As much as I enjoy the camp (no pun intended) value of the Dragnet hippies, the horny teens, and the Mayberry RFD yokels, it’s undoubtedly a good thing to have an episode’s tone determined by the acting of Linda Cardellini, William Catlett, and Hamish Linklater. As Briana, Devin Kessler also performs in this serious register. When comic relief characters like Dorfman, Rita, and Enos are used here, they’re used in a way that feels consistent both with their own humorous track records and with how normal people would behave. That neatly ties both halves of the show together.

But the real dramatic energy here is from the demented nuclear (again, no pun intended) Whittering/Voorhees family: patronizing, patriarchal, sociopathic Elias; ferocious, loyal, chemically imbalanced Pamela; and…Jason, or whatever’s left of him.

I reviewed the season finale of the fantastic Crystal Lake for Decider.

There’s nothing surprising about the secret origin of Pamela and Jason Voorhees. Should there be? It might be nice, I suppose, but then there was never anything all that surprising about Friday the 13th to begin with. You’re not here to watch Crystal Lake reinvent the wheel, you’re hear to see it stud that thing with spikes and run people over with it. In that sense, this episode delivers. You may have seen this kind of super-child origin story done before, but rarely with the gusto you get here by the end.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Crystal Lake Season 1 for Decider.

If you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger. This maxim was a favorite of United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It seems to be the approach favored by the increasingly unhinged Pamela Voorhees as well, and with similarly grisly results. 

I reviewed episode 6 of Crystal Lake for Decider.

I am now fully on board with the cartoon hippies of Crystal Lake. I’m smoking their grass, I’m dropping their acid, I’m rockin’ their van till no one comes a-knockin’. They’re simply too funny to resist anymore.

Funny on purpose, I mean. To me, that’s obvious, because the show is funny on purpose all the time. Claudette droning on about how the power of prayer can spiritually replace her hymen because “Jesus has a hard-on” for her, Barry teaching the kids how to row with a paddle by saying “cup the tip, guide the shaft, in and out, in and out” over and over, the dark dark comedy reveal that Claudette’s pastor is a pervert — this episode alone has ample evidence of the show’s comedic chops. But you can also think back to the brilliant splatstick comedy of Pamela’s fight with the Bellflower thugs, or the bawdy read-along that introduced us to Rita and the rest of the townsfolk. 

In other words, when this show wants to be sharp, it is. And not just in the comedy department, either: The gap between how seriously Pamela, Lee, and Grace are taken versus the rest of the cast remains pretty vast, which by now seems deliberate. The point is that if Crystal Lake is ever stupid, it’s stupid like a fox.

I mean, for crying out loud, they’re giving Harmony, the lead hippie, dialogue like this:

“The straight world’s no place for our kind.”

“Our souls are vibrating at the same frequency.”

“Everyone’s waiting for us. We’re building a new society.”

“I get the suffocating hypocrisy of our male-dominated society.” (“Right on, sister,” her friend chimes in.)

Everyone making this is aware they’re just doing the Dragnet hippie episode on the shores of Crystal Lake, and everyone’s having a whale of a time with it. So am I.

I reviewed episode five of Crystal Lake for Decider.

Crystal Lake’s problems remain consistent: Pamela, Lee, and Grace’s material remains much stronger than everyone else’s, and man do I wish the nighttime cinematography made real use of darkness and light. But so do its strengths: Linda Cardellini and William Catlett are fantastic, the gore is gross and right in your face, and perhaps most importantly, it’s suggesting that Jason Voorhees and Captain America have similar origin stories. Now all we need is a little mass murder and we’ll really be cooking.

I reviewed episode 4 of Crystal Lake for Decider.

Is Harry Da Souza too good for the Harrigans? I don’t mean too good a person; we’ve seen him execute way too many people in blood way too cold to have any illusions about the kind of person Harry is. But is he too good at his job, too good at being a fixer and fixing things, for a family as thoroughly broken as the Harrigans?

I reviewed this week’s MobLand for Decider.

Crystal Lake isn’t a perfect show. The yokels are drawn a little too broadly to be effective as characters, especially up against characters as serious Pamela and Lee and performances as strong as Linda Cardellini’s and William Catlett’s. The nighttime photography is flat and lifeless, an especial shame given the original films’ oceans of black illuminated by flashlights and porch lights. 

But there’s just so much fun stuff here! In the opening flashback, young Jason blows off a nasty series of jagged cuts in his arm he got from a branch, feeling no pain at all; “I’m pretty tough,” he says, in the understatement of the year. The discovery of the cabin is another piece of the “how did Jason survive out there” puzzle. There’s a creepy shot that reveals Jason has been in Pam’s garage without her knowing it, going through his old box of toys. The opening credits are striking and unlike anything else on TV right now.

