This is the story being told by Them. This is what creator/co-writer Little Marvin, co-writer David Matthews, director Nelson Cragg (previously the cinematographer for Ryan Murphy’s masterpiece American Crime Story), director of photography Xavier Grobet, and editor David Kashevaroff (not to mention executive producer Lena Waithe) convey with every tool at their disposal—the relentlessly downbeat script, the breathtaking use of every camera trick in the book from Dutch tilts to split screens to Vertigo shots, the disorienting staccato editing, and the uniformly thoughtful and precise performances of both the Emory family and their enemies up the block, led by the increasingly unhinged Betty. Them is a ghost story, yes, and the specter of Miss Vera and the blood pouring from the poor dog’s grave at the end of the episode promise more in store along those lines. But in terms of where the atmosphere of terror and dread this show maintains actually come from, it is about being sane in an insane land, never knowing whether, say, the kindly old white man at the hardware store is going to reveal himself to be an inveterate racist (he doesn’t, though in Livia’s mind he encourages her to buy an axe off the wall display just in case she has further trouble with the neighbors), or whether the teacher at your school will punish you when your classmates make monkey noises at you because you answered a question. It’s about putting your best foot forward in a world intent on cutting you off at the knees. It’s about choking down that goddamn pie, choking down every last bite.

I reviewed the second episode of Them for Decider.

Them is about the real-life horror of racial covenants, which excluded Black families from home ownership in certain neighborhoods and towns. Harold chose to move to Compton despite its covenant past because covenants are, at this point, illegal. But there are other ways to enforce the racial hierarchy, as Betty and company realize very quickly. In essence, Livia and Henry are inverting the fundamental, foundational myth of America—the myth of the pioneer, moving into a land that doesn’t welcome them—only it’s the white people who are the true savages. One need look no further than the 1/6 insurrection or the new Jim Crow voting laws in Georgia or the anti-trans bill in Arkansas or the union-busting zeal of the well-to-do spokespeople of Amazon, the company airing this show, to see the truth in this.

But cinematically, Them is about more than that. It’s about the way the light looks on a sunny California afternoon, and the way the night looks in the well-lit home of a family that loves each other’s company. It’s about framing Livia and Henry up against the edge of the screen as they talk to each other, conveying their intensity and intimacy. (There’s a closeup on the two of them after kissing that’s just achingly, ferociously romantic.) It’s about the kind of staccato editing that represents Livia’s terrible memories, and the brutality of her current predicament. It’s about sparing the audience a bunch of getting-to-know-you bullshit and moving right to the stuff that’s frightening and unpleasant and vital. It’s about how sometimes the pain and fear we face is so overwhelming that the vocabulary of the quotidian fails us, and we must reach for the supernatural for recourse. It’s beautifully shot. It’s thoughtfully edited. It’s mercilessly written. It’s the best new show I’ve seen this year.

I’ll be covering Them‘s entire first season for Decider over the next few days, starting with my review of the series premiere.

“The desire to become a superhuman cannot be separated from supremacist ideals.” So says Baron Zemo, the self-appointed scourge of the world’s super-people. Does he have a point? Decades of angry message-board debates between superhero fans and the genre’s detractors would at least indicate that he has a constituency. Is there something inherently fascistic about stories in which superpowered übermenschen fight crime and battle foreign menaces, stories in which might quite literally makes right? Or is it all in the application, and can superhero stories reflect progressive ideals, however retrograde their vigilante violence might seem on the surface?

I’m not here to litigate this question, frankly. There are plenty of superhero stories I like just fine, and plenty I think are reactionary garbage, and even more—like much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—that I think cloak militarism and jingoism in palatably colorful costumes, so deftly that people don’t realize what they’re actually being served. If there’s a right answer, you have to pull apart a whole tangle of conflicting threads to find it.

