DTF St. Louis takes three real goofballs, gives them complicated and unhappy lives, and sits back as they throw themselves at each other in various combinations, hoping that one of them sets off the chain reaction that will free them from their unhappiness. It feels increasingly tragic, knowing that they failed.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of DTF St. Louis for Decider.

“I need more Godzilla and King Kong in the Godzilla and King Kong show.” I’ve heard variations of this comment since Monarch debuted, even from people who generally enjoy the series. The romantic sturm und drang, the bureaucratic/technocratic squabbling, the fun flashbacks, the stunt casting of the Russells, a star turn for Anna Sawai, all the other monsters — that stuff’s well and good. Sometimes, however, you just wanna see the big guns.

To paraphrase Valerie Cherish, well, you got it.

I reviewed today’s episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.

You can’t say you didn’t see it coming. All throughout its second season, Paradise has been building to a science-fictional scenario that’s frankly preposterous even by Paradise standards. This episode confirms it. Yes, Dan Fogelman is really going there: He’s created a competent billionaire who wants to save the planet. And oh, right, there’s time travel or something.

I reviewed the season finale of Paradise for Decider.

It’s surprisingly emotional to get attacked by a godzilla. That’s more or less the premise of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, a show that has a ton of fun with its creatures but wants to make it clear the experience of coming into contact with kaiju is dangerous and deadly. The trail of physical destruction the monsters leave behind is easy to see. The trail of emotional destruction? Making that debris and detritus as visible as the monsters is Monarch’s main task.

I wrote about last week’s Monarch for Decider.

What Floyd Smernitch, Clark Forrest, and Carol Love-Smernitch had together is a hard thing to categorize, and each new revelation makes it even harder. This episode of DTF St. Louis sees our intrepid investigators Donahue Homer (amazing name) and Jodie Plumb dig deeper into the nature of this unusual arrangement, while flashbacks show us things even the detectives don’t yet know. The result is a portrait of people who grow more interesting to look at by the week.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of DTF St. Louis for Decider.

This episode — like every episode of this show — takes big, bold swings at the risk of seeming silly. It assumes, correctly, that the reward is worth the risk. Satisfyingly ludicrous sci-fi twists walk arm in arm with Cameron Britton and Julianne Nicholson’s marvelous acting. Cal Bradford’s comic relief is offset by Xavier and Teri hugging in the sunlight, and Sinatra extending her hand into that same sunlight, for the first time in years, a continent away. Moments of real power and poetry — and politics, with Link laying into billionaires like Sinatra for destroying the planet they now purport to save, or Cal laying out the exact way America’s empire is currently collapsing from its own false sense of permanence — illuminating an entire moon of cheese. Every show should go this hard or go home.

I reviewed this week’s Paradise for Decider.

At the end of the day, Carol is sitting exhausted in the backyard when Floyd comes over to tell her the umpire outfit is a turnoff. Then the landscapers that Floyd promised to cancel because they can no longer afford them show up, leaf blowers roaring. The tears that were already flowing from Carol’s eyes devolve into full-blown sobbing. She can’t count on this man for anything. Do nice guys finish last? Who can say — but the women who marry them sure do, from where Carol is sitting. The overall effect of the scene is like watching someone get punched, hard, while they’re already down for the count.

All this happens before the opening titles. It’s a knockout cold open, one which takes the drama’s least sympathetic character and reframes the story from her perspective. Now we see why the officious, mendacious, successful, put-together Clark seemed like not just a breath of fresh air but an actual lifeline for Carol, and why lovable loser Floyd was only sporadically lovable where Carol is concerned. 

And this is just one of several truly masterful sequences in this episode, which moves from strength to strength. 

I reviewed this week’s DTF St. Louis for Decider.

Monarch is hardly the first franchise effort to use its genre elements to explore family, but the absence of any kind of superheroic or chosen-one mantle to be passed from one generation to the next allows the show to focus more on what matters. Few of us are going to view what our families bequeath to us as a cape and cowl or a mighty ancestral sword, even if we are generally happy with them. It’s more likely that it’s like the Randas — setting an fine example in some ways and a poor one in others, passing on their genius and their dedication to others, but also their fixations and obsessions and hubris. 

In your case or mine, we might inherit heart disease, or a likelihood of cancer, or a treatment-resistant mental illness, or outright abuse. In the Randas’ case, they inherit the ability to set loose the beasts of the apocalypse. But when you’re there in the heat of the moment, dealing with your own family fallout, it really can feel like the world is ending.

I reviewed this week’s Monarch for Decider.

Jane herself is a case in point. I’m not convinced a person like her has ever existed in the real world; the character is often an awkward fit in a show so focused on intensely expressed but relatable human emotion. That said, here’s a woman who’s working out her mommy issues by giving one surrogate mother a man’s severed penis as a present and serving as Sinatra’s hired gun — while also holding up her hair to pay herself compliments in Sinatra’s voice, in a long and smartly framed mirror shot that had me saying “Welp, they got me again, goddammit.”

