I’ve got a little essay on horror in the back of The Hangman #1 from Archie Comics’ superhero imprint Dark Circle, in stores today. I’ll be contributing one of these to every issue. Riverdale will run red with blood.
#PeakTV
Many of my peers, mostly the full-time staff-writer critics, jokingly complain about this idea of #peakTV, that there are simply too many good shows for anyone to watch and that this is a problem because it’s spreading advertising and attention too thin and stuff is slipping through the cracks. First of all I disagree with the conclusion, since basically nothing good gets cancelled anymore. But beyond that–
The nominees for the Best Drama Emmy award this year were as follows:
Better Call Saul
Downton Abbey
Game of Thrones
Homeland
House of Cards
Mad Men
Orange Is the New Black
I realized that you could EASILY put together a second slate of shows with absolutely no overlap and have it be just as respectable, if not better. Certainly you could come up with three shows that were better than Homeland, House of Cards, and the last season of Downton Abbey, a show I love but which was kind of aimless last year, plotwise. To wit:
The Affair
The Americans
Boardwalk Empire
Daredevil
Empire
The Good Wife
Halt and Catch Fire
Hannibal
The Knick
The Leftovers
Manhattan
Scandal
That’s without counting anthologies, dramedies (except for Orange Is the New Black, which changed categories from Comedy to Drama a while back), and shows that aired after the eligibility period. Throw those into the mix and you’ve got…
Fargo
Girls
Mr. Robot
Narcos
Transparent
True Detective
UnREAL
That’s an insaaaaaane number of high-quality contenders. You don’t even need to like all of them, that’s not the point, I’m just saying that based on the standards you can deduce from the actual nominees, any and all of the above shows could have been given a shot and a slot. If you like longform, serial narrative this is fucking hog heaven. #PeakTV is an embarrassment of riches. We’re very fortunate to live at such a time!
If you’re still tempted to complain, just compare it to the nominees for the Best Drama Emmy in the ‘70s, pictured above. That’s what an art form with problems looks like.
“Empire” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Six: “A High Hope for a Low Heaven”
SPOILER ALERT
When was the last time the end of an episode of a television show made you laugh with delight? If you’re an Empire viewer, chances are good this is a regular occurrence. And if you watched tonight’s installment, it probably happened to you about five minutes ago. Cookie Lyons shows up at the house of her hot new security chief Delgado to finally set their slow-burn sexual tension alight; the guy takes off his shirt to reveal the longhorn-cattle brand that marked her son Hakeem’s kidnappers. And boom! A sex scene turns into a plot twist without missing a beat, or a thrust. It’s yet another “oh, shit!” moment of the sort that’s made the Fox soap so damn entertaining, week after week after week.
I reviewed tonight’s episode of Empire for Rolling Stone. This show is such a blast.
“Fargo” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four: “Fear and Trembling”
There are better shows than Fargo on TV right now, but I’m so anxious to watch each new hour of Minnesota noir every week that I almost forget what they are. Nearly halfway through its second season, it’s clear that showrunner Noah Hawley has once again put together a preposterously compelling crime series, one that leaves you fiending for the next episode the way Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Sopranos, True Detective, and Game of Thrones have at their peaks. Simply put: Fargo is fucking riveting.
“The Leftovers” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Five: “No Room at the Inn”
The Leftovers gives you a lot to chew on with no guarantee you’ll like the taste, and “No Room at the Inn,” last night’s episode, was even more of a mouthful than most. It focused on Rev. Matt Jamison (Christopher Eccleston), who last season was the star of what was, for my money, one of the worst episodes of prestige television ever aired. This new spotlight ep strings together a series of trials and tribulations in which Matt drops his phone in a toilet, learns his brain-dead wife is pregnant with a baby whose conception no one will believe she consented to, gets his head bashed in and his hand stomped on by a mugger who steals his ID bracelet and sabotages his car, pushes a wheelchair for over five miles in the Texas sun, loses a fight with a man in a wedding tuxedo, gets detained, gets thrown out of town, is forced to knock a stranger unconscious with an oar for cash, nearly drowns in a flash flood, loses his wife’s wheelchair, gets smuggled back into town in the trunk of a car, gives up his recovered bracelet to the son of the guy who mugged him after the guy dies in a car wreck the kid somehow survives, and voluntarily has himself locked up full-frontally nude in a pillory—and just in case you didn’t get what’s going on, says his favorite book in the Bible is Job. By rights this shouldn’t be any more successful than the first go-round. Instead it winds up being one of the series’ finest hours to date.
I reviewed this week’s very strong, very demanding The Leftovers for Decider.
