This is not the kind of show America needs. It does an active disservice to the body politic to misdiagnose its problems and their architects as badly as Zero Day does, even if in the end it’s just a classier Olympus Has Fallen. I’m sorry, but fascism and trans people are not equivalent threats. Neither are the Oathkeepers and the DSA. Neither are unaccountable billionaires and people protesting outside the homes of government officials. And at no point are Mike Johnson and Ayanna Pressley going to team up to do anything, let alone collude with Tim Cook to install a centrist dictatorship under Mike Johnson’s control for some reason. You hear how stupid this all sounds? Please tell me you hear how stupid this all sounds!

But even if you think demanding a political thriller have a brain in its head is too much to ask, calling a show out for assembling an incredible cast and then squandering it is certainly fair play. Joan Allen and Connie Britton, relegated to playing not one but two Concerned Wife types for Robert De Niro’s grandfatherly Dudley Do-Right. Angela Bassett and Bill Camp stranded in thankless supporting roles. Matthew Modine giving the kind of supervillain speeches Alan Moore dunked on in Watchmen almost forty years ago. Gaby Hoffman? Blink and you’ll miss her. Dan Stevens seemed to be having fun, at least, but he always does. 

And as ferociously watchable as Lizzy Caplan is, I couldn’t help but wish, when she had her big screaming match with De Niro in this episode, they were screaming about literally anything else than Zero Day. About the only actor who got material worth their time on set is Jesse Plemons, whose character was both compromised and complex; Plemons invested him with the squirrelly, Coen Brothers energy of a man in way over his head and only just beginning to realize he can’t swim. 

I reviewed the finale of Zero Day for Decider. What a waste!

“It’s amazing how powerful these tech types have become,” Sheila says.

“Yeah, well, I’d have imagined she’d bee too smart to take this kind of gamble,” George replies.

The idea here is that even the richest, most powerful people can bring about their own downfall when they fly too close to the sun. Fingers crossed.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Zero Day for Decider.

Even in the present, the show’s historic weak spot, the material improves a great deal now that Shauna finally comes out and says the obvious truth: Misty and Lottie are a murderer and a cult leader respectively and have no business being around her and her teenage daughter. Van and Tai’s goofy waiter storyline also gets a much-needed shot of adrenaline when it gets connected to the No-Eyed Man and the wilderness mythos instead of just dangling there as a story of yet another poor sap who winds up dead because he encountered the Yellowjackets. In both cases, it feels like writers Jonathan Lisco, Ashley Lyle, and Bart Nickerson stood behind their own show and gave it a good hard shove, forcing it out of the mud it had been stuck in.

But there’s one last observation to make, and it’s about what wasn’t in this episode. It’s easy to forget just how much crazy shit has happened on Yellowjackets, because Yellowjackets itself seems to forget from time to time. Remember how Shauna’s murdered lover Adam Martin was all mysterious because he had no online presence whatsoever? What happened there? Remember how Walter framed that murder on Shauna’s cop classmate Kevyn, whom he murdered in turn? Has anyone in the Shipman family mentioned how they owe their continued freedom to some lunatic friend of Misty’s they’d never met before? This is the problem with mystery-box storytelling, where you open three doors for every one you close. It’s easy to get, well, lost.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Yellowjackets for Pop Heist!

Speaking of billionaires, George refuses to kowtow to one as well. (Granted, he then starts torturing people, but pobody’s nerfect.) When Monica Kidder, who’s been turning her monopolistic tech company’s algorithms against Mullen and the investigation, is granted an audience, it quickly turns nasty, and Mullen has no interest in dancing to her tune. He corrects her garbled Ben Franklin quote about trading freedom for security — billionaires adore mangling the wisdom of the ages when they’re not just quoting made-up email-forward bullshit in wisdom’s guide — by saying “‘Freedom’ is what allows people like you to do whatever you want. ‘Liberty’ is what protects the rest of us from people like you.” If Zero Day can grasp this concept even a little bit, there’s hope for the rest of us yet.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Zero Day for Decider.

