But behind the show’s genre elements are, ostensibly, human stories designed to give those elements heft and weight. Nothing we’ve seen thus far feels weightier than what we see Tove survive. What’s more, to the extent 1899 is serious at all about its by-now obvious allegorical resonance with real-world refugee and resource crises, accurately depicting an act of violence as hideous and traumatic rather than stylized and dramatic is necessary to get the point across. The show is treating this as the terrible crime it is, and not allowing the audience to look away.
“1899” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six: “The Pyramid”
“1899” thoughts, Season One, Episode Five: “The Calling”
As previously mentioned, I grow less and less convinced that 1899 has big things to say about anything in particular as the show progresses. To the extent that it’s any fun at all, it’s purely down to the sci-fi hijinks and the overall murky tone that accompanies them. It’s binge-y stuff, and who knows? Maybe that’s enough.
“1899” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four: “The Fight”
Okay, I get it now: 1899 is Lost. It’s just Lost! I mean, it’s Lost with no jokes and no heart-tugging Michael Giacchino score, which is to say that tonally it’s way, way different — different enough, I think, to insulate it from rip-off charges. But: trapped in the middle of the ocean because something went wrong with the vehicle you were using to cross it. A motley crew of passengers fleeing their troubled pasts. Secret connections between them. Mechanically induced teleportation. Mysterious strangers. Mysterious symbols. Maybe an eccentric gazillionaire behind it all. A boy with special powers. (Remember, that was an important part of Lost, once upon a time, before the showrunners realized children age in real time even if the characters on your show do not!) And flashbacks, hoo boy, flashbacks. Literally and figuratively, it’s Lost at Sea.
“1899” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three: “The Fog”
One thing 1899 has going for it, despite my present reservations, is its apparent determination to barrel full speed ahead into the weird. I mean, this is only the third episode, and already entire steam ships are disappearing into ruptures in the spacetime continuum opened by strange machinery. It took Lost years to get there; it took 1899 three hours. That’s storytelling confidence, is what that is. Let’s just hope it’s warranted.
Mckenna Grace Found Hope at the End of A Friend of the Family
Jan herself introduces the show in its first scene. She says, “I know it may seem unbelievable, but we lived in a different world back then.” Do you think there are lessons from Jan’s ordeal with B that are still applicable today?
I hope one of the main things people take away is that they can learn from the Brobergs’ mistakes. They’re very up front about it: They made every mistake in the book. And It was a very different time. The fact that the FBI agents didn’t even know what a pedophile was? That was shocking.It’s easy to hide behind a screen and be like, Wow, that’s insane, but if that was me or my family, I never would’ve let that happen. You don’t know until you’re in that situation. Look at the pain and heartache the Brobergs went through: They still came together as a family afterwards. That’s one of the beautiful things about seeing Jan at the very beginning. It gives you hope that she’s okay. She made it out the other side.
I interviewed actor Mckenna Grace about playing Jan Broberg, the kidnapping and brainwashing victim at the heart of Nick Antosca’s harrowing true-crime drama A Friend of the Family, for Vulture. I’m so glad this piece is finally out there.
“1899” thoughts, Season One, Episode Two: “The Boy”
What is the difference between a mystery-box show and a show that is purely mysterious? Is there a difference? Since J.J. Abrams coined the term to describe Lost, the seminal science-fiction series he co-created (and then largely left to its own devices, under Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse), I’ve seen it used to describe everything from the kids’ cartoon Gravity Falls to HBO’s once-upon-a-time next-big-thing Westworld to shows that predate the term entirely, like Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner. At root, the phrase seems to be used to describe shows that create a sort of “What the hell is going on here?” feeling: The stories in question do not contain a mystery or multiple mysteries, they are one big mystery, leaving the viewer scrambling (and, ideally for the creators and networks, tweeting and Redditing and tumblring and so on) to figure out what is happening and why at basically all times.
