In short, Fatal Attraction is a remake where the game is worth the candle, one that honors the anxieties that animate the original while jettisoning its thriller approach in favor of something both more expansive and more humane. And unlike the original, the story does not end when the monster is destroyed and the status quo is restored so that everyone can live happily ever after; the damage lives on, and another monster may have been born in the bargain. Filled with memorable performances from terrific actors, it’s one of the best-written shows of the year. Let’s hope it’s one of the best-written shows of next year thanks to a second-season renewal, too. It’s earned one.

I reviewed the season finale of Fatal Attraction for Decider.

Two words come to mind when describing Episode 7 of Fatal Attraction: emotional abattoir. That’s the environment Alex Forrest grew up in, as we learn in the series of flashbacks that give this episode its spine. And the moment I realized that’s where this was headed, that the kid we were watching play mini-golf in the opening scene while her father ignored her to flirt with another woman was Alex, I could feel my whole body tense. I knew we were about to examine the family dynamic that made her into what she eventually became, I knew it would be horrific, and I was right.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Fatal Attraction‘s (hopefully) first season for Decider.

I came into the Yellowjackets season finale expecting it to be brutal. Well, it was brutal alright, just not in the way I hoped it would be. Folks, we need to talk about needledrops, specifically all the ones on this show. Simply put, Yellowjackets has the worst music supervision on television, and it’s fucking the rest of the show up, bad.

Seriously. “Zombie” by the Cranberries as everyone staggers back to the cabin with Javi’s corpse in tow, eyes glassy, completely drained, shuffling around like, you guessed it, zombies. “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” by Radiohead as Natalie hallucinates being back on the crashing plane as she dies from an accidental lethal injection by Misty before, you guessed it, fading out. “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen, one of the most overused music cues of the past two decades (which should have been retired after its pitch perfect usage by Richard Kelly in Donnie Darko), as the surviving kids stand outside their burning cabin, looking forward to a future of, you guessed it, killing people under the moonlight. 

Every song is hugely famous already, carrying tons of preexisting emotional weight, and used to the most literal effect possible, like a sort of musical Cliff’s Notes for what’s happening and how we’re supposed to feel about it. It’s all so blunt, so artless. It makes Stranger Things sound like The Sopranos. (Nora Felder, who took over from Euphoria’s Jen Malone on music supervision duties this season, also handled Stranger Things, to which I can only say no shit.)

I reviewed the season finale of Yellowjackets for Decider. Woof.

But the show’s sophistication is present in more than how its characters talk to one another — it’s in why they talk to certain people the way they do. On a show like Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof’s Mrs. Davis, the main character’s occupation as a nun, as clergy for the Roman Catholic Church, is treated as a quirky detail, an excuse for running around having wacky adventures in a fun costume, and the setup for an admittedly very surprising and funny twist — but that’s it. The fact that being a part of the structure of a specific religion has a specific political valence goes completely unremarked upon.

Not so here. Much to my surprise and delight, much of this episode of Fatal Attraction (“The Dillingers”) explores how poorly people treat Dan and Mike in the present, not because they’re a disgraced ex-DA and ex-cop respectively, but because they were ever a DA and a cop at all. These are political jobs, and politics have real-world consequences on real people’s lives, and people justifiably hate them for that, and Dan and Mike are not excepted simply because they’re the main characters, or because they’re played by actors we like. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fatal Attraction, which is very good, for Decider.

Setting a show in world this insular and claustrophobic requires an attention to fine detail when working with the characters who inhabit it. True, it’s the kind of genre storytelling painted with very broad strokes, so I’m not expecting these people to suddenly become the cast of The Sopranos or Mad Men or Halt and Catch Fire. But what writer Rémi Aubuchon (PSA: The writers of the WGA deserve fair treatment and fair pay from the enormous corporations that profit off their labor), director David Semel, and actors Amelie Child-Villiers and Iain Glen achieve here is extraordinary nonetheless. You can feel how real the crack-up between them is — stemming from their exhaustion and frustration at the end of their respective days, triggered by the sudden clangor of the alarm and the threat of the smoke, built up over time as Juliette grew to resent her father for keeping her at a distance and her father grew to resent himself for doing so as well.

Thanks to Child-Villiers you can hear the absolute misery in Juliette’s voice as she runs from the room, blocked by Semel so that her back is turned to both her father and the camera as she mourns for the childhood she’s losing and blames him for the loss. Glen (very convincingly de-aged by makeup, a wig, and I’d imagine a little bit of digital sleight-of-hand) holds back just long enough before delivering the doctor’s retort to convey the fact that this is a failure of self-control for him; he knows he should not play tit for tat with his grieving daughter, but his pain is such that he can’t stop himself from venting it. 

