18. The Wheel of Time

Created by Rafe Lee Judkins; based on the books by Robert Jordan (Prime Video)

In assembling this list of the year’s best shows I decided not to hold the total number of entries to some arbitrary multiple of five. Any show where I’d say to a loved one “You know what you should watch?” makes the cut. Getting canceled immediately after this season makes The Wheel of Time a tougher series to recommend, which costs it some points through no fault of its own. It’s a shame, because Wheel, aka the High Fantasy That Fucks, had really come into its own. Its ornate, colorful design, high-camp dominatrix villains, increasingly impressive cast (we’re missing out on Shoreh Aghdashloo as a main antagonist!), prog-album-art visuals, and occasional rousing lesbian drinking song about how great the locals’ tits are all made it a show I eagerly anticipated; its pleasures are still worth sampling.

17. A Thousand Blows

Created by Steven Knight (Disney+/Hulu)

My primary memory of watching A Thousand Blows, just one entry in creator Steven Knight’s long list of period crime dramas, is being knocked flat on my back by Erin Doherty. As Mary Carr, leader of the all-women’s gang of thieves the Forty Elephants, she projects a raw need under the viciousness that’s frighteningly intense. (Anthony Boyle wowed similarly in Knight’s House of Guinness.) Stephen Graham and Malachi Kirby are deeply impressive, too, as the bareknuckle boxers whose paths intertwine with Mary’s. You want to see these people win, which is why it’s so compelling to see what they do when they lose.

16. Pluribus

Created by Vince Gilligan (Apple TV)

Particularly on television, where the genre has thrived ever since Lost landed on that island — and its roots can be traced even further back, to The X-Files and Twin Peaks and The Prisoner — the sci-fi mystery combines two genres that invite audience speculation to create a Frankenstein’s monster of theory-mongering. For a critic who prefers to write about what’s on screen now instead of what might end up on screen several episodes or seasons later, these shows are frustrating, particularly when all the speculating requires one to overlook holes in the here and now. But after creator Vince Gilligan shook off the broad comedy that tends to mark his shows’ early going and drilled into just how deranging being one of the Last People On Earth would be, the juice finally seemed worth the squeeze. The show is augmented immeasurably by its million-dollar visual, its bold use of composition and color, and the work of Rhea Seehorn, who can make a deliberately insufferable character easy to spend time with.

15. Last Samurai Standing

Created by Kento Yamaguchi and Michihito Fujii; based on the book by Shogo Imamura; Creative Director: Junichi Okada (Netflix)

Are you a fan of Takashi Miike samurai films like 13 Assassins and Blade of the Immortal? How do you feel about end-of-the-Old-West stories like The Wild Bunch and Red Dead Redemption 2? What about the way Yuen Woo-Ping rewrote the rules of on-screen combat in The Matrix, Kill Bill, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? If any of this sounds intriguing to you, let alone a combination of all three, make a point of seeking out this stellar samurai series. Choreographed by star Junichi Okada, every fight and battle is completely different from its predecessors, and somehow better. As a bonus, it’s the kind of rousing action-adventure story you can sell to the non-sickos in your family over the break.

14. The Pitt

Created by R. Scott Gemill (HBO Max)

More stylistically and narratively straightforward — more downright broadcast-networkian, even — than anything else on this list, The Pitt was a tough sell for me at first. It was only a matter of a few episodes. Once the show gets past the unavoidable surfeit of “Here’s this doctor or nurse and here’s their name and here’s their deal” dialogue and digs deep into the physical and psychological labor involved in keeping both a hospital emergency room and its traumatized staff up and running, its game cast and real-time gimmick make it nigh irresistible viewing.

13. Task

Created by Brad Ingelsby (HBO)

Everything everyone else saw in Mare of Easttown, Brad Ingelsby’s previous drama/thriller about crime in the downwardly mobile Philadelphia suburbs, I saw here. Tom Pelphrey, perhaps the single most endearing actor working today, plays a small timer who draws big heat by trying to do the right thing after a home invasion goes horribly wrong; Tom Ruffalo, Fabien Frankel, and Alison Oliver are among the messy, endearing cops (sorry) trying to track him down. Directors Jeremiah Zagar and Salli Richardson Whitfield shoot the woods of DelCo as if drawing forth their very life force, creating a mood best labeled fentanyl transcendentalism.