As the episode progresses, it becomes clear that neither George nor anyone else on the show fits on a political spectrum we’d recognize as existing at any point during this sad American century. Pop quiz: To what political party does George belong? Is his daughter, Alex, in the opposition party? What about her apparent boss, Speaker Dreyer? President Mitchell? Shrieking news influencer Evan Green? Shady, possibly pedophilic billionaire Bob Lyndon? Zero Day may know, but it isn’t telling.

But okay, forget party entirely: To what political wing do any of them even belong? Dreyer is clearly a right-wing type, but he’s passionately demagoguing about the violation of leftists’ civil liberties. Alex comes across like an AOC in terms of affect, but she’s working directly for Dreyer while attempting to hamstring her Biden-coded dad. Green looks and sounds right at home on the Ben Shapiro/Matt Walsh spectrum, but he refers to the left-wing Reapers as hard-working Americans whose rights should be defended and defends a mother whose child has been taken from her by government thugs. He also really hates billionaire Bob, while billionaire Bob thinks war with Russia would be good for business. Mitchell’s politics are completely opaque; all we really know is she’d prefer picking a fight with a nuclear superpower to rounding up a few dozen Discord users. All of these people seem to hate each other on ideological grounds, but we’re never really even told what those ideologies are.

Again, there have been many, many political thrillers the politics of which consist solely of “corruption and authoritarianism are bad,” and since until recently this has been the bipartisan consensus there has historically been little need to go beyond that. But at a certain point, a refusal to depict politics as it exists when you’re telling a story about presidents and congresspeople and civil liberties violations and so on obscures more than it reveals, even simply as entertainment. That lack of politics isn’t apolitical at all: it’s a politics of cowardice, or worse, appeasement.

I reviewed the third episode of Zero Day for Decider.

Last things first: You know how every episode of Paradise ends with some preposterous slowed-down moody spooky breathy cover of a huge ‘80s/‘90s radio rock hit? This week’s is actually quite good! It’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” by RAIGN, a frequently selected sync for big emotional TV moments. Since the Guns n’ Roses version the show is riffing on was already a cover, of a song by not only one of the best but also the most coverable songwriter in rock history, this cover works quite well. It’s a whole lot better than hearing someone doing “We Built This City” and singing phrases like “knee deep in the hoopla” in the exact tones of Mozart’s “Requiem.” And it really helps this show when it doesn’t end with a music cue that makes you laugh out loud at the screen.

I reviewed the most recent episode of Paradise for Decider.

Are we meant to sympathize with George Mullen? This is largely a rhetorical question, as the answer is obviously yes, or else you don’t ask legendary actor Robert De Niro to play the character as America’s Grandpa. But it’s not entirely a rhetorical question. It’s one thing to sympathize with the man’s plight: his mission to uncover the parties responsible for a devastating cyberattack, his need to navigate the political rat’s nest he’d previously extracted himself from, and his fight against the slow, insidious development of senile dementia. It’s quite another thing to sympathize with how he’s dealing with all of it: pressing on blindly in one of the most-high stakes jobs in the history of (fictional) America, knowing full well his aging brain can no longer hack it. Gosh, if only we had one or two recent real-life examples of what a bad idea this is. 

I reviewed the second episode of Zero Day for Decider.

The plot of Zero Day reads like a laundry list of phenomena the real world has rendered totally moot. Transportation crashes due to the rapid shutdown of vital infrastructure? Our government is doing that itself, right out in the open. A president suffering from obvious cognitive decline? The most recent guy had that, and he lost to another guy who also has that. (Reagan had it forty years ago.) Rogue, Russian-aligned actors seizing control of the nation’s digital nerve system? I hope Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegstreth get to the bottom of this when they’re not exchanging greeting cards with Vladimir Putin. A massive, unconstitutional civil-liberties power grab that could see people being disappeared off the streets without a warrant? That’s just your tax dollars and our pals at ICE at work. Lizzy Caplan wondering if neo-Nazis had somehow learned to use computers? I give you DOGE. Lunatics shrieking at the government about conspiracies and crisis actors? The day I’m writing this, the Senate voted to confirm, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, a man who has claimed covid was bioengineered to spare Jews. And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and on and on and on, and, and, you get it, we all get it, it’s great.

