But in the end, I enjoyed the bulk of my time in Ozark’s world. Clearly positioned as Netflix’s answer to the canonical prestive-TV crime dramas, it succeeded in creating a visually distinct world peopled with compellingly broken characters. With the exception of a Ben Davis here and a Ruth Langmore there, it never quite held the incandescent power of those earlier shows in its hands. But I appreciate the boldness of its core performances—Jason Bateman as the perpetually scowling Marty, Laura Linney as the crescendoingly dangerous Wendy, Julia Garner as the raw nerve that was Ruth Langmore. And I respect its bleak outlook, never bleaker than here in the finale—a view of a fallen world. Welcome to Ozark Country, population: us.

I reviewed the series finale of Ozark for Decider.

I’m starting to wonder if, in the end, we’ll look back at Ozark as primarily Wendy’s story rather than Marty’s or even Ruth’s. I wonder if watching her American dream completely fall to pieces, scattering dead bodies all along the way, is the whole point.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Ozark for Decider.

“I know I’m not easy to love,” Wendy Byrde tells her husband Marty.

Long pause.

“…That’s not true,” he finally says.

But it’s the pause that does the talking here. I do believe Marty still loves Wendy, in that bone-deep way that people who’ve thrown their lot in together do—despite their bitter disagreements, despite their enmeshment in criminal conspiracy after criminal conspiracy, despite their constant life-and-death danger. Or maybe not despite them, but because of them. Hard though Wendy may be to love, I can’t see Marty taking her up on her suggestion that, after it’s all said and done, she’ll understand if he leaves her. They’re simply in too deep together. And in Ozark Season 4 Episode 12 (“Trouble the Water”) may well be where they finally start drowning.

I reviewed the antepenultimate episode of Ozark for Decider.

There’s other business to attend to in this episode, of course—Wendy and Camila attempting to force Claire Shaw to uphold her end of the old deal with Javi, Ruth getting declared Wyatt Langmore’s heir and thus the inheritor of a large portion of Darlene Snell’s holdings, FBI SAC Hannah Clay (Tess Malis Kincaid) trying to force Marty to remain in charge of the cartel—but I’ll freely admit to being most fascinated by the return of Rachel and Wilkes. These once-and-future main characters, seemingly swept aside for others, are now being put back in play for the show’s endgame. What will their moves at this late stage mean for the game at large? I have no idea—and that’s a thrilling place to be. More shows should leave the viewers guessing like this, I say. Bring it on.

I reviewed Ozark Season 4 Episode 11 for Decider.

Two momentous developments bookend Ozark Season 4 Episode 10. Both feature members of Wendy Byrde’s family. Both involve executions. But beyond that, they couldn’t be more different. It’s a hell of a parallel that writer John Shiban and director Melissa Hickey construct here, first showing us how a decent person dies, then how a deeply compromised person kills.

I reviewed Ozark Season 4 Episode 10 for Decider.

It’s business as usual in Ozark country. After a killer mid-season premiere that effectively functioned as an interlude based on a single plot point—the murder of Javi Elizondro by Ruth Langmore, in response to his murder of her cousin Wyatt—the show has returned to the status quo ante. Tense phone calls, shifting loyalties, last-second business deals, lots of characters driving back and forth to talk to other characters for two minutes or less: The tropes that have made Ozark what it is, for better and for worse, are back with a vengeance.

I reviewed Ozark Season 4 Episode 9 for Decider.

Ruth Langmore behind the wheel of her truck. Ruth Langmore standing in the middle of a country road. Ruth Langmore sitting atop her trailer. Ruth Langmore listening to music and sipping coffee in a diner. Ruth Langmore following Wendy and Marty Byrde. Ruth Langmore crying in an underground parking lot after shooting a man to death.

You could practically reconstruct the plot of Ozark Season 4’s mid-season premiere (“The Cousin of Death”) from lingering closeups of Ruth Langmore alone. Writer/showrunner Chris Mundy and director Amanda Marsalis know what a weapon they have in the form of actor Julia Garner—I’ve waxed rhapsodic about her myself, multiple times—and in this pivotal episode from the show’s final season, they’re firing at will. Even aside from the repeated use of lengthy shots of nothing but her face, this whole hour is a star turn for Garner, and a turning point in the life of the character she plays.

