Beyond that, though, Roy’s nipple rings, weed habit, and kinky penchant for having his wife roleplay as women he wants to punish during sex could be seen as the show scoring some cheap points about right-wing hypocrisy. (Not that such shots don’t hit the mark.) But it could just as easily be seen as a depiction of how to men like Roy, this isn’t hypocrisy. Roy is free to do what he wants, and the people of Stark County are also free to do what he wants — the completely consistent conservative definition of freedom in a nutshell.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fargo for Decider.

It can be a cheap trick for a popcorn flick or its TV equivalent to mine real-world tragedy for pathos. It’s so easy for the relative tastelessness of that kind of entertainment, much as I love so much of it, to read as defilement of something that should be held sacred. When it goes wrong, it does so in spectacular fashion: Marvel attributing the authorship of Hiroshima to one of its Eternals, say, or Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” playing over the memorial for Emmett Till in Lovecraft Country. 

These are not accusations you can level at any project in the Godzilla franchise. Godzilla is inextricably linked to the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically, and to the threats of nuclear war and environmental devastation generally. So when the third episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters depicts a Japanese woman trying to physically stop the detonation of a nuclear bomb while screaming in terror and grief, all I can do is respect it. With a paraphrase of “My God, what have I done,” writer Andrew Colville and director Julian Holmes underline what’s really going on here, though they respect you enough to catch it without anyone bringing up Dr. Keiko Miura’s nationality. In this franchise, they shouldn’t have to.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch for Decider.

But the episode we get is a very good one. Once again, writer-director Hawley displays his facility for building tension and dread; the long take that includes the stabbing murder of Gator’s partner by Ole Munch feels endless, drawing out the sense that something terrible is going to happen before delivering on it. Jeff Russo’s score goes full horror movie in this scene as well, which helps immensely. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up my favorite homage in the episode: Jon Hamm getting out of the bath bare assed, à la Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Season 3. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so gander all you want.

I reviewed the second episode of Fargo Season 5 for Decider.

Two > > Three > One >> Four. There, that’s the extent to which we need to relitigate Noah Hawley’s Fargo. This love letter not just to the Coen Brothers’ 1996 black-comedy crime classic but to their entire oeuvre is getting to that M*A*S*H point where it’s funny to point out how it’s outlasted its inspiration, but along the way it has aired one truly great season of television, two merely terrific ones, and one that would have gone over a lot better had poor Chris Rock not been miscast as a crime boss. That’s an excellent track record from where I’m sitting, even before you factor in Hawley’s acuity with action sequences, tension and suspense, weird eruptions of uncanny horror, getting gangbusters work out of a slew of fantastic actors both with and without prior Coens experience, you name it. So what if Hawley, on whom I run hot and cold as a rule, is not Joel and Ethan fused into one new guy? Voguish or not, if Fargo is on, I’m watching. 

I reviewed the season premiere of Fargo for Decider. This season’s real good!

What a difference a dragon makes, huh? There’s a lot I find misjudged and misguided in Apple TV+‘s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters at this early stage, but they got at least this much right: They ended their two-episode series premiere with a huge berserk reptilian creature emerging from the wreck of a sunken World War II battleship that’s now on land for some reason. After all, this is not Monarch: Legacy of America’s Next Top Best Friend. There’s a promise the show makes with its very title, and it knows it has to deliver.

I’m not sure it’s delivering on much else at the moment, unfortunately. Once again written by co-developer and showrunner Chris Black and directed by Matt Shakman, this episode (“Departure”) is not, as I’d hoped, all delivery after the first episode’s setup. It’s basically more of the same.

I reviewed the second episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.

The MonsterVerse is a mixed bag. As an official welding together of the big screen’s two biggest giant-monster icons, Godzilla and King Kong, it mostly does what it needs to do, i.e. toss giant monsters at each other and get out of the way. But there’s a pretty wide range of quality in terms of the movies surrounding those monster fights. Kong: Skull Island is a charmingly berserk adventure-movie throwback, with a fun cast of memorable little characters. This puts it head and shoulders above the three Godzilla-led entries in the series, in which the characters range from inert to inane. But there are some truly awe-inspiring, almost cosmic monster visuals in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Godzilla vs. Kong has the lizard/ape action you crave. 