“The Affair” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Five (205)
“People don’t see me, Cole. They don’t. They just wanna fuck me, or they don’t…see me. They don’t care. Sometimes I worry at night that I’m not a real person, that I’m just a figment of other people’s imaginations.” In this week’s episode of The Affair, Alison (Ruth Wilson) self-diagnosed her core self-esteem issue with a level of insight you’d usually get charged by the hour for. That she offers this analysis not in her own POV segment, but in her estranged husband Cole’s, is largely immaterial. Okay, maybe it’s proof that Cole knows her better than just about anyone, since this entirely accurate appraisal is his memory’s construction of their conversation. But it also demonstrates that Cole sees her as a woman in need of rescue…which is her point exactly. She’s always a character in someone else’s story, while her own gets pushed to the wayside.
“Ash vs. Evil Dead” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “El Jefe”
But the show’s biggest selling point is neither a dick joke nor a Deadite — it’s the director. As a filmmaker, Sam Raimi brings every weapon in his arsenal to shooting this thing: kinetic but clear action-sequence editing, off-kilter angles, whiplash-inducing camera movements, and that signature evil’s-eye-view high-speed tracking shot. He has one of the few directorial styles that really does merit the ubiquitous comparison to a rollercoaster, although in this case you’ve gotta move down the midway to another attraction: the haunted house ride. The episode lurches and careens, stops short and speeds up, and always seems to have another jump-scare just around the corner. It’s all so gleefully gonzo that you forget this gentleman has helmed some of the biggest mainstream blockbusters of all time. Watching Raimi work his magic on the small screen isn’t just entertaining, it’s inspiring — a sign that TV really can do whatever it wants, and that the only obstacle is that no one bothered to try before.
I’m covering Ash vs. Evil Dead for Rolling Stone this season, starting with last night’s premiere—a mixed bag, especially the writing, but with much to recommend it.
“Fargo” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Three: “The Myth of Sisyphus”
#TVCriticProblems: Quite often a network will send reviewers multiple episodes of a show’s new season in advance. The temptation to binge—especially if the show is good, and Fargo is very, very good—is overwhelming. But I’ve always thought it does a disservice to readers to write about a given week’s episode with knowledge of what’s to come fresh in my brain. Much as it pains me, I almost always* hold off and pace myself, mirroring the average audience member’s experience by watching and writing about one ep at a time.
But here’s how absorbing Fargo is: The moment I finished writing up last week’s episode, I popped this one, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in the DVD player. What’s the harm, I figured—I’ll just file my review early. But time passed, life and other assignments intervened, and before I knew it another week was upon me. And what does another week mean but another episode of Fargo? So I watched the fourth installment, wrote my review, sent it to my editor…and only then did I realize I’d missed a step. I’m so into this show that I forgot to write about this week’s ep, because all I could think about when the time came was watching next week’s. Fargo is so good it will make you forget your place in the spacetime continuum. How’s that for a pull quote?
The Great Boiled Leather Audio Hour/A Podcast of Ice and Fire Crossover 2015!
Exciting news from the world of ASoIaF podcasts: Stefan and I are the special guests on this week’s edition of A Podcast of Ice and Fire. Join us and host Amin Javadi as we celebrate the 100th installment of Stefan & Amin’s Supreme Court of Westeros Q&A feature (which I all too infrequently remember to post here at boiledleather.com) by tackling a host of reader-generated questions about the series’ biggest mysteries, theories, and themes. Consider it the Boiled Leather Audio Hour Episode 42.5!
STC on Cut to the Chase!
I’m the guest on this week’s episode of Chase Thomas’s Cut to the Chase podcast on writers and critics! Chase and I discuss my origin story as a writer, Game of Thrones, Lost, The Affair, Empire, True Detective, Gotham, Daredevil, cartoons, comics, and much more. I hope you enjoy!
The 25 Best Horror TV Shows of All Time
3. Hannibal (2013-2015)
How the hell did a show as visually audacious, narratively perverse, and mind-bogglingly gory as Hannibal wind up on the Peacock Network? Before its unceremonious and unfortunate third-season cancellation, Bryan Fuller’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s series of serial-killer novels — starring cannibalistic psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter and his arch-frienemy, FBI profiler Will Graham — was nothing short of a horror lover’s fever dream. It treated murder as performance art, peeling away the flesh and gristle of the human body in sensuous, spectacular slow motion to expose the heart of darkness within. In the process it made pretty much every other Prestige Drama look like a student film. As the Phantom of the Opera once said: Feast your eyes, glut your soul.
I counted down the Top 25 horror tv shows of all time for Rolling Stone. Who’s number one?