12. The Lowdown

Created by Sterlin Harjo (FX/Hulu)

Unless the Dude himself is involved, sun-baked South/Western neo-noir is generally not my scene. I wear all black all the time, and this is a “guys who wear brown” genre. Oil and water, you know? Imagine my surprise, then, as The Lowdown steadily won me over. As a comedy it’s rock solid, its jokes and sight gags — more often than not at the expense of Ethan Hawk’s Lee Raybon, the good-hearted, down-on-his-luck “truthstorian” investigative reporter at the center of it all — landing with a high hit rate. The supporting cast is killer: Kyle MacLachlan, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Peter Dinklage, Keith David, Tim Blake Nelson, and Paul Sparks, just to name a few. Ethan Hawke plays Lee as what George R.R. Martin might write as hedge knight — a hardscrabble servant of the public good, whether or not he earns either money or appreciation for it (though he’d be happy for either). The Lowdown is a poignant plea to do the right thing in an era that rewards the opposite, even considering the cost.

11. Daredevil: Born Again

Created by Dario Scardapane and Matt Corman & Chris Ord; based on the work of Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Gerry Conway, John Romita Sr., Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, Charles Soule, Christos Gage, Ron Garney, Stefano Landini, and others (Disney+)

Daredevil: Born Again is about a blind vigilante ninja lawyer called Daredevil teaming up with his frenemy, a serial killer called the Punisher, to take down Donald Trump and his army of sociopathic cops. That’s it. That’s what it’s about. It’s as clear as day. It’s the reason Garth Marenghi called writers who use subtext cowards. This show is the best thing Marvel had put out in years, despite its many growing pains during development and production. Arriving early in the year, it was a welcome sign of artistic resistance to fascism via one of the most popular franchises on the planet; in that category, though, it would soon be topped.

10. It: Welcome to Derry

Created by Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs; Showrunners: Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane; based on the work of Stephen King (HBO)

To paraphrase myself talking about the similarly strong start for Nick Antosca’s Channel Zero way back when, the first scene of the first episode of It: Welcome to Derry is grosser, scarier, weirder, more pointedly political, and just plain meaner than everything in director Andy Muschietti’s two It feature films combined. The show almost feels like penance for those movies, in a way — as if Muschietti and his collaborators were determined to get the queasy mix of nostalgia and brutality found in Stephen King’s masterpiece right this time. They succeed in large part thanks to a surprisingly strong lineup of child actors, led by Clara Stack and Matilda Lawler, and, amazingly, an adult cast that can command audience interest just as well as the adorable kids and the killer clown (played once again, and better than ever, by Bill Skarsgård). Jovan Adepo, Taylour Paige, Madeleine Stowe, and especially Chris Chalk as recurring King character Dick Hallorann aren’t acting like they’re in a Halloween haunted house, but rather in a place where their families, sanity, and souls are legitimately at stake. Despite some needlessly Hollywood plotting, it’s a testament to the power of cruelty in art.

9. Monster: The Ed Gein Story

Created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan (Netflix)

Between The People vs. O.J. Simpson, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Dahmer, and Monsters, Ryan Murphy and his collaborators are responsible for the four best true crime dramas I’ve ever seen. Murphy and Ian Brennan’s latest Monster show, about the Wisconsin killer and grave robber Ed Gein, feels less tightly focused than the other four shows, but this is to be expected due to The Ed Gein Story‘s expanded scope. Bluntly gruesome and woven through with surreal flourishes, it really is about the Ed Gein story — not just the killer’s life, his crimes, and the media circus immediately surrounding their discovery, as was the case with O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan and Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers, but the legend that grew up around him. Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and the true-crime industry itself can all be traced, in one way or another, back to Ed’s lonely heart.

8. The Chair Company

Created by Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin (HBO)

The original concept behind Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard’s comic book series The Walking Dead — which I liked quite a bit, as opposed to the TV show — was simple: What if a zombie movie never ended? “What if an I Think You Should Leave sketch never ended?” works well as a description of The Chair Company. ITYSL creators Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin trap Robinson’s senior-manager everyman Ron Trosper in a labyrinth of fraud and corruption that he uncovers more or less by being monomaniacally insufferable. I get the impression from the season’s cliffhanger ending that the plan here is to follow the original roadmap for Twin Peaks, whose creators David Lynch and Mark Frost never intended to solve their central mystery, using it instead to draw us deeper and deeper into their weird world. Will Ron ever get to the bottom of why that chair fell out from under him? Does it matter?

