A couple years ago I wrote an essay about a TV style or subgenre I called “the New Lurid”: Dead Ringers, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Idol, Copenhagen Cowboy, and other hyper-lush depictions of the incestuous degeneracy of the ultra-rich — Saltburn-core, basically. Since then, recent seasons of shows such as The White Lotus, Industry, Euphoria, and Interview with the Vampire as retitled The Vampire Lestat have carried the New Lurid torch. Cape Fear, a raw psychosexual thriller about a one-percenter family in which everyone is related, as they fight and fuck under trees whose branches appear ready to snap from the weight of their greenness, does so too.

“Like a televisual vanitas,” I wrote, these shows are “sensual but death-haunted, lush to the point of rottenness, like a once-magnificent family finally, terminally, gone to seed.” If that doesn’t describe Cape Fear, I don’t know what does.

I reviewed this week’s Cape Fear for Decider.

It’s a very strong ending, a razor-sharp idea that keeps the spotlight on Farrell and Dalton where it belongs. I don’t know if it’s the influence of showrunner and Breaking Bad veteran Sam Catlin, the presence of Better Call Saul star Dalton or what, but it reminds me of something Walter White might have done to Jesse Pinkman if push came to shove for them. If the Sugar 2.0 can generate more moments like these, then we’d be talking. I’m just not sure it makes up for all the ways the writing had to fudge things to get us there. 

I reviewed this week’s Sugar for Decider.

Ironically, given the nature of the titular structure, Silo’s lore does not run that deep. I’m fond of pointing out that rather than take the usual mystery-box approach, keeping the core question in the dark as you add more and more questions to maintain momentum, Silo keeps it simple. There’s really only one mystery here: Why are they down there? Everything else flows directly from or to that central gap in the narrative.

But it’s not just the mystery plot, Juliette’s often interrupted quest to get to the truth, that reflects this welcome simplicity. As a result of that storytelling decision, all the backstory, the fake history, the world-building, the lore must also point in the direction of that one big question. In a lore-heavy episode like this one, we see the benefits of that approach. The information still opens up new vistas of understanding, but the camera, so to speak, is always focused on the exact same landscape. We just see it more clearly now.

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

I’ve written that Sugar is a fantasy of a frictionless, trafficless Los Angeles, in which our angelic alien glides from destination to destination, easily earning the trust of people from across the town’s tapestry of cultures.  It enhances the show’s dreamy tone, sure. But does the fact that John Sugar is, for all intents and purposes, a rich white man in a suit influence his ability to do what he does so effortlessly? The other explanations — highly stylized writing, or as-yet undisclosed alien pheromones — are satisfying, but they don’t make for a particularly rich text.

What has always distinguished Sugar is the off-kilter excellence of its execution. In some senses that’s still there: the photography of Los Angeles, whether at night or in broad daylight, remains absolutely beautiful, and so does the photography of Colin Farrell. 

But the wheels are really starting to creak everywhere else. The sequence in which Sugar walks through the EZ4’s base of operations is frankly an embarrassment, a series of glowering tattooed Mexicans with white socks pulled up high, mean-mugging the only white person on the screen. To paraphrase Community, I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at a boring walk through a yard controlled by drug dealers when The Wire did this for season after season without ever once being dull about it twenty damn years ago. 

I reviewed this week’s disappointing Sugar for Decider.

We live in a time of unsubtle metaphors. The White House lies in ruins so the billionaire president can build a combination ballroom and bunker for himself and his rich pedophile pals, the Reflecting Pool is full of pond scum and guarded by soldiers and cops who arrest people for touching a monument that belongs to them. So by all means, stick psychotic omnisexuals in the walls, have a misogynistic freak buy the house across the street, leave literal trails of blood everywhere you go. You could not possibly be less subtle with the subtext than reality itself.