I’m covering Ozark‘s final episodes for Decider, starting with my review of the mid-season premiere.

My main critical takeaway from this episode (“Rightful Place”)—as was the case with the first half of the two-episode premiere, this installment was written by showrunner Dustin Lance Black and directed by David Mackenzie—is how ultimately pathetic the behavior and motives of the Lafferty brothers really are. Wyatt Russell, in particular, is a perfect choice for would-be “man of the house” Dan; his snot-nosed “you think you’re better than me?!?!” performance here echoes his similar work as the replacement Captain America in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, of all things. (I wasn’t nuts about that Disney/Marvel show, but Russell was well cast, that’s for sure.) There’s a brilliant bit where he insults a client, then says “you can say that twice!”, then literally says it a second time. As for Robin, Seth Numrich gives him the air of an inveterate second banana, so determined to make a life for himself as Dan’s father-appointed right hand man that he’s called down the Word of God itself to justify his conduct. The fact that he’s grown a shaggy beard, prophet-style, shows just how far he and his kin have drifted from the conservative but straight-laced beliefs of their father. This generation wants to be seen as different from the norm.

All in all, it’s another compelling glimpse into the secret life of America, fueled by faith and resentment in equal parts. Good thing we’ve moved past all that, huh?

I reviewed the second episode of Under the Banner of Heaven for Decider.

Whatever the case, the story makes for fine true-crime television so far. Part of that is down to the casting, which is uniformly excellent. There’s a sort of echo between Andrew Garfield as Jeb and Daisy Edgar-Jones as Brenda, for example—they both seem like affable, guy/girl-next-door types, which helps root the awful circumstances of the story in an “it can happen here” way. Christopher Heyerdahl, who played a terrifying religious fanatic in Them, brings some of that dark fire with him here as Ammon, a guy who looks extremely unpleasant if you’re on his bad side. I liked Wyatt Russell’s smarmy smile as favored son Dan and Sam Worthington’s barely repressed emotion as passed-over Ron. Even a stock detective character like Taba is invested with verve and vigor by Gil Birmingham.

Aside from the cast, Under the Banner of Heaven distinguished itself so far with its use of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them snatches of flashbacks, often lit brightly by the sun as if in contrast with the night work of the detectives. This is how we see the story of Joseph Smith unfold as Allen narrates it; the cross-cutting between historical figures and the modern-day plot (which echoes the structure of Jon Krakauer’s original book) and between recent and distant memories takes on an almost hallucinatory rhythm at times.

I’m covering Under the Banner of Heaven for Decider, starting with my review of the first half of the show’s two-part premiere.

The question, I suppose, is this: Is it so bad that the show ends this way? If you were looking for a happy ending, then sure, it’s a bummer. But the counterargument, that individual virtue and skill are not enough to stem systemic injustices, is a strong one, and it’s powerfully made here. It may not be the ultimately upbeat tale of a cub reporter exposing wrongdoing that the show promised to be early on, but that may not be a bad thing in the end. After all, it’s the job of a journalist to tell the truth, and sometimes that truth is ugly indeed.

I reviewed the puzzling finale of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

An episode like this serves as a good reminder that the show has a secret weapon on its side: the casting of Oscar Isaac as its hero. Isaac has to be equally at home screaming and sobbing from the sudden intrusion of deeply traumatic childhood memories and talking to a CGI hippopotamus woman; he has to play both his Marc and Steven personalities, holding conversations between the two of them thanks to a little movie magic; that split has to be played for laughs, for pathos, and for mind-warping reality-shifting superhero antics. Isaac makes it all look easy.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Moon Knight for Decider.

