WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE FINALES OF THE CURSE AND FARGO SEASON 5

It’s this collapse of meaning that frightens me the most about The Curse. The idea of falling into the sky is a common enough fear for anyone who’s laid back and looked up at the blue yonder and suddenly found themselves gripping the grass a little tighter. Once it starts happening to Asher, he and Whitney and their employees come up with a series of rational explanations and practical solutions, none of which mean anything in the face of a power capable of flinging a human being clean off the face of the earth and into the frozen space beyond. Everything Asher believed was true ceased to be true, in the most rapid and complete way imaginable. 

Fargo slams the breaks on all that. There’s a version of this season that ends with a happy suburban family systematically executed by a supernatural entity whose only moral code is that debts must be paid, a version in which everything that spousal abuse survivor Dorothy Lyon was able to put together for herself and the new husband and child she loves is dumped into that metaphysical garbage can by a psychopath. In the case of this television program, anyway, that’s not the version we got.

I wrote about the January 2024 finales of Nathan Fielder & Benny Safdie’s The Curse and Noah Hawley’s Fargo Season 5 as two contrasting visions of the future for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World. It’s a subscriber-only piece, so subscribe!

“Humanity’s greatest weapon is the lie,” says Reverend Mother Tula Harkonnen of the Sisterhood (Olivia Williams). “Human beings rely on lies to survive. We lie to our enemies, we lie to our friends, we lie to ourselves. Lying is among the most sophisticated tasks a brain can perform.”

The acolytes under Tula’s tutelage in this first episode of “Dune: Prophecy,” the new prequel series developed by Diane Ademu-John and Alison Schapker, are learning to lie more effectively in order to better control the people they supposedly serve. As recipes for political success go, it’s hard to argue with the results.

I’m covering Dune: Prophecy for the New York Times, starting with my review of the series premiere.

The makers of mafia-related media would do well to keep in mind that “My offer to you is this: nothing” was not Michael Corleone’s opening gambit. Mike seemed perfectly willing to negotiate with that crooked Nevada senator until the man got belligerent and racist and insulted Michael’s family. Only then did the Don slam the negotiation window shut. What kind of businessman would he be if his initial offer were always “fuck you”?

Well, he’d be the same kind of businessman as Dwight Manfredi. Anytime he quote-unquote “negotiates” with a rival, the so-called General never gives an inch of ground — and somehow, this strategy always works. Dwight tells four different crime bosses where to stick it in this episode alone and suffers no consequences whatsoever. It’s hard to stay invested in the story of a man who’s always right.

I reviewed the season finale of Tulsa King for Vulture.

Forty-five minutes following Rebecca Ferguson around as she explores an impenetrably dark subterranean structure in silence, with the exception of the occasional understated “okay”? I can’t help but feel that the first episode of Silo’s second season might have been a tougher sell to Apple in a pre–Dune 1& 2 world. But Ferguson is a star now, and one of the ways you can tell is how she carries this episode when most of the time all you can really see is her face, and barely at that. She’s got the kind of face, with its command of the screen and the audience’s attention, that can pull it off. That’s a star in my book.

I reviewed the season premiere of Silo for Decider.

Part of the problem with Before’s barely-half-an-hour run time and the resulting pacing of the storytelling is that you feel like you might have covered just this much ground in, like, an episode and a half of an hour-long drama about the exact same topic. However, now that we’ve got enough of the show under our belt, the vision is becoming more apparent. I still can’t say Before is scary, and that’s the biggest knock on it; horror TV shows should frighten you, full stop. But I do find the supernatural mystery becoming more compelling as the wriggly, wormy shape of it comes into focus. 

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

On Tulsa King, revenge is a dish best served in thirty minutes or less, or it’s free! Something like that, anyway. The show spent its entire second season establishing the five factions warring for control of Tulsa’s weed farms: the New York mob, led first by Chickie Invernizzi and now by Vince Antonacci; the Kansas City mob, led by Bill Bevilaqua; Cal Thresher, oil baron turned unscrupulous weed magnate; Jackie Ming, Thresher’s partner and the boss of the local Triad organization; and Dwight Manfredi’s Tulsa outfit itself, a motley crew of disparate interests — nebbishy weed-store owners, Native American growers and wind farmers, a smattering of wiseguys, would-be and otherwise — held together by Manfredi’s own charisma. In this episode, it dispenses with the conflict in a matter of seconds.

