“Griselda” thoughts, Episode Two: “Rich White People”
Normally, meanwhile, I’d complain about the show’s overreliance on the dull Obama-era blue-and-orange digital color scheme. (True Detective Season 4 is another offender in a trend I thought we’d left behind as a species.) Look closer, however, and you’ll see that Baiz is doing much of this in-camera. The Griselda team populates every shot with blue and orange props and costumes and set elements: shirts, jackets, dresses, walls, signs, taxicabs, the wheels of a bicycle, a painting of a beach at sunset on the wall of a hotel room at one point. I’m not saying this is Asteroid City, but nor is it just slapping a filter on top of what they shot. Thought went into this. Care went into this. It’s Something!
“Griselda” thoughts, Episode One: “Lady Comes to Town”
I didn’t know what to expect going into Griselda, beyond a general raised-hackles sense that someone was pulling a fast one by not just making a new season of Narcos already. What I got was a surprising performance in a glamorous and gory hour of TV with a banging soundtrack. You cut that kind of thing into a line on my glass table and you bet I’ll be inhaling it.
I reviewed the premiere of Griselda for Decider, where I’ll be covering the whole show. Sofía Vergara is up to something special here.
“True Detective” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Two: “Night Country: Part 2”
The real reason I don’t want True D S3 to go for broke in that direction is this: I don’t think this show has the chops to be genuinely frightening. It’s jumpscared me a few times — the mystery man still running around the station at the beginning of episode 1, the first appearance of Travis (Erling Eliasson), the car crash, various characters pulling jumpscare pranks on various other characters, and of course the fact that one of the frozen scientists turns out to be alive and screaming. But to dig deep into the true black, the cosmic void, the annihilating evil at the heart of all truly great supernatural horror? I don’t see The Exorcist or Under the Skin or The Shining or The Blair Witch Project or Skinamarink in here. I don’t see Twin Peaks or The Terror or Channel Zero here — or True Detective Season 1, for that matter. I don’t think this season’s horror, such as it is, is going to horrify me, and that’s important.
I reviewed this week’s episode of True Detective for Decider.
We ask that you refrain from talking about your experience inside the structure
The Siegel house, intended to evoke comfort, safety, and the capital-G Good life due to its fancy pants and ultimately pointless “passive house” environmental certification, is where you feel that malevolence the strongest. The place the Siegels themselves designed to make them feel their safest and best is where they are most keenly and cruelly observed by the camera, and where they are, in the end, most harshly punished by whatever force exists to do so in their world. The family home is central to the middle-class dream; it is just as central to the nightmare of surveillance cinema.
‘Fargo’ Season 5 Ending Explained: What Does Ole Munch The Sin Eater Chowing Down on A Bisquick Biscuit Mean, Anyway?
In offering the biscuit to Ole, Dorothy is essentially rewriting the very similar sequence from No Country for Old Men, in which the freakish and seemingly unstoppable hitman Anton Chigurrh (Javier Bardem) pays an identically menacing visit to Carlar Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald), long after his business with her husband Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) seemed to have concluded. Like Dorothy tells Ole, Carla Jean tells Anton that his strange code of honor isn’t some binding thing placed on him from some external authority — it’s a choice he makes, or doesn’t make, to continue hurting people. He could stop if he wanted, stop right then and there.
The Coens’ oeuvre and the Fargo TV show alike are full of characters like this — strange, implacable killers who seem like visitors from another world. (Indeed, they usually are alien to “normal” American culture in some way, in terms of nationality or subculture.) No Country’s Chigurrh, Raising Arizona’s Leonard Smalls, Miller’s Crossing’s the Dane (J.E. Freeman), a character I won’t spoil for you in Barton Fink. On the show, you’ve got Season 1’s Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton), Season 2’s Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClarnon) and the Kitchen Brothers (Brad and Todd Mann), Season 3’s V.M. Varga (David Thewlis) and his henchmen Yuri (Goran Bogdan) and Meemo (Andy Yu), Season 4’s Constant Calamita (Gaetano Bruno), plus the recurring character of Mr. Wrench (Russell Harvard). Whether they live or die, these men all have one thing in common: Ain’t no one serving them biscuits. No one’s telling them they can refuse to swallow the shit the rich and awful make us eat. No one’s telling them they can be forgiven.
I went long on the end of Fargo Season 5 for Decider. (You can skip the servicey bits if that’s not your thing.)
