I’m really glad we did this one: In our latest subscriber-only Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast, Stefan Sasse and I discuss the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes—why they’re happening, what they mean, and where Hollywood and labor go from here. Subscribe and listen!
BLAH/WGA/SAG-AFTRA Solidarity!
“Full Circle” thoughts, Episode Four: “Safe in the Circle”
I think I’ve sussed out what Full Circle is up to. Besides being the quintessential Gripping New Crime Thriller, that is. The show’s fourth episode (“Safe in the Circle”) is like a Jenga tower made of lies, dating back decades from the kidnapping at the center of the show, and the characters spend it pulling the tower apart piece by piece. Everyone lies, as (unfortunately) Morrissey once sang. That’s the big idea.
“Full Circle” thoughts, Episode Three: “Jared’s Body”
Move over, Transformers: There’s a new “more than meets the eye” show in town. Returning for its second double dose of twisty crime hijinks, Full Circle spends its third episode (“Jared’s Body”) revealing one surprising connection between the players after the other. It does so with minimalist precision, serving up just enough information to get the audience on the right track, confident everyone watching is smart enough to keep up. Personally? I appreciate that vote of confidence. Everyone else seems to be getting in on the investigation; why shouldn’t we?
The Miracle of ‘Andor’
That Andor, a Star Wars television series on Disney+, received an Emmy Award nomination for Best Drama doesn’t tell you much about Andor. Like all awards shows, the Emmys are ultimately about themselves; following their nominees and winners from year to year is less a way to keep track of what’s actually good and more a way to track the values of the Academy of Television Arts & Science’s values and preferences as they change, or don’t change, over time. For example, the acting on the satirical HBO dramedies Succession and The White Lotus was very good, but please take it from someone who covers this stuff for a living: In no way did these two shows alone contain the eight best supporting actor performances of the year all by themselves, unless they were the only two shows you watched.
Similarly, Andor’s nods for Best Drama, Best Directing, and Best Writing — three of its total of eight nominations — are very nice for Andor, a show acclaimed by nearly every critic from nearly every quarter. But please note that the rote exercise in IP management Obi-Wan Kenobi, aka Ewan McGregor’s Divorce Attorney Needs a New Pair of Shoes, also landed a nomination in the historically competitive Best Limited Series category. Put it all together and what you have is evidence that Emmy voters listen when the Mouse tells them something is For Your Consideration, that’s all. It’s just like how the capture of an entire category by two shows that aired on the same network/streamer in the same time slot on the same night while parodying the same kinds of people tells you more about how Emmy voters like spending their Sundays than anything else.
Fortunately, what Andor’s success in the gold statuette realm really means is that we have another opportunity for us, you and me, to talk about just how good Andor is.
“Foundation” thoughts, Season Two, Episode One: “In Seldon’s Shadow”
“Rip-roarin’” isn’t an adjective I’d use to describe Foundation, science-fiction godhead Isaac Asimov’s heady tome (is there any other kind of tome?) about a rogue mathematician’s plan to save humanity from itself. I do not mentally associate the novel with the phrase “psychedelic freak-out.” Nowhere in its pages do I recall a chapter entitled “The Emperor Fucks a Robot, Then Has a Fight Scene in the Nude.”
And yet, my friends. And yet!
Bombastic, lascivious, arch, gorgeous — “In Seldon’s Shadow,” the long-awaited return of David S. Goyer’s epic-scale adaptation of Asimov’s magnum opus, is all of the above. Written by Goyer and his fellow genre luminary Jane Espenson and directed with verve and grace by Alex Graves, it indicates that this show learned every possible lesson from its inconsistent but entertaining first season. It leans hard into its strengths, shores up its weaknesses, and provides enough beauty — both science-fictional and human-physical — to leave me as optimistic about this show as I’ve ever been.
And I’m not gonna bury the lede here: Lee Pace has a naked fight scene in it.
I reviewed the terrific season premiere of Foundation for Decider.
