No one who didn’t watch it ever believes me when I tell them, but the Netflix Punisher show felt like it was designed specifically to upset people with Blue Lives Matter American Flag Punisher decals on their F-350s. All of the main villains were either ex-military who’d gone capitalist or criminal to make money by killing people, corrupt cops, or right-wing politicians bought off by Russian oligarchs — a who’s who of the kind of people that people who are really into the Punisher logo love. 

It’s always been odd that the Punisher TV show is harder on these people than the company that owns the character. Disney has never seriously objected to the co-option of one of their marquee superheroes’ symbol by fascists, even as they’re willing to block grieving parents with Spider-Man stuff on their child’s gravestone. For one reason or another — and I leave it to you, fair reader, to learn a bit about the historical relationship between capitalists, corporations, and fascists and decide that reason for yourself — the Mouse has been bizarrely gloves-off on the issue.

This is the reason why, when I saw that one of the corrupt and murderous cops being beaten up by an enraged you-left-me-no-choice Matt Murdock had a Punisher skull tattoo, my notes read simply “ARE YOU FUCKIN’ KIDDING?!?

I reviewed the second episode of Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

“I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” When Garth Marenghi — author, dreamweaver, visionary, plus actor — uttered these words, he spoke as a prophet. We live an era that has made the subtext text. This country re-elected a billionaire who’d previously, publicly tried to overthrow the government to once again run the government. He brought in an even richer billionaire, the scion of an evil foreign government (apartheid South Africa), to rule it for him; sometimes this second billionaire wields a chainsaw. They’re firing people for being women or Black or queer and not really pretending there’s another reason for it. They’re trying to legislate an entire minority group, trans people, out of existence. They’re handing over your Social Security and IRS data to neo-Nazi teenagers. The big billionaire gave a Nazi salute on stage, twice. These are all things that have happened or are happening now, in real life. Every conspiracist’s fever dream about America’s fall to sinister oligarchic forces has come to pass; most of those conspiracists just happened to vote for the oligarch(s) in question. No subtext required!

I say all this because, as a long-time writer about superheroes (comics, films, television), I used to think the “supervillain pretends to be nice and is allowed to take over the government” storylines were idiotic. “But Norman Osborn is the Green Goblin and everyone knows it,” I said about twenty years ago, during Marvel’s Dark Reign storyline. “I don’t care if he fired the killshot on the leader of a Skrull invasion and improved his public image — they wouldn’t just let him take over a major intelligence organization and turn it on his enemies. He’s a serial killer who dresses up in a Halloween costume and throws molotov cocktails at college students. He’s admitted it. If Charles Manson killed Osama bin Laden on live TV tomorrow, they still wouldn’t put him in charge of the CIA.”

Whoops!

I reviewed the season premiere of Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

It’s a pretty terrific closing salvo for A Thousand Blows’ first season. (Based on the teaser that follows the “To be continued…” title card, the second has already largely been shot.) It places the emphasis right where it’s been and belonged the whole time: on Erin Doherty’s work as Mary Carr, once (and future?) Queen of the Forty Elephants. Doherty has spent the entire season challenged to hold down her end of the screen against guys who literally trained to beat people up to play their roles. She has to answer their physical charisma with the kind that can only come out of your voice, your eyes, the set of your jaw. She clears the bar without so much as brushing it with the hem of her dress. It’s early yet, but this is one of my favorite performances of the year.

I reviewed the season finale of A Thousand Blows for Decider.

I’m not gonna sit here and tell you Paradise is one for the ages, or even for year-end best-ofs. But it’s competent, its three leads (Sterling K. Brown, James Marsden, and Julianne Nicholson) are extremely talented people who make a feast of everything they’re given, it got really nasty and scary when it needed to, and it solved its main mystery by using a killer librarian, like a half-forgotten slasher film set at a high school in the early ’80s. Like its knowingly ridiculous needle drops, the combination is fun almost despite itself. 

I reviewed the season finale of Paradise for Decider.

