The sense of humor brought to this fine adaptation of Anne Rice’s goth classic by showrunner Rolin Jones, writers Jonathan Ceniceroz and Dave Harris, and ace TV director Alan Taylor is undoubtedly a pleasant surprise, but it’s one of many. Simply put, this show is a cavalcade of delights, some dark and some less so. Blood and horror exist on the same plane as sex and sensuality; flashes of piercing insight into the human condition rival those into the inhuman condition; sharp commentary on race, sexuality, and even the grim toll of the pandemic is there to be found alongside jokes about eating babies. In other words, this is good, good shit.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

The bad news first: American Gigolo Episode 5 (“The Escape Wheel”) is easily the least good of the lot thus far. The tone is sappy, the plot is creaky, the characters turn at the drop of a dime, and there’s no sex to speak of. If you thought the American Gigolo concept would suffer when removed from the antiseptic gaze of original writer-director Paul Schrader, this installment makes your case.

I reviewed this week’s episode of American Gigolo for Decider.

I’m fond of saying that when it comes to adapting a work of art from one medium to another, “change” is value neutral. The mere fact that something is different in the TV or movie version than it was in the book is not an artistically or aesthetically meaningful thing in and of itself; what matters is whether the change improves the adaptation or weakens it. In all the cases outlined above, I cannot for the life of me figure out how altering these basic facts of the agreed-upon timeline of Tolkien’s Middle-earth improves anything. They make the story less coherent, they substitute bait-and-switch character disappearances and deaths for actual meaningful developments, they flummox hardcore Tolkien nerds like me while, I suspect, adding nothing of particular interest to newbies and casuals. 

Disa’s fire, Durin and Elrond’s friendship, the Stranger’s isolation, Elendil’s quiet dignity: This is where The Rings of Power’s power lies, not in turning Galadriel into a badass or pretending Isildur is dead or acting like we in the audience have no idea what and where Mordor is. (And btw, if you must treat the Mordor reveal as a reveal, why not have Adar proclaim the new name and then end the episode, instead of using that goofy “THE SOUTHLANDS/MORDOR” text to do it?) None of this is a dealbreaker of course; plenty of shows have rebounded from weak first seasons to achieve goodness, even greatness. It’s just hard to imagine a show with this kind of money behind it, these resources, the attention of the Eye of Bezos Himself, being granted the room to grow and breathe and change. I fear that what you see is what you get, no matter which eye you’re looking through.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power for Decider.

I don’t know how else to say it about Andor: It is just flabbergasting to hear genuinely adult ideas and witness genuinely adult character dynamics in a Star Wars project. Rogue One is an antecedent of course, and I think some of the very early scenes in the original Star Wars — Luke arguing with his aunt and uncle, concerns about work and the harvest, politics as a threatening but distant cloud — have a similar vibe. But to see it on this scale, consistently, is just amazing.

Now, I totally get if it’s not for you. It might not be the kind of Star Wars you want. You might simply be sick of Star Wars in general or post-Lucas Disney Star Wars in particular. But man, get a load of this dialogue from this week’s episode:

“It’s so confusing, isn’t it? So much going on, so much to say, and all of it happening so quickly. The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it, and that is the real trick of the Imperial thought machine. It’s easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident.”

My dudes, come on. Come on. Does this sound like a reality we’re familiar with or what?

(And yes, I understand the irony of an oppressive corporate entity like Disney presenting us with a ferociously anti-oppression message like that. But Too Old to Die Young and The Underground Railroad, respectively perhaps the most ferociously, brutally anti-cop and anti-racist works of art I’ve ever seen, were both funded by Jeff Bezos. Ooh, baby baby, it’s a wild world.)

I reviewed this week’s quietly remarkable episode of Andor for Decider.

All in all it’s a marvelously melodramatic production. The prose of creator Rolin Jones’s script is defiantly purple. The costumes and sets are lavish and decadent. Anderson and Reid are mesmerizingly attractive, a key component of Rice’s legendarium. Director and Game of Thrones vet Alan Taylor knows his way around torchlit period pieces, that’s for sure. Daniel Hart’s score is like something out of Old Hollywood. Hell, they even put ominous thunderclaps in the background during Lestat’s assault on the church and conversion of Louis into the undead. 

