Throughout The Prisoner‘s many strange visits to the Village, the title sequence has remained comfortingly familiar. With its sound of thunder and spy-thriller soundtrack, the wordless depiction of Number Six’s resignation and abduction is a blast to watch, culminating with him rising from his forced slumber, looking out his front window, and seeing the Village for the first time. (And the episode title, too, which must be helpful for him.) Just like that, anyone tuning in for the first time knows the backstory.

Then comes the call-and-response voiceover face-off between Number Six and each episode’s Number Two. This part of the opening sequence sets up the show’s big mysteries in a handful of koanlike questions and mantralike answers. The ominous sight of Rover, the reveal of the new Number Two, Six raging at the sky while yelling “I am not a number, I am a free man!”, Two’s mocking laughter … it puts today’s “abstract substances coalesce and morph into various familiar things from the show you’re watching” trend to shame; that’s for sure. All told, those three minutes are one of The Prisoner‘s greatest achievements.

Naturally, they went and binned it. This is The Prisoner we’re talking about — a show that breaks every mold it can get its hands on, including its own. Even the credits are fair game. 

All of this is a long way to say that when this episode opens with a cowboy on horseback in the Wild West instead of a secret agent in a sports car in London, I cheered “Hot damn!” These magnificent bastards did it again!

I reviewed one of the most unusual episodes of The Prisoner for Pop Heist. Gift link!

I make nocturnally themed playlists as the Nightcrow that I love sharing with people. It’s pure vibesmithing. Here’s everything I’ve done so far. New stuff at the bottom! Happy listening, my creatures of the night!

NIGHT YACHT

Yacht rock and yacht rock adjacent music for a moonlit pleasure cruise

Apple Music | Spotify | Youtube

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NIGHT YACHT 2

A second soundtrack for romance and glamour at sea after sunset, in the key of yacht rock and its fellow voyagers

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

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NOW APPROACHING MIDNIGHT: AMERICAN TRIP-HOP

Hazy, smoky, sexy pre-millennium grooves from across hip-hop, r&b, and alternative, all made in the USA

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

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DOIN’ IT AFTER DARK: DISCO NIGHTS 1972-1981

Select classics from a nocturnal genre, more or less chronologically

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

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80s SEX BOT POP ROCKS

Mirror-shiny dance/rock/pop with an aggressive strut and a one track mind

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

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RETURN OF 80s SEX BOT POP ROCKS

More chrome-plated, hot-blooded dance/rock/pop classixxx

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

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UNCONTROLLABLE URGES: HORNY PUNK 1969-1983

Sweaty, desperate, down bad tracks that need it all through the night, from in & around the punk explosion

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

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STRIKE DEAR MISTRESS: SEXY GOTH 1967-1996

Sensual, sexual, romantic sounds to warm the cold dark

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

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WORDS ARE VERY UNNECESSARY: SEXY GOTH II 1967-1996

More songs from the shadows of love and lust

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

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WHEN ALL WE HAVE IS TWO: SEXY GOTH III 1997-2025

More sounds of the eternal twilight now

Apple Music | Spotify (alternate final track due to rights issues) | YouTube

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STRAIGHT ’98

Cool blue sounds from an era after hours

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

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NIGHT ARBY’S

Sensual. Wistful. Eternal. Dark is falling, you have taken the wrong exit, and you have parked here among the 20-year-old cars. Inside the light is a dim glow that seems to emanate from the beef-scented air itself. The patrons seem to share a secret, as if they know each other, and you. But you are hungry — yes, so hungry. Welcome to NIGHT ARBY’S, where the customer is, always. [Photo by R.J. White]

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

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SLIPPIN’ INTO DARKNESS: A NIGHT OF FUNK

A party starter, a sampler, a mothership connection to an evening on the one

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

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DIVE BAR GLAM

Music for a night of grit and glitter

Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube

In the new episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, the longest running GRRM/GoT/HotD podcast on the internet, Stefan and I continue our Best of ASOIAF series with the Battle of the Whispering Wood! I read the whole thing aloud! Available at our Patreon or wherever you find podcasts!

“Do you feel it? The air gone stale? The common people holding their breath, watching their neighbors’ door get kicked in?” When Captain Han Pritchard asks this of the wealthy nepo baby Toran Mallow (Cody Fern) and his “wife” — marriage is the latest trend; everything old is new again — Bayta (Synnøve Karlsen), he knows what their answer will be. They’re too rich, too callow, too comfortable to hear the sound of the jackboots. When the Black Tongue, the flagship vessel of the telepathic pirate warlord known as the Mule, hovers over their honeymoon spot, their only concern is that its shadow will prevent them from getting a tan. They don’t want something so insignificant as a coup interfering with their comforts.