The thing to understand about this season, it seems, is that it’s no longer a satire. It’s a drama with satirical elements. It’s darker. It’s weirder. It’s more serious. It does dream sequences about tsunamis. It’s not Succession anymore, it’s Mad Men. It may not seem like it, but the gulf between the effects of those styles of writing and directing is cavernous. It’s not that there’s no longer room for humor — watching the stars of Fallout and The Zone of Interest compete to properly pronounce Sritala’s last name is funny, I don’t care who ya are — but it’s not the focus. The focus is deeper.

I get the impression that what is at the very least a vocal minority of White Lotus fans feel, therefore, that the show is slipping. I don’t know what people used to see in it that I didn’t, and I don’t know what I’m seeing in it now that people aren’t, but if you’d hid the title of the show, changed the name of the hotel, and simply screened these first three episodes for me, the only way I’d be able to tell it’s the same series from the same filmmaker is the presence of Greg and Belinda. Otherwise I simply would not have believed you. I mean, that opening scene alone is more interesting than anything that happened in the first two seasons by a comfortable margin. Emotionally, tonally, visually, aurally, it feels like a different show. Maybe that’s why people who were happy with what they’d been getting have soured on it a bit, but it sure is sweet to me. The episode closes with Victoria asking a pilled-out Tim “Is something going on?” The answer, in every sense, is yes.

I wrote about this weekend’s The White Lotus for Decider.

A Thousand Blows remains an enjoyable show thanks to the physically commanding performances of its three leads. Stephen Graham, Erin Foster, and Malachi Kirby swagger across the screen so vibrantly now that the de rigeur digital teal-and-apricot color palette that plagues TV these days obscures their emotions. Overall, however, things are looking so dire that it’s hard to figure out how any of our heroes or antiheroes turn it around. Maybe that’s fine, and it’s crime doesn’t pay narrative, or a story about how the masses can never beat the classes. But I think snatching victory from the jaws of defeat would do this show well. These people are all survivors, bottom line. I wouldn’t mind seeing them thrive, for a change.

I reviewed the fifth episode of A Thousand Blows for Decider.

Maybe you want to give the lion’s share of the credit to Dichen Lachman, the strikingly telegenic actor who plays the severed and stranded Gemma Scout/Ms. Casey. Maybe you want to tip your cap to Adam Scott, who traces his character Mark Scout’s progression from happy college professor meeting cute with his future wife to widower finding out the terrible news for the first time. Maybe you appreciate the work of Sandra Bernhard as a scowling Lumon technician, or Robby Benson as Dr. Mauer, Gemma’s torturer and would-be lover during her multiplicitous, mysterious severed simulacra of life.

I submit to you, however, that the real star of “Chikhai Bardo,” an episode destined to go down as one of Severance fans’ favorite Severance episodes, is Jessica Lee Gagné. Believe it or not, but as best I can tell, this swirling, tumbling, brilliantly filmed and assembled episode marks the veteran cinematographer’s directorial debut. From the flips and fades and segues and other weird tricks that mark scene transitions to the high-stakes performance she coaxes out of the actors, it’s hard to imagine a more auspicious debut. 

So why do I feel so frustrated?

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

The episode-length sequence is a flop for a variety of reasons. For starters, key members of the cast don’t seem to know how to act after such a radical tonal shift, though a few rise to the challenge. Sophie Thatcher maintains Natalie’s uneasy balance of responsibility and fear easily enough, and Sammi Hanratty really demonstrates her range as a righteously indignant and legalistically canny Misty; it makes you excited to see what the actor will do when given actual adult roles, and it’s my favorite work of Hanratty’s in the series so far.

As Coach Ben, Stephen Krueger is similarly compelling. Fully believing the girls will convict (and likely kill and eat) him no matter what he says or does, he therefore has no reason to lie, and is bracingly honest both about what he dislikes about his job, which he has never seen as a career, and what he loves about the girls, even though they’re a threat to his life. Emoting all of this through a layer of grime and beard is an impressive feat in and of itself, and it shows how crucial Krueger is to the flashback material.

