It’s a blue rose case.

The opening image of this week’s Daredevil: Born Again is taken straight from the iconography of David Lynch, in the form of the blue-colored flower used to designate paranormal investigations in the world of Twin Peaks. When the image resolves, we see it’s a flower in a garden, but that the garden is surrounded by the bars and towers of a prison yard. This feels like a play on another famous Lynch image, that of the verminous insects writhing beneath the pristine red roses and green lawns of the all-American suburb in Blue Velvet. This time, however, the darkness is on top. Maybe that’s appropriate these days.

This isn’t the only Lynchian moment in the episode. Several times, as we follow the mass-murdering marksman nicknamed Bullseye as he’s transferred to general population in prison, escapes, and arrives at Mayor Fisk’s black-and-white ball, the screen takes on a blue tint. When Matt Murdock takes the bullet Bullseye intended for Fisk, the screen is hypersaturated with red. It’s reminiscent of Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, respectively. 

Lynch’s work ties to what writers Jesse Wigutow and Dario Scardapane and directors Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead are up to in this episode only in the loosest possible sense. Maybe you could stretch and say the dual personae of both Murdock/Daredevil and Fisk/Kingpin are just the superhero genre’s way of exploring the same fissures in identity that Lynch’s Hitchcockian doubles did in the two aforementioned horror masterpieces. Or maybe Vincent D’Onofrio’s raspy stop-and-start voice reminds you of Robert Loggia growling his way through Lost Highway as the similarly, let’s say, romantically possessive gangster Mr. Eddy in Lost Highway. 

But I don’t think you need to be doing the same kinds of things David Lynch did to borrow the tools he used to do them with. Indeed, that’s where many soi-disant “Lynchian” films and TV shows go wrong — aiming for his thoughtful, sensual surrealism and landing somewhere in the neighborhood of “whoa, that was weird” at best. Why not stick a blue rose at the beginning of a TV show about a blind lawyer’s blood feud with both a gangster the size of Shaquille O’Neal and an assassin who can spit out his own tooth hard enough to put an eye out with it? Why not do big beautiful things with color just because they’re big and beautiful things you can do?

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

Dying for Sex has every right to be funny if it wants, and it’s often very good at it. The sight gag where Nikki pulls bloody gauze out of her mouth like a magician at a child’s birthday party is delightfully gross. Gail telling Molly that her ex-husband “said you were on some kind of ‘sex quest’” made me snort with laughter. The increasingly large and dreadful gathering around Molly’s chemotherapy, when it became apparent that Steve brought his new girlfriend to meet her under these conditions? Curb Your Enthusiasm–level stuff. I am not trying to sell the show short in that regard. 

I just question why 9 scenes out of 10 have to either tickle your funnybone or make you nod in approval when they end. With material about sex, illness, power, friendship, family, kink, love, and death this intense, it’s almost insulting for the show to add a little rimshot to the proceedings every now and then. Let me be blown away by this stuff. I think it’s got that strength.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Dying for Sex for Decider.

Kinks and fetishes are like a psychosexual itch on the small of your back. Under normal circumstances, no matter how you stretch and reach, it’s untouchable. Grab a back-scratcher or a wooden spoon or whatever’s available that suits the purpose, though? Ahhhhhh, what a relief! You just need to know what the tools are and how to use them, so to speak. (This is a metaphor, not a demand that you invest in some BDSM hardware.)

The best thing about Dying for Sex’s journey into dominance and submission this episode is that it shows Molly scratching an itch. Here’s a woman who’s lost her bodily autonomy for years at a time, as cancer attacks her body from within and doctors poke and prod and scan and irradiate and pump pills into from without. Her (ex?) husband, Steve, took total control of her treatment when he was around. Her best friend, Nikki, isn’t nearly so domineering and constantly encourages Molly to get involved — but Nikki’s primary mode of dealing with Molly’s illness is anger, which brings out Molly’s anger in turn, which makes her feel even less in control. The episode also alludes to the abuse she endured as a child — just briefly, just a good guess by a supporting character, but that’s a loss of control from which she’s suffered her whole life.

What better way to process all of this than by re-shaping it into something with the power to get you off?

I reviewed the fourth episode of Dying for Sex for Decider.

“‘Normal sex.’ Who decides what that means? You early millennials are so tragic. You think sex is just penetration and orgasms. Why? Because that’s what Samantha said. Sex? Sex is a wave. Sex? Sex is a mindset. Sex is the nonlinear emergent phenomenon that arises when two or more beings, they touch energy fields.”

Did you get all that, class? If not, the notes are up on the student portal. 

This huge gob of sex-positive pablum is hawk-tuah’d up by Sonya, Molly’s palliative care counselor. The whole time she’s talking about how sex is like a rainbow in the shape of the infinity symbol or whatever, I was sitting there thinking, “Not if you’re doing it right! Sex is the province of fucked-up perverts. Leave this crystal-energy don’t-yuck-your-yum bullshit for Obama-era webcomics and BuzzFeed personal essays — I’d almost rather fuck the guy who keeps demanding that Molly clasp his balls.” (Clasp, not cup. It’s an important distinction!)

