To see so much of myself on screen screen made me hurt, yes. It also made me feel less weird, less perverse, less alone. Other men experienced this? Other men felt this? Other men continue to feel it decades later? The sense of validation was indescribable. I would not want to be warned against it.

Now I’ve actually experienced being triggered, a phenomenon I’d only ever really viewed from a remove, almost academically. I’ve really gone through it, felt truly awful, felt like I wanted to shrivel up and blow away, felt like I wanted to puke my whole insides out. And while I can only speak for myself of course, I now really do believe that trigger warnings do more harm than good. 

What would have happened had I seen “TW: child abuse” before watching that episode of Supersex? Well, not much in my case, as it was a paying gig I was obligated to do, and I’d have watched it anyway. Moreover, without knowing beforehandhow similar it was to what I’d gone through, I probably wouldn’t have given the warning much thought. I’ve been at this for a while, and I’ve seen plenty of rough stuff. 

But had I seen a trigger warning, I’d have steeled myself for it. I’d have braced for impact, and thus the impact would have been lessened or even lost. The catharsis I experienced, that feeling that something inside me that was festering and poisonous was being violently forcibly expelled — so much for that. So much for that sense of validation, the gift of the knowledge that I’m not the only one. So much for the tremendous, miraculous privilege of being that moved by a work of art, of having a work of art speak directly to things inside myself I couldn’t even bring up on my own. This brought them up alright, pretty literally. I’ll never forget that. I wouldn’t want to go back.

Earlier this month I had the most violent reaction to a work of art I’ve ever experienced. I wrote about how and why I was triggered and what it taught me for Decider.

I like the jokes. The giant triangular video screen that descends from the ceiling of the conference room while displaying the image of Elena taking an ice bath. Elena describing the smell of the impoverished area as “like a hog’s urethra.” Singer believing “given the China of it all” is a convincingly childlike thing for one of the kids to say. Elena and Nicky dipping fondue in a photo op. The final sex scene, which is both hilarious and, let’s be honest here, hot. (Imagine being the head of government and having everyone including your advisors and spouse clear the room so your crush can fuck you.) This is how this kind of wealth-and-power satire is supposed to be done.

I reviewed this weekend’s episode of The Regime for Decider.

But as driving as Tokyo Vice’s plot can be, it’s the look and atmosphere that keeps me coming back excited week after week. Carefully composed and illuminated nighttime street scenes. Vistas of the city seen through windows behind our characters, or our characters seen through a window from somewhere high in the sky above the city. Needlessly gorgeous interior shots. Seriously, if you look at my notes on the gifs that illustrate this review, the adjectives are all effusive: “Stunning elevator shot,” “really cool hotel hallway shot,” “incredible street scene with the green phone.” Even in a show this good-looking, director Eva Sørhaug and DP Corey Walter do memorable work here.

Actors, of course, can contribute to the look and the atmosphere of a show as much as anyone. All these handsome men in tailored suits. Ansel Elgort painstakingly lighting and smoking a cigarette as Jake guts his way through his meeting with Yabuki. Rachel Keller and Show Kasamatsu getting into bed at the end of a long day, looking exhausted and beautiful. The way actors look and move and sound is as much a part of the art of filmmaking as cinematography or editing, and in this case it’s all sumptuous stuff. This suits Tokyo Vice, the most sumptuous show on television right now, to a tee.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

All that and more applies to leading man Alessandro Borghi. Borghi’s fearless, shameless performance as Rocco is one for the ages — an actor leaping naked into the deep end and swimming downward as far and as fast as he can. It’s not just the countless sex scenes, or the explicit dialogue. It’s the willingness to be seen as a sex idiot, a man whose dick does his thinking for him. This can make him seem incredibly sexy or incredibly vulgar, like a dog humping another dog in the park while everyone watches. Emma Stone just won an Oscar for this kind of genitals-first performance, and I think Supersex has more to say, more insightfully, about sex than Poor Things manages to muster, that’s for sure.