The biggest disappointment in the series is its opening entry, 2014’s Godzilla, for two reasons. First, it hides its monster effects by staging its fights at night, an annoying maneuver also employed by Pacific Rim. Second, it fails completely to deliver on the horror promised by the Bryan Cranston–heavy trailer (not least by killing off Bryan Cranston after the second reel). One of the reasons the subsequent entry, Kong, feels so strong is because it does just the opposite: It focuses squarely on its best actors, roots itself in horror with genuinely gruesome kills, and shows us its titans clashing in glorious broad daylight.

So there’s a template to be followed for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the new TV show set in the MonsterVerse — a set of Giant Radioactive Do’s and Don’t’s already established by the franchise. What approach will showrunner Chris Black, who developed the show with Matt Fraction, wind up taking?

I’m covering the new Godzilla TV show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider, starting with my review of the first episode. It has its moments.

It’s unlike me, but with Monarch I banked all the reviews I could in advance, so I’ve seen and reviewed the first eight episodes. My initial reviews won’t reflect it, but the show does get much better as it goes. The material centered on romance and on Godzilla himself is very strong by the end. The Russells are as good as you’d expect and Mari Yamamoto is really something.

Spectacle is the language through which art communicates when the vocabulary of the everyday fails us. Fantastic fiction, an inherent trafficker in the unreal, says as much through spectacle as any art form this side of musical theater, in which excesses of emotion transcend dialogue and emerge through the eruption of song and dance. That Act Two showstopper speaks to us (or rather sings to us) because we recognize what it is to be so in love; so enraged, so bereft, so drunk on the possibilities or vicissitudes of life that mere spoken words could never capture it. Only an explosion of sound and movement will do.

So it is with genre. The dragon, the android, and the vampire embody fears and dreams either too delicate or too overpowering for realism to express. Ratcheting up the scale and stakes of ideas and imagery like these to the level of spectacle renders them capable of handling even more intense feelings and fantasies. A trip beyond the infinite, a monumental horror-image like a wicker man aflame, a last terrible battle between good and evil: Such spectacles describe our desire and capacity as people to do things so great or terrible—or so great and terrible—that they stagger the mind.

Before they assayed updating a country’s biggest pop-cultural icon and helming the first large-scale battle on what was rapidly becoming television’s biggest show (respectively), Hideaki Anno and Neil Marshall were past masters of this technique. Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion pitted giant robots against increasingly bizarre godlike beings in battles that directly reflected the titanic scale of its protagonists’ adolescent angst. Marshall’s The Descent plumbed the depths of its heroine’s grief in a literal bloodbath.

Importantly, they each recognized the role of beauty in such spectacularly grim visions. From Anno’s awe-inspiring animated angels to the firelit scarlet of Marshall’s subterranean charnel pit, the gorgeousness of it complimented and enhanced the terror rather than canceling it out. Beauty is the sea salt in the caramel of horrific spectacle.

Both filmmakers applied these lessons to the biggest assignments in their careers. In 2012, “Blackwater,” his directorial debut on David Benioff & D.B. Weiss’s blockbuster fantasy series Game of Thrones, Marshall depicted the horror of war with an explosion that beggars anything seen on television before, and most of what has come since. In 2014, Anno and co-director Shinji Haguchi’s satirical but harrowing update Shin Godzilla destroyed Tokyo with an alien dispassion that reignited all the majesty and menace felt by filmgoers when the king of the kaiju first emerged decades earlier. And despite their differences, the techniques used by each to convey the magnitude of these unnatural disasters and the people they befell are strikingly similar.

I wrote about Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla, Neil Marshall’s “Blackwater” from Game of Thrones, and the horrible beauty of spectacular violence for Blood Knife.

Updated and expanded! A 100-song career retrospective, hitting every phase and album (plus select singles and collaborations), some more than others. My pride and joy. Listen on Apple Music!