I reviewed this week’s Tulsa King for Vulture.

Despite its extra runtime, this episode mostly flies by thanks to the direction of Jennifer Getzinger. In addition to her capable handling of all the cat-and-mouse business, she almost entirely avoids the ghastly orange color palette of the earlier episodes, which allows the performances of key cast members Deirdre O’Connell and (beneath all those prosthetics) Colin Farrell in particular to actually shine through. You need unsparing grey light on Oz’s face when he’s confronted with his crimes, something that shows his every scar and flaw and combover. And you need to be able to fully register Frances’s horror at the monster she helped create, or at the very least allowed to live on.

I reviewed the finale of The Penguin for Decider.

“You’re managing the idea of me having been violated by someone far more easily than the idea of that someone bringing me pleasure. It’s almost like you — you’re relieved that I was raped. And I just…Sorry, I…I don’t know how to forgive that.”

Catherine Ravenstock is talking to her soon-to-be ex-husband Robert in the hospital waiting room, while their son Nicholas recuperates from his stroke nearby. She’s explaining to him that despite his contrition over having falsely accused her of infidelity is, in its way, worse than the accusation itself. So long as she could be blamed for the crime of enjoying herself illicitly, he could stay angry. One he finds out that she was merely brutalized for three and a half hours by a knife-wielding stranger, he can love her again. And that’s not a love Catherine Ravenstock wants. 

But Catherine isn’t just talking to Robert. She’s talking to the audience.

I reviewed the finale of Disclaimer for Decider. I thought it was very good.

Here’s the kind of day Eli is having. In the morning, he has a meeting with his troubled client Noah where he hallucinates that an action figure the boy buries in the sand so it can’t “hurt anyone” looks just like himself. Before action figures are going to be the hottest toy of this holiday season, mark my words.

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

Top hats, tuxedos, umbrellas — there’s even a bit in Astaire’s dance where he mimes machine-gunning the other dancers with his cane…it’s as though The Penguin went out of its way to include everything that traditionally makes the Penguin the Penguin and then said “eh, none of that really registered with him, I guess.” Would a top-hat wearing machine-gun-umbrella toting Oz Cobb really be so terrible to show us?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Penguin for Decider.

But I said there’s good stuff in this episode, and I mean it. For instance, the story of Armand, the accidental turncoat semi-ex-mafia guy played by Max Casella, could easily have come from either of the crime masterpieces Winter worked on. One by one, everyone Armand counts on to help him dodge the inevitable wrath of Dwight: The boss knows Armand’s the one who fed key intel to his rival, Cal Thresher, and payback is just a matter of time.

Armand calls his ex, but when she sees that he’s half in the bag at 9 a.m. and wants her to join witness protection with him, she tells him to lose her number. Enraged, he blows up at Spencer, his underling at the ranch, leading to an argument with his boss, Margaret, that ends in his firing. He turns to his erstwhile benefactor, Thresher, who pretty much laughs in his face; if Dwight’s onto him, he’s no longer useful.

Casella packs a wallop in his final pair of scenes. First, in an underpass, he leaves a tearful, uncomfortably candid message for one of his sons, in which the pain of life as a perpetual fuckup is etched into his face. Then, with desperation visible in his eyes and his pained grimace, he sticks up Tulsa’s consigliere, Goodie, and makes off with a sack of the outfit’s cash. His bluster on the way out the door seems like a cover-up for the knowledge he’s a dead man walking.

I reviewed this weeks’ Tulsa King for Vulture.

Her son is on death’s door. Her husband won’t spend more than two seconds in her company and refuses to listen to a word he says. The man who’s ruined her life has more access to her child than she does. But Catherine Ravenstock is a storyteller by trade, and her story is going to get told, one way or the other.

So she flips the script on Stephen. She breaks into his house, violating his personal space, to let him know what really happened. (The rattling we keep hearing in the background of her flashbacks is actually his malfunctioning freezer, which has been on the fritz since before Jonathan’s death.) Writer-director-creator Alfonso Cuarón shoots her in blazing white light, like an alien visitation. I think that’s a key visual indicator, personally. I think she’s an avatar of the truth.

I reviewed this week’s Disclaimer for Decider.