WGA/SAG-AFTRA Solidarity Forever
I don’t think I’ve posted about it here, but for the past couple of months I’ve been involved with a group of organizers from the Freelance Solidarity Project in developing ways we as culture writers, freelance or otherwise, can show solidarity with the striking workers of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. Their fight is our fight!
To that end, we developed a pledge people can publicly sign, agreeing to support the strikes in various ways through our writing. We also came up with a nice simple statement anyone can slap into any piece they write: “This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the [series/movie/etc] being covered here wouldn’t exist.“
If you’re in the position to do so — this includes podcasters, folks who write about TV and movies just for fun, you name it — please sign the pledge and start using the statement. Power to the writers, power to the actors, solidarity forever!
“Full Circle” thoughts, Episode Two: “Charger”
Everyone says you can’t make a good thriller in the age of cellphones. Ed Solomon and Steven Soderbergh just said “bet.” “Charger,” the portentously titled second episode of the duo’s new crime pulse-pounder (is that a word?), bakes ubiquitous smartphone usage into the drama so smartly and organically that you’d be amazed anyone ever considered the devices a problem for stories involving mystery and suspense. Maybe people just aren’t trying hard enough?
“Full Circle” thoughts, Episode One: “Something Different”
The Road Warriors never stayed put. Considered one of the greatest tag teams in the history of professional wrestling, the two muscled-and-mohawked behemoths known as Hawk and Animal brought their Mad Max–indebted brand of post-apocalyptic style and mayhem to wrestling promotions across the country and around the world, never staying in one place for very long. They’d dip in, wreck shop, and bounce. It made them superstars.
At the risk of being the first person in human history to compare Steven Soderbergh to a couple of gargantuan ex-bouncers who entered the ring wearing spiked shoulder pads while blasting Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” the director’s career reminds me of theirs quite a bit. Bouncing from genre to genre, style to style, tone to tone, and in this particular case film to television — a medium he visits every few years, directing the shit out some show or other before departing for the movies once again — he’s a journeyman filmmaker in the very literal sense that his filmography is a journey across one boundary after the next.
Soderbergh’s latest trip to the small/streaming screen, Full Circle, is a reunion with his frequent collaborator, comedy-turned-crime screenwriter Ed Solomon. And based on its trickily plotted, emotionally earnest first episode…well, go ahead and cue up “Iron Man.”
In the Mouth of Sadness: On the Erotic Bummer
But the erotic thriller is truly defined by the second half of its sobriquet. Such stories typically revolve around a femme fatale—sometimes calculating, sometimes unhinged, always dangerous—and the poor sap who’s both lucky and unlucky enough to be fucking her. Sometimes, as in The Last Seduction (1994), the dangerous woman gets away with it and the patsy is left wishing he’d never met her. Other times, as in the original Fatal Attraction, the monster gets what’s coming to her and the status quo of the family man she led down the path of sin is restored. (In rarer cases, the villain is an outside force not represented by the female half of the sexual dyad—Body Double, say.) In all cases, erotic thrillers use tension and suspense to build to a good-versus-evil resolution, and no matter which side comes out on top, sexuality is on the side of sin.
Yet there’s an adjacent genre that does away with those conventions, as easily as Catherine Tramell bumps off her lovers: a genre of tragedy. In these films, sexuality pervades, not as a troublesome interloper, but as an all-consuming directive; like hunger, it is dangerous only when thwarted. It refuses to be relegated to the shadows. Like buried trauma, sex demands an audience. The perennial discourse of the plot-relevant sex scene—does it or does it not exist, and should it?—can find no footing here: sex is the plot, and it does so much more than titillate. It communicates. There is not just the soft-focus romantic lovemaking we’ve come to expect on-screen; there is also fucking for anger, shame, sorrow, and all the ugliness of which we fear to speak in the light of day. There is transgression and discomfort. There are real taboos hard at work between the sheets.
What there aren’t, though, are thrills. These sex tragedies are downbeat, enervating to the last frame. Call this genre the “erotic bummer.”