A seemingly endless font of sexual fantasy, fetish, and dysfunction, Supersex is one of the bravest shows I’v ever seen. It turned me on and fucked me up. I’m grateful to have watched it.

I reviewed the finale of Supersex for Decider.

Okay, now I’m really paying attention. For the second time, The Regime has bucked my expectations of what The Regime would be about. 

I reviewed episode three of The Regime for Decider.

Watching Supersex is like shaking a snow globe filled with particles of the densest psychosexual shit imaginable, then seeing how these poor bastards deal with the fallout. Its frankness and ambition in this are unparalleled in my memory. 

I reviewed episode 6 of Supersex for Decider.

Supersex has already conjured up some of the most intensely traumatizing sexual experiences a person can have; perhaps it was inevitable that it would eventually get around to some of the most intensely transcendent. Set apart from the other episodes even by its title, “The Island,” Supersex’s fifth episode and its best since the premiere, chronicles a months-long lost weekend of endless, loving, liberating sex between Rocco and his new girlfriend, his first girlfriend. In this, as in its portrait of Rocco’s abuse and awakening, the show is fearless. 

I reviewed episode 5 of Supersex for Decider.

Rocco Siffredi, the Italian Stallion, future icon of the porn industry, is kind of a goofball. Have you noticed this? The floppy hair with its tips bleached blond. The goofy smile he gets when he’s amused, eyes squinted and teeth bared by his retracted upper lip. The constant sense that he doesn’t quite know what’s going on, or what to do next, or who to do it with. He’s like an overgrown kid who has found his candy store at last.

I reviewed episode four of Supersex for Decider.

This installment splits its time between the Adelsteins’ in Missouri and the situation back in Tokyo. Somewhat to my surprise, the American material doesn’t feel like time wasted compared to the sumptuous unfamiliarity of the Tokyo underworld. In fact, it’s its very difference that makes it come alive. After all this time spent in the close quarters of Tokyo’s glass, concrete, and neon, seeing all those big trees, all those green lawns, all that open blue sky feels like entering another world. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

If Supersex has a problem at this point, it’s similar to Rocco’s: It hasn’t quite mastered the animal within. It has the spirit, obviously, the willingness to go there, whether there is Rocco’s mountain of childhood trauma or the show’s many explicit sex scenes. In a variety of ways this is not a forgiving climate for a show revolving in large part around how quickly a man does or doesn’t get an erection or ejaculate, much less for one willing to show so much of the process on screen in such explicit, if not actually graphic, detail. In a world where the filming of The Idol was all but ruled a sex offense by the press and the public, that Supersex even exists is exciting.

But that doesn’t forgive some of its soap-operatic excesses. The plot beats can get predictable: Tell me you couldn’t see Tommaso accusing Rocco and Lucia of sleeping together coming from a mile away, for example. Other times they seem to come and go as the needs of the show require them to: Weren’t the Corsicans after Rocco, and weren’t the cops after Tommaso? Meanwhile, writer-creator Francesca Manieri and director Francesco Carrozzini rely too heavily on the same set-ups for the creation of drama: If you made a drinking game where you took a shot every time the camera lingers on someone’s wide or flat or tear-swollen eyes as they stare at someone else doing something they don’t want them to do, I hope you have a very strong liver.

Still, there remains much to recommend Supersex if you’re interested in its core subject: the power of sex. I’ve never seen a television series this fixated on that one specific area of human experience, in those terms. I think they’re onto something, frankly. Sure, we may not all become world-famous porn stars as a result of those first pubescent stirrings of lust the way Rocco did. But something fundamental in us changes at that point, introducing an entirely new set of priorities into lives previously concerned with, I dunno, paleontology or Sailor Moon. It’s huge, basic driver of human behavior, even if it only becomes the driver of all our behavior for a very few of us. Supersex, and the character of Rocco, respect that power. They both ask how, or if, it can be controlled.