For me, the phrase has taken on an almost purely pejorative connotation. It describes shows that hide things from the viewer almost arbitrarily, not because the story demands it or benefits from it, but because the goal is to keep the audience engrossed and guessing at the expense of creating emotional and intellectual investment more organically. So for me, The Prisoner wouldn’t qualify, as its sinister surrealism requires a lack of explanation to establish that tone; Westworld, with its ginned-up “who is he? when is he?” riddles, does qualify, as it’s obscure mainly for the sake of eventual revelations that don’t really pay off the delayed gratification. More recently, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power attached a series of needless question marks to seemingly half its characters and storylines, for no ostensible purpose other than to get the viewer to tune in next time to find out who the heck Adar is or whatever. Mysteries push the story forward; mystery boxes are substitutes for stories.
By this (entirely invented for the purpose of this review) definition, 1899 is not a mystery-box show. Oh, all the hallmarks are there: an entire cast of characters each with their own mysterious past; an implied or explicit but uncertain connection between several or all of them; flashbacks and flashforwards and hallucinations and dreams that reveal new layers of story; portentous symbols; mysterious strangers; the strong suggestion that there’s some kind of temporal rupture or loop involved.
But — here’s the key — it doesn’t make me feel trapped like a mystery-box show does. I’m not banging my head against the walls of this thing, trying to find the writers’ way out before they reveal it. I’m taking each new revelation and secret and strange occurrence as they come, treating them as seasoning for the real main course: a collection of sad and broken people who have discovered a calamity, and who may be next in line.
“1899” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “The Ship”
1899 features dialogue in English, French, Spanish, Cantonese, Danish, German, Polish, and Japanese. The opening credits list a lead cast larger than your average Game of Thrones episode. Creators Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar already proved, with their mind-melting, time-warping German-language science-fiction masterpiece Dark, that they know their way around a dark genre story with a sprawling cast; here, it’s as if they looked at themselves and said “Hold my beer.” You have to respect their ambition, and this pilot episode proves you have to respect their execution, too.
I’ll be covering 1899 for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. Due to some personal stuff these reviews will probably not be rolling out as quickly as my Netflix coverage normally does, but they will roll out, I promise!
“Andor” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eleven: “Daughter of Ferrix”
There had to be a comedown. By the standards of Episode 10’s for-the-ages, nothing-left-to-lose prison break, the penultimate installment of Andor’s first season is a quiet, somber episode. It’s more concerned with moments of individual sadness than collective action, with frustration and powerlessness rather than catharsis. But still there are unexpected reprieves, dry humor — and, in a move that ought to delight longtime fans of the franchise, some of the most Star Wars-y stuff this Star Wars TV show has ever attempted. That these attempts are so successful should come as no surprise: This is Andor, and Andor doesn’t miss.
“The White Lotus” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Three: “Bull Elephants”
Let’s talk about The Godfather. More specifically, let’s talk about The White Lotus talking about The Godfather.
The colloquy in question happens between family members Bert, Dom, and Albie and Albie’s would-be inamorata Portia, at the tail end of a Godfather-themed sightseeing tour. Portia, who hasn’t seen the movie — whether that’s writer/director/creator Mike White making a point about ignorant youth or the out-of-touch olds who would view such youth as ignorant is anyone’s guess, but you can bet a point is being made — has to get filled in on the details by Bert, who recounts the murder of Michael Corleone’s Sicilian wife Apollonia with relish. Portia, noting the replica of Apollonia’s blown-up car complete with a female mannequin inside, finds the whole thing a little tasteless for a tourist destination, which, y’know, fair.
Here’s where things get interesting, or annoying. Bert says hey, let the place do it, the best American movie ever made was filmed here. Albie scoffs at him, then argues that the reason older men like The Godfather is because it’s a patriarchal fantasy that glorifies violence, philandering, and the loyal wives kept at home. Now pay attention to what the magician’s hands are doing: Rather than take issue with this take, both Bert and Dom agree, arguing that there’s nothing wrong with men having such fantasies.
So to sum up: When presented with Albie’s moronic argument — only a real dum-dum could watch The Godfather and conclude Francis Ford Coppola is saying “and this is fine,” not that there’s any shortage of such dum-dums — Bert and Dom, two of said dum-dums, make an equally moronic argument in return.
