What a wunderkammer of an episode. From its opening moments, in which grumbling orcs desert Adar’s army rather than fight, to its closing image, of catapults hurling flaming rocks that arc through the night sky on their way to rain death and destruction on the sprawling Elf city of Eregion, this week’s Rings of Power delivered something special seemingly with each scene. 

I quite enjoyed this week’s Rings of Power, which I reviewed for Decider.

“A live-action television series about the Batman villain the Penguin, starring Colin Farrell.” Describing The Penguin, the new series from showrunner Lauren LeFranc and director Craig Zobel, makes you sound like you’re doing a bit. 

You have to start with The Batman, the Matt Reeves–helmed Bat-reboot that introduced Farrell’s version of the character. He’s a good actor, of course, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what made director Matt Reeves cast Colin Farrell as a bad guy famous for being a funny-looking little short fat dude. Were there no funny-looking little short fat dudes available? Some guys wouldn’t have to put on about twelve square feet of prosthetics to make the role work? 

And why is he getting his own TV show? This isn’t the Joker or Catwoman we’re talking about here, it’s the villain the Joker and Catwoman make fun of in their group text with Two-Face and Poison Ivy. And what is up with this weird era where baddies like Penguin and Harley Quinn and freaking Kite-Man get their own shows on Max while the Caped Crusader himself gets his new cartoon drop-shipped to Amazon to air on Prime Video instead? In the absence of the help of the World’s Greatest Detective, alas, we’ll have to muddle through without these answers.

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

There’s a joke in the animated series Adventure Time, where the young hero, Finn, praises the biscuits cooked by his sidekick Jake, a talking, shapeshifting dog. “Finn,” says an exasperatedly honest Jake in response, “I made those biscuits with so much butter! You were just responding to the butter!” 

This is worth thinking about when you watch TV. (Other than Adventure Time, I mean.) How often are we responding favorably to a show because all the parts work in sync to create a whole that’s more than their sum, or because we just like a bunch of the parts a lot? When are we responding to the biscuits, and when are we just responding to the butter?

—

After the first episode, I started wondering if The Old Man’s primary strength was just how enjoyable and talented veteran actors Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow are. This episode proves that Alia Shawkat is a vital ingredient, without whom The Old Man noticeably feels like half a show. 

It also shows that she, too, is a casting coup in the same way Bridges and Lithgow is: She’s simply a very interesting person to look at. Bridges has his Old Man of the Mountain visage, Lithgow his unparalleled look of officious aggrievedness, and Shawkat a prodigiously freckled canvas across which emotions as simple as rage and defiance and as complicated as grief for a life never allowed to exist are splashed like a Jackson Pollock. 

The Old Man returned last week with a two-part premiere; I reviewed episode one and episode two for Decider.

Turns out there are more horrifying things to see than a decomposing corpse. A lonely middle-aged man, fabricating some kind of emotional connection with his much younger employee entirely in his head, then firing her hours after she rejects his clumsy romantic/sexual advances. That same young woman, too stunned by the prospect of a life without her awful father that she fails to stop the boat rapidly speeding away from his floundering form in the Mediterranean, guaranteeing his death. That young woman’s best friend, reacting to the news that criminally negligent homicide has been committed and needs to be covered up the way you might respond to getting tickets to the Oscars. That same friend turning on the young woman in the end, unable to face the fact that every terrible thing she’s saying about her is true. This week’s episode of Industry is an emotional abattoir, one that reminds me of the tagline for the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Who will survive this season, and what will be left of them?

I reviewed this week’s awesome Industry for Decider.

The Elf-lord in question is Celebrimbor, who’s powered here by a sad and anxiety-inducing performance by Charles Edwards. Edwards had been an odd choice for Celebrimbor for me until now; he simply seems too approachable to play one of the most towering figures in Tolkien’s entire legendarium. 

But now I see the vision. Edwards’s job this is to take his genial approach to the character and draw the notes of self-doubt his placid disposition normally papers over. When you watch Celebrimbor look at his own shaking hands, wondering where the creation of the Seven Rings for the Dwarf-lords went wrong — he’s received word from Prince Durin that his father Durin III has undergone a complete personality change since receiving his very powerful piece of jewelry — you see the grandson of the godlike Elf craftsman Fëanor. Can he ever live up to his grandsire? And given the death and misery that resulted from Grandpa’s creations, would he even want to?

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

“This is the one situation where I get to control my helplessness.” I didn’t expect Sir Henry Muck, of all people, to crack the code for the way Industry uses sex to explore its characters interior lives, but there you have it. Henry says this in the context of finally asking Yasmin to urinate on him — please note that he’s “no pervert”; instead of some elaborate production where he gets down on his knees and she stands over his face or whatever, he just has her pee on his leg, then acts as if he’s caught in the video for “Here Comes the Rain Again.” But he could be speaking for almost anyone on the show. Sex is where you can choose to dominate or be dominated, for your own pleasure, instead of having these roles forced on you by external circumstance by a world driven not by pleasure but money, money at all costs. No wonder they all fuck and fetishize like rabbits with Fetlife accounts. 

