There’s a bit early on in “Furs by Sebastian,” the mildly amusing fourth episode of Maniac on Netflix, that got on my nerves as a lifelong Long Islander, taking me to a level I always forget I have inside me until some offworlder sets it off. With the same ostentatious ATTENTION TO DETAIL it’s displayed in constructing its retro-futuristic “real” world, the show takes us to a Long Island of the mind, in this case the mind of Owen Milgrim. (And quite possibly Annie Landsberg too; more on that in a bit.) After taking the B-pill as part of Neberdine’s clinical trial, Owen has subconsciously recast himself as Bruce, a mullet-sporting jersey-wearing Volvo-driving resident of a stripmall suburb in the ’80s. In this fantasy, Annie is Linda, his no-nonsense hospice-worker wife.
They’re on the trail of an exotic and illegal lemur stolen from one of her dying patients, and utilizing quick instincts and shrewd detective techniques — she wrote down the license plate of the van used by the thieves as she watched them speed away, then went to the DMV and got their address by reading it from a computer screen’s reflection off a DMV clerk’s big-ass glasses — they’ve got their man. (Men, as it turns out, but more on that in a bit too.)
As they pull out of the DMV parking lot, a Long Island Rail Road train traverses an overpass in the background. The problem is that while everything — the hairstyles, the cars, the storefronts, the billboards, the jeans (oh god, the acid-washed jeans), and the music (“Close (To the Edit)” by Art of Noise for pete’s sake) — screams ’80s, the train is an M7 model, which didn’t debut on the line until the 2000s. The red-on-black LED readout of the next stop on the cars’ exteriors is the tell. Real LIRR heads know we shoulda been looking at M1s or M3s, with their distinctive subway-style double doors and gross leather-and-wood interiors. Bruce and Linda, sharp cookies that they are, would have smelled a rat from the start.
Is this the most picayune criticism I’ve ever lobbed at a show? Absolutely. But when you’ve got a petard, you’d better prepared to be hoisted by it. Maniac‘s painstaking attempts to recreate the look and feel of the Reagan Era — even during its present-day material, with its blend of smartphones and clunky old computers — often substitute for it having anything particularly interesting or innovative to say about technology, time, or humans’ interface with either. As they say on Law & Order, you opened the door, counselor.
“Maniac” thoughts, Episode Four: “Furs by Sebastian”
“Better Call Saul” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Eight: “Coushatta”
Even the most well-oiled machine needs a trip to the shop for a tune-up now and then. Better Call Saul, I suppose, is no exception. This week’s episode, “Coushatta,” is the first time that the show’s tremendous fourth season has hit any significant storytelling hiccups. They’re hardly deal breakers — the show is simply too good for that at this point, it seems — but for once, it felt like Jimmy McGill and company are playing for time.
[…]
The opening letter-writing montage is set to as impeccable a deep cut as ever, in this case Les McCann’s funk-inflected barn-burner “Burnin’ Coal”, but the music feels like an excuse to make the filmmaking less interesting, not an impetus to get innovative. Better Call Saul obviously thrives on depicting the tedium of crime in an innovative way, but there’s nothing particularly interesting about a series of straightforward shots of a guy writing postcards on a bus as a hot piano tune plays. If the cinematography had been bolder, sure. Hell, if they’d gotten rid of the music entirely, and just let us sit on that bus with Jimmy for five minutes, soaking in the repetition of it all, that would have worked too. The choice the show made, neither fish nor fowl, feels like junior-varsity Saul at best.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for TV Guide. It was the first one this season that felt less than essential to me, but it’s still Better Call Saul. I’m proud of that analysis of the musical montage, for what it’s worth.
“Maniac” thoughts, Episode Three: “Having a Day”
“The ‘A’ experience on its own can be a seductive demon,” says Dr. Robert Muramoto in Maniac Episode 3. “Most people wouldn’t understand why someone wants to revisit a trauma again and again, even take pleasure from it. Most people wouldn’t.”
“But you do,” Annie guesses in response.
“People like that don’t want to move forward,” Muramoto continues.