How deep does that villainy go? There’s the rub, with the show and with [David] Simon’s work as a whole. Starting with The Wire, Simon opened a lot of eyes to the rank brutality, corruption, and racism of the War on Drugs, and for that he is to be commended. But…well, let’s quote from the blurb HBO PR attached to advance screeners of the show: “We Own This City chronicles…the corruption and moral collapse that befell an American city in which the policies of drug prohibition and mass arrest were championed at the expense of actual police work.” This presupposes, of course, that somewhere out there exists “actual police work” divorced from these cruel, classist, and racist policies; it ignores the possibility that cruelty, classism, and racism are in fact the real work that the institution of policing exists to do. For all his fire and brimstone, Simon is a garden-variety cop-respecting Bernie-bashing solidarity-undermining centrist in many respects; he doesn’t question bedrock supposition that policing is, at its heart, pretty good, and could perhaps be made to be pretty good overall. So, as you did in The Wire, you’re going to see a few heroic cops fighting to reform the system from within, shoring up the romantic ideal of police work even as the show purports to undermine that ideal.

I’m covering We Own This City for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

“I do it despite the indifference,” says Jake Adelstein’s editor, Emi, “because somebody has to tell the truth. Someone has to build the wall of information, brick by brick, story by story, until the facts cannot be ignored, and then things have to change.” Ah, were we ever so young?

Perhaps Tokyo Vice’s greatest strength, as well as its greatest flaw, is its faith in journalism as a means of fighting corruption and criminality. It’s very hard, in the year of our Lord 2022, to look around and think that journalism has done much of anything with regards to fighting off the wolves at the door. If anything, the workaday venality and vice among the political class that journalism has exposed over the past six years has almost reached the level of white noise, easily tuned out. Always there are new horrors, and always those horrors are met with a shrug, a “wish there was something we could do, but….”

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

This episode of Tokyo Vice, written by Jessica Brickman and directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka, is one of my favorites so far. It has a biting sense of humor, like when Jake approaches Tozawa’s mistress and says “One of Tozawa’s mistresses went missing because she spoke to the press—would you care to comment?” It delivers a Godfather-worthy meeting of mob bosses. It plays with lighting in a beautiful way: the dim recesses of the car in which Ishida passes his intel to Jake, the lovely blue light when Sato picks Samantha up after work, the lurid pink-red when her friend Polina gets wasted on the dime of her club-owner boyfriend, that dazzling green mirror backdrop at Samantha’s club.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

We’re now two thirds of the way into Moon Knight, and the show’s strengths are self-evident. No, there’s no cool superheroic death-defying Moon Knight action in this ep, and Khonshu is out of the picture as well. But you’ve still got Oscar Isaac’s charming performance as both nebbishy Steven and deadly serious Marc. There’s still inventively staged action—Layla really makes the most of her collection of flares throughout, at one point stabbing a lit flare into a zombie’s eye. And the show is aware enough of its pulpy B-movie/syndicated-TV roots to make a joke about it in the form of that Tomb Buster video. There’s even a little mystery about the identity of Marc’s old traitorous partner, though the odds are certainly stacked in favor of Harrow himself.

Is Moon Knight going to reinvent the genre? No. Is it going to rise to the emotional heights of the better ex-Netflix Marvel shows? I doubt it. Does it need to do either of these things to be an enjoyable action-adventure series? Not as far as I’m concerned!

I reviewed today’s episode of Moon Knight for Decider.

It seems like a good time to take stock of Tokyo Vice as a whole. Adelstein makes a lot more sense as a character than he did at the start, and that goes a long way. A little action never hurt a crime drama either. But there’s definitely a sense that the mystery aspect of the story is a bit too easy to suss out—seriously, who else but Kume could have been the mole inside Ishida’s organization? And certain character beats, like Jake’s phone call to his oh-so-concerned mother (Jessica Hecht), feel really paint-by-numbers.

That said, this is still a stylish crime drama in a fancy and exotic milieu, involving secretive criminal organizations, cynical cops, and idealistic reporters. These basic components are sort of hard to screw up unless you’re, like, trying really hard. It may not make for remarkable television, but watchable television? You bet. I’m looking forward to next week’s double dose of episodes, to see if it rises or sinks from here.