I’m covering the Robert De Niro political thriller Zero Day for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.

The theme song for The White Lotus is, or was, musical cilantro. Created by Cristobal Tapia de Veer for writer-director-creator Mike White’s anthology series’ first season, then tweaked in a Mediterranean direction for Season 2, it is, or was, chirpy and screechy and unlike anything else on television. To many people, it’s the banger theme music of the decade. To my ears, it was basically unlistenable. 

In this sense, the theme matched the show it accompanied. The White Lotus is, or was, a cheaply cathartic satire of the rich and useless, inviting you to pull up a chair and have your mind blown by the fact that wealthy, attractive people are often, get this, huge assholes. (Glad you were sitting down, aren’t you?) The beautiful resort-hotel settings — not to mention White’s obvious, infectious, seemingly out-of-character love of filming nature, especially water — distinguish it somewhat from your average anti-capitalist dramedy, but it’s still basically just Succession: Hawaii Nights.

When what to my wondering ears should appear but a whole new theme song! It’s less abrasive, and I suppose fans of the original, uh, “melody” will miss it, but it’s just as propulsive, and its ominous, bassy synth washes toward the end suggest both depth and menace. Based on this initial episode, the show may be following suit. It’s weird to say a filmmaker as accomplished and acclaimed as White has finally found his sea legs, but with this particular project it may well be the case. 

I’m covering The White Lotus‘s third season for Decider starting with my review of the season premiere. For the first time, I really liked it!

Two of Yellowjackets’ greatest strengths are on display in this week’s episode before five minutes have elapsed. The first: This show has long offered viewers some of the gnarliest self-applied field surgery the small screen has ever aired. Here we have Mari, her knee dislocated after a fall into Coach Ben’s trap, following his advice and shoving her grotesquely out-of-whack kneecap back into place. It’s the kind of scene that makes you say to yourself “It’s only make-believe,” for all the good it does you. Like all of the show’s makeshift amputations and childbirths and facial reconstruction surgeries before it, you know it’s not really happening, it’s just very good practical effects, but that doesn’t stop you from feeling it in your own bones. It’s great stuff.

So too is the opening credit sequence. With its eerie and aggressive theme song by Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker (of ’90s alt-rock bands Shudder to Think and that dog. respectively) and its distressed VHS aesthetic courtesy of Digital Kitchen art directors Rachel Brickel and Peter Pak, it towers above an opening-title landscape that’s been dominated by “shapes of familiar things morph into shapes of other familiar things” for what feels like a decade. Honestly, it may be almost too good, as it promises a level of anxiety and terror that the show only occasionally aims for or achieves. 

Actually, we can throw in a third strength of the show: At no point is it ever digitally color-graded into a bluish haze or a gray-purple murk or a ghastly teal-and-orange mailman-with-a-fake-tan color palette. When you see these kids out in the woods, it looks like they’re in the woods. When you see these grownups out and about in the ‘burbs, it looks like they’re in the ‘burbs. There’s light and shadow and contrast. I’m not saying the cinematography is spectacular, but it’s not meant to be: It’s meant to be legible, to be a reliable delivery mechanism for the story being told by Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, Jonathan Lisco et al are telling. It never distracts, and that really is an achievement. (This is admittedly a bugbear of mine, but the aquamarine nighttime of True Detective Season 4 and the bright orange nighttime of The Penguin broke something in me.)