One thing I’m realizing is that keeping us guessing like this is an artifact of the show’s running time. An unusual half-hour drama — I don’t think Apple TV+ will be submitting this one for Best Comedy, The Bear–style — it’s also an even more unusual half-hour supernatural mystery thriller. What this means is every thirty minutes or so, it’s got to end on a cliffhanger that raises more questions than it answers to keep us moving through all ten episodes, instead of doing so every sixty minutes or so to move us through the same number of episodes or fewer. 

In other words, writer-creator Sarah Thorp all but designed Before to deny us answers. The mysteries add up one on top of the other until it’s tune in next week, same Before-time, same Before-channel. For a while, anyway, we’re gonna be as in the dark as Eli. 

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

In the meantime, the show is most artistically successful in Eli’s dreams. Whatever else you think of what is going on, and whatever you think of Crystal’s performance (I like it but I don’t feel he’s had the chance to do much nuanced work with this material yet), the man repeatedly dreams of being maimed and killed — by Noah, by Lynn, by himself. That’s the depth of desperation and darkness beneath the surface-level warmth everyone seems drawn to in Eli. I wonder how much Noah and the phenomena surrounding him will drag up to the light.

I reviewed the second episode of Before for Decider.

But the focal point of the episode remains Eli’s attempts to figure out what’s going on with his patient. A harrowing MRI goes awry when the boy hallucinates one of those black-goop tentacle-worm things, a tiny one this time, extruding from the top of the chamber and slithering into his IV wound. I so wish they’d taken the time to use practical effects for an image that inherently squirmy and uncomfortable; the CGI just doesn’t feel viscerally frightening and gross the way it needs to. (Being more creepy than actually scary is a consistent problem for the show.)

I reviewed the second episode of Before for Decider.

Weird kid. Dead wife. Bloody bathtub. Black goop. Creepy tentacles. Recurring nightmares. Scary drawings. Cursed cabin. The series premiere of Before, the new psychological-supernatural thriller from writer-creator Sarah Thorp, feels a little like it went into the horror store and said “I’ll take one of everything.” With nine half-hour-or-so episodes to go after this one, there’s only one question to ask: Will the whole add up to more than the some of its parts?

I reviewed the first episode of the new Billy Crystal/Judith Light supernatural/psychological thriller Before for Decider.

With a fun script by Nick Towne, and a distinct lack of the orange that has often overwhelmed the image on this show — kudos to director Kevin Bray and cinematographer David Franco for making the night scenes look like they were shot in the night air of a big cold city, just for starters — this episode makes it seem like The Penguin has truly gotten its sea legs. I’m still crossing my fingers it get its (bat-)wings eventually too, that’s all. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Penguin for Decider.

Now, this is a Tulsa King worth bending the knee for. With refreshingly nuanced, twisty plotting and sharp dialogue courtesy of writer David Flebotte, the somewhat misleadingly titled “Life Support” (more on that in a second) is, appropriately, the first time in a long time that this show has shown signs of real, creative life.

I reviewed this week’s Tulsa King for Vulture.

Now please forgive me as I say something corny: The real star of the show is the camera. Disclaimer is stupidly lovely to look at, a rejoinder to anyone who says all TV is color-graded digital shit. Watch how the light shifts from grey to gold when Nicholas receives the DM that proves his new friend Jonathan died years ago, echoed several scenes later as Stephen stands in his house pondering what he’s done to the young man. Look at the bright grey rainy afternoon light seeping into Stephen’s house when Catherine comes calling, demanding for him to listen to her side of the story. (For our sake I hope he acquiesces!) For crying out loud, look at how well-lit the dinner scene is. It’s not a big orange glow, there are actual light sources, there’s contrast, there’s shadow…this is basic stuff, but it’s worth calling out. 

I reviewed this week’s Disclaimer for Decider. Maybe next week I’ll review Decider for Disclaimer.

Friends, I flapped my arms like an excited goose when I saw Dan and Emily reunite. This despite the fact that I already knew she was alive — they revealed it at the end of last episode and spent the first third of this one explaining how she pulled it off by killing all her Pavlovich-hired captors, duh — and that their reunion was almost certainly inevitable. I’m just that invested by this point in how much these two characters love each other. 

And why wouldn’t I be? The whole point of the show is about how their love for one another persists despite all the madness and misery. It’s the only constant in either of their lives, through multiple identities and countries and continents and allegiances. You can question whether their love for each other is healthy, you can question whether professional killers feel love the way you and I do, but you can’t question that connection between them, flawed and befouled though it may be. 

I reviewed the strong season finale of The Old Man for Decider.