7. Foundation

Created by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman; based on the books by Isaac Asimov (Apple TV)

There’s no other…okay, there’s one other science fiction show on television that looks as good as Foundation. (More on that in a bit.) Everything from space travel to psychic powers to genocidal superweapons are rendered as kaleidoscopic and beautiful, while owing very little to the obvious genre antecedents. There’s heroism and sadism, derring-do and body horror. There’s mid-century SF’s usual obsession with scientifically measuring and predicting the broad movements of human society. There’s sex appeal galore. Right at the apex of it all are the strange, engrossing performances of Lee Pace, Terrence Mann, and Laura Birn as the immortals cursed with the burden of Empire, turned into monsters by wielding more power than any being should hold. There’s a lesson here about personalist regimes that’s too loud, and often too blackly funny, to ignore.

6. Murdaugh: Death in the Family

Created by Michael D. Fuller and Erin Lee Carr; based on the podcast by Mandy Matney (Hulu)

I’ve deliberately avoided using the word “mesmerizing” during any of these write-ups so far, despite it being a go-to superlative for someone in my line of work. (Well, for me anyway.) This is because there is one performance out of everything I watched this year that deserves “mesmerizing,” and it’s Jason Clarke as Alex Murdaugh in this true-crime drama from under the Nick Antosca umbrella. With his Christmas-ham face, his good ol’ boy charm, and his mountain of criminal secrets, his dynamic with his kind but enabling wife Maggie (Patricia Arquette, proving the weakness of her work on Severance is just a writing issue) resembles nothing so much as that of Tony and Carmela Soprano. Both stories are about the insatiable maw at the heart of the American dream, and who gets fed into it, and by whom. A sharp, tight, sensational show.

5. Alien: Earth

Created by Noah Hawley; based on the screenplay by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett (FX/Hulu)

An unconscious man with an alien parasite attached to his face, hastily stashed under a child’s bed. A sheep with one bulbous eye, gazing coolly at its surroundings. An android with a shock of white hair, observing the sheep-creature right back. A wide-eyed billionaire manchild, vibrating with sociopathic glee. A child in a woman’s body, cooing at an apex predator from outer space. A glowering working stiff with nothing left to live for, and no morality to govern that life, save the completion of his mission. A xenomorph in full flower, running through the forest canopy, basking in the hot sun like a jungle cat. By stitching together memorable images in an almost ruminative way while never skimping on the all-out monster action, Noah Hawley has added a third entry to the Alien canon, behind only Ridley Scott and James Cameron in the originality and impact of his vision of the creature and the world it invades.

4. The White Lotus

Created by Mike White (HBO)

From the moment the show’s new and improved theme song began playing, it was clear something different was going on with The White Lotus this season. I’d previously found its broad satire of the leisure class smug and insufferable, but this season it opened up its tonal range to its great benefit. There’s a grand doomed love affair. There are characters who aim to do the right thing as much as there are who take the easy way out. There’s an astonishing monologue about the nature of desire by Sam Rockwell that has a decent claim on being the scene of the year. Lavish shots of the natural world and its animal inhabitants serve as the lifeblood of the thing, flowing between scenes and lending the whole sordid thing an air of mystery and danger.

3. Chief of War

Created by Thomas Pa’a Sibbett and Jason Momoa; showrunner: Doug Jung (Apple TV)

Jason Momoa, man. Jason goddamn Momoa. Star, co-creator, co-writer of every episode, director of its absolutely breathtaking finale, a landmark achievement in screen combat — watch Chief of War and you’ll find his achievements nearly as impressive as those of Ka’iana, the painfully ethical warlord of the show’s title. Torn between two women, at war with two kings on behalf of another — and all these characters are fully fleshed out to the point where you feel they could sustain the show as the lead themselves — Ka’iana is a real-life figure turned legendary. That’s Momoa and Thomas Pa’a Sibbett’s overall approach to the material: a myth for the Hawaiian Islands, an answer to King David or King Arthur. Appropriately, the visuals are mythic in scope, using greens and reds and yellows in painterly fashion; Momoa does things with digitially color-graded orange in the finale I’ve simply never seen on screen before, the way Danny Boyle put new shades of green on camera in 28 Years Later. It’s that kind of story, almost, right down to the presence of a Bone Temple. The finale delivers the climactic battle the show’s been promising all along, too — no false advertising here. An epic like few others.