On a more serious note, Grace remains a refreshingly imperfect and complicated child character; watching her try to figure out how to parent these terrible adults is heartbreaking, as is the scene in which it’s revealed her cigarette burn was self-inflicted. Pam and Lee’s chemistry is as incendiary as her need to mother Grace is stifling. “I couldn’t save my son,” she growls at one point, “but I can save her.” From whom?

Bottom line: Pamela Voorhees knocks a woman’s face off with a bigass meat hammer. That’s entertainment, if you’re a sicko. If you’re not a sicko, what are you doing here?

I reviewed episode three of Crystal Lake for Decider.

The thing I love most about Crystal Lake so far — and I do love it, make no mistake, I’m a real sucker for what this show is doing — is its hidden depths, no pun intended. You don’t have to make a character like Rita both a classic ’70s floozy and a woman who suffered a stillbirth and thus sees Pamela’s strength and love for her child more clearly than anyone else on the show, but isn’t it better if you do? You don’t have to burrow into the original series’, how shall I put this, fraught relationship with teenage female sexuality so deep that you’ve got Grace mimicking older kids gossiping about “sluts” in the bathroom mirror, or staring intently at the sexual graffiti all over the stall door, or putting on lipstick and clogs to hang with the very kids she watched have sex while Jason drowned — but again, doesn’t it make this a more interesting show when you go there?

I reviewed the second episode of Crystal Lake for Decider.

As a slasher series, Friday the 13th is like a chainsaw that took three tugs on the cord to fully fire up. 

Like Scream famously points out, Jason Voorhees, the unstoppable killing machine that the franchise turned into a horror icon, isn’t even the killer in original 1980 film. It’s his mother, Pamela Voorhees. Even though Victor Miller’s unevenly written script doesn’t bother introducing this character before the big reveal, the gleefully deranged performance of actor Betsy Palmer ensures Pamela’s place in horror history.

After we watch a gaggle of camp counselors engage in fairly wholesome sexual activity (strip Monopoly! oh no!) and get slaughtered one by one by an unseen assailant, we learn that Pamela has gone insane and is out to avenge her son’s death from drowning at Camp Crystal Lake decades earlier. The culprits were a couple of neglectful, sexually active teenage camp counselors whom she killed a year after the incident; now, to Pamela, the only good camp counselor is a dead one. No lumbering behemoth in a hockey mask here, just a middle-aged lady with a haircut and sweater that scream “church bake sale,” slaughtering teenagers for “making love while that boy drowned!”

Only in Part 2 does Jason himself, who survived his apparent drowning and has lived in the woods as a feral scavenger ever since, begin his own killing spree. Taking the same zero-tolerance approach to camp counselors as his mother, whose death he’s now out to avenge, he is defeated by yet another sexually active camp counselor, who smartly uses his fixation on his mother to escape certain death.

By Part III, Jason’s a lumbering behemoth with super-strength, seemingly just killing anyone unlucky enough to be near Crystal Lake, where he, uh, didn’t drown. It’s here he gets his trademark hockey mask, grabs his trusty machete, and becomes the monster the series is famous for. It’s also here where the series gets incredibly dumb: toilet humor, central-casting hippies and “punks” as victims, and the worst 3D effects you’ve ever seen. By the time he literally rises from the dead in the fourth film, infamously subtitled The Final Chapter, he might as well be Godzilla, if Godzilla movies had gratuitous nudity and special gore effects by Tom Savini.

Sleazy, silly, and creatively disjointed as they are, though, there’s an arc formed by these initial Fridays — the story of a disabled and bullied boy, a mother driven mad by grief, and an improbable tale of survival that turned the boy into a monster like his mother before him. The heart of it all is an incredible scene at the end of Part 2, in which the film’s “final girl” (Amy Steel) finds Jason’s macabre shrine to his mother (complete with her severed head), puts on her trademark blue sweater, and pretends to be her, cooing at the crazed killer to “come to mommy.” The scene is such a psychosexual live wire, so brilliantly acted by Steel and Palmer, that it feels like it’s from a different, better series. 

Wisely, it’s on this powerful, ultimately lethal relationship between mother and child that Peacock’s Crystal Lake focuses. This prequel/reboot hybrid from creator-writer Brad Caleb Kane, co-showrunner of the excellent, similar It: Welcome to Derry, launches with an entire episode about a mother losing her vulnerable, beloved son before her eyes. It actually takes the emotional stakes of the films’ premise seriously, even as it plants seeds for some of the franchise’s most outlandish elements — and, arguably, gets even more out-there than they did by the end.

