The problem I’m having with Vladimir is that instead of reviewing it, I want to transcribe it. Adapting her own novel, writer-creator Julia May Jonas alternates aphoristic quips, keen interpersonal observations, and steamily subtle come-ons with such alacrity that I don’t think a review can do it justice. People use the phrase “thrill ride” to describe action movies, but with one gleefully surprising line after another, Vladimir earns the title.

I reviewed episode 2 of Vladimir for Decider.

Rachel Weisz has played sexy women of a certain age before, pretty much since she became a sexy woman of a certain age herself. She’s one of those actors who seems keenly interested in exploring the subject of sexuality in their work. But I’ve never seen her come at it from quite this angle before. Her narrator character isn’t steely or commanding, she isn’t repressed and ready to explode — she’s just kind of some dude, really. She’s attractive and intelligent but awkward and insecure about her age. She’s no stranger being on either end of an affair, but seemingly unable to conceive of herself as having another one, until now anyway. 

All of the professor’s sexual energy is right near the surface, and it’s up to Weisz, Jonas’s script, and the camera of directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini to capture and convey that. It’s in the way she objectifies Vladimir, devouring him with her eyes as reflected in closeups on individual body parts. It’s in the frank way she describes her and John’s past, coupled with the nervous way she handles her interactions with Vladimir — that disconnect exists because she’s powerfully attracted to this guy, it’s not some now-dulled memory. 

It’s Weisz’s job to make you wonder whether she’ll give in and kiss this guy at any given moment, or run away screaming. It probably goes without saying that she succeeds, but I’ll say it anyway. Weisz is a fascinating and very funny actress; she was a scream in her dual roles as the Mantle twins in Alice Birch’s Dead Ringers remake, as dark as that material got, and a generation of moviegoers still remember her light touch as the heroine of The Mummy. 

Vladimir makes Weisz’s professor a comical character, having her giggle nervously when he mentions his quads and lie about how much everyone loves her salad and so forth. But it also spares none of the actors smoldering sexuality, thanks to her frank voiceovers and hot blink-and-you’ll-miss-them fantasy visions. The combination/contrast is such a smart and novel choice, on everyone’s part. Even the Ferris Bueller fourth wall breaking, a real break from the norm on TV, works because Weisz’s performance and Jonas’s writing are both charming and unpredictable. Cutting, provocative, laught-out-loud funny, and horny as hell? It’s gonna be a good semester.

I’m covering the college-campus sex comedy Vladimir for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. It’s terrific!

The Beauty has been one of the season’s most pleasantly unpleasant surprises — nasty, horny, catty, bloody, and beautifully disgusting. The production and costume design is first rate, referential of past horror/dystopian classics without feeling derivative. Ditto the body horror, which like that in The Substance is reminiscent of Cronenberg and Carpenter but blazes vile new snail trails of its own. 

The show’s approach to its titular concept has been multifaceted and frequently fascinating. Fully acknowledging that beauty standards are draconian and arbitrary and designed to be profited from, the show also uses a variety of characters — a lonely shut-in, a depressed teenage girl, a trans woman, a sick child — to make the point that it’s not always shallow to want to look and feel like an idealized version of yourself. The question of “Whose ideal would that be, anyway?” is never far below the surface. 

Plus it’s fun as all hell. Beautiful people running around bare-assed. Assassins and mutants and loose-cannon FBI agents (oh my!). Sci-fi lab facilities and pastel commercial parodies. Impeccable stunt casting. Mac Quayle’s creepy synth score. Frank sex talk. My favorite Ashton Kutcher performance ever. If the season had lasted just five seconds longer and shown us the new old Cooper instead of leaving us with a shrug of the shoulder I don’t think I’d have any substantive complaints at all. If they make a booster dose available in the form a second season, I’ll be first in line for a poke. 

I reviewed the season finale of The Beauty for Decider. Fun show!

But more unsettling than anything else is the speed with which this almost entirely untested product, which is so festooned with gruesome side effects that they need to knock their rich patients out to hide it from them, takes over society. It blows past the usual testing and government approval. In fact, it has the full backing of the unnamed, unseen, but Beautified president (you know who it is: he threatens to run for five terms as a result), whose entire cabinet takes the shot by way of endorsement. 