“I don’t deserve to,” Annie replies.
“Don’t you?”
“I want to move forward,” Annie says. “I wanna know what the second pill does.”
“People who feel they deserve loss might try to move forward. They might taste recovery. But,” Muramoto concludes, “they always end up going back.”
(Author’s note: At this point in the exchange between Annie and Dr. Robert (ahem), I wrote THIS IS PRETTY GOOD in my notes.)
“Why?” asks Annie.
Then Dr. Muramoto makes a weird grunting sound and drops dead at his desk. The most interesting thing Maniac has said yet about how human beings process trauma and guilt, tossed aside for a black-comedy sight gag. You’d be hard pressed to find a better illustration of how this show’s ostentatious hyper-cleverness gets in its own way.
I reviewed episode 3 of Maniac for Decider. It has its ups and downs but this sums it up.
“Maniac” thoughts, Episode Two: “Windmills”
“I hate this character. I hate this character.” The note so nice I wrote it twice! Maniac Episode 2 (“Windmills”) focuses on Emma Stone’s Annie the same way the pilot centered on Jonah Hill’s Owen. Like that fifth-generation photocopy of Zach Braff in Garden State, Annie is, with all apologies to Pirandello, six tics in search of a character. High-functioning addict, self-injury scars, fractured family, needless hostility as behavioral baseline, sarcastic scofflaw, skillful dissembler. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, you know?
I reviewed episode two of Maniac for Decider. Things have not improved, though on the plus side there’s Julia Garner.
“Maniac” thoughts, Episode One: “The Chosen One!”
Maniac is Stranger Things after half a semester at a liberal arts college. It’s back home during Thanksgiving break, first semester freshman year. It’s hanging out at the bar everyone goes to. It’s got you cornered in that bar. It’s monopolizing your time with a solid 15-minute monologue ranking the music videos of Spike Jonze in ascending order of formativeness as your eyes dart around the room, looking for your FWB from last summer or your weed connect or basically any other human being. It’s holding a copy of House of Leaves under one arm, front-cover-side out. It considers itself spiritual but not religious. It thinks cubicles are a metaphor. It has its doubts about Prozac.
What Stranger Things is to the 1980s horror, science fiction, and fantasy milieu reigned over by Spielberg, Carpenter, and King, Maniac — written by The Leftovers veteran Patrick Somerville and directed in its entirety by future James Bond auteur and True Detective Season One-derkind Cary Joji Fukunaga — is to the films of 1999, give or take a year. Instead of doing what the Duffer Brothers did with The Goonies and Ghostbusters and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Somerville and Fukunaga do it with Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, Office Space, American Beauty, Magnolia, The Matrix. There’s some Coen Brothers in there too (Barton Fink), some Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums), a whole lot of Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), with outliers like Children of Men and Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy thrown in for good measure. If you’re a TV person, and Netflix counts on it that you are, you’ll see shades of Mr. Robot, Legion, and the Adult Swim Infomercials in there too, but that’s not the meat of the thing, nor the point of it. Maniac is as much a product of nostalgia as Stranger Things, only now it’s the stuff you watched when you were 20 rather than 12.
“Succession” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “Prague”
Succession should find a way to set every episode in the most aggressively obnoxious places possible. That’s the lesson I’m drawing from “Prague,” its eighth episode, which does not take place in Prague at all. Rather, it’s set almost entirely in the faux-grimy confines of a subterranean/off-the-grid warehouse-party quasi-orgy for the rich and…well, the rich. At the behest of Stewy, the sleazy private-equity guy who wormed his way into the company on Kendall’s behalf and then kicked his old friend to the curb when it suited him, Roman has selected this environment, known as Rhomboid (“New York’s hottest club is Rhomboid,” I can hear Stefon saying even now), for his simpering future brother-in-law Tom’s bachelor party. “Is it cool, or is it, like, total fucking bullshit?” Roman asks as they enter. “Who knows!” One thing’s for sure: It gives the collection of assembled dickheads invited to the party their best opportunity yet to be shady and shitty in very funny ways.
