I see what Mare of Easttown is going for; with creator Brad Ingelsby’s workmanlike script, it’s impossible not to. Teenage mothers, dead-end jobs, opiate addicts, cancer patients, necessary but unaffordable medical procedures, chronic illness, the constant flow of cheap booze, old high-school glories substituting for any new real-world ones: This, the show argues, and not without reason, is small-town America in the year of our Lord 2021, or at least it would be if we weren’t still in the grips of the pandemic that shuttered the show’s production for a time. For what it’s worth, I don’t detect a ton of condescension in the portrayal. Ingelsby is a native of the area, and although the gap between Hollywood screenwriter and, say, exurban teenage mother is a big one, he does his best to paint everyone in a sympathetic, even noble, light.

Is it possible this is its own form of condescension? Yeah, I suppose it is. There’s something a little Barton Fink-y, a little “theater of and about and for The Common Man,” in Mare‘s portrayal of Easttown and its denizens. You can get as granular and gritty as you want with the talk of deductibles and diapers, but in the end, you’re still air-dropping one of the most famous movie stars in the world into this thing, and having her play a cop to boot. The very idea of a downtrodden but fundamentally good-hearted police officer, at this point in time…I mean, if you find it hard to swallow, I find it hard to blame you.

I’ll be covering Mare of Easttown for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

There’s one episode left in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and given the way Sam was eyeing the contents of the high-tech Wakandan briefcase Bucky delivered to him, it seems safe to assume the Falcon—whose wings got torn off by Walker, if you’re in the symbolism market—is about to don the stars and stripes himself. I’d guess some sort of reckoning with Sharon is in the offing, as well as a battle with Karli and the Flag-Smashers that will paint them as well-intentioned but dangerously misguided and militant the way the whole rest of the season has done. Walker, by the way, is still walking around free, lying to the parents of his slain friend Lamar that he’s already killed their son’s killer. He’s got a grudge against Karli and a potential backer in the Contessa, and if we know anything about this show, it’s that people can show up anywhere at a moment’s notice, so I wouldn’t count him out of the final battle just yet either.

All told, it’s a whole lot of work just to get Sam to the place where the movies left him. I get that the show is supposed to be a meditation on the idea of Captain America in light of the fictional peril of criminal superhumans (whether in the form of Karli or the pre-cure Winter Soldier) on the one hand and the real-life issue of anti-Black racism on the other. But a show like this was always going to answer these questions simply by pointing at the heroes and declaring theirs the correct path. The game isn’t worth the candle. Oh hey, look over there, it’s Elaine from Seinfeld!

I reviewed today’s episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.

What Them does believe in is evil, manifested in white supremacist racism. The supernatural element merely recreates, as a parable, the evil that men do. You might be able to walk away from that alive, but you can’t walk away from it unscathed, or unchanged. The same can be said of the show itself. Them marks the arrival of a major new talent in showrunner Little Marvin and a staggering achievement in television horror. It’s vital as it is violent. It’s one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.

I reviewed the season finale of Them for Decider.

Directed in stark black and white by Craig William Macneill (Channel Zero) from a script by Dominic Orlando, “Covenant II” is reminiscent at turns of The Witch, The Lighthouse, Hereditary, There Will Be Blood, episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return. Like its predecessor “Covenant I,” is one of the most brutal things I’ve ever watched in a lifetime of watching horror. It, like Them, is a masterpiece.

I reviewed episode nine of Them for Decider. Please note that Amazon swapped the running order episodes eight and nine after screeners were sent out, so you may notice artifacts of the previous running order.

Clocking in at just over half an hour, not counting the closing credits, this is a short, throat-clearing episode, a squall-before-the-storm. The details are, as always, impeccable: George’s casually sexist insistence that his prisoner Betty wear more pink; the masks on Marty’s shirt and the Iron Cross on the car he tries and fails to fix in his garage; the brooch on the doctor’s lapel that matches the one worn by Helen the real estate agent and, I think, the flowers plucked by Livia to put in that awful bloody pillowcase; the parallel fucking chicken dinners consumed by George and Betty on one hand and Marty and Earl on the other. And maybe it’s foolish to have hope when watching a show like this, but that excruciating basement scene did end with Ruby retrieving that axe from the corner of the basement. It’s going to get buried in someone before this all ends—if it ends for the Emorys at all.

I reviewed episode eight of Them for Decider. Please note that the running order of episodes eight and nine was switched by Amazon after screeners were sent out, so you may notice some weird artifacts of the previous running order.

