There are two things really worth emphasizing in this episode. The first is how nice it looks. Taking over from creator and co-writer Guy Ritchie, director Eran Creevy displays an eye for striking color and framing. My favorite sequence in the whole episode is just Lord Hawthorne (god rest ye, merry gentleman) in ceremonial red, literally hiding his face in the wardrobe as he calls her with his crisis of conscience, while Eddie and Joe verbally spar in silhouette in a hallway lit in cold blue. Elsewhere, Susie and Bella converse in a crimson-lit multi-mirrored room that wouldn’t look out of place in Suspiria or The Neon Demon.

I reviewed episode 4 of The Gentlemen Season 2 for Decider.

On the opposite side of the ledger from Troy is Juliette. The show has smartly selected a storyline for her final act, one that will push her two most compelling characteristics to their limits. By taking on Silo 1, she has gone from criminal to dissident to rebel to revolutionary, the apotheosis of her endearingly defiant spirit. The question of how to pull it off — how to get there undetected, how to take down its defenses, how to take out its leadership caste, how to shut down the Safeguards for good — will meanwhile push her problem-solving skills to their absolute limit. This is exactly what you want from this character.

And this episode, a series high point, is exactly what I wanted from this show. The savagery that starts the episode is hard to watch but absolutely necessary, a reminder that the exciting sci-fi dystopia is built on a mountain of corpses, with a billionaire technocracy allied with a radical and egomaniacal right-wing politician deciding who lives and who dies. This is a very real story playing out across our all too real world at this very moment.

I reviewed the season finale of Silo for Decider.

“Once you stop taking responsibility for your own actions, it’s very hard to go back.” Lord Eddie is talking to Susie Glass about his time in the military when he drops this little nugget. She interprets it as a shot at her willingness to follow her daddy Bobby’s orders. I interpret it as an indictment of this charming man, issued by the man himself. He’s decided he has no choice but to do the bad things he does, which means he can choose to do anything he wants.

I reviewed episode three of The Gentlemen season two for Decider.

I’m surprised how much mileage actor Theo James has been able to get out of this core contradiction. He keeps Eddie suspended somewhere in the grey zone between “likeable guy,” “decent person,” and “good character,” which is right where you want the handsome, slightly amoral antihero of your comedic crime drama to live.

I reviewed episode 2 of The Gentlemen Season 2 for Decider.

Genre entertainment of modest ambition that overdelivers on the execution: They don’t make ’em like Netflix’s The Gentlemen anymore. Not often, anyway. Its effervescently violent story of a posh duke turned weed kingpin — it’s Downton Abbey meets Breaking Bad — is played mostly for laughs, but with a welcome hard edge when it needs one. What really distinguishes it is the screwball-level zip of the wittily profane dialogue from creator Guy Ritchie and showrunner Matthew Read, which Ritchie’s surprisingly restrained direction helps its fine cast deliver in style. The thing moves like some earl’s Alfa Romeo.

I’m covering The Gentlemen Season 2 for Decider, starting with my review of the season premiere. Woo!

Well, that was a slapper of an episode, wasn’t it? With only one episode remaining now, FX’s The Shards has established some pretty serious candidates for the secret identity of the serial killer called the Trawler, while also digging deep into the way the characters’ extravagant wealth and privilege is a sort of rot that eats away at family, friendship, business, and romance with equal voraciousness. And it remains fun as hell to watch.

I reviewed this week’s The Shards for Decider.

Three episodes in, and already HBO’s Lanterns needs its creative batteries recharged. That’s not a great sign. With its clichéd alien visitor, preposterous origin story, and domineering mother who’s somehow more cartoonish a character than the pink guy named Sinestro, this flashback-heavy episode feels like a major misstep. 

I reviewed this week’s not good Lanterns for Decider.

Why are they in the Silos? Why can’t they leave? Why can’t the Silos communicate with each other? Why is there a genocidal Safeguard in place? Why would the sainted Founders do any of this if they really cared? Why?

Based on the events of the Before Times material, in which nefarious forces set off a nuclear explosion and force everyone into the Silos forever, I have a feeling we’re about to find out. At the very least, we’ll get a big enough chunk of the information to make the still-missing pieces a tantalizing lure for the fourth and final season of the show. Either way, it’s tremendously satisfying to see both our heroes and our villains, whoever they wind up being in the end, getting so close to their respective finish lines. We’re on the verge of finding out Why, the only question worth asking.