“Fargo” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Ten: “Bisquick”
When it comes to men, I have a type. Fortunately for me, this type of man is common across the Prestige TV space: The Hound on Game of Thrones, Richard Harrow on Boardwalk Empire, Wild Bill Hickok on Deadwood, and Hanzee Dent on our very own Fargo. Simply put, I like men who have been absolutely immiserated by how good they are at killing people.
I don’t think I’m spoiling anything when I say that whether they live or die, these characters rarely have a happy ending waiting for them. Their line of work is both physically dangerous and emotionally poisonous, making emotional survival difficult even if literal survival is achieved. That’s what makes these men such tragic figures: They are capable of seeing all this, but they’ve despaired of changing it. As Wild Bill told Charlie Utter in Deadwood: “Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?”
I reviewed the excellent finale of Fargo Season 5 for Decider.
“True Detective” thoughts, Season Four, Episode One: “Night Country: Part One”
A Jodie Foster/John Hawkes/Fiona Shaw show? That’s enough to sign me up right there. But one of the pleasures of the premiere is seeing how boxer-turned-actor Kali Reis holds her own on screen in a role that requires her to go after Foster’s character head on. There’s nowhere to hide in a role like that if you can’t hang, and Reis hangs. I’ll bet more than a few viewers will think over the history of the franchise and just assume she’s famous from something or other, since she gives you no reason to think otherwise.
The concept is like a turducken of similar stories, in a fashion that’s shameless enough for me to respect it. “What if we turned The Thing and The Terror and 30 Days of Night and that one episode of The X-Files that riffed on The Thing into a season of True Detective starring Agent Clarice Starling with Sol Starr as her deputy?” You’d get a pretty entertaining introductory hour of television, that’s what.
I reviewed the season premiere of Issa López’s True Detective for Decider.
“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode Ten: “Beyond Logic”
I really, really, really want to call attention to the score by composer Leopold Ross in this scene. Director Andy Goddard, working off a script from showrunner Chris Black, lets the moment linger. He pretty much just points the camera at the two actors and lets them cook. But Ross’s score fills in the blanks. It’s a woozy, swooning, repetitive series of two notes, like a deep inhale and a deep exhale. Taken in tandem with the radiant acting of Russell and Yamamoto and the dreamlike background provided by the strange neither-here-nor-there fauna of the so-called “axis mundi” between our world and that of the titans into which they’ve fallen, it feels like a dream you might have of reuniting with someone you once loved, finding yourself as you are and them as they were, and all you have to share is sadness. I loved it.
“Fargo” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Nine: “The Useless Hand”
Fargo loves a good misdirect. Remember the bit in this week’s episode — “The Useless Hand,” the penultimate episode of the show’s stellar fifth season — where Dorothy opens up all the gas valves on Roy Tillman’s stove? You anticipate fireworks that never come. Roy smells the gas, stops one of his dipshit minions from lighting a cigarette, turns off the stove, has the boys open all the doors and windows, boom, problem solved.
All the gambit manages to do is tip Roy off that Dorothy has been in the house, which he honestly might have eventually guessed anyway. (He’s very quick to figure out she’s hiding someplace she thinks they wouldn’t expect.) And he would have figured that out the moment he went up to his bedroom and found his wife knocked out cold — not that the sight gives him a second’s thought of stopping his hunt to help the woman when he does stumble across her. Not our Roy!
The point is that neither expected outcome, neither the worst nor the best, comes to pass. The gas doesn’t make or break Dorothy’s escape attempt. She doesn’t kill Roy with it, and she doesn’t get killed because of it. (It’s a close call in the end, but again, it would have been a close call regardless.) The show just wants you to think something might happen. Creator Noah Hawley, who wrote this episode, constructed the show’s entire approach to action and suspense around allowing the viewer’s mind to spin as fast as it can for as long as it can before he finally lowers the boom.
Later in the episode, state trooper Whit Farr warns the task force of feds and state cops he’s assembled to rescue Dorothy not to shoot at her even if she appears armed and dangerous, which she almost certainly will. “This story,” he tells them, “will not end with us crushing the victim with the helping hand.” Puts an idea into your head, doesn’t it? Doesn’t beat you over the head with it, but slides it right in there nonetheless. And there it will stay for one more week. You can rotate it in your mind like a cube if you want. I’m pretty sure Noah Hawley wants you to.