2. Adolescence

Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (Netflix)

You forget about the stunt aspect. That’s the highest compliment I can pay Adolescence, considering how impressive the stunt aspect is. Director Philip Baratini shoots each of the show’s four episodes as a single continuous take, immersing us in the lives of a Liverpool family being detonated by their young son’s shocking, misogynistic crime. A Thousand Blows stars Stephen Graham (the show’s co-creator and co-writer) and Erin Doherty knocked me out once already; in this they’re almost too luminous with the terrible truth of their characters’ circumstances to look at. Owen Cooper, who plays the boy at the heart of it all with precocious power, is the acting find of the year. This show is a triumph.

1. Andor

Created by Tony Gilroy; based on the work of George Lucas and others (Disney+)

“Andor,” I wrote on Bluesky partway through watching the show’s second season via advance screener copies provided to me by the Mouse, “is a stone cold masterpiece. There’s stuff in Andor Season 2, images, moments, as good as anything on television ever. Not grading on the Mandalorian curve, grading on the Mad Men curve.” I stand by every word, and I’ll go further. Andor isn’t just the best show of the year, it’s one of the ten best television shows ever made.

I believe Andor is the most expensive television series ever made, and every penny is visible on screen. Tony Gilroy and his collaborators have created a fully fleshed out society from the sketched out structure left behind by George Lucas as the bridge between his prequel trilogy and the original films. He crafts a bright, shiny dystopia of propaganda, ecocide, and genocide — one that countless viewers were all too able to recognize as our own — then examines what enforcing that regime, or fighting back against it, would really look like.

The result is a Star Wars show that treats the existence of something called the Death Star as the moral obscenity it really is. It explores the strangely compelling sexual neuroses of fascist apparatchiks, and is unsparing about the kind of sexual violence the servants of the Empire would inflict on civilians. It tells a terrifying story of genocide from start to finish. It shows the sacrifice of personal happiness inherent in a life lived for the cause. When it finally introduces the Force, a subject from which the series stays away for nearly its duration, the concept regains its power as the animus within all living things. “Life will defeat you,” Winston Smith insisted to the Party in 1984; Andor says the same thing, and means it. Vital, elegiac, magnificent.

My gorgeous genius wife Julia has fully restocked her webstore with new items! Now you can purchase a copy of her career-spanning collection World Within the World directly from us, as well as handbound collections of her zines/minicomics and her out-of-print graphic novel Vision, her new minicomic Children of the Garbage Island, and 14 Fashionable Views of Coruscant, an erotic Andor fanart zine! (Yes, you read me right!)

Buying directly from us — I can say “us” because in addition to helping within the store I also wrote a few of the comics in those collections and got Julia into Andor — is the best way you can support us. What’s more, you’ll be treated to the work of the best cartoonist of her generation. Thank you!

There’s a great and powerful beauty in giving voice to true things that are forbidden to say. This is why authoritarian governments work so hard to keep you from saying them. They will arrest you, they will disappear you, they will strongarm you, they will blackmail you, they will bribe you, they will kill you to keep you from saying them. Nemik’s manifesto points this out when it talks about how frantic tyranny’s efforts have to be to control all the spontaneous outbursts of freedom that threaten it. People want to hear true things, say true things, share true things. True things shield us from the fascists. Eventually, with effort, with sacrifice, when enough people try, true things can be shaped into a sword to kill them with. 

Andor has spent two season avoiding “May the Force be with you.” It’s nearly ignored the Force entirely, except for these last handful of episode, in which its presence is minimal still. This was in large part the point of the show. Stripped of good and bad samurai wizards whose powers effectively demonstrate who’s good and who’s evil, the Star Wars galaxy was remade by showrunner Tony Gilroy and his collaborators into something, hopefully, more recognizable to us. A galaxy of slave labor in prisons. A galaxy of dehumanizing propaganda campaigns against scapegoated groups. A galaxy of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, and execution. A galaxy of rapists and torturers and murderers in uniform, swaggering around like they own the place. A galaxy of dead friend after dead friend after dead friend, the bodies piling up all around. Andor ground its title character’s face into this dirt over and over again.