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

Despite the episode’s cruelty — some of it comedic, like the sight of the homecoming queen in cuffs; some of it horrific, like Matt’s awful fate — there are some surprising displays of tenderness. Susan really seems to treasure the opportunity to turn the now drab and dour Rhonda into someone who commands attention once again. (“You’re gonna be able to have sex with anyone you want!” Debbie enthuses when she sees the results of the makeover. “Anyone in the band, at least!”)

Bret, meanwhile, rigs the election so that Debbie has a decent showing, knowing how much the appreciation of others means to her now that her reputation as “a frivolous and spiteful clown” has seemingly been cemented. He doesn’t fix it so she wins, just so she won’t be upset. It’s a decent thing to do, and it shows that despite all his delusions of grandeur, Bret’s heart is in the right place. I just hope his brain catches up.

I reviewed the second of this week’s two episodes of The Shards for Decider.

“Though she returned to school, Rhonda did not come back,” Bret Easton Ellis gravely intones near the start of this episode of FX’s The Shards. “What she felt, she felt alone. The world was lost to her, and her to it.

“I deeply related to this feeling,” he concludes.

I’m sorry, but this show is a goddamn scream. You can feel however you want about Bret Easton Ellis the real person, but Bret Easton Ellis the co-creator of this show has helped craft “Bret Easton Ellis,” a hilariously pretentious and self-serious know-it-all whose good intentions regarding the murder and kidnapping victims now dotting Los Angeles’s tonier districts don’t keep him from planting his head firmly up his own ass. 

I reviewed the first of this week’s two episodes of The Shards for Decider.

As someone who’s read a fair number of Green Lantern comics, it’s difficult for me to say whether a great big introduction for SINESTRO!!! means anything to anyone not familiar with the character and mythos already. But his presentation as “Hannibal Lecktor” to Hal Jordan’s Will Graham in (appropriately) Michael Mann’s Manhunter — the imprisoned killer whose capture both made this lawman’s reputation and broke his spirit — creates an instantly recognizable and compelling dynamic regardless. It’s not terribly original (neither is the Spider-Man 2 powers-on-the-fritz flying attempt by John) but it gets the job done.

Meanwhile, the core cast continues to exude charisma from every pore. Does it help that Kyle Chandler, Aaron Pierre, Kelly Macdonald, and Poorna Jagannathan are all really, really, really, ridiculously good-looking? Yes, but they also all have an easy, convincing chemistry. This is true even of Chandler and Pierre as Jordan and Stewart, whose relationship feels like the former finding out just how far he can push things before the latter finally snaps. As always, I’m hoping a giant green fist is involved.

I reviewed this week’s Lanterns for Decider.

Silo continues to be some of the most pound-for-pound satisfying storytelling on television. In this episode, the flashbacks serve up a heaping helping of Answers — though pointedly they have little to say about why the hell Stensen felt the need to turn his Silos into giant gas chambers with the flip of a switch, a haunting mystery in itself. The future returns us to our home for half of Season 2 and a much-beloved supporting character, wraps up the Orla Kent case, and keeps up the confrontations between Camille, Robert, and Juliette, which have been dramatic gold for all three actors involved. To me, this is the baseline of what TV should be. If you’re not at least this competent and compelling, give the job to someone who’ll do it right.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

I love a good dance scene. I mean I love a good dance scene. I adore watching interesting characters played by beautiful people move their bodies in time with good music playing within their fictional world. I find interpreting their body language, feeling what the music and the movements are meant to communicate, absolutely thrilling. Dance scenes are a rhythmic audiovisual spectacle of sex and glamour. That’s the stuff movies and TV were made for. So of course I’m gonna go gaga for an entire dance episode. 

I reviewed this week’s The Shards for Decider.

To put it into the context of superhero comics, Lanterns is very much a ’00s-style “superheroes-plus” story, the idea back then being that superheroes were unpopular, but other genres were not, so you just mash them together and enjoy the results. The plus in this “superheroes-plus” story is “a True Detective–style unlikely buddy cops in rural America murder mystery.” It’s the kind of slow, down-to-earth thing superhero fans reared on Bendis and Brubaker are likely to enjoy.

I reviewed the series premiere of Lanterns, which I liked, for Decider.