‘The Sopranos’ at 25: Robert Iler’s Portrayal Of AJ Soprano Never Got The Recognition It Deserved
Until an early-2010s casting bonanza rendered such complaints largely outdated — Kiernan Shipka on Mad Men, Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner on Game of Thrones, and Holly Taylor on The Americans all proved capable of holding down tremendously demanding adult material seemingly with ease — the common rap on child actors who aged into becoming main characters was that they were kind of a waste of everyone’s time. Iler got it as bad as anyone, especially because relative to his on-screen sister, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, his best material didn’t come until much later in the series.
But just as random Italian-American character actors like Tony Sirico, Vincent Curatola, and Steven R. Schrripa were given the material of their careers by this show and ably rose past their background-character origins to meet the challenge, so did Iler. His part is much less cool and funny and scary and glamorous than the gangsters, which is what makes it so brave. Unlike virtually everyone else on the show, he didn’t have any bedrock of thrilling criminality on which to base his performance and trust that the audience would put up with it. He just went there, all in, right into the deep end. In the process he showed me myself. It’s not a flattering portrait, but The Sopranos doesn’t show us as we wish we were. It shows us as we wish we weren’t.
“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” thoughts, Season One, Episode Nine: “Axis Mundi”
No, don’t worry, I won’t bury the lede: This week’s episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters ends with a hero shot of actor Mari Yamamoto wielding a bow and arrow. In other news, I’m pregnant!
Certainly one of the great discoveries of this strangely sophisticated Godzilla TV show for American audiences is a woman who looks like she should be photographed by the same people as Marlene Dietrich, and that’s no doubt what I’m responding to. I’m kind of over the whole character you thought was dead comes back as a survivalist badass thing to be frank; that would not be “strangely sophisticated,” if you were wondering. But this character, who as the only major participant on the losing side of the first atomic war is the heart of the old Monarch enterprise, and this actor, who handled complicated romantic material with both of her leading men so adroitly…well, by all means, hand her Legolas’s gear and see what she can do.
Tom Wilkinson And His Baguettes Are Eternal
We’d all love to be remembered at our best—some great thing we did or said, a life we touched or changed, a moment of pure pride or bliss. Tom Wilkinson will forever be remembered with this photograph. His legacy is encapsulated in a hilarious image of him doing a tremendous job as a beloved character in a fantastic scene from an original and righteous and perfect movie. That’s tough to top.
I wrote about Tom Wilkinson and his Michael Clayton baguettes for Defector.
How ‘The Wheel Of Time’ Made Great Art Out Of Great Pain
My kid is not a vocal viewer. Actually, as they’d be the first to tell you, they are a weirdly un-vocal viewer. Together, and largely at their insistence, we’ve marathoned all of The Golden Girls and Cheers and are currently working on Seinfeld; as they themselves are quick to point out, they’ve laughed out loud at these, three of the funniest shows ever made, maybe four times. Mostly they just smile and nod affirmatively. Yes, they are aware of the Seinfeld episode about the woman who just says “That’s so funny,” and are looking forward to it. For people like them it’s so rare to see yourself represented on screen.
So their reaction to the most brutal sequence of torture scenes they’ve seen in their young life gave me pause. It happened in the sixth episode of the second season of The Wheel of Time, showrunner Rafe Judkins’s adaptation of the monolithic epic fantasy series by the late Robert Jordan and his literary heir Brandon Sanderson. The episode is called “Eyes Without Pity,” and for good reason.
In the storyline at the center of this episode, the character Egwene al’Vere—a young woman whose nascent magical powers make her one of the show’s co-protagonists—is imprisoned, enslaved, physically and psychologically tortured, and finally broken. As a lowly damane, she is being turned into a living weapon by her overseer, or sul’dam, Renna—an agent of the brutal, American-accented Seanchan empire, a colonial power that spends the season wreaking havoc in the land our heroes call home.
The gist of it is simple. Egwene has been fitted with a magical collar, linked to a corresponding magical bracelet on Renna’s arm. As long as she’s wearing the collar, she can do no harm to Renna; the mere thought of reaching for a weapon sends agonizing waves of pain throughout her entire body, and should she manage to land a blow against her tormentor, she will receive multiple times the pain herself. (The BDSM influence on all this is unmistakable, undeniable, well explored by the fandom, and confirmed by Jordan himself, so no, you’re not crazy.)