Taken in totality, this scene gives what could be a rote partial-orphan origin story for Juliette (genre fiction absolutely loves killing off its protagonists’ mothers) and makes it something raw and lived-in. This in turn makes the Silo feel less like something from a YA novel you read and forget about and more like a real place, with real people in it. It’s an achievement.

I reviewed today’s episode of Silo for Decider.

This is all terrific stuff, frankly. (Kudos to writers Sarah L. Thompson and Liz Phang; writers are responsible for all your favorite shows and deserve fair treatment and fair pay!) It really, really is about time that Yellowjackets got around to portraying its teenage characters as feral cannibals in the making; as I hoped and predicted, the combination of Shauna’s baby dying in the past and the whole gang reuniting in the present has marked a turning point for the show. None of them will ever be able to walk back what they were planning to do, and what they’re going to do instead. It’s the hidden shame beneath every interaction the adult characters have had.

I reviewed today’s episode of Yellowjackets for Decider.

What follows plays out like a class demonstration in how to execute a thriller sequence. The mission? Simple: Shut down the generator, fix it, and start it back up. The risks? The steam could blow, the repairs could fail, the workers could die. The stakes? The future of the Silo. That’s all you need to know to enjoy the white-knuckle stuff that follows. Keep it simple, stupid.

What’s more, every individual step within that simple plan is described, depicted, and executed with clarity and verve. The show establishes the major players — Juliette, her boss Knox (Shane McRae), her apprentice Cooper (Matt Gomez Hidaka), and her colleague Shirley (Remmie Milner) — and gives them all easily understood jobs to do — Juliette IDs the problem and then descends into the steam hatch room to cool it down with a fire hose; Cooper reinstalls the repaired rotor blade he and Juliette remove; Shirley monitors the situation in the steam room; Knox watches over the whole thing, communicating messages from one person to the next.

It’s easy to understand where everyone is in relationship to one another in the space of the big machinery chamber. It’s easy to understand the kind of damage they’ll incur if things go wrong — from a fall, from getting hit by machinery, from drowning, from burning. It’s easy to understand how much time they have left, and to feel the tension mount along with them as that time ticks away faster than they’d anticipated. And finally, it’s easy to feel the same relief and triumph they do when they pull it all off just in the nick of time. 

Meanwhile, the recognizable, analog, industrial nature of all the machinery — it’s all blades and bolts and pipes and valves and big steel plates — only helps us intuit exactly what could go wrong and how bad going wrong would be. This goes double or triple for Juliette, whose fear of drowning (presumably that’s how her mom and/or brother died) has already been established; Rebecca Ferguson’s guttural shrieks of terror as the water rises around her in the steam hatch chamber are convincing and effective.

Seriously, from top to bottom, it’s crackerjack genre filmmaking. It’s also a marked contrast from the main-character switcheroos that characterized the first two episodes. This one’s based on action, and the action is damn good.

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

I like a mystery box show that isn’t in a big rush to show off how mysterious the box is. Shotgunning holy shit, what’s going on, everything we thought we knew was wrong moments at the viewer is seen as a shortcut to intrigue, a way to get people hooked early and hooked hard. More often than not, though, it obscures whatever other ideas the show may have about itself, its characters, its world, its worldview. I already know something mysterious is going on; I don’t need to be frogmarched past hidden door after hidden door and treasure chest after treasure chest and hidden connection after hidden connection just for my interest to be held. Like, what’s the hurry? You got a hot date or something, mystery box show?

So kudos to the second episode of Silo (“Holston’s Pick”) for playing things out with focus and restraint. Instead of going all 1899 on us and flipping everything upside-down just as we’re getting the lay of the land, it simply burrows deeper into the mysteries we’re already familiar with.

I reviewed the second episode of Silo for Decider.

I’ll say this right up front: Silo will not wow you. This is not a big, bold, bizarre, frightening science-fiction vision in the vein of Netflix’s marvelous Dark or HBO Max’s late, lamented Raised by Wolves. It’s more in the vein of Apple+’s own Foundation: adapted from a series of novels, given a decent budget and a solid cast, and aimed right down the middle at the kinds of folks who like to open up streaming apps and watch science fiction shows. There are a lot of people like that, and so there have been a lot of shows like that too. Which is fine.