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

When was the last time you watched an episode of television that made you clap your hands and cheer at the end? It’s been a minute for me, I must say, and I watch a lot of television. A lot of really good television, even! But there’s something special about “White Mischief,” the fourth episode of Industry’s Industry-standard terrific third season. Written by series creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay and directed with breathless panache by Zoé Whittock, it is both a showcase for the prodigious talent of Sagar Radia and for everything this show does well, which is, at this point, pretty much everything.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Industry, one of the best hours of television I’ve ever watched, for Decider.

Call this one “The Episode Starring All the Characters Whose Names You Forgot.” With no Elrond or (especially) Galadriel to anchor it, no Stranger/Harfoot antics to provide comforting Hobbit-y vibes, and a pair of very shaky storylines in their place, the third and final of the three episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 released as a giant-sized premiere faces by far the heaviest lift. If it doesn’t get as far as its two predecessors, it manages quite a bit more than I both expected and feared.

I reviewed the third and final episode of last week’s three-ep season 2 premiere of The Rings of Power for Decider.

Is this really happening? Is The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power…good, now? Without possession of an Elven ring myself, I cannot see things that have not yet come to pass. Who knows, maybe the show falls right back off a cliff in the third and final of the three episodes Amazon released for its giant-sized Season 2 premiere. But so far, so good. Quite good, even.

I reviewed the fine second episode of The Rings of Power‘s second season for Decider.

Well. Well, well, well. Now that’s more like it!

The last thing I wrote about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was this: “a crushing disappointment.” I stand by that. But I also speculated that the inexperience of creators and showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne, coupled with the sheer amount of money poured into the misfire, meant there was little chance the show would improve. 

Boy, am I happy to be wrong. It’s early yet, obviously, and the show could revert to the mean. But the first episode of Rings’ second season, is, quite frankly, crackerjack live-action fantasy television. No one’s going to mistake it for the first-in-class Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon franchise anytime soon — for one thing, my 13 year old cracks wise about the special effects looking goofy when they watch this one — but can it stand with Amazon’s similarly improved sophomore season of The Wheel of Time? If it keeps it up, I don’t see why not.

I liked the season premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, believe it or not, and I reviewed it for Decider.

This is is as good a time as any to say the obvious: Myha’la and Marisa Abela are absolutely fucking outstanding as Harper and Yasmin, and they have been from the start. In part this is down to smart casting. Putting “a diminutive woman,” as both Otto and myself have called her, into the role of your leading sociopath is a deft bit of sleight-of-hand, while Abela has the kind of beauty that’s both striking and somehow approachable, both of which are key components of her job as it’s been constructed.

But it’s raw talent, too. That wolfish grin on Myha’la’s face as she brings Eric to heel, then lightens the mood by observing the glitter all over his face! The way Abela can change Yasmin from a woman who hates herself for missing her abusive father to a woman who can make powerful men beg for her favor using just the cast of her eyes! Coupled with the ferocity of the show’s stance against the personal and political hypocrisy and abusiveness of everyone involved, and the two actors are like samurai wielding their swords so efficiently you don’t even notice you’ve been sliced in two. 

I reviewed this week’s Industry for Decider.

Can such a gap in experience and circumstance ever be bridged? The show seems to take a glass-half-empty approach to that question. It’s true that Black Baltimoreans bust up a Nazi rally, since the Jews’ enemies are their enemies too. But the last images of such unrest are the riots and brutal crackdowns that erupted following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination; Cleo, meanwhile, wearily scoffs at the idea that she and Maddie could be friends. The severing of Maddie’s ties to Ferdie and to her adopted neighborhood are other datapoints to consider when assessing the show’s take on cross-racial solidarity against robber barons and fascist mobs. In Lady in the Lake’s world, at least, the outlook is grim.

I did a little explainer for the end of Lady in the Lake for Decider. These are servicey, but I try to have some fun and say something interesting with them.

But the nice thing about racism is that it has no basis in fact. It’s entirely made-up nonsense. It’s bullshit, it’s bupkis, it’s a fabrication, it’s a myth. This is why all the groups rattled off by that awful Officer Bosko in the previous episode — the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, presumably Polish people like himself — have been able to “overcome” racism and “become” white. Race is sociopolitical Calvinball: The people in charge get to decide who counts, and it has nothing to do with any qualities that are innate to anyone. They make up the rules as they go along!

In other words, people are treated differently, and their different experiences make them different in many ways, but people are the same. The family you see on the news, crying for their slain child in a pile of rubble half a world away, feel the same grief and pain as the family you see on the news, crying for their slain child at a school shooting in an American suburb, who feel the same grief and pain as the family you see on the news, crying for their murdered daughter/sister/mother killed by cops for committing no crime at all. Lionel, Cleo’s son with sickle cell anemia, and Anne Frank, seen in a photo hanging from the wall near Maddie’s desk, are united by far, far more than what separates them. But you don’t have to take my word for it: Ask the Nazis in this very episode.

I reviewed the series finale of Lady in the Lake for Decider.

All you need is one hour. 