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

At a certain point, it starts to feel like the plot holes outnumber the plot threads. One minute, Bucky’s so concerned about Baron Zemo’s hatred for the Avengers that he won’t even allow Sam to speak to him; the next, he’s breaking Zemo out of jail and presenting a team-up with him to Sam as a fait accompli. Sharon Carter has been on the run for the better part of a decade for a crime for which everyone else involved has long been forgiven, including various enormously famous and beloved superheroes. (Once again, I just don’t buy the lack of clout Sam commands as a member of the world-saving Avengers who has an ongoing relationship with the U.S. military.) Sharon just so happens to be on the scene when Sam, Zemo, and Falcon need rescuing; bounty hunters spontaneously appear in the hidden location to which the foursome have traveled to find the evil doctor; Ayo appears to have arrived at the group’s destination before they even got there. Stuff keeps happening, seemingly just to keep things moving, regardless of whether it happening makes any sense.

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

There’s something so dreary about taking Redwing, the comic-book Falcon’s telepathic, bright-red bird sidekick, and turning him into a drone. An explicitly military one at that, property of the United States government, as this episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (“The Star Spangled-Man”) dutifully informs us. When one of those sinister border-hating Flag-Smashers knocks the damn thing from the sky, it felt like a mercy killing on behalf of imagination.

Can’t say I’m enjoying The Falcon and the Winter Soldier very much! I reviewed this week’s episode for Decider.

I have a confession to make: I have been known, from time to time, to make mine Marvel. I’ve read hundreds of their comics over the years (and even wrote one once myself). I enjoyed the Marvel/Netflix shows Daredevil and The Punisher, as I’ve chronicled at length on this very site. As for the movies…well, Robert Downey Jr. as Tony “Iron Man” Stark was casting so strong it essentially made superheroes the dominant genre nearly singlehandedly (give or take a Hugh Jackman or a Heath Ledger), and the fight scene that opened Captain America: The Winter Soldier however many years back was a pip.

The rest I can take or leave. Mostly leave.

I say all this in the interest of full disclosure. But if I’m gonna cop to being indifferent to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole, I also want to state for the record that I’m in the liking-things business, and I go into every new series I watch hoping to enjoy what I see. It’s true that I may not have caught a new Marvel movie since the underbaked and overrated Guardians of the Galaxy—after a dozen servings of pistachio ice cream, it’s okay to decide pistachio ice cream isn’t for you and stop eating each new serving just in case this one’s the good one. But I was certainly prepared to enjoy The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the latest series to take characters from the blockbuster movies and plop them down on the small screen for several extra hours of screentime. It shares half a title with the one Marvel movie I can actually remember anything about—that’s promising, right?

Wrong, as it turns out! I’ll be covering The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider all season long, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Maybe that’s the single biggest problem with this version of The Stand: It pulled all its punches. There was really no internal struggle going on among any of the characters other than Harold and Nadine—Larry didn’t repeatedly second-guess his own habitual shittiness, for example, nor did Lloyd Henreid realize he’d sold his soul to the devil, nor did the Trashcan Man struggle to reconcile his pyromania with his desire to fit into Vegas society and do right by Flagg, the man who elevated him from captivity to the height of power. Vegas itself is pure fantasy and spectacle; it never makes the vital point that people willing to serve a sadistic authoritarian look and sound like normal people more often than not. The demands of Mother Abigail’s very Old Testament God are never properly struggled with either; the idea that the forces of Good can be cold and uncompromising in their Goodness never gets communicated. The freaking plague itself was an afterthought!

I reviewed the series finale of The Stand for Decider. What a disappointment.

Now consider the Trashcan Man. Arguably the series’ single biggest misfire from a character standpoint, he has no arc or growth or interesting personal journey to speak of. When he first appears in the series, he’s a gibbering crazy man with a penchant for firestarting. When he next appears, he’s retrieving a nuclear warhead, at the express orders of Randall Flagg. And for his final appearance, he delivers the bomb, as requested; the only hiccup is that he brings it to the wrong place, and considering his overall level of sanity it would have been a minor miracle if he hadn’t brought it to the wrong place.

If you’ll permit one last contrast with the novel, this is a case in which nearly every choice made by the show was the wrong one. In the book, Trash is crazy, yes, but he’s capable of coherent speech, coherent thought, and actual attachment to other human beings. He feels friendship with the people he gets to know under Flagg’s command in addition to puppylike devotion to the Dark Man. But his compulsive pyromania gets the better of him after someone unthinkingly ribs him about his fiery habits, and he winds up killing several men and destroying much of Flagg’s nascent air force before fleeing. Desperate to make amends, he does the only thing he feels is big enough to make up for his crime: He retrieves a nuke all on his own, without Flagg’s orders to do so, and delivers it to the Dark Man’s doorstep as an offering of penance. It’s a whole lot more complex, interesting, and ultimately human than just hooting and hollering his way from Point A to Point B to Point C the way he does in the show.