Of course, you have to be willing to go with all that kind of stuff to get anything out of the show. Which, I think, is a price of admission worth asking for, if not paying. Any show that’s really intent on adapting the vibe of Anne Rice’s sublimely arch, hypersensual books — even if it’s changing the time frame and, rather crucially to the story, the race of one of the protagonists — has to be willing to go there, to leave taste behind and go over the top with, well, pretty much everything. You can either stomach that sort of thing or not.

I certainly can. I’m excited to see a vampire show made with such evident craft and care, instead of the umpteenth show about teenage vampires trying to make it through Vampire High or whatever. I’m excited to see a vampire show that presents vampires as both thoroughly awful — whatever else he is, Lestat is an egomaniacal dickhead murderer — and completely irresistible once they have you in their clutches. I’m even excited to have a horror show on TV that is more about vibes than raw terror or pitch-black bleakness, one more indebted to Bram Stoker’s Dracula than 28 Days Later or Under the Skin. And I’m excited to see any show this relentlessly, bombastically horny. These are notes worth playing, and based on this performance, I’m willing to listen.

I reviewed the delightful series premiere of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

Looking over my notes on the episode, I’m struck by, well, how struck I was by Julian and Sunday’s kindness toward strangers. Even while fucked up on booze and coke, Julian personally carried that dog to the vet, made sure his owner knew where he was, and footed the bill for the pup’s treatment. He’s just as careful with Anne’s feelings as he is with the dog’s physical well-being. And even though his mother initially fled Sunday, the detective waits until she returns, carefully nurses her back to health, and apologizes for wrongfully accusing Julian of the murder he went to prison for. Underneath their diametrically opposed (and morally dubious, depending on your point of view) jobs, they’re both decent people.

And again, the show plays to O’Donnell’s strengths as a comedian in particular. She’s hilarious when Isabelle gives her a drink that’s more fruit than water. She’s hilarious when she tries and instantly, I mean within five seconds, fails to chase his mother into the desert. (“Stop running! Slow down!” she hollers at the fleeing woman as she herself, you guessed it, slows down and stops running.) She’s hilarious with Paloma, as she repeats the reasons she doesn’t have a partner either at work or in life verbatim: “I’m cranky, I’m set in my ways, and I like to work alone.”

As for Bernthal, the dude gets seriously sexy in this episode too — a less surprising element of the show than the kindness or the comedy, perhaps, but a vital one. I loved the way he instinctively smiled when he said “Hi” to Anne during their first phone conversation, as if his ladykiller charm cannot be switched off even when he’s alone. The sex scene in the bathroom is both hot and, well, kind of disgusting, as hot things can sometimes be; Anne winds up in bare feet, one of them resting on the toilet seat, as they bang against the wall. 

I reviewed tonight’s episode of American Gigolo for Decider.

As it turns out, Adar’s whole deal is absolutely fascinating: He is a first-generation orc, one of the original Elves whom Morgoth tortured and warped to create his race of minions. (He also claims that he killed Sauron, which, okay buddy, but that’s neither here nor there.) If you’re deep into Tolkien lore — as, presumably, a decent chunk of the audience for a show set in Tolkien’s Second Age would be — this is a glimpse of something we’ve never seen before but have been wondering about since…well, in my case, since I first read The Hobbit at age four. Wouldn’t it have been so much more interesting for the show to make his origin clear immediately, thus getting the audience invested in who he is rather than who he might be, instead of erroneously presuming that mYsTeRiEs are the be-all and end-all of fantasy narratives?

Please recall that there are approximately zero “mysteries” in Tolkien’s work: Aside from the origin of Gollum and the Necromancer, which are irrelevant when they first show up in the text, everything you need to know is spelled out almost immediately, with Tolkien counting on his inventive skill to engross you all by itself. Which it does!

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Rings of Power for Decider.

Ian Brennan, Ryan Murphy, Evan Peters, Niecy Nash, Richard Jenkins, and their collaborators have created one of the most harrowing, most viscerally upsetting, television shows I’ve ever seen. And when they finally turn the violence against its primary perpetrator, they make it hurt, they make it hard to look at. In the end, there’s nothing glamorous about this dead man who caused the deaths of so many others, who shuffled and stumbled his way through life, whose presence at the center of a vortex of homophobia, racism, bad policing, bad medicine, bad parenting, and pervasive isolation tells us so much about how what this country values, and how it rewards those who fail to measure up. 

I reviewed the finale of Dahmer for Decider. I’m grateful to have taken on this difficult assignment.