Personal tastes aside, the problem with this kind of dialogue on Dying for Sex is an almost universal one when it comes to shows and films that use very direct therapeutic language to address their core conflicts. Simply put, that’s what we have therapy for. Fiction teaches us better by showing us how people behave and allowing us to reason out why for ourselves. Even on The Sopranos, Dr. Melfi’s insights were only ever half the equation; you had to see how Tony interpreted what she said and applied it, or didn’t, in his actual day-to-day life before drawing the lesson David Chase and company intended to impart in any given episode or storyline. You get a lot more out of that than you do from a fictional mental health professional simply describing best practices and calling it a day.

I reviewed the third episode of Dying for Sex for Decider.

One thing I’ll say for this episode is that it’s some of the calmest filmmaking I’ve ever seen from director Guy Ritchie, once again working off a script from series creator Ronan Bennett and Jez Butterworth. There aren’t really any splashy images or flashy cuts, more just lingering shots of people aged 40-80 looking older and wiser than the various lads and louts who are giving them headaches. 

And sexier, too. From Tom Hardy and Lara Pulver as the extinguished flames Harry and Bella to Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan as IGILFs (Irish Grandparents I’d Like to Fuck) Maeve and Conrad, there’s a lot of simmering going on here for actors of various demographics that can be sadly underrepresented in the simmer department. You love to see it. 

I would, however, also love to see this show make a stronger argument for its existence. MobLand is very entertaining while it’s on, with a bunch of fine, fun actors making the crisp tough-guy dialogue sing. It’s just that the recipe is so familiar that the taste doesn’t linger when the meal is done. I’m looking for something that’ll make me say “Ooh, new MobLand is out!” instead of merely “Oh hey, new MobLand is out.”

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

“I want him. I want him to rub that beard on my face. I want him. Oh God, I want him right now. I can’t wait anymore.” Molly thinks this to herself as she looks at the man (Chris Roberti) she’s just picked up at a bar for a one-night stand as they ride home in an Uber together. She asks him if he wants to kiss her, and he does. The camera films his rough hand on her face and hair in close-up. Both Sheila Callaghan’s script and Chris Teague’s direction are keenly observed, focused squarely on desire and the things that trigger it.

Then the guy cums after a five-second handjob, groaning and spasming for like a full minute, like a character from a Farrelly Brothers movie. He gets thrown out of the Uber for it and everything. Is it funny? Sure — my notes read “lol” and everything. Is it as funny as the moments that preceded it were sharp, sexy, and vulnerable in how they exposed Molly’s hunger for contact with this man? Not by a long shot.

I reviewed the second episode of Dying for Sex for Decider.

Yet for all its reliance on the finely observed details of human interaction, both inside and outside the bedroom, there’s an element of unreality to the proceedings. Part of that is its nature as a sitcom-length dramedy: There’s gotta be a joke every 90 seconds or so, and by god the story and the characters will do whatever it takes to hit that mark. (This is an anti-comedy bias of mine, I freely admit.)

But it also has to do with the character of Molly. White, thin, blonde, and beautiful, she has a smart, successful, attentive (except in one important way) husband who dotes on her. She has a quirky yet dependable friend who does the same. She has no job or calling the show seems to even find worth mentioning, yet she has no apparent worries whatsoever in terms of insurance or medical debt.

Molly has just gotten the worst hand she can possibly be dealt, and that’s true regardless of your socioeconomic status. But her situation is unusual, and the show doesn’t seem interested in examining this. Maybe it’ll get around to it — it’s early yet. But I get the bad feeling that this show is gonna be, ugh, life-affirming, and I’m not sure exploring the ways in which even dying itself is easier on the white and wealthy than it is on others jibes with that overall vibe. (It’s probably going to be easier to get laid looking like Michelle Williams than it might be otherwise, too.)

That said, there’s something honestly admirable about a show that asks its audience to embrace a woman who jilts her husband for being too nice and caring, while not wanting sex enough. That’s pretty much the inverse of what the classic ideal husband delivers, and what the classic ideal wife wants. But pleasure is important, truly and sincerely, much more so than society typically allows us to admit and embrace. Life is too short for anyone to live otherwise — much too short, in Molly’s case. Dying for Sex essentially asks the audience how willing they are to prioritize their own pleasure in far less dire circumstances. That’s a hard question, no pun intended, to answer.

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

Running through the plot just now, the whole thing feels rather breezy and entertaining. When your top-billed cast are Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Paddy Considine, and Joanne Froggat, it’s hard not to be entertaining. I’ve seen shows squander strong casts — Zero Day, cough cough — but MobLand is not one of them. I’m not a hundred percent sold on what Mirren’s doing just yet, though she certainly looks incredible doing it, but Brosnan tears into his bombastic crime boss character with grinning ferocity. The moment where he mimics the pigs to whom he fed the gangster who both mentored and molested him is unexpected and delightful. 

Hardy, for his part, fully understands that the innate seriousness projected by his hangdog handsomeness is also innately funny in some way — just as it was when he played Bane, or Venom, or Mad Max. He brings that same blockbuster-role energy to this crime tale, and it matches well with the crisp direction of action veteran Guy Ritchie, who mined much the same vein in his surprisingly strong black crime comedy The Gentlemen on Netflix last year. Both shows even end their premieres with the same inciting incident: somebody shooting someone to death in front of their family in a poshly appointed room in a country house. 