(In a way, Trashcan Man is as underdeveloped as Mother Abigail. In her case, we’re never really made to understand what’s so magnetic about her, or how close a relationship with God she really has. She’s just kind of…there, and it’s like the good-guy characters coalesce around a random old woman, not the Voice of the Almighty on Earth. Similarly, Trash is just a firebug, not the complicated individual with a near-supernatural expertise in weapons, incendiaries, and explosives that he is in the novel.)

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Stand, in which many of its overall weaknesses are made manifest, for Decider.

The smartest thing this adaptation of The Stand has done yet is to stand aside. The convoluted, shifting timeframes, the need to balance the apocalypse with its aftermath—that’s all gone now. In its place is a very, very straightforward story: The man in black lives in the desert, and four people (and one dog) are walking to meet him.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand, which I pretty much liked, for Decider.

I hate to do this, but I hope you’ll permit a book-to-TV comparison just this once. In Stephen King’s novel, this traumatized pyromaniac, née Donald Merwin Elbert, is a central figure, one of the core characters we follow across the country in the aftermath of the plague. If Lloyd Henried is the Stu Redman of Las Vegas, the main man in the new society Randall Flagg has founded just as Stu is the head honcho of Mother Abigail’s, Trashcan Man is roughly equivalent to Nick Andros, an outcast from society allegedly destined for a key role in the new world, or Tom Cullen, a man whose mental disabilities allow him more unfettered contact with forces beyond our understanding. (That element of Tom’s personality appears to have been dropped by the show.)

Yet for some reason, instead of following Trash from the outset, The Stand‘s 2020-2021 iteration just sort of plops him down at the start of the sixth episode out of nine episodes total. We’ve barely gotten a glimpse of him blowing up oil tanks somewhere and receiving a psychic communiqué from Flagg when bam, the next thing you know he’s already in Vegas, getting the lay of the land from Lloyd and receiving the blessing of the Dark Man himself. Why didn’t the show sprinkle Trashcan Man scenes throughout the season, starting no later than episode two or three? I legitimately have no idea. Was it simply to shield us from Ezra Miller’s performance in the role—a high-pitched, gibbering caricature of a neurodivergent person? Again, I got nothing, man. I enjoyed the creepy Willy-Wonka-tunnel evil psychedelic montage he envisions when Flagg psychically contacts him, and I appreciate that he alone out of everyone in Vegas seems to recognize that Flagg is effectively a demigod worthy of worship, but otherwise nearly every decision involving this character is baffling to me right now.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

It’s as if on the Vegas Strip did Randall Flagg a stately pleasure dome decree. People in fetish gear fuck freely in public. Everyone’s drunk, and some are doing blow right out the open. It’s a bacchanalia—and it’s being staged around a gladiatorial pit where slaves are made to fight each other with chainsaws.

In other words, it’s the nightmare scenario of people who used to want parental advisory stickers on Marilyn Manson records. Is it a plausible setup for a dystopian society run by a demon in denim? I’m not so sure. Where did he find all the hardbodied models, male and female, who are gyrating and pole-dancing and having sex out there? Does no one find the blend of hedonism and ultraviolence a little much? Could a new society really coalesce around that particular kernel?

The funny thing, and I use funny very loosely here, is that we’ve scene what an American dystopia would look like just last week. And while there is a certain cathartic venting of violent desires, it’s against perceived enemies to the desired order of things, not randos dumped into a thunderdome scenario while onlookers hump each other. It seems to me that the pitch Randall Flagg made to Lloyd Henried in prison—don’t you want the chance to get even with the kind of people who did this to you?—is a much more compelling and plausible way to structure New Vegas. Everyone there is attracted to the darkness Flagg embodies, so promise them the chance to extinguish the light (specifically in Boulder)! Turning the place into a sex club with a death-match arena in the middle just rings hollow. It’s a Hollywood idea of what fascism looks like.