1. Liza Jane [Davie Jones with the King Bees, single, 1964]
2. You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving [Davy Jones and the Lower Third, single, 1965]
3. I Dig Everything [single, 1966]
4. The London Boys [b-side of “Rubber Band,” 1966]
5. Love You Till Tuesday [David Bowie, 1967]
6. Space Oddity [David Bowie aka Space Oddity, 1969]
7. Memory of a Free Festival
8. The Width of a Circle [The Man Who Sold the World, 1970]
9. The Man Who Sold the World
10. Changes [Hunky Dory, 1971]
11. Oh! You Pretty Things
12. Life on Mars?
13. Queen Bitch
14. Velvet Goldmine [recorded during the Ziggy Stardust sessions, 1971; b-side of UK re-release of “Space Oddity,” 1975]
15. Five Years [The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972]
16. Moonage Daydream
17. Starman
18. Ziggy Stardust
19. Suffragette City
20. Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide
21. All the Young Dudes [Mott the Hoople, All the Young Dudes, 1972]
22. Satellite of Love [Lou Reed,Transformer, 1972]
23. John, I’m Only Dancing (Sax Version) [single, 1973]
24. Watch That Man [Aladdin Sane, 1973]
25. Drive-In Saturday
26. Cracked Actor
27. Panic in Detroit
28. Time
29. The Jean Genie
30. Hang on to Yourself [Live July 3, 1973; released on Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture, 1983]
31. Sorrow [Pin Ups, 1973]
32. Diamond Dogs [Diamond Dogs, 1974]
33. Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise) [edit, iSelect, 2008]
34. Rebel Rebel
35. 1984
36. Young Americans [Young Americans, 1975]
37. Can You Hear Me?
38. Fame
39. Station to Station [Station to Station, 1976]
40. Golden Years
41. TVC15
42. Stay
43. Breaking Glass [Low, 1977]
44. Sound and Vision
45. Always Crashing in the Same Car
46. Be My Wife
47. A New Career in a New Town
48. Subterraneans
49. Sister Midnight [Iggy Pop, The Idiot, 1977]
50. Nightclubbing
51. Lust for Life [Iggy Pop, Lust for Life, 1977]
52. Some Weird Sin
53. Beauty and the Beast [“Heroes”, 1977]
54. Joe the Lion
55. “Heroes”
56. The Secret Life of Arabia
57. D.J. [Lodger, 1979]
58. Look Back in Anger
59. Boys Keep Swinging
60. Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) [Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 1980]
61. Ashes to Ashes
62. Fashion
63. Under Pressure [Queen & David Bowie, single, 1981]
64. Remembering Marie A. [David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, 1982]
65. Cat People (Putting Out Fire) [from Cat People: Original Soundtrack, 1982]
66. Modern Love [Let’s Dance, 1983]
67. China Girl
68. Let’s Dance
69. Loving the Alien [Tonight, 1984]
70. Blue Jean
71. Dancing in the Street [David Bowie & Mick Jagger, 1985]
72. Absolute Beginners [from Absolute Beginners: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 1986]
73. Magic Dance [from Labyrinth, 1986]
74. Beat of Your Drum [Never Let Me Down, 1987]
75. Tin Machine [Tin Machine, Tin Machine, 1989]
76. You Belong in Rock & Roll [Tin Machine, Tin Machine II, 1991]
77. The Wedding [Black Tie White Noise, 1993]
78. Black Tie White Noise [feat. Al B. Sure!]
79. Buddha of Suburbia [The Buddha of Suburbia, 1993]
80. Strangers When We Meet
81. The Motel [Outside, 1995]
82. The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty)
83. I’m Deranged
84. Little Wonder [Earthling, 1997]
85. Battle for Britain (The Letter)
86. Dead Man Walking
87. I’m Afraid of Americans (V1) [remixed by Nine Inch Nails, single, 1997]
88. Thursday’s Child [‘hours…’, 1999]
89. The Dreamers
90. Toy (Your Turn to Drive) [Toy, recorded 2000, released 2021]
91. I Would Be Your Slave [Heathen, 2002]
92. 5:15 The Angels Have Gone
93. New Killer Star [Reality, 2003]
94. Never Get Old
95. Province [TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain, 2006]
96. The Next Day [The Next Day, 2013]
97. Dancing out in Space
98. Blackstar [Blackstar, 2016]
99. Lazarus
100. I Can’t Give Everything Away

(art by Brian Cunningham)

The demimondes depicted by the American master Martin Scorsese vary widely — his New York stories alone span three centuries — but they have one common requirement: It takes intelligence, of one kind or another, to navigate them. His protagonists are smart, street smart, shrewd, skillful or some combination of those qualities as a rule.