In dedicating his book The Stand to his wife Tabitha, Stephen King referred to it as “this dark chest of wonders.” “Wonders,” in this case, is a euphemism: The Stand is a catalog of horrors from its first page to its last. Episode seven of Little Marvin’s masterful Them (“Day 7: Night”) can be seen in a similar light. Each storyline, each scene, feels like retrieving some fresh nightmare from the recesses of a box long forgotten in an attic, or a basement. When, in the end, an actual box is revealed to contain something truly horrific, it feels both surprising and inevitable.

I reviewed episode seven of Them for Decider.

Livia achieves a momentary catharsis—and I do mean momentary, the payoff lasts about 15 seconds before cutting off abruptly—when, after returning home with Gracie, she gets sick of Betty’s racist taunts and slaps her across the face. James Brown’s “The Big Payback” plays for a few seconds, ceasing suddenly when Livia and Gracie go inside their house. Betty, too, goes back inside, and promptly destroys nearly everything she can get her hands on—including the wallpaper (this show practically doubles as a wallpaper gallery), behind which is the black mold she metaphorically warned about in her speech at the Home Owners Association meeting. She finally calms down enough to call her milkman, asking him to do her the favor he promised after mentioning to her that he did the things in Korea that most men could not.

Betty warned Livia a while back that things were only going to get worse for her. I’m worried she’s right.

I reviewed episode six of Them for Decider.

It’s rare to think “I will never forget watching this episode of television,” rarer still to mean it. Even within the sphere of horror, a genre dedicated in part to searing imagery into your brain, the truly unforgettable is thin on the ground.

Not this time, though. Not this time.

I reviewed episode five of Them for Decider.

Finally, the Emorys return home. With the kids in bed, Livia and Henry begin to make love. Neither of them sees the voyeur in the corner: the Black Hat Man (Christopher Heyerdahl). It’s a scare, yes. But at the end of this long day, in which so many attempts to escape have gone sour, it’s hard not to see this figure as a sign that this form of escape won’t save the Emorys either. As Major Garland Briggs, a character from another great horror television series, Twin Peaks, once said, the most frightening thing is the possibility that love is not enough.

I reviewed episode four of Them for Decider.

“The woman was holding her baby.” “A man came to the house.” Those are my notes on Them Episode 3 (“Day 4”), which revolves around the nightmare from which Livia Emory awakes on the morning of her family’s fourth day in their new home, a nightmare about her baby Chester and…whatever happened to him in North Carolina. Simple statements, conveyed with simple shots, all the more menacing for their simplicity. Whatever did happen on “that day,” as her husband Henry refers to it—and from the show’s first scene there’s been a dreadful, growing certainty that we’ll be forced to bear witness to it at some point—there’s no distance far enough to move from it, not even all the way across the country. It’s always there.

I reviewed episode three of Them for Decider.

This is the story being told by Them. This is what creator/co-writer Little Marvin, co-writer David Matthews, director Nelson Cragg (previously the cinematographer for Ryan Murphy’s masterpiece American Crime Story), director of photography Xavier Grobet, and editor David Kashevaroff (not to mention executive producer Lena Waithe) convey with every tool at their disposal—the relentlessly downbeat script, the breathtaking use of every camera trick in the book from Dutch tilts to split screens to Vertigo shots, the disorienting staccato editing, and the uniformly thoughtful and precise performances of both the Emory family and their enemies up the block, led by the increasingly unhinged Betty. Them is a ghost story, yes, and the specter of Miss Vera and the blood pouring from the poor dog’s grave at the end of the episode promise more in store along those lines. But in terms of where the atmosphere of terror and dread this show maintains actually come from, it is about being sane in an insane land, never knowing whether, say, the kindly old white man at the hardware store is going to reveal himself to be an inveterate racist (he doesn’t, though in Livia’s mind he encourages her to buy an axe off the wall display just in case she has further trouble with the neighbors), or whether the teacher at your school will punish you when your classmates make monkey noises at you because you answered a question. It’s about putting your best foot forward in a world intent on cutting you off at the knees. It’s about choking down that goddamn pie, choking down every last bite.

I reviewed the second episode of Them for Decider.