Then this man, a kind man, a good man, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s friend, Princess Leia’s dad, walks up to him and says “May the Force be with you.”

These, too, are the words of a dead man to a dead man. Bail will be killed when the Death Star destroys his home planet of Alderaan. Cassian will be dead before then, perishing in the fight to transfer the battle station’s plans to Bail’s daughter Leia. But that doesn’t matter. Forget what Cassian’s done, what he’s seen, what he’s lost, what he stands to lose. There’s good in this world. He’s a part of it. It’s a part of him. He is one with the Force, and the Force is with him.

As if to honor all this, John Williams’s magnificent Star Wars theme actually plays over the end of the closing credits, if I’m not mistaken the first time in the history of the Disney+ Star Wars TV shows that this has happened. Someone up there knows we’ve watched something special.

There are no Jedi in the world we live in, no Sith. No one will deflect a blaster bolt with a lightsaber or choke you out with a gesture. We’re not so lucky to have definitive proof of good and evil. But we can recognize it when we see it; only years, decades of conditioning can convince us otherwise. That conditioning is unnatural. Freedom is not. That’s the force we can be a part of, not a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but here, now.

After forty years of fandom, forty years of it being a catchphrase, “May the Force be with you” meant something to me again. It moved me. Sitting there with the television paused, I was unable to continue until I processed this feeling — the pure, simple hope for good things to happen to other people rather than bad. Rebellions, of course, are built on hope.

Hearing those words spoken aloud in this moment feels like a miracle. Four decades after it was first said on screen, “May the Force be with you” made me burst into tears. That is the power — the force, if you will — of Andor, one of the best television shows of all time.

I reviewed the series finale of Andor for Decider. This show is a masterpiece.

The miracle of this penultimate episode of Andor is that despite knowing how everything turns out for just about everyone left on the show — their futures are spelled out in the prequel film Rogue One, their legacies cemented in the original Star Wars film, A New Hope — it’s one of the most suspenseful 30-odd minutes of television I’ve ever seen.

I reviewed episode 11 of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

The zeal of the convert is a fearsome thing. The classic Biblical example is Saul, persecutor of Christians, taking the road to Damascus and becoming Paul, Christianity’s greatest and most strident proselytizer. Paul famously saw the light. A man named Sgt. Lear saw the darkness. 

In this episode of Andor, chronicling the final hours in the life of Luthen Rael, we learn that he was once an Imperial soldier during what seems like its birth and initial establishment of dominance. But the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations wrought by his brothers in arms leaves the sergeant cowering in his ship, chanting “Make it stop! Make it stop!”, sometimes in his native language, “Rosh ne luts” — the first and only time we ever hear him speak it. 

I reviewed episode ten of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

When a murderous campaign of wholesale destruction abroad is used to justify widespread repression at home, when few members even of the nominal opposition party will say the things we know to be true, when no one seems willing to use the words we know must be used…I’d like to say it’s heartening, even thrilling, to hear the word “genocide” used by a fictional senator on a television program. But it’s also humiliating that our leaders don’t see fit to talk to us with the honesty of a Star Wars character — and frightening to see how rapidly speaking honestly about what is happening both in Gaza and here at home is being criminalized.

I reviewed the ninth episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

It’s frankly astonishing how well writer Dan Gilroy and director Janus Metz create a taut and tragic political action thriller, working within the contours of the Star Wars sensibility and aesthetic while making them feel fresh and new. In much the same way that the previous episode recaptured the magic and mystery of the Force, this one conveys the menace of the Empire as though we’d never seen it in action before.

The stormtroopers’ death’s-head helmets are menacing, their meaning plain. When Syril walks into a safe room in the Imperial building only to find it primarily occupied by hulking security droids with their own skull-like faces, his fear is easy to relate to. The TIE fighters screeching overhead once again come across like the cries of the sorcerous Nazgûl in The Lord of the Rings. This is the machinery of death, and not even Syril and Dedra can deny it any longer. 