For Tom, played by the magnificent Matthew Macfadyen, this mostly means enthusing with uncomfortable manic glee over his free pass from his fiancee Shiv to get up to some shenanigans. After abandoning his childhood friends (they’re not on the guest list), he spends the evening alternately shouting over the music to various in-laws about “splooge” and worrying about whether Shiv also has a free pass (if he only knew!). Mercifully, his exploits, if they happened at all, are reported to us rather than shown. Suffice it to say that by the end, the entire family has congratulated him on “swallowing your own load.” Just the kind of impression you want to make on the people you’ll be seeing at Christmas every year!
I reviewed episode eight of Succession for Decider. It’s the best one since the pilot, primarily because Matthew Macfadyen’s character spends most of the episode talking about his own semen.
“Better Call Saul” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Seven: “Something Stupid”
Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) are living separate lives together, and Better Call Saul is using every trick in the book to prove it.
“Something Stupid,” the seventh episode of the show’s outstanding fourth season, kicks off with a musical montage set to the song of the same name. Made famous by Frank and Nancy Sinatra, it’s a meticulously constructed tune, its verbose lyrics and complicated two-part harmony embodying the fear of being really close to someone but holding back because you’re worried about revealing you’re more into them than they are into you. (It’s made slightly awkward by the fact that Frank and Nancy were father and daughter, but this is the Nicole Kidman/Robbie Williams version, so no harm done.) It’s one of the most astute soundtrack selections in the history of the BCS/Breaking Bad universe, and that’s saying something.
The imagery accompanying the song is equally effective. Using a split-screen effect — one that takes a few seconds to get going so that at first all you see is half a screen before the second image kicks in — it chronicles Jimmy and Kim’s daily routine. They brush their teeth, eat breakfast, go to work. Kim moves into her new office as a partner in the firm of Schweikart & Cokely; Jimmy plays handball against the window of his empty cellphone store. Kim racks up commemorative trophies for Mesa Verde branch openings and clients for her sideline as a pro bono public defender; Jimmy piles up visits to his parole officer and stacks of cellphones for sale to his less-than-legal clientele.
But the split screen stays in effect even when the two are right next to each other, eating dinner or getting into bed. Sure, Jimmy might reach across that black bar to pour Kim some wine, or Kim might stretch a leg across to drape it over Jimmy as she sleeps, but it’s always there. And in the end, after the song fades away, Kim’s side of the split screen fades away too, leaving Jimmy alone in the dark. Writer Alison Tatlock and director Deborah Chow conveyed the slow death of a relationship in the form of a music video, basically, and it’s beautifully sad to watch. A later scene, in which Jimmy wows everyone at Kim’s company party with his gift of gab except for Kim herself, only underscores the initial point.
I reviewed episode seven of Better Call Saul Season Four for TV Guide. This show can take your breath away with what feels like no effort at all.
Vote Suppression in Andrew Cuomo’s New York
I spent yesterday collecting dozens and dozens tweets describing the difficulties faced by people attempting to vote in the Democratic primary here in New York. Many of those people appear to have been purged from the rolls altogether.
I started this thread after first noticing reports of people running into trouble at the polls yesterday morning, hours and hours before the polls closed and we knew who won. It’s not about “making excuses” for Nixon’s defeat. It’s about chronicling voter suppression. Did these incidents decide the election in Cuomo’s favor? Unlikely, given the numbers. Nor were the Watergate break-in or ratfucking the Democratic primary responsible for Nixon’s landslide win in 1972. That doesn’t mean those crimes didn’t happen, or that they didn’t matter.
New York has one of the highest numbers of registered voters and is consistently near the bottom in electoral turnout. The absurd rules for registering and voting in the primaries are part of that. So is the culture of chaos around what can happen to you when you *try* to vote. “People who want to vote should be able to vote” ought to be the least controversial statement it’s possible for people in a democracy to make. Yet the official position of New York State—and based on yesterday, the passion project of its now-reelected governor—is to ensure otherwise.
