“It will all work out, Raych.”

“Everything is dying.”

“That doesn’t mean it won’t all work out.”

That, in a nutshell, is Foundation, the new science fiction series from creators David S. Goyer (the journeyman genre storyteller of Dark Knight Trilogy fame) and Josh Friedman. Adapted—in some cases very loosely—from the landmark series of novels by sci-fi godhead Isaac Asimov, Foundation is a story about people anticipating the greatest calamity ever to befall humankind, and choosing to look at it as a glass-half-full situation.

I’m covering Foundation for Decider this season, starting with my review of the series premiere.

One thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around, in terms of the show’s status as horror, is its willingness to tug on the heartstrings like a weepy primetime soap. I’m perfectly fine with, say, the lengthy pair of monologues in which Riley and Erin outline their different ideas about what happens after we die, with Riley celebrating his eventual dispersal into the ecosystem and thence to oblivion while Erin imagines an afterlife for her disappeared daughter (very firmly a daughter in her mind, though the doctor never ascertained the sex of the baby) in which she is surrounded by love and never alone. I have a harder time with it when it’s underlaid with syrupy music designed to make us feel a certain way about all of it. Think of how much more engaging, riveting even, it would have been had these monologues passed in silence, leaving the words to rise or fall on their own strength.

Other than that, the show’s biggest problem remains Bev Keane. I don’t know how else to put it: This character is dead weight. She’s pure self-righteousness, pure zealotry, pure petty cruelty, pure obnoxiousness—a brick wall where someone who really lives and breathes on the page and on the screen could have been placed. Did you have any doubt in your mind that she’d become more of an acolyte and defender of Father Paul/Msgr. John when she discovered he’d murdered someone? Did you have any doubt she’d cow relatively soft figures like the handyman and the mayor into obedience, as if they were mere schoolchildren? It’s such a boring dynamic! Every second with her is wasted.

I reviewed episode four of Midnight Mass for Decider.

There’s something extraordinary about the third episode of Midnight Mass—and no, I don’t mean the ending. It’s the performance of Hamish Linklater as “Father Paul Hill,” the…villain of the piece? Or the hero? Or just some poor deluded sap who’s about as wrong as wrong can be about the horror he’s unearthed?

Anyway, long before we see what happened to his “predecessor” Monsignor John Pruitt in a buried desert ruin half a world away, we see a lot of sides of Father Paul. We see a priest asking God for forgiveness for the lies he’s about to tell his congregation. We see a man struggling to deal with a secret illness. We see a preacher delivering the kind of homily that sends you away from Mass thinking “Wow, he was really onto something,” at least until he collapses from exhaustion.

We see the leader of an AA meeting, calling bullshit on Riley Flynn’s recalcitrance around the group’s new third member Joe Collie, disarming the atheistic cynic with his warm but unyielding voice.

In short, we see, ironically as it turns out, just about the most realistic portrayal of a priest I’ve ever seen on TV. Linklater absolutely nails it: the soft vocal cadence, the paradoxically ostentatious humility, the ability to weave God in and out of conversation with members of the congregation, the dark secret locked away.

I reviewed episode three of Midnight Mass for Decider.

The second episode of Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass begins with an uninterrupted, seven-minute-long shot of its cast of characters surrounded by dead cats. They walk, they talk, they investigate, they speculate, they come together and drift away, and all the while seagulls flock to the stretch of beach they inhabit, picking away at the hundreds of slaughtered stray cats that have washed ashore on Crockett Island. As long takes go, it’s not especially noteworthy—it’s not as eventful as, say, that endless shootout from season one of True Detective, and it’s not as still as the out-of-nowhere egg-cooking scene from last week’s episode of Billions. But you have to respect Flanagan for plopping us down amid a mountain of cat corpses and allowing us to linger there, long after most shows would have looked away.

I reviewed episode two of Midnight Mass for Decider.

“Whatever walked there, walked together.” With that sentence, writer-director-horror impresario Mike Flanagan converted The Haunting of Hill House, author Shirley Jackson’s scabrously bleak meditation on the fundamental isolation of being human, into some sort of hymn to the power of family. As an admirer of the original novel, I must confess this is where I tapped out of Flanagan’s work altogether. I just couldn’t forgive so deliberate a missing-of-the-point, no matter how much praise Ouija: Origin of Evil may have received.

