However it goes down, I’m impressed by how much mileage Murderbot has gotten out of its simple premise, small cast, and brief runtime. More would-be sci-fi mindbenders could stand to install a Keep It Simple, Stupid module.

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

Put it all together and it’s one of the most entertaining hours of Marvel superhero TV I’ve seen that doesn’t involve a blind ninja lawyer. 

I reviewed episode three of Ironheart for Decider.

Writer-creator Chinaka Hodge and lead actor Dominique Thorne don’t quite surmount the standard “Here’s who I am and here’s who everyone is and here’s how I feel and here’s why I feel that way and here’s what I need” over-explanatory first-episode syndrome, but they do their level best. You can rarely judge a show by its pilot in that regard at any rate, since the structural requirements of a first episode are so much different even than the needs of a second. 

A bigger problem for the script is the sense that it’s out of step with the moment. Riri’s lionization of billionaires and, as they put it in Speed Racer, the unassailable might of money feels real real weird right now. So does the constant invocation of so-called AI as the wave of the future. I get that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, AI means “Paul Bettany” rather than “fascist technology developed by rich men who want to own slaves that steals from writers and artists in an attempt to eliminate freedom of expression and thought,” but at a certain point you have to adjust with the times.

None of this would be so bad if it weren’t for the two most recent Disney+ franchise dramas of note. The last MCU show, Daredevil: Born Again, was an anti-Trump allegory that was as subtle as a crushed skull. Andor, Ironheart’s immediate predecessor, is somehow one of the most politically radical things ever aired on American television, to the point where thousands of people from MSNBC resist libs to honest to god leftists (ask me how I know!) quoted from it unironically while protesting against Trump and his ICE gestapo on No Kings Day. Those are big shoes to fill.

Of course, you can simply sidestep the shoes entirely, and tell a kickass story about a woman of steel who battles a guy in an evil cape. I’d be 100% down with that! Certainly the fight choreography we see in this episode feels promising — it’s not the brutal bonecrunching of the Born Again and its Netflix antecedents, but it’s fluid and physical and fun. Which, when you think about it, is maybe exactly how a superhero story should be.

But Ironheart has something going for it that those other shows don’t: it’s…well, I was gonna say “unapologetically Black,” but it’s the kind of show that recognizes that being unapologetically anything only gets you so far. Every time Riri pipes up with some prepared speech about she’s a special young giant being made to feel small while rousing music swells on the soundrack, someone’s there to undercut the easy catharsis of speechification. I think there’s a very real possibility that by the end of this short six-episode season, Riri may feel very differently about the almighty dollar, too, especially if an obvious evildoer like Parker is speaking up on its behalf. We’ll just have to stay tuned for the next issue — I mean, the next episode — to find out.

In the meantime, though, just seeing Chicago photographed lovingly, while the most powerful man on the planet demonizes and attacks it…just hearing a guy say hello by saying “Hey, Black people,” which feels like a radical statement while books and people are being purged based on their race by the white supremacist government…just seeing Black characters who are straightforwardly portrayed as brilliant without a single concession made to segregationist anti-DEI scaremongering…This is a world people are actively trying to take away from us, even within our imaginations. These things are not nothing. In a way, these things are the only thing.

I reviewed the series premiere of Ironheart for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show for the duration.

From start to finish, this episode’s entire “creature/other creature/monster sex/gross eggs/evil robot/monster’s revenge” sequence is a perfectly executed daisy chain of escalating sci-fi action and gross-out splatstick humor. Rampaging robots, Lovecraftian beasts, huge gooey 1980s horror movie style slime-dripping monster eggs — this thing has it all. It serves as a bombastic bookend to the subdued first scene, which relies not on special effects or spectacular gore but the performance of David Dastmalchian as Gurathin, whose combination of shame, gratitude, and awkwardness about his checkered past and the way Mensah rescued him from it is riveting to watch. 

This is a really fun show, man!

I reviewed this week’s Murderbot for Decider.

Murderbot is a triumph of casual viewing. It’s breezy without feeling flimsy and disposable. It’s intense without demanding that you respond to that intensity with your entire mind, body, and soul. The violence is taken seriously and depicted graphically, but it’s still more in the “Halloween haunted house” vein than the “Jesus Christ this is a real endurance test” mode. 

Everyone’s performance is lively and engaging. The biggest star in the piece steps back and mutes his wattage — it’s inherent to his character — so that everyone else shines brighter. There’s interesting romantic chemistry going on between a whole bunch of people with interesting faces, people who are handsome and beautiful in a real way rather than a movie-star-with-veneers way. 