But the superb costuming and sound design put a new spin on the look and feel of the Rebellion, too, from the World War II–era costuming to the unique and unsettling noise of the airhorns the protesters blow on their way to the plaza. Syril and Cassian’s brutal, sloppy fight scene is unique in the entire history of the franchise, a Duel of the Fates set in a hotel bar with glassware instead of dual-bladed lightsabers, thrumming with the violent energy of a Sopranos beatdown rather than a wuxia showcase. Actor Kyle Soller makes these final moments of catharsis feel appropriately out of control, as if this one man, this fascinating character study in how functionaries function, is a stand-in for a galaxy on the edge.

Moving, beautiful, angry, and desperately sad, Andor has done something very special here. That song is still ringing in my ears.

I reviewed the eighth episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

Cassian Andor has flown from one end of the galaxy to the other. He’s seen a lot of strange stuff. But he’s never seen anything to make him believe there’s some all-powerful Force controlling everything.

Han Solo’s doubting Thomas routine, paraphrased above, applies both to the hardened Rebel soldier and the show that tells his story. The Force, the Jedi, the Sith, Darth Vader — maybe I’m forgetting something, but I’m not sure any of these mystical elements of the Star Wars legendarium have been so much as mentioned, let alone factored into the plot. Star Wars in general is science-fantasy, or space opera; Andor is science fiction.

This has worked well for Andor. In the real world, there’s no such thing as a verifiable religion, no magical power that can be wielded either to fight or to heal. By eliminating these elements from the story while still looking and sounding and feeling very Star Wars — this despite its comparatively adult approach to the material — Andor has brought Cassian’s experience of oppression and rebellion more in line with our own. 

But keeping the Force out of its Star Wars story makes Andor‘s sudden introduction of it feel more magical and beautiful than it has since Yoda lifted Luke Skywalker’s X-wing out of the swamps of Dagobah. 

I reviewed episode 7 of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

I can’t tell you how much good it does my heart to watch a Star Wars show that’s horny. Actually horny, not just “oh look, it’s a hunky guy with his shirt off, aren’t we all excited” Kylo Ren/Steve Rogers/Disney horny. Horny enough to make Dedra Meero topping Syril Karn more or less canon. Horny enough to finally, finally have a queer kiss onscreen because, despite their danger, it’s been years, and Vel Sartha and Cinta Kaz can’t keep their hands off one another. Horny enough for Bix Caleen to only semi-jokingly ask her boyfriend, Cassian Andor, to bring his glamorous fashion-designer cover identity home with him one night so she can have sex with someone “very, very pretty.” I’m all for a smoldering kiss between Han Solo and Princess Leia, don’t get me wrong, but this is something else. This is sex, not romance, or not just romance, and it makes Andor feel alive even in the midst of death.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

Syril Karn is living the life of his dreams. He’s involved in highly classified work for the Imperial Security Bureau, pretending to chafe at the Empire’s yoke while secretly setting up its opponents for a sting. He’s working directly with his girlfriend, Dedra Meero, a relationship he has to keep a secret from everyone including his ghastly mother. In both cases, I can only imagine the thrill leading a double life gives to this man — particularly when one of those double lives involves Dedra in all black, commanding him to turn out the lights because they only have an hour together and they need to get down to business. Oooh-whee. Even though House of Cards creator Beau Willimon wrote this script, it feels like erotic fanfic where these two are concerned, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.

I reviewed episode 5 of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

But the highlight of the episode is quiet, wordless. It’s the moment of parting, when Cassian and Bix simply touch each other, hand to hand. Composer Nicholas Britell’s music is minimal yet lushly romantic here — like their love itself, I suppose, which they’ve forced into the tiny compartment left available for love by the world they inhabit. There’s something truly beautiful in that moment. These people are not deluding themselves that the world is okay, that life is okay, that their own lives are okay. But they love each other anyway, because while the government they live under does not value the things that make us human, we do, we can, and we must.

I reviewed episode 4 of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

There is an audience — a massive one, as Sinners proves — for forceful fuck-yous to fascism, racism, willful ignorance, gleeful sociopathy. There’s nothing delicate, nothing safe about any of it, either. People want to see antivax moms get yelled at by the guy from ER. People want a supervillainous politician as openly awful as the people currently occupying the White House and Gracie Mansion, and they want heroes who’ll take the fight right to him and his goose-stepping thugs. (You would be shocked at the sheer number of uniformed NYPD the Punisher murders alone.) They want to watch the Empire go down in flames not just at the hands of sword-wielding space wizards, but regular people who said enough of this shit and had the courage to walk the talk.

