The best way to sum up “The Day,” Paradise’s genuinely harrowing seventh episode, is this: There’s no ironic slowcore ’80s hair-rock cover to close out the episode. Someone thought better of it, and I’m glad. The covers are so obviously goofy I refuse to believe creator Dan Fogelman is unaware; it stands to reason that when you’re depicting the end of the world, it’s better to enjoy the silence. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Paradise for Decider.

The first thing we see Mary Carr do is lie. In front of Jamaican immigrants Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) and Alec Munroe (Francis Lovehall) — two fresh-faced but not necessarily wide-eyed newcomers to London, capital of the empire that rules their home with an iron fist — she pretends to be a pregnant woman giving birth on the street. Even as a crowd of lookie-lous gathers, though, her henchwomen are busily picking their pockets. When someone says a cop is on his way to help her, she just gets right up and vanishes, her minions along with her. Unless you knew exactly where to look you’d have no more luck finding her than locating a single specific rat. She’s a creature of the streets. 

A Thousand Blows, the new period piece from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, stars Erin Doherty as Mary, Queen of the Elephants. (More on that sobriquet in a moment.) Doherty is interesting casting, because she has an interesting face. Most lead actors on TV shows have beautiful faces, and Doherty is certainly no exception there. But Doherty’s face has the long, curvilinear structure of a Modigliani portrait. When Mary’s temperament grows dark, her face becomes inscrutable and frightening and hard to maintain eye contact with. When it warms up, whether over money or men, you’d be hard pressed to look away. Doherty and her imposing performance instantly level A Thousand Blows up.

I’m covering the fine period piece A Thousand Blows for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

This is a nice, simple episode of Severance. I mean it! Despite major advancements being made in the storylines of almost every character, there’s very little that’s inscrutable this time around. No mystery men whose faces you don’t see, no new rooms with bizarre new people, no hints at vast reams of new Lumon/Eagan lore. It’s just a bunch of people going through a bunch of stuff and reacting accordingly. At its best, this show is always a drama to be watched, not a code to be cracked. 

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

There’s something in the water. Or someone. That’s the sensation the opening shot of this episode of The White Lotus gives us: We’re bobbing up and down on the ocean, dipping beneath the waves and then rising up again, gazing at the dark shore through the eyes of…no one, as it turns out. There’s no one out there spying on the hotel and its patrons — no one except creator-writer-director Mike White and his camera. Somehow, that’s even creepier. 

In lingering shots like this one, or the long interstitials between scenes showing us the flora and fauna and statues that surround the action, White creates the sense that there’s some animating spirit behind the camera, an unknown intelligence observing the events as they unfold for reasons we cannot understand. What’s more, these lovely, eerie shots routinely whisk us away from the world of these rich, egotistical assholes, instead showing us a world where their dreams and schemes mean nothing. It’s a mesmerizing effect, one the show has utilized in the past but never nearly this well.

The White Lotus feels like a more serious show now than it has in the past, too. Or I dunno, maybe it feels exactly the same and I’m projecting because I like this season more than the others so far. But from where I’m sitting it now comes across like a drama with the occasional funny moment, rather than a comedy that gets serious every once in a while. It seems like a minor distinction, but it makes all the difference in the world for the characters: In a comedy their primary function is to deliver a punchline every 30 seconds or so, with other considerations secondary. In this season, I really feel like I’m watching people’s lives unfold, weird as those lives may be.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The White Lotus for Decider.

This is not the kind of show America needs. It does an active disservice to the body politic to misdiagnose its problems and their architects as badly as Zero Day does, even if in the end it’s just a classier Olympus Has Fallen. I’m sorry, but fascism and trans people are not equivalent threats. Neither are the Oathkeepers and the DSA. Neither are unaccountable billionaires and people protesting outside the homes of government officials. And at no point are Mike Johnson and Ayanna Pressley going to team up to do anything, let alone collude with Tim Cook to install a centrist dictatorship under Mike Johnson’s control for some reason. You hear how stupid this all sounds? Please tell me you hear how stupid this all sounds!

But even if you think demanding a political thriller have a brain in its head is too much to ask, calling a show out for assembling an incredible cast and then squandering it is certainly fair play. Joan Allen and Connie Britton, relegated to playing not one but two Concerned Wife types for Robert De Niro’s grandfatherly Dudley Do-Right. Angela Bassett and Bill Camp stranded in thankless supporting roles. Matthew Modine giving the kind of supervillain speeches Alan Moore dunked on in Watchmen almost forty years ago. Gaby Hoffman? Blink and you’ll miss her. Dan Stevens seemed to be having fun, at least, but he always does. 

