray, the script still tends toward the obvious (the predictable twist at the party, a too-cute bit that introduces the “doesn’t look like anything to me” catchphrase) and the clichéd (someone actually says “You have no idea what you’re up against”). The plotting is plodding, with one thing happening after another and no clear climax or standout sequence to point to.

And with the exception of a sprinkling of jokes, the tone is so unsmilingly serious that it feels like its parodying a Weekend Update Stefon bit: “This park has everything: unhappy robots, unhappy people, unhappy robots who think they’re unhappy people …” Like the characters, we’ve got a long road ahead of us before we reach our destination. If the show stays in this grim mode, it may not kill us to take that ride. But it won’t exactly thrill us, either.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Westworld for Rolling Stone. It’s not a good show, but the way in which it’s not good is mesmerizing. With both this review and the one I wrote for the premiere, I found myself doing a ton of beat-by-beat plot recapping, which I usually avoid, and wondered why. I came to the conclusion that it’s because the show is nothing but plot. The puzzlebox mysteries can’t be commented on without indulging in baseless speculation, the themes can all be encapsulated in a sentence or less, and there’s no poetry or rhytm; the show just morosely moseys along until it ends, week after week. Yet it’s never actively off-putting to watch, somehow. On twitter someone described it to me as watching a ballgame with no commentary and no real rooting interest in either team, which is as good a read on it as I’ve ever heard.

Can people change? The question drives many of the New Golden Age of Television’s greatest shows. Arguably it drives the New Golden Age of Television. To the extent that the medium’s rebirth coincides with the seismic upheavals in American life in the time period that stretches from 9/11 through the election of Barack Obama to the ascension of Donald Trump, the question may resonate because it’s so similar to the one we’ve been asking ourselves as a country for over half a generation.

Can people change? Different shows have come up with different answers. The Sopranos says no. Deadwood says yes, but at a cost. The Wire says the system prevents change, so “n/a.” Mad Men says yes, eventually. Breaking Bad (and its doom-laden prequel Better Call Saul) says yes, for the worse. The Walking Dead says yes, for the worse, and that’s good, which is why the show is bad.  Game of Thrones says we’d better fucking hope so.

Can people change? After watching “The Great Patriotic War” — an appropriate title for one of the most upsetting episodes of this series yet — I think The Americans is saying yes and no, simultaneously. Perhaps this, more than the simple fact of having co-ed co-protagonists, is its real innovation in the antihero genre. It’s telling two stories at once, chronicling two competing theories of the world. It’s its own cold war.

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Americans for Decider. I’m proud of what I was able to do with this review (and, in a different way, that headline).

To do character work this deft within a magisterially frightening set piece is impressive. For it to be just one such element among many is even more so. For all of it to come together in a sequence that symbolizes the entire story—grand plans laid disastrously low, or as the title of another harrowing work about the Franklin expedition puts it, Man Proposes, God Disposes—and for none of it to blunt the blow of all that death and fear in the slightest? That’s a mark of great horror, and that’s exactly what The Terror is.

I reviewed last week’s great episode of The Terror for the A.V. Club. This show improves upon the book in ways both large and small.

As drama, however, Westworld still needs a serious tune-up. Working off the first season’s template, co-showrunner Lisa Joy and her co-writer Robert Patino have once again created a world in which everyone’s an asshole and no one likes anyone else. Even aside from the actions of obvious villains like the Man in Black or Dolores – who kills hosts and humans alike if she feels they don’t fit into her grand plan – you’ve got Lee trying and failing to sell Maeve out to human security forces the first chance he gets; Maeve keeps him around and alive out of necessity, but that’s about it. Ditto her utilitarian affection for Hector: She’s got a kid to rescue, and she needs a gunslinger to do it. As for Miss Abernathy, her promise that she and Teddy will be together till the end apparently winds up floating belly-up alongside the poor cowboy himself.

On the human end of the spectrum, Sizemore and Charlotte react to the deaths of dozens, if not hundreds, of people primarily as an annoyance, both of them slipping back into their usual sleazy subroutines without missing a beat. Strand, the domineering Delos thug who “rescues” Bernard, treats everyone he meets like dirt; it’s enough to make you miss the as-yet unseen dirtbag Logan from Season One. Even the offsite company higher-ups are willing to let all their friends and financial backers die gruesome deaths until they get what they want; considering the real-world class solidarity among the One Percent, this is even harder to believe in than the existence of killer robots in cowboy outfits.

Whatever else it is, Westworld is a workplace drama. (The office may be overrun by rampaging androids and the drama mostly consists of dodging bullets and accessing robotic brains, but still.) If everyone we meet is a sarcastic creep who’d sacrifice everyone they know to achieve their goals, the workplace can’t function and the drama can’t engage or enlighten. For conflict to mean anything, there has to be some kind of genuine cooperation and affection for contrast. Unless and until that emerges, the guns of Westworld will never quite hit their marks.

I’m covering Westworld for Rolling Stone again this season, starting with my review of last night’s premiere. I think the best we can hope for is a bunch of cool gross violent shit to tide us over during long dull periods of dorm-room philosophy and people being dickheads, but I’d love to be wrong.