They want to see the Klan dead, and they want to see it happen at a Black man’s hands. They’re rewarding the movie that serves this up as its grand finale with history-making amounts of money. 

I wrote about Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, as well as Andor, Daredevil: Born Again, and The Pitt, in a new piece for Welcome to Hell World on audiences’ voracious hunger for watching cool tough people stomp fascism into the dirt.

Andor feels designed to prove that the Star Wars setting can do anything any other science fiction can do. If it’s ugly, if it’s sexy, if it’s violent, if it’s pathetic, if it’s human, it can be done way out there just as surely as it can be done down here. The Star Wars branding is just plausible deniability. This isn’t a show about the Empire and the Rebellion. It’s a show about us, because we’re both.

I reviewed the third episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

The second of three episodes released simultaneously as this season’s opening “chapter,” this episode doesn’t pack the wallop of its predecessor. That’s understandable: The thrill of being the first new episode of Andor in two years is something you can really only capture once, even if you’re debuting three of them at a time. Since the first episode already gave us the “where are they now” for almost all of these characters, there isn’t that same rush of new information to contend with either.

For the most part, anyway. Dedra and Syril forming a romantic relationship is a genuine shock. Dedra running her thumb tenderly around Syril’s mouth because her baby’s afraid of his mom is an even bigger shock. I genuinely didn’t think she had it in her! But fascists are human too, which makes this scene even creepier. Watching a genocidal space Nazi comfort the man who loves her is like watching a Black Lodge entity pretend to be human on Twin Peaks. It’s uncanny, and it only gets more so the closer to human they get.

I reviewed the second episode of Andor Season 2 for Decider.

There comes a time when the price of inaction outweighs the price of action. There comes a time when the cost of living with your failure to do something outstrips the cost of doing something and paying the price. What Andor’s talking about is integrity — integrating your thoughts and your words with your actions. Anything less is a betrayal of your soul, and on some level you know it. That’s why committing to the fight against oppression feels so freeing. It’s not because you’re now in less danger, quite the opposite. It’s because it makes you feel like a whole human, maybe for the first time ever. Andor’s quest is to capture that feeling and transmit it to the viewer. What you do with it next is up to you.

I reviewed the season premiere of Andor for Decider. This is one of the best television shows of al ltime.

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. 

I wrote about Andor for Decider.

The new Boiled Leather Audio Hour is up! Stefan Sasse and I discuss the season finale of Andor, available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

And remember, the Boiled Leather Audio Hour is brought to you by Manscaped! Groom your area and save 20% plus get free shipping when you use the code BOILEDLEATHER at manscaped.com!

Our latest patreon-exclusive Andor podcast is about that big final post-credits scene. Listen and enjoy1

If anything ties Andor together, it’s this: a conviction that great things are made from small pieces, painstakingly assembled. It was true of the bomb, it’s true of whatever they were building in that prison (a post-credits scene reveals it to be components for the planet-killing weapons system on the Death Star), it’s true of the growing Rebellion, and it’s true of Cassian Andor himself, a lowlife who’s gone from scrambling to survive to fighting for something much larger than himself. It’s amazing to see a Star Wars story this thoughtfully constructed, adding brick to brick to brick until the most impressive story that universe has seen in two decades is right there before our eyes.

I reviewed the season finale of the truly excellent Andor for Decider.

One of the most unusual things about the show is that, especially in the early episodes, Cassian Andor is not particularly charismatic. We’re used to dramas centered on the most magnetic guy in the room.
You probably were in a room with him and never noticed. Cassian had to be that guy because this is a big show that wants to tell the story of people that big shows never cared about before. It’s the only way to be honest about a revolution.

Yes, there are leaders, but revolutions are not made by leaders. They’re made by numbers, by conviction, by regular people thinking they can do something extraordinary. This is the story of one of those people that was never celebrated. Oh, this person is going to bring change, this person is different — no, not really. The strength of community, that’s what the show is about.

You cannot fall into the trap of making the charismatic, funny guy who you know from the beginning is going to find a way out. You have to think the opposite. You have to question, Why are we supporting him? I was always saying, “Let’s avoid movie moments as much as we can.”

I interviewed Diego Luna about his incredible Star Wars show Andor for Vulture.