And as ferociously watchable as Lizzy Caplan is, I couldn’t help but wish, when she had her big screaming match with De Niro in this episode, they were screaming about literally anything else than Zero Day. About the only actor who got material worth their time on set is Jesse Plemons, whose character was both compromised and complex; Plemons invested him with the squirrelly, Coen Brothers energy of a man in way over his head and only just beginning to realize he can’t swim. 

I reviewed the finale of Zero Day for Decider. What a waste!

“It’s amazing how powerful these tech types have become,” Sheila says.

“Yeah, well, I’d have imagined she’d bee too smart to take this kind of gamble,” George replies.

The idea here is that even the richest, most powerful people can bring about their own downfall when they fly too close to the sun. Fingers crossed.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Zero Day for Decider.

Speaking of billionaires, George refuses to kowtow to one as well. (Granted, he then starts torturing people, but pobody’s nerfect.) When Monica Kidder, who’s been turning her monopolistic tech company’s algorithms against Mullen and the investigation, is granted an audience, it quickly turns nasty, and Mullen has no interest in dancing to her tune. He corrects her garbled Ben Franklin quote about trading freedom for security — billionaires adore mangling the wisdom of the ages when they’re not just quoting made-up email-forward bullshit in wisdom’s guide — by saying “‘Freedom’ is what allows people like you to do whatever you want. ‘Liberty’ is what protects the rest of us from people like you.” If Zero Day can grasp this concept even a little bit, there’s hope for the rest of us yet.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Zero Day for Decider.

As the episode progresses, it becomes clear that neither George nor anyone else on the show fits on a political spectrum we’d recognize as existing at any point during this sad American century. Pop quiz: To what political party does George belong? Is his daughter, Alex, in the opposition party? What about her apparent boss, Speaker Dreyer? President Mitchell? Shrieking news influencer Evan Green? Shady, possibly pedophilic billionaire Bob Lyndon? Zero Day may know, but it isn’t telling.

But okay, forget party entirely: To what political wing do any of them even belong? Dreyer is clearly a right-wing type, but he’s passionately demagoguing about the violation of leftists’ civil liberties. Alex comes across like an AOC in terms of affect, but she’s working directly for Dreyer while attempting to hamstring her Biden-coded dad. Green looks and sounds right at home on the Ben Shapiro/Matt Walsh spectrum, but he refers to the left-wing Reapers as hard-working Americans whose rights should be defended and defends a mother whose child has been taken from her by government thugs. He also really hates billionaire Bob, while billionaire Bob thinks war with Russia would be good for business. Mitchell’s politics are completely opaque; all we really know is she’d prefer picking a fight with a nuclear superpower to rounding up a few dozen Discord users. All of these people seem to hate each other on ideological grounds, but we’re never really even told what those ideologies are.

Again, there have been many, many political thrillers the politics of which consist solely of “corruption and authoritarianism are bad,” and since until recently this has been the bipartisan consensus there has historically been little need to go beyond that. But at a certain point, a refusal to depict politics as it exists when you’re telling a story about presidents and congresspeople and civil liberties violations and so on obscures more than it reveals, even simply as entertainment. That lack of politics isn’t apolitical at all: it’s a politics of cowardice, or worse, appeasement.

I reviewed the third episode of Zero Day for Decider.

Last things first: You know how every episode of Paradise ends with some preposterous slowed-down moody spooky breathy cover of a huge ‘80s/‘90s radio rock hit? This week’s is actually quite good! It’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” by RAIGN, a frequently selected sync for big emotional TV moments. Since the Guns n’ Roses version the show is riffing on was already a cover, of a song by not only one of the best but also the most coverable songwriter in rock history, this cover works quite well. It’s a whole lot better than hearing someone doing “We Built This City” and singing phrases like “knee deep in the hoopla” in the exact tones of Mozart’s “Requiem.” And it really helps this show when it doesn’t end with a music cue that makes you laugh out loud at the screen.

I reviewed the most recent episode of Paradise for Decider.

Are we meant to sympathize with George Mullen? This is largely a rhetorical question, as the answer is obviously yes, or else you don’t ask legendary actor Robert De Niro to play the character as America’s Grandpa. But it’s not entirely a rhetorical question. It’s one thing to sympathize with the man’s plight: his mission to uncover the parties responsible for a devastating cyberattack, his need to navigate the political rat’s nest he’d previously extracted himself from, and his fight against the slow, insidious development of senile dementia. It’s quite another thing to sympathize with how he’s dealing with all of it: pressing on blindly in one of the most-high stakes jobs in the history of (fictional) America, knowing full well his aging brain can no longer hack it. Gosh, if only we had one or two recent real-life examples of what a bad idea this is. 