I reviewed the series premiere of Crystal Lake — and the Friday the 13th movies too — for Decider, where I’ll be covering the whole show over the next few days. KI KI KI MA MA MA

Tom Hardy echoes this binary nature in his performance. Harry’s most disarming quality is how casual he seems, how loose and laid-back even though he’s a battlefield commander. He peppers his speech with “yeah”s and “all right”s that deflate the gravitas of what he’s saying, no matter what that is. It’s a trait that can calm the most panicked people…or panic the most calm, because whether he’s saving someone’s life or ending it, it never changes. 

What seems endearing in one circumstance becomes repulsive under another. When you’re forcing a cop you bought off but who is now compromised to hang himself from a tree in the woods in the rain, for instance, that shit is no longer adorable. It’s nightmarish. Harry reminds me of Tommy from GoodFellas or Nicky from Casino: They really are funny guys, until they pop your eye out of your head with a vise. Their charm is poisonous.

I reviewed this week’s MobLand for Decider.

Seriously. Were we supposed to know that eons-old shapehsifting robots could do the virgin-birth thing and make new shapeshifting robots who look, act, and age like humans? Because that feels like new news to me. Seems important! Maybe the Guardians should have mentioned it!

And yet you’re not going to see me complain about the twist any further, because the payoff is one terrific performance after another. Aaron Pierre is so rock solid as sleuthing, morally conflicted John Stewart that it’s as if he carries the weight of the whole show on his shoulders. 

He’s complemented by Kerry Macdonald, rarely more beautiful than when she greets Hal upon his release from jail in a flashback, or more empathetic than when she explains to John that she killed him without thinking to protect her child’s normal life rather than live amongst the stars as fugitives.

Playing two alternate versions of the same character, the wizened and repentant Hal of 2026 and the affable digital backup Hal of 20-odd years earlier, Kyle Chandler perfects the character’s unique chip-on-his-shoulder charm. The real Hal dies trying to save Noah and Kerry, but also not listening to what Kerry is saying — classic Hal. His backup dies telling John Stewart “Love you too, Junior” after tricking him into saying those three little words — a very different Hal altogether.

I reviewed tonight’s Lanterns finale for Decider.

“The word got around that finally, there was a real gangster in town.” — Casino

It only occurs to me now, after this excellent episode of Paramount+’s MobLand, that the show has never had a really interesting villain. Discounting the shifting loyalties of the Harrigans themselves, all of whom are basically co-protagonists of the show, there’s really only been the tough-as-nails cockney crimelord Richie Stevenson and the cold-as-ice American macher Kat McAllister. You’ve seen British gangsters and Yankee black-ops bosses a million times. 

Frankie Cooper, by contrast, stands out in a crowd.

With his mop of hair and tracksuits, he looks like a man they found on a desert island somewhere, clinging to the belief that a 1994 festival with Oasis headlining was still going on. His speech is non-stop patter, non-stop bits, non-stop little jokes that more often than not are so smoothly delivered the target isn’t even given the opportunity to get mad. 

I reviewed this week’s MobLand for Decider.

Flashbacks and Father’s Day Hallmark-card shit aside, I’ll risk sounding like a broken record and say once again how much this show benefits from its leads. All three are beautiful and charismatic, but all three, even the legitimately godlike John, feel like people it’s probably interesting to have a beer with — not fun necessarily, but it’ll be a conversation you’ll remember, and be glad to have. They’re endearing despite being, let’s face it, three very weird and compromised people. They’re the gold amid the green.

I reviewed tonight’s Lanterns for Decider.

It’s interesting to compare MobLand to The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie’s other stylish British gangster thriller. Where the latter derives its power from bold imagery and biting class commentary, this show relies more on the strength of older, more idiosyncratic actors — not even Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren and Toby Jones, but Hardy and Pulver and Froggatt and Paddy Considine and so on. These characters aren’t brash up-and-comers; they’re middle-aged men and women who’ve lived lives, hard ones, and they look it. (In the sexiest way possible, for the most part.) They’re caught somewhere between a younger generation that doesn’t believe in a future and an older one that won’t live to see it but wants to take it all with them anyway.

I reviewed this week’s MobLand for Decider.

Using women like Aileen, and women turned into modern myths like Lizzie, to make this point is a deliberate act of provocation. That’s the Monster project. The idea is that people who have done terrible things are still people, and we can make art that sympathizes with them, that attempts understand what made them what they are, without either artist or audience exploiting or condoning those terrible things. For eight episodes at a time, we can attend their carnival, and take away what lessons we can.

I reviewed the finale of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story for Decider.