Them is about the real-life horror of racial covenants, which excluded Black families from home ownership in certain neighborhoods and towns. Harold chose to move to Compton despite its covenant past because covenants are, at this point, illegal. But there are other ways to enforce the racial hierarchy, as Betty and company realize very quickly. In essence, Livia and Henry are inverting the fundamental, foundational myth of America—the myth of the pioneer, moving into a land that doesn’t welcome them—only it’s the white people who are the true savages. One need look no further than the 1/6 insurrection or the new Jim Crow voting laws in Georgia or the anti-trans bill in Arkansas or the union-busting zeal of the well-to-do spokespeople of Amazon, the company airing this show, to see the truth in this.

But cinematically, Them is about more than that. It’s about the way the light looks on a sunny California afternoon, and the way the night looks in the well-lit home of a family that loves each other’s company. It’s about framing Livia and Henry up against the edge of the screen as they talk to each other, conveying their intensity and intimacy. (There’s a closeup on the two of them after kissing that’s just achingly, ferociously romantic.) It’s about the kind of staccato editing that represents Livia’s terrible memories, and the brutality of her current predicament. It’s about sparing the audience a bunch of getting-to-know-you bullshit and moving right to the stuff that’s frightening and unpleasant and vital. It’s about how sometimes the pain and fear we face is so overwhelming that the vocabulary of the quotidian fails us, and we must reach for the supernatural for recourse. It’s beautifully shot. It’s thoughtfully edited. It’s mercilessly written. It’s the best new show I’ve seen this year.

I’ll be covering Them‘s entire first season for Decider over the next few days, starting with my review of the series premiere.

“The desire to become a superhuman cannot be separated from supremacist ideals.” So says Baron Zemo, the self-appointed scourge of the world’s super-people. Does he have a point? Decades of angry message-board debates between superhero fans and the genre’s detractors would at least indicate that he has a constituency. Is there something inherently fascistic about stories in which superpowered übermenschen fight crime and battle foreign menaces, stories in which might quite literally makes right? Or is it all in the application, and can superhero stories reflect progressive ideals, however retrograde their vigilante violence might seem on the surface?

I’m not here to litigate this question, frankly. There are plenty of superhero stories I like just fine, and plenty I think are reactionary garbage, and even more—like much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—that I think cloak militarism and jingoism in palatably colorful costumes, so deftly that people don’t realize what they’re actually being served. If there’s a right answer, you have to pull apart a whole tangle of conflicting threads to find it.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.

At a certain point, it starts to feel like the plot holes outnumber the plot threads. One minute, Bucky’s so concerned about Baron Zemo’s hatred for the Avengers that he won’t even allow Sam to speak to him; the next, he’s breaking Zemo out of jail and presenting a team-up with him to Sam as a fait accompli. Sharon Carter has been on the run for the better part of a decade for a crime for which everyone else involved has long been forgiven, including various enormously famous and beloved superheroes. (Once again, I just don’t buy the lack of clout Sam commands as a member of the world-saving Avengers who has an ongoing relationship with the U.S. military.) Sharon just so happens to be on the scene when Sam, Zemo, and Falcon need rescuing; bounty hunters spontaneously appear in the hidden location to which the foursome have traveled to find the evil doctor; Ayo appears to have arrived at the group’s destination before they even got there. Stuff keeps happening, seemingly just to keep things moving, regardless of whether it happening makes any sense.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.

There’s something so dreary about taking Redwing, the comic-book Falcon’s telepathic, bright-red bird sidekick, and turning him into a drone. An explicitly military one at that, property of the United States government, as this episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (“The Star Spangled-Man”) dutifully informs us. When one of those sinister border-hating Flag-Smashers knocks the damn thing from the sky, it felt like a mercy killing on behalf of imagination.

Can’t say I’m enjoying The Falcon and the Winter Soldier very much! I reviewed this week’s episode for Decider.

I have a confession to make: I have been known, from time to time, to make mine Marvel. I’ve read hundreds of their comics over the years (and even wrote one once myself). I enjoyed the Marvel/Netflix shows Daredevil and The Punisher, as I’ve chronicled at length on this very site. As for the movies…well, Robert Downey Jr. as Tony “Iron Man” Stark was casting so strong it essentially made superheroes the dominant genre nearly singlehandedly (give or take a Hugh Jackman or a Heath Ledger), and the fight scene that opened Captain America: The Winter Soldier however many years back was a pip.

The rest I can take or leave. Mostly leave.