“The Leftovers” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four: “Orange Sticker”
At the end of the episode, Nora handcuffs herself to Kevin. It’s her attempt to provide security for his sleepwalking, and to ensure that she never wakes up to an empty bed again. But given what we’ve learned of their quiet desperation, it reads like the jail sentence it probably is. Thus The Leftovers reduces another moment of human connection to illusion and panic. This kind of thing makes it a hard show to watch, and a harder show to turn away from.
“The Affair” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four (204)
If you had to sum up the Tao of The Affair—what it is, what it does, how it does it—in two lines of dialogue, this week’s beautiful car wreck of an episode has you covered with Helen (Maura Tierney) alone. In her half of the episode, which leads the hour, she puts a punctuation mark at the end of her humiliating arrest for DWI and marijuana possession by asking Noah (Dominic West), the man she feels drove her to this point, “Why are you doing this to us?” At the same point in Noah’s side of the story, she instead says “Why do you get to fuck up and I don’t?” Right there you have the yin and yang, the presence and absence, of Helen’s dilemma. Noah’s infidelity and their subsequent divorce have devastated her by forcing her and her children to suffer the consequences of someone else’s actions, yes; that’s the explanation she allows herself to articulate. But they’ve also hurt her by forcing her to confront how much she wishes she could get away with that kind of tomfoolery, too. Showing us every side of the gender-specific resentments and self-perceived virtues of men and women, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives—even the sides the people in question don’t wish to show, or can’t see themselves—is The Affair’s specialty and strength.
Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed this week’s The Affair for Decider. I think this show is excellent, and I’ll level with you: I think the writing we’re doing on it is second to none.
“Empire” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Five: “Be True”
What’s an empire without a few martyrs? Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Andre Lyon’s born-again Christianity hasn’t cost him anything more than a few tense moments with his family — yet. But when tonight’s episode — “Be True” (as in the Shakesperean “To thine own self…”) — dunked the eldest of Emperor Lucious the First’s three sons in the baptismal font, it also put him in the hot seat.
I forgot to link to it the other day, but I reviewed last week’s transitional episode of Empire for Rolling Stone.
The Boiled Leather Audio Hour Episode 42
Fire and Blood: The Third Reich
We’re traveling from Westeros to Nazi Germany in this unusual—and, to us, urgent—episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. Why are we venturing so far afield from our usual topics of discussion and debate? Because we’ve always believed that A Song of Ice and Fire, like life itself, is best viewed through an unsparing ethical and historical lens. Lately, however, that lens has been clouded. In recent weeks, numerous right-wing politicians—most notably Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson and his supporters in the United States—have distorted and repurposed the rise of Adolf Hitler and the roots of the Holocaust to suit their preexisting positions. Astonishingly, in the day since this podcast was recorded, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu followed suit. We believe this to be an act of tremendous disrespect for the dead, one that also does a grave disservice to the living. Given our personal and professional interests in this pivotal epoch in history, which have shaped our interaction with ASoIaF in ways large and small, we decided to explore the era’s real lessons as best we could.
What role did privately held weaponry and paramilitary organizations actually play both in the Nazi Party’s ascent to power and the resistance against it? How should we view Europe’s failure to act in the face of Hitler’s belligerence, and Germany’s failure to capitulate in the face of certain defeat? What parallels can be drawn between the forces that fueled the war Hitler ignited and those at play in Westeros and Essos? What makes World War II different enough from other conflicts for the likes of Vietnam-era conscientious objector George R.R. Martin to say it was worth fighting? Is there such a thing as a “good war” at all? In this experiment of an episode, we try to answer those questions.
Two notes before we proceed:
1) We are deeply indebted to the work of the historians Ian Kershaw and Richard J. Evans, particularly Kershaw’s two-volume Hitler biography and Evans’s Third Reich trilogy.
2) On a much lighter note, this episode (hopefully—with iTunes, god only knows) marks the debut of our brand new logo, created by Sean’s partner, Julia Gfrörer. We are in her debt.
Additional links:
All Leather Must Be Boiled’s Ian Kershaw tag.
“Fargo” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Two: “Before the Law”
In the mood for grim pronouncements about the nature of power, the legacy of family, and the fate of empires? Chances are Fargo is not where you’d normally look. Sure, Lorne Malvo had some heavy shit, man to say about living life in predator mode, but his deranged outlook was a sort of solo semi-fascism, a view in which life is nothing but struggle between the weak and the strong and no alliance has value beyond temporary exploitation. Beyond that, the show’s take on morality has been pointedly small-bore, demonstrated through the selfless or squalid behavior of individuals. In that respect, showrunner Noah Hawley has much in common with his inspirations, Joel and Ethan Coen, or with the more surreal and supernatural work of their spiritual cousin David Lynch, who like them tends to split his narrative time between Small Town U.S.A. and the City of Angels. They examine violence for its place in human nature, not its potential as a force of nature.