Less than an hour, actually. 51 minutes: That’s how long it will take you to watch the first episode of Industry, HBO/Max’s buzzy series about sex, drugs, friendship, money, life, and death among the young sharks of London’s financial industry. And that’s all you’ll need to decide whether Industry, one of the smartest and sexiest on television right now, is for you. 

I know, I know, the show is currently in the middle of its third season, and that kind of time commitment can be intimidating. But this isn’t one of those “it starts getting good in Season 2” kind of shows, where you have to sink in several full work days to make it worth watching. Far from it. Everything that makes the show great is present right there in the pilot, and the show only gets better from there. 

So it’s simple. If you like the pilot, you’ll like Industry; if you don’t, you won’t. It’s the lowest bar to entry of any prestige TV drama currently on the air — and as far as prestige TV dramas go, Industry is as good as it gets. And don’t worry: We won’t spoil any major twists or surprises as we explain why.

I gave Industry, one of the best shows on the air and a real sleeper until this season, the hard sell for Decider.

Industry is not an easy show to cover. Oh, it’s an absolute pleasure to watch — gorgeous to look at, a cast bristling with talent, gripping financial-thriller storylines, and the proverbial Strong Sexual Content we all know love. And it’s equally pleasurable to think about, to discuss, to pull apart and piece back together. You could unpack Eric’s feelings about Harper, or Yasmin’s sexual personae, or the show’s whole bitter commentary on capitalism with someone over drinks for an hour. (I don’t even wanna think about how long you could go with cocaine.)

But it isn’t easy to write about, for the simple reason that, well, it’s too good. There’s so much stuff going on, and so much of that stuff is so rich and attention-demanding, that it’s hard to know where to begin. Often I’ll hit this point with shows I really like fairly deep into a season or a run, reaching a point where all I can do is rattle off a list of superlatives. I’m now on my second review of Industry ever, and I feel as though I’ve hit that point already. Where do we go from here? I swear I’m going to limit this kind of meta self-referential nonsense in future reviews of Industry as much as I can, but after this episode? Come on. 

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

Filmmakers love putting Natalie Portman’s face in the mirror. It’s easy to understand — if I were a director who had access to a face like Natalie Portman’s, I’d put it everywhere I could. But like Perseus defeating Medusa by her reflection in his shield, there are some faces simply too powerful to gaze at directly for too long. Studying such a striking person from that reflective remove can be more revealing than looking at them directly. 

It certainly is in Episode 3 of Lady in the Lake. Adapted from the novel by Laura Lipmman, Alma Har’el’s Apple TV+ series stages this sex scene involving Portman’s character, fed-up ex-housewife turned cub reporter Maddie Morgenstern Schwartz, and her lover, Baltimore police officer Ferdie Platt (Y’lan Noel), in front of a mirror. And there’s a lot to see. 

A few weeks ago, Lady in the Lake had a scene where Natalie Portman has sex in front of a mirror. This got me to thinking about Natalie Portman, sex, mirrors, and the relationship between all three across her career. I wrote about it for Decider.

The Sopranos, but more bitingly cynical. Euphoria, but with more and better sex and drugs. Mr. Robot, but there’s no hackers. Mad Men, but you flash forward six decades to discover basically nothing has changed. Succession, but with characters who sound like humans instead of lab rats in some kind of inventive-swearing experiment. Industry, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s remarkable workplace drama set in the atavistic world of London finance, feels like many shows at once; somehow, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. 

I am so thrilled to be covering Industry for Decider this season, starting with my review of the season premiere. It’s a show I slept on for way too long. It’s not too late!

This was the big one. In retrospect, the fourth episode of Lady in the Lake makes the first three look like they were holding their breath (when they weren’t gasping it out while fucking or dancing or running for their lives, of course), waiting for this big inevitable exhalation of raw unadulterated plot movement. A lot happens in this episode — some of it above and beyond what seems strictly necessary, or even advisable, to tell the story of these two women.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lady in the Lake for Decider.

Lady in the Lake is two shows in one. Each half has a charismatic female protagonist, a murder-mystery/crime-thriller plot, and an awareness of the race, class, and gender power differentials at work. But they don’t feel the same, do they, despite all that? And it goes beyond the skin color and religion of the leading players, too. Creator-director Alma Har’el and writer Briana Belser make this not just a tale of two cities, but almost of two genres.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Lady in the Lake for Decider.

His voice really jumps out at you. It’s the sound of every promising up-and-coming politician you’ve ever voted for, knowing the whole time he’s going to disappoint you. Where did it come from?

William Atherton, the bad guy in Ghostbusters. I was reading the script and thinking Who really annoys me like that? Who’s this kind of officious, pompous guy? Then I was like, Oh, wait. [Imitating Atherton’s Ghostbusters character, Walter Peck] “And what is the magic word? May I please? How many ghosts have you caught?” He was brilliant in it, and using this Ghostbusters character as a reference point really excited me, really intrigued me. I went to Joel Goldes, who actually was one of the two main dialect coaches I used for Obama, and he and I started trying to carve out this specific dialect.

I interviewed the great O-T Fagbenle about his miraculous performance as slick, soft-spoken prosecutor Nico Della Guardia on Presumed Innocent for Decider.