So far, at least, the show’s real selling point is not the originality of the plot, but the aesthetics of the game. The brightly colored uniforms and face-obscuring masks recall that other global sensation of recent times, Among Us, while that multi-colored staircase is a killer visual. (There’s more than a little Daft Punk mixed into all of this, I think.) When it comes, the violence is presented in a blasé manner meant to convey the callousness of the game’s masters, but which could also read as glib and exploitative if the show doesn’t play its cards right.

And that’s where we’re at after the first episode: intriguing if unoriginal premise, a likable down-on-his-luck protagonist, compelling visuals. To see if Squid Game is more than the sum of its parts, we’ll have to play again.

I’m covering Squid Game for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

By all appearances, Dawn is the odd man out in the current Cleon triumvirate; Day and Dusk seem to speak and move in unison during an audience with an ambassador from one of the galaxy’s big religions, Luminism, with Dawn always a beat behind. However, this external synchronicity is belied by a schism behind the scenes, one to match the schism growing within Luminism. While the Emperors have a chosen candidate in mind to succeed the religion’s deceased leader, another candidate has emerged, one who’s embraced a heretical doctrine: as clones, the Cleons have no soul, and are therefore less than human, not more. This, Day believes, is a direct challenge to their right to rule, one potentially embraced by three trillion citizens of the Empire if the rogue candidate takes over. (Day is pulled away from a deliciously erotic encounter with a sex worker he’s training to touch him gently enough to get past his personal shield aura to deal with this crisis; maybe that’s why he’s so grumpy.)

In a fierce argument, Day overrides the usual protocol and insists on traveling to the religion’s decision-making conclave himself, rather than letting Dusk take the trip as is custom. (No Emperor has ever left Trantor during his “Brother Day” years.) Day has a long memory, it seems, and he blames his predecessor Dusk for the fall of the starbridge, the callous bombing of the warring barbarian kingdoms Anacreon and Thespis, and the exile of Seldon, whose mathematical models predicted both the religious schism and an ongoing insurrection on Trantor, another problem the Emperors are having a hard time managing. No more rash decisions like these, Day says—it’s time for him to take charge of the Luminism issue, not Dusk. (“Certainly now the Empire will no longer be rent by impulsive action,” the robotic assistant Demerzel deadpans when Day strongarms Dusk out of the diplomatic mission. Ya burnt, Brother Day!) Should we be troubled that Day has grown so furious about the Empire’s mathematicians’ inability to debunk Seldon’s work that he shouts one into a fatal heart attack? Yeah, probably.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Foundation, freshly renewed for a second season, for Decider.

You don’t have to be a movie buff to love On Cinema at the Cinema, but it helps!

Actually, nevermind—it probably won’t help you at all.

The central joke of this cult-hit comedy series is that its “hosts”—comedians Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington, portraying elaborately fictionalized versions of themselves—don’t know the first thing about the cinema. What they do know about is driving each other crazy, and that’s the core of On Cinema’s appeal. With its Season 12 premiere recently debuting on the show’s new dedicated website HeiNetwork.tv, it’s the perfect show for anyone who’s ever shared a workplace with someone they absolutely can’t stand. And who hasn’t?

I wrote about On Cinema at the Cinema, which might be the best thing Tim Heidecker has ever done?, for Decider.

Impeachment’s studied agnosticism regarding the motives, trustworthiness, and guilt or innocence of its characters is its most fascinating trait. The anger Clinton feels when he’s questioned about his commitment to the advancement of women, for example, is (to my eyes anyway) painted as completely legit; certainly the makeup of his Cabinet is an argument in his favor here, as he’s quick to point out to his legal team. But of course, this doesn’t preclude him from being a cad, a creep, and/or a predator in his personal life; his behavior with Monica, an unpaid employee fresh out of college, is proof of that.

Then there are figures like his accusers Paula Jones and (appearing here for the first time) Juanita Broaddrick. There’s no reason to believe, in the show’s construction of these characters, that they’re being anything but truthful in their allegations against the president; Jones is too naive to dissemble and seems completely aghast at being asked explicit sexual questions during her meeting with Clinton’s lawyers, and Broaddrick tries like hell to get the right-wing private investigators who come sniffing after her story to leave, so averse is she to getting mixed up in all this. What reason would such women have to lie about what Clinton did to them?

I reviewed this week’s episode of ACS Impeachment for Decider.

Salvor Hardin’s segment, by contrast, asks a bit too much of the audience. Salvor herself is something of a cipher, like a generic Star Wars Universe protagonist: barren world, space-age weapon, hidden powers, secret destiny, the whole schmear. And so many mysteries surround her storyline that they blend together into a sort of storytelling soup. We’re nearly two decades removed from the events of the first two episodes, we’re told: okay, great. Why did Raych murder his adoptive father Hari Seldon? What happened to the Foundation after Seldon’s death? How did they weather the storm that surely followed after the death of their founder and leader? What happened to Raych, for that matter? Why did he load our narrator and focal character, Gaal Dornick, into some kind of liquid-filled escape pod? Where is Gaal now? 