I reviewed the second episode of Yellowjackets Season 3’s two-part premiere for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

Yellowjackets has always thrived when it tears out its own heart of darkness and holds it beating in front of the audience’s face. This is what’s always made the material about the teenage soccer team stranded and starving and going insane in the woods more compelling than the material about the messed-up middle-aged women having zany murder hijinks played largely for laughs. The strength of the adult cast, cleverly (though not entirely, which has always been weird to me) made up of former teen actors Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis (RIP Natalie, we miss you girl, they really should have dyed your hair blonde so you’d look more like Sophie Thatcher), Christina Ricci, Lauren Ambrose, and Elijah Wood, disguises the lopsided nature of the drama somewhat, but only somewhat. As fun as, say, Ricci’s performance as adult Misty, the world’s perkiest sociopath, can be, I’d much rather watch her teenage self react with shock and grief to her first kill than her adult self react with quirky neurotic cheer to her third or fourth. 

I’m making my debut at Pop Heist, a new non-corporate worker-owned pop-culture publication!, with my review of the Yellowjackets season premiere. (Gift link!)

Tramell Tillman’s work as Milchick is really extraordinary, isn’t it? To be blunt, this kind of self-consciously quirky character would normally make my skin crawl with cringe, but Tillman makes his every throwback styling choice, every unnecessarily stiff and formal sentence, every bit of tendentious bullshit, every deeply weird thing he does (including authoring the entire “kindness reform” for the severed floor) feels like the product of a three-dimensional (if cartoonishly deranged) person’s mind. Contrast this with Patricia Arquette as Cobelvig, a collection of Disney-villain quirks that never congeals into anything solid. 

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Using a populist ignoramus who inherited everything from his daddy as a catspaw, the richest person alive takes over the federal government. Paradise is the show that dares to wonder what would happen if this far-out, science-fictional, dystopian scenario were ever to come to pass. Fortunately, It Can’t Happen Here, right?

I reviewed this week’s Paradise for Decider.

They burned the horses at dawn. Word had traveled fast in the city, and by the midnight break everyone knew what was coming. Wagons rolled out of the mines, the oil barrels glinting in the moonlight, headed for the Temple of Pain. With no recent skirmishes to speak of it wasn’t going to be a matter of prisoners, and even internally there was an unspoken but pervasive sense that too few people had been brought in for the question to fill the arena’s basin. Eventually someone—it could have been Bowd; it usually was for this sort of thing—recalled overhearing a troll who complained about lugging cages around for the expeditionaries. Something about a great herd, too. Animals, then, wild animals. They hated the animals. They hated anything that grew wild.

As daybreak approached Vik was holding her right hand in her left, like she always did by the end of the worknight. Carving the spiral sigil into the wooden shields was once something she dreaded, and after that something she took a perverse sort of pride in; now it was just drudgery, numbing to the mind and brutal to her hand. Her leg hurt, too, a powerful ache that traveled from her right foot up through her calf and thigh until it nestled in a knot below her ass. Attending the burning would give her a chance to walk off the pain before the daybreak cease, she thought as she tidied up her workspace. Even sitting on the stone rows allowed her to shift her weight off her right side. It was something to look forward to at least.

She fell in line with the other humans in the street, their faces flickering in the torchlight as they streamed toward the Temple. Orcs were out in force, baying and guffawing. They knew what they were in for. Vik saw a sizeable group of trolls, too, scaly knuckles dragging against the dirt road. 

But it was the presence of ogres that frightened Vik the most. Ogres, bruise-yellow and black-eyed, towering into the sky. For ogres to interrupt their ceaseless searching—this was a surprise. They didn’t usually turn up for a burning, not unless called by the Higher Ups. That meant there’d be Higher Ups in attendance, Vik realized, and more than just the Vortex Wizard at that. Her nerves spasmed.

Her group were nearing the building now, a massive circle of black stone rising high above the ground, higher than any other building in the city. Fire glimmered in each of its windows, through which the hum of the already assembled crowd could be heard. The flaming spiral above the gates hurt her eyes if she looked at it, so she looked down. The dirt beneath her feet was the same color as her dress.

There was much of the usual shoving and pushing and roaring as the queue became a crush at the bottleneck. Vik let herself be pushed this way and that. Everyone was going to the same place. Why fight it. 