This is, in effect, the world we currently live in. Hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into AI, a technology known, for a fact, to induce psychosis in its users, to reduce the cognitive abilities of children, to produce child sexual abuse materials and spread Nazi propaganda at scale. This is being done with the White House’s approval and encouragement. Major governmental departments are fusing with AI as fast as they can. There are no guardrails when the people in charge are too insane and corrupt and evil to want them in place. 

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Beauty‘s first season for Decider.

“You’ll still be scared shitless, but you will not believe the joy. You’ll be playing with your kid, watching them splash around in the bath or play soccer for the first time, and sometimes, Annie, I swear it feels like your heart will fuckin’ explode.”

“My dad used to say if you were lucky you got a few moments where you got to experience life at full volume. That’s how he put it: ‘life at full volume.’ Those moments when you’re completely present, and everything slows down, and all the textures and colors and sounds, they all go, like, hi-def.”

I’ve struggled to explain the power of Paradise. On the surface level (haha, no pun intended) it’s one of the goofiest shows I’ve ever seen, combining the basic premise of Fallout with the aesthetics of an NBC prime-time drama. Yet somehow, time and again, the goddamn thing hits me like a freight train. I like to think I’m not a sucker, a mark, a cheap date when it comes to drama. So what gives?

It’s simple, as it turns out: Paradise is a show about life at full volume. It’s a show about moments when it feels like your heart will fuckin’ explode. It’s a maximalist emotion machine, using both human interest and post-apocalyptic/survivalist/political-thriller/sci-fi genre tropes to blow the part of you that feels love and hope and grief to smithereens, as often as possible. I’m not sure I’ve ever watched anything quite like it. 

I reviewed today’s episode of Paradise for Decider.

We live in an era of impunity. Crimes of world-historical scale are being committed before our eyes on a daily basis. The elite in both America and Britain are becoming known as the Epstein Class — a coterie of rich, pseudo-smart racist perverts pushing global politics to the right as part of their project of enriching themselves and exploiting the most vulnerable to feel more powerful. The Trump Administration is so lousy with these figures that the cabinet would have a staffing shortage if they all faced the justice they deserve, from the Oval Office on down.

Yasmin has chosen to embrace this evil. It served her father well; he faced no real justice while he was alive until she herself left him to drown. Whit Halberstram escaped punishment completely. Her ex-husband’s “disgrace” amounts to a life of luxury unimaginable to the vast majority of human beings alive in history. You can dress it up fancy and teach it to speak politely, but all that matters here is vulgar power. Yasmin sees this power in fascism — the libidinal thrill of smashing things just to show that you can. Yasmin has been destroyed in such a fashion over and over. Now it’s her turn to play destroyer.

By the end of last season, Harper Stern was in full Heisenberg mode, a criminal mastermind overseeing an empire, brooking no dissent. Compared to Whit’s utter lack of humanity and Yasmin’s embrace of authoritarianism, though, Harper is a veritable folk hero. As the interviewer says, the goal of her company is to uncover the ugly truth, when so many are so willing to listen to pretty lies. The financial world today is structured to reward fraud; Harper is rewarded when she exposes fraud. 

As the last decent person in an increasingly reactionary Labour party, Jennifer Bevan gets on stage and says that neoliberalism has gutted the moral infrastructure of society for decades, a scheme with which she herself was complicit. In the wasteland left behind, monsters roam. Harper Stern is, or was, such a monster, until she encountered creatures even more loathsome and insatiable than herself.

I reviewed the season finale of Industry for Decider. This show is one of the all-time greats.

I suspect that whether you’re interested in the answer depends on how much the dry vibe Conrad conjures here resonates with you. From Floyd’s restrictive clothing to Clark’s pinched smile, from Plumb’s crisp professionalism even when talking about her and her husband’s porn use to Homer’s mausoleum of a police station, there’s an austere air to the proceedings here, as darkly comic and motivated by sexual desire as they are. 

This isn’t to say the show never goes for broad jokes; Carol’s umpire outfit and Floyd’s lack of Batman reading comprehension are pretty damn broad. It’s simply to say that there’s a welcome chilliness to the proceedings, one that cuts against the comedy of the title. Fittingly, Conrad frequently keeps each of the key figures isolated in the frame — except Floyd and Clark, whom he puts together over and over again, from that convenience store to a restroom in an Outback Steakhouse. It makes moments like the footage of Floyd performing ASL translations for some kind of pop act stand out all the more for their exuberance.