Obviously, the show’s decision to withhold these answers was a deliberate one, and I respect that. And we do get some info on what happened after the Foundation’s slowship made planetfall on Terminus (kicking up an impressively earthy giant billow of dirt and stones when it did so): They cannibalized the ship for spare parts in order to build their settlement, they established various procedures for safeguarding their perimeter, contacting the Empire, trading with other worlds, and so forth. 

But so much is left unanswered that when we start adding new mysteries on top of the old ones—the Vault’s expanding null field, the mysterious figure Salvor twice follows into the wreckage of the slowship—we’re basically building on sand. There’s not firm enough, and I hope you’ll pardon my use of the term, foundation on which to build either the character or her world. But then again, we’re talking about a story that plays out over multiple thousands of years, not just a couple of decades. If the show plays its cards right, I’m sure Salvor and her adventures can age up into something interesting.

I reviewed the third episode of Foundation for Decider.

The second matter involves Vernon Jordan, the longtime Clinton ally played by famously handsome man Blair Underwood. Clinton sends Monica his way in order to placate her demands for a job, and—friendly and avuncular and full of Southern charm—he’s quick to promise her an interview, at the very least, for a PR job at Revlon up in New York City. But as he says goodbye to her after their meeting, he pats her ass. He does it seemingly without thinking about it, before or afterwards. Monica herself is momentarily taken aback, but from that point out all she cares about is whether his Revlon recommendation pans out. The workaday sexual harassment doesn’t even seem to register.

Which makes sense, given what we learn about Monica in this episode. In a painful slumber party with Linda—painful because we already know Linda has “made my peace” with losing Monica as a friend once her tape recordings are made public as part of a potential book deal or as evidence in the Paula Jones suit, a connection Tripp herself makes—Monica reveals her dating history. It consists exclusively of “dating” inappropriately older men in positions of authority over her, from a camp counselor who penetrated her until she said “no” at age 14 to a teacher who took her virginity in high school, then literally relocated his entire family to be closer to her when she went to college in another town. Boys her own age, she says, have always ignored her. Why wouldn’t she gravitate to the most powerful man in the world once he revealed his openness to their flirtation? For that matter, why wouldn’t she accept Vernon Jordan’s ass-slaps as the cost of doing business? The question the show itself asks, I think, is why do we tolerate any of this shit at all?

I reviewed this week’s of ACS Impeachment for Decider.

SPOILERS AHEAD

A matter of hours. That’s how long the dominion of the vampires reigns over Crockett Island, from their orgy of death in St. Patrick’s Church to their demise in the morning sun in this, the seventh and final episode of Midnight Mass. This is not to say that Crockett Island survives the night, anymore than they do. By the time they all (well, almost all—more on this later) accept their fate and greet the dawn, they’ve killed and partially devoured everyone else on the island, converting many of them into killers in turn—a grim tide of slaughter we watch slowly overtake the island, dragging people screaming from their houses, falling upon them in the streets as they flee. They’ve burned every building on the island, with the exception of the church, burned by their erstwhile leader, and the rec center, burned by one of their own. The boats on which they were counting to spread their religious contagion to the mainland have been burned by their enemies. They are all dead. Their enemies—Erin Greene, Sheriff Hassan, Dr. Gunning—are all dead. The island is dead. There are two survivors.

I reviewed the finale of Midnight Mass for Decider. This was a very good show.

Utter chaos follows. An orgy of death and violence breaks out in the church, as people poison themselves and die vomiting blood, then rise up to kill and consume the few who resisted this miniature, supernatural Jonestown. Director and cowriter Mike Flanagan lingers on this for a long, long time—echoing the way he shot a candlelit procession of singing congregants for over three minutes, long enough for them to sing an entire hymn—and the effect is profoundly disturbing, a genuine violation of cultural taboo. It’s like watching someone lance a boil from which all the evil done in God’s name bursts out like pus.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Midnight Mass for Decider.

I don’t know where creator/director/showrunner/co-writer Mike Flanagan is going to go with this story in the end, and certainly the hopepunk makeover he gave to Shirley Jackson’s brutal The Haunting of Hill House inspires little confidence. But so far—so far—he sure does seem to be likening Roman Catholicism and Christianity more broadly to, yes, a vampire, profiting off the suffering of the communities on which it battens itself. And that’s something worth a personal confession, of sorts.

The priest who confirmed me was a child molester, and you can read legendary newspaperman Jimmy Breslin’s column about the horror he wrought right here, if you can stomach it. A priest on the faculty of my all-boys Catholic high school was a predator as well; last time I checked, he enjoyed a Vatican sinecure. So even aside from wider questions of doctrine, of historical atrocities, of Catholicism’s role as a bastion of present-day right-wing revanchism from the Supreme Court on down, I get it.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Midnight Mass for Decider.

Well. That was unexpected!

I reviewed episode two of Foundation for Decider.

“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.