I reviewed the second episode of Zero Day for Decider.

The plot of Zero Day reads like a laundry list of phenomena the real world has rendered totally moot. Transportation crashes due to the rapid shutdown of vital infrastructure? Our government is doing that itself, right out in the open. A president suffering from obvious cognitive decline? The most recent guy had that, and he lost to another guy who also has that. (Reagan had it forty years ago.) Rogue, Russian-aligned actors seizing control of the nation’s digital nerve system? I hope Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegstreth get to the bottom of this when they’re not exchanging greeting cards with Vladimir Putin. A massive, unconstitutional civil-liberties power grab that could see people being disappeared off the streets without a warrant? That’s just your tax dollars and our pals at ICE at work. Lizzy Caplan wondering if neo-Nazis had somehow learned to use computers? I give you DOGE. Lunatics shrieking at the government about conspiracies and crisis actors? The day I’m writing this, the Senate voted to confirm, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, a man who has claimed covid was bioengineered to spare Jews. And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and on and on and on, and, and, you get it, we all get it, it’s great.

I’m covering the Robert De Niro political thriller Zero Day for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.

The theme song for The White Lotus is, or was, musical cilantro. Created by Cristobal Tapia de Veer for writer-director-creator Mike White’s anthology series’ first season, then tweaked in a Mediterranean direction for Season 2, it is, or was, chirpy and screechy and unlike anything else on television. To many people, it’s the banger theme music of the decade. To my ears, it was basically unlistenable. 

In this sense, the theme matched the show it accompanied. The White Lotus is, or was, a cheaply cathartic satire of the rich and useless, inviting you to pull up a chair and have your mind blown by the fact that wealthy, attractive people are often, get this, huge assholes. (Glad you were sitting down, aren’t you?) The beautiful resort-hotel settings — not to mention White’s obvious, infectious, seemingly out-of-character love of filming nature, especially water — distinguish it somewhat from your average anti-capitalist dramedy, but it’s still basically just Succession: Hawaii Nights.

When what to my wondering ears should appear but a whole new theme song! It’s less abrasive, and I suppose fans of the original, uh, “melody” will miss it, but it’s just as propulsive, and its ominous, bassy synth washes toward the end suggest both depth and menace. Based on this initial episode, the show may be following suit. It’s weird to say a filmmaker as accomplished and acclaimed as White has finally found his sea legs, but with this particular project it may well be the case. 

I’m covering The White Lotus‘s third season for Decider starting with my review of the season premiere. For the first time, I really liked it!

Tramell Tillman’s work as Milchick is really extraordinary, isn’t it? To be blunt, this kind of self-consciously quirky character would normally make my skin crawl with cringe, but Tillman makes his every throwback styling choice, every unnecessarily stiff and formal sentence, every bit of tendentious bullshit, every deeply weird thing he does (including authoring the entire “kindness reform” for the severed floor) feels like the product of a three-dimensional (if cartoonishly deranged) person’s mind. Contrast this with Patricia Arquette as Cobelvig, a collection of Disney-villain quirks that never congeals into anything solid. 

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Using a populist ignoramus who inherited everything from his daddy as a catspaw, the richest person alive takes over the federal government. Paradise is the show that dares to wonder what would happen if this far-out, science-fictional, dystopian scenario were ever to come to pass. Fortunately, It Can’t Happen Here, right?

I reviewed this week’s Paradise for Decider.

Acting is the engine that drives Paradise. Not the plot, which you’ve seen before on better shows (watch Silo! watch Fallout!); not the dialogue, which is a wildly mixed bag of astute and cartoonish. Sterling K. Brown, Julianne Nicholson, James Marsden: These are the load-bearing components of what creator Dan Fogelman has built down in that bunker.

To that number we can safely add Jon Beavers, who plays — or played — Agent Billy Pace, the character who gave this episode its title. Via a series of flashbacks, we learn how he became the man he is — or was — today, and it’s a very different man than what we’ve seen from him so far. But Beavers is so endearing in the role and so deft with his bantering dialogue that he almost singlehandedly makes the contradiction make sense.

I reviewed this week’s Paradise for Decider.

Well, that was fast! It was probably inevitable that Severance would, at some point, un-sever Mark and Mark S., the outie/innie pair at the center of the series. But if it went anything like everything else on this show goes, the process would take several painstaking steps over several hour-long episodes, during which time any number of other pathways would open up and get walked down before we made our way to our appointed destination.