Four episodes (though just two weeks) into Andor, and I remain shocked by just how good it is. And having made similar statements on Twitter, I feel the need to clarify and caveat a bit. Is it The Sopranos? No. But is it, say, Obi-Wan Kenobi? Also, no, and that’s a good thing. This is a real show, with a real message yes, but more importantly with real moments that are not necessary to move the plot or pop the fans with Easter eggs and references. 

There are going to be viewers and critics who are so disgusted with Disney Star Wars material that this simply will not penetrate to them, and that’s fine, I totally get it, it’s not hard for me to imagine being in that position too. But I’m too shocked by the show’s many subtle, legitimately subtle, touches of personal and interpersonal drama to share that disgust. Again, Andor is a real show. Given the machine that produced it, that’s a minor miracle.

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

Not all of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims died. No, not all of them. I’m not even talking about the escapees — Tracy Edwards, Ronald Flowers, Somsack Sinthasomphone, the jogger who dodged his baseball bat. I’m talking about his slain victims’ families, his neighbors, even his own family, even the entire city of Milwaukee. “The Bogeyman,” once again directed by Jennifer Lynch from a script by Ian Brennan, David McMillan, and Reilly Smith, depicts the many ways in which Dahmer haunted all these people even while safely behind bars. (Safely for them, physically speaking, if not for himself, but we’ll get to that.) They lived on, but — as he’d longed to do with his actual, physical victims — he got into their heads, permanently.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Dahmer for Decider.

For Lionel, though, clinging to the belief that his son was insane when he committed his crimes is important because, for a long while at least, he lives in terror of the idea that he was in some way responsible for it all himself. When Jeff brings up the way Lionel used to help him collect and dissect roadkill, Lionel literally starts laughing in comical outrage over the idea. “You ain’t gonna lay this on me, no!” he says. “It’s not my fault! I didn’t do this! I was a good dad to you!” Of course he wants to believe this. Who wouldn’t, in his position?

I reviewed the eighth episode of Dahmer for Decider.

“I called y’all for months! Now y’all finally came and it’s too late! You came too late!” 

That would be the first time during this episode of Dahmer that I burst into tears.

“You knew he was a monster.”

“I knew. But nobody heard me.”

“I hear you, Glenda.”

That would be the last time during this episode of Dahmer that I burst into tears.

But there were times in between, and times afterwards, times after the episode ended and left me alone with what I’d just seen. Once again directed by Jennifer Lynch, from a script by co-creator Ian Brennan, Janet Mock, and David McMillan, this installment — titled “Cassandra,” after the prophetic figure from Greek mythology doomed to see the future without anyone every listening to her about it — is the most emotionally taxing thing I’ve seen on television all year. In terms of my visceral reaction to it, it’s one of the most emotionally taxing things I’ve seen on television ever.

I reviewed the seventh episode of Dahmer for Decider.

But for those of us who major in Jon Bernthal Studies, Gigolo remains a captivating portrait of a guy forced into a life he didn’t want at a too-young age, who found he excelled at it and came to embrace everything about it, only to have it all taken away from and be forced to reinvent himself, first as a convict, now as a free man. By the looks of things, he’ll be tricking again soon enough, yet another reinvention. Bernthal’s natural magnetism is the thing that connects all the dots: He’s equally convincing as a carefree playboy, a tatted-up jailbird, a down-on-his-luck sad sack, a doe-eyed heartsick lover, and a recidivist hustler. Physically, his gift is that he can embody all these things at once: It’s so easy to picture him as a fuck machine, a friendly just-folks kinda guy, or a thug, or sometimes all three at once. That’s the beauty of his work, and that’s the beauty of American Gigolo.

I reviewed this weekend’s episode of American Gigolo for Decider.

Dahmer may be the most grueling drama I’ve ever covered, and its sixth episode, “Silenced,” is one of the saddest hours of television I’ve ever seen. Anchored by a tremendous, heartfelt, achingly vulnerable performance by deaf actor and former reality TV star Rodney Burford, it offers the corrective that Dahmer has needed by giving one of the killer’s victims his own story, then slams the door on it, as you knew it must. That knowledge does not soften the blow one bit.

I reviewed episode six of Dahmer for Decider.