Robert talks Camille down by saying their son should be spared having two murderers for parents. Clearly he’s feeling guilty for using the boy’s school jacket to help smuggle IDs needed for the aborted bombing; Camille caught him so easily you’d almost think he wanted to be caught. Once again, actor Common makes Robert’s moral and emotional dilemmas seem truly painful for him to endure. This is not a man used to honoring his own conscience.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

The episode ends with Debbie refusing to look up at the beautiful sky. “I’ve seen it already,” she sighs. This cynicism is the embodiment of the world of adulthood and death into which Bret now feels he’s been thrust permanently. His days as a kid are permanently over. This, of course, is what the whole party was a rehearsal for, but now it seems ugly and empty. As a wise woman once said, when they get what they want, they never want it again.

I reviewed episode four of The Shards for Decider.

FX‘s The Shards loves lingering on beautiful things that won’t last. Director Michael Uppdendahl’s lens luxuriates in the sight of a beaming, utterly fearless girl roller-disco dancing on her own in slow motion…on a circle of young, beautiful friends eating lunch, the camera whirling around and around them…on an incredible dancer commanding the camera…on a fast drive down a twisting, secret road…on a fallen model practicing her grand Oscar kiss-off…on a boy smelling his lost boyfriend’s jacket and crying. When this episode finds something nice to look at, it lets you know it, and does not let go, until it has to.

I reviewed episode 3 of The Shards for Decider.

What an odd thing Apple TV‘s Sugar has become. Whatever the behind-the-scenes turmoil during Season 1 that led to a showrunner handoff was, it’s worth bringing up only because its effects are still being felt on screen. Despite being built to for a full season, there’s a rushed, slapdash quality to the resolution of old storylines and the establishment of new ones here that’s really unfortunate to see on a show that only just began steering itself out of its second-season skid.

I reviewed the baffling season finale of Sugar for Decider.

What a pleasure it is, watching Apple TV’s Silo’s investment in Camille Sims — and in Alexandria Riley, the actor who plays her — pay off. 

Making someone who’s not part of the cast’s core the chief antagonist for the show’s third season is a risky move. Camille’s been around since early on, but she’s hasn’t had the importance of a Knox or a Shirley or a Sheriff Paul. Nor does Alexandria Riley have the star cachet of series leads Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Robbins, Common, Harriet Walter, Steve Zahn when he’s around, or Rashida Jones and David Oyelowo for a hot minute way back when. 

Yet here Camille is, generating the story’s main conflict, acting like a true conflicted but hubristic arch-villain. She’s having arguments with the AI that runs the Silo, with its messianic hero Juliette Nichols, with her increasingly estranged husband Robert Sims, even with her troubled son Anthony. She’s helping the Voice in the Vault deceive Juliete, while also staying a step ahead of the Voice by taking the initiative and dosing the whole damn Silo with the forgetting drug “Vitamin D+” hours before the Algorithm orders her to. 

As a politician, she’s an all too familiar type. She’s always turning the ratchet to the right, to more extreme extralegal sanction, to duplicity as policy, to ceding decisions to an AI program that tells her what a great job she’s doing to calm her down. Her apparently sincere belief that she’s going to turn the minds of everyone in the SIlo to Swiss cheese For The Good Of The Silo somehow makes her conduct more infuriating than if she were merely a cynic or a sociopath. She’s a portrait of a person mistaking doing their worst for doing the best they can.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

Directed by frequent Ryan Murphy collaborator Michael Uppendahl, this episode lacks its predecessor’s copious film references and dreamy vibe. But it’s excellent at capturing the outrageous lives of hedonism, luxury, and unsupervised independence enjoyed by Bret and “the gang.” Drinking red wine in the hot tubs of houses blissfully unoccupied by parents might be a memorable evening for normal kids; for them, it was Tuesday.

The show’s deadpan cheesiness, meanwhile, is a hoot. The central-casting Satanic cult and its evil leader named (dun dun dunnnnnn!) Bruce (Gus Halper). Bret keeping a knife on his manuscript for self-defense. Susan narrating every detail of the Kellner family’s lives (Matt’s dad is played by an uncredited James Wolk) like she’s somehow the prosecuting attorney in his murder trial. Bret’s pretentious pronouncements about the perils of life in the Serial Killer Age…It’s funny! On purpose! 

It’s also sexy and sleazy and now and then creepy and occasionally, as in a striking composition that puts Bret’s face in the extreme foreground as Debbie does her makeup behind him, lovely. As is typically the case with Murphy ensembles, everyone in the cast appears to be having a ball with the material. I know I am.

I reviewed episode two of The Shards for Decider.