I reviewed this week’s less-than-promising episode of The Stand for Decider.

I get the feeling that this iteration of The Stand is meant to focus on the whole life-in-the-aftermath aspect of the story, to the near-exclusion of the pandemic, and relegating the dark vs. light conflict—the titular stand!—to second place, at least for now. But it’s running out of road for this approach. Sooner or later, and probably sooner than later, it’s going to come down to Mother Abigail and her crew against Randall Flagg and his own. (A crew we simply have not seen at all yet, aside from that one episode when he rescued Lloyd Henried from prison.) I think the tone it’s struck for the material on which it’s concentrating its efforts is appropriately elegiac and surprisingly gentle. But if you’re gonna knock the house down again, it pays to have sturdily built it, and that I’m not sure the show has done at all.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

It is kind of a feat, when you think about it: an audience in 2020 not knowing what’s going to happen in The Stand. This unusual, mix-and-match adaptation of one of the best-known horror novels in the English language continues to unfold in non-linear fashion, making familiar characters and plot points seem strange and unexpected. Sometimes this is very effective, like how it allows Nick-the-outsider and Nick-the-high-priest-of-Mother-Abigail to be directly contrasted with one another in the episode where we get to know him in the first place. Sometimes it doesn’t work as well, like how it races through the creation of the “committee” established by the survivors to govern Boulder; here it’s all the work of Mother Abigail, who picks them to be her emissaries first and a governing body second (if at all).

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

Overall, this episode functions less as a successor to the premiere and more as a part two. Showrunners Josh Boone and Benjamin Cavell are still introducing characters, weaving their pasts and presents together in that same dreamy way—a million miles from Stephen King’s relentless forward pace at this same stage in the story in the book version. In effect, we’re just seeing pieces of the puzzle at this point, and waiting for the final picture to take shape. Until then, it’s hard to judge the show as a success or failure, though the game cast, impactful score, and occasional flash of post-apocalyptic imagery (like the George Washington Bridge covered from one end to the other by stalled cars filled with dead passengers) are keeping my interest. It’s kind of like we’re in the early stages of the superflu, before it’s had a chance to really take off. We’ll see what kind of world we’re inhabiting when we reach the other side.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

So that’s what The Stand 2020 is. I can tell you what it isn’t, though: It isn’t anything like Stephen King. I mean, the characters are all there, sure, and the story beats too, albeit shuffled; what I’m talking about is (paraphrasing Barton Fink here) That Stephen King Feeling. King, as he himself has written about extensively in his treatise on horror Danse Macabre, nearly always establishes a situation-normal status quo, then introduces some world-ending catastrophe or soul-eating demon-thing that overturns the whole Apollonian apple cart. You have to see little George Denbrough make his toy boat, kiss his big brother goodbye, and head out into the rain in his yellow slicker before you can meet Pennywise the Dancing Clown, you know? It’s the most King-feeling thing in all his work: You set up the house of cards, and then you knock it down.

In the book version of The Stand, the house of cards was the entirety of human society—specifically the American subsection thereof—and the knocking down was performed by Captain Trips. And boy, was it ever! For my money there’s no more thrilling section in all the King books I’ve read than the opening quarter or so of The Stand, where we meet all our main characters as civilization stumbles, crumbles, and completely collapses around them. Hell, they don’t even need to be main characters at all: There’s a chapter that simply follows the virus across the country from one random person to the next, establishing the virus as history’s most lethal chain letter, that’s just gleefully dark and frightening. It’s as good as King gets.

And The Stand’s 2020 TV adaptation will not be going there at all, it seems. It is, to put it mildly, a bold choice. And you know what? I like bold choices where adapting Stephen King is concerned! The most slavish recreations of his work tend to be the most boring; even in a case like the recent Hulu series Castle Rock, which was not a straight adaptation at all but an attempt to do for King’s oeuvre what Noah Hawley’s Fargo did with the Coen Brothers’ filmography, the effort to nail all those little King-isms came at the cost of doing anything actually memorable, let alone frightening. (I’m old school in that I think horror TV shows are supposed to be scary. Go figure!) Compare and contrast with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: It’s very much Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, not Stephen King’s, and it just so happens to be one of the greatest movies ever made; King, of course, despises it.