The point being made by Neveah’s existence within the very walls of the Bowdens’ happy home is that nothing is sacred, nothing is safe, home and family provide neither security nor succor. This is borne out by the plot time and again. Not a single member of the Bowden family trusts any of the others.

I reviewed this week’s psychedelic Cape Fear for Decider.

The last we saw Juliette Nichols, she was on fire. Played by Rebecca Ferguson, Juliette is the working-class hero of the post-apocalyptic bunker called the Silo and the protagonist of the series. Expelled by former mayor Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) for investigating the Silo’s secrets, she survived the poison atmosphere of the outside world long enough to make it into a different Silo entirely. Its few residents helped her make it back home, leading to a fiery confrontation with Bernard just outside the original Silo’s airlock before her storyline cut to black.

Three months later, it’s a whole new world down there. Juliette has been elected mayor. Hell, some people seem to view her as a kind of messiah. In addition to miraculously surviving both the poison air and the fiery reentry chamber, her return to alert the Silo residents that it was deadly to go outdoors ended the facility’s brief civil war. 

What’s more, her actions exposed Bernard’s schemes to society. Though he himself died during the fire, his surveillance camera system is being dismantled, his abuse of the governing Pact has been curtailed, and the Pact itself is being rewritten by Sheriff Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche). Now there’s a whole governing council comprising representatives of every level and department in the Silo: Juliette, Paul, Judge Robert Sims (Common), and his wife Camille (Alexandria Riley), Juliette’s handler and chief of staff.

There’s just one problem: Juliette doesn’t have the first clue how any of this happened.

Silo‘s back, and I’m reviewing it for Decider, starting with a look at the season 3 premiere. Woo!

But the episode’s loveliest shot isn’t one of Sugar’s visions of the cosmos, gorgeous as those are. It’s when he visits the grandmother of a murdered friend of Ji’s, sees that her grief has rendered her unable to do basic tasks like the dishes, and voluntarily starts doing them for her. Unwilling to let a guest in her home do all the work himself, she gets up and helps dry. This goes on for a wordless minute or two — a moving moment of human connection. (Well, half-human, anyway.)

I reviewed this week’s Sugar for Decider.

What Max is doing is playing the most long-term, high-stakes game of “not touching you! not touching you! not touching you!” of all time. Over the course of years he built his plans for revenge, turning various people (mostly women and girls) to his cause. (Tabitha, the vapid journalist, seems on the verge of becoming one of his disciples herself.) 

There’s no law against bumping into people, or having a daughter, or buying a house. He’s not doing anything, not that they can successfully pin on him anyway. Since every word Max speaks to the Bowdens is friendly, at least on the surface, there’s little grounds for any kind of legal protection. They just have to sit there and take it as he tricks them into being their own undoing. Judging from the number of unforced errors they make this episode, that won’t be too hard. Cape Fear is a journey into brains as overheated and unhealthily vibrant as the colors of the show itself.

I reviewed this week’s Cape Fear for Decider.

Cape Fear is overripe. Its colors are too rich — and rewardingly so. The skin tones glowing pink to the point of redness, the foliage so green it looks like something might descend from the canopy to eat you, the air itself seemingly tinted aquamarine, as though you could as soon swim in it as walk through it, like the humid air of a late summer afternoon before an evening storm. When Max prays in front of his Santería altar at home, his face is so red he looks like he’s inside one of the candles.

A lurid show in terms of its color palette, Cape Fear follows suit with its subject matter. Putting the plot aside for a moment: As a practical matter, this show is about — let’s not kid ourselves here, we’re all adults — the tremendous sexual charisma of Javier Bardem, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that he’s playing a cackling psychopath. When his dapper Max Cady plants a surprise kiss on Anna Bowden in the middle of a park, you can tell she’s feeling a lot of ways about it; “Ewww” is not one of them. Nor does it appear to be the first time their lips have met, either. Amy Adams makes Anna look like she’s ready to vibrate out of her skin as she walks away; I half expected her to rub one out in the parking lot before she drove home.