But the stuff we heard from Floyd Gerhardt, the matriarch of this season’s German-American gangster heavies, in “Before the Law,” this week’s episode? You could just as easily have heard it in Tywin Lannister’s Red Keep, Lucious Lyon’s boardroom, or Frank Semyon’s Vinci casino, if not for the Minnesota accents.
“The Affair” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Three (203)
It’s episodes like this that make The Affair the smartest show about relationships on television. Nothing is as explicit or unflinching about the ways grief and memory can remain so present they’re practically a third partner. Nothing is as honest about the power and the limitations of sexual connection. Nothing is as observant about how we identify the comforting, satisfying elements of love, then lie and hide and self-censor to preserve them, all but guaranteeing their eventual loss.
Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed last night’s The Affair for Decider. This is an excellent show.
“The Leftovers” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Three: “Off Ramp”
The persecution of cults by the government has stealthily become the series’ most disturbing theme: Seen both as dangerous and, just as importantly,repulsive, these fringe movements are treated like free targets for government agents and pissed-off citizens alike. The thing is, though, that they are both dangerous and repulsive. Holy Wayne was a creep and a kook, irrespective of the inexplicable coincidences surrounding him. The Guilty Remnant are unforgivably cruel to the grieving and physically abusive to their own members. Laurie and Tommy are now peddling pure snake oil. The Leftovers doesn’t give them a pass, or act like their crimes are mere doctrinal disputes. It does, however, force us to examine who we consider a part of our tribe, the tribe of American society, and what we consider acceptable losses among those we cast out. That’s gutsy, and I’m grateful, because hey, someone’s gotta do it.
I reviewed last night’s The Leftovers, another strong one, for Decider.
“Empire” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four: “Poor Yorick”
We live in an era of all-or-nothing politicization of fandom: Every show and every star is treated as either ideologically flawless or irredeemably evil. Empire knows it’s not that simple. It speaks to the issues, knowing that’s the duty of all art. But it also sees how easy it is to pass off schlock and kitsch as grand statements, and holds itself to a higher standard in that regard than any fan or critic ever could.
I reviewed tonight’s extraordinarily astute Empire for Rolling Stone.
“Fargo” thoughts, Season Two, Episode One: “Waiting for Dutch”
How did they ever make a TV show of Fargo? The answer: Quite well indeed, surprisingly. At first, second, and even third glance, novelist Noah Hawley’s attempt to translate Joel & Ethan Coen’s Oscar-nominated Minnesota murder-comedy into an anthology series seemed like a frozen folly to rival Seward’s, no matter what the smash Season One success of Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective augured for another author-helmed cable crime series with a fresh cast and story ever season. Even if Fargowasn’t a straightforward adaptation/expansion of the original, the unique Coen Brothers blend of small-town dorkiness, splatstick comedy, and unsparing despair could perhaps be imitated, but never duplicated, no?
Oh, yeah. Hawley wisely took the Rumsfeldian approach to the seemingly impossible task, solving the problem by making it bigger. Yes, his all-new story borrowed all the familiar elements from the original: the snowy setting, the North Central accents, the pregnant policewoman, the milquetoast murderer, the Mutt-and-Jeff hitmen, the escalating calamities, even little details like an awkward reunion over dinner, a chase over thin ice, and (in the show’s one true link to the movie) a hidden suitcase of loot marked with an ice scraper. But it also made a magpie-like raid on the Coens’ entire oeuvre: a hotel corridor from Barton Fink here, a parable-dispensing rabbi from A Serious Man there, and, in the form of Billy Bob Thornton’s hellaciously awful contract killer Lorne Malvo, a living embodiment of predatory evil out of No Country for Old Men everywhere. (Even composer Jeff Russo’s extraordinary score paid homage to a variety of Carter Burwell’s Coen-movie musical contributions.) The result was less a riff on the Brothers’ 1996 classic and more “Songs in the Key of Coen”—a tribute to the writer-directors’ unflagging ability to playfully puncture the thin ice of human decency and find the deadly cold beneath that may well have surpassed the original.*
All of which makes the show’s Emmy Award–winning first season (technically miniseries, but only the network and the Academy care) a tough act to follow. Not only does the show have to maintain that level of care and quality, it must do so with no Billy Bob, no Bilbo Baggins, and no out-of-nowhere star turn from Allison Tolman as an underappreciated master investigator with a bun in the oven. The sad fate that can befall an anthology series’ sophomore season is as plain as the mustache on Ray Velcoro’s face.
Fortunately, “Waiting for Dutch,” Fargo’s Season Two premiere, is no Redux Detective.
I reviewed the season premiere of Fargo, and talked a lot about its excellent first season too, for the New York Observer, where I’ll be covering the show this season.