I’m covering Silo for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

I bring all this up not to suggest that Dan is, like, a really terrible guy or anything. (It was always weird when people acted like Don Draper’s infidelity was somehow on par with Walter White killing loads of people on the “I Hate This Antihero” scale.) I bring it up to point out that the real attraction of Fatal Attraction isn’t how it does or doesn’t mirror the dynamics and major moments of the movie, but the dialogue the show serves its participants. Writers Kevin J. Hynes, Tandace Khorrami, and James Dearden, *LOWERS SHADES TO LOOK YOU DEAD IN THE EYE* who like all union writers should be paid and treated fairly by the Hollywood studios by the way, continue the show’s tradition of simply giving Amanda Peet, Toby Huss, Joshua Jackson, Lizzy Caplan, and Alyssa Jirrels interesting things to say and interesting ways of saying them.

I reviewed the most recent episode of Fatal Attraction for Decider.

New theme song! Gutting secret confessions! Intense grief! Thwarted suicide attempt! Hallucinatory parrot-based musical theater interlude! Multiple total breaks with reality! Savage Fight Club–style beatdown! Gahhh, there’s so much to talk about in Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 7…and it’s thanks to the work of writers Rich Monahan and Liz Phang that we get to watch and talk about any of it at all. The union writers of the WGA deserve to be paid and treated fairly by the major studios — surely not even the Antler Queen herself would be evil enough to disagree with that!

At any rate, last week I speculated that in simultaneously reuniting all the known survivors in the past and killing Shauna’s baby in the present, Yellowjackets may have reached a major inflection point, moving from being one kind of show into being something else. I think the new version of the theme song — quieter, more somber, and performed by Alanis Morrisette — may be an indication that creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and showrunner Jonathan Lisco agree. You can’t do either those things and then go on as if two major, major milestones haven’t been reached, and now passed.

I reviewed the most recent episode of Yellowjackets, which I thought was pretty darn good, for Decider.

It feels like Yellowjackets is about to change, and for the better. In fact, maybe it’s already happened. In Season 2 Episode 6 (“Qui”), momentous events take place in both the present and the past. In the former, the gang’s all here: Shauna, Taissa, Misty, Natalie, Van, and Lottie end the episode face to face for the first time in 25 years, each bearing the weight of her own secrets and regrets; the unspecified terrible things they did in the woods loom over them like a threatening wave. 

And in the past, the moment the survivors have waited for for months has finally arrived: Shauna gives birth. A full episode passes before we really learn how that birth turns out. It’s another point of no return.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Yellowjackets for Decider.

So yeah, I’m still in on what Fatal Attraction is doing. It’s not the stylish, sexy, nasty, almost expressionistic exploration of male desire, insecurity, and guilt that the movie was, but it doesn’t want to be, and I won’t hold that against it — not when it’s providing so many simple pleasures in exchange.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fatal Attraction for Decider.

Which leads us back to the bulk of the episode, in which we see the formation of the affair from Alex’s perspective. The most interesting thing about this is that while it presents Alex as more instantly deranged about things than it initially appeared, it also fleshes her out as a human being, with her own likes and dislikes, fears and hangups, friends and colleagues — a life, in other words. It’s just not a very good one.

Alex’s therapist from out of state unceremoniously breaks up with her over the phone, ostensibly because she’s not licensed to practice in California but also, by the tone of it, because she’s tired of dealing with Alex. Paul, the doctor from across the hall, tries to slam the breaks on whatever they had going on; Alex responds by unsubtly threatening to call the cops on him over his extracurricular pill-peddling. She recounts trying and failing to get closer to her dad by getting really into his favorite Civil War movie, to the point of memorizing the real and moving letter from a soldier that closes the film. You get the feeling this is the story of Alex’s life: She gets intensely close to people, inevitably alienating them, then turns against them on a dime when they fail to live up to her expectations. (This is literally textbook borderline personality disorder stuff, by the way.)

I reviewed the third episode of Fatal Attraction for Decider.

But it does raise the question: Where do we go from here? If we’re going off the movie as a template, the sexual affair between Dan and Alex is now over, nearly as soon as it began — within the same episode, at least. Her suicidal gesture — she pretends to ingest every pill she has after he tries to leave, not admitting to the ruse until he drives her all the way to the hospital and warns her that she will lose her job if authorities determine she’s suicidal — marks the end of this being a casual, easy thing for either of them, and the beginning of the spiraling obsession that will destroy their lives.What do you think? Post a comment.