Like their erotic thriller cousins, these films combine sex and death too, but the balance is shifted. Sex is prioritized in the plot, drives the plot, often becomes the plot, so the erotic component is stronger than ever. But the violence inherent in erotic thrillers is transmuted into something morbid rather than thrilling. It’s as if the characters’ growing appetite for ever-intensifying sexual intimacy devours them until there’s nothing left. No mind games, no cat-and-mouse chases through expensive apartments, no fundamental battle of good versus evil; the erotic connection between the characters is beyond good and evil, and is itself their undoing, leading inevitably to tragedy, isolation, and death.
Unlike the erotic thriller, which, until its recent revival, was essentially a discreet Hollywood phenomenon that existed from Reagan through Clinton, the erotic bummer manifests itself in a much wider range of modes, styles, countries, and time periods. This ad hoc genre spans from European art films of the 1970s (The Night Porter in 1974, Last Tango in Paris in 1972, the French-Japanese co-production In the Realm of the Senses in 1976) to erotic-thriller-adjacent Jeremy Irons vehicles in the ’80s (Dead Ringers, Damage) to turn-of-the-millennium period-piece Oscar bait (Atonement in 2007, The End of the Affair in 1999, The English Patient in 1996) to stylish psychological horror (Possession in 1981, Mulholland Drive in 2001) to divisive 21st-century art-house fare (The Brown Bunny in 2003, The Piano Teacher in 2001, Antichrist in 2009). In addition to jettisoning the erotic thriller’s default neo-noir template of murder plots and their resolution, the erotic bummer is less dependent on violating the specific sexual mores of “Morning in America” and its aftermath. Forget AIDS, NC-17, the Parents Music Resource Center: the erotic bummer posits that anyone, at any time, can fuck themselves to death.
The Boiled Leather Audio Hour Episode 178!
In my most recent appearance on the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, my co-host Stefan Sasse and I continue our “Best of ASoIaF” series with a look at Bran’s dream from A Game of Thrones—available here or wherever you get your podcasts1
The Weeknd Delivered One of 2023’s Best Performances in ‘The Idol’
At any rate, presented with a starring vehicle he himself helped build, Tesfaye proceeded to get in that vehicle, aim at the wall, and plow into it at full speed throughout the course of The Idol’s five episodes. I’m not talking about the strength of his performance, which I’ll get to, or the critical and commercial reception of the show, which is irrelevant. I’m talking about the deliberate damage he did to his image as a suave, sophisticated, ice-cold Hollywood vampire. The goofy name, the rat-tail hairdo, the rehearsed pickup lines, the corny daddy-dom sexual antics, the on-screen comparisons to parasitical showbiz-adjacent cults run by weirdly charismatic grifters like the Manson Family and NXIVM, the backstory of decidedly unglamorous pimping and abuse, loudly jacking off in the dressing room of an upscale clothing boutique, getting hammered and trying kung fu to intimidate his inamorata Jocelyn’s (Lily Rose Depp) ex-boyfriend, obnoxiously heckling Joss after she rejects him and plans her next career move without him, visibly struggling not to puke after a multi-day bender as industry bigwig Nikki (Jane Adams) tells him what a genius he is — Tedros, the character Tesfaye created with showrunner-writer-director Sam Levinson and co-creator Reza Fahim, is a stake driven through that Hollywood vampire’s heart, over and over again.
I wrote about Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye’s performance in The Idol for Decider.
“The Idol” thoughts, Season One, Episode Five: “Jocelyn Forever”
Anyway, does any of this resemble how the music industry works? I don’t have a clue, and I don’t really care. For one thing, I don’t think any of that matters much for visual fantasias about pop stardom. Velvet Goldmine changed my life and I don’t think it was a realistic look at how David Bowie’s management screwed him contractually. For another, realism in this kind of satirical erotic-thriller thing is beside the point: I don’t go to Body Double for a look at the adult film industry of the early ‘80s, which I’m reasonably sure involved fewer Frankie Goes to Hollywood performances IRL. I don’t think Basic Instinct is an accurate portrayal of homicide detectives or novelists, and I wouldn’t want it to be. Once it became clear what The Idol was doing — and that what it was doing was good shit, in the vein of much good shit from days of yore — all I wanted, and what I got, was for it to keep doing it, and doing it, and doing it well, as the song goes. It hit an unpleasant note there at the end, but that’s by design. If it were any more pleasant, they’d have been doing it wrong.