Minutes later, as the sky began to lighten above, she was seated in a row distant from the center. She looked around and saw no one she knew well. That was fine, maybe even good. They didn’t want you getting close to people, not even your workmates, though they couldn’t stamp it out entirely. The Servants’ vicious camaraderie proved too much of an example for the humans not to emulate. Some Wizards, Vik had heard, even took this as a point of pride. The Vortex Wizard was not one of them.

Vik looked down across the basin. There he was, short and bald and small in his armor. His face was an unreadable mask, rendered illegible by the spiral tattoo that matched the engravings on every steel plate. With a shock, Vik saw he was not seated in the central throne. He was not alone in the Master’s Box this time. The Blue Wizard, whose skin and hair matched the azure hue of his robe, he was there. Vik recognized the Wizard of Knives, the Water Wizard in his tank—awkwardly crammed into the box; someone would pay for that—and the Ash Wizard.

But the tall, thin figure in the black robe, with his long hair and full beard and gnarled, peeling hands—he was new to her, to this place, but he could only be the Wizard of the Wastes. For him to be here, so far from the blasted lands, was a surprise. No wonder the ogres had come, Vik thought. He knows their names.

A portcullis at the opposite side of the Temple rose, and suddenly the arena was full of the sounds of horses. They were panicked, terrified. Vik watched as troll handlers, their muscled arms glinting green in the torchlight, beat the animals forward. If one bit or kicked, they were bit and kicked back. One troll got fed up, grabbed a horse’s leg, and snapped it in two. The bones hung together by muscle and sinew. He picked the horse up and threw it forward. It landed in the basin, where the oil waited, its fumes giving Vik a headache. Even as the rest of the horses were forced inward Vik watched the one the troll had tossed as it screamed and struggled. Not long, though: Once it got tired it couldn’t keep its nose above the level of the oil, and it drowned. Lucky.

One of the wizards was speaking. The Vortex Wizard; it was his Temple. Probably he was welcoming his honored guests. Vik clapped when everyone clapped and that was good enough. His whispering voice, amplified by magic, proclaimed this a great day, the day when the last of the free herds of the darklands would be put down. The smoke from the burning would blot out the hateful sun as the flames made mock of its cursed illumination, and all would know what the People of the Spiral had done to honor the Sorcerer. 

Death to the Bastard Sun, roared the Servants. Death to the Wild Green, responded the humans.

A huge troll, its body resinous with burned tissue, strode to the box and handed a torch to the Wizard of the Wastes, the highest of them. With a nod to his host he tossed it down into the basin. It bounced off a horse’s head and into the oil.

The conflagration was immediate and the result unbearable. The horses screamed like men, eyes rolling, mouths frothing in agony. Their manes and tails went up like candles. Those that could still move trampled the fallen further into the flames before going up themselves. The smell was vile and also enormously appetizing. Vik’s stomach leaped and it took all she had not to vomit. Others were not as lucky, and there were orcs pointing at them, and the trolls were bellowing, and the ogres gazed in silence.

She looked away, back at the basin, back at the last of the great herds as it died. She looked to the sky, reddened now from the rising sun, darkened now by the smoke of the burning. She looked at all the Servants, the orcs and trolls and werewolves and the vampires behind their shaded glass. She looked at the Master’s Box, at the Vortex Wizard and the Blue Wizard and the Wizard of Knives and the Water Wizard and the Wizard of the Wastes. She looked at all of these telepaths and conjurers, these necromancers and elementals. She even, for as long as she dared, looked at the ogres.

She looked at them, and she hated them, and as the burning died down and the chants ended and she shuffled her way down the row and down the stairs and out the gate and through the streets and into her cell to wait out the day alone with the stink of death on her, she wondered why they had not killed her yet. Their hammers rose; their hammers fell; they would fall on her someday, she knew, but when they did they would crush her body but not her hatred. Her hatred would live on because she knew she was not alone, she could not be alone, it was impossible. Her hatred would leave her battered body and take root in another’s. She would be like a demon, a demon who yearns for life not death, for laughter not screams and not chants and not tears. Incorporeal and eternal she would one day look through other eyes and see the sun.

