Daredevil: Born Again feels improbable, like the filmmakers are getting away with something, in the same way really great superhero comic-book storylines have always felt. It’s everything I want out of a superhero show.

I reviewed this week’s Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

From a practical perspective, you’re sitting there to be yelled at by this boy for a long time. For a long freaking time. Was that unpleasant? It feels like it had to have been a tough day at work.

No, it really was. We rehearsed for two weeks, then we shot it for one week, and we did two takes a day, because that is all we could emotionally and physically achieve. I think we’d be on the floor if we tried to do it any more. At the end of the whole three-week process, I was obliterated, just a shell of a being. 

To maintain that focus, to get through a whole shot with someone as essentially a two-hander, was physically draining. To be on the receiving end of someone’s emotions is so exhausting. I’ve already admired therapists for years and years and years, I think what they do is incredible, but this process made me understand that they are athletes in their own sense. So yeah, it was really challenging to go through it twice a day. But hopefully we were able to portray the danger and the dynamism of what it means to actually go through a session. It was a tough ask. But that project and that story specifically needed that episode to really pick out what is going on inside this boy’s mind. 

I interviewed actor Erin Doherty about her phenomenal work on A Thousand Blows and Adolescence.

Is it cathartic to condemn yourself? Can it be healing to admit your wound was, in part at least, self-inflicted? Can you move on from the worst thing that’s ever happened even if you know you’re part of the reason it happened? Is that the only way you can move on at all?

[…]

Asking your audience to accept that good intentions aren’t guarantees of good outcomes and don’t morally absolve you from bad ones is bold at any time, much less this one. It’s a dramatic third rail few shows dare touch; even the very fine and similarly themed Disclaimer, filmed by technical wizard Alfonso Cuarón, turned its well-meaning failures into outright villains rather than ask the audience to live with the pain of their understandable, relatable guilt. Wallowing in that anguish, employing a phalanx of performances by actors who make their characters feel like they’ve been set on fire from within, shooting through a camera that never lets us look away, Adolescence is truly exceptional television. 

I reviewed the finale of Adolescence for Decider.

This is the best hour of television I’ve seen all year.

I reviewed the astonishing third episode of Adolescence for Decider.

It’s wonderful, is what it is. Much of it is bathed in red and green light, as is the ladies’ night back on the mainland. As such, it fits right into one of my favorite microgenres: the New Lurid. These are stories that use saturated colors (especially red), explicit sexuality, outbursts of disturbing violence, and an unhealthy fixation on propagating the tangled family line, all as a way of satirizing and excoriating the wealthy. Think of it as Saltburn-core. The brazenly sexual vibe, the vivid colors, the incest, and — in a separate storyline that’s intercut with the rest as if providing commentary — Victoria Ratliff’s wildly bigoted and reactionary response to Piper’s desire to throw away her heritage to seriously study Buddhism — nearly all the ingredients are in place.

But there’s a gun that doesn’t go off, and it’s, well, the guns that don’t go off. Rick’s friend gives him a gun at Rick’s request, but Rick is too busy being dumbfounded by his pal’s tale of erotic transfiguration to do much with it just yet. Tim refuses to return his stolen gun, but is prevented from using it on himself — while wearing a Duke t-shirt, one of the most mean-spirited and hilarious gags in this show’s history — by Victoria, who unwittingly interrupts him just as he’s mustered the strength to pull the trigger. Of course we know bullets will fly by the end of the season, but so far they’re still chambered.

My admiration for this show, on the other hand, is ricocheting all over the room. What a fuckin’ feast this episode is: sleazy, scary, riveting, written in a way that takes real risks in exposing the filmmaker’s understanding of what desire is and what it can do, with that masterful monologue as the centerpiece and incest as a closer.

I reviwed this week’s episode of The White Lotus for Decider.

As Jade and Mrs. Bailey discuss Jade’s dire situation, cheerful “Hello!” and “Bienvenue!” signs hang in the background. A few minutes after chasing down and arresting a child for conspiracy to commit murder, Bascombe takes his son out for chips and a soda. Yards away from the murder scene, children play on a playground. Everything is terrible, but for our children’s sake we pretend that life goes on.

I reviewed the second episode of Adolescence for Decider.