I reviewed the finale of The Idol for Decider. I am not in the prognostication business but I’ve read enough recently from sharp writers to lead me to suspect the tide will shift in favor of this very good show.
“Silo” thoughts, Season One, Episode Ten: “Outside”
I can’t remember the last time a show had me gasping and howling and pointing at the screen the way “Outside,” the finale of Silo’s crackerjack first season, did. Actually, no, that’s not strictly true. I can’t remember the last time a show that wasn’t professional wrestling had me gasping and howling and pointing at the screen the way this episode did. Silo is the most purely entertaining drama of the year, and these drum-tight 40-odd minutes demonstrate why.
I reviewed the season finale of Silo for Decider. What a fun show!
“The Idol” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four: “Stars Belong to the World”
When it comes to The Idol, I think Jabba the Hutt put it best: “This bounty hunter is my kind of scum, fearless and inventive.” It’s smart about its sordidness in a way that leaves me thoroughly entertained. As it shifts from one tone to another, from sledgehammer-obvious satire to genuinely unpleasant psychological horror (nobody says torture porn on my watch) to Skinemax-style erotica, there’s one constant: It’s a nasty bit of business (complimentary).
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The Idol (which I’ll note for the record is airing during the WGA strike, which the studios could end at any time by paying and treating their writers fairly) has its fairly obvious film antecedents, Basic Instinct and Showgirls and The Neon Demon and Body Double and so forth. But while the vituperative reaction to the show may mask it, it’s not alone in TV land either. Nicholas Winding Refn’s Copenhagen Cowboy and Too Old to Die Young, Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion’s Brand New Cherry Flavor, and even some elements of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope and The New Pope, not to mention Levinson’s own Euphoria, point in the direction of this visually lurid, tonally fluid exploration of exploitation and glamour. It’s like biting on sexy tinfoil. I’m all for it.
“Silo” thoughts, Season One, Episode Nine: “The Getaway”
Let’s first focus on the man who appeared to be the show’s big bad before Bernard revealed his true nature: Sims, the Judicial commandant played by Common. Actually, Sims is just “Rob” to his friends and family, who from his boss Bernard to his wife Camille (Alexandria Wiley) appear to view him with legitimate love and respect. Of course, Bernard’s willing to look past all that when he reprimands Rob for sending unauthorized guards to escort Camille and their son to his apartment, but be that as it may: The point is that this jackbooted thug is just some guy, a guy with a wife and a kid and a tiny apartment and dreams beyond his station. Kind of like literally everyone else in the Silo, in other words.
It’s up to Common to pull off this contrast, and he does so using the same tools that make him intimidating. Take his black-leather-jacket-and-turtleneck wardrobe, for example. On one hand, it’s secret-police chic. On the other, the cut and styling are reminiscent of the 1970s-indebted clothing often worn by musicians who emerged from the same conscious-rap/neo-soul circles Common himself did as a hip-hop artist back in the day. Scary but sexy, that’s our Sims.
Common’s made two separate careers out of using his voice, and that helps him here too. Like George Clooney, he’s blessed with pipes that make him sound handsome as well as look it, and that mellifluous baritone makes him an attractive figure as well as a convincingly caring parent and spouse. But any guy who can speak that softly and still sound that commanding is a perfect villain from an aural perspective, and that’s a big part of what makes him believable as a guy who will stop at nothing to acquire his target, runaway Sheriff Juliette Nichols.
I reviewed the penultimate episode of Silo season one for Decider.
‘Secret Invasion’ Proves Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Up To The Challenge of Replicating the Artistry That Powers TV’s Best Opening Credits Sequences
But the problem with Secret Invasion’s AI credits isn’t just one of ethics, or of ugliness. It’s a waste of some of the most valuable creative real estate any television show has. Throughout television history, thoughtfully crafted opening title sequences have set the tone for the shows to follow, conveying valuable information about everything from the mood you can expect to the plot of the show itself. Some are woven so deep into the fabric of the series they kick off that the two become synonymous. The best function like short films, artistic statements on their own. Speaking plainly, AI just doesn’t have the juice.