Is Mike White’s point of view really that The Godfather glorifies the life of Michael freaking Corleone? Or is he simply presenting us with three characters with separate but equally stupid opinions about art? Perhaps a better question to ask is, does it matter? Either the creator of The White Lotus thinks something very dopey about a much better work of art, or he’s so intent on making the same “rich people are stupid assholes” point in different ways over and over that he’s exploring a new frontier. Not my idea of a good time on a Sunday night either way, I’m afraid.
I reviewed last night’s episode of The White Lotus for Decider.
House of the Dragon Character Guide Update post-Episode 10!
The final iteration of my increasingly enormous House of the Dragon character guide is up at Vulture. This takes you all the way through the entire first season. Thank you for playing along!
“Andor” thoughts, Season One, Episode Ten: “One Way Out”
Star Wars means a lot to me. The original film is the first movie I can remember watching, a copy taped off of CBS by my father, who carefully paused the recording to cut out the commercial breaks. I remember seeing Return of the Jedi in the theater at age 5. I had all the action figures I could get my hands on. My Millennium Falcon hangs from the ceiling in my children’s bedroom; my AT-AT passed into the possession of my niece. During my adolescence and teenage years, when nerd culture was a complete non-starter, I kept that love alive like a secret fire, wolfing down the Expanded Universe novels. When the characters in Clerks had that conversation about contractors on the Death Star I nearly lost my mind. At age 18 I got my first tattoo, the Rebel Alliance insignia. I waited on line overnight for the Special Edition theatrical re-releases, and for the first prequel. (I’m a prequels guy, for the record.) Once I had children of my own I took my daughter to every new Disney Star Wars movie, though admittedly I tapped out on The Rise of Skywalker; better for her not to sully the memories with that thing. So yeah, Star Wars means a lot to me.
But nothing in any of the Star Wars media I’ve consumed over the years ever brought me to tears, until now.
I reviewed today’s magnificent episode of Andor for Decider.
“Interview with the Vampire” thoughts, Season One, Episode Seven: “The Thing Lay Still”
But like I said, this is the climax, and it’s okay to get a little less nuanced and more bombastic overall. Creator Rolin Jones has constructed a remarkable show regardless, one that captures the essence of Anne Rice’s work while improving upon it, for its new era and medium, with every change it makes. I don’t know what I expected of Interview with the Vampire beyond “I hope I have a good time watching the sexy vampires,” but it delivered in every way I could have wanted, and many more I didn’t know I wanted till I got them. Interview is a beautiful and sparklingly intelligent show. It’s going to be hard to wait until next year for Season 2, but I know a vampire who could tell you a thing or two about the beauty of delayed gratification.
I reviewed the season finale of Interview with the Vampire for Decider. It’s up a week early online!
“Interview with the Vampire” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six: “Like Angels Put in Hell by God”
The only problem with Interview with the Vampire is that at a certain point you simply run out of superlatives. Like its contemporaries Andor and House of the Dragon, IWTV provides proof week in and week out that genre television rooted in nerd-beloved source material can be as smart, incisive, surprising, and rich as any of its more traditional prestige-TV counterparts.
I reviewed last night’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.
“The White Lotus” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Two: “Italian Dream”
I’m not one to complain about the absence of likeable characters on a television show. I mean, find me a halfway decent person on The Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire or House of the Dragon or, god help you, Too Old to Die Young. The difference, I suppose, is that while all of those unlikeable characters are grasping for something larger than themselves, the unlikeable characters of The White Lotus are all on a luxury vacation. They’re annoying people who aren’t even doing anything interesting.
Yes, I get that this is the point of the show; it’s a character study, about characters whose worst qualities only intensify over time, whose eventual epiphanies, if they come at all, only reinforce their current insipid lifestyles. None of this is artistically invalid. The problem is that all of this is easy to grasp in an episode or two. After that, you just…you need shifting sands under your feet, you know? You need crises, you need struggles, you need some kind of crescendo. Otherwise you’re just watching, I dunno, the first reel of Visconti’s The Damned on loop, with none of the descent into hell that makes the banality of evil something more than banal in the end. The White Lotus has the banality down pat. It just needs something more, is all.
I reviewed this weekend’s episode of The White Lotus for Decider.
“Andor” thoughts, Season One, Episode Nine: “Nobody’s Listening!”