So his latest Netflix project, Midnight Mass, is a bit of a hard sell, even if some of its elements—isolated island, charismatic and possibly evil priest, cat-eating vampires—are right up my alley. Can it transcend its creator’s tendency toward treacly sentimentality and let the scares do the talking?

I’m covering Mike Flanagan’s new show Midnight Mass for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Camp icon Matt Drudge? That’s certainly one takeaway from the third episode of Impeachment: American Crime Story (“Not to Be Believed”). As played by comedian Billy Eichner, the enfant terrible of Internet muckraking is painted as a poseur, a (euphemistcally) flamboyant, self-consciously self-styled hardboiled reporter whose persona stems as much from a love of the Golden Age of Hollywood and its chief gossip Walter Winchell as it does from his right-leaning politics or any actual affinity for journalism. Here, he’s the forerunner of a million online dorks in fedoras, settling grudges and talking shit. He just so happens to be a major figure in a plot to take down the President of the United States, is all.

I reviewed the third episode of ACS Impeachment, which I enjoy more with each new installment, for Decider.

Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is most famous for the scene in which Robert De Niro’s rapidly disintegrating title character, Travis Bickle, looks at his reflection in the mirror and asks “Are you talkin’ to me?”, but this isn’t the only pane of glass into which Bickle gazes. During his disintegration, he also watches television. He stares at the tube, gun in hand, as young couples slow dance on American Bandstand. He slowly tips the TV set over with his foot while watching another young couple address their star-crossed affair on a soap opera, until the TV falls and explodes. He knows he has reacted inappropriately to these displays of romance, but he’s powerless to stop the poisonous feelings they engender in his mind. 

“Damn,” he whispers to himself as he cradles his head in his hands, one of them still clutching a gun. “God damn.” 

I thought about these scenes a lot during this episode of Impeachment: American Crime Story (“The President Kissed Me”), because of a similarly staged scene involving its central character, Linda Tripp. (More on her centrality later.) On Inauguration Day, 1997, she’s at home, while her young friend Monica Lewinsky is dressed to the nines in a stunning red gown, attending the Inaugural Ball. Her teenage daughter gives her shit and mocks her job. Her dinner is some joyless diet concoction, nuked in the microwave. And there on the television are two people she casually loathes, Bill and Hillary Clinton, celebrating their second historic victory. As they dance to Nat “King” Cole’s posthumous duet with his daughter Natalie, the 1990s remix of “Unforgettable,” they beam lovingly into each other’s eyes.

Linda knows this is a sham, knows Bill is having an affair, knows that he habitually can’t keep his hands or other parts to himself. She knows things that can bring the whole Clintonian edifice down. Yet there she is, alone, eating a TV dinner, dodging the insults of her own children, while the world moves on without her. Director Michael Uppendahl, working from a script by showrunner Sarah Burgess, cuts from closeups on Linda to closeups on Bill on the screen, arranging them so it almost looks as if Clinton is staring right into her eyes, teasing her, taunting her. In this moment, you can feel the years of roiling resentment that have built up inside Linda threaten to burst free, as we know they will eventually do, destroying the life of her friend and nearly destroying a president. But for now, like Bickle, all she can do is sit and stare at a world that holds better things than what she’s been given by it. 

Damn, you can all but hear her think. God damn.

I reviewed last night’s episode of ACS Impeachment for Decider.

How do you follow two masterpieces? This is undoubtedly what The Wire would refer to as “one of them good problems,” but for Impeachment: American Crime Story, it’s a problem nonetheless. The first two iterations of superproducer Ryan Murphy’s anthology series, The People v. O.J. Simpson and The Assassination of Gianni Versace, grabbed every third rail of American life they could get ahold of—race, class, gender, sexuality, celebrity, media culture, the nature of truth itself—and welded together near-peerless true-crime dramas out of what they found. (Versace ranks up there on the TV horror scale too, thanks to its central character Andrew Cunanan’s metamorphosis into a serial killer.) Operating under showrunners Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski for O.J. and Tom Rob Smith for Versace, the results were head and shoulders above anything else Murphy has produced. Could another quintessentially ’90s crime saga help Murphy capture lightning in the bottle a third time?

