From the moment Arnold Ridgeway takes out a flask and begins drinking whiskey from it, you know he’s in strange territory. Not literally, not at all—he’s returned to his family home for one last attempt at rapprochement with his dying father, “rapprochement” in this case meaning “my dad owes me an apology.” The strangeness is all in his demeanor, which takes a sudden turn for the fearful, the petulant, the anxious and uncertain—a far cry from his nearly supernatural implacability up until that point. “So Arnold Ridgeway is human after all,” Cora says after finding out the nature of their visit. He’s not a good human, but yes, something like that.

This episode of The Underground Railroad (“Chapter Six: Tennessee: Proverbs”) is essentially one drawn-out drunk for Ridgeway, who is absolutely hammered by the time he witnesses his father breathe his last breath. In one particularly galling scene, he drags Cora to a nearby saloon—in chains—for a meal and a drink, though in his case “a drink” means “an entire bottle.” He waxes philosophical and patriotic about Manifest Destiny and the American spirit—”The only ‘Spirit’ worth its salt,” he says, compared to the Great Spirit that his father borrowed from indigenous religious beliefs. The American spirit, he says, is a call to the people of the Old World to come to the New civilize the land, and either “lift up, subjugate, [or] exterminate, eliminate” the other peoples they encounter. “The American Imperative,” he calls this last bit. Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day.

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

Throughout it all, Barry Jenkins’s camera makes slow pilgrimages from one end of a given scene to the next, like it too has been enlisted in Ridgeway’s grim procession. The ruined vistas it captures are stunning in their own bleak way. The camera also captures some characters looking directly at us, like Cora when she speaks aloud to her absent mother and Lovey and Caesar, or Ridgeway Senior when he glares at (presumably) his detestable son in the vision Cora conjures of their eventual pointless reunion. It is hard to meet their gaze.

I reviewed episode 5 of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

As I said last week, tonal shifts of the sort Mare is attempting require a strong, almost singular creative mind behind them. I’ve seen no evidence thus far that either creator and writer Brad Ingelsby or director Craig Zobel have what it takes to pull it off. Rather, the show comes off as determined to cut its serious material off at the knees with cheap twists and bad comedy, while the lighter material plays on as if oblivious to the steadily mounting pile of abused and murdered bodies.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

And so, without a stable ethical foundation to stand on, the whole thing teeters and wobbles on the verge of collapse. There’s just no way to have, say, the slapstick teen sex comedy of Siobhan’s situation and Helen’s whack on the noggin on the one hand and the Silence of the Lambs–style abduction of women on the other and make them both work without that foundation. You can’t portray, for example, Mare’s continued presence in the investigation from which she’s been barred like it’s simple dogged detective work when she’s also keeping huge secrets from her own partner (who, I remind you, has also asked her out). For god’s sake, you can’t have Mare balancing multiple suitors and make it cute while she’s been suspended from the force for a fucking felony that’s getting swept under the rug!

I reviewed the baffling fourth episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

In reviewing the premiere of The Underground Railroad, the word “dystopia” came up as a description of the slave state of Georgia—an attempt to apply this powerful fictional designation to the very real nightmare regime of American slavery. In reviewing the second, the word’s opposite, “utopia,” was used to in describe the illusory nature of South Carolina’s genteel “betterment” policies for its Black residents, all of whom still live and thrive only at the pleasure of their patronizing white overlords.

What I didn’t count on is for The Underground Railroad to traffic in out-and-out, alternate-history dystopianism. That’s what Cora finds when the Railroad runs into a roadblock, stranding her in North Carolina. There’s no betterment here. There’s not even slavery. There’s genocide.

I reviewed episode three of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: When Sir Thomas More coined the term utopia, he did so as a pun. Spelled eutopia, from the Ancient Greek, it means “good place,” which is how the term functions in fantastical literature—utopia as ideal society. But spelled utopia, which is the version More emphasized, it translates rather to “no place.” By definition, then, the ideal society cannot exist.

Griffin, South Carolina seems like a utopia in the eu sense, at least at a glance. By the time The Underground Railroad arrives there for its second episode (“Chapter 2: South Carolina”), our heroes Cora and Caesar have been safely ensconced there for some time. In this semi-integrated town, dominated by its futuristic “skyscraper,” Black people are not enslaved, but free—again, at least at a glance.

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

Of course, that kind of underground railroad is a fantasy, and that’s the simple genius of novelist Colson Whitehead’s original idea. Why not take the reality and make it a fantasy? Why not concretize the journey of slaves to freedom by creating a locomotive that literally operates underground? Genre stories use fantastical and spectacular ideas and images to communicate powerful ideas and emotions in a visual vocabulary that matches their power. The idea of an actual steam-powered underground railroad—well, it puts the status-quo-smashing “punk” back into “steampunk.”