It’s only by cruising through life on Easy mode due to his race and gender — despite his outcast status, despite his closeted sexuality, despite his unspeakable urges, despite his overall taciturn and unlikeable demeanor — that Jeff got away with everything he got away with for as long as he did. Looked at with clear eyes, his life is just one long chain of fuck-ups. If he were a different color, if his victims were a different color, that chain might have been cut short much, much earlier.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Dahmer for Decider.

Anyway, I could not help be brought up short by the idea that mithril, of all things, is required to preserve the lives of the Elves? Because of the failure of a magic tree with no basis in Tolkien’s mythology? This seems like an awful lot to add to the mythos, and for what? An added sense of urgency? A connective tissue between the disparate narrative threads? A way to move the story along during these early episodes in order to kill time between now and the end of the season? All of these seem like ways of saying “the writers didn’t really know what to do, so they said to hell with it, Elves need mithril to live, so let it be written, so let it be done.” Granted, I’m bringing a certain bias to this analysis. But even if I weren’t, it seems both too neat and too busy, an overcomplication of a pretty straightforward story about the resurgence of evil and the need for disconnected races to unite to fight it. Adding “or else one of them will go extinct” undercuts the human (for lack of a better word) drama inherent in the need to persuade different peoples to fight for a common cause.

I reviewed the fifth episode of The Rings of Power for Decider.

There are three shots from this episode that are going to stay with me, I think. The first is Jeff in the bathroom mirror, covered in blood, accompanied by a menacing sting from the excellent score by art-rock musicians Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. The second is the moment where a drunken Jeff raises his cup of beer in a toast to the test of strength at the fair, emblazoned with phrases like “HE MAN” and “GOOD BOY,” phrases that mean more to him than anyone could have ever known. The third, probably obviously, is when he kisses the severed head through the plastic at the end of the episode. The man he murdered is now his keepsake, his secret. And many more men and boys will die before the secret is out. 

I reviewed the fourth episode of Dahmer for Decider.

We’re only three episodes deep into Dahmer’s ten-episode run, and already the accrual of brutal, depressing incidents has become difficult to endure. The fantastic, committed performances of Evan Peters as Jeffrey and Richard Jenkins and Penelope Ann Miller as his parents manage to make everything both better and worse. These are real, recognizable people with real, recognizable hopes and fears — the scene in which an astonished, joyful Joyce is offered a job counseling women at the center where she was once a patient is a genuinely touching moment of kindness towards an otherwise resolutely unpleasant, if very ill, person — that Jeffrey’s deeds will pulverize as surely as his hammer smashed those bones. It’s not going to be easy to watch, but then, that’s the point.

I reviewed the third episode of Dahmer for Decider.

Once again, cowriters Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy, led by director Clement Virgo, create a gruesome portrait of a broken person who can only find wholeness by breaking other people, quite literally down into their constituent body parts. He is both sad and contemptible, a shattered person who finds his meager pleasures only in shattering other people. The degree of difficulty inherent in handling this material is astronomical, but so far, they’ve pulled it off. I’m darkly excited to see where this ten-episode limited series goes. I’m anxious. I’m frightened. I’m sick. I’m watching good television.

I reviewed the second episode of Dahmer for Decider.

It’s with all this in mind that I approached TV superproducer/auteur Ryan Murphy’s stab at the material (no pun intended) with trepidation. Murphy is perhaps the most puzzling of all the big-name New Golden Age of TV figures. He’s responsible for American Crime Story, which in three distinct seasons, each overseen by different creators, established itself as probably the best anthology series in television history. He’s also responsible for…well, for everything else he’s done, from Glee to American Horror Story. These productions did not fill me with confidence; nor did the possibility that, as an attempt to score easy points with the audience, this version of Dahmer’s story would be treated as some sort of corrective to earlier interpretations, painting him as an unmitigated and unrepentant monster while showing little interest in what made him what he was and how he struggled with it. I mean, Monster is in the subtitle, or title, depending on your point of view. Can you blame me?

So I’m happy, if that’s the right word, to report that Ryan Murphy and his co-creator Ian Brennan’s Dahmer is as good an artistic take on Dahmer’s life and crimes as I’ve yet seen. Directed by TV veteran Carl Franklin, the first episode alone brought me to tears. Dahmer is treated as appropriately pathetic, but the viciousness of his crimes is not candy-coated. It’s clear that he knows something’s wrong with him, but he’s past the point of trying to do anything to stop it, and it’s other people — almost entirely people of color — who pay the price. 

I reviewed the first episode of Dahmer for Decider.