Not to sound like a broken record in these reviews, but boy, does that feel familiar!

I reviewed this week’s Foundation for Decider.

Despite all his scheming and note-planting and trust-undermining, Six doesn’t really do anything to take Number Two down in this episode. He’s not actually a plant; he’s not actually working for a top-secret new commander; he’s not actually conspiring with any of the other Villagers on either side of the invisible cage bars. He’s just … there, solid and unyielding as ever. Through sheer implacability, he forces Number Two to bang and bang and bang away until there’s nothing left of him. In boxing, this is called rope-a-dope, and they’ve done it time and time again to Number Six. Turnabout is fair play.

Now, I’ve done a lot of research about this by now, and anywhere it’s discussed, a blacksmith will eventually chime in and point out that hammers damage anvils all the time. Anecdotal counterexamples aside, you get the idea, right? Compared to the solid mass of an anvil, a hammer’s as flimsy as a conductor’s baton. Bang that thing as hard as you can and you’re more likely to break the hammer, or even your own arm, than you are the anvil itself. And what is Number Two in the end if not a broken arm of the Village body? Control’s strength is finite, but defiance’s is not. Tyranny is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

I reviewed episode 12 of The Prisoner for Pop Heist. Gift link!

What can I say? The rom worked, the com worked, the Shakespeare/Austen happy wedding ending worked. I’d watch a second season about their married life in a heartbeat. It’s not Girls at all, but at no point did I expect it to be. It delivers on the promise of its opening moments: It gives Jessica her grand English love story, and it gives that to us too. 

I reviewed the finale of Too Much for Decider. It’s a funny, romantic show that makes great use of both its cast and its setting!

Will she head back to him, or is Lena Dunham going to give us a rom-com with an unhappy ending?

Beats me, man. People often forget that though Dunham’s own character on Girls, Hannah, got a bit of a grace note, the show’s verdict on its protagonists was bitingly cynical. I wouldn’t put it past her to craft a five-hour America-dreams-of-England rom-com with a down ending, even if it is based on the real-life happy ending she found with her own husband, the show’s co-creator Luis Felber. But I doubt it. I think we’re headed for a kind of anti-Girls, in which the creator of a show all about how grand young romances are dysfunctional and doomed throws her lot in with love, actually.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Too Much for Decider.

So the two angrily part ways in the night, a beautiful floodlit blackness as captured by Bravo’s camera. Assuming we’re headed for a happy ending, this isn’t the end of the road, but it’s something that’s just as important in its way: the first Big Fight, the first Close Call, after that first exchange of I Love Yous. You’ve put your heart on the line, you’ve staked a decent part of your life on it, and now you’re furious at each other. Do you work through it, or do you decide it’s a dealbreaker?

I reviewed the eighth episode of Too Much for Decider.

“Welcome to my filth!” So says a cheery Brother Day (Lee Pace), the absentee Emperor of the galaxy, to his predecessor/older brother/imperfect clone, Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann). He’s welcoming the aging avatar of Empire to his lovely villa, where he’s “playing poverty” with his beautiful lover (and drug dealer), Song (Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing). But Day — stupid, sexy, Christlike Day, with his bare chest and his oversized drug rug and his “Common People” decision to slum it — speaks for me as well. Foundation is extremely my shit. Welcome to my filth!

I reviewed the Season 3 premiere of Foundation for Decider. So glad this one’s back!

I’d like to get right down to it in this review, so I’m doing something uncharacteristic and including a content warning: If frank discussion of sexual abuse troubles you in a way you’re not up for at the moment, you can skip this one. Like I said, I’m gonna get right down to it.

Everyone alright? Okay. Well then:

One of the best things I’ve ever done in my life was tell the woman I love that I was sexually abused as a child. Doing so meant, among other things, that I was finally willing to tell this to myself, to admit to myself what had been done to me. Weird verb choice there, I realize: How do I admit to myself what was done to me? How does that work? How have I, the victim, done anything to admit? But that’s the kind of infuriating anti-logic abusers embed in your brain.

More than that, though, telling my wife about my abuse was, in its strange way, a major building block in our relationship. I forced myself to trust this woman with a terrible part of my life, because I had faith that she would handle me with care. When she did, which of course she did…well, the reward has been the healthiest romantic relationship of my life. And whatever else it is or does, Too Much is a romance in the end.