Instead, Mark learns he can be reintegrated, agrees to do it, then gets it done in a grand total of two back-to-back scenes at the very end of this episode. Zero to 100, just like that, in defiance of the way this show has told its story since its inception. It’s a surprise that works on more than just an entertainment level, too: If your show is about the tyranny of routine, it’s a good idea to break from routine now and then.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

It may be an espionage thriller, but no one’s gonna mistake Paradise for Michael Clayton or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy anytime soon. Information about the assassination of President Cal Bradford and the compromising positions of virtually everyone involved in the case isn’t unearthed or deduced — it’s delivered in great gobs of personal exposition, the confessor standing face to face with the interrogator. The casework seems to amount to a series authority figures asking people “Did you do it?” and backing down when the person says “No.” I’ve seen more compelling detective work in episodes of DuckTales. 

Okay, so creating a thrilling murder mystery is not Paradise’s strong suit. What it relies on instead is using the strength of its cast to turbo-charge its tearjerking tales of their pasts. Even when the material is kind of underbaked, simply involving Sterling K. Brown means you’ll get something edible.

I reviewed episode three of Paradise for Decider.

I single out these two moments for a reason: Man oh man do they make creator/co-writer Dan Fogelman’s strengths crystal clear. Working with co-writer Katie French, he just sort of casually tosses off two enormously endearing moments, from two very different spheres of human interaction. The flirtation is fun and genuinely sexy. The family bonding is warm and sincere. None of it feels particularly like something from a television show — or if it does, it feels like it’s from a good television show. You know, the kind of television show that doesn’t immediately give young Dylan a terminal illness to wring out extra sympathy points for his mother, who in the present day is a calculating man-behind-the-throne figure straight out of billionaire reality. 

But Paradise is that kind of show, too! Paradise is the kind of show that has the son beg Julianne Nicholson to tell him if he’s going to Heaven and what it will be like — it’s going to have more horsey rides! — over a breathy cover version of, I swear to god, “We Built This City” by Starship. This is a level of tasteless, mawkish sentimentality that feels like it comes from a whole different universe than that bit about her lying in hopes of picking that dude up. It’s so much broader, too, than everything this beautifully observed moment outside the supermarket on the horse with the ice cream had been right up until that point. 

From a strictly mercenary perspective, I get it: People like having their heartstrings tugged. But the show had already proven it could do so without resorting to crass, poorly soundtracked emotional manipulation. Why settle for a single when you’re a home-run hitter?

I reviewed episode two of Paradise for Decider.

Even after just one episode (out of three debuting simultaneously), the strengths of Paradise are obvious — and they have nothing to do with the twist, or even with the simple murder mystery. If anyone’s gonna care about any of that at all, they owe it to Fogelman’s knack for writing engaging, real-feeling friendly banter, and the casting of the deeply charming (and good-looking, which doesn’t hurt) actors Sterling K. Brown and James Marsden to deliver much of it. Whether Xavier is allowing his kids to gently bust his chops, or whether he’s doing the same thing to his buddy Billy, or whether he’s navigating his complicated relationship with President Bradford, the conversations are lively and hard to predict from one beat to the next. It’s a gift to write that kind of scene, and I feel I can assume without looking that this is what drove This Is Us at least as much as the twists and turns.

I also assume we’ll get a whole lot more of those in the episodes to come. When you drop “oh by the way, this is science fiction” on the audience at the end of your pilot, it’s hard to imagine there are no further tricks up your sleeve. That’s putting aside the fact that Fogelman made his bones off creating an engaging sense of mystery and surprise for his viewers. The subject matter feels weird in the present moment, that’s for certain — for one thing, it presupposes the continued existence of the federal government, which seems like an open question at this point. Many of the creative choices — the pedestrian teal-and-apricot color grading, a breathy ominous cover version of a pop hit to close the episode out — fall flat the same way they do when pretty much any show tries them. (Remember True Detective Season 4?) But “What will they do next?” is a decent hook, especially with actors like Brown, Marsden, and Nicholson dangling from it. Sure, I’ll bite.

I’m covering Paradise, the new show from the creator of This Is Us and Only Murders in the Building, for Decider

But the main benefit of an episode like this is to take us out of the, for lack of a better word, zany world of the severed floor. Down there, Mark S., Dylan G., and Irving B. are basically empty shells, or maybe characters in a one-panel gag cartoon about office life. (Helly R., who never buys into the bullshit for a second, is considerably more vibrant.) Up top, however, Mark is a real guy, a guy who hangs out with his sister a lot and gets real angry about his wife’s death. Irving seems to share his innie’s vocal pattern, but his military background, music taste, obsessive painting of a secret location in the basement, and potential link to anti-Lumon activities mark him as a very different guy from his lovesick but largely comical counterpart. I wish we weren’t being kept in the dark about Dylan and Helena’s lives at home, but at least there’s some dark to explore. I’m interested in these people, not the meticulously constructed world around them.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.