Lizzie enjoys her acquittal, of course. She thanks the jurors individually per Nance’s advice, then stands before the unfamiliar flashbulbs of the press and announces her intention to create an animal sanctuary. (Oh god, Lizzie Borden is going Carole Baskin.) She marches out of the courtroom and travels in her carriage to the triumphant strains of the Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s version of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time,” familiar as the basis for the Verve’s hit “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” She’s just vibing joyfully…but she’s doing it without Bridget, who disappears for the entire trial and is only glimpsed in hallucinations and wishful thinking.

But then I think about the literal acting lessons Lizzie received to win a not guilty verdict. I think about the old-school cinematic irises that have transitioned us in and out of different scenes. I think of that curtain opening at the start of the show, revealing a toy piano played by unseen hands. Is The Lizzie Borden Story hallucinations and wishful thinking all the way down?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story for Decider.

Now what? If you have your audience asking that question right in the middle of the inaugural season of your show, I’m not sure if you’re doing something good or bad, but you’re certainly doing something unusual. 

That’s the point we reached at the end of episode five of HBO’s Lanterns. The three-way war between aliens, Lanterns, and Zoe the Manhunter, with the fate of Rushville, Nebraska hanging in the balance, reached its bloody conclusion. So did the struggle for control of the Green Lantern power ring: John Stewart pried it from Hal Jordan’s still living hand, then delivered it straight to Lianna the Guardian, refusing to take this extremely shitty job after all. Sheriff Kerry Kane calls off a mob of angry villagers when they surround John, and that’s that.

Leaving the fate of your show so wide open so early in the proceedings is, by far I think, the boldest thing series co-creators Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King have done during the show’s shaky but promising run so far. In a way, of course, they’re just mimicking the structure of, you guessed it, True Detective Season 1, with its mid-season time jump from being primarily flashbacks to primarily present-day material, and its concurrent shift in the personalities and fortunes of the two main characters. But in both cases, the big mid-season climax only gets you so far. You still have to come up with something interesting for everyone to do afterwards.

So far, at least, Lanterns has done it.

I reviewed tonight’s Lanterns for Decider.

I cried during this episode of Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. More than once. First I cried when Aileen Wuornos described her childhood of brutal physical and sexual abuse to her hallucinated idol, Lizzie Borden. Then I cried when Bridget and Lizzie shared one last dance to “Smalltown Boy,” Bronski Beat’s mournful dance classic about an ostracized young gay man leaving home, while Aileen Wuornos and her girlfriend Shelby somehow join in. 

I found this material deeply affecting. It made me sad to think about how some people have to feel the way these people were made to feel. It made me think how beautiful any moment of escape can be, whether through music or sex. (Murder is just the Monster-verse’s misguided attempt to find that kind of transcendence through violence.) I thought these scenes were beautiful. They moved me to tears.

I’m saying all this up front just so you know if you’re in the right place or not. If you find this kind of true-crime material distasteful, if you find Ryan Murphy (who does not appear to have been particularly involved in this season, certainly not as a writer) distasteful, if these factors are enough to preclude you from enjoying the show, I understand. I also disagree, and that’s the perspective from which I’m writing. Monster is a surreal exploration of life as an outsider as reflected in the lives of famous killers, their victims, and the legends surrounding them all; it moves me to tears, and to me, that’s worth both examining and celebrating.

I reviewed episode six of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story for Decider.

An episode this focused on Andrew Borden, one of Lizzie’s hugely unsympathetic victims, invites some wider musings about the whole Monster project. I’ve wondered why it bothers people so much, beyond understandable squeamishness about the subject matter and distaste for Ryan Murphy. I think it comes down to the way Brennan is using both killers and victims as stand-ins for society’s misfits and outcasts, the people who can’t hack it, the abused who become abusers. The fact that all of Brennan’s killers could be considered in some way queer is just one example of how the show complicates our sympathies. 

To me, the idea is fairly straightforward. People are people, and our experiences are often quite similar at root no matter how different we seem on the surface. Things that turn some people into monsters have the opposite effect on others; somewhere in between are the rest of us, stumbling along, struggling through the blows life has dealt us. Monster posits that all these lives are worth examining, even if the killers get top billing, because in their lives we see glimpses of our own.

I reviewed episode 5 of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story for Decider.

Special guest serial killers. Harrowing sexual violence depicted on camera. Lurid savagery against innocents out of European art films like The Devils or Saló. A woman’s declaration of independence turning into a monstrous display of emotional abuse. And, of course, an axe murder. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story has grabbed ahold of the hatchet, and it’s taking the biggest swings it can. 

I reviewed episode four of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story for Decider.