The idea that we hoi polloi see the ruling class who lord over us as louche, overindulgent, perverse, and dangerous is nothing new. It is, after all, as clear how Edgar Allan Poe felt about Prince Prospero and his revelers as it is how Mike Flanagan feels about Prospero Usher and his. But in the main, television’s swipes at the ultrarich have been satirical and visually straightforward, and have preferred to keep violence to a sanitized minimum. Succession is a very nice-looking show, as is The White Lotus (2021– ), but they don’t feel as though the depravity of the characters has seeped through into the stuff of the filmmaking itself.

The New Lurid, by contrast, gives television auteurs and viewers alike a new narrative and visual vocabulary, one commensurate with the degeneracy of our overlords as represented by the characters to which they often directly correspond. Like a televisual vanitas, it is sensual but death-haunted, lush to the point of rottenness, like a once-magnificent family finally, terminally, gone to seed.

I wrote about Copenhagen Cowboy, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Idol, Dead Ringers, and a genre I like to call “The New Lurid” — overheated, oversaturated, oversexed tales of depravity and violence among the entropic elite and its interlopers; think “Saltburncore” — for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Podcast takes a look back at the year in television, as Stefan and I review my picks for the ten best shows of 2023. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

9. The Idol (HBO/Max)

Fuck what you heard. The Idol, 2023’s most hated show, is far and away the TV I’ve thought, and argued, about the most this year. Hype and backlash cycles notwithstanding, Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye created a sleazy, lurid, funny, fucked-up, incredibly straightforward satire of the starlet factory à la Paul Verhoeven. Unlike, say, Succession, which spoofs the ultra-wealthy without simultaneously trying to feel like Dallas or Empire, The Idol sends up the sex-and-drugs world of pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp in the year’s most underappreciated performance) and her grifter svengali Tedros Tedros (Tesfaye in the year’s second most underappreciated performance) while also embodying it. 

The two leads act out their intense and at times humiliating material without a net, but they’re buoyed by a Greek chorus of comedic performances by the likes of Hank Azaria, Rachel Sennott, Eli Roth, Jane Adams, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who turns on a dime to deliver genuinely affecting material whenever called for). All of these terrific actors perform in front of a backdrop of lush retro synths and strings courtesy of Tesfaye, Levinson, and composer and super-producer Mike Dean, appearing as himself. In a sane world this would have just been Pop Starship Troopers — gnarly, nasty, sexy, fun, appreciated by those who get it and basically ignored by everyone else. It couldn’t sustain the discourse around it, and shouldn’t have had to, when its meaning was so plain to see, and enjoy

I wrote about the ten best television shows of 2023 for Decider. I’m enormously proud of this list. The variety I’ve seen across TV critics’ best-of lists this year can be nothing but good for both TV and criticism, and I’m glad to have contributed in my own way. Anyway, I believe in all these shows and think they’re worth your time.

Channel Zero (2016-2018)

There are more scares packed into the first scene of the first episode of the first season of showrunner Nick Antosca’s exceptional horror anthology series than most horror TV shows can muster in their entire run. Amazingly, it only gets better from there. Each surreal standalone season of Channel Zero loosely adapts a famous “creepypasta” from the internet — the subjects include a cursed children’s television broadcast, a Halloween haunted house with a dark secret, a family of wealthy cannibals, and a woman haunted by her imaginary friend — and uses a different talented director. This gives story a different feeling, look, and tone, with one thing in common: All four are legitimately terrifying. The episodes and seasons are short, too, making each one a perfect weekend afternoon binge. And if you feel like the series ends too soon, don’t worry: Antosca has since co-created a quartet of killer streaming miniseries about murder and madness — The Act, Brand New Cherry Flavor, Candy, and A Friend of the Family — that are just as distinctive and chilling.

For Decider, I wrote about ten of my favorite horror television shows since 2016.

