The show is smart in showing how the ultra-rich perform virtue for the hoi polloi—dredging up old social posts strictly to punish someone under a woke smokescreen (wokescreen?), turning the party designed solely to spite someone into a fundraiser, denouncing bullying immediately after bullying the shit out of someone, and so on. These kids learn about privilege, cancel culture, et cetera only because they can use it to their advantage. For people who were worried Gossip Girl would be humanizing its characters by making them more socially aware than their predecessors, you can stop worrying. It’s just given them a new set of weapons.

I reviewed this week’s episode of the new Gossip Girl for Decider.

Full frontal male nudity! Enthusiastic same-sex make-outs! Underage analingus! Folks, this is not your father’s Gossip Girl! Unless your father is extremely rich and sending you to an elite private school in Manhattan, in which case I suppose it’s very much your father’s Gossip Girl. I wouldn’t let him watch it, though!

I reviewed episode three of the new Gossip Girl for Decider.

Spotted: Gossip Girl changing the parameters of its own show. According to the traditional Kristen Bell voiceover narration that opens each episode, GGv2.0 is now about “the scandalous lives of New York’s elite,” rather than the previous iteration’s focus on Manhattan specifically. Congratulations to Brooklyn, I guess? And maybe Queens, depending on the neighborhood?

I reviewed this week’s episode of Gossip Girl for Decider.

Full disclosure: I watched every single episode of the original Gossip Girl, from the pilot to the finale. I loved pretty much every moment of it, too, the climactic and nonsensical revelation of Gossip Girl’s secret identity aside. (Seriously, if that’s enough to put you off the scandalous misadventures of Manhattan’s elite, you need to calm down.) I even wrote a fanfic comic about the origin of Chuck Bass, for crying out loud. It was my ideal primetime soap. I am what you might call a Gossip Man.

But that was years ago, and we’re all very different people now than we were then, are we not? So I greeted the news that HBO Max was reviving the show for a sequel series with some trepidation. Without the original characters—to say nothing of the cast, all of whom seemed to have names that sounded even snootier than those of the Upper East Siders they were playing (seriously: Leighton Meester! Taylor Momsen! Chace Crawford! Ed Westwick! Blake Lively! Penn Badgely!)—and without its original sociopolitical setting, could a revival thrive?

Based on this pilot episode (“Just Another Girl on the MTA”), I’d say the answer may well be yes. Written by series creator Joshua Safran (a veteran of the original version) and directed by music-video ace Karena Evans, it replaces Serena van der Woodsen, Blair Waldorf, Chuck Bass, and the rest of the original group with a new crew of the young and the consequence-free, then uses a simple but twist-filled structure to set up the big-money backstabbing that’s sure to follow.

Spotted: me, covering the new Gossip Girl reboot for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Mare of Easttown may ultimately go down in history, for me anyway, as “the one where Kate Winslet did a Philly accent,” the same way that a previous prestige-procedural like the acclaimed The Night Of is “the one where John Turturro puts ointment on his feet.” Deliberately de-glamorizing character bits like those will do that sometimes. (Her work has been excellent throughout regardless.) There are some weird lacunae in this episode, too—like, couldn’t it have found the time to catch up with Kenny, the father of the slain girl, to see how he took the news about the identities of Erin’s abuser and killer? What kind of teenager has a physical hard copy of an incriminating photo in the year of our digital Lord 2021? Did Mare really “need” to arrest Ryan, or was this grim bit of symmetry—having lost her son, she now takes away her best friend’s—unnecessary and cruel, just as Lori said, with the show counting on our faith in the institution of policing to carry the weight? And the final shot of Mare going up the attic stairs to confront her grief over her late son Kevin looked a bit more Hereditary-style spooky than it was probably supposed to; one last not-quite-right move from a show that made plenty of them.

That’s a lot of caveats, I know. But in this episode, at least, the series left me feeling moved, rather than ripped off. Folks, I’ll take it.

