It’s a hell of a note to end on. Only one episode remains before Suburra arrives at its final destination, and I find myself just as enthralled by these handsome criminals and their emotional misadventures as ever. Almost certainly this will leave me bereaved by the season’s end, as I just can’t imagine all of them making it out alive. I want them to, though—that’s the thing. I want my beautiful boys to live to fight another day. I want them to get along. I want the New Kings of Rome to stand triumphant, that’s how successful this show has been, over the course of its three seasons, in making me care about these dirtbags. And I have a sinking feeling I’m going to be disappointed.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome for Decider.

Watching the two of them egg each other on is like watching a dark mirror image of meetings between Spadino and Aureliano; you want the boys to get along, whereas with Manfredi and Adelaide, all you want them to do is sit down and shut up.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season Three for Decider.

The most endearing thing about Suburra is how endearing Aureliano Adami and Spadino Anacleti find each other. Despite starting the series at odds, despite all the twists and turns in their personal and professional relationship since then, you always get the sense that these two dudes fundamentally enjoy each other’s company, even at times when they enjoy very little else. There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in this episode that makes that point very clearly. At the big, ill-fated party Spadino throws to celebrate his and Aureliano’s coronation as “the new Kings of Rome,” they, along with their significant others Nadia and Angelica, toast to their success. And right then, Aureliano leans over and kisses Spadino on the arm.

The main thing to notice here is what you don’t notice here. There’s no camera cut to emphasize the gesture. There’s no reaction shot focusing on any of the characters, showing that they’re taken aback or smiling warmly at the kiss or anything like that. In the absence of that kind of basic filmmaking infrastructure it feels safe to assume that the kiss was improvised on the spot by actor Alessandro Borghi and then kept in the episode because the filmmakers liked the look of it.

But that absence of emphasis says so much about the closeness between these two guys. Aureliano can kiss Spadino on the arm and the party proceeds as normal (for now anyway) because yeah, of course these two guys love each other and would display that without it being a big deal. And it’s in moments like those that I love them too.

I reviewed the third episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 3 for Decider.

I think the thing that surprises me most about this episode is the rapidity with which Spadino and Aureliano are moving their way through Rome’s criminal power structure. We barely meet the truculent Titto before he’s opening fire on the duo’s enemies on their behalf. If the rest of the season simply frogmarches our heroes to the top of the power structure—well, I’ll be pretty excited about it, the way the episodes of Boardwalk Empire or Fargo in which someone comes out indisputably on top always excited me.

I reviewed episode 2 of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 3 for Decider.

Of course, this is Suburra, so the other star of the show is just the way the show itself looks. Competing color schemes, none of which are the typical prestige-TV palette of slate-blue or puke-green, come with each character: Aureliano is blue like the sea of his oceanside headquarters, Spadino is gold like the overly opulent decorations in his home, Nascari is crimson like a cardinal’s robes, and Cinaglia tends to be shot in harsh lighting as if he might wilt under the bright lights. The show doesn’t beat you over the head with any of this, but it’s there, and it has an impact.

I reviewed Suburra: Blood on Rome‘s third and final season premiere for Decider, where I’ll be covering the entire season.

I don’t know where this season of Fargo is going; I just know I feel like I’m in expert hands on the way there.

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

I like art when it’s weirder than it needs to be. That historically has been one of the things I’ve liked best about Fargo: It’s weirder than it needs to be. Think of Lorne Malvo’s batshit extended flashback in Season One, or the prophetic dream soundtracked in part by Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” in Season Two, or V.M. Varga’s whole deal in Season Three. None of these things needed to be that way, but they were, because weirdness is where art lives.

Perhaps that’s why, in the least weird episode of Fargo Season Four to date, I keep thinking of the incredibly morose and shadowy birthday celebration (complete with creepy singing) that the Smutnys, fresh from the takeover of their family business by Loy Cannon, sing to their daughter Ethelrida. Happy birthday to you, kid! It’s really weird around here!

I reviewed last night’s episode of Fargo for Decider.

The first thing we should talk about when it comes to this week’s episode of Fargo (“The Birthplace of Civilization”) is the last thing that happens in it. As the lights flicker and fade around the dead body of Loy Cannon’s consigliere Doctor Senator, shot dead by Gaetano Fadda’s button man Constant Calamita, Jeff Russo’s grandiosely melancholy Fargo theme—absent from the entire season until now—comes roaring in on the soundtrack. It’s as if series creator and episode co-writer (with Francesca Sloane) Noah Hawley is sending us a signal: The real show is about to begin.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Fargo for Decider.