Every episode is substantial but short, and you can watch it with your laptop on your lap, your feet kicked up on the sofa, stoned and eating pretzels and hummus quite comfortably. (Ask me how I know!) All told, Murderbot is my favorite way to spend 20 minutes on TV this season. 

I reviewed this week’s Murderbot for Decider.

To paraphrase Ghostbusters: Yes, it’s true. This Murderbot has no dick.

I mean, so we’ve seen, in, uh, non-graphic detail. Whatever organic components went into the construction of our reluctantly, confusedly heroic SecUnit, a penis was not one of them. But that doesn’t stop Leebeebee (Anna Konkle), the delightfully stupidly named sole survivor of the DeltFall habitat massacre, from fantasizing about his imaginary potential penis at length. No pun intended. 

I reviewed the most recent episode of Murderbot for Decider.

There’s one moment in this episode in particular that I think speaks to a much broader problem with The Better Sister as a whole: a phone call in which Chloe reports Agent Olivero’s misconduct to an FBI complaint hotline. The operator’s dialogue is stiff and wooden. The report, if you can call it that, goes into no details whatsoever beyond saying his behavior was inappropriate and hanging up. This takes place while actor Jessica Biel is behind the wheel of a car, with sunglasses on, effectively making it impossible for her to convey emotion. 

And the entire conversation lasts about 20 seconds. It’s so abrupt, so goofy, like on the level of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie, that I actually laughed. The effort feels so minimal! If The Better Sister had put half the energy into making little scenes like this work that it did into ensuring everyone dresses exclusively in shades of blue-green and orange-brown, it might have been something, well, better.

I reviewed the finale of The Better Sister for Decider. What a turkey!

I miss the days when people on television wore colors. Sure, television is still in color, technically, but on far too many shows that color runs the gamut from Point A to Point A. Everything is blue and orange, apricot and teal, denim and wood, aquamarine shirts and orange skin tones. The fourth season of True Detective Season 4 served as a real Magic Eye poster for this critic in this regard — once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it, and now I see it everywhere, up to including otherwise brilliant works of art like the second season of Andor. And I’m not crazy — oh no, not I! Watch this episode of The Better Sister and take a drink every time you see a shot with that exact blue-orange palette or a variation thereof. By the end you’ll be drunker than Nicki after getting roofied by her husband Adam.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Better Sister for Decider.

There is, however, one genuinely strong scene in this episode, the cold open. In a flashback, we see Adam in a confessional at a Catholic church. Rather than confide his own sins in the priest, however, he enumerates Ethan’s. He sees the boy as a fat, slothful stoner-gamer who’s ungrateful for everything Adam’s worked so hard to provide him with, and he sees his mother, Chloe, as an enabler who keeps throwing bad money after good where the boy is concerned. Corey Stoll is quietly but very frightening in this scene; you can feel how his anger would warp Nicky, Chloe, and Ethan around itself one after the other. 

It takes the priest to point out that he hasn’t actually confessed any sins to be forgiven, but he grants Adam absolution anyway. When Adam asks what for, the priest replies, “You can name it, son.” He can tell this is a man who can’t even admit to himself the things he’s done wrong, but he knows they’re there, and he’ll need to face up to it sooner or later. 

Stoll’s performance makes the scene, but it’s beautifully and moodily lit as well, it deepens the character of Adam, and it even retroactively explains his career as a prosecutor and his current work with the FBI — he was a do-gooder because he’d done bad and wanted to atone for it. In other words, the whole thing makes sense, aesthetically, narratively, emotionally, intellectually. It can be done. I just wish this show did it more often.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The Better Sister for Decider.

But in terms of it success as a show, MobLand pulls off the most important caper of all: It gets deeper as it goes. There’s no way I expected this show to be such a sharp interrogator of Tom Hardy’s charms as an actor, or such an empathetic (if still inarguably gangster) look at how abuse can affect the course of people’s life and feeds into/emerges from other forms of violence, state-directed and otherwise. I honestly thought it’d be Tom Hardy mixing it up with callow young London ganglords and maybe shagging some birds, I dunno. Instead it proved it had a brain without ever losing its balls. 

I reviewed the season finale of MobLand for Decider.

