Ooh look, it’s the new Boiled Leather Audio Hour, in which Stefan Sasse and I discuss 1899, the new series from the makers of Dark! Available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

The annual holiday tradition returns: I wrote about ten of the year’s best TV music cues for Vulture.

One of the best science fiction shows ever made, and one of the finest dramas of the Peak TV era, Dark ended thoughtfully, emotionally, beautifully, brilliantly.

I reviewed the series finale of Dark for Decider.

Welcome to Dark: The Lost Years.

In a way, “In Between Time” (that’s the episode title as translated by the subtitles; Netflix bills the episode as “Between the Time,” a more literal but also more nonsensical translation) is an answer to “An Endless Cycle,” Season 2’s tour de force. While that episode broke from the usual structure in order to depict a single, pivotal day in the Winden saga, the day of Michael Kahnwald/Mikkel Nielsen’s suicide, this one bounces around time and space much like most others do—but it’s the times to which it bounces that are the key. We visit the years in between the pivotal years, the years that fall outside of the show’s 33-year time-traveling cycles. It’s a way of showing us how the characters grow and develop when the threat of apocalypse isn’t imminent, and when Adam and Eva’s plans to alter or facilitate that apocalypse aren’t operating at a fever pitch.

I reviewed the seventh episode of Dark Season Three for Decider.

It probably goes without saying after all that that we’ve reached the most science-fictional point in the narrative thus far. You have to have a pretty tight grasp on the cast and the overlapping, sometimes contradictory timelines and alternate realities to have the first clue what much of the action of the episode is even about. If people were to accuse the show of disappearing up its own ass, I couldn’t really blame them.

But in the end, what you have here is a story of people being ground down by forces they can barely comprehend and cannot control. There’s a universality to that sentiment; dig past the twelve different versions of Martha or whatever and you’ll see it plain as day.

I reviewed episode six of Dark Season Three for Decider.

We haven’t even heard the opening line of dialogue in Dark Season 3 Episode 5 by the time we witness the disposal of its first dead body. The body belongs to Regina Tiedemann, buried by her time-traveling mother Claudia after dying of cancer. The first line of dialogue is “Why do we die?”—and it’s a question this episode answers in detail. One of the most melancholy and death-haunted hours of Dark to date, and boy is that saying something, “Life and Death” continues to add new wrinkles to the series’ complex spacetime-travel plot, while rooting itself deep in the fears and resentments of everyday people.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Dark‘s increasingly wild third season for Decider.

It really is a minor miracle that a show this dense and this loaded with science fictional plot devices works as a character-based drama. And vice versa, I suppose. I’m glad I get to bear witness.

I reviewed episode four of Dark‘s final season for Decider.

“I was always too gullible.” No kidding, Adam! Back when you were referred to as Jonas and weren’t yet horribly scarred, you followed a whole line-up of would-be time-travel gurus: Claudia Tiedemann, your own future self Adam, and now the elderly self of an alternate world’s Martha, named Eva. And guess what? Every single one of them lies to and manipulates you to their own ends. But don’t blame yourself. Skipping and jumping across time and space probably takes a toll on your internal lie detector.

I reviewed episode three of Dark Season Three for Decider.

But for all its plot density, for all its tangled family trees and multiple timelines and now multiple worlds, it doesn’t feel like boring sci-fi bullshit for a second. It’s too warm towards its characters for that. And no, warm in this case does not mean kind or soft—it means respecting their essential humanity and putting that at the forefront of the story, not the mind-teasers.

Katharina is a terrific example of this. As played by Jördis Triebel, she’s embittered and worn out from suffering, and that can entail lashing out, as it does when she practically assaults the teenaged Hannah. But the tenderness with which she greets Ulrich is heartbreaking, as are the tears in her eyes when she meets her mother, a nurse at Ulrich’s psychiatric facility. Like Jonas and Martha and Elisabeth and Claudia and Regina and everyone else, she’s a person, not a plot device.

This mentality has a ripple effect on the filmmaking as well. You see it in throwaway establishing shots, even, like when a nurse lights a cigarette and you can see the orange glow of the ember outside the psych hospital. There’s no reason for that to be there; it just is, because sometimes people step outside for a smoke. Dark never loses sight of what people do by virtue of just being people. The time traveling doesn’t change that. To borrow a phrase from another spacetime-warping show, humanity is Dark‘s constant.

I reviewed episode 2 of Dark Season 3 for Decider.

