The highest compliment I can pay this season of The White Lotus is this: When Tim Ratliff opened this episode by blowing his brains out, I bought it. When his wife Victoria discovered his body and began screaming in grief and agony, I bought it. When Piper, their daughter, raced in to see what was the matter only to be devastated in turn, I bought it. I fully believed that what was once a sort of low-effort wealth comedy had become a tragedy.

What’s more, I believed that writer-director Mike White was perfectly capable of pulling the trigger, so to speak — not just in general, not just in the finale, but right now, at the start of Episode 6, with three full hours of TV ahead of us before the closing credits roll on the season. I was fully on board with the idea that not only was White capable of taking away a main character and making it really hurt — the previous deaths on the show came at the end of what amounted to gross-out comedy sequences — but that he’d do so abruptly and unexpectedly enough for it to come as a genuine shock. I didn’t see it coming, but I didn’t see Sam Rockwell’s monologue or Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s amazing new theme music coming either. 

Now, it turns out that this is only a morbid fantasy in Tim’s head as he thinks through the ramifications of killing himself and letting his beloved family find him like that. But the tsunami dream from earlier in the season was just that, a dream, and its discomfiting power has lingered all season long. The physical stakes in this week’s opening scene turn out to be illusory, but the emotional stakes are real, and high.

But you probably just wanna talk about the incest, don’t you. You’re incorrigible.

I reviewed this week’s terrific episode of The White Lotus for Decider.

Stranded in a shitty motel room with her dad, Callie finally comes out and says what I wish the show itself had made up its mind about two seasons ago: Her mother, Shauna, is a bad person, capable of horrible crimes, including the disappearance of the two researchers and their guide during her time in the wilderness. Her dad, Jeff, would rather unconsciously scratch his skin raw than face facts. But in the meantime, Shauna’s parked outside a stranger’s house with a recently purchased Rambo knife. Callie has the right idea, I suspect.

I wish the show did. I wish Yellowjackets had the kind of faith in itself and its audience displayed by, well, any number of other shows about murderers, which didn’t feel the need to obscure its’ protagonists’ awfulness with zany mix-ups and Scooby Gang shenanigans. If adult Shauna had shown any signs of being a lastingly bad person, instead of an adorable housewife having a fling, back in Season 1, Seasons 2 and 3 would have been a lot more interesting. Instead you get what we’ve got, which is a show in which half of the airtime feels like it’s being spent actively combatting the other half. Even the Yellowjackets know that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

Despite being Apple TV+’s most talked-about show, Severance has not been renewed for a third season, and this second outing was dogged with rumors of behind-the-scenes disputes and difficulties during its multiple-year production. So let’s say Erickson set out to do what many showrunners have done before him, and crafted a season finale that could make a pretty solid series finale if need be. Frankly, I’m not sure he could have done any better.

I reviewed the season finale of Severance for Decider. It was good!

The Wheel of Time is at its best when it lets the wheel stop spinning. During season two, when the show finally found its footing, it did so with the help of strong stand-alone episodes or lengthy segments: Nynaeve’s heartbreaking journey through the alternate realities of the Aes Sedai’s Arches, Egwene’s breaking at the hands of her Seanchan captor Renna. Historically, the show has always benefited from narrowing its focus.

Though I haven’t read it, I’ve certainly gathered from speaking to fans that the repleteness of author Robert Jordan’s source material is its main attraction. There’s simply a lot of stuff going on at all times, involving a lot of people from a lot of cultures in a lot of places following a lot of quests to achieve a lot of things, and if you have a certain kind of fantasy-nerd mind-set (as I do!), this is a ton of fun. So, I understand why that’s the show’s baseline approach. But boy, is it nice when The Wheel of Time stops to … I was gonna say smell the roses, but not on this show. No, this show only stops to rub its characters’ faces in the thorns.

So it is with this week’s episode, hands down the best of the young season so far.

I reviewed this week’s very good episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

Daredevil: Born Again feels improbable, like the filmmakers are getting away with something, in the same way really great superhero comic-book storylines have always felt. It’s everything I want out of a superhero show.

I reviewed this week’s Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

From a practical perspective, you’re sitting there to be yelled at by this boy for a long time. For a long freaking time. Was that unpleasant? It feels like it had to have been a tough day at work.

No, it really was. We rehearsed for two weeks, then we shot it for one week, and we did two takes a day, because that is all we could emotionally and physically achieve. I think we’d be on the floor if we tried to do it any more. At the end of the whole three-week process, I was obliterated, just a shell of a being. 