So far, The Better Sister is one of those take-what-you-can-get kind of shows. Biel is an obvious selling point. Corey Stoll playing his umpteenth type-A shitheel — I mean, there’s a reason he gets these kinds of roles, because he’s really good at them. Nicky’s survival instincts, like insisting on a bigger tip-slash-bribe for Arty the doorman, cut right through the character’s clownishness. There are one or two ostentatiously arty shots that don’t really communicate anything but are fun enough to look at. Guidry and Bowen as a sort of arranged work marriage, where she’s older and gay and doesn’t like his personal grooming but they constantly flirt by making fun of one another anyway, is a fun choice for roles we’d otherwise have seen a thousand times. Cut the ancient punchlines, take Nicky out of her Billy Joel baseball tees (which doesn’t make sense anyway, she’s not even from Long Island) and make her a real person instead of a rough sketch, and those individual components may cohere into something memorable.

I reviewed episode three of The Better Sister for Decider.

 Biel is a compelling actor, one of those performers blessed with looks so striking they have to figure out something interesting to do with it lest it swamp their talents. (Think of half the cast of Mad Men, for example.) In Biel’s case, she uses her severe, patrician beauty and gym-toned silhouette to suggest being tightly wound, even brittle. She projects the air of a person whose house of cards is about to come tumbling down just by how she inhabits her wardrobe, her hairstyle, the screen itself. 

This all works particularly well when contrasted with the flashbacks that show her as a looser, less particular version of herself when her relationship with Adam began. And talk about a psychological cocktail there: Chloe and Adam trying to make up for Nicky’s failure by effectively recreating the relationship with a different sister swapped in. But despite this potentially fertile material, there’s simply a limit to what any actor can do with a character who’s less a person and more a contradiction in terms.

I reviewed the second episode of The Better Sister for Decider.

We love watching the ultra-rich suffer. This has always been true to one extent or another, but less than 15 years ago we mostly loved watching the ultra-rich either dress up in science-fiction armor and blast supervillains, or buy Dakota Johnson lingerie for spanking purposes. But the days of Iron Man and 50 Shades of Grey gave way to the time of Succession and The White Lotus some time ago, and the advent of an American government run for the sole purpose of taking money out of your pocket and putting into Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump Jr.’s has only sharpened the viewing public’s metaphorical guillotines. 

Into this heady atmosphere emerges The Better Sister. Adapted by Olivia Milch from the novel by Alafair Burke, it’s the story of an extremely put-together go-getter who’s tied to her good-for-nothing sister by the man they both loved and the child they both share through him, brought back together when that man gets murdered. There’s a lot of potential in the idea. There’s a lot less potential in the execution. 

I’m covering the new Amazon show The Better Sister for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Once again, Murderbot delivers on its modest promise: fun sci-fi shenanigans, 20 minutes at a time. 

I reviewed this week’s Murderbot for Decider.

If you’ll permit one last bit of TV-critic musing, I’ll say this: I’ve seen shows go from “yeah, it’s pretty good” — or even “yeesh, it’s not that good” — to “whoa, something’s going on here” before. Usually the real quantum leap in quality occurs around the Season 2 premiere, but there tend to be glimpses of a better show beneath the surface of the existing one in the final quarter or so of the debut season. That’s what we’re experiencing with MobLand right now, and that’s a great sign, for the season finale and beyond.

I reviewed this past weekend’s MobLand for Decider.

It insists upon itself. That’s it. That’s the issue with The Last of Us. That bit of not-quite-intelligible criticism that Seth MacFarlane swiped from a film professor and put in the mouth of his Godfather-disliking creation Peter Griffin is, despite coming from The Family Guy, a one hundred percent accurate assessment of this show. Every case is made a bit too strenuously, every loss is rendered a bit too tragically, every act of villainy is heinously unjustifiable, every act of antheroism is justified in its heinousness, every dive for profundity leaves the show with a cracked skull in the shallow end. It aims for the heavens, but it can only play to the cheap seats. It insists upon itself, Lois.

I reviewed the season finale of The Last of Us for Decider.

Clocking in at just around 20 minutes total — shorter than a Friends episode, minus commercials and the Rembrandts — this installment of Murderbot shows what a fun approach to this material these bite-sized episodes offer. There’s something really old-school about it, and I mean old school, like 1960s Batman old-school. Here’s a colorful genre piece about a strange pereson in a costume fighting to keep people safe against nefarious forces that nearly triumph once every half hour.

Why belabor the issue by extending the episodes to an hour, or deviating from the bubbly pop-surival-horror tone? Why not play the Aliens Colonial Marines’ arrival on LV-426 with Burke from the Company in tow for laughs? Why not do it as the thesis statement for an entire show? 

I reviewed this week’s Murderbot for Decider.