I’m covering Impeachment: American Crime Story for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.

Alongside money, sex and social justice are this iteration of Gossip Girl‘s currency. This is our last episode before a mid-season hiatus, so go ahead and spend it all, I say!

I reviewed the final episode of the new Gossip Girl‘s first batch for Decider.

Spotted: Serena van der Woodsen! Blair Waldorf! Dan Humphrey! Chuck Bass! Nelly Yuki! Well, kind of, anyway. The last original Gossip Girl character on that list makes an appearance in the flesh courtesy of returning actor Yin Chang, playing the all-grown-up editor of New York magazine. The other four? You’re going to have to settle for cosplay. It’s a Halloween episode of Gossip Girl 2.0, you see, and the GG originals are the hottest costumes in town.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Gossip Girl for Decider.

 The show is smart in showing how the ultra-rich perform virtue for the hoi polloi—dredging up old social posts strictly to punish someone under a woke smokescreen (wokescreen?), turning the party designed solely to spite someone into a fundraiser, denouncing bullying immediately after bullying the shit out of someone, and so on. These kids learn about privilege, cancel culture, et cetera only because they can use it to their advantage. For people who were worried Gossip Girl would be humanizing its characters by making them more socially aware than their predecessors, you can stop worrying. It’s just given them a new set of weapons.

I reviewed this week’s episode of the new Gossip Girl for Decider.

Full frontal male nudity! Enthusiastic same-sex make-outs! Underage analingus! Folks, this is not your father’s Gossip Girl! Unless your father is extremely rich and sending you to an elite private school in Manhattan, in which case I suppose it’s very much your father’s Gossip Girl. I wouldn’t let him watch it, though!

I reviewed episode three of the new Gossip Girl for Decider.

Spotted: Gossip Girl changing the parameters of its own show. According to the traditional Kristen Bell voiceover narration that opens each episode, GGv2.0 is now about “the scandalous lives of New York’s elite,” rather than the previous iteration’s focus on Manhattan specifically. Congratulations to Brooklyn, I guess? And maybe Queens, depending on the neighborhood?

I reviewed this week’s episode of Gossip Girl for Decider.

Full disclosure: I watched every single episode of the original Gossip Girl, from the pilot to the finale. I loved pretty much every moment of it, too, the climactic and nonsensical revelation of Gossip Girl’s secret identity aside. (Seriously, if that’s enough to put you off the scandalous misadventures of Manhattan’s elite, you need to calm down.) I even wrote a fanfic comic about the origin of Chuck Bass, for crying out loud. It was my ideal primetime soap. I am what you might call a Gossip Man.

But that was years ago, and we’re all very different people now than we were then, are we not? So I greeted the news that HBO Max was reviving the show for a sequel series with some trepidation. Without the original characters—to say nothing of the cast, all of whom seemed to have names that sounded even snootier than those of the Upper East Siders they were playing (seriously: Leighton Meester! Taylor Momsen! Chace Crawford! Ed Westwick! Blake Lively! Penn Badgely!)—and without its original sociopolitical setting, could a revival thrive?

Based on this pilot episode (“Just Another Girl on the MTA”), I’d say the answer may well be yes. Written by series creator Joshua Safran (a veteran of the original version) and directed by music-video ace Karena Evans, it replaces Serena van der Woodsen, Blair Waldorf, Chuck Bass, and the rest of the original group with a new crew of the young and the consequence-free, then uses a simple but twist-filled structure to set up the big-money backstabbing that’s sure to follow.

Spotted: me, covering the new Gossip Girl reboot for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Mare of Easttown may ultimately go down in history, for me anyway, as “the one where Kate Winslet did a Philly accent,” the same way that a previous prestige-procedural like the acclaimed The Night Of is “the one where John Turturro puts ointment on his feet.” Deliberately de-glamorizing character bits like those will do that sometimes. (Her work has been excellent throughout regardless.) There are some weird lacunae in this episode, too—like, couldn’t it have found the time to catch up with Kenny, the father of the slain girl, to see how he took the news about the identities of Erin’s abuser and killer? What kind of teenager has a physical hard copy of an incriminating photo in the year of our digital Lord 2021? Did Mare really “need” to arrest Ryan, or was this grim bit of symmetry—having lost her son, she now takes away her best friend’s—unnecessary and cruel, just as Lori said, with the show counting on our faith in the institution of policing to carry the weight? And the final shot of Mare going up the attic stairs to confront her grief over her late son Kevin looked a bit more Hereditary-style spooky than it was probably supposed to; one last not-quite-right move from a show that made plenty of them.

