Copenhagen Cowboy, Dead Ringers, The Idol, Foundation Season 2: It’s been a great year for the lurid and the florid on television, maybe the best I can remember. The Fall of the House of Usher fits right alongside them, glowing and buzzing like a gorgeously lit, expensively dressed corpse. 

I reviewed the finale of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

Similarly, the script, by Mike and Jaime Flanagan, reveals that Freddie would have been a dentist in another life, because, ha ha, he tears Morrie’s teeth out with pliers. Once again, major kudos to the dead actor of the episode, Henry Thomas, for finding remarkable depths in his character’s shallowness. There’s no real pathos for Freddie of course, the way there was for the other four kids: There’s just disgust at discovering that someone this ineffectual could also be this cruel. It’s like watching a tree sloth light an orphanage on fire. You wind up relishing every swing of that pendulum as it slices his drugged but conscious and feeling ass in half.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

As was the case with T’Nia Miller last episode, Samantha Sloyan is outstanding as an extraordinarily wealthy and well put-together woman coming apart at the seams. The way she almost physically wills her presentation back on track after stumbling out on stage shouting the f-bomb at a nonexistent person, with the camera never flinching from her high-cheekboned, anxiety-ridden face, is a wonder to behold. She handles the explicit sex stuff in the sex tape with the practiced frankness of a woman confident in asking for what she wants. (As much as her fetishes represent a deeper dysfunction, I don’t think Usher is presenting the fetishes as a dysfunction in and of themselves, any more than Chuck Rhoades being a sub on Billions is supposed to indicate he’s an unethical prosecutor.)

I reviewed episode six of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

True, the episode may lack keep-you-up-at-night scares — the occasional flash of a corpse in a place where corpses shouldn’t be isn’t enough — but it makes up for that in intensity. It’s like an Evil Dead movie in that regard: I don’t think anyone has a hard time sleeping because of anything Ash slices up with that chainsaw hand, but none would deny that Evil Dead 2 is horror, because it was clearly made by filmmakers dedicated to shotgunning outrageous fucked-up violent gross over-the-top shit at your face every thirty seconds. From its rich assholes’ long Glengarry monologues about their own awfulness to the deliberately cruel demises of all the Usher kids, that’s obviously The Fall of the House of Usher’s intention too. You could say that’s its beating heart.

I reviewed episode 5 of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

It’s my kind of catty, my kind of blunt, my kind of gross, my kind of show.

I reviewed the fourth episode of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

And so we continue with the recipe that’s worked so far: Graphic violence, sexual fetishism, actors having fun playing heel, and the unwavering belief that the ultrawealthy should be brutally punished for their crimes. What, honestly, is not to like here?

I reviewed episode 3 of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

Okay, I’m calling it: This show fucks! Somewhat literally! Titled “The Masque of the Red Death” after the Edgar Allan Poe story upon which it’s loosely based (Is that how this is gonna go? It’s a stealth anthology series with an overarching storyline?), this episode of The Fall of the House of Usher is one of the horniest episodes of television I’ve seen in a while. And I covered Season 2 of Foundation! Honestly, it takes me back to the the bone-deep kinkiness of Alice Birch and Rachel Wesiz’s Dead Ringers, a show with which Mike Flanagan’s Usher has some stylistic as well as narrative similarities. Those similarities now also include the desire to rev your engine.

I reviewed the second episode of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

Is that good enough? Y’know…yeah, probably. Denying your audience any kind of opening season wrap-up whatsoever isn’t a habit I want to see showrunners adopt as a rule, and it’s frustrating to see it in effect here. My concerns about the emotional tone of the show remain in effect, too. (Over the past week I kept thinking about how little I want little soliloquies about how great it is to remember the smell of food cooked in the kitchen with love in a horror TV show.) But it’s still LaKeith Stanfield, one of the best in the biz. It’s still Clark Backo, who I feel has many more notes to play in this role. When the show does make its mind up to be creepy, it’s real creepy — just the baseline assertion “It’s not a baby” alone is a scary thing to hear, to contemplate, to consider the ramifications of and the rationale behind. The Changeling was frustrating, but it showed a great deal of promise. I’ll head deeper into the forest if the journey continues.

I reviewed the season finale of The Changeling for Decider.

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.

Making gutsy departures from the norm, “Stormy Weather” is a noble failure, yes, but it’s still a failure.

I reviewed today’s episode of The Changeling for Decider.

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before. In this story from Stephen King, a psychic child with a bullying father is drawn to a sprawling old building, built by the rich and thrumming with undying evil. The building needs the child’s psychic energy to fully unleash its horrors, but a kindly adult psychic stands in the way. No, it’s not The Shining — it’s Rose Red, the 2002 ABC miniseries currently burning up the Hulu charts. But hey, if it ain’t broke, am I right?