That “Sh-Boom” singalong is a solid stand-in for Lovecraft Country and its season finale, “Full Circle.” I see what they’re going for—in this case a moment of levity before the horror and desperation of the final battle sinks in. I get it, in theory. But the delivery is just a bit off: The smiles feel forced, the shared connection too neat, the scene too much of a scene instead of something that feels like it emerged organically from the characters involved. Similarly, I get what Lovecraft Country wants to do; I just don’t think it did it.

I reviewed the season finale of Lovecraft Country, a nobly intentioned, well-acted, poorly executed show, for Decider.

This isn’t the first time Fargo the series has trafficked in the supernatural. Season Two was punctuated by alien vistations; Season Three gave us a character who was invisible to all electronic sensors, and another, played by Twin Peaks‘ Ray Wise, who can best be described as an avenging angel, meting out justice to the wicked. And there are precedents in the work of Joel and Ethan Coen, whose entire oeuvre is Fargo the TV show’s source material at least as much as Fargo the movie itself: Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Hudsucker Proxy, and even The Big Lebowski—whose narrator, the Stranger played by Sam Elliott, shows up and interacts with the Dude before addressing the audience directly—all dabble in the paranormal, to name a few.

But neither the show nor the body of cinematic work that inspired it has, to my recollection, presented us with so pure a figure of horror as Mr. Snowman (played by Will Clinger, according to FX’s press notes on the season). With his blackened, frostbitten fingertips, his missing nose, his pale gray skin, and his ability to change the atmosphere surrounding him, he’s more like a White Walker or one of their wights than anything we’ve seen on the show before. Why series creator and episode co-writer (with Stefani Robinson) Noah Hawley decided to veer so hard and so far in a horror direction with this entity is a mystery, at least for now.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Fargo, which was a doozy, for Decider.

There’s something in the zeitgeist. 2020 has been…well, let’s say a difficult year, and now not one but two effects-heavy science-fantasy HBO shows have tapped into an antecedent for so much of the trouble we’re now in: the Tulsa Race Massacre, the violent slaughter of hundreds of Black people and the destruction of their prosperous town-within-a-town by white attackers in 1921. First Watchmen used it as a retconned origin story for Hooded Justice, the first masked vigilante in the show’s universe. Now, Lovecraft Country returns to the atrocity as part of a time-travel storyline. I wish I could say the journey was worth it.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

I don’t know. I just don’t know. Lovecraft Country used Emmett Till’s murder as an in-story plot motivator and I…I just don’t know.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider. I really struggled with it.

I believe it was Chekhov who said that if you put an apple pie loaded with ipecac syrup on the table in the first act, you’d better use it to give a stickup artist uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea in the second. 

I reviewed last night’s eventful, scatalogical episode of Fargo for Decider.

Primarily, though, I’m grateful for a show that was so consistently surprising—the biggest surprise of all being that it was a good show in the first place. Raised by Wolves is the best American science-fiction show I’ve seen in years—asking big but not boring questions, using tried-and-true sci-fi devices in unexpected ways, constantly unfolding its dark mysteries before our eyes. With so little resolved in the finale, it is admittedly possible that the show will return for Season 2 only for us to discover it’s bitten off more than it can chew. But I’m all for a show that errs on the side of ambition. In that sense, Raised by Wolves‘s mission is accomplished.

I reviewed the wild season finale of Raised by Wolves for Decider. What an unexpected pleasure this show turned out to be.

Lovecraft Country, I’d now venture to say, is pretty good. Which is not to say I don’t have problems with it still. The CGI effects are still often shockingly poor—there’s an outrageously fake-looking digital blood-spread across a decapitated Confederate’s shirt that’s particularly egregious; meanwhile, imagine how much more impressive last week’s episode would have been if Ji-ah’s tentacular tails had been practical effects a la John Carpenter’s The Thing and weep for what might have been. And there’s an innate corniness to some of the proceedings, like the math equations superimposed over Hippolyta as she crunches the multidimensional numbers; how has this particular device survived years of ruthless memeification?

But it should hardly need saying that a mainline injection of Afrofuturism in the form of Seraphina and her world-warping technology—not to mention a Sun Ra voiceover describing Black people as living myths, or the massacre of the Confederacy’s protofascist infantry by Black women with swords—is something of a balm in these troubled times. Aunjanue Ellis, meanwhile, is expected to dance like Josephine Baker and swordfight like Wonder Woman in the space of a single episode, which she does with fearless aplomb.