I reviewed episode 7 of Too Much for Decider.

It all comes full circle when she makes it to Polly’s and screams for Felix to come out to talk to her. (“There’s a bell,” he points out.) She invites him to move in, which he agrees to do — but from now on, she has to talk about her problems with him with him, not with her phone.

Now get this: That’s exactly what she does! We catch up with them some time later at her apartment, where she’s just wrapping up telling him the whole Zev story. Her conclusion isn’t even “please tell me how bad that guy sucked,” it’s “please understand this my instincts are so screwy because I have all this bottled-up anger at him with no place to go but the wrong directions.”

I reviewed episode six of Too Much for Decider.

When Jessica ends up needing an abortion after a “look how spontaneous I’m being” fling with a production assistant at her latest gig, she finally decides to break things off with Zev. She outlines her reasons in a speech that actor Megan Stalter seems to bring forth from her bile ducts somewhere, with a clarity about who he is and what he’s done that’s hugely gratifying to hear after watching this poor woman get the shit kicked out of her for 20 or 30 minutes. “You just want to beat me into submission,” she says, accurately. “Maybe not with your fists, but with your words, and your lack of love.” She’s got him dead to rights. But she still affords him the grace of an opportunity to tell her he still loves her. The door is still open, if just a crack.

Zev slams it shut as hard as he possibly can. After first flipping the script so that it’s Jessica, not himself, who kept the other person trapped in a relationship she didn’t want, he says sure, it’s possible he’s made her feel as lonely as she claims to feel. But there’s an alternate explanation that he prefers: “At the root of it all, you really are just a fucking cunt.” The crooked-mouthed, open-jawed look of combined horror, sadness, fury, disgust, and terrible clarity that comes over Jessica’s face when she hears this shocking statement is Stalter’s finest moment on the show so far.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Too Much for Decider.

This is the surprisingly humane and complex note on which Murderbot ends. This is what sci-fi on television can be: a simple idea, staged in a vividly imagined universe, executed with skill at delivering both the expected thrills and the unexpected complications.

I reviewed the season finale of Murderbot, happily already renewed for a second season, for Decider. People seemed to have gotten a kick out of these reviews — thank you for reading!

The vast majority of this episode is like a good crazy-party episode of any comedy you’d care to name, from Woody’s wedding on Cheers to Pam feeling God in this Chili’s tonight on The Office to, well, more rich-asshole-party-based dramedy episodes than I could possibly list. And since every single person in the cast is a funny actor in a funny role, guess what? It’s funny! It’s wall to wall good bits, like Boss explaining to Felix that he was avoiding eye contact because he prefers to avoid eye contact with people he might have sex with, or Jessica slurring “Icanhaveadrink onceinawhile,” or Ann talking about how her dog was there for her during “Jonno’s emotional affair with Kylie Minogue.” (“What happened to her?” “She became like a sister.” “No, I mean, like, your dog.”) You’ve got some rom, you’ve got some com. No complaints here!

I reviewed episode four of Too Much for Decider.

The Prisoner is, no pun intended, a number of things. It’s both colorful episodic sci-fi and a bleak, Kafkaesque parable of persecution. It’s a work of dreamlike surrealism and an extended riff on swinging ’60s super-spy shows. And it’s a dystopia in miniature, its setting an eerily idyllic open-air prison instead of a gigantic closed society. Of course, at least one Number Two has suggested that the endgame for all of this can be summed up as “Today the Village, tomorrow the world.”

Of all the episodes we’ve watched, “A Change of Mind” is the one in which actor-auteur Patrick McGoohan — who once again directs under his “Joseph Serf” pseudonym — seems engaged most directly with the mid-20th century’s dystopian landmarks. Orwell’s 1984 looms large, of course, as it long has: faces of authority looming down from sloganeering posters, captives reconditioned to love their tormenters, a reassuring face replacing an image of terror in compulsory film viewing, even the  Winston/O’Brien relationship between Number Six and several of the Number Twos. 

The use of drugs and aversion therapy to induce reflexive compliance and nonviolence, meanwhile, is straight out of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, published five years prior. The show predates Stanley Kubrick’s infamous and stylistically influential adaptation of the novel and anticipates the director’s aesthetic approach, from its costumed droogs to its combined movie theater/torture chamber.