Side note: I see a quote going around in smug centrist circles about Nixon’s campaign “complaining” about turnout. If you can find an actual complaint about turnout in that quote, which is about Cuomo’s money funneling overall anti-Trump fervor to the polls, be my guest.
You can’t mock that statement *at the same time* that you mock people saying they couldn’t vote because of funny business at the polls or ridicule the whole idea that New York’s primary system constitutes voter suppression, as centrist/liberal pundits have done for years now. The harder it is for people to vote in the primary, the less likely they’ll be to try again. It’s a vicious cycle, by design.
People who want to vote should be able to vote.
“Succession” thoughts, Season One, Episode Seven: “Austerlitz”
As for Shiv’s assignation with her ex-boyfriend turned new colleague Nate, everything I said about it last week still stands: Sex between ciphers is definitionally not hot. Note that this is different from saying sex between strangers is definitionally not hot. When you don’t know someone, the element of anonymity and mystery involved in watching them fuck is erotic. We know Shiv and Nate just fine, and that’s the problem, since there’s nothing to know. They’re not idealists, that’s for sure. Nor are they monsters like Logan or scoundrels like Roman or just repulsive like Tom. They’re barely pragmatists, since that would imply goals, and we don’t have any clue what attracted them to politics since they express no actual political viewpoints. Shiv says whatever will get a rise out of the person she’s currently trying to act tough toward and reverses course without compunction when the need passes, hence going to work for a guy she jokingly called Stalin and less jokingly called too radical within about five minutes of meeting him. Nate himself comes right out and says, “I don’t believe in anything.”
Nate and Shiv are dull, the way only people who are handed everything in the world and can’t be bothered to use the spare time to develop even the most rudimentary and idiosyncratic beliefs or personalities can be dull. Under normal circumstances? The lay-it-on-the-line, “I want to fuck you, here’s where and when we can do it” transactional flirting, the all-business hand-down-the-pants initiation of intimacy—whoa nellie. Here it’s like watching the weather report. I’m supposed to get hot for this? Heroes, villains, rogues, by all means have at it, but orgasms for bores I will not abide.
[…]
I’ll tell you what works here, beautifully and unequivocally, or rather I’ll tell you who works: Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy. Watching him handle the prodigal son’s near-instantaneous collapse of sobriety (aided and abetted by his dad planting stories that he was running through the street muttering about a coup; now we know the plot purpose of his otherwise unnecessary dash through the streets) is gripping stuff. Once he makes the decision to leap off the wagon, he’s in it all the way. He’s determined to have a great time, and so he does, whether he’s chatting with the locals, calling his brother with the firmness of purpose of the incredibly high, disrupting the family gathering, goading his father into near violence, or just kicking back in the wilderness enjoying the coke and the view.
Strong handles all of this with restraint and without cliche, from the anger, frustration, and feigned toughness as he takes the plunge to the chemical relaxation and goofy good cheer that follows. The irony is that in the ease of his interaction with the local burnouts, whom everyone else in his family would (and in Roman’s case, does) treat like sentient dogshit, you can see him find even more ways to convey Kendall’s innate, if relative, decency. In fact, when one of the methheads gives Roman shit in turn, Ken sticks up for him, too. It’s like watching a performance from Deadwood show up on Petticoat Junction. On this show there’s Strong and then there’s everyone else.
“Castle Rock” thoughts, Season One, Episode Ten: “Romans”
Which leaves us to wonder: What, exactly, was the point?
It’s not just that you can find more compelling (and bewildering) horror-tinged alternate-reality dramas without breaking a sweat, from Lost to Twin Peaks to The Leftovers. It’s not even that the ending cribs so hard from The Shining (and, from non-King country, The Babadook) that you feel déjà vu. It’s that Castle Rock undermined its own big twist — the introduction of the whole parallel-world concept and the idea that the Kid might be a hero rather than a monster — almost immediately after introducing it.
