9. Interview With the Vampire

“Home Is Where You’re Happy” by Charles Manson

“Look, Charlie Manson wrote a couple of beautiful songs. Still, he was Charlie Manson.” Controversial, Daniel Molloy! The conductor of this vampire drama’s titular interview, played by Eric Bogosian, has very little patience for the bloodsucker in question, Louis de Pointe du Lac, and even less for Louis’s psychotic, pubescent protégé, the teenage vampire Claudia. It’s her Molloy compares to Manson, the cult leader who defined the death of the Age of Aquarius … and much to my everlasting surprise, it’s Manson who soundtracks the end of this episode. Molloy is right: Manson could be a talented songwriter in very limited doses, as his buoyant ode to personal freedom, “Home Is Where You’re Happy,” makes clear. It’s just hard to hear that happiness when you recall the fate of Sharon Tate, which is what makes the song a strong choice for the soundtrack of a show about magnetic mass murderers, even when they’re of the supernatural variety.

I wrote about ten of the best uses of popular music on TV this year for Vulture.

But ultimately, it’s about Jimmy Keene’s desperation to help the girls’ families Larry murdered. In other words, his discovery of a cause much bigger and more morally meaningful than his own freedom should his mission succeed. That’s why he could no longer sit there and listen as Larry detailed his crimes and gleefully anticipated his own likely release. That’s what made him blow up at Larry, what made him scream for the doctor or the warden or the FBI, what drove him to repeatedly infuriate his guards despite the punishments they doled out to him, what caused him to scrawl all over the cell walls in his own blood like a madman, what made him cry and feel like a failure even after McCauley tells him he’s nailed Larry. Even after he’s free, the judge commutes his sentence while wondering aloud where Jimmy’s overwhelming sense of entitlement went while in that “hell” he went to.

Those girls, their lives, their deaths, the love their families felt for them, and the love they felt for their families: These things are real to Jimmy in a way nothing else, not even his own plight, is.

I reviewed the magnificent finale of Black Bird for Vulture. This was a powerful show that exceeded my expectations.

With this simple act, this insistence on giving Larry Hall’s sole legally accredited victim a voice in her own story, Black Bird earns my undying respect. Why should the killers monopolize the stories of the lives they snuffed out? Why shouldn’t their victims, vibrant and alive and full of their own hopes and fears and dreams, have a say in how they are remembered? If a show about the murder of girls doesn’t treat them as fully human and possessing agency, who will?

I reviewed this week’s episode of Black Bird for Vulture.

None of this would work half so well as it does if not for the fine, carefully contrasted performances of Taron Egerton as Jimmy and Paul Walter Hauser as Larry. Hauser’s showier, if you can call the reedy-voiced Larry showy; his distinctive manner of speech and off-kilter physicality no doubt reflect the careful study of such men. But Egerton is impressive in his own right, always walking in such a way as to emphasize his muscular bulk — as if to impress women and frighten abusers who are no longer there.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Black Bird for Vulture.

Show of hands, and be honest here: Who among you thought this drama about a drug dealer cozying up to a serial killer would feature real-life mafia don Vincent “the Chin” Gigante in a supporting role as that drug dealer’s benefactor on the inside?

No one? Okay then!

Hell, I was taken aback, too. But at the suggestion of a friendly (more on that later) prison guard, our anti-hero Jimmy Keene, cop’s son turned gun- and drug-runner, becomes acquainted with honest-to-god Genovese family boss Gigante (Tony Amendola). Dubbed “the Oddfather” by the always-colorful New York press, Gigante was often found wandering the streets of Greenwich Village in his bathrobe muttering to himself — a ruse meant to keep law enforcement off his back that worked for nearly three decades.

By the time Jimmy meets him, that’s all over with: He’s been convicted and imprisoned, and so he’s now just an old Italian American gentleman who enjoys playing boccie in the prison yard and dislikes being disrespected by anyone, ever. Despite his Irish surname, Jimmy manages to get on the Chin’s good side with three-quarter Italian ancestry, good manners, and not-half-bad boccie playing. (He learned the game from his Irish grandfather, but the Chin doesn’t hold that against him.) If Jimmy really were just the humble Wisconsin gunrunner that his cover story makes him out to be, he just found the best rabbi in perhaps the entire American carceral system.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Black Bird for Vulture.

“Dogs of Lust,” by the The, blares from a stereo somewhere on a college campus in Indiana. A young woman walks through the hubbub and onto a deserted street with lamps that evoke Magritte’s Empire of Light. And all the while, a van has been following her. The van pulls up a bit ahead of her until it’s lost to the camera, tracking the girl’s walk. Eventually, she reaches the van, which has parked. The camera keeps on moving; the girl is gone.

It’s smart cinematic business, using the constant, steady movement of the camera to show us that the woman we’ve been following isn’t there to follow anymore. You feel the shock of her absence in the belly. And it’s just one trick up the sleeve of Black Bird’s second episode. Shrewd writing, expert filmmaking, powerful but understated acting — if you want it, you’ve got it.

I reviewed the second episode (or part two of the premiere if you prefer) of Black Bird for Vulture.

I mean this as a compliment: Black Bird is not a tasteful show. There’s lead character Jimmy Keene, a former high-school football star turned drug dealer with a body chiseled from marble who likes his music loud and his liaisons dirty.

There are the needle drops, smacking you over the head with Guns N’ Roses’ “Mr. Brownstone” and REO Speedwagon’s “Don’t Let Him Go” and Soundgarden’s “Fell on Black Days,” each with lyrics that speak directly to the plight of the protagonist.

There’s Jimmy’s opposite number, suspected killer Larry Hall, a serial confessor to crimes he didn’t commit who likes to cruise around in his Dodge van asking female passers-by about their “boobies.”

There’s the overall sense that we’re watching something sordid and sleazy, even — strike that, especially — when the Feds sweep in with their big offer to Jimmy: Befriend Larry, get him to confess to another murder, and get out of jail free. It’s so grotesquely transactional that you want to pull away from the screen lest you be coated in a thin layer of slime.

To all this, I can only say, great job! I’ve watched several “based on a true story” crime dramas over the past few months, most of which (Tokyo Vice, We Own This City, Under the Banner of Heaven) I liked, and at least one of which (Candy) I adored. But except for Jon Bernthal’s material in We Own This City, none of them had the swaggering bravado of this pilot episode. Credit to writer/creator Dennis Lehane and director Michaël R. Roskam: This one stands out in a crowded field.

I reviewed the premiere of Black Bird for Vulture.