In fact, Jane takes the gun part of hired gun very seriously. “I’m a killer. It’s what I’ve always been: a weapon,” she says. “People I respect aim me, and I execute for them. To serve my purpose, I need someone like you.” A living weapon that other people aim? Talk about self-objectification. This is what she meant when she told Sinatra “you’re no good to me dead” after she shooting her in the chest (to keep Xavier from shooting her in the head). At least that’s Jane’s convincing, and vaguely kinky, explanation. You could say she wants Sinatra’s finger to remain on her trigger. Ahem. 

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

“Floyd was wonderful.” Clark Forrest is insistent on this point. He says so twice, one time adding “and I would never hurt him.” Why? Because he loved him. He loved him “like the sun when you’re cold, water when you really need water.” He loved him more than he loved Carol. “Floyd was wonderful.”

And you know what? He was. If this episode of DTF St. Louis establishes nothing else, it makes it clear that Floyd Smernitch was, in fact, wonderful. Time and again, in circumstance after circumstance, his foremost concern, really his only concern, is making life better for people. Which he did, for a lot of people, Clark Forrest included.

I reviewed this week’s DTF St. Louis for Decider.

It’s Cate’s first moment this season that’s truly commensurate with actor Anna Sawai’s talent. She has an easy, convincing sexual chemistry with her ex. Her the world is ending, might as well party bravado curdles into open self-loathing in an admirably ugly way. Just from the bottomed-out way she looks at the ruins of the bridge where she lost so many children to Godzilla, she makes the emotional cost of living in a world overrun with monsters feel real to us. Of course, it isn’t hard to relate to a woman living in world overrun with monsters these days.

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

Paradise’s second season is a fascinating thing to observe. A radical departure from the original season’s structure as well as a dramatic expansion of its scope, it keeps introducing new characters not as cameos, but as load-bearing features of the narrative and members of the cast. Even if Gary winds up lasting no longer than Annie — actually, especially if he lasts no longer than she did — it’s an illustration of Dan Fogelman and company’s confidence in their own abilities. (I dunno about you, but it helps that I like Annie and Gary more than just about anyone let down there in the bunker. Woodley and Britton made sure of that.)

I reviewed today’s episode of Paradise for Decider.

Big spectacular images and keenly observed human emotions don’t clash, they harmonize. When your television show juxtaposes nuanced depictions of love and lust with grand-scale visuals that cause the viewer to ooh and ahh in awe, it makes an implicit connection between the two. Those feelings may be trapped inside two or three human beings, but the magic of cinema allows them to be represented on camera in allegorical form anyway. 

Industry and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, to name two shows of recent vintage, both do this in very different ways: Industry through druggy nightlife psychedelia and ostentatious Kubrickian shot compositions, Monarch through, well, King Kong and Godzilla. But I can’t think of a show that’s explored sexuality with the frankness of the former or romance with the rapture of the latter. (No, seriously, the King Kong/Godzilla show is romantic as hell.) Industry’s “Blinded by the Lights” London vistas and Monarch’s colossal monster attacks visually represent the emotional stakes.

Unlikely though it may seem, creator-writer-director Steven Conrad’s black comedy about a trio of middle-aged Missourians and the bizarre love triangle that left one of them dead with his beer gut exposed can be added to the list. DTF St. Louis is quickly emerging as one of the most thoughtfully shot shows on TV this year, utilizing brutalist architecture and expressionist lighting and shot compositions to create the sense that something massive is happening, even if it’s just about a bunch of horny people catching feelings and getting killed in a Dateline NBC sort of way.

I reviewed this week’s DTF St. Louis for Decider.

So Vladimir finally, finally, pins her up against the wall. He takes our heroine in his hands, his arms. He throws her around the cabin, kissing her hard, telling her all the things he’s wished he could have done to her throughout their times together. Everything he does matches the fantasy snippets we’ve been seeing in her mind’s eye. These weren’t just fantasies, they were prophecies.

The result is an incredibly hot sex scene. It works because it pays off every last bit of anticipation we’ve experienced all season long. It achieves catharsis through sex just as surely as the final battles in shows like Chief of War and Last Samurai Standing and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms offer explosive emotional climaxes through violence. All of it is driven by Vladimir’s vocalized desire, and the narrator’s vocalized enjoyment. “Oh my God! Oh Jesus! Oh fuck!” she exclaims with each of Vladimir’s moves and maneuvers. She is absolutely transported by all this. When he finally penetrates her she orgasms instantly. Her dream has literally come true.

I reviewed the series finale of Vladimir for Decider.

Pop quiz, hotshot: Does the protagonist of Vladimir want to have sex with the title character? Think carefully before you answer. I know what it looks like, I know what she says and thinks she wants, but does she really want it? Like, really?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Vladimir for Decider

It’s 2026, and academia is under direct threat by the might of the United States government itself. An entire political party has sworn to destroy it. The Department of Education has been illegally dismantled. The most prestigious universities in the country are being shaken down for billion-dollar bribes. Public universities in red states are being turned into dark-age propaganda mills. Professors and students are being hounded and arrested for having the wrong views. Cancel culture exists, alright, but it has nothing to do with squeamish students who use they/the pronouns. The very people who decried censorship on campus are now working round the clock to destroy campus life altogether. Seen in that light, Vladimir is kinda fighting yesterday’s battle here.