I reviewed the finale of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

With one episode to go, many mysteries remain. What was in that piece of paper or photograph that Erin’s beleaguered friend Jess showed to the Chief of Police? Why was it urgent for him to get in touch with Mare immediately thereafter? Why is there a gun in the Ross brothers’ tackle box, and who plans to use it on whom? Why the hell did the show confuse the whole issue by giving their cousin Kenny—not brother, all previous appearances to the contrary—a different last name? Why is the murder-mystery event of the season, stacked top to bottom with talent, so frustrating to watch?

I reviewed the sixth episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

And in the end, The Underground Railroad‘s titular, fictional, fantastical version of the real world’s underground network wound up being a bit player in its own story. Cora is transported from place to place by the Railroad and its offshoots several times, yes. But the story is found in the crimes that drive her from one destination to the next, always seeking safe harbor, finding nothing but an uncertain future—a hopeful one, yes, especially compared to where she’s come from and where she’s been, but still an uncertain one. We know now, decades and decades after Cora’s story, that there really is no safe harbor from the horrors of American racism—not in St. Louis, not in California (ask Them about that one), not in any given place.

No, to the extent that a better place exists, it’s in the uncertain hopes of people, people like Cora and Polly then and everyone involved struggling against what the late, unlamented Arnold Ridgeway referred to as “The American Imperative” today. “Are you kind, mister?” Cora asks Ollie when she approaches his wagon. “Most times, yes,” he says, before adding “Of course, like anybody, I falters, of course.” Of course, of course—he repeats it for emphasis, taking it as a given that no one can be their ideal self all the time, not in this world. But you can try, damn it. You can try.

I reviewed the finale of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

“You shoulda let ’em win a little,” Judge Payton tells the man named Mingo after their poker game with the local worthies has concluded in The Underground Railroad Episode 9. “Wouldn’t hurt not to parade around how as-good-as-white-men you are every chance you get.”

“But I am, Payton” Mingo insists, every syllable weighed with a lifetime of frustration and fury over not being able to convince people of this simple fact. “But I am.”

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

What follows her trip to the Ghost Tunnel is, essentially, a dream version of the same excursion. In Cora’s dream, she descends the Tunnel’s long rope ladder and winds up in a truly palatial Underground Railroad station packed with Black travelers of all kinds. But the ticket agent says she can’t move Cora along until her testimony checks out, a potential problem since she hasn’t offered testimony in Indiana. “Did you really tell your truth?” the agent asks; Cora has nothing to say in response.

The tension mounts courtesy of some incredible sound design, which makes this mysterious mega-station—whether it is above or below ground “depends on where you’re coming from,” says a conductor—sound like it’s constantly inhaling and exhaling, with a crying baby thrown in for good measure. Cora exits and finds herself in the run-down house in the forest where the hatch is from; she reenters and everyone is staring at her as she walks her way to a reunion with her lost friend Caesar. They dance together, quoting their own romantic banter from several episodes earlier. They cry. This is not the surreal logic of a Mad Men or Sopranos fever dream; it’s a straightforward longing for something that can no longer be had.

I reviewed the eighth episode of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

Well, that was a relief.

Clocking in at just over 16 minutes, not counting the closing credits—that’s slightly longer than an installment of, like, Teen Titans Go! or Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!—The Underground Railroad Episode 7 rockets right by, taking us from tragedy to triumph in record time. Titled “Chapter 7: Fanny Briggs” after its main character, whom we’ve already met under another name, it’s a rare moment of elation in this relentlessly, appropriately grim series.

I reviewed the seventh, short, structurally bold episode of The Underground Railroad for Decider. More shows should do stuff like this.