I reviewed this week’s Cape Fear for Decider.

John Sugar’s Los Angeles is back. It’s a fantasy LA, a frictionless LA, an LA where you can cruise around in your perfect car in your perfect suits and never hit traffic. It’s a place where clips from old movies help you wax philosophical about the human condition and your own place in it, as the the buildings and the neon glow in your windshield. It’s colorful place, with heavily saturated reds and blues in particular, an unusual color palette for a streaming show. (You do see it in Michael Mann films.)

It’s a place where nurses willingly incriminate themselves to help you after knowing you for all of two minutes, like you’re Sgt. Joe Friday on Dragnet. It’s a place where a middle-aged Irish guy like Colin Farrell can meet cute with a different beautiful middle-aged Irish (or Irish-American) lady every season and get a whole cool stylish sci-fi mystery out of it. It’s a city of immigrants, like Ji Moon, like John Sugar.

It is, in short, very much my kind of place. And if both the Season 1 twist and this Season 2 reshuffle are any indication, there’s no way to get a sense of its boundaries until you’ve been there. I’m ready to hop in.

I reviewed the season premiere of Sugar for Decider. Hooray for this weird little show.

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” In Widow’s Bay as in the real world, Karl Marx was right. In a sense, Widow’s Bay is a complex metaphor for trying to survive and stay sane in that nightmare world. Life is a horror show, driven by the failures of our dead forefathers, and the cost of putting an end to it may not be one we are willing or able to pay. By fighting it, we are forced — or we choose — to become monsters ourselves.

That’s the fancy-pants, mainland way of looking at this episode. The other way, the island way, is Holy shit, they did human sacrifices depending on the number of times the cursed church bell tolls, and now Loftis is trapped on the island forever because his son Evan is the final descendant of Richard Warren, and as long as he’s alive the sacrifices must continue??? 

All that and it’s funny, too? To borrow a term from Stephen King: Dear Reader, that’s good TV.

I reviewed the season finale of Widow’s Bay for Decider. Woo!

Death by a thousand cuts. Max Cady (Javier Bardem) has already compared his (allegedly) undeserved prison sentence to this form of piecemeal torture. He may have actually committed it, if indeed he’s responsible for severing a certain teenager’s toe. But after this episode of Cape Fear, it’s apparent that Anna (Amy Adams) and Tom Bowden’s (Patrick Wilson) happy family is under lethal threat, and death by a thousand cuts is how they’re in danger of being taken out.

I reviewed this week’s Cape Fear for Decider.

The funny thing is that this isn’t a super-funny episode of Widow’s Bay, or a super scary one, or one that riffs on one or two very specific stories or subgenres. Sure, there are shades of Nope and The Lighthouse here and there, and a twister straight out of The Wizard of Oz, but there’s no one central horror here — no sea hag, no sunset cocktails death ritual, no machete-wielding Boogeyman. Other than Chris Fleming’s untimely demise and the genuinely chilling cold open, this episode feels mostly like set-up for the finale. It’s funny in places and creepy in others, but in both the horror and comedy categories, I’m hoping it’s just the calm before the storm.

I reviewed this week’s Widow’s Bay for Decider.

When we open, Max Cady’s life has been turned upside down. Seven years ago, in a flashback sequence depicted in gritty black and white, Max is attacked in the prison weight room by a trio of Nazis. He gets the better of them, definitively killing two of them before passing out from his own head injuries, which we know continue to plague him even now. 

But this bare-bones description does not do this cold open justice. Cape Fear has just given us the most brutal television fight scene since the Mountain dueled the Red Viper on Game of Thrones, possibly even since Dan Dority met Captain Turner in the thoroughfare on Deadwood. Simply put, it’s fucking unbelievable. 

I reviewed the second episode of Cape Fear for Decider.

