Two > > Three > One >> Four. There, that’s the extent to which we need to relitigate Noah Hawley’s Fargo. This love letter not just to the Coen Brothers’ 1996 black-comedy crime classic but to their entire oeuvre is getting to that M*A*S*H point where it’s funny to point out how it’s outlasted its inspiration, but along the way it has aired one truly great season of television, two merely terrific ones, and one that would have gone over a lot better had poor Chris Rock not been miscast as a crime boss. That’s an excellent track record from where I’m sitting, even before you factor in Hawley’s acuity with action sequences, tension and suspense, weird eruptions of uncanny horror, getting gangbusters work out of a slew of fantastic actors both with and without prior Coens experience, you name it. So what if Hawley, on whom I run hot and cold as a rule, is not Joel and Ethan fused into one new guy? Voguish or not, if Fargo is on, I’m watching. 

I reviewed the season premiere of Fargo for Decider. This season’s real good!

What a difference a dragon makes, huh? There’s a lot I find misjudged and misguided in Apple TV+‘s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters at this early stage, but they got at least this much right: They ended their two-episode series premiere with a huge berserk reptilian creature emerging from the wreck of a sunken World War II battleship that’s now on land for some reason. After all, this is not Monarch: Legacy of America’s Next Top Best Friend. There’s a promise the show makes with its very title, and it knows it has to deliver.

I’m not sure it’s delivering on much else at the moment, unfortunately. Once again written by co-developer and showrunner Chris Black and directed by Matt Shakman, this episode (“Departure”) is not, as I’d hoped, all delivery after the first episode’s setup. It’s basically more of the same.

I reviewed the second episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.

The MonsterVerse is a mixed bag. As an official welding together of the big screen’s two biggest giant-monster icons, Godzilla and King Kong, it mostly does what it needs to do, i.e. toss giant monsters at each other and get out of the way. But there’s a pretty wide range of quality in terms of the movies surrounding those monster fights. Kong: Skull Island is a charmingly berserk adventure-movie throwback, with a fun cast of memorable little characters. This puts it head and shoulders above the three Godzilla-led entries in the series, in which the characters range from inert to inane. But there are some truly awe-inspiring, almost cosmic monster visuals in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Godzilla vs. Kong has the lizard/ape action you crave. 

The biggest disappointment in the series is its opening entry, 2014’s Godzilla, for two reasons. First, it hides its monster effects by staging its fights at night, an annoying maneuver also employed by Pacific Rim. Second, it fails completely to deliver on the horror promised by the Bryan Cranston–heavy trailer (not least by killing off Bryan Cranston after the second reel). One of the reasons the subsequent entry, Kong, feels so strong is because it does just the opposite: It focuses squarely on its best actors, roots itself in horror with genuinely gruesome kills, and shows us its titans clashing in glorious broad daylight.

So there’s a template to be followed for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the new TV show set in the MonsterVerse — a set of Giant Radioactive Do’s and Don’t’s already established by the franchise. What approach will showrunner Chris Black, who developed the show with Matt Fraction, wind up taking?

I’m covering the new Godzilla TV show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider, starting with my review of the first episode. It has its moments.

It’s unlike me, but with Monarch I banked all the reviews I could in advance, so I’ve seen and reviewed the first eight episodes. My initial reviews won’t reflect it, but the show does get much better as it goes. The material centered on romance and on Godzilla himself is very strong by the end. The Russells are as good as you’d expect and Mari Yamamoto is really something.

Scorsese and Lynch share in the recognition that there are tragedies that cannot be undone, that there are wounds that cannot be made whole, that some tears in the fabric of human decency are permanent. By facing the horror of violence head on, they raise the curtain, turn on the spotlight, and allow the preciousness of life to take center stage.

I wrote about Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and the work of David Lynch, particularly Twin Peaks, for Decider.

What Shows and Movies Will It Remind You Of? Pull up a chair, this is gonna take a minute. The pastel wonder of the all-ages series Adventure Time and Steven Universe, the beautifully creepy sci-fi psychedelia of the French animation landmark Fantastic Planet, the weird techno-organic symbiosis of G.I. Joe: The Movie, the grotesque fungal infections of The Last of Us, the adorable and improbable bio-psychic critters of James Cameron’s Avatar, the beauty and danger and environmentalism of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the futuristic motorcycles and gloopy expanding blobs of Akira, the weird-new-thing-every-four-minutes imagination and pacing of Raised by Wolves, the working-stiffs-get-stranded-among-xenomorphs-by-an-uncaring-Company idea of Alien, the hey-we’re-just-folks-trying-our-best-in-the-wasteland vibe of Station Eleven…but wait, there’s more! Beyond films and TV, the biggest touchstone of all is the comics and art of French cartoonist Moebius, and the Moebius-indebted wave of underground science-fantasy comics that peaked around 10-15 years ago (and spawned the. If you’re a gamer, you’ll be reminded of virtually every exploration-based science-fantasy game of recent years: No Man’s Sky, Astroneer, Subnautica (the plot is virtually identical), even The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and its weirdly lovely Depths. 

Our Take: Reread that last paragraph. Think you can guess the problem here? Scavengers Reign is exceedingly well-executed psychedelic science-fiction animation for adults and teens; co-creators, co-writers (with Sean Buckelew and James Merrill), and co-directors Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner are very obviously both huge aficionados and skilled practitioners of the genre. But if you, like me, are steeped in this stuff, you’ll react one of two ways: “Oh boy, more of this!” or “Oh boy, more of this?” I’m more in the latter camp myself.

But that doesn’t take away from the talent on display in the creature concepts and designs. Again, these are mostly attempts to reinvent a pretty reliable wheel — How can we make an alien parasite, but different? — but they’ll have you saying cool/gross/ooh/eww throughout. Considering that this is a survival adventure, that’s half the battle.

I took a look at Scavengers Reign, the vibey, gloopy new Max sci-fi animated series, for Decider.

And the thing looks so expensive. The casual ease with which it depicts the most expensive place to film in America getting completely destroyed by a gigantic entity and the United States military is mindblowing, especially after 15 years of bland destructive spectacles in superhero movies shot either on streets in Vancouver or in warehouses in Atlanta. I watched it with my 14-year-old kid, who at times literally couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “How the hell did they film this?” he asked, completely baffled — and awed.

I wrote about Cloverfield, an excellent and extremely effective giant-monster horror movie that deserves reappraisal, for Decider.

GOYER: We’re aware of the fact that we’ve got actors like Lee Pace and Jared Harris, and that we can’t just plunk anyone into one of those smaller roles, or it’s going to break the suspension of disbelief. That is our motto: Every one of these people has to be able to stand toe to toe with Jared Harris.

I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time: I interviewed David S. Goyer about making Foundation Season 2, the year’s most thrilling show and one of the all-time great sophomore surprises, for Decider.

Not many actors can say they embodied a masterpiece in a few minutes of screentime. I certainly doubt that’s what Burt Young had in mind when he appeared on The Sopranos back in 2001. But the lovable Rocky alum’s turn as an ailing, elderly hitman who’s got one last burst of violence in him is getting held up as one of the veteran actor’s most memorable roles for a reason. In a handful of scenes in a one-off performance, Young gets his nicotine-stained fingers on nearly everything important aspect of the show. It’s a role seemingly written to illustrate what this show is about, with Young selected to give the demonstration.

I wrote about the late Burt Young’s one-episode role on The Sopranos as a microcosm of everything good about the show for Decider.

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.