Ellie doesn’t know the backstory, of course, but she takes Joel’s words on board. “I don’t think I can forgive you for this,” she says. Yeah, no fuckin’ shit, I wrote in my notes. He perpetrated a mass shooting and doomed humanity to a second dark age like a one-man Trump administration, on behalf of a person who would rather have died for the cause. (One of TLoU’s many false binaries is the idea that the only way the Fireflies could find a cure is by killing Ellie; another is that the only way they could bring about her death is through deception, rather than by respecting her autonomy and asking her for this sacrifice.)

But then she adds “…but I would like to try.”

To quote I Think You Should Leave, you sure about that? 

I think it’s perfectly okay not to forgive Joel for what he did, actually. (No matter what Druckmann says in interviews.) I think it is in fact reasonable to demand that members of society, even one being actively atomized by environmental catastrophes and authoritarian governments, consider not only their rights but their responsibilities, not only the good of them and theirs but of everyone and everyone’s. I think a common good exists, and I think it’s meet and right to shun and despise people who do their utmost to destroy it. 

Like most episodes of TLoU, this one makes the most of its gorgeous natural backdrop. Druckman has a real knack for theatrical tableaux — Joel watching Ellie climb a vine-encrusted dinosaur statue, Joel and Ellie walking around a model of the solar system, Ellie and Joel and Gail and Tommy gathered around Eugene’s body. These moments, where the action slows down so both the characters and ourselves can gaze in something in awe or horror or wonderment, are one of the show’s trademarks, and maybe its strongest aesthetic weapon. And again, Mazin is a frequently clever and capable writer; that moth business is going to stick with me.

But The Last of Us has chosen to prioritize a heartwarming father-daughter reunion over, quite literally, the salvation of humankind. The world is awash with men harboring this exact paranoid fantasy, that their proprietary interest in their wives and children absolve them of their bonds to broader humanity and absolve them of any wrongdoing committed in their in-group’s name. They run our country now, as they do others, and they’ve perpetrated real horrors against real people. I’m not interested in trying to forgive them. I think it’s worth considering what this show is asking us to forgive.

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

In short? These people are interesting. Their relationships are interesting. Their jobs are interesting. Their world is interesting. And most importantly, the way creator Ronan Bennett, co-writer Jez Butterworth, and director Lawrence Gough are depicting all this is, itself, interesting. The deeper we get into the crime shenanigans, the more complex and engaging the characters become. 

It’s worth keeping in mind that many shows, even many great shows, start simple and broad before their focus sharpens and their strength increases. Just to cite one extremely mighty example, The Sopranos was always terrific, but it wasn’t until midway through Season 3, during an incident involving Ralph Cifaretto, a stripper named Tracee, and a parking lot, that it truly became THE SOPRANOS. Mad Men was making corny jokes about how “there’s no magic machine that makes copies” in its pilot episode, but by the end of its first season it had created a rivalry storyline between main character Don Draper and his young nemesis Pete Campbell that simply never went where I expected it to go. 

Is MobLand either of those shows? I’d say “no, of course not,” but I’m never gonna sell this particular cast short. If someone gave this crew Sopranos-level scripts, I have no doubt they’d nail it. My point is simply that a rising tide lifts all boats, and this episode is a rising tide. The twisty plot, the twisted secrets, the idiosyncratic and engaging lead performance of Tom Hardy, the reliably keen work of everyone else in the cast — there’s something here, I think, something potentially fascinating. And if worse comes to worst, all we get is a fun British gangster show with a crackerjack crew of actors. Every show should be so lucky as to have that for their worst case scenario.

I reviewed this week’s MobLand for Decider.

Apple TV+ has done more experimentation with 30-minute dramas, particularly genre pieces, than any other streamer I can think of. To cite two examples, last year’s Sugar, starring Colin Farrell as an unusual private detective, worked, because the mystery format lends itself to being broken up into discreet chunks whenver there’s a twist or breakthrough in the case. Before, a supernatural thriller starring Billy Crystal and Judith Light, did not work, because effective horror depends on building tension and dread, which you can’t do if you’ve got to end on a big cliffhanger every 26 minutes or so. 

Murderbot can go in the “works” category. It’s not asking a ton of you as a viewer, at least not yet; its main question seems to be “Do you like watching Alexander Skarsgård play a neurodivergent Terminator?”, and that’s a question you can easily answer, in the affirmative, in 30-minute chunks. I want to see what trouble this big goofy killing machine gets up to. I want to find out what trouble it’s gotten up to in the past. And I want to see how it gets its reluctant human friends out of their own trouble — or, who knows, maybe abandons them to it in a shocking way and becomes a real antihero, instead of a wisecracking sidekick who suddenly got a story of its own. Either way, I’ll be watching. 

I reviewed the second episode of Murderbot for Decider.