And by taking on directorial duties for all ten episodes, Jenkins—who also wrote the episode—instantly joins a select company of Academy Award–winning filmmakers helming entire seasons of television, right alongside David Lynch and Steven Soderbergh. If this episode (“Chapter 1: Georgia”) is any indication, Jenkins, like his predecessors, will be making no qualitative distinction between the two cinematic mediums. His camera is calm, cool, and collected, allowing the inhumane drama of the plantation to play out in unsparing long takes. It’s a stylistic choice that makes sense, since so much of that drama is a matter of people being made to bear witness to atrocity. The camera won’t let us look away, either. And when the viewpoint does shift, most memorably letting us—or forcing us to—look through the eyes of the lynched slave as he burns to death, the impact is all the stronger. The surreal, staccato editing of the episode’s opening moments also stand out by comparison.

I’ll be covering Barry Jenkins’s strong new series The Underground Railroad for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Here’s the thing about that: Mare of Easttown clearly expects us to take its title character’s side. Yes, even when she’s raiding the department’s evidence locker for packets of heroin she can plant in an ex-junkie’s vehicle in order to ruin said ex-junkie’s life. This isn’t portrayed as a heinous act of corruption and authoritarianism, but as the rash but understandable act of a grandmother acting in her grandson’s best interest. For me? It just left me wondering how many real-world cases of police misconduct get justified by the participants and swept under the rug by their superiors in the way that Mare and the Chief do here. It’s darkly fascinating to see to whom Mare of Easttown is willing to extend the benefit of the doubt, you know?

I reviewed Sunday’s episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

The titular Mare of Easttown does not have an easy life. Maybe that’s a given, when you consider that she’s seemingly the sole detective in a town with at least one outstanding missing-persons case and a fresh murder of a teenage girl on its docket. But there’s more to it than that. In “Fathers,” Episode 2 of HBO’s murder-mystery Mare of Easttown, we learn that her son Kevin killed himself. We learn that her grandson Drew has begun to display some of the same tics that Kevin did as a child, prior to his downward spiral. We learn that Carrie (Zosia Bacon), Drew’s mother, is filing for full custody despite living in a sober house after an unspecified drug or alcohol addiction. And everywhere Mare turns, she’s forced to confront old friends and acquaintances with whom she’s now at life-and-death odds, whether that’s the mother of the girl she’s failed to find, the father of the girl whose corpse she’s just examined, or the parents of the girl who beat the dead girl up on camera the night of her murder. If I were her, I’d pound Rolling Rocks like they were bottles of Gatorade the very second I got off duty, too.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

It’s an arresting visual, I’ll give it that. A man in a red, white, and blue angel costume descending from the heavens, cradling the dead body of a slain radical in his arms. If it took five-plus hours to get us to that one image, it was probably worth it to Marvel for the gifs and fan art alone.

The episode that surrounds the shots of the angelic new Captain America sprinkled throughout the Season 1 finale of The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, though? Good God, what a mess. Written by series creator Malcolm Spellman and Josef Sawyer, “One World, One People” is a shockingly incoherent product for an experienced purveyor of unobjectionable and slick genre fare like Marvel, right down to borrowing its idealistic-sounding title from the very radical group its heroes spend the episode defeating and killing.

I reviewed the finale of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.

I see what Mare of Easttown is going for; with creator Brad Ingelsby’s workmanlike script, it’s impossible not to. Teenage mothers, dead-end jobs, opiate addicts, cancer patients, necessary but unaffordable medical procedures, chronic illness, the constant flow of cheap booze, old high-school glories substituting for any new real-world ones: This, the show argues, and not without reason, is small-town America in the year of our Lord 2021, or at least it would be if we weren’t still in the grips of the pandemic that shuttered the show’s production for a time. For what it’s worth, I don’t detect a ton of condescension in the portrayal. Ingelsby is a native of the area, and although the gap between Hollywood screenwriter and, say, exurban teenage mother is a big one, he does his best to paint everyone in a sympathetic, even noble, light.

Is it possible this is its own form of condescension? Yeah, I suppose it is. There’s something a little Barton Fink-y, a little “theater of and about and for The Common Man,” in Mare‘s portrayal of Easttown and its denizens. You can get as granular and gritty as you want with the talk of deductibles and diapers, but in the end, you’re still air-dropping one of the most famous movie stars in the world into this thing, and having her play a cop to boot. The very idea of a downtrodden but fundamentally good-hearted police officer, at this point in time…I mean, if you find it hard to swallow, I find it hard to blame you.

I’ll be covering Mare of Easttown for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

There’s one episode left in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and given the way Sam was eyeing the contents of the high-tech Wakandan briefcase Bucky delivered to him, it seems safe to assume the Falcon—whose wings got torn off by Walker, if you’re in the symbolism market—is about to don the stars and stripes himself. I’d guess some sort of reckoning with Sharon is in the offing, as well as a battle with Karli and the Flag-Smashers that will paint them as well-intentioned but dangerously misguided and militant the way the whole rest of the season has done. Walker, by the way, is still walking around free, lying to the parents of his slain friend Lamar that he’s already killed their son’s killer. He’s got a grudge against Karli and a potential backer in the Contessa, and if we know anything about this show, it’s that people can show up anywhere at a moment’s notice, so I wouldn’t count him out of the final battle just yet either.