To maintain that focus, to get through a whole shot with someone as essentially a two-hander, was physically draining. To be on the receiving end of someone’s emotions is so exhausting. I’ve already admired therapists for years and years and years, I think what they do is incredible, but this process made me understand that they are athletes in their own sense. So yeah, it was really challenging to go through it twice a day. But hopefully we were able to portray the danger and the dynamism of what it means to actually go through a session. It was a tough ask. But that project and that story specifically needed that episode to really pick out what is going on inside this boy’s mind. 

I interviewed actor Erin Doherty about her phenomenal work on A Thousand Blows and Adolescence.

Is it cathartic to condemn yourself? Can it be healing to admit your wound was, in part at least, self-inflicted? Can you move on from the worst thing that’s ever happened even if you know you’re part of the reason it happened? Is that the only way you can move on at all?

[…]

Asking your audience to accept that good intentions aren’t guarantees of good outcomes and don’t morally absolve you from bad ones is bold at any time, much less this one. It’s a dramatic third rail few shows dare touch; even the very fine and similarly themed Disclaimer, filmed by technical wizard Alfonso Cuarón, turned its well-meaning failures into outright villains rather than ask the audience to live with the pain of their understandable, relatable guilt. Wallowing in that anguish, employing a phalanx of performances by actors who make their characters feel like they’ve been set on fire from within, shooting through a camera that never lets us look away, Adolescence is truly exceptional television. 

I reviewed the finale of Adolescence for Decider.

This is the best hour of television I’ve seen all year.

I reviewed the astonishing third episode of Adolescence for Decider.

It’s wonderful, is what it is. Much of it is bathed in red and green light, as is the ladies’ night back on the mainland. As such, it fits right into one of my favorite microgenres: the New Lurid. These are stories that use saturated colors (especially red), explicit sexuality, outbursts of disturbing violence, and an unhealthy fixation on propagating the tangled family line, all as a way of satirizing and excoriating the wealthy. Think of it as Saltburn-core. The brazenly sexual vibe, the vivid colors, the incest, and — in a separate storyline that’s intercut with the rest as if providing commentary — Victoria Ratliff’s wildly bigoted and reactionary response to Piper’s desire to throw away her heritage to seriously study Buddhism — nearly all the ingredients are in place.

But there’s a gun that doesn’t go off, and it’s, well, the guns that don’t go off. Rick’s friend gives him a gun at Rick’s request, but Rick is too busy being dumbfounded by his pal’s tale of erotic transfiguration to do much with it just yet. Tim refuses to return his stolen gun, but is prevented from using it on himself — while wearing a Duke t-shirt, one of the most mean-spirited and hilarious gags in this show’s history — by Victoria, who unwittingly interrupts him just as he’s mustered the strength to pull the trigger. Of course we know bullets will fly by the end of the season, but so far they’re still chambered.

My admiration for this show, on the other hand, is ricocheting all over the room. What a fuckin’ feast this episode is: sleazy, scary, riveting, written in a way that takes real risks in exposing the filmmaker’s understanding of what desire is and what it can do, with that masterful monologue as the centerpiece and incest as a closer.

I reviwed this week’s episode of The White Lotus for Decider.

As Jade and Mrs. Bailey discuss Jade’s dire situation, cheerful “Hello!” and “Bienvenue!” signs hang in the background. A few minutes after chasing down and arresting a child for conspiracy to commit murder, Bascombe takes his son out for chips and a soda. Yards away from the murder scene, children play on a playground. Everything is terrible, but for our children’s sake we pretend that life goes on.

I reviewed the second episode of Adolescence for Decider.

What long takes offer a show like this is a vital ingredient: tedium. I’m dead serious, too. Think of any time you’ve been parked in some institutional space or another — a school, a court, a hospital — knowing your life is about to change forever but unable to fast-forward to the moment that change actually occurs. It’s maddeningly boring, a boredom made all the worse by your body’s flight-or-fight activation. It’s almost unbearable.

So it is here. When Bascombe and Frank make unpleasant small talk about Bascombe’s digestive issues prior to the raid, we’re there for every second of it. We’re there for every second of terror as the rest of the family stands or lies around with cops’ guns pointed at them as Jamie is arrested. We’re there in the police van as Jamie is driven to the station, sobbing. We’re there as he’s made to answer various questions and endure various inspections. We’re there with his family in the waiting room. We follow cops and lawyers around not just when they’re actually doing something, but when they’re making their long walks through this unpleasant place to wherever they need to go to do those things. 