But Jasmin Savoy Brown as the faux-D.A. and Sophie Nélisse as the chief hang-‘im-high juror flounder are speechifying and smirking and acting more or less like people reading the script of a courtroom drama out loud. Liv Hewson as the bailiff fares little better with the corny shit she’s forced to say to open the trial, but as her part is relatively minor it’s nowhere near as grating as Tai and Shauna’s flared-nostril rage against their assistant coach, who quite obviously did not burn their cabin down. They’re straight-up trying to kill him, just as he’s accused of trying to do to them. Misty does such a bang-up job of unpacking this, in fact, that it makes the eventual guilty verdict feel not so much as unjust as merely stupid.

I reviewed this week’s Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

Perhaps most importantly, at least if you’re an audience member, Hezekiah is growing closer than ever to Mary herself. On at least one occasion during this episode they come with in a finger’s breadth of kissing before Mary calls it off, openly saying she’s not quite sure if this is a relationship she wants or not. Cue that Dumb and Dumber “So you’re saying there’s a chance” gif, only for real this time. And well there should be: The chemistry between these two gives off a lot of steam, perhaps because Mary is the only person around whom Hezekiah really comes out of his shell and starts acting like a future world champion. If you find someone who brings that out of you, lock that shit down, my friends.

I reviewed episode four of A Thousand Blows for Decider.

“I’m not afraid of death…I am afraid of murder.” Watching this scene this morning, hearing those two sentences this morning, made me cry. Not because we’ve lost Gene Hackman, sad though that is, especially given the loss of his wife, musician Betsy Arakawa. I cried because I feel the same way, especially now.

We live in a time when people like the Director, Mark, and Amy — vicious, unscrupulous, driven by the will to power — are engineering death on a colossal scale. Ending vital healthcare programs at home and abroad. Tormenting trans people with the end goal of their erasure from public life, and life itself. Targeting immigrants, documented and undocumented, with deportation either to countries that will kill them or American concentration camps where no one knows what is happening. Pardoning traitors, insurrectionists, fascist militiamen, pedophiles. Ushering open Nazis into the highest levels of government. Aiding genocidal authoritarians around the globe with the goal of copying their playbook here at home. 

I’m not afraid of death. I am afraid of murder. I am afraid of murderers. I am afraid of their minds, which aren’t minds as you and I know them at all, which are masses of gray sludge in which there is no joy or beauty to be found but in the suffering of others. I am afraid of their powers of surveillance and their willingness to use illegal and lethal methods to enforce the conclusions they draw from what they hear. They’d kill us if they got the chance.

In honor of Gene Hackman, I wrote about his performance in the dream sequence from The Conversation and why it haunts me for Decider.

Neither Mary nor Sugar got where they are without self-confidence in the face of long odds. The same of course is true of Hezekiah, but he hasn’t yet had the chance to parlay his willpower into actual success the way the Queen of the Elephants and the King of the East End have managed to do. Despite being a physically striking guy, actor Malachi Kirby is still visibly holding much of his magnetism in reserve; Hezekiah, who can’t run long distances without collapsing from a stitch in his side, similarly needs to train himself in the art of swagger before Kirby can be free to command the screen the way Erin Doherty and Stephen Graham do. A Thousand Blows isn’t a perfect show — some dialogue (“Most men feel threatened by ambition in a woman.” “I am not most men.”) feels a bit undercooked, and the teal-and-apricot color palette can be grating. But the smart choices of its talented cast have me looking forward to each new round.

I reviewed the third episode of A Thousand Blows for Decider.

Series premieres, even of very very good shows, often suffer from what I call “pilot-itis.” It’s a tendency to go a bit big and broad in hopes of catching and capturing the audience’s attention. Right from its resumption mid-cliffhanger, with Jamaican immigrant Hezekiah Moscow preparing to face off against Sugar Goodson in the boxing ring, A Thousand Blows shakes free of the “newcomers in the big city” clichés that marked its opening act. 