Fans of Uncle Stevie (I’m certainly raising my hand) will recognize many of the beloved horror maestro’s signature touches in this story of a professor determined to prove the existence of psychic phenomena by leading a gaggle of seers and mediums to an infamous haunted house. The recurring power of evil, the idea that some places are just bad, the psychic child, the psychic guardian, the sins of America’s robber-baron past, Cliff Clavin-esque factoids about the paranormal, and of course the promise of seeing something scary when you see the words “Stephen King’s” before the title of a movie or show — it’s all there. But is the whole greater than the sum of its nostalgically familiar parts? Let’s head inside that haunted house and find out!

I took a look at the first episode of Rose Red, the currently improbably popular 2002 Stephen King/ABC miniseries, for Decider.

If you’re a horror person, it’s as fun (“fun”) to watch as anything; it wouldn’t have made major bank at the domestic box office if it weren’t. But at heart, it’s a film about suffering, about our compulsion to inflict it in ways both large and small, political and personal, extravagant and intimate. If it is indeed torture porn, it’s not here to jerk you off, metaphorically or otherwise. Hostel has a lot to say, as long as you have the stomach to listen.

I wrote about Eli Roth’s Hostel for Take 2, Decider’s series on films that deserve a second look.

And that, sigh, is where Wheels come in. He’s the leader of a secluded but benevolent underground community in the tunnels beneath Grand Central Station, a multi-racial gender utopia that is functionally identical to a hippie commune from a circa-1970 off-Broadway musical. In New Orleans-accented dialogue laden with absurd beatnik wordplay like “electrickery” and “ain’t no people higher, in both senses of the word,” he introduces Emma to this improbable community of “mole people” straight out of an urban legend.

Frankly, I wish they’d stayed there. Once, not very long ago, this was a show about a mother driven to psychosis by the belief her baby is not human, and the horrified husband left behind to deal with the fact that the woman he loved more than anyone murdered their child and nearly murdered him as well. The horror stems from that, and from the uncertainty of the role of the supernatural in it all — the fear that the mother was right all along, and what that means about the world. It does not stem from a visit to the Age of Aquarius, featuring Tom Bombadil narrating a Zatarain’s commercial.  

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

Throughout the Ahsoka journey — and what a journey it’s been, am I right? — I’ve insisted that the people who say its problem is assuming everyone’s familiar with the Dave Filoni cartoons to which it’s a direct sequel have identified the wrong problem. This is Star Wars after all, and you don’t exactly need to consult Wookieepedia to figure out which characters are good, which characters are bad, and which one-sentence-long backstories and motivations have driven them in those directions. I didn’t need to be familiar with Ahsoka, Sabine, Hera, Ezra and the gang to figure out they were Rebel soldiers and friends, that Ezra was lost in some big victory, and that the loss has haunted the otherwise basically genial survivors. You don’t need to know anything beyond that.

But occasionally, you do need to feel something beyond that, and that’s where the two most recent episodes of Ahsoka have failed. That includes this episode, inexplicably subtitled “Dreams and Madness” despite the total lack of dreams or madness in the episode itself. Sure, you can understand that Sabine’s reunion with Ezra, Sabine’s reunion with Ahsoka, and Ahsoka’s reunion with Ezra are big deals. But unless you spent several years watching some genuinely hideous computer-animated children’s cartoons, I’m not sure how writer-creator Dave Filoni expects you to actually feel about this stuff. I’m not sure I feel anything at all, other than boredom.

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

Did you ever see passable CGI space whales undulating through a hyperspace rainbow vortex, man? Did you ever see passable CGI space whales undulating through a hyperspace rainbow vortex…on weed? It’s fuckin’ crazy, man! It’s like you are a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away!

I reviewed this week’s Ahsoka, which contains the worst moment in the history of Star Wars, for Decider.

When I say LaKeith Stanfield is the star of The Changeling, I mean it: LaKeith Stanfield is the star of The Changeling. So much of what makes the show work stems directly from his performance, which takes a single note — grief — and turns it into a symphony. 

I reviewed today’s episode of The Changeling for Decider.

Oddly, this is the second week in a row that a dark fantasy show from a major tech-platform streaming service debuted with three episodes because they were clearly saving the best for last; the same thing happened with Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time just a few days ago. Lord only knows why streamers do what they do (beyond screwing writers and actors to save a buck, I mean), but it’s hard to question the wisdom of packaging The Changeling this way. From “promising but a bit treacly” to “okay, now we’re going somewhere” to “Jesus Christ make it stop” in three episodes is the kind of trajectory that shows a horror series is being made with thought, skill, and a willingness to go there. I’m both dreading and excited for where it goes next.