Horror is a genre in conversation with itself. Tasked with frightening their audiences, horror filmmakers naturally turn to what has frightened them. Even the very best works in the genre borrow ideas and images from their predecessors, often quite openly. Provided the end result is something unique unto itself, this process can yield results as vital as cover versions or well-chosen samples do in music. 

Nick Antosca, creator and writer of Cape Fear, has a distinguished track record in the genre himself, creating or co-creating the shows Channel Zero, The Act, Brand New Cherry Flavor, Candy, and A Friend of the Family — a mix of gory, surreal horror and true crime served at a bone-chilling temperature. Here he’s working directly from a trio of sources: John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners, J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 film Cape Fear, and Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of it. All three are credited as source material on screen. 

But the show’s very first scene isn’t a reference to any of those works that I can see. With its inverted, photo-negative images soaked in lurid color, with its images of a happy family enjoying the good life on the Fourth of July, it feels like a nod to a very different movie: of all things, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest.

I reviewed the series premiere of Cape Fear for Decider. It rules.

Let’s not beat around the bush here: How about that jump scare, huh? Or more accurately: Jesus Leweezus, how about that freaking jump scare?

I reviewed this week’s terrific Widow’s Bay for Decider.

Euphoria’s third season has amounted to a full reboot, starring most of the same people in the same roles but with little else in common. It truly can’t be exaggerated what a difference the shift between Labrinth and Hans Zimmer as composers alone makes to the overall vibe, much less having Rue make border runs and Cassie make actual porn and Jules wear multi-thousand-dollar garments instead of stuff from the Salvation Army. These aren’t the kids we knew, fucked-up kids though they may have been, and this isn’t a show about those kids anymore. It’s a show about sawed-off shotguns. You have to make your peace with that.

Which I have. Euphoria Season 3 doesn’t feel like a memorial service, it feels like a viking funeral. It’s not about first kisses and popularity and suburban secrets, it’s a VistaVision fantasia about a hell on earth governed by a devil named fentanyl, and the lost souls fighting against the demon lords responsible. It’s not how I saw this story ending when it started, but it’s one of the wildest and most beautifully filmed neo-Westerns in the history of TV, big and bold and bloody against blue skies, like Pluribus for perverts. I’m only sorry you can’t light the same ship on fire twice.

I reviewed the series finale of Euphoria for Decider.

In the meantime, it’s still a marvelously made show. The vocal effects for Warren feel like something out of Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, and the age makeup holds up extremely well under direct closeups. But even less showy aspects of the episode are striking, like the sharp blue-tinted white light used to illuminate the boat and its cabin, cutting against the digital gloom that often plagues nighttime scenes set at sea on streaming shows. It’s a minor thing, but minor things add up, whether you’re making a show about a haunted island, or actually living on one.

I reviewed this week’s second episode of Widow’s Bay for Decider.

Betty Gilpin is television’s most valuable player. She has that Catherine O’Hara/Philip Seymour Hoffman factor: She’s good in absolutely everything, no matter how good that thing is. To name two recent examples relevant to her work in the first of this week’s two Widow’s Bay episodes, she played a ferocious survivor in Mark L. Smith and Peter Berg’s brutal ordeal, American Primeval, and a momentary First Lady in Mike Makowsky and Matt Ross’s creepily relevant assassination drama Death by Lightning. The former felt like a project written with her in mind, the latter one like one where her character was an afterthought. Regardless, she’s excellent in both. Unsurprisingly, she’s excellent here. 

So is Hamish Linklater. (Jeez. Is this the most “actors beloved by TV critics” cast ever assembled or what?) His most relevant recent work is Midnight Mass, Mike Flanagan’s story of a small island fishing town beset by evil forces, in which Linklater plays a God-fearing religious protector of the village with a sinister secret of his own. Sound familiar? 

I reviewed this week’s first Widow’s Bay episode for Decider.

Did Nate deserve any of this? What difference does that make, one way or the other? This is what happened to him. As Clint Eastwood put it in Unforgiven, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

I reviewed this week’s Euphoria for Decider.