As a drama, the show boasted intelligent, understated performances from Holland, Skarsgård, Spacek, Melanie Lynskey, Scott Glenn and more. As a Stephen King riff, it understood and updated his concept of everyday American evil better than any adaptation of his work in recent memory. But as a horror story of its own, the series made promises then all but went out of its way to avoid delivering in the end. A finale that seemed destined for dark magic was just a bait and switch. The show has been renewed and a new tale will be told. Let’s hope our next visit to this terrible Maine town lives up to its potential.
I reviewed the final episode of Castle Rock’s first season/storyline for Rolling Stone. The bottom line is that it never really got scary for more than a moment or two, and it doesn’t amount to much as a head-scratcher either. The acting is there, and the attention to American evil too, and both were handled with smarts and restraint, but it was pretty much exactly the sum of its parts.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Ten: “The Gold Coast”
I’ve never been quite sure if Ozark is about anything. Its criminal parable is so broadly drawn, and the plot is so oddly specific (all those timed ultimatums), that it’s hard to read it as anything but the crudest allegory for the corrupting effect of money and secrets. But it uses its gorgeous watery and woodsy locations as well as any show this side of Game of Thrones, it gives interesting actors a chance to dig deep, and it seems comfortably settled into a slow-and-steady pace. Breaking Bad comparisons are well and good, but I wonder if The Americans isn’t a better point of reference. Like Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, Marty and Wendy Byrde are living the nightmare side of the American dream, trying to pretend to the world, and their children, that there are no monsters under the bed at all when they are those monsters themselves. It’s a show I’ll be thinking about for quite a while.
I reviewed the season finale of Ozark for Decider. Given Netflix’s track record there’s no way of knowing if the show’s current level of quality can be maintained, much less improved, but it really does remind me of where The Americans was at at this stage in its development: not great yet, but carrying the seeds of greatness within.
“Better Call Saul” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Six: “Piñata”
I’m in awe of Mike Ehrmantraut, the way only a guy who has to make plans days in advance to do the dishes watching a senior citizen smoothly transition into running OpSec for a billion-dollar drug cartel can be. Sure, Mike (Jonathan Banks) is a guilt-ridden murderer who blames himself for his son’s death and will eventually die in disgrace, but in the meantime his hyper-competence is an absolute joy to watch when you’re feeling less than competent yourself. And despite being a comedown from the lethal tension and emotional turmoil of recent episodes, this week’s installment of Better Call Saul (“Piñata”) offers this particular pleasure in bulk.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for TV Guide. Like I said, it’s kind of a time out from the mounting terror.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Nine: “The Badger”
The episode’s cold open gives us a sense of what the Snells in one another, and how Darlene’s wild side is not some out-of-the-blue thing, as it’s at times seemed. In a flashback set to Glen Campbell’s gorgeous romantic dream of a song, “Witchita Lineman,” we see Jacob as a just-returned Vietnam veteran, clean cut in his uniform. Darlene is a young hellcat — there’s no other word for it — who crashes the date he’s on at the local diner and, promising him a life of excitement that won’t leave him wishing he’d died in ‘Nam after all, whisks him away to skinnydip. She’s half naked by the time she even introduces herself. So, y’know, I get it.
So does Jacob. During a rueful conversation with Marty and Helen, he learns he’s made an error that gives the government claim to nearly all his land just like what happened to his ancestors in 1929. The camera lingers on actor Peter Mullan throughout Marty and Helen’s explanation of just how badly he’s gotten swindled, giving it an effect that’s like the opposite of the similar “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE” speech at the end of There Will Be Blood — here, the point isn’t the glee Jacob’s enemies take in beating him, since they really aren’t taking any, but in his own sense of failure, his realization that Darlene was right and they never should have gone into business with the cartel, his other realization that things wouldn’t have gotten this bad if Darlene could control her anger, and no doubt a sense of stupidity about spending a lifetime trying hold on to what his family built up from nothing, only to lose it all again. (Though millions in cash from the casino would probably salve the pain a little.)
Anyway, at the end of it all, he asks Marty this: “What do you do, Martin, when the bride who took your breath away becomes the wife that makes you hold your breath in terror?” It’s a gorgeous, portentous line, and Mullan savors it; I wish he’d had been given anything that Boardwalk Empire/Deadwood-memorable during his recent stint on Westworld, just for example. He knows he forged a connection with Darlene so deep from the start that severing it will be a disaster. He was just wrong about who’d bear the brunt.