Now Egwene has a simple task: She must pick up a pitcher of water and pour Renna a cup. Unless and until she abandons all hope of escape and any belief that she’ll be able to use the pitcher as a weapon to hurt Renna, the magically induced pain makes so much as touching the pitcher impossible. No matter how many times Renna says “Pour the water, Egwene”—a mantra along the lines of The Marathon Man’s “Is it safe?”—it simply can’t be done.
Until, finally, Egwene breaks. She reaches for the pitcher. She pours Renna the water without pain. And immediately, after day upon day of this torture, Renna dumps the water on the floor. “Good girl,” she tells Egwene.
My 12-year-old kid turns to me at this point and says, “This is a good show.”
This is the opening of the long interview I conducted for Defector with actors Madeleine Madden and Xelia Mendes-Jones about their work as Egwene and Renna in the central storyline of The Wheel of Time Season 2. It was my kid’s first exposure to what I (and they) would consider great television drama, and it involved two actors of color, a woman and a nonbinary person. I thought this was exciting, and my nonbinary kid did so too, so I had to dig in. This is very personal to me, and I hope you enjoy it.
Dave Foley Knows What Danish Graves Was Thinking
WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THIS WEEK’S EPISODE OF FARGO AHEAD
Danish falls victim to one of the central schisms of this season, which is the split on the political right wing between the true believers, like Roy Tillman, and the rich people, like Lorraine, who think they’re just using the true believers to keep their taxes low. Danish thinks he knows which side is really in charge, but Roy is the man with the gun, and he thinks otherwise.
You definitely have a sense with Jennifer’s character, Lorraine, that there’s still humanity in her. She cares about her family, and wants to protect them, so it’s at least as far as that. Obviously she’s willing to destroy other people’s lives in service of that goal without any real compunction.But then you have Jon’s character, who believes he’s empowered by God, and therefore infallible. And can commit murders, randomly, constantly! He believes that if a man’s intentions are pure, everything he does is right, which is a much more dangerous mindset. It’s a psychopathy: You are incapable of feeling empathy, feeling any guilt or remorse for any of your actions, no matter how heinous, because you know, for a fact, you’re right in everything you do.
It reminded me of this fascinating little moment earlier in the season, where Danish is trying to leave Lorraine’s compound, but one of the security guards he himself hired won’t let him leave until he shows ID. It doesn’t make any sense, but the guard has the gun, so he makes the rules.
The power Danish thinks he has is illusory. All his power stems from Lorraine, he doesn’t have any power that’s vested in him, but he thinks he does. When the guard blocks him, it’s a little taste of what’s coming with Sheriff Roy.When he sees Roy’s gun, in my mind, Danish is just disbelieving, because usually people are afraid of him. He’s like, “No, people are afraid of me! This isn’t gonna happen! He’s not gonna do this.” Right up until the moments the shots are fired, he still believes he has a fearsome presence.
Danish’s disbelief is so convincing that for a minute I didn’t believe it either. Roy pulls out his gun and I’m just like, Hmmm, what’s he getting at here?
[Laughs.] Then the misdirection worked! Good!
I interviewed Dave freaking Foley about Fargo for Vulture! Holy cow!
“Fargo” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Eight: “Blanket”
I had an absolute blast watching this episode, even when it made me feel like curling up and dying.
STC’s Best of 2023
2023 was the first full year of my adult life in which I did not suffer from depression and anxiety. That’s pretty much the story of my year, full stop. I spent 365 days feeling happy. That’s unreal to me. I literally didn’t think it was possible for me. Yay!
My depression/anxiety had become quite debilitating in retrospect, and before I took a new med (ask your doctor if Rexulti is right for you!) starting in June last year, one of the biggest problems it caused for me was an inability to feel safe and comfortable experiencing new art. I’m a TV critic, and I’m determined to keep a roof over my family’s head, so I gutted through quite a bit, but this is the first year in a long time where I feel like my heart is open again.
So first I’d like to show off my favorite music of the year: ABSOLUTE BEST OF DAVID BOWIE: STARDUST EDITION, a 110-song playlist I made as an exercise. It covers every era and album, plus the major singles and collaborations, with an emphasis (of course) on the things I like best. I’ve listened to it nonstop since I made it. David Bowie is my favorite musician and the most life-changing artist I’ve ever encountered. I adore him so much but spent years away from his music. It felt like coming home.