That’s a lot of caveats, I know. But in this episode, at least, the series left me feeling moved, rather than ripped off. Folks, I’ll take it.

I reviewed the finale of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

With one episode to go, many mysteries remain. What was in that piece of paper or photograph that Erin’s beleaguered friend Jess showed to the Chief of Police? Why was it urgent for him to get in touch with Mare immediately thereafter? Why is there a gun in the Ross brothers’ tackle box, and who plans to use it on whom? Why the hell did the show confuse the whole issue by giving their cousin Kenny—not brother, all previous appearances to the contrary—a different last name? Why is the murder-mystery event of the season, stacked top to bottom with talent, so frustrating to watch?

I reviewed the sixth episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

And in the end, The Underground Railroad‘s titular, fictional, fantastical version of the real world’s underground network wound up being a bit player in its own story. Cora is transported from place to place by the Railroad and its offshoots several times, yes. But the story is found in the crimes that drive her from one destination to the next, always seeking safe harbor, finding nothing but an uncertain future—a hopeful one, yes, especially compared to where she’s come from and where she’s been, but still an uncertain one. We know now, decades and decades after Cora’s story, that there really is no safe harbor from the horrors of American racism—not in St. Louis, not in California (ask Them about that one), not in any given place.

No, to the extent that a better place exists, it’s in the uncertain hopes of people, people like Cora and Polly then and everyone involved struggling against what the late, unlamented Arnold Ridgeway referred to as “The American Imperative” today. “Are you kind, mister?” Cora asks Ollie when she approaches his wagon. “Most times, yes,” he says, before adding “Of course, like anybody, I falters, of course.” Of course, of course—he repeats it for emphasis, taking it as a given that no one can be their ideal self all the time, not in this world. But you can try, damn it. You can try.

I reviewed the finale of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

“You shoulda let ’em win a little,” Judge Payton tells the man named Mingo after their poker game with the local worthies has concluded in The Underground Railroad Episode 9. “Wouldn’t hurt not to parade around how as-good-as-white-men you are every chance you get.”

“But I am, Payton” Mingo insists, every syllable weighed with a lifetime of frustration and fury over not being able to convince people of this simple fact. “But I am.”

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

What follows her trip to the Ghost Tunnel is, essentially, a dream version of the same excursion. In Cora’s dream, she descends the Tunnel’s long rope ladder and winds up in a truly palatial Underground Railroad station packed with Black travelers of all kinds. But the ticket agent says she can’t move Cora along until her testimony checks out, a potential problem since she hasn’t offered testimony in Indiana. “Did you really tell your truth?” the agent asks; Cora has nothing to say in response.

The tension mounts courtesy of some incredible sound design, which makes this mysterious mega-station—whether it is above or below ground “depends on where you’re coming from,” says a conductor—sound like it’s constantly inhaling and exhaling, with a crying baby thrown in for good measure. Cora exits and finds herself in the run-down house in the forest where the hatch is from; she reenters and everyone is staring at her as she walks her way to a reunion with her lost friend Caesar. They dance together, quoting their own romantic banter from several episodes earlier. They cry. This is not the surreal logic of a Mad Men or Sopranos fever dream; it’s a straightforward longing for something that can no longer be had.

I reviewed the eighth episode of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

Well, that was a relief.

Clocking in at just over 16 minutes, not counting the closing credits—that’s slightly longer than an installment of, like, Teen Titans Go! or Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!—The Underground Railroad Episode 7 rockets right by, taking us from tragedy to triumph in record time. Titled “Chapter 7: Fanny Briggs” after its main character, whom we’ve already met under another name, it’s a rare moment of elation in this relentlessly, appropriately grim series.

I reviewed the seventh, short, structurally bold episode of The Underground Railroad for Decider. More shows should do stuff like this.