Even before the long closing shot, we’re being made to sit with it, to sit with it all. The confusion, the frustration, the unexpected moments of kindness, the obsequious fawning of the family for being shown even the slightest consideration — when Barlow informs Eddie that the cops likely have very strong evidence on his son, Eddie ends the conversation with a crushingly informal thanks of “ta” — it all feels more real because we’ve watched it all unfold in real time, without a moment’s respite, even during the stuff normal films and shows would trim for being unnecessary. Again, the unnecessary is the essence of art. (By some definitions, art is inherently unnecessary, or else it would be some other thing.)

I reviewed the first episode of Adolescence, which is extraordinary, for Decider.

Fantastic stuff from top to bottom, really. Ben’s fate is bleaker and more brutal than anything I’d anticipated. His death gives several characters — Natalie, Misty, Shauna, Lottie, and Akilah, who’s now having stop-motion animation visions of three-eyed bear-wolf hybrids — their strongest material of the season. Sophie Thatcher in particular stands out as Natalie, whose very soul you can see buckling under the weight of all its been asked to endure. She makes the character as we come to know her later make sense, which hasn’t quite been possible in many other cases. 

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

There’s only one episode left in this season of Severance. Isn’t that a pip? Of the nine episodes that have aired so far, fully four of them broke the mold of the show entirely: The cast is on an outdoor excursion, or Harmony Cobel travels to her hometown, or we get lost in Gemma and Mark’s memories, or we pretend Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat are on the show now for an hour. All of this has been varying degrees of fun. 

But it might have been more fun than it was wise. This week’s penultimate episode of Season 2 really makes you realize just how much you haven’t learned about what’s actually going on, and how much you haven’t seen the core cast interact, and how much it isn’t like the first season that brought the audience of Apple TV+’s most buzzworthy show to the dance. I’m not sure it’s a tradeoff I’d have made, is what I’m saying.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

The Wheel of Time is a show I enjoy, but I still feel that every recap ought to begin with “Okay, how much time ya got?” There’s just so much going on, involving so many people in so many places with so many quests for so many objects because of so many prophecies. I find this fun, more or less, but I can understand people who land on “less.” Clearly, its memorable standalone sequences and moments of passion and sensuality are the show’s real power, the way it delivered its knockout blows during season two. I’m waiting patiently to be coldcocked.

I reviewed the third episode of The Wheel of Time‘s triple-decker Season 3 premiere for Decider.

The good news is that due to one of those cockamamie streaming-service release schedules, the first three episodes of The Wheel of Time’s third season have all dropped at once. Chances are, therefore, that you didn’t have to wait much longer than an hour and ten minutes in real time between starting the premiere and arriving at the deliciously nasty opening scene of episode two. The bad news is that you probably shouldn’t have had to wait even that long. I get that the battle with the Black Ajah in the heart of the White Tower is probably the necessary starting point for this segment of the WoT saga, but 15 minutes of characters whose names you only sort of remember shooting digital fingertip fire at each other can be a little off-putting as a welcome back. A brand-new evil-queen character, played by Olivia Williams, with a Robespierre-type Red Ajah Aes Sedai adviser, played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, executing a bunch of rival nobles even after they literally bend the knee? Brother, I’ll take all of that ya got.

I reviewed the second episode of The Wheel of Time Season 3 for Vulture.

There are two kinds of writers, according to Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon demiurge George R.R. Martin. Some, like Martin’s idol and inspiration, J.R.R. Tolkien, are architects, meticulously planning out their intricate worlds and the hundreds of characters and story lines that exist within them. Others, like Martin himself, are gardeners, planting seeds and knowing what they’ll eventually blossom into, but without any knowledge or control of what shape they’ll take along the way as they grow. The gardener’s job isn’t to draw and execute blueprints; it’s to prune and cultivate the blossoms into a pleasing shape.

I haven’t read The Wheel of Time, the 15-volume epic-fantasy saga by the late author (and close friend of Martin’s) Robert Jordan and, following Jordan’s death, his collaborator and chosen successor, Brandon Sanderson. A cursory search indicates Jordan, at least, was more of a gardener type — he labeled himself a “discovery” writer — and it stands to reason: A planned trilogy doesn’t wind up a dozen books longer than expected if you’ve got it all mapped out in an outline in a notebook or hard drive somewhere.