I still don’t find Lovecraft Country scary, except insofar as it chronicles racist realities, rather than horrific fantasies; the two have yet to properly meld. But I do find it engaging, for three episodes in a row now. It’s a start.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

Writer-director-creator Noah Hawley gets a lot of grief for reasons that don’t entirely make sense to me—look, I didn’t like Legion at all, but the dude’s not the devil—yet he has a knack for the little narrative filigrees that the almighty Coen Brothers weave into and out of their films, particularly the crime films with a darkly comedic edge. He also shares the Coens’ affinity for couples so odd it’s like they’re speaking a different language; cf. the Mutt-and-Jeff physicality of Gaetano and Josto, or the contrast between Gateano’s fiery youth and Doctor Senator’s smooth and serious experience, or Nurse Mayflower’s chatty but hard-edged relationship with the quietly sharp Ethelrida. And he’s certainly not above throwing in the occasional overt homage, like the cattle gun used by the slaughterhouse workers, a shoutout to Anton Chigurh’s modus operandi in No Country for Old Men.

But the Coen-ness of such details is just gravy, not the main course, which is the show’s deliberate pacing and slow ratcheting-up of stakes in anticipation of an eventual explosion. And language itself is often a pleasure on this show. Witness the brief exchange Loy Cannon and Rabbi Milligan have, when the latter tells the former he’s teaching his son that “dog eat dog” is the way the world works: “That’s how dogs work,” Cannon replies. “Men are more complicated.”

“Not in my experience,” Milligan counters.

Fargo feels like a roller coaster slowly cranking its way up an incline, waiting for the drop to come.

I reviewed the back half of Fargo‘s two-episode season premiere for Decider.

Ah, that Fargo feeling. A chill in the air and in the blood. An assemblage of eccentrics, drawn together by someone’s elaborate criminal scheme. A sense of time and place that does more than provide context, but traps the characters in amber, allowing for dispassionate observation of the fate they’re unable to escape. A shootout between fact and fiction, fake and real, the stories we tell ourselves and the true stories that underlie them. And split screens—lots of split screens.

Last sighted during the opening months of the Trump regime—a regime it anticipated and echoed with its grotesquely greedy modern-day gangster V.M. Varga—and returning now for, god willing, that regime’s final days, Noah Hawley’s Fargo is back, baby. And for a show that has fallen in and out of critical vogue so fast you can feel a slight breeze, it seems blithely unconcerned with being anything but Noah Hawley’s Fargo. It’s a loving tribute to the crime films of Joel and Ethan Coen, writing a melody in their signature key while improvising notes all its own. I’m thrilled to have it back. Aren’t you?

I’m covering Fargo for Decider this season, starting with my review of its fine season premiere.

We’re deep in the weirdness now. The penultimate episode of Raised by Wolves‘ remarkable first season takes the show’s characters and the world they inhabit in increasingly strange directions. Body horror, splatstick comedy, visions of some unimagined past replete with mysteries—the austerity of the early episodes has been replaced by something far messier, but in its way, just as interesting.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Raised by Wolves‘ first season for Decider.

When you’re eight episodes deep into a show as immaculately crafted as Raised by Wolves, even a single new note in a familiar performance opens up whole new realms of possibility. That’s certainly the case in “Faces,” one of the show’s strangest and least predictable episodes to date. Pivoting off powerful turns by Amanda Collin as Mother and Travis Fimmel as Marcus, it radically upends the status quo, yet it does so in a way that feels like it was organically grown from the soil provided by these two fine actors. The madness makes sense.

I reviewed episode eight of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

It’s a note of anti-climax, to be sure, and in a series that has had its problems with figuring out how to end episodes. But it’s everything that came before that impressed me: the weird complexity of the Ji-ah character, who’s part starry-eyed romantic, part dutiful daughter, part fish out of water, and part tentacle monster; the no-bullshit approach to Atticus’s ghastly conduct during the war; the implicit comparison between the lynching of communists in Korea and the similarly brutal treatment of minorities in America; the way Ji-ah both is and is not the daughter of a woman who’s trying her best not to become fond of the spirit she has called forth, since helping that spirit devour souls is the only way she’ll get her real daughter back, and so on. The emotional valence of the episode is constantly shifting, even at the risk of making it harder to root for the show’s hero, and that’s admirable.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country, the second in a row I’ve enjoyed, for Decider.