I focus so much on the writing of this show, the shocking and rewarding ways that it deviates from the Disney Star Wars norm, that I feel I neglect the performances. Frankly, they’re uniformly excellent. Genevieve O’Reilly, conveying Mon Mothma’s imprisonment in a gilded cage. Denise Gough, making Dedra Meero one of the most magnetic and frightening villains in the Star Wars legendarium. (She’s serving Peter Cushing, baby.) Diego Luna, a rat in a trap, always searching for a way out, never letting himself let up. Andy Serkis, showing layers of weariness and fear under Kino Loy’s bluster, emotions that finally give way to anger when he realizes he’s been had. Kyle Soller barely keeping it together as Syril Karn, all desperation to prove himself to someone, anyone, to be respected, perhaps to be loved. Kathryn Hunter as his mother, a passive-aggressive martinet, making his life worse even as she purports to be making it better. It’s such a wide range of performances for such a wide range of characters, all of them handled with care, all of them, even the bad guys, treated as three-dimensional human beings.
Unless things go badly wrong, Andor has already cemented itself as one of the best science-fiction shows of the century, up there with Battlestar Galactica, Dark, and Raised by Wolves. I simply cannot wait to see how far it goes.
I reviewed this week’s excellent episode of Andor for Decider.
“Interview with the Vampire” thoughts, Season One, Episode Five: “A Vile Hunger for your Hammering Heart”
“I’m trying to think of something more fucked up than this.” Me too, Daniel Molloy, me too. Titled “A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart” with the show’s typical baroque brio, the fifth episode of Interview with the Vampire is a troubling hour of television. It chronicles first the disintegrating sanity of the young vampire Claudia, then the traumatic event that forces her back home, then the final collapse of her surrogate family via the abusive tendencies of its miserable patriarch. It does all this while sacrificing none of the richness that has made the characters, and the show, so vivid and surprising all this time.
I reviewed this week’s excellent episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.
“The White Lotus” thoughts, Season Two, Episode One: “Ciao”
Have you enjoyed your stay at The White Lotus? No, seriously, I want to know: What did you make of the first season of writer-director Mike White’s anthology satire, about the trials and tribulations of the white upper class and their overworked, underappreciated servants at a luxury Hawaiian resort? Because here I am, filling out my comment card, and I’m just not sure what to write.
Of course I wish I loved the show. That’s easy: Don’t you wish you loved every show you watch? Particularly when you’re a TV critic who considers himself to be in the liking-things business, it’s always more fun to be over the moon for a series than to be left scratching your head. With a show as widely beloved and acclaimed as The White Lotus, that goes double.
But a part of me also wishes I hated the show. Hour-long comedy-dramas are the Coward’s Television: On a surface level they appear as character-driven and attention-demanding as your standard prestige-TV drama, but because the characters involved are joke-delivery mechanisms first and “characters” second, they are in fact neither. Unlike the people on, say, The Sopranos or Mad Men or Better Call Saul, their purpose is to be funny, which makes them a lot different than people who happen to be funny sometimes. You’ve met lots of people like the latter; people like the former don’t exist.
But unlike, say, Succession — another widely beloved and acclaimed HBO dramedy about the rich and awful, which has somehow managed to convince the critical and awards establishment to let it have its cake (everyone telling variations of the same over-elaborate dick jokes season after season) and eat it too (sometimes characters get sad and, hey presto, Drama!) — The White Lotus tended to fall firmly enough on the black-comedy side of the spectrum to dodge that obnoxious neither-fish-nor-fowl nature.
It took its time to get there of course, after an opening couple of hours so dry it wasn’t clear what the show was up to; and in its final episode or two it made sure to have several important female characters get really upset so you knew you were watching something real, man; but there was a sweet spot in the middle there where the assholishness and/or obsequiousness of the players just kept ratcheting up and up to such hilariously uncomfortable levels that it was hard not to root for the thing.
Which I suppose is where I find myself with Season 2, the first episode of which (“Ciao”) takes us to a new locale with an almost entirely new cast of characters, but with almost all the same thematic and comedic preoccupations. Everyone’s still rich, everyone’s still horny, everyone’s still either completely oblivious or so ostentatiously tuned into the world’s suffering that they’re oblivious to their own obliviousness, and the staff are still oh so happy to serve you.