What long takes offer a show like this is a vital ingredient: tedium. I’m dead serious, too. Think of any time you’ve been parked in some institutional space or another — a school, a court, a hospital — knowing your life is about to change forever but unable to fast-forward to the moment that change actually occurs. It’s maddeningly boring, a boredom made all the worse by your body’s flight-or-fight activation. It’s almost unbearable.

So it is here. When Bascombe and Frank make unpleasant small talk about Bascombe’s digestive issues prior to the raid, we’re there for every second of it. We’re there for every second of terror as the rest of the family stands or lies around with cops’ guns pointed at them as Jamie is arrested. We’re there in the police van as Jamie is driven to the station, sobbing. We’re there as he’s made to answer various questions and endure various inspections. We’re there with his family in the waiting room. We follow cops and lawyers around not just when they’re actually doing something, but when they’re making their long walks through this unpleasant place to wherever they need to go to do those things. 

Even before the long closing shot, we’re being made to sit with it, to sit with it all. The confusion, the frustration, the unexpected moments of kindness, the obsequious fawning of the family for being shown even the slightest consideration — when Barlow informs Eddie that the cops likely have very strong evidence on his son, Eddie ends the conversation with a crushingly informal thanks of “ta” — it all feels more real because we’ve watched it all unfold in real time, without a moment’s respite, even during the stuff normal films and shows would trim for being unnecessary. Again, the unnecessary is the essence of art. (By some definitions, art is inherently unnecessary, or else it would be some other thing.)

I reviewed the first episode of Adolescence, which is extraordinary, for Decider.

There’s only one episode left in this season of Severance. Isn’t that a pip? Of the nine episodes that have aired so far, fully four of them broke the mold of the show entirely: The cast is on an outdoor excursion, or Harmony Cobel travels to her hometown, or we get lost in Gemma and Mark’s memories, or we pretend Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat are on the show now for an hour. All of this has been varying degrees of fun. 

But it might have been more fun than it was wise. This week’s penultimate episode of Season 2 really makes you realize just how much you haven’t learned about what’s actually going on, and how much you haven’t seen the core cast interact, and how much it isn’t like the first season that brought the audience of Apple TV+’s most buzzworthy show to the dance. I’m not sure it’s a tradeoff I’d have made, is what I’m saying.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

In this week’s episode of Daredevil: Born Again, Mayor Wilson Fisk, a man with multiple felony convictions recently elected to powerful office, says “The rule of law must prevail.” Meanwhile, (presumably) a crooked cop sporting the Punisher skull murders a politically inconvenient man (who’s Puerto Rican by the way) on Fisk’s orders. By this point in the episode cops have already tried to murder a witness (twice) and successfully frighten him out of testifying when that fails. And oh yeah, the interview is given to an influencer, not the New York Times, mentioned and rejected by name in the influencer’s favor. 

In other words, if you were wondering whether the first two episodes were a fluke and the rest of the series wouldn’t scream IT’S ABOUT TRUMP AND MAGA at you at full volume, wonder no longer.

I reviewed this week’s Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

I don’t want to give the impression that this isn’t a funny show, because it very much is. (Much funnier than the seasons that felt more like a comedy, imo.) Tim does a big comical take to the camera at one point that’s only slightly more subtle than the one Paul Rudd does in Wet Hot American Summer. Belinda and Greg have a slow-motion staredown that clearly has unpleasant implications for Belinda, but which still amounts to a couple of people at a luxury resort reenacting the Avon Barksdale/Lt. Daniels bit from The Wire. Parker Posey and her anesthetized accent are a scream. So is Aimee-Lou Wood, who along with Belinda is basically the only person you actually want to see have a good time at this place. There’s a zoom-in on the Ratliffs walking like the Reservoir Dogs for crying out loud. 

But it’s been a while since I’ve watched a show this suffused with an all-encompassing, omnipresent sense that Something Bad is going on. It reminds me of Mad Men Season 5, an experiment in just how freaked out a show about rich people completely insulated from lasting consequences by money can make you feel on an episode-by-episode basis. And now the boat’s sailing off, and Rick’s on his way to Bangkok, and the trio are out partying, and the pink moon gonna get ye all. 