That rule is broken in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Normally, a character like Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) — a World War I veteran turned henchman in a plot to murder Osage people for their oil profits in 1920s Oklahoma — would either rise to the top of his uncle Bill Hale’s organization, or wise up and fight to stop it on his own. Ernest does neither, precisely because he lacks the qualities Scorsese has spent a lifetime depicting.

I wrote a little visual essay about Killers of the Flower Moon and Martin Scorsese protagonists for the New York Times.

Scorsese and Lynch share in the recognition that there are tragedies that cannot be undone, that there are wounds that cannot be made whole, that some tears in the fabric of human decency are permanent. By facing the horror of violence head on, they raise the curtain, turn on the spotlight, and allow the preciousness of life to take center stage.

I wrote about Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and the work of David Lynch, particularly Twin Peaks, for Decider.

What Shows and Movies Will It Remind You Of? Pull up a chair, this is gonna take a minute. The pastel wonder of the all-ages series Adventure Time and Steven Universe, the beautifully creepy sci-fi psychedelia of the French animation landmark Fantastic Planet, the weird techno-organic symbiosis of G.I. Joe: The Movie, the grotesque fungal infections of The Last of Us, the adorable and improbable bio-psychic critters of James Cameron’s Avatar, the beauty and danger and environmentalism of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the futuristic motorcycles and gloopy expanding blobs of Akira, the weird-new-thing-every-four-minutes imagination and pacing of Raised by Wolves, the working-stiffs-get-stranded-among-xenomorphs-by-an-uncaring-Company idea of Alien, the hey-we’re-just-folks-trying-our-best-in-the-wasteland vibe of Station Eleven…but wait, there’s more! Beyond films and TV, the biggest touchstone of all is the comics and art of French cartoonist Moebius, and the Moebius-indebted wave of underground science-fantasy comics that peaked around 10-15 years ago (and spawned the. If you’re a gamer, you’ll be reminded of virtually every exploration-based science-fantasy game of recent years: No Man’s Sky, Astroneer, Subnautica (the plot is virtually identical), even The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and its weirdly lovely Depths. 

Our Take: Reread that last paragraph. Think you can guess the problem here? Scavengers Reign is exceedingly well-executed psychedelic science-fiction animation for adults and teens; co-creators, co-writers (with Sean Buckelew and James Merrill), and co-directors Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner are very obviously both huge aficionados and skilled practitioners of the genre. But if you, like me, are steeped in this stuff, you’ll react one of two ways: “Oh boy, more of this!” or “Oh boy, more of this?” I’m more in the latter camp myself.

But that doesn’t take away from the talent on display in the creature concepts and designs. Again, these are mostly attempts to reinvent a pretty reliable wheel — How can we make an alien parasite, but different? — but they’ll have you saying cool/gross/ooh/eww throughout. Considering that this is a survival adventure, that’s half the battle.

I took a look at Scavengers Reign, the vibey, gloopy new Max sci-fi animated series, for Decider.

Am I at a loss for words over the series finale of “Billions”? That depends. Do hooting and hollering count as “words”?

There’s no other way to put this: In its final hour, “Billions” delivered, and delivered, and delivered. It saw what it needed to do — spend 45 minutes beating the living snot out of Mike Prince, and the remaining 15 minutes depicting beloved characters being really nice to each other for a change — and by God did it. In the process, it gave us that rarest of prestige-TV commodities: a happy ending.

I reviewed the marvelous series finale of Billions for the New York Times. I’m gonna miss this wild show.

And the thing looks so expensive. The casual ease with which it depicts the most expensive place to film in America getting completely destroyed by a gigantic entity and the United States military is mindblowing, especially after 15 years of bland destructive spectacles in superhero movies shot either on streets in Vancouver or in warehouses in Atlanta. I watched it with my 14-year-old kid, who at times literally couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “How the hell did they film this?” he asked, completely baffled — and awed.