From the moment Arnold Ridgeway takes out a flask and begins drinking whiskey from it, you know he’s in strange territory. Not literally, not at all—he’s returned to his family home for one last attempt at rapprochement with his dying father, “rapprochement” in this case meaning “my dad owes me an apology.” The strangeness is all in his demeanor, which takes a sudden turn for the fearful, the petulant, the anxious and uncertain—a far cry from his nearly supernatural implacability up until that point. “So Arnold Ridgeway is human after all,” Cora says after finding out the nature of their visit. He’s not a good human, but yes, something like that.

This episode of The Underground Railroad (“Chapter Six: Tennessee: Proverbs”) is essentially one drawn-out drunk for Ridgeway, who is absolutely hammered by the time he witnesses his father breathe his last breath. In one particularly galling scene, he drags Cora to a nearby saloon—in chains—for a meal and a drink, though in his case “a drink” means “an entire bottle.” He waxes philosophical and patriotic about Manifest Destiny and the American spirit—”The only ‘Spirit’ worth its salt,” he says, compared to the Great Spirit that his father borrowed from indigenous religious beliefs. The American spirit, he says, is a call to the people of the Old World to come to the New civilize the land, and either “lift up, subjugate, [or] exterminate, eliminate” the other peoples they encounter. “The American Imperative,” he calls this last bit. Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

Throughout it all, Barry Jenkins’s camera makes slow pilgrimages from one end of a given scene to the next, like it too has been enlisted in Ridgeway’s grim procession. The ruined vistas it captures are stunning in their own bleak way. The camera also captures some characters looking directly at us, like Cora when she speaks aloud to her absent mother and Lovey and Caesar, or Ridgeway Senior when he glares at (presumably) his detestable son in the vision Cora conjures of their eventual pointless reunion. It is hard to meet their gaze.

I reviewed episode 5 of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

As I said last week, tonal shifts of the sort Mare is attempting require a strong, almost singular creative mind behind them. I’ve seen no evidence thus far that either creator and writer Brad Ingelsby or director Craig Zobel have what it takes to pull it off. Rather, the show comes off as determined to cut its serious material off at the knees with cheap twists and bad comedy, while the lighter material plays on as if oblivious to the steadily mounting pile of abused and murdered bodies.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

And so, without a stable ethical foundation to stand on, the whole thing teeters and wobbles on the verge of collapse. There’s just no way to have, say, the slapstick teen sex comedy of Siobhan’s situation and Helen’s whack on the noggin on the one hand and the Silence of the Lambs–style abduction of women on the other and make them both work without that foundation. You can’t portray, for example, Mare’s continued presence in the investigation from which she’s been barred like it’s simple dogged detective work when she’s also keeping huge secrets from her own partner (who, I remind you, has also asked her out). For god’s sake, you can’t have Mare balancing multiple suitors and make it cute while she’s been suspended from the force for a fucking felony that’s getting swept under the rug!

I reviewed the baffling fourth episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

In reviewing the premiere of The Underground Railroad, the word “dystopia” came up as a description of the slave state of Georgia—an attempt to apply this powerful fictional designation to the very real nightmare regime of American slavery. In reviewing the second, the word’s opposite, “utopia,” was used to in describe the illusory nature of South Carolina’s genteel “betterment” policies for its Black residents, all of whom still live and thrive only at the pleasure of their patronizing white overlords.

What I didn’t count on is for The Underground Railroad to traffic in out-and-out, alternate-history dystopianism. That’s what Cora finds when the Railroad runs into a roadblock, stranding her in North Carolina. There’s no betterment here. There’s not even slavery. There’s genocide.

I reviewed episode three of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: When Sir Thomas More coined the term utopia, he did so as a pun. Spelled eutopia, from the Ancient Greek, it means “good place,” which is how the term functions in fantastical literature—utopia as ideal society. But spelled utopia, which is the version More emphasized, it translates rather to “no place.” By definition, then, the ideal society cannot exist.

Griffin, South Carolina seems like a utopia in the eu sense, at least at a glance. By the time The Underground Railroad arrives there for its second episode (“Chapter 2: South Carolina”), our heroes Cora and Caesar have been safely ensconced there for some time. In this semi-integrated town, dominated by its futuristic “skyscraper,” Black people are not enslaved, but free—again, at least at a glance.