(Just note that the original 1965 versio of “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving,” the all-in-one medley version of “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise),” and the Tin Machine song “You Belong in Rock n’ Roll,” which are on the playlist as it exists on my computer, aren’t available on Apple Music and they’re hard to find anywhere else. He’s really purged Tin Machine II for some reason!)
2023 is also notable for being the first (and second, and third) time I watched Cabaret. This film hit me like a freight train, from out of nowhere, like Nightbreed did in my teens and Velvet Goldmine in my 20s. I have never, never, never seen a musical theater performance like Liza Minnelli in that film. She makes even the other greats look like Clapton coming on stage after Hendrix. They’re not even playing the same instrument. I know that I’m corny and sentimental and lachrymose and prone to hyperbole, but watching her sing that final song is like looking at the face of god to me. Utterly poleaxed by this. Can’t get over it.
Since I started watching new/new-to-me movies seriously again late last year, I’ve been keeping a running list. Not Letterboxd, that feels like homework to me and I need at least SOME of my media consumption to be a pastime, but it helps me keep track of what I’ve seen and what I’d like to see. My favorite movies of 2023 are:
- The Zone of Interest
- Skinamarink
- May December
- Godzilla Minus One
- Killers of the Flower Moon
- Oppenheimer
- Barbie
- M3GAN
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
- probably The Outwaters (very mixed on this one but that ending is like nothing I’ve ever seen)
Still haven’t seen Poor Things though, which really seems up my alley.
Which brings us to the thing I’m qualified to talk about: television! Here’s my top 10 for the year. I’m very proud of how little it looks like any other critic’s (none of the big consensus faves are on mine bc i either don’t like or don’t watch them lol), but in general there was a ton of variety this year on critics’ best-of lists, which I think can only be good for TV and criticism. Everybody loves dramedies but me though.
- Dead Ringers (Prime)
- The Idol (HBO/Max)
- Copenhagen Cowboy (Netflix)
- Foundation (Apple TV+)
- Billions (Showtime/Paramount+)
- Fargo (FX/Hulu – reserving the right to raise this if the ending kills)
- The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix)
- The Wheel of Time (Prime)
- Perry Mason (HBO/Max)
- Silo (Apple TV+)
I have a piece coming out in the Los Angeles Review of Books about the lurid tone I like in a lot these shows, so that will be exciting.
I also watch AEW wrestling all the time. I don’t really care about its ups and downs, I always have a ball.
Finally, in terms of my own work, here’s what I’m proudest of:
My Los Angeles Review of Books debut, which is also the first time my wife Julia Gfrörer and I have collaborated on a prose piece together. It’s about one of our favorite genres: the sad sex movie, or to use Julia’s term, the Erotic Bummer.
Got my first film-related pitch into the Times, with this piece on Killers of the Flower Moon and Scorsese protagonists.
I got a pretty consistent essay-writing gig at Decider — here I am on Oppenheimer, Barbie, Hostel, and Angus Cloud.
Also for Decider I did a list of ten great recent horror TV shows to check out. I love making up the canon as I go.
I interviewed several showrunners of my favorite shows: Billions’ Brian Koppelman & David Levien, The Wheel of Time‘s Rafe Judkins, and Foundation‘s David S. Goyer.
I wrote about Godzilla a lot, for some reason, in Blood Knife, Welcome to Hell World, and Decider.
I got into Defector with this piece on queer and trans wrestlers dealing with regional anti-LGBTQ+ legislation as practitioners of a traveling business.
I helped organize the Freelance Solidarity Project strike support campaign for the WGA and SAG/AFTRA strikes.
Finally, one day I read a New York Times piece on trans kids at school, thought of my own kid at school, got real fucking mad, and sent a DM to the great organizer Eric Thurm. As a result, NYTLetter.com happened and humiliated the most important newspaper in the English-speaking world into (not completely but largely) knocking it the fuck off, no matter what the suits fucking say about it. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.
Happy new year everyone!
“Monarch” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “Birthright”
Some of the best, sweetest, sexiest, most convincing romantic storytelling being done on TV this year is happening on — get this — Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I know! I didn’t see it coming either! But first with May and Kentaro, then with Kei and Lee, and now with Kei and Billy, this show has given the blossoming of romance the kind of casual intimacy and heat that makes you crave the stuff in the first place. That this week’s expert demonstration of yearning and desire involves the younger version of a crackpot character played by John Goodman and eaten by a monster in a film called Kong: Skull Island is part of the fun.