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

Clocking in at exactly 36 minutes long, not counting the closing credits — there are no opening credits this week — Severance Season 2 Episode 8 (“Sweet Vitriol”) is essentially a three-hander that finally catches up with Ms. Cobel. Our girl Harmony has returned to her hometown of Salt’s Neck, an icy coastal village that appears ready to fall into the sea. Once a Lumon company town — it’s where Kier Eagan met his future wife in the ether factory — it’s now a no-company town: As Hampton (James Le Gros), Harmony’s estranged childhood boyfriend and a dedicated Lumon-hater, sarcastically parrots back to her, “With the market readjustment and fluctuating interest rates, there was a retrenchment from some of the core infrastructure investments.” In other words, fuck you, Salt’s Neck, Lumon has moved on and left you behind.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

No one who didn’t watch it ever believes me when I tell them, but the Netflix Punisher show felt like it was designed specifically to upset people with Blue Lives Matter American Flag Punisher decals on their F-350s. All of the main villains were either ex-military who’d gone capitalist or criminal to make money by killing people, corrupt cops, or right-wing politicians bought off by Russian oligarchs — a who’s who of the kind of people that people who are really into the Punisher logo love. 

It’s always been odd that the Punisher TV show is harder on these people than the company that owns the character. Disney has never seriously objected to the co-option of one of their marquee superheroes’ symbol by fascists, even as they’re willing to block grieving parents with Spider-Man stuff on their child’s gravestone. For one reason or another — and I leave it to you, fair reader, to learn a bit about the historical relationship between capitalists, corporations, and fascists and decide that reason for yourself — the Mouse has been bizarrely gloves-off on the issue.

This is the reason why, when I saw that one of the corrupt and murderous cops being beaten up by an enraged you-left-me-no-choice Matt Murdock had a Punisher skull tattoo, my notes read simply “ARE YOU FUCKIN’ KIDDING?!?

I reviewed the second episode of Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

“I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” When Garth Marenghi — author, dreamweaver, visionary, plus actor — uttered these words, he spoke as a prophet. We live an era that has made the subtext text. This country re-elected a billionaire who’d previously, publicly tried to overthrow the government to once again run the government. He brought in an even richer billionaire, the scion of an evil foreign government (apartheid South Africa), to rule it for him; sometimes this second billionaire wields a chainsaw. They’re firing people for being women or Black or queer and not really pretending there’s another reason for it. They’re trying to legislate an entire minority group, trans people, out of existence. They’re handing over your Social Security and IRS data to neo-Nazi teenagers. The big billionaire gave a Nazi salute on stage, twice. These are all things that have happened or are happening now, in real life. Every conspiracist’s fever dream about America’s fall to sinister oligarchic forces has come to pass; most of those conspiracists just happened to vote for the oligarch(s) in question. No subtext required!

I say all this because, as a long-time writer about superheroes (comics, films, television), I used to think the “supervillain pretends to be nice and is allowed to take over the government” storylines were idiotic. “But Norman Osborn is the Green Goblin and everyone knows it,” I said about twenty years ago, during Marvel’s Dark Reign storyline. “I don’t care if he fired the killshot on the leader of a Skrull invasion and improved his public image — they wouldn’t just let him take over a major intelligence organization and turn it on his enemies. He’s a serial killer who dresses up in a Halloween costume and throws molotov cocktails at college students. He’s admitted it. If Charles Manson killed Osama bin Laden on live TV tomorrow, they still wouldn’t put him in charge of the CIA.”

Whoops!

I reviewed the season premiere of Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

It’s a pretty terrific closing salvo for A Thousand Blows’ first season. (Based on the teaser that follows the “To be continued…” title card, the second has already largely been shot.) It places the emphasis right where it’s been and belonged the whole time: on Erin Doherty’s work as Mary Carr, once (and future?) Queen of the Forty Elephants. Doherty has spent the entire season challenged to hold down her end of the screen against guys who literally trained to beat people up to play their roles. She has to answer their physical charisma with the kind that can only come out of your voice, your eyes, the set of your jaw. She clears the bar without so much as brushing it with the hem of her dress. It’s early yet, but this is one of my favorite performances of the year.