With poetry-of-the-gutters dialogue that owes a lot to David Milch’s Deadwood — Sugar even presides over the square from his perch on a balcony, lest you thought writer-creator Steven Knight was trying to hide his influences — this episode follows the fallout of Sugar and Hezekiah’s big fight. It’s a nasty three-round sprint filmed in lurid detail, with little of the back-to-the-camera punch-hiding or fast editing the first episode used to dull the impact of Alec and Treacle’s bout.

I reviewed the second episode of A Thousand Blows for Decider.

The best way to sum up “The Day,” Paradise’s genuinely harrowing seventh episode, is this: There’s no ironic slowcore ’80s hair-rock cover to close out the episode. Someone thought better of it, and I’m glad. The covers are so obviously goofy I refuse to believe creator Dan Fogelman is unaware; it stands to reason that when you’re depicting the end of the world, it’s better to enjoy the silence. 

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

The first thing we see Mary Carr do is lie. In front of Jamaican immigrants Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) and Alec Munroe (Francis Lovehall) — two fresh-faced but not necessarily wide-eyed newcomers to London, capital of the empire that rules their home with an iron fist — she pretends to be a pregnant woman giving birth on the street. Even as a crowd of lookie-lous gathers, though, her henchwomen are busily picking their pockets. When someone says a cop is on his way to help her, she just gets right up and vanishes, her minions along with her. Unless you knew exactly where to look you’d have no more luck finding her than locating a single specific rat. She’s a creature of the streets. 

A Thousand Blows, the new period piece from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, stars Erin Doherty as Mary, Queen of the Elephants. (More on that sobriquet in a moment.) Doherty is interesting casting, because she has an interesting face. Most lead actors on TV shows have beautiful faces, and Doherty is certainly no exception there. But Doherty’s face has the long, curvilinear structure of a Modigliani portrait. When Mary’s temperament grows dark, her face becomes inscrutable and frightening and hard to maintain eye contact with. When it warms up, whether over money or men, you’d be hard pressed to look away. Doherty and her imposing performance instantly level A Thousand Blows up.

I’m covering the fine period piece A Thousand Blows for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

This is a nice, simple episode of Severance. I mean it! Despite major advancements being made in the storylines of almost every character, there’s very little that’s inscrutable this time around. No mystery men whose faces you don’t see, no new rooms with bizarre new people, no hints at vast reams of new Lumon/Eagan lore. It’s just a bunch of people going through a bunch of stuff and reacting accordingly. At its best, this show is always a drama to be watched, not a code to be cracked. 

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

There’s something in the water. Or someone. That’s the sensation the opening shot of this episode of The White Lotus gives us: We’re bobbing up and down on the ocean, dipping beneath the waves and then rising up again, gazing at the dark shore through the eyes of…no one, as it turns out. There’s no one out there spying on the hotel and its patrons — no one except creator-writer-director Mike White and his camera. Somehow, that’s even creepier. 

In lingering shots like this one, or the long interstitials between scenes showing us the flora and fauna and statues that surround the action, White creates the sense that there’s some animating spirit behind the camera, an unknown intelligence observing the events as they unfold for reasons we cannot understand. What’s more, these lovely, eerie shots routinely whisk us away from the world of these rich, egotistical assholes, instead showing us a world where their dreams and schemes mean nothing. It’s a mesmerizing effect, one the show has utilized in the past but never nearly this well.

The White Lotus feels like a more serious show now than it has in the past, too. Or I dunno, maybe it feels exactly the same and I’m projecting because I like this season more than the others so far. But from where I’m sitting it now comes across like a drama with the occasional funny moment, rather than a comedy that gets serious every once in a while. It seems like a minor distinction, but it makes all the difference in the world for the characters: In a comedy their primary function is to deliver a punchline every 30 seconds or so, with other considerations secondary. In this season, I really feel like I’m watching people’s lives unfold, weird as those lives may be.

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

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.