I reviewed the penultimate episode of Ozark Season Two for Decider. Love Peter Mullan, love Julia Garner.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Eight: “The Big Sleep”
Now that’s more like it. After treading water for an episode with a ginned-up kidnapping crisis and Screenwriting 101 religious debate involving a character way past his sell-by date, Ozark returns to its strengths in this antepenultimate installment of Season 2. Titled “The Big Sleep,” it’s a slow-burn affair that spends its time widening the cracks in the Byrde clan, ratcheting up tension between their various partners, and digging into the fundamental questions of family, trust, and honor among thieves that serve as the show’s primary fuel. All without a “you have 24 hours” deadline in sight.
I reviewed the eighth episode of Ozark Season Two for Decider. I want David Lynch to make another movie or show just so he can work with Julia Garner in it.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Seven: “One Way Out”
You have 48 hours to find an episode of Ozark Season 2 in which no one is given 48 hours to do something. Or 24 hours. Or two minutes. Or any artificially imposed time frame, actually, though I mention those numbers specifically because all three are cited in ultimatums issued in this episode alone. A black-marketeer gives Ruth and Cade Langmore 48 hours to steal a fancy thermal imaging system for him in exchange for ten thousand dollars. Marty Byrde gives Darlene Snell two minutes to tell him where she’s hiding his wife Wendy before siccing the cartel on her. Pastor Mason Young gives Marty 24 hours to retrieve his infant son from the foster system or he’ll kill Wendy, whom he’s kidnapped. Ozark Season 2 Episode 7 is called “One Way Out”; it might as well be named that after the strategy employed by the writers’ room.
Honestly, the timed-ultimatum thing is more funny than anything else at this stage, to the point where I wonder if it’s not intended to be some kind of recurring gag. The bigger problem with this episode, which follows one of the series’ strongest, is how much it feels like wasted time.
I reviewed episode seven of Ozark Season Two for Decider. This one is an old-school wheel-spinner digression, though holy shit, Julia Garner puts in work as Ruth Langmore.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Six: “Outer Darkness”
This one sneaks up on you. After a big prestige-crime blowout in Episode 5, the second season of Ozark heads into the homestretch in the cryptically titled “Outer Darkness,” its sixth and best episode. The title phrase calls to mind cosmic concepts from Lovecraft and Tolkien, but the episode itself is a stately and intimate thing — a surprisingly thoughtful mood piece about death and the severing of human connection by both mortality and immorality. I dug it.
“Succession” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six: “Which Side Are You On?”
We’ve reached a Pivotal Episode. It’s Succession Episode 6, “Which Side Are You On?”, and my understanding is that after watching it, a whole lot of viewers were firmly on Succession‘s side. This is a Tony vs. Uncle Junior type situation, in which a quartet of coup plotters — Kendall, Roman, Frank, and Gerri — make their move against Logan in a vote of no confidence brought before his company board. Their hope is to remove him before he embarrasses himself and destroys the company. It does not go well, and unfortunately I mean that in every sense.
I reviewed the sixth episode of Succession, aka The One with the Board Meeting, for Decider. It’s rare for me to be as immediately pleased with a piece of writing as I was with this, so I hope you’ll read check it out. It was a chance for me to hash out pretty much everything I think works (some) and doesn’t (most) in the series. Pros include strong comic performances by Matthew Macfadyen, Kieran Culkin, and Nicholas Braun, and some truly powerful work by Jeremy Strong as the show’s sole real dramatic role. Cons include flummoxing camerawork and plotting, a disconnect where the show’s main erotic energy is located, and a music-cue misfire for the ages.
