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.
“American Gigolo” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “East of Eden”
Several episodes ago I made the argument that American Gigolo’s warmth was a welcome development given the emotional sterility of Paul Schrader’s original film. Now I’m not so sure. These final few episodes have seen warmth tilt over into soap suds, and the replacement of a harsh look at Julian’s lifestyle with a give me back my son whodunnit didn’t benefit anyone in the end. And I can’t help but feel that this show with “gigolo” in the title should have featured, well, more gigolo-ing, or really had any interest in sex work at all beyond providing an taboo backdrop for a murder mystery. A curious, curious beast, this American Gigolo. I wonder if we’ll see Julian ride again. So to speak.
I reviewed the season finale of American Gigolo for Decider.
“Andor” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “Narkina 5”
But mostly, trying to encapsulate the brilliance of this show is best done by simply recounting a litany of the many many ways in which it draws the Star Wars struggle down to a human level. This is a show concerned with prison bureaucracy, with the existence of toilets, with the existence of deaths from despair. It’s aware of revolutionary factionalism and bureaucratic infighting. It unflinchingly depicts cops and corrections officers as unrepentant, moronic sadists. It shows how prisoners can be made to turn on one another, crabs-in-a-bucket style. It includes insightfully fascistic phrases like “Can one ever be too aggressive in preserving order?” and “If you’re doing nothing wrong, what is there to fear?” It acknowledges that the quaint customs of the various exotic civilizations in the Star Wars Galaxy include shit like arranged marriages between children. It shows committed romantic partners reading each other to filth, as when Cinta dismisses Vel as “a rich girl running away from her family,” then effectively quoting the Velvet Underground & Nico by telling Vel “I’m a mirror…you love me because I show you what you need to see.” A prison overseer tells Andor “Losing hope? Your mind? Keep it to yourself.”
House of the Dragon’s Director Wants You Asking Questions About Daemon
Much of the finale’s storytelling is conveyed through largely silent close-ups of people’s faces, particularly Rhaenyra’s. What was the thought process behind that?
I think about the amount of craft and hard work that went into getting that set built and those costumes made and those wigs put on everybody’s heads, just to get to a space where I can have two people talking to each other at a table or by a fireplace. Those moments are a testament to everyone’s work.I tell the actors to take their time and live in those moments of silence, to not feel they have to rush through those scenes. I call it “the mud” — those complex, human, partner-on-partner scenes. I cut my teeth in network television, and I think silence scares people; I appreciate a show where the silences are deliberate choices to make it more cinematic and emotional.
One of my favorite moments is when Rhaenyra comes in and she’s just been crowned queen. Emma and I talked about this: “Sit and wait until you feel you have something to ask or say. Think about your dad: What would he do? Look at all those faces looking back at you. Where do you start? What are your first words as queen? Just be there until the line wants to come out.”
“American Gigolo” thoughts, Season One, Episode Seven: “Atomic”
Here’s a quick question for you: Remember when American Gigolo was about being a gigolo?
Admittedly, it’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it situation. Since his exoneration for murder and reemergence from prison, Julian Kaye has, by my count, gone on precisely one date with a client. They skipped out on a high-school reunion and had sex in a dive-bar bathroom before she revealed to him that she’d once accidentally killed someone, putting something of a damper on the evening. He coached her through her guilt and escorted her to the doors of the high school, yes, but that was where their evening ended.
All the other sex work we’ve watched Julian/Johnny perform has been via flashback, and much of that coerced while he was a juvenile. To the extent that his titular job is a factor in the series at all, it’s purely as context, the world in which the various crimes, lies, betrayals, and heartbreaks with which the show is more concerned emerge from. The killing for which Julian was framed; the death of his high-school girlfriend upon her involvement in this other part of his life; his complicated relationships with fellow veterans of the trade Lorenzo and Isabelle; his continued dealings with Detective Sunday, the cop who put him away and now feels guilty about it; his child with former client-turned-girlfriend Michelle Stratton; his son running away with an older woman, that older woman’s murder by one of Michelle’s husband’s employees, and his kidnapping by a second such employee; the revelation that the woman he was accused of murdering was the sister of the girl who killed herself: All of these things stem from Julian’s life as a gigolo, without actually providing us with any insight into or commentary on that life. He could just as easily be a (very sexy) cop, or teacher, or paleontologist.