The thing is, the show has eight hours of screentime to fill instead of just two. Rushing through the affair made sense in the film: Dan and Alex’s sexual relationship was limited to a 48-hour whirlwind they both knowingly entered into because his wife was out of town, and which he planned to end upon his wife’s return; his literally fatal error was in assuming Alex planned the same thing. The show has already extended the timeframe of the affair, adding two other nights of passion to that initial lost weekend. Moreover, Dan is a much more active agent in the affair’s progression — following Alex to the roof, having her assigned to one of his cases, going back to her place after she interrupts his dinner with Mike. 

If I had the kind of time on my hands that the filmmakers do, I might have expanded the affair’s screentime to match. In addition to further cementing the complicity of both participants in creating the idea in Alex’s head that this isn’t just some limited-time-only fling, this would give the show the chance to develop and intensify the characters’ sexual relationship before bringing the hammer down on it after another episode, perhaps. In other words, the show could stay hotter for longer, and I, for one, like my erotic thrillers erotic.

I reviewed the second episode of Fatal Attraction for Decider.

Let’s get it out of the way quickly: Fatal Attraction is not the kind of show that Alice Birch and Rachel Weisz’s Dead Ringers is. I mean, why would it be? Despite their proximity in the broader erotic-thriller genre, Fatal Attraction is not the kind of movie David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers is either. That said, it’s a much more interesting looking, interesting sounded, interestingly acted and written movie than it needed to be to become a titillating hit; Lyne’s use of silence, shadow, and silhouette in particular is notable without being overtly neo-noirish. Go watch it if you haven’t in a while, it’s worth your time.

I’d say the same about Fatal Attraction the TV show, based on this episode. The simplest way to put it is that if you want to watch telegenic actors like Joshua Jackson, Lizzy Caplan, Toby Huss, and Amanda Peet have a good time talking to each other the way grown-ups actually talk while being crisply filmed and scored, Fatal Attraction is a show for you. 

I reviewed the series premiere of Fatal Attraction for Decider.

So yeah, I worry that the show’s eyes are too big for its stomach. You can really feel the creakiness around some of these storylines, and because of their sheer number and variety, the creaky storylines are going to vary from viewer to viewer. Some people don’t give a shit about the survival horror or the supernatural stuff, while for others that’s the main draw. Some don’t care about the adult stuff compared to the teenage stuff, while for others the draw of the legendary ‘90s stars as grownups will outweigh the young unknowns. Some will like the comedic bits, some will think they’re in the way. Everyone will find certain characters more compelling than others. Everyone will prefer certain casting decisions (Lauren Ambrose as Van is dynamite) to others (Simone Kessell has none of her younger counterpart Courtney Eaton’s damaged, blank-eyed magnetism as Lottie). Some people adore the big obvious ‘90s needledrops (4 Non Blondes! Danzig!), while others think the whole I Love the ‘90s thing is, ahem, overblown. 

Me, I found myself spending a lot of time thinking I wish the hyperactive score by Theodore Shapiro, Craig Wedren, and Anna Waronker would just shut the fuck up for a few minutes, allowing the tension, the dread, the quiet isolation of the woods to build. And that’s a decent stand-in for my problem with the whole thing. Pare back. Let stuff breathe. Let stuff be.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Yellowjackets Season Two for Decider.

In all honesty, I prefer being a little bit confused. Elliot is what Beverly and Genevieve’s relationship has been about from the start — Genevieve says so herself. She’s what Beverly’s whole life has been about from the start — as the younger sister she has never known a second of life outside the womb without the other. Even when they’re apart Ellie is the constant buzzing of an unanswered phone, everywhere, at all times, inescapable, even in the audience you just want to turn the goddamned thing off it’s so fucking anxiety-inducing, but you can’t any more than she can. She seeps through cracks, around corners, over boundaries, until she’s all that’s left. If that clouds how we read the actions of the women closest to her, Beverly and Genevieve and Rebecca, well, that’s Elliot for you.

Even on a narrative level, the Mantle twins cannot be separated. After watching this exceptional show, I’m going to have a hard time separating them from me.

I reviewed the finale of Dead Ringers for Decider. Holy shit, what a show.

With only one episode to go, there’s no sign Dead Ringers is content to keep its head down and its guard up during the final rounds. Nope, it looks like this is a show that’s swinging haymakers until the final bell rings.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Dead Ringers for Decider.

All told, despite being the least spectacular of the show’s episodes to date, it’s the most momentous. So much has been dragged out into the light, with the promise of more life-upending revelations to come. The episode begins with an exterior shot of the twins’ nightmarish birthing and research center, but I suspect the Center cannot hold.

I reviewed episode four of Dead Ringers for Decider.