I reviewed the second episode of The Underground Railroad for Decider.

Of course, that kind of underground railroad is a fantasy, and that’s the simple genius of novelist Colson Whitehead’s original idea. Why not take the reality and make it a fantasy? Why not concretize the journey of slaves to freedom by creating a locomotive that literally operates underground? Genre stories use fantastical and spectacular ideas and images to communicate powerful ideas and emotions in a visual vocabulary that matches their power. The idea of an actual steam-powered underground railroad—well, it puts the status-quo-smashing “punk” back into “steampunk.”

And by taking on directorial duties for all ten episodes, Jenkins—who also wrote the episode—instantly joins a select company of Academy Award–winning filmmakers helming entire seasons of television, right alongside David Lynch and Steven Soderbergh. If this episode (“Chapter 1: Georgia”) is any indication, Jenkins, like his predecessors, will be making no qualitative distinction between the two cinematic mediums. His camera is calm, cool, and collected, allowing the inhumane drama of the plantation to play out in unsparing long takes. It’s a stylistic choice that makes sense, since so much of that drama is a matter of people being made to bear witness to atrocity. The camera won’t let us look away, either. And when the viewpoint does shift, most memorably letting us—or forcing us to—look through the eyes of the lynched slave as he burns to death, the impact is all the stronger. The surreal, staccato editing of the episode’s opening moments also stand out by comparison.

I’ll be covering Barry Jenkins’s strong new series The Underground Railroad for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Here’s the thing about that: Mare of Easttown clearly expects us to take its title character’s side. Yes, even when she’s raiding the department’s evidence locker for packets of heroin she can plant in an ex-junkie’s vehicle in order to ruin said ex-junkie’s life. This isn’t portrayed as a heinous act of corruption and authoritarianism, but as the rash but understandable act of a grandmother acting in her grandson’s best interest. For me? It just left me wondering how many real-world cases of police misconduct get justified by the participants and swept under the rug by their superiors in the way that Mare and the Chief do here. It’s darkly fascinating to see to whom Mare of Easttown is willing to extend the benefit of the doubt, you know?

I reviewed Sunday’s episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

The titular Mare of Easttown does not have an easy life. Maybe that’s a given, when you consider that she’s seemingly the sole detective in a town with at least one outstanding missing-persons case and a fresh murder of a teenage girl on its docket. But there’s more to it than that. In “Fathers,” Episode 2 of HBO’s murder-mystery Mare of Easttown, we learn that her son Kevin killed himself. We learn that her grandson Drew has begun to display some of the same tics that Kevin did as a child, prior to his downward spiral. We learn that Carrie (Zosia Bacon), Drew’s mother, is filing for full custody despite living in a sober house after an unspecified drug or alcohol addiction. And everywhere Mare turns, she’s forced to confront old friends and acquaintances with whom she’s now at life-and-death odds, whether that’s the mother of the girl she’s failed to find, the father of the girl whose corpse she’s just examined, or the parents of the girl who beat the dead girl up on camera the night of her murder. If I were her, I’d pound Rolling Rocks like they were bottles of Gatorade the very second I got off duty, too.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

It’s an arresting visual, I’ll give it that. A man in a red, white, and blue angel costume descending from the heavens, cradling the dead body of a slain radical in his arms. If it took five-plus hours to get us to that one image, it was probably worth it to Marvel for the gifs and fan art alone.

The episode that surrounds the shots of the angelic new Captain America sprinkled throughout the Season 1 finale of The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, though? Good God, what a mess. Written by series creator Malcolm Spellman and Josef Sawyer, “One World, One People” is a shockingly incoherent product for an experienced purveyor of unobjectionable and slick genre fare like Marvel, right down to borrowing its idealistic-sounding title from the very radical group its heroes spend the episode defeating and killing.

I reviewed the finale of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.