But McGoohan’s also firing live ammo here. Under the new Number Two (John Sharp, whose roles in The Wicker Man and Barry Lyndon yield a significant Prisoner-fan Venn diagram overlap), the Village’s methods of bringing antisocial, inadequate, disharmonious, UNMUTUAL Villagers to heel recall any number of real-world oppressions: Soviet show trials, McCarthyite purges, Maoist self-criticism sessions, the vicious conformity of little England or small-town America. The term used in the episode for its science-fictional mind-wiping procedure, “social conversion,” carries bitter echoes of the persecution of queer kids in the decades to come.

I reviewed the eleventh episode of The Prisoner for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

More or less a two-hander other than the major cameos by Emily Ratajkowski and Kit Harington — I know, I know, that’s not a two-hander, but you get what I’m saying — this is an episode of fairly modest ambition. It’s a snapshot of a point in time for these two people. Writer-director Lena Dunham is using Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe, two charismatic and attractive actors with believable chemistry, to depict what it’s like to be so into your new significant other that you pull an all nighter to have sex four times. That’s a fun topic to take on, and together they do it well.

I reviewed episode three of Too Much for Decider.

All told, this is a very promising episode. As Kim and Boss, Janciza Bravo and Leo Reich waltz onto the screen as if Too Much is a show about them, not Jessica — the exact right energy for these characters, who are clearly the stars of the shows running perpetually in their own minds. Meanwhile, I love the way writer-director Lena Dunham gradually but unmistakably reveals that Felix, for all his kindness and warmth, is kind of a cad. For all that Jessica’s first two days in London have resembled one of her beloved Brit romances, she’s got a rockier road ahead of her than she realizes. I’m looking forward to watching her (and Megan Stalter, who’s a delight) rant and rave her way down it.

I reviewed the second episode of Too Much for Decider.

Lena Dunham is a fascinating talent. I’ve written that as this review’s first sentence fully expecting a number of readers to hit EJECT and bail right away. Let’s give them a minute.

Okay, they’re gone? Everyone else settled in? We’re good? Great. 

Now that we’re among friends, Lena Dunham is a fascinating talent. Girls, the only dramedy I’ve ever enjoyed, is as perfect a cringe-comedy portrait of Dunham’s age group and demimonde as Curb Your Enthusiasm is of Larry David’s; simply substitute fabulously wealthy middle-aged showbiz types from New York who now live in L.A. with liberal-arts college grads bumbling around Brooklyn trying to find themselves and/or get laid and you’re basically looking at the same show. Seriously, cue up an episode of Girls on HBO Max and mentally replace Michael Penn’s twee indie-guitar score with the familiar Curb stock music. Now do you get what she was doing?

Of course, Girls also frequently got serious, as dramedies do, and here’s where Dunham’s chops as a director come in. A tremendous chronicler of The City and life in it, she has an eye for beautifully lit street scenes and skylines and an ear for the kind of dialogue people regret shouting at each other in those streets once they’ve calmed down or sobered up. After you’ve finished Curb-ifying that episode of Girls, stay on the HBO app and watch the first episode of Industry: A showcase for Dunham’s talents as a director of both actors and images, it’s one of the best pilots ever made. Dunham did that!

So it was with considerable excitement that I cued up Too Much. Loosely based on Dunham’s own life and co-created with her British musician husband Luis Felber, it tells the story of a young American woman with a media job who moves to London and falls in love with a British musician. Hey, write what you know!

I’m covering Too Much, Lena Dunham’s fun new Netflix rom-com, for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.

Even if there isn’t much tension involved in the question of whether the title character, played by the show’s only marketable star, dies in the season one finale, there’s still just, y’know, the pleasures of watching Murderbot. Solid jokes, solid action, impressive gore, a clever spin on robotics and actual artificial intelligence, some cutaways to Murderbot’s stories, a monster or two maybe, and off-kilter romantic/sexual tension between just about everyone in the crew — that’s the Murderbot promise, and I see no reason why the finale won’t deliver.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Murderbot for Decider. It was delayed due to an inexplicable technical glitch, which seems appropriate.

It begins in silence, and in silence it stays. Other than some unintelligible radio chatter and a couple of lines barked in German, 19 minutes pass after Number Six proclaims “I am not a number, I am a free man!” at the end of the opening sequence before anyone utters a single word. The Village is deserted, so there’s no one there to speak. The boat which Six builds and sails to freedom, sails all the way back to England in fact, houses exactly one passenger, and he has nothing to say to himself. Six’s first line of dialogue — the episode’s first line in English — is a question, to a Roma traveler he encounters on a seaside cliff. It’s just three words and just three syllables: “Where is this?”

That is the question, Number Six. That is the question.

I reviewed the tenth episode of The Prisoner, the best yet, for Pop Heist. Gift link!