It’s frustrating! Come on, guys, it says “American Gigolo” right there in the title!
I reviewed this week’s episode of American Gigolo for Decider.
“Interview with the Vampire” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four: “The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child’s Demanding”
I think that’s the key thing about this episode, written by Eleanor Burgess and directed by Keith Powell, and about the show in general. Its ability to balance the thrills and chills and sex and blood and comedy of an over-the-top Gothic vampire romance with serious observations about race, wealth, addiction, unhappy relationships, and now de facto child abuse and the misery of teenagers is hugely impressive. It manages to deliver pretty much everything you’d want from a vampire show, and more besides. And now we have four core performances that are funny and empathetic and nasty and brilliant, from Bailey Bass as well as from Jacob Anderson, Sam Reid, and Eric Bogosian.
Between Interview, Andor, and House of the Dragon, those of us who hunger and thirst for legitimately sophisticated nerd-genre storytelling are eating very, very well this Halloween season.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.
Ryan Condal Was Surprised People Liked ‘House of the Dragon’ So Quickly
That seems to be the case most specifically with Prince Daemon. Much of the fandom wants to see him, as you put it, wearing a white hat or a black hat, to the point that many of them criticized Sara Hess, a writer and executive producer on the show, for her less-than-glowing assessment of Daemon. Did you see this coming?
I’m having trouble understanding it. We established right out of the gate, in the pilot, that Daemon is a fascinating guy, but he’s not Ned Stark. So I didn’t see it coming.
To me, Daemon is the antihero of this story. He’s a character with a real darkness to him, who’s dangerous and charming in equal parts. I knew people would be fascinated by him and latch onto him, but I figured they’d do it in the way they did with Jaime Lannister or Bronn or the Red Viper. I did not think they would oddly apply this sort of super-fandom to him and try to justify every single thing he’s done as being intrinsically heroic. It simply isn’t. It’s not the case. Nor will it be in the future.
Nobody in the show writes in a vacuum. I’m the lead writer; I oversee everything that happens on the show; every choice comes through me. If it’s on the screen, it’s because I either wrote it or approved it being written. Sara Hess and I wrote 85 percent of Season 1 together. We did not set out to write villains and heroes in this. We set out to write interesting humans and complex characters who are hopefully compelling, but compelling doesn’t always mean heroic or unimpeachable.
I see Daemon as having heroic aspects to him, and I understand why people would. I mean, he’s incredibly charismatic, he’s handsome, he looks great in that wig, he rides a dragon, he has a cool sword. I totally get it. But if you’re looking for Han Solo, who’s always going to do the right thing in the end, you’re in the wrong franchise, folks.
I interviewed House of the Dragon co-creator and co-showrunner Ryan Condal for the New York Times.
“House of the Dragon” thoughts, Season One, Episode Ten: “The Black Queen”
Which brings us back to that torn-out page Alicent sent to Rhaenyra as an olive branch. The two girls were just 14 when Rhaenyra was declared heir and Alicent was sent by Otto to “comfort” a grieving Viserys, putting an end to those carefree days. Luke was just 14 when he died. And so a war set up long ago in the names of two children, who grow into women whose shared childhood memories nearly prevent that war from breaking out, becomes inevitable when a child dies. None of these poor kids asked for any of this, but the system — the monarchy, the patriarchy, the violence underpinning it all — turned them all into cogs in the war machine anyway.
Dragons, incest, one-eyed princes, ancient prophecies, etc.: They’re the flashy, occasionally sleazy adult-fantasy stuff that have made Dragon blockbuster material. The arresting visuals — the meeting between Rhaenyra and Otto at sunset, Luke’s flight through the stormclouds, all those hulking dragons — help as well. But it’s that central tragedy, of two well-meaning women slowly made into realm-destroying monsters in a world where actual monsters still take wing, that elevates the show above its genre counterparts. Forget dragons for a moment; there are other ways to soar.
I reviewed the season finale of House of the Dragon for Rolling Stone. Heck of a show!