Cal, Faye, and Cassie really get dunked on in particular, but Nate is portrayed as a sweaty loser and Jules as a vaguely sinister femme fatale, while neither Maddy nor Rue’s behavior makes you particularly fond of them. The OnlyFans shoots are horny as hell, the language is laden with bad guy–appropriate slurs, a pig shits live on camera, Chloe Cherry groans about someone’s big cock in front of a swastika flag, on and on it goes.

Is it shock for shock’s sake? Admittedly I’m mostly with Cassie on these things as a matter of principle: When a friend of hers tells her that people are into sick shit, she replies “I know, right??” with audible excitement. Hell yeah, sister! That said, when you remove these characters from the supposedly sacrosanct setting of adolescence, it really does change everything. Rue and her friends are no longer teen tragedies, they’re just adult assholes. 

But that’s the point. What’s really shocking in an era when many fans judge the quality of a show by how good it makes their favorite characters look? All these people are assholes. Their experiences didn’t make them wiser, they made them more cunning. They are eager to exploit and willing to be exploited. That sucks. They suck. And that’s good television.

I reviewed this week’s hilariously mean-spirited episode of Euphoria for Decider.

For the first time all season long, the monsters of Monarch have stolen main-character status from the human beings. Featuring a big appearance by Godzilla himself, some impressively disgusting egg-laying visuals, and a recognizable emotional plight for Titan X to endure, this week’s episode shifts the focus from star-crossed romance to, well, monsters punching each other. In that respect, it’s a fun one. 

I reviewed last week’s characteristically spiffy Monarch for Decider.

“The beginning of a story, when you start to read it, is like a first date. You hope that from the opening lines, the magic will happen, and that you will sink into the narrative like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely. That’s what you want: for the author to come right up to you in the dark of your twisted mind and kiss you on the throat.”

Putting narration like this in the opening minutes of your brand new show is either very brave or very foolish. Using the voice of title character Margo Millet — English major, aspiring writer, and (as of the end of this premiere) single mother — writer-creator David E. Kelley is laying out the criteria by which the audience can evaluate the opening of his own show. By the time the closing credits roll, you can think back to Margo’s words and judge the quality of what you’ve watched.

Did it feel like a great first date? Did the magic happen? Did you sink into a hot narrative bath, like Margo herself sinks into an actual bath later on? Did Margo’s Got Money Troubles come up to you in the dark of your twisted mind and kiss you on the throat?

Well, no. 

I’m covering Margo’s Got Money Troubles for Decider, starting with my review of the uneven series premiere, one of three episodes that were released last week. Expect my other reviews up shortly after a back-end backlog!

Euphoria is lurid, overheated, violent, fetishistic, hyper-stylized, cynical, sentimental, melodramatic, druggy dirtbag action trash, so of course I love it. But it’s not hard to see why this has come to be the position of an increasingly beleaguered minority. Even putting aside the show’s lengthy-for-a-million-reasons absence from screens and writer-director-creator Sam Levinson’s “where there’s smoke, there’s…well, there’s smoke” air of disreputability, one need look no further than Stranger Things to see how critical fortunes can shift when the stars of a high-school drama age up. That show still at least pretended to be set during high school. What is Euphoria now?

I reviewed the season premiere of Euphoria for Decider.

“Disco deserved a better name, a beautiful name, because it was a beautiful art form. It made the consumer beautiful. The consumer was the star.” 

Reading these words changed my life. I was a sophomore in college and very much arrayed against any kind of mainstream music when I happened to pick up the loose liner notes for a Barry White best-of compilation one of my roommates had lying around. All my life disco had represented everything cheesy and plastic about popular music — until I read what Barry said.

Suddenly it all clicked for me. What used to come across as phony about disco now felt to me like the utmost sincerity. Love really is that powerful. Dancing really is that wonderful. The night really is that magical. Disco is designed to make you feel good things in as big a way as possible. It makes you beautiful.

This revelation opened up a mind that had been closed to vast swathes of artistic expression. It also made me just about lose my mind when DTF St. Louis writer/director/creator Steven Conrad selected my favorite Barry White song, “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More, Baby,” to soundtrack the climactic underwear-only dance party between Clark Forrest and Floyd Smernitch. I’m serious, I threw my hands up in the air so fast I spilled a beverage. I love this music. As it turns out, I think I love these men, too.

I reviewed the finale of DTF St. Louis, an extraordinary show and one of the year’s best, for Decider.

This season of Daredevil: Born Again feels like it plays out in the mind of The Pitt’s ferocious charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherin LaNasa) after watching Jesse get dragged away in zip-ties. The Pitt depicts the frustrating reality; Daredevil: Born Again is the dreamworld version, and as such it’s where dreams of justice can come true. No one here — certainly not me, and I don’t think anyone making either show — is under the impression that television is enough. Nor does the fact that Daredevil can kick the secret police in the teeth while Dr. Robby can’t make Born Again a more radical or more important work. But Daredevil demonstrates that with sufficient talent and courage behind the camera, even corporate superheroes can use their larger-than-life spectacle to express emotions we otherwise can’t. It’s amazing what you can get away with when you wear a mask.

I wrote about how The Pitt and Daredevil: Born Again each handle the ICE Age for Decider.

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.