I wrote about Cloverfield, an excellent and extremely effective giant-monster horror movie that deserves reappraisal, for Decider.

Since “Billions” first aired, shows taking on the very wealthy have become both common and popular. But shows like “Succession,” “The White Lotus,” even a horror story like “The Fall of the House of Usher,” are often satirical. “Billions” is frequently funny, but the intent feels different.

LEVIEN This was not a satire. It’s a drama with comedic moments, but that’s different than a satire. These characters are perhaps exaggerated in some ways, but we’re not sending up the rich. That wasn’t our goal here. It was more to let people into a world we felt we’d identified — yes, with our spin and our point of view, but not so that we could all huddle together and laugh and feel better than them.

KOPPELMAN There’s an absurdism to “Billions,” for sure, but that’s because the world right now is capital-A Absurdist. The show has to capture that spirit.

On the eve of the series finale, I spoke to co-creators and showrunners David Levien and Brian Koppelman about Billions for the last time (sniff!) for the New York Times.

A group of writers across multiple disciplines have launched a campaign in solidarity with Palestinians against the ongoing war on Gaza. If you’d like to sign on as I have, please click here.

GOYER: We’re aware of the fact that we’ve got actors like Lee Pace and Jared Harris, and that we can’t just plunk anyone into one of those smaller roles, or it’s going to break the suspension of disbelief. That is our motto: Every one of these people has to be able to stand toe to toe with Jared Harris.

I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time: I interviewed David S. Goyer about making Foundation Season 2, the year’s most thrilling show and one of the all-time great sophomore surprises, for Decider.

Not many actors can say they embodied a masterpiece in a few minutes of screentime. I certainly doubt that’s what Burt Young had in mind when he appeared on The Sopranos back in 2001. But the lovable Rocky alum’s turn as an ailing, elderly hitman who’s got one last burst of violence in him is getting held up as one of the veteran actor’s most memorable roles for a reason. In a handful of scenes in a one-off performance, Young gets his nicotine-stained fingers on nearly everything important aspect of the show. It’s a role seemingly written to illustrate what this show is about, with Young selected to give the demonstration.

I wrote about the late Burt Young’s one-episode role on The Sopranos as a microcosm of everything good about the show for Decider.

Whatever may eventually happen with this almost vestigial story line, it doesn’t here. There’s no big prestige to whatever trick the writers Brian Koppelman, David Levien and Beth Schacter are pulling, not in this episode anyway. This one really is as simple as two groups vying for an alliance with a minor character we’ve seen only once, ahead of revealing her pick. Forgive me, but I still have visions of that fabulous shock ending from Season 2’s penultimate episode dancing in my head, a level of scheming, skulduggery and surprise that I want to see again before the curtain closes.

We may yet get it. I simply refuse to believe that a show this beautifully bombastic won’t go out with a bang, in a finale with more twists and turns than a Mario Kart racetrack. Keep in mind that while the opposing armies seem pretty firmly established, they have every possibility of fracturing, reconfiguring or turning on themselves. Which leads to the biggest question of all, and no, it’s not whether Chuck and Axe can stop Mike Prince — it’s whether they will be back at each other’s throats if and when they do.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Billions ever for the New York Times.

Copenhagen Cowboy, Dead Ringers, The Idol, Foundation Season 2: It’s been a great year for the lurid and the florid on television, maybe the best I can remember. The Fall of the House of Usher fits right alongside them, glowing and buzzing like a gorgeously lit, expensively dressed corpse. 

I reviewed the finale of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

Similarly, the script, by Mike and Jaime Flanagan, reveals that Freddie would have been a dentist in another life, because, ha ha, he tears Morrie’s teeth out with pliers. Once again, major kudos to the dead actor of the episode, Henry Thomas, for finding remarkable depths in his character’s shallowness. There’s no real pathos for Freddie of course, the way there was for the other four kids: There’s just disgust at discovering that someone this ineffectual could also be this cruel. It’s like watching a tree sloth light an orphanage on fire. You wind up relishing every swing of that pendulum as it slices his drugged but conscious and feeling ass in half.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.