I reviewed the season finale of A Thousand Blows for Decider.

I’m not gonna sit here and tell you Paradise is one for the ages, or even for year-end best-ofs. But it’s competent, its three leads (Sterling K. Brown, James Marsden, and Julianne Nicholson) are extremely talented people who make a feast of everything they’re given, it got really nasty and scary when it needed to, and it solved its main mystery by using a killer librarian, like a half-forgotten slasher film set at a high school in the early ’80s. Like its knowingly ridiculous needle drops, the combination is fun almost despite itself. 

I reviewed the season finale of Paradise for Decider.

A Thousand Blows remains an enjoyable show thanks to the physically commanding performances of its three leads. Stephen Graham, Erin Foster, and Malachi Kirby swagger across the screen so vibrantly now that the de rigeur digital teal-and-apricot color palette that plagues TV these days obscures their emotions. Overall, however, things are looking so dire that it’s hard to figure out how any of our heroes or antiheroes turn it around. Maybe that’s fine, and it’s crime doesn’t pay narrative, or a story about how the masses can never beat the classes. But I think snatching victory from the jaws of defeat would do this show well. These people are all survivors, bottom line. I wouldn’t mind seeing them thrive, for a change.

I reviewed the fifth episode of A Thousand Blows for Decider.

Maybe you want to give the lion’s share of the credit to Dichen Lachman, the strikingly telegenic actor who plays the severed and stranded Gemma Scout/Ms. Casey. Maybe you want to tip your cap to Adam Scott, who traces his character Mark Scout’s progression from happy college professor meeting cute with his future wife to widower finding out the terrible news for the first time. Maybe you appreciate the work of Sandra Bernhard as a scowling Lumon technician, or Robby Benson as Dr. Mauer, Gemma’s torturer and would-be lover during her multiplicitous, mysterious severed simulacra of life.

I submit to you, however, that the real star of “Chikhai Bardo,” an episode destined to go down as one of Severance fans’ favorite Severance episodes, is Jessica Lee Gagné. Believe it or not, but as best I can tell, this swirling, tumbling, brilliantly filmed and assembled episode marks the veteran cinematographer’s directorial debut. From the flips and fades and segues and other weird tricks that mark scene transitions to the high-stakes performance she coaxes out of the actors, it’s hard to imagine a more auspicious debut. 

So why do I feel so frustrated?

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

Perhaps most importantly, at least if you’re an audience member, Hezekiah is growing closer than ever to Mary herself. On at least one occasion during this episode they come with in a finger’s breadth of kissing before Mary calls it off, openly saying she’s not quite sure if this is a relationship she wants or not. Cue that Dumb and Dumber “So you’re saying there’s a chance” gif, only for real this time. And well there should be: The chemistry between these two gives off a lot of steam, perhaps because Mary is the only person around whom Hezekiah really comes out of his shell and starts acting like a future world champion. If you find someone who brings that out of you, lock that shit down, my friends.

I reviewed episode four of A Thousand Blows for Decider.

Neither Mary nor Sugar got where they are without self-confidence in the face of long odds. The same of course is true of Hezekiah, but he hasn’t yet had the chance to parlay his willpower into actual success the way the Queen of the Elephants and the King of the East End have managed to do. Despite being a physically striking guy, actor Malachi Kirby is still visibly holding much of his magnetism in reserve; Hezekiah, who can’t run long distances without collapsing from a stitch in his side, similarly needs to train himself in the art of swagger before Kirby can be free to command the screen the way Erin Doherty and Stephen Graham do. A Thousand Blows isn’t a perfect show — some dialogue (“Most men feel threatened by ambition in a woman.” “I am not most men.”) feels a bit undercooked, and the teal-and-apricot color palette can be grating. But the smart choices of its talented cast have me looking forward to each new round.

I reviewed the third episode of A Thousand Blows for Decider.

The best way to sum up “The Day,” Paradise’s genuinely harrowing seventh episode, is this: There’s no ironic slowcore ’80s hair-rock cover to close out the episode. Someone thought better of it, and I’m glad. The covers are so obviously goofy I refuse to believe creator Dan Fogelman is unaware; it stands to reason that when you’re depicting the end of the world, it’s better to enjoy the silence. 

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