There’s no easy reentry into the world of Dark. Netflix’s twisty time-traveling psychological thriller, created by Baran bo Odar (who directs this episode, entitled “Deja-vu”) and Jantje Friese (who wrote it), has no shallow end of the pool to step into. You’ve got to plunge in head first where it’s deepest and, yes, darkest. That’s where the show’s sophisticated, character-rooted approach to one of science fiction’s most shopworn devices shines the clearest.

So let’s dive in, shall we?

I’m covering the final season of Dark for Decider, starting with my review of the season premiere. It’s a hell of a show.

Grappling with the big questions?

Try The Young Pope and The New Pope (HBOGo/HBO NOW)

Here’s the deal: Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s outrageously bold pair of series take on the iconography and ideology of the Catholic Church with a sly sense of humor and a knack for surreal visuals. The Young Pope stars Jude Law as Lenny Belardo, an “incredibly handsome” American elected Pope by his brother cardinals, whom he comes to rule with an iron fist. The New Pope, which is simply The Young Pope Season 2 by a new name, introduces John Malkovich as Belardo’s successor, the dandyish Englishman Sir John Brannox. Fully loaded with eye candy, both shows grapple head-on with the power of faith and the mystery of love—or is that the other way around? Your jaw will drop even as your mind expands.

I wrote a guide to 10 off-the-beaten-path shows to binge-watch during quarantine for Decider. This one was a long time in the making—I hope you dig it!

The final episode of Dark‘s relentlessly gripping second season is entitled “Endings and Beginnings,” a reversal of the season premiere’s title “Beginnings and Endings.” And believe me, that cheap symmetry is the only cheap thing about it. Whether you’re talking about Stranger Things on Netflix, Westworld on HBO, or even the letdown of (sigh) Mr. Robot Season 3 on USA, Dark is the science fiction show to beat. Its take on its sci-fi concept is wholly original. Its grasp on its complex story is sure. Its creation of characters worth caring about—not necessarily liking; there’s a difference, and it cuts in Dark’s favor—is unmatched. Its refusal to pull punches is glorious.

I reviewed the season finale of Dark Season Two for Decider.

This is how a time-travel story can be used as a metaphor—a barely disguised one at that—for how our own lives can feel like a closed system from which there can be no escape. It’s direct, it’s discomfiting, and it is very dark.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Dark Season Two for Decider.

From the opening montage to the closing scene, this is a tour de force episode of Dark. The everyday trials and tribulations of the adult and teenage characters are sexy and sad and often both. The Hannah/Ulrich/Katharina triangle of love, lust, friendship, and betrayal clicks in every respect. The beach scenes are funny and hot. The party is both sweet and, knowing what we know about the fates of everyone involved, brutal. Ben Frost’s music, particularly during the Martha/Jonas love scenes, is huge and rapturous, the way doomed young love feels.

And the meeting between Jonas and Michael is powerful and quietly crushing given its outcome. Actors Louis Hofmann, a truly extraordinary talent, and Sebastian Rudolph seem to pour themselves out all over the table where they sit and talk. What’s more, unlike the Ulrich/Mikkel material from the previous episode, the emotional impact of this father/son reunion isn’t hampered in the slightest by relying on sci-fi shenanigans to take place.

It feels like what it is: a son trying to save the man he loves most, a father trying to save the boy he loves most, and the both of them arriving at a decision over who must live and who must die. It takes the toughest decisions we must make as members of a family, as children and as parents, whether we’re ever actually forced to make them or whether they remain the stuff of troubling daydreams and what-ifs, and uses the science-fiction genre to probe that nerve as directly as possible. It does the same with falling in love, with the loss of virginity, with marital infidelity, with motherhood, with couplehood, with friendship. It’s reminiscent of “The Garveys at Their Best,” the standout episode from the first season of HBO’s The Leftovers—the episode that showed that series would become a classic. It’s dynamite. I’m glad it exists.

I reviewed episode six of Dark Season Two for Decider.

Adding an entire working theory of theology, theodicy, and the nature of the universe to, y’know, families in the German suburbs being torn apart by time travel, episode five of DarkSeason Two offers a lot to ponder, from plot to philosophy. It offers an eye-opening look at both the tactics and the worldview of Adam, the prime mover of Winden’s cross-generational “war” for control of time and the wormholes within it. Yet it muddies up some of the show’s more directly effective and affecting interpersonal elements.

I reviewed episode five of Dark Season Two for Decider.