All told, it’s a whole lot of work just to get Sam to the place where the movies left him. I get that the show is supposed to be a meditation on the idea of Captain America in light of the fictional peril of criminal superhumans (whether in the form of Karli or the pre-cure Winter Soldier) on the one hand and the real-life issue of anti-Black racism on the other. But a show like this was always going to answer these questions simply by pointing at the heroes and declaring theirs the correct path. The game isn’t worth the candle. Oh hey, look over there, it’s Elaine from Seinfeld!

I reviewed today’s episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.

What Them does believe in is evil, manifested in white supremacist racism. The supernatural element merely recreates, as a parable, the evil that men do. You might be able to walk away from that alive, but you can’t walk away from it unscathed, or unchanged. The same can be said of the show itself. Them marks the arrival of a major new talent in showrunner Little Marvin and a staggering achievement in television horror. It’s vital as it is violent. It’s one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.

I reviewed the season finale of Them for Decider.

Directed in stark black and white by Craig William Macneill (Channel Zero) from a script by Dominic Orlando, “Covenant II” is reminiscent at turns of The Witch, The Lighthouse, Hereditary, There Will Be Blood, episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return. Like its predecessor “Covenant I,” is one of the most brutal things I’ve ever watched in a lifetime of watching horror. It, like Them, is a masterpiece.

I reviewed episode nine of Them for Decider. Please note that Amazon swapped the running order episodes eight and nine after screeners were sent out, so you may notice artifacts of the previous running order.

Clocking in at just over half an hour, not counting the closing credits, this is a short, throat-clearing episode, a squall-before-the-storm. The details are, as always, impeccable: George’s casually sexist insistence that his prisoner Betty wear more pink; the masks on Marty’s shirt and the Iron Cross on the car he tries and fails to fix in his garage; the brooch on the doctor’s lapel that matches the one worn by Helen the real estate agent and, I think, the flowers plucked by Livia to put in that awful bloody pillowcase; the parallel fucking chicken dinners consumed by George and Betty on one hand and Marty and Earl on the other. And maybe it’s foolish to have hope when watching a show like this, but that excruciating basement scene did end with Ruby retrieving that axe from the corner of the basement. It’s going to get buried in someone before this all ends—if it ends for the Emorys at all.

I reviewed episode eight of Them for Decider. Please note that the running order of episodes eight and nine was switched by Amazon after screeners were sent out, so you may notice some weird artifacts of the previous running order.

In dedicating his book The Stand to his wife Tabitha, Stephen King referred to it as “this dark chest of wonders.” “Wonders,” in this case, is a euphemism: The Stand is a catalog of horrors from its first page to its last. Episode seven of Little Marvin’s masterful Them (“Day 7: Night”) can be seen in a similar light. Each storyline, each scene, feels like retrieving some fresh nightmare from the recesses of a box long forgotten in an attic, or a basement. When, in the end, an actual box is revealed to contain something truly horrific, it feels both surprising and inevitable.

I reviewed episode seven of Them for Decider.

Livia achieves a momentary catharsis—and I do mean momentary, the payoff lasts about 15 seconds before cutting off abruptly—when, after returning home with Gracie, she gets sick of Betty’s racist taunts and slaps her across the face. James Brown’s “The Big Payback” plays for a few seconds, ceasing suddenly when Livia and Gracie go inside their house. Betty, too, goes back inside, and promptly destroys nearly everything she can get her hands on—including the wallpaper (this show practically doubles as a wallpaper gallery), behind which is the black mold she metaphorically warned about in her speech at the Home Owners Association meeting. She finally calms down enough to call her milkman, asking him to do her the favor he promised after mentioning to her that he did the things in Korea that most men could not.

Betty warned Livia a while back that things were only going to get worse for her. I’m worried she’s right.

I reviewed episode six of Them for Decider.

It’s rare to think “I will never forget watching this episode of television,” rarer still to mean it. Even within the sphere of horror, a genre dedicated in part to searing imagery into your brain, the truly unforgettable is thin on the ground.

Not this time, though. Not this time.

I reviewed episode five of Them for Decider.

Finally, the Emorys return home. With the kids in bed, Livia and Henry begin to make love. Neither of them sees the voyeur in the corner: the Black Hat Man (Christopher Heyerdahl). It’s a scare, yes. But at the end of this long day, in which so many attempts to escape have gone sour, it’s hard not to see this figure as a sign that this form of escape won’t save the Emorys either. As Major Garland Briggs, a character from another great horror television series, Twin Peaks, once said, the most frightening thing is the possibility that love is not enough.

I reviewed episode four of Them for Decider.

“The woman was holding her baby.” “A man came to the house.” Those are my notes on Them Episode 3 (“Day 4”), which revolves around the nightmare from which Livia Emory awakes on the morning of her family’s fourth day in their new home, a nightmare about her baby Chester and…whatever happened to him in North Carolina. Simple statements, conveyed with simple shots, all the more menacing for their simplicity. Whatever did happen on “that day,” as her husband Henry refers to it—and from the show’s first scene there’s been a dreadful, growing certainty that we’ll be forced to bear witness to it at some point—there’s no distance far enough to move from it, not even all the way across the country. It’s always there.

I reviewed episode three of Them for Decider.