So no, a lack of fidelity isn’t going to get on my nerves per se. It never does! So I’m not interested in comparing chapter and verse, describing what the series got “right” and “wrong” about the details or even the broad strokes. In the end, it’s all in the execution. And in this early going at least, the execution is intriguing enough to keep me watching. The fading between times and places, the freeform mixture of “now” and “then,” gives the show the feel of a dream, or a nightmare (several of which punctuate the action, after all). The lush, traditional score (no John Carpenter knockoffs here) by Nathaniel Walcott and Mike Mogis contributes beautifully to that dreamy feeling. Will it last? Or, in the absence of the harrowing rise of the superflu plague, will the flashback/flashforward device wear out its welcome before the real action kicks in? These are open questions, but compared to “Why the hell am I watching this?”, they’re questions I don’t mind asking at all.

I’m covering The Stand for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere. It’s bold, I’ll give it that!

But it’s Mike Milligan/Satchel Roy who must bear the weight of all this. It’s he who’s cursed to remember, he in whom the bloody history of this war is imprinted. And for the purposes of this episode, it renders him speechless. Who fits in and who is rejected? For whom is the power of violence sufficient to gain entry into the promised land? How many people must watch their loved ones die in front of them to feed the maw of the money machine? Mike has no history report to offer us. He stares out at the great American nowhere and fiddles with a gun and does nothing—and if that isn’t the “Storia Americana” that gives the episode its title, I don’t know what is.

I reviewed the season finale of Fargo for Decider. The final scene made the whole season for me.

In thinking about this episode, it’s the details that jump out at me, despite all the major goings-on. The black comedy of the cops explaining their presence in Oraetta’s apartment by simply saying “He woke up.” Oraetta’s taunting of Ethelrida: “What does it feel like to be so sure you’re right and nobody cares?” Josto and Gaetano literally bragging about the size of their dicks. (“Big like a pickle?” Gaetano asks his brother, quoting “The Humpty Dance” of all things.) The lovely slo-mo shots of strutting gangsters and lethal shootouts in the episode’s opening gang-war montage. Josto trying to lift his brother up affectionately and failing miserably. Josto’s baffled “What the fuck?” when Gaetano dies. Odis’s smile. Gaetano’s flapping skull. Loy’s forgery of a painting he grew fond of when he saw it in a magazine, and Ethelrida’s ability to identify it.

If this season of Fargo is to be considered a success, it’s in these little things, these images, these exchanges of dialogue—moments that accumulate and tell a story of their own, even if the big picture has yet to come together.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Fargo Season Four for Decider.

Deliberately disorienting and strange, the better to mimic the world in which Satchel Cannon now finds himself alone, this episode of Fargo (“East/West”) is by far the season’s best. Coming as it does after the bloodbath of Episode 8, it relies less on sheer body count for its power than on the mysteries described above—the meta mysteries of why the show uses the techniques it does, the in-world mysteries of Satchel and Rabbi’s fellow guests at the Barton Arms hotel (it hardly needs to be said that this is a reference to Barton Fink, which is itself set largely in a strange hotel), and the general feeling that some horrible future awaits.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fargo, the season’s strangest and best to date, for Decider.

Now that the inevitable bloody explosion for which we’ve waited all season has taken place, it’s worth noting that three full episodes remain. Will we be looking at a protracted aftermath, or will the violence continue, or even ratchet up? Will Odis and Oraetta get their comeuppance? Will Josto’s scheming (he’s like a snake, in Gaetano’s admiring words) or Loy’s stoicism win the day? Will Zelmare seek revenge of her own? And what is to become of Ethelrida, the one decent person in the whole mess? With no righteous lawman or law-woman to anchor the action as in previous seasons, and an extra episode for creator and co-writer Noah Hawley to play with, the contours of the season’s denouement are unclear. I get the feeling, though, that Ethelrida isn’t the only character who can’t afford to make mistakes.

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

I was not prepared.

No, seriously, listen: I was not prepared.

I reviewed the series finale of the magnificent Suburra: Blood on Rome for Decider.