After watching the season-three premiere of The Wheel of Time — one of three episodes debuting this week — I’m not convinced that creator-showrunner Rafe Judkins and writer Justine Juel Gillmer are architects or gardeners. They’re more like Abstract Expressionist painters, dipping their brushes into big cans of epic-fantasy stuff and just splashing them all across the canvas. It may seem random or haphazard, and it’s definitely overwhelming to look at at first. But eventually, a picture emerges, one that clearly communicates the artist’s ideas and emotions. Even if it’s difficult to make them out now, hey, that sure is a lot of bright-colored paint they flung at the wall, isn’t it?

I reviewed the season premiere of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

In this week’s episode of Daredevil: Born Again, Mayor Wilson Fisk, a man with multiple felony convictions recently elected to powerful office, says “The rule of law must prevail.” Meanwhile, (presumably) a crooked cop sporting the Punisher skull murders a politically inconvenient man (who’s Puerto Rican by the way) on Fisk’s orders. By this point in the episode cops have already tried to murder a witness (twice) and successfully frighten him out of testifying when that fails. And oh yeah, the interview is given to an influencer, not the New York Times, mentioned and rejected by name in the influencer’s favor. 

In other words, if you were wondering whether the first two episodes were a fluke and the rest of the series wouldn’t scream IT’S ABOUT TRUMP AND MAGA at you at full volume, wonder no longer.

I reviewed this week’s Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

I don’t want to give the impression that this isn’t a funny show, because it very much is. (Much funnier than the seasons that felt more like a comedy, imo.) Tim does a big comical take to the camera at one point that’s only slightly more subtle than the one Paul Rudd does in Wet Hot American Summer. Belinda and Greg have a slow-motion staredown that clearly has unpleasant implications for Belinda, but which still amounts to a couple of people at a luxury resort reenacting the Avon Barksdale/Lt. Daniels bit from The Wire. Parker Posey and her anesthetized accent are a scream. So is Aimee-Lou Wood, who along with Belinda is basically the only person you actually want to see have a good time at this place. There’s a zoom-in on the Ratliffs walking like the Reservoir Dogs for crying out loud. 

But it’s been a while since I’ve watched a show this suffused with an all-encompassing, omnipresent sense that Something Bad is going on. It reminds me of Mad Men Season 5, an experiment in just how freaked out a show about rich people completely insulated from lasting consequences by money can make you feel on an episode-by-episode basis. And now the boat’s sailing off, and Rick’s on his way to Bangkok, and the trio are out partying, and the pink moon gonna get ye all. 

I reviewed this weekend’s episode of The White Lotus for Decider.

Clocking in at exactly 36 minutes long, not counting the closing credits — there are no opening credits this week — Severance Season 2 Episode 8 (“Sweet Vitriol”) is essentially a three-hander that finally catches up with Ms. Cobel. Our girl Harmony has returned to her hometown of Salt’s Neck, an icy coastal village that appears ready to fall into the sea. Once a Lumon company town — it’s where Kier Eagan met his future wife in the ether factory — it’s now a no-company town: As Hampton (James Le Gros), Harmony’s estranged childhood boyfriend and a dedicated Lumon-hater, sarcastically parrots back to her, “With the market readjustment and fluctuating interest rates, there was a retrenchment from some of the core infrastructure investments.” In other words, fuck you, Salt’s Neck, Lumon has moved on and left you behind.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

The problem is that Tai can’t go through with it, even while doing target practice by aiming at a frowny face on a tree. Van, who’s helping her practice, suggests they try to summon Tai’s dark side, which we haven’t seen anything of yet this season. First, they try summoning it with sexual energy: Van pins Tai against a tree face first and fingers her. (The sex scenes have gotten a lot more fucked up and hot this season for sure.) 

When that fails, they kill a rabbit caught in one of the girls’ traps, since the sinister spirit of the wilderness seems to frequently call for blood. In keeping with the show’s storied tradition of extremely nasty up-close survival violence, Tai slits the poor rabbit’s throat in full view of the camera, which lingers as the animal’s legs and paws frantically flail at the air in pain and terror. With Van’s encouragement, Tai narrates the entire process of the rabbit’s death. “I see its fear. I feel its breath … I smell its blood. I feel its heartbeat slowing. It’s calmer now.” To really be present with the fear and pain you’re inflicting on another living thing — more importantly, to force the audience to be present with it — makes for harrowing television.

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.