When Cheers wanted to show you a place where everybody knows your name, they relied on a carefully curated and edited selection of illustrations and photographs depicting nostalgic good-old-days revelry created by James Castle, Bruce Bryant, and Carol Johnsen. Monty Python member Terry Gilliam established his troupe’s style of surrealistic inanity with animation that would become a staple of the show. David Lynch and Mark Frost used second-unit footage and the evocative music of close Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti to transport you to Twin Peaks.
“The Idol” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three: “Daybreak”
But why is material that’s this much of a live wire present in the grunting-as-he-jerks-off, “cartay blanchay” show? You’ve gotta return to your Basic Instinct and your Body Double for the answer to that. The Idol is a sort of satire you don’t really see much that often, not even on a network as satire-heavy as HBO: the kind of satire that effectively imitates, and thus also functions as, that which it’s satirizing.What do you think? Be the first to comment.
Succession played with the allure of extreme wealth as both a selling point and a plot point, but it’s not like it felt like Dynasty or Dallas at any point; it was satirizing these kinds of people, not those kinds of shows. Same with The White Lotus or The Righteous Gemstones.
The Idol, by contrast? Well, you know how RoboCop and Starship Troopers lampoon action movies but are also incredibly kickass action movies? For that matter, you know how Twin Peaks’s initial run was both a weird parody of nighttime soaps while also being the best nighttime soap on television? The Idol is doing fucked-up sex shit even as it pastiches fucked-up sex shit. To put it in terms from the show itself, it’s Chaim saying “I fucking love that guy” one minute, and “I think our girl’s in trouble” the next.
“Silo” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “Hanna”
The best way I can describe Silo is this: Imagine you’re a baseball player and your thing is that you’re a monster home run hitter, like pitchers are afraid of you, you get intentionally walked a lot, when you take the field they play “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath. You are one home run away from breaking the record. And for some reason, the league has given you a choice: You can take your chances with the best relief pitcher in the game…or you can simply set a tee on home plate, put a ball on it, and knock it out of the park, easy-peasy lemon squeezey.
Silo is a show that always chooses the latter option. It’s not here to impress you with its high degree of difficulty. Why would it, when it’s so much easier to keep things simple and just deliver on what you set out to do, over and over and over?
“The Idol” thoughts, Season One, Episode Two: “Double Fantasy”
To that point, this episode has very little time for the “The Idol is a glorification of abusers” viewpoint, because much as he was in the pilot (remember that gross coke loogie he hocks?), Tedros is depicted as a tacky and obvious grifter creep at every opportunity — the exception, of course, being when he’s pouring on the charm-and-dom routine for Jocelyn in the flesh. But behind the scenes, he’s talking about her like a business investment for his club — the exact same way he talks about Dyanne (Jennie Kim), the talented backup dancer he seems to have steered into Jocelyn’s orbit specifically to replace her. Writer-director Sam Levinson literally has Tedros do the “no, I’m alone” bit over the phone to Joss when in fact he’s surrounded by people and getting his hair braided that very moment. For god’s sake, his name is Tedros Tedros! Tedros is a ridiculous dick! It isn’t subtle!
“Silo” thoughts, Season One, Episode Seven: “The Flamekeepers”
Ah, the simple pleasures of Silo. It’s a show I look forward to watching and writing about every week, because it’s a show that, to paraphrase the Sex Pistols, knows what it wants and knows how to get it. Its aim is to explore a central mystery — who’s keeping everyone inside this Silo and why — and it does that. Its technique is to use the fundamental building blocks of suspense filmmaking — cat and mouse games, races against the clock, a drip-drip-drip of clues — and it does so with skill and panache. If this sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise, then I’m misspeaking, because it really is a formidable achievement. Lots and lots and lots of science fiction shows try and fail to achieve what Silo makes look easy.