I reviewed the third and final episode of The Changeling‘s three-part premiere last week for Decider.

It’s not until I lay it all out like that that I realize just how steep a hill the tenth and final episode of Foundation’s superb second season had to climb. To deliver on any one of these promising elements of the show would be an achievement, one that many shows, including ones I really like, would settle for. Just by way of a for instance: Silo, a sister “adaptation of a bestselling sci-fi series about the menacing future airing on Apple TV+” show, is all the better for having a narrow focus and relentlessly aiming its laser at it.

But that was not the path chosen for Foundation. Instead, writers Goyer and Liz Phang, director Alex Graves, and the entire stellar cast set about delivering on every single thing. And deliver they did. Overdelivered, actually. In fact, in terms of sheer scale and scope and daring, the last show I can remember serving up season finales this replete with emotional and visual spectacle is, deep breath, Game of Thrones. And no, I’m not tossing that comparison around lightly. In terms of SFF TV, Foundation is currently as good as it gets.

I reviewed the finale of Foundation Season 2 for Decider. What a show!

Humor aside, the project this episode brings to mind more than any other — and not just because they share a composer, Baltimore musician Dan Deacon — is Unedited Footage of a Bear, the terrifying 2014 Adult Swim Infomercial whose drum I never stop banging. (I’ve probably talked more about this short film than the filmmakers, Alan Resnick and Ben O’Brien, have themselves.) The slow descent from happy parenthood to isolated misery; the emphasis on how mothers in psychological distress often go un- or under-treated; the portrayal of severe mental illness as something so close to the supernatural stuff of horror that it’s a distinction without a difference; the use of both the family and the phone as vectors for fear — it’s all there. I don’t mean to imply this is a rip-off, because it isn’t by any stretch of the imagination. I do mean to imply, however, that this episode is eerie enough to merit comparison to one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen on television.

As was the case with Unedited Footage, the lead performance is the load-bearing structure here. Like twin actors Kerry and Jacqueline Donelli in that earlier project, Clark Backo transitions so seamlessly from perky, fun mama to glassy-eyed, sallow-faced living zombie. Her paranoia and dread, which either bring on or are brought on by her sleeplessness, have turned her into something less than herself — a being one macabre half-step out of sync with the world around her, like a mirrored reflection that somehow begins moving a brief but unmistakable moment after you do. By episode’s end, you too want to keep this poor person and her poor baby away from each other, for both their sakes.

LaKeith Stanfield’s assignment in this episode is a comparatively easy one: Be normal, be a good dad, be a pretty shitty friend, and be ready willing and able to distance yourself from your obviously sick wife after months of this shit have you at your wits’ end. But in a horror series, playing the character who doesn’t realize something is capital-W Wrong actually is hard work: You have to keep the audience caring what happens to you even as your ignorance or unwillingness to see what’s happening drives us away. Stanfield’s not doing the gangbusters work Backo is in this ep, but what he is doing is impressive in its own right.

I reviewed episode two of The Changeling for Decider.

Our Take: Professional wrestling is a truly fascinating, uniquely American art form and subculture. Long before I became a weekly viewer — fully three decades removed from when I thrilled to the likes of Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, and the Ultimate Warrior as a child — I was drawn to its history, its personalities, and its jargon, which remains one of the most valuable lenses through which to see the world I can think of. (The concept of “kayfabe,” the agreed-upon un-reality in which pro wrestling conflicts exist, is worth the price of admission alone.)

Wrestlers depicts this riveting demimonde through the memorable personae of people living in it. Booker (i.e. head writer) Al Snow, co-owner and promoter Matt Jones, and the Julia Garner character-in-waiting HollyHood Haley J are instantly recognizable character archetypes: hero, villain, and antihero. 

Director Greg Whiteley wisely contrasts the emergence of these figures within the non-fictional narrative (at least by reality-show standards) on one hand and the pre-planned presentation of OVW’s faces and heels on the other. Effectively, he’s announcing that the show will work much like a wrestling storyline; like many magicians, he tells you what he’s doing before does it.

I, for one, am impressed — skeptical though I might be of the way he manipulates events with standard reality-show drama. Do I wish this were a real documentary that just so happened to catch a company at a pivotal moment, instead of what it likely is: a reality show, where Jones and Snow and Haley and the rest have been encouraged off-camera to act their parts and play up conflict, especially around the risky tour that just so happens to coincide with the series’ production? Yes I do. Will it stop me from watching? No, it probably won’t.

I took a look at the premiere of Wrestlers, the fun new Netflix docu-reality series about the small but storied regional promotion Ohio Valley Wrestling, for Decider.