—originally published March 13 2020, revised Feb 8 2025

Over on the Boiled Leather Audio Hour Patreon, we like to stretch our muscles a bit to stuff less directly relevant to ASOIAF/GOT/HOTD/fantasy/SF/the sweep of history. If you’re a subscriber, listen to our new episode on Mike Flanagan’s Netflix horror miniseries Midnight Mass. I think it’s one of our best.

She doesn’t get caught because she gets overheard plotting with the Board. She doesn’t get caught because she accidentally lets slip that she knows something she couldn’t possibly know. She doesn’t even get caught because she invented a “night gardener” as a shoddy alibi regarding her time on the outside, or because Irving B. has a weird prophetic dream when he sleeps rough in sub-freezing temperatures. 

No, it’s simply being a little bit too mean that gives this impostor away. “What you said to me last night, it was cruel,” Irving B. tells her, his suspicions confirmed by this behavior. “Helly was never cruel.” Indeed, the way “Helly” deflects Irving B.’s accusations by bringing up his heartache over his loss of his office romance Burt G. stands out like a sore thumb in the moment, even before you think through what it says about who she really is. It’s the kind of emotional manipulation we saw Milchick use to get Mark to come back to work just a couple episodes ago — straight out of the Lumon handbook, perhaps even literally.

Shows that try their hand at mystery-box storytelling would do well to follow the example set by Severance in “Woe’s Hollow” (Season 2 Episode 4). It’s much more compelling to let the nuances of performance and writing reveal a character’s layers over time, the way they do in a regular drama, than to constantly pull rabbits out of hats like a stage magician. 

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

Acting is the engine that drives Paradise. Not the plot, which you’ve seen before on better shows (watch Silo! watch Fallout!); not the dialogue, which is a wildly mixed bag of astute and cartoonish. Sterling K. Brown, Julianne Nicholson, James Marsden: These are the load-bearing components of what creator Dan Fogelman has built down in that bunker.

To that number we can safely add Jon Beavers, who plays — or played — Agent Billy Pace, the character who gave this episode its title. Via a series of flashbacks, we learn how he became the man he is — or was — today, and it’s a very different man than what we’ve seen from him so far. But Beavers is so endearing in the role and so deft with his bantering dialogue that he almost singlehandedly makes the contradiction make sense.

I reviewed this week’s Paradise for Decider.

Well, that was fast! It was probably inevitable that Severance would, at some point, un-sever Mark and Mark S., the outie/innie pair at the center of the series. But if it went anything like everything else on this show goes, the process would take several painstaking steps over several hour-long episodes, during which time any number of other pathways would open up and get walked down before we made our way to our appointed destination.

Instead, Mark learns he can be reintegrated, agrees to do it, then gets it done in a grand total of two back-to-back scenes at the very end of this episode. Zero to 100, just like that, in defiance of the way this show has told its story since its inception. It’s a surprise that works on more than just an entertainment level, too: If your show is about the tyranny of routine, it’s a good idea to break from routine now and then.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

It may be an espionage thriller, but no one’s gonna mistake Paradise for Michael Clayton or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy anytime soon. Information about the assassination of President Cal Bradford and the compromising positions of virtually everyone involved in the case isn’t unearthed or deduced — it’s delivered in great gobs of personal exposition, the confessor standing face to face with the interrogator. The casework seems to amount to a series authority figures asking people “Did you do it?” and backing down when the person says “No.” I’ve seen more compelling detective work in episodes of DuckTales. 

Okay, so creating a thrilling murder mystery is not Paradise’s strong suit. What it relies on instead is using the strength of its cast to turbo-charge its tearjerking tales of their pasts. Even when the material is kind of underbaked, simply involving Sterling K. Brown means you’ll get something edible.

I reviewed episode three of Paradise for Decider.

There’s a podcast about my old job, and this week I’m the special guest! I had a wonderful time discussing my stint at Wizard. If you ever wanted to hear me tell tales out of school about that time in my life, now’s your chance!