“Castle Rock” thoughts, Season One, Episode Nine: “Henry Deaver”
Have you guys seen Henry Deaver around? You know — tall skinny guy, floppy hair, big Gollum eyes, white as the Swedish snow? The renowned Alzheimer’s researcher who fled Castle Rock when his mother escaped his abusive preacher father? The guy who found a little boy locked in a cage in his old man’s basement, where the kid has apparently lived without aging for nearly three decades? The one who realizes that this little boy’s name is also Henry Deaver?
You have now.
Titled “Henry Deaver” after not one but two of its main characters, the penultimate episode of Castle Rock‘s first season takes the biggest storyline swerve the show has seen yet. It relocates us to a different version of the town, one that’s still marked by tragedies like helicopter crashes and schoolbus accidents but noticeably healthier and wealthier overall. (Best gentrification joke: That awful dive bar is now a “gastropub.”) Here, Molly Strand isn’t a pill-popping real-estate agent, but a member of the city council who’s got serious clout with folks like the police department — and their top cop, Dennis Zalewski.
Most importantly, Castle Rock 2.0 is the hometown of Henry Deaver — not the African-American defense attorney played by Andre Holland as an adult and Caleel Harris as a teen, but a white neurologist played by Bill Skarsgård, a.k.a. The Kid. You thought Lost had some wild timeline-shifting tricks up its sleeve? Hold Castle Rock‘s beer.
I wrote about episode nine of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. As narrative sleight-of-hand, and as a showcase for the surprisingly wide range of Bill Skarsgård as an actor, it worked. As horror? Not really, and that’s the show’s biggest problem.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Five: “Game Day”
I’m much less sold on the waterboarding of Ruth Langmore, orchestrated by Helen to determine whether or not she’d ratted Marty out or if his trust in her, despite it all, was valid. I get the need to portray the cartel as the supreme badasses, and to sell Helen as the slay-queen sort who can torture teenagers on behalf of mass murderers but still wish she was at home playing with her kids; since you can’t just pause the action and turn to the camera and recite the URL for these cliches on TVTropes this will have to do.
But I have a harder time swallowing the idea that a billion-dollar drug operation believes this form of interrogation yields any useful information whatsoever when everyone outside the Republican Party knows it just makes people say what they think you want to hear, or that we as viewers need to suffer through the brutalization of a teenage girl to reinforce the bogus notion that Torture Works.
To add insult to injury, the scene was superfluous, because the issue of whether or not Ruth would flip was already tense and emotional as it was. You had the whole weird sexualized intimidation routine with Petty. You had the normally stalwart Ruth hiding, crouched in strip club office, wondering how to make it past the cartel alive. You had Marty learning Ruth had tried to kill him, and Ruth learning that Marty learned it, and Marty talking to Ruth directly about it, and Ruth admitting it. You had Wendy and Cade floating around in the mix too, with their own agendas and reactions to everything. Wasn’t watching these four people figure out what to do about the mess they were in more interesting than a Zero Dark Thirty reenactment?
I will at least give the show credit enough to believe that Ruth’s experience will wind up being the most important aftershock of this sequence, not Cade’s thirst for revenge or Marty’s guilt; Ozark has taken great pains to build Ruth up as its most interesting and well-rounded yet still difficult character, and I don’t see them suddenly non-lethally fridging her to make the menfolk feel things. But I can really only talk about what’s on screen in the here and now (at least until the Netflix UI automatically rolls me over into the next episode), and it was corny and ugly and pernicious. I expected better, and more entertaining to boot.
I reviewed the fifth episode of Ozark Season Two for Decider. I wanted to draw attention to this (uncharacteristically) unsavory and unnecessary sequence in particular.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four: “Stag”
Ozark is getting weird in its old age. Why not, right? When you’ve got ten full Netflix-length hours of television to fill — the kind of runtime that makes a show feel old not even halfway into its second season — with nothing more than blue-gray early-autumn atmosphere punctuated by the occasional out-of-nowhere escalation of the threat level that Ozark employs as plot movement, you can afford to do some strange, melancholy shit. And “Stag” (Season 2 Episode 4) does it in spades.
I reviewed episode four of Ozark Season Two for Decider. It’s nice to see a show flow out into little stylistic filigrees every now and then. It shows confidence.