In short, the show is about pregnant women, and the legal, medical, ethical, moral, and political issues that swirl around them. Needless to say, this significantly shifts the framework of the original. Jeremy Irons’s Mantle twins are misogynists who see women as both sexual playthings and medical tools against which they can sharpen their genius. The misogyny present in Rachel Weisz’s Mantle twins, as well as in characters like Rebecca and her ghoulish circle of rich women, is internalized, though it’s no less present for that.

In both versions, the female body is a commodity to be experimented with, and on, but changing the gender of who’s doing the experimenting changes almost everything else. But only the TV show expands this into a multifaceted feminist critique of the economic and political forces surrounding the issue: America’s murderous for-profit healthcare system and the women who’ve girlbossed their way to its apex; racial and class discrepancies in maternal healthcare outcomes; the fascist anti-abortion movement’s pas de deux with advances in care for premature infants; the objectification and infantilization of women during the process; and probably more I’m missing. All of this emerges naturally through story and character, which is a pretty staggering achievement in itself.

I compared the David Cronenberg/Jeremy Irons Dead Ringers film to the Alice Birch/Rachel Weisz Dead Ringers TV series for Decider.

In all honesty, I prefer being a little bit confused. Elliot is what Beverly and Genevieve’s relationship has been about from the start — Genevieve says so herself. She’s what Beverly’s whole life has been about from the start — as the younger sister she has never known a second of life outside the womb without the other. Even when they’re apart Ellie is the constant buzzing of an unanswered phone, everywhere, at all times, inescapable, even in the audience you just want to turn the goddamned thing off it’s so fucking anxiety-inducing, but you can’t any more than she can. She seeps through cracks, around corners, over boundaries, until she’s all that’s left. If that clouds how we read the actions of the women closest to her, Beverly and Genevieve and Rebecca, well, that’s Elliot for you.

Even on a narrative level, the Mantle twins cannot be separated. After watching this exceptional show, I’m going to have a hard time separating them from me.

I reviewed the finale of Dead Ringers for Decider. Holy shit, what a show.

With only one episode to go, there’s no sign Dead Ringers is content to keep its head down and its guard up during the final rounds. Nope, it looks like this is a show that’s swinging haymakers until the final bell rings.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Dead Ringers for Decider.

All told, despite being the least spectacular of the show’s episodes to date, it’s the most momentous. So much has been dragged out into the light, with the promise of more life-upending revelations to come. The episode begins with an exterior shot of the twins’ nightmarish birthing and research center, but I suspect the Center cannot hold.

I reviewed episode four of Dead Ringers for Decider.

It all goes to what Agnes, the woman who lives in the alley outside the Mantles’ apartment and who storms the place after Ellie rains down debris on her from several stories up, says to Elliot in her fucking unbelievable rant on the rooftop. There’s really no way I can overstate what writer Rachel De-Lahay and actor Susan Blommaert accomplish here; it’s like watching some swift, muscular predator with claws the size of your middle finger tear a slow-moving gazelle to shreds. 

I reviewed episode three of Dead Ringers for Decider.

How good is Dead Ringers the TV show? I’ll tell you how good it is: While watching this second episode of the show, the first comparisons that sprang to my mind were Mad Men and The Terror. The two shows with the most precise, lacerating dialogue and character work in the past 15 years? Two shows obsessed with class, status, and the creation and severing of intimacy? Two shows with absurdly stacked casts of actors given their best material ever? Two shows that had me dying to see what happened next with every episode? That’s probably a good sign for Dead Ringers, right? 

I reviewed the incredible second episode of Dead Ringers, featuring one of the very best television scenes ever aired, for Decider.

Smartly, savagely adapted by Alice Birch from the David Cronenberg film of the same name (co-written by Cronenberg and Norman Snider) — itself adapted from the novel Twins, by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, which was adapted in turn from the true story of twin gynecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus — Dead Ringers is part of a wave of reimagined erotic ‘80s classics, including Paramount+’s Fatal Attraction and Netflix’s Damage update Obsession. This one, though, comes with a massive mainline injection of what I like to call “the high weirdness” — the spectacle and perversity that’s the stuff of great art.

I reviewed the first episode of Prime Video’s extraordinary remake of Dead Ringers for Decider.