So what will it take to sever the two men’s connection? And to what degree is Carol a proxy for a relationship between Clark and the man who saved his life — who several flash-forwards or flashbacks or whatever they are show embracing, shirtless? Whodunit is one thing. Whydunit is where the good stuff can be found.

I’m covering the dark comedy DTF St. Louis for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. It’s good!

Fortunately, the lead actors — particularly Sawai, Yamamoto, and the Russells — are uniformly skilled at wielding the show’s secret weapon, a sense of profound yearning thank links one person to another, whether their connection is familiar or romantic in nature. The dynamic in the past between Mari, Bill, and Lee, three people who love each other but who can never properly resolve that love since a romantic pairing is only possible between two of them at a time, is sophisticated, heartbreaking, and acted with both tenderness and humor.At times, this group is asked to take on material that isn’t at their level: big gobs of “I’m going back, it’s what he would have done for us” genre-movie motivation, say, or an underwritten scene in which Cate and Hiroshi finally address his bigamy that should have been emotionally riveting. When that happens, you feel the disconnect between their abilities and the script.

I suppose having a cast strong enough to expose the occasional weakness is one of them good problems, however. Certainly you see the advantages of a cast this stacked come through in the character work: Young Lee’s petulant sneer when Kei cracks a dirty joke about Bill, Kei’s mesmeric connections with both men, Cate wrestling with how her Monarch experiences have completely uprooted her from the world. Sawaii makes it feel like Cate’s quest to rescue Lee is less a matter of hero-of-the-story bravado and more a desperate woman clinging to a man who’s been her literal lifeline. 

And the monsters! Man, this show has not disappointed there. In addition to Kong and the trilobites and (presumably) Biollante, there’s a giant bat thing that barfs electricity, a huge rat monster Kentaro kills with a forklift, and one of those cool giant ram/boar/rhino things whose hides are protected by a layer of trees and plants and giant thorns. Monarch’s thought process for creating and deploying new monsters and Titans appears to be “Hey, you know what would be cool?”, and so far their answers have been correct. The result isn’t a perfect show, but it’s certainly a fun one.

I’m covering Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider again this season, starting with my review of today’s premiere. Woo!

We have this episode’s pleasures to enjoy, and they are many. Foremost among them is Graynor as the Mother, a supervillain just as sexy and insane as Byron, but with the demeanor of a woman who has business to attend to, not a guy who’s got parties to plan. 

Mac Quayle’s score, meanwhile, really sizzles in this one; the closing music was so good I let the credits play just to listen to it all the way through. It’s a visually splendid show, too, with director Crystle Roberson Dorsey serving up a series of little treats and terrors for the eye. Even shots that don’t need to be anything fancy, like Cooper and Bennett traveling up the stairs back to their room together, can become an Escher-esque trompe l’oeil. If sometimes that means watching a man’s ribs pop open like that turkey in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, well, beauty always comes at a cost.

I reviewed episode nine of The Beauty for Decider.

The eighth dose of The Beauty we’ve received is the most refined formula yet. In just over half an hour of screentime, this episode encapsulates everything that makes this show what the Tom Tom Club once referred to as “fun, nasty fun!”

I reviewed episode 8 of The Beauty for Decider.

The whole episode feels like a necessary course correction for some of the weaker elements of the story so far. Dr. Torabi spent Season 1 as a cypher; now we get to see how she really feels about being deceived by someone who was more than a client or a meal ticket to her, someone she considered a friend. It’s Shahi’s best work on the show to date.

Baines may be dead now, meanwhile, but his brief reign of terror is exactly what Paradise needed to stay current. The first season’s confidence that the American government would maintain some kind of continuity in the face of disaster, with a handsome young president in charge and a hypercompetent sphere of scientists, capitalists, politicians, and security forces keeping the wheels rolling indefinitely, simply couldn’t survive exposure to the actual Trump regime, which (among other things) has partially destroyed the actual White House building and taken a wrecking ball to scientific research. The norms aren’t intact now, let alone after a global tsunami. Having a loser like Baines run amok until someone gets fed up and kills him feels more like how things would actually work.