I say all that mostly just to get it down on paper and out of the way, because I don’t think Vladimir can be dismissed as a didactic swipe at political correctness or what have you. The people making those arguments, John and Sid and the narrator, are not terribly sympathetic characters. Oh, they’re likeable, very much so. I especially want to shout out Ellen Robertson as Sid, the high-powered lawyer with the fashion sense and impulse control of a 15-year-old boy, who’s in there doing three-person work with Rachel Weisz and John Slattery and feels every bit as compelling and entertaining on screen. But if you told their story to your friends, your friends would take the other people’s side, guaranteed. This isn’t to say they don’t have valid points, however! It’s complicated!

Vladimir trusts you to be smart enough to properly weigh the advice of infantile people who are arguing that adults should not infantilize themselves. The narrator’s lust for Vladimir grants her keen insight into how human beings work behind closed doors and within their own minds, but it also clouds her judgment. Enough to chain Vladimir to a chair? It seems we’ll soon find out.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Vladimir for Decider.

It’s fascinating and funny to watch sex, not even the reality of it but the imagined promise of it, turn the narrator into the proverbial Absent-Minded Professor. She’s a fine educator by all accounts, and a fine writer too. But she neglects her duties, her students, her own standards, and basic professional due diligence in her pursuit of falling into Vladimir’s loving, muscle-corded arms. 

And let’s say you sympathize with her as both a sexual being as an educator of students who are, ultimately, sexual beings themselves. Maybe you’re thinking “How dare they make an example of this woman for saying the embraces in Edith Wharton novels are a metaphor for the female anatomy or whatever? They are! Grow up!” Maybe you’re think it’s like the misleadingly edited takedown in Tàr, in other words, a work that looms large over this one despite its much different, more dour tone. 

But it’s about more than that, isn’t it? Her egregious apology to Lila, her neglect of a student she’s advising, her theft of a scholarship file — there’s no possible pedagogical or sociopolitical justification for any of that. And her continued support of John neglects the fact that conduct may be legal and even fully consensual, but still sleazy and stupid and unbecoming of an educator. Ironically, understanding this requires the kind of nuance she asks of the students she wants to forgive her. 

I reviewed episode 5 of Vladimir for Decider.

If the monsters are Monarch’s muscle and its chance to show off its imaginative mind, the characters’ relationships are the show’s big soft heart. It’s beating loud and clear here. Takehiro Hira is a quiet MVP as Hiroshi Randa, a man forced to justify to his children why they come from two separate families he kept secret from one another — one where his wife was a coworker and confidante and one where he could leave that world behind. Meanwhile, he’s able to reunite with his mother, who’s barely aged since he last saw her when he was a boy. His life is…complicated.

Equally complicated are the feelings of young Lee Shaw when he hears Kei describe her relationship with his best friend, Billy. She says he’s a far better husband to her even than her son Hiroshi’s father, the sainted doctor who died treating victims of the atomic bomb. Lee knows he shouldn’t begrudge his friends that kind of love, but one look at his face is all it takes to know it hurts him badly all the same.

It makes you appreciate the effort that went into ensuring that the human elements of the show could hold your interest between monster attacks. If both remain exactly as good all season long as they are this episode, then the Great God of the Sea has truly blessed us with a bountiful catch.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.

There are a couple of interesting reversals from the norm at work here. Obviously there’s the fact that both Vladimir and the professor have spouses who more or less endorse them stepping out.. But on top of that, only one of the two marriages involved can even be said to be unhappy. Vladimir and Cynthia are struggling, but John and the narrator are basically rock solid. 

Even through his scandal and suspension, she’s on his side, as both a practical matter and a matter of principle. She and John clearly love each other — and lust for each other, however horny they are for other people — and want each other to be happy. Their marriage is open, not on the rocks. That’s not a dynamic you often see explored in TV shows about extramarital affairs. (The bit where she slashes the deer net protecting his precious vegetable garden out of frustration is a bit more of what you’d expect.)

I reviewed the fourth episode of Vladimir for Decider.

A fascinating frisson arises from all this. We’re seeing everything through the professor’s eyes, so Vladimir comes across like a misunderstood dreamboat genius being neglected by his standoffish wife. But he can just as easily be described as a gym-bod literature bro who’s clearly thinking about stepping out on the mentally ill woman who nearly lost her life to postpartum depression while raising their toddler. That makes him sound a whole lot less sympathetic.

But such is the power of the professor’s gaze that we can feel what it’s like to ignore the red flags. The professor is so twitterpated by this guy — I feel like I could recreate his calf muscles from memory after watching the narrator watch him run — that even as you watch her neglect or mess up nearly every aspect of her life, you get it. Considering that this all ends with a man chained to a chair, I wonder just how long Vladimir can make us see things through our heroine’s besotted eyes.

I reviewed episode 3 of Vladimir for Decider.