“The Travelers” brings us to the halfway point of Dark‘s strong second season, and the music of composer Ben Frost is our company on the journey. An experimentalist whose musical and geographical travels have taken him far and wide, and who’s spent time working with venerable avant-rock superproducers Brian Eno and Steve Albini (just don’t call them superproducers to their faces), Frost’s work in this episode is a sanity-testing tide basin of shrieks and thrums and tones of alarm. It’s reminiscent of Brian Reitzell’s confrontational work on Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, or the collaborative soundscape produced by Angelo Badalamenti, Dean Hurley, and David Lynch on Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Not just sonically, either: Dark continues to make the case that it’s the best genre drama Netflix has put out yet. If it’s not on Hannibal‘s level, much less Twin Peaks‘s, it has no reason to be shy about standing in their company.

I reviewed episode four of Dark Season Two for Decider.

Time travel, kidnappings, cancer, nuclear apocalypse—yes, sure, all well and good. But for this review of Dark, I’d like to start out by showcasing some acting. That’s an advantage of having two or three different actors play every single character at different times in their lives, right? There’s a lot more acting to go around!

I don’t mean to make light of it, either. “Ghosts,” the third episode of the German Netflix drama’s second season, shows how important the cast is to making this crazy-on-paper project work. Following young, adult, and old versions of characters spread across a hundred-year timespan, often interacting with each other anachronistically and even starting whole new lives out of sync, is demanding work for the audience. Rooting that work in the happiness, sadness, and shame of the characters—making them people, not plot devices—is the secret of the show’s success.

I reviewed episode three of Dark Season Two for Decider.

As always, getting through the raw plot of the show takes up a lot of column inches. But don’t let it take up all the storage space your brain has allotted for the show. While the family tree is a maze of brambles and the timelines look like the tangle of wires connecting your TV to your Xbox, the emotions are recognizable and real. Feeling like you don’t really know the people who are supposed to love you; feeling like you’re trapped in a great cosmic fuck-up and the only way to be happy is to try to just ignore it; feeling powerless to stop oncoming tragedies both great and small—that’s the stuff this show is working with, the stuff it really cares about. It’s dark matter indeed.

I reviewed episode two of Dark Season Two for Decider.

Easily one of the most thematically ambitious dramas Netflix has produced (in any language), and certainly the most narratively complicated one, Dark has returned after a year and a half for a second season of sci-fi and sadness in the woody suburbs of Germany. It does so without making the slightest concession to the notion of jumping-on points for viewers coming to the second season fresh. This is not that kind of show. If you want to get the most out of Dark—if you want to get anything out of Dark—you’d better start from the beginning. This is a journey you have to follow every step of the way.

I reviewed the premiere of Dark Season Two on Netflix for Decider. It’s the network’s best show, give or take a Suburra: Blood on Rome. 

(NB: Descriptions in these link posts will be minimal due to me playing catch-up. I guess you’ll just have to go read the reviews!)

Call it the Lilyhammer of the Gods.

In February 2012, Netflix established its creative model right out of the gate. Its first original show, Lilyhammer, starred “Little” Steven Van Zant, fresh from playing a mobster on The Sopranos…as a mobster, albeit one who’s relocated to Norway for witness-protection purposes.

The road from Lilyhammer‘s quirky Sopranos rehash to Stranger Things‘ unabashed theft from ’80s pop-culture staples is not a particularly long one. All that changed was the company’s self-identification as a creator of original content rather than an online video store, and its subsequent accumulation of user data and development of a predictive algorithm to deliver the goods.

Many of the network’s original series —”original” being a relative term— speak to this desire to please the crowd with things that have already pleased them. Why have only one off-beat comedy about the mildly crazy lives of young people set in New York (Master of None), for example, when you can also have one in Chicago (Easy) and Los Angeles (Love) as well? It’s too bad Donald Glover titled his show Atlanta and took it to FX, or else I’m sure Netflix would have something on the docket for that youth-culture mecca as well. In a more traditional move, reboots are common, from the campy (Fuller House) to the acclaimed (One Day at a Time). And that little row of Netflix Original rectangles contains enough grim-visaged cops, crooks, and killers to look like a photo array you’d use to identify suspects in the world’s most focus-grouped crime.

Which is what makes shows like Dark, The Punisher, and Suburra: Blood on Rome stand out. From the outside, these 2017 debuts seem like status-quo programming. But each veered of the course they could have cruised down effortlessly, taking creative risks that yielded entertaining and provocative results.

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action: Over at Decider I wrote about the possibility that Dark, The Punisher, and Suburra represent a creative turning point for Netflix, in which the sheer volume of material the network puts out is now enabling some shows to complicate and interrogate their genre elements rather than serving them up straight.