I reviewed the third episode of Supersex for Decider.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a television show dig this deeply into the annihilatory power of sex, into its ability to make you forget not just the troubles of the day but troubles at all, its ability to make you feel like you’re everywhere and nowhere all at once. (In fact I may never have seen it tackled this directly by a show; this territory tends to be reserved for feature-length erotic bummers like In the Realm of the Senses or Last Tango in Paris.) The Supersex persona is liberating for Rocco because it’s his way of not being himself anymore, not even being a person anymore. He’s a force, an entity, an energy animating a penis with a vestigial human attached to it. 

I reviewed the second episode of Supersex for Decider.

Sato and Samantha are in bed together, and Sato is taking his ring off. Watching from home, I’m wondering why. Is this item of jewelry significant to him in some way — a mark of his membership in Chihara-kai, maybe? If so, I don’t remember it coming up before. Nor is it a wedding band he couldn’t bear to part with following a death or divorce, not unless there’s a whole lot about Sato we don’t know. I couldn’t quite figure out why writers Annie Julia Wyman & Joshua Kaplan and director Takeshi Fukunaga bothered to include this detail, beyond perhaps adding a little down-to-earth touch to the sex scene…until I noticed the position of Sato’s arm between Sam’s legs. He took off his ring so he could finger her without hurting her. 

I bring this up not out of prurient interest — although I firmly believe that if you’re not operating at least partially out of prurient interest, you’re not watching TV for the right reasons — but out of admiration for how Tokyo Vice handles, well, pretty much anything. For the second episode in a row, the show has served up an admirably graphic sex scene, in which the technical aspects of physical sexuality are made clear, whether that’s Trendy’s legs in the air around his boyfriend or Sato slipping off his ring before putting his fingers inside Sam. Much as I hate to give them any oxygen, there’s a vocal contingent of viewers who prefer not to watch sex scenes at all. Sex is as much a part of life as anything else going on in Tokyo Vice, and as such it belongs on screen. The show has little time for those who think otherwise, and good on the show for it.

I reviewed this week’s Tokyo Vice for Decider.

The acquisition and hoarding of wealth and power should be understood as a mental illness. Period, point blank, deadass. At the very least it’s a cognitive impairment on par with getting spike piledrivered onto your noggin in a wrestling ring for several decades running. This is in no way a joke. Access to the money and authority that prevents you from every hearing the word “no” if you don’t want to turns your brain into soup. Ask Elon Musk. 

The Regime gets this and runs at it more directly than any other satire of its sort, which makes it the satire for me. Kate Winslet as the incredibly sexy and stylish, incredibly self-absorbed and stupid, incredibly gullible and theatrical and vindictive and woo-woo New Age-y, and incredibly impossible to actually be around or get to know unless you’re just as fucked in the head as she is commander-in-chief of a modern nation. That, friends, is a TV show. It’s also life in these United States, but it’s a TV show too, boy howdy.

I reviewed the second episode of The Regime for Decider.

Supersex upset me worse than any other show…ever, really. I had a reaction to “Superpower,” the premiere of this loosely biographical series about Italian porn legend Rocco Siffredi, so intense, so severe, that it knocked me out for the rest of the day. There’s a chance this review runs late because of it and everything. 

Good. Good! I’ll say it again: Good. Art should have that kind of power. Art should be able to change your entire day. That it changed my day for the worse is immaterial. Supersex moved me, and that’s what good television is supposed to do.

I reviewed the premiere of Supersex for Decider.

At the risk of sounding like one of the terrified subjects of Chancellor Elena Vernham: You’ve made a marvelous debut, Chief. There’s nothing to complain about in the first episode of The Regime, and much to delight in. Written by Will Tracy (The Menu) and directed by Stephen Frears (The Grifters), it’s the strongest, sharpest, best-looking, and (very importantly) funniest satire of wealth and power HBO has served up in its whole “satires of wealth and power” era. 

I reviewed the debut of the new Kate Winslet comedy The Regime for Decider.