I’m sure that in the wake of the federal government’s assault on Minnesota, the show’s portrayal of a resistance movement will also seem outdated. But it’s admittedly inspiring watching the kids pass samizdata notes to each other through a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in a Free Little Library, and to see the son of an assassinated president ask a scientific genius to help him take the place down from within. 

I reviewed the third part of Paradise‘s three-episode premiere for Decider.

Watching Paradise feels like losing a match to a spectacularly talented professional wrestler. Sure, you may be skeptical of their abilities when you first step in the ring. But before you know it the chops are caving your chest in, the running knees are taking your head off, and the 450 splash off the top rope is putting you away for good. It’s hard to overstate how laser-targeted and powerful this show’s strikes against your heart can get. 

I reviewed the second episode of Paradise Season 2 for Decider.

Paradise, the hit post-apocalyptic thriller from This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman, stars Sterling K. Brown as Xavier Collins, a Secret Service agent living in an underground bunker in Colorado, where the country’s richest and most powerful people work in secret to control the survivors. After the murder of his boss, the President (James Marsden), leads him to uncover the conspiracy’s leader, the billionaire known as Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson), Xavier must set out to the surface world to rescue his still-living wife — 

Hang on, I’m receiving an update. [pause] Really? Interesting! Okay, I’ll start again.

Paradise, the hit post-apocalyptic thriller from This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman, stars Shailene Woodley as Annie, a Graceland tour guide living in Elvis’s old home, where a group of interloping do-gooders camp out before heading west for the Colorado bunker. They’re joining a larger group of people who hope to crack the bunker’s secret wide open — and kill someone named Alex, whoever that is. After Annie discovers she’s pregnant by one of the do-gooders, a man nickamed Link (Thomas Doherty), she heads out to a plane crash site expecting to find him returning for her. Instead, she finds Xavier Collins, who needs no further introduction.

I’m covering Paradise for Decider again this season, starting with my review of part one of the show’s three-episode premiere.

Health, wellness, beauty: unobjectionably positive things, right? The last time I watched broadcast television, every commercial that wasn’t for AI or online sports betting was for products pertaining to one of the three. There’s a section in your supermarket named after them and everything. 

But whose health? Whose wellness? Whose beauty? That is to say, who’s defining what it means to be healthy, to be well, to be beautiful? What do they stand to gain from those definitions? Most importantly, who stands to lose from them?

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Beauty for Decider.

It’s not easy on Yasmin to do this, to be fair. When she calls Jenny and tries to land a job in her comms office, the politician indignantly blows her off. (Assuming you’ll just waltz right into the office of a woman whose mentor you publicly destroyed over her express wishes is classic Yasmin.) “You abandoned him when he needed you the most,” Jenny spits at Yasmin regarding her addict husband, “so you take that for a dance around your conscience.” You can see this blow to Yasmin land almost physically. 

So Yasmin does what she always does when she has nothing else: She returns to Harper. Their conversation is a meticulous unpacking of the unhealthy psychology that has long driven their relationship. Harper admits she’s happy to have all this power at Yasmin’s expense — after all, Harper is going to make a fortune when Tender tanks — and Yasmin thanks her for her honesty. Both say they envy each other: Yasmin wishes she had Harper’s intelligence and confidence, while Harper wishes she had Yasmin’s looks, pedigree, and ease of access to the world. Harper has always resented Yasmin for making her feel less than; Yasmin loves Harper for showing her how she can be more.

Most importantly, they zero in on Yasmin’s damage. Why does she feel this constant need to be in control, “to dominate” as Harper puts it, to “not be at anyone’s mercy”? She grew up at somebody’s mercy, Yasmin laughs through her tears, and can’t bear to live that way again.

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

At this point in its run, Industry is the kind of show that makes me sound like a drunk at a party, cornering you with booze-scented opinionation. So be it. You gotta understand: I watch a lot of television. Industry is as good. as. it. gets. As good as it gets! Set to a pulsating horror-movie synth score by Nathan Micay and even more massive needledrops (“Silence” by Delirium and Sarah MacLachlan, freaking “Both Sides, Now”), it continues to rival the greatest television shows ever made: for insight, for intensity, for that freefall sense of never knowing what will happen next, but still being sure it’ll hurt.