But that comparison doesn’t flatter MobLand. The Gentlemen brought a madcap brio to its story of aristocrats, the original gangsters in most respects, turned actual gangsters, and is maybe the best thing Ritchie ever did. Meanwhile, Paramount+’s fine prequel series to the Jonathan Glazer British gangster classic Sexy Beast, also from last year, had heart-on-sleeve romance and genuine terror that MobLand so far lacks. It’s pretty good, sure, a classic “if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like” situation. It’s still got time to prove itself to be something more.

I reviewed the series premiere of MobLand for Decider.

Later on we’ll see a fantasized family annihilation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of viewers feel the dinner-table argument between Laurie, Jaclyn, and Kate is the episode’s real bloodbath. Laurie tells Jaclyn she can’t be trusted, and hints that she maybe made a play for Kate’s perfect husband Dave back in the day. Jaclyn says all of Laurie’s unhappiness is her own fault, due to her own decisions: She could have hooked up with Valentin the night before, just as she could have gotten a different job or married a different guy, but she didn’t. She’s the one constant in all this misfortune. 

Kate takes Jaclyn’s side, in brutal fashion. “The source of your disappointment changes,” she tells her quote-unquote friend, “but the constant is you’re always disappointed.” That’s when Laurie storms off, calling Jaclyn vain and selfish, telling Kate her perfect life is an obvious lie. Afterwards, a judgey Kate drives unfaithful-wife Jaclyn away fuming as well. The White Lotus has done this kind of emotional wetwork before, but never with such ruthlessness or effectiveness. Every blow lands.

I reviewed this week’s The White Lotus for Decider.

Well, that’s more like it! After a pointless 40-minute detour into a shockingly uneventful bank robbery, Daredevil: Born Again is back to being, well, Daredevil: Born Again. Cops are evil and can’t be trusted. Interview segments from BB Urich’s YouTube show pop up between scenes. The supporting cast is in it. There’s a real fight scene. No superhero’s dad shows off their Funko Pop like Wayne and Garth shilling Reebok and Pepsi. I don’t know why the show was briefly turned into a mid MCU TV show for a minute there, but it seems to be over for now.

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

It’s become moderately popular in certain online circles to claim to miss the “filler episode.” In this age of short streaming-TV seasons that often arrive years apart from one another, the thinking goes, writers can’t afford to pause the overarching story to do something different and low-stakes for an hour. A 22-episode season, by contrast, has room for all those great little side quests and hang-outs and diversions and distractions that can come when, y’know, the characters all go on a road trip, or they get snowed in, or they have to spend Halloween in a haunted house, or Hurley and Sawyer and Charlie and Jin fix the van on Lost or whatever.

Sure, sometimes this feels like pointless wheel-spinning, or the pejorative term “filler episode” wouldn’t have been devised in the first place. The aforementioned Lost made television history by bargaining with the network to shorten their seasons and end their overall run in order to avoid making more filler episodes.But the idea is that since they can give you the chance to get to know the characters better by seeing them cut loose from the norm a bit, the tradeoff is worth it.

I have one question for people who think this way: Where’s your God now, Moses?

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

The highest compliment I can pay this season of The White Lotus is this: When Tim Ratliff opened this episode by blowing his brains out, I bought it. When his wife Victoria discovered his body and began screaming in grief and agony, I bought it. When Piper, their daughter, raced in to see what was the matter only to be devastated in turn, I bought it. I fully believed that what was once a sort of low-effort wealth comedy had become a tragedy.

What’s more, I believed that writer-director Mike White was perfectly capable of pulling the trigger, so to speak — not just in general, not just in the finale, but right now, at the start of Episode 6, with three full hours of TV ahead of us before the closing credits roll on the season. I was fully on board with the idea that not only was White capable of taking away a main character and making it really hurt — the previous deaths on the show came at the end of what amounted to gross-out comedy sequences — but that he’d do so abruptly and unexpectedly enough for it to come as a genuine shock. I didn’t see it coming, but I didn’t see Sam Rockwell’s monologue or Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s amazing new theme music coming either. 

Now, it turns out that this is only a morbid fantasy in Tim’s head as he thinks through the ramifications of killing himself and letting his beloved family find him like that. But the tsunami dream from earlier in the season was just that, a dream, and its discomfiting power has lingered all season long. The physical stakes in this week’s opening scene turn out to be illusory, but the emotional stakes are real, and high.

But you probably just wanna talk about the incest, don’t you. You’re incorrigible.

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

Despite being Apple TV+’s most talked-about show, Severance has not been renewed for a third season, and this second outing was dogged with rumors of behind-the-scenes disputes and difficulties during its multiple-year production. So let’s say Erickson set out to do what many showrunners have done before him, and crafted a season finale that could make a pretty solid series finale if need be. Frankly, I’m not sure he could have done any better.

I reviewed the season finale of Severance for Decider. It was good!

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.