Tokyo Vice Season 2 is a confident show. It glides from character to character, plot point to plot point, and strength to strength. Its directors know how to frame and wrap light around the characters to make them seem as vivid and memorable as the high-frequency emotional tenor of the material demands. Its sex is graphic and sexy, its violence graphic and brutal, its heroes lovable, its villains compelling. Its story has the comfortable familiarity that genre work provides, with the ability both to shock and to dig surprisingly deep that distinguishes a genre’s standouts. In a year of stiff competition (Fargo, Griselda, Sexy Beast, True Detective), it’s a crime show to remember.

I wrote about this week’s episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

Sexy Beast is as good a TV prequel as Andor, House of the Dragon, and Better Call Saul. I hope it runs exactly as long as creator Michael Caleo wants it to. […] It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a crime show this rich. I mean, the obvious antecedent really is Better Caul Saul. I’m very pleased to say, however, that it hasn’t been that long since I’ve seen a prequel or adaptation this good. From Dead Ringers to Fargo Season 5, miraculous extrapolations of preexisting masterpieces are, strangely, thick on the ground. I’m so glad this show exists, so glad for the performances by James McArdle, Emun Elliott, Sarah Greene, Stephen Moyer, et al — so glad that a movie I love as much as I love Sexy Beast spawned a show worthy of the name.

I reviewed the season finale of Sexy Beast for Decider. Incredible show.

“This reminds me of The Sopranos”: Now that’s a thought you love to have. If a show is doing something reminiscent of the show that effectively made all of your subsequent favorite shows possible, then it’s doing something right. Watching a pair of gangster idiots escalate a meaningless offense into a brutal murder and clumsy coverup? That’s that Sopranos magic, baby!

I reviewed this week’s episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

As Nancy Sinatra sings “Bang Bang,” my stomach ties itself in knots. Two episodes remaining in this season of Sexy Beast and I find myself torn. Part of me wants the story to go on for however long the filmmakers want. But another part hopes they wrap everything up, since high quality isn’t the kryptonite of short-sighted cancellation it was just a few short years ago. (Fatal Attraction, we hardly knew ye.) 

More importantly, though? I’m nervous as hell. My body’s reacting to the prospect of pressing play on this episode as though it thinks I’m actually in danger myself. The atmosphere of mounting dread, created by showrunner Michael Caleo and now helped along here by writer Alastair Galbraith and director Stephen “Teddy Bass” Moyer, has me that shook. 

As it needs to. In the original Sexy Beast, you know from moment you see Aitch, Jackie, Deedee, and Gal react to the news that Don Logan called that this man is terrifying; you spend the movie wondering when he’ll make good on his reputation. The TV show’s trick is to set whatever event gave Don that reputation—whatever made people stop thinking of him as weird and annoying and start thinking of him like an alien could burst out of his chest and eat them at any moment—in the indeterminate future. We know we’re getting closer to it, but we don’t know how far we’ve gone.

I reviewed the fantastic penultimate episode of Sexy Beast‘s first (?) season for Decider.

The “To be sure” paragraph in a review, the bit where the critic briefly tempers their overall praise or criticism with the reverse, usually comes pretty deep into things. Not this time, friends.

To be sure, the sixth and final episode of True Detective: Night Country has its high points. The highest is undoubtedly Liz Danvers’s ferocious tirade at Evangeline Navarro when the younger woman claims to have seen and heard Liz’s dead son Holden. “You don’t come here and tell me ‘he said,’ or I will shoot your sick fucking mouth right off your face,” she screams, the threat so blunt it almost sounds silly. “Leave my kid out of it, or I will rip you apart. I am not merciful. You understand? I got no mercy left.” Jodie Foster tears into the words like they’re between her and oxygen. 

It’s not just tremendous acting, it’s tremendous writing. Creator/writer/director Issa López gives Liz a wholly and appropriately furious and disgusted reaction to the fucking bunkum Evangeline is spewing. Dead kids returning to tell their mommies everything’s okay? Ghoulish. A ghoulish thing to claim! People who do so, who take advantage of the grieving whether for profit or ideology or psychological gratification, deserve to be screamed into silence.

Then the show itself goes and does exactly that. 

I reviewed the season finale of True Detective: Night Country for Decider.