I reviewed this week’s incredible Industry for Decider.

While the episode looks and feels bifurcated, it’s really best considered as a whole. Byron Forst is a cautionary tale about the obsession with beauty — how in the hands of a vapid sociopath it’s just another weapon, a set of fangs that lets him sink his teeth even deeper into a world he’s already despoiled. He’s human Mar-a-Lago Face, if Mar-a-Lago Face didn’t make you look like a monster on the outside as well as the inside, that is. He’s an obsession with beauty as dominance, beauty as the currency of the world’s masters.

Mike and especially Clara, by contrast, illustrate that it’s not always vain or frivolous or shallow or incel to care about how you look. Mike’s not really that much of a schlub, he’s just kind of leading a low-effort life when he’s not at work. Clara’s spent decades living as a man, getting married, having kids, the whole nine; now she’s finally out and transitioning, but she can feel the wasted time hanging over her already, and the process itself is immiserating to her. 

These people don’t want to bang stewardesses and then order their murder with their genitals still wet. They don’t want to deplete children’s college savings funds to overcharge for a miracle drug. They want to have the confidence that looking amazing, the way they want to look, will give them. Are they reckless, maybe selfishly so, given how little they know about the drug? Yes. But they care about each other before, during, and after their transformations. They’re friends. Their motives are not alien to us, as Byron’s are. Clara and Mike are fascinating books to read, but they get judged by their covers. It’s hard to begrudge them their redesign, even though we know that disaster follows.

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

In the present, the newly Beauty-fied Jordan convinces Cooper she is who she says she is by repeating her nickname for his dick: Provigil, an anti-narcolepsy drug, that “brings me back to life.” (I mean this sincerely: Stay classless, The Beauty.) At dinner, she explains how after fleeing the hotel in a panic after transforming, she initially enjoyed the attention her youthful new body and face received, until increasingly unpleasant interactions with men made her feel objectified and stupid. Cooper assures her she was beautiful long before the drug got in her system.

I’d like to see that explored a bit more, to be honest. Rebecca Hall, the actor who plays original-version Jordan, is in fact stunning, and the character is not even 40 yet. Ashton Kutcher, the transformed version of Byron, is 47 years old. He can absolutely play younger, but so can Hall, so what gives?

At the risk of shooting the show bail, I think the double standard is deliberate. Men made this drug, mostly for a male userbase, entirely for a patriarchal world. For these guys, and for a lot of people in fact, it’s okay to be a handsome 47-year-old man in a way it’s not okay to be a beautiful 40-year-old woman. Men online will speak of “the wall,” some completely mythical barrier women hit as they age after which their looks evaporate, as if it’s an incontrovertible fact of life. Would a scientist willing to take these bastards’ money be any different?

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Beauty for Decider. This show rules.

There’s always the risk of overpraising a current show you’re very excited by. Critics especially are given to hyperbole in order to convey that excitement to their readers, and I know I’m no exception. Nevertheless, the one season of television I keep thinking of while watching Industry Season 4 is Mad Men Season 5, a string of back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back masterpieces representing the show, and the entire medium of television, at its absolute best. Industry feels very much as if it’s on the same kind of run right now. I eagerly anticipate, and deeply dread, everything to come. 

I reviewed this weekend’s Industry, released early to avoid the Super Bowl, for Decider. Wowee zowee.

Fallout is a victim of its own success. It’s just aired a season of television that was meaner, sharper, grosser, funnier, and better looking than its already strong initial outing. Expectations for the finale, therefore, were always going to be high. Even so, I had every confidence that Fallout would meet the moment. 

But there’s an air of anticlimax to Fallout’s Season 2 finale. There were just a few too many payoffs deferred, a few too many secrets held back, a few too many storylines stretched thin. Don’t get me wrong, everything here was good, but there’s the nagging sense that the show decided to stop just short of being great.

You can say this for the finale, directed by Frederick E.O. Toye from a script by Karey Dornetto: It never lets you get bored. The action ricochets between half a dozen characters, locations, and even time periods at frequent intervals. By the end of the episode you’re going from one to the next every few seconds. All of them are compelling action/thriller sequences, featuring characters whose fates we care about.

I reviewed the season finale of Fallout for Decider.