I reviewed episode five of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

It begins with a fantasy. As a cover of “Fly Me to the Moon” plays, as if we’re watching an old bootleg of Neon Genesis Evangelion, a resplendent Samantha descends into the high-end hostess club she’s opened. Her old coworkers preside over the place like respected courtesans. Everything is golden and gorgeous. 

Then the fantasy ends, and we find Samantha in a vacant building she plans to buy and convert into the club of her dreams. Will she get there? I’d say Tokyo Vice is ambivalent about her chances. This episode (Episode 4, “I Want It That Way”) is in large part about the gulf between what we want, and what we get.

I reviewed episode four of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

We’re now fully halfway through Moon Knight’s short six-episode run, and by now it’s pretty clear what the show’s real selling points are: Oscar Isaac as our troubled hero, and F. Murray Abraham as the voice of the surly, petty god who powers him. Isaac plays Mark Spector as a straight-down-the-middle action hero in the Jason Bourne vein…then switches gears to play Steven Grant as a refugee from some unmade British slapstick remake of Night at the Museum. All the while he has Abraham’s booming voice in his ear, making demands and doing freaky shit with the sky. It’s a hoot.

That said, the fight choreography is a mixed bag, especially for a series that sold itself on being sort of a return to the grim and gritty combat of the old Marvel/Netflix shows. It’s not that the rooftop knife fight that opened the episode or the spear battle near its conclusion were bad, per se; I just don’t see them sticking in my memory. This, of course, is a pitfall for nearly all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s products—full of sound and fury, but weightless in the end.

Ah well. Even if I weren’t getting paid to watch it, I’d stick with Moon Knight on the strength of Oscar Isaac’s unusual star turn and the extremely cool-looking superheroic power of his costume. And at a scant six episodes, it’s a very small time investment relatively speaking; fighting aside, one advantage this show has over its lengthier Daredevil-style antecedents is that there will be no room for the dreaded Netflix Bloat. For now, at least, the Fist of Khonshu still has me in its grip.

I reviewed today’s episode of Moon Knight for Decider.

For me, the show is at its most interesting at its most granular; the details matter as much as the big picture. I enjoyed Adelstein and Samantha talking about manga. (She recommends Dragon Head and 20th Century Boys, recommendations I happily second.) I enjoyed, if that’s the right word for it, Tin Tin’s disclosure that people in Japan tend to commit suicide by fire in public so that their families won’t face legal repercussions from their landlords for damaging their apartments. I enjoyed the demure way Sato averted his gaze when Samantha tried on the dress he picked out for her, even if he immediately reneges on the gift.

I enjoyed that our first glimpse of maniac tough guy Tozawa involves a prostate exam. I enjoyed seeing Jake’s editor Emi work on murder cases in between getting berated by her Korean husband. I enjoyed the off-hand disclosure by Jake that the medical condition plaguing his kid sister was a suicide attempt. I enjoyed seeing Sato and his superior, Kume, steal a bunch of dresses right off the racks just because they could. (It reminded me of that Sopranos subplot where Tony and Christopher steal a bunch of booze off a biker gang just for shits and giggles.)

And it stands to reason that details like these stick out. If Adelstein’s mission statement means anything, it certainly means that the details matter at least as much as the big picture; without details, there wouldn’t be a big picture to begin with. Here’s hoping the show continues going down this direction when the next pair of episodes drop next week.

I reviewed the third episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

Tokyo Vice has largely been sold to the world as a Michael Mann joint, but the director of Heat and Manhunter was only behind the camera for the premiere. Where does that leave us now? In a surprisingly strong place. This episode does a lot to alleviate many of the concerns I had about Ansel Elgort as the show’s leading man, and thus about the show itself. (No, not all of the concerns, obviously, not by a long shot.)

For one thing, Elgort’s character Jake Adelstein spends a lot of the episode laughing, smiling, busting the balls of his coworkers, striking up a conversation with a yakuza soldier by comparing their sneakers, riding around on a bicycle like an overgrown kid. He just seems like a much livelier, more youthful character in this outing, and it makes the story that much more believable.

I reviewed the second episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.