I say all this in the interest of full disclosure. But if I’m gonna cop to being indifferent to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole, I also want to state for the record that I’m in the liking-things business, and I go into every new series I watch hoping to enjoy what I see. It’s true that I may not have caught a new Marvel movie since the underbaked and overrated Guardians of the Galaxy—after a dozen servings of pistachio ice cream, it’s okay to decide pistachio ice cream isn’t for you and stop eating each new serving just in case this one’s the good one. But I was certainly prepared to enjoy The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the latest series to take characters from the blockbuster movies and plop them down on the small screen for several extra hours of screentime. It shares half a title with the one Marvel movie I can actually remember anything about—that’s promising, right?

Wrong, as it turns out! I’ll be covering The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider all season long, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Maybe that’s the single biggest problem with this version of The Stand: It pulled all its punches. There was really no internal struggle going on among any of the characters other than Harold and Nadine—Larry didn’t repeatedly second-guess his own habitual shittiness, for example, nor did Lloyd Henreid realize he’d sold his soul to the devil, nor did the Trashcan Man struggle to reconcile his pyromania with his desire to fit into Vegas society and do right by Flagg, the man who elevated him from captivity to the height of power. Vegas itself is pure fantasy and spectacle; it never makes the vital point that people willing to serve a sadistic authoritarian look and sound like normal people more often than not. The demands of Mother Abigail’s very Old Testament God are never properly struggled with either; the idea that the forces of Good can be cold and uncompromising in their Goodness never gets communicated. The freaking plague itself was an afterthought!

I reviewed the series finale of The Stand for Decider. What a disappointment.

Now consider the Trashcan Man. Arguably the series’ single biggest misfire from a character standpoint, he has no arc or growth or interesting personal journey to speak of. When he first appears in the series, he’s a gibbering crazy man with a penchant for firestarting. When he next appears, he’s retrieving a nuclear warhead, at the express orders of Randall Flagg. And for his final appearance, he delivers the bomb, as requested; the only hiccup is that he brings it to the wrong place, and considering his overall level of sanity it would have been a minor miracle if he hadn’t brought it to the wrong place.

If you’ll permit one last contrast with the novel, this is a case in which nearly every choice made by the show was the wrong one. In the book, Trash is crazy, yes, but he’s capable of coherent speech, coherent thought, and actual attachment to other human beings. He feels friendship with the people he gets to know under Flagg’s command in addition to puppylike devotion to the Dark Man. But his compulsive pyromania gets the better of him after someone unthinkingly ribs him about his fiery habits, and he winds up killing several men and destroying much of Flagg’s nascent air force before fleeing. Desperate to make amends, he does the only thing he feels is big enough to make up for his crime: He retrieves a nuke all on his own, without Flagg’s orders to do so, and delivers it to the Dark Man’s doorstep as an offering of penance. It’s a whole lot more complex, interesting, and ultimately human than just hooting and hollering his way from Point A to Point B to Point C the way he does in the show.

(In a way, Trashcan Man is as underdeveloped as Mother Abigail. In her case, we’re never really made to understand what’s so magnetic about her, or how close a relationship with God she really has. She’s just kind of…there, and it’s like the good-guy characters coalesce around a random old woman, not the Voice of the Almighty on Earth. Similarly, Trash is just a firebug, not the complicated individual with a near-supernatural expertise in weapons, incendiaries, and explosives that he is in the novel.)

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Stand, in which many of its overall weaknesses are made manifest, for Decider.

The smartest thing this adaptation of The Stand has done yet is to stand aside. The convoluted, shifting timeframes, the need to balance the apocalypse with its aftermath—that’s all gone now. In its place is a very, very straightforward story: The man in black lives in the desert, and four people (and one dog) are walking to meet him.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand, which I pretty much liked, for Decider.

I hate to do this, but I hope you’ll permit a book-to-TV comparison just this once. In Stephen King’s novel, this traumatized pyromaniac, née Donald Merwin Elbert, is a central figure, one of the core characters we follow across the country in the aftermath of the plague. If Lloyd Henried is the Stu Redman of Las Vegas, the main man in the new society Randall Flagg has founded just as Stu is the head honcho of Mother Abigail’s, Trashcan Man is roughly equivalent to Nick Andros, an outcast from society allegedly destined for a key role in the new world, or Tom Cullen, a man whose mental disabilities allow him more unfettered contact with forces beyond our understanding. (That element of Tom’s personality appears to have been dropped by the show.)

Yet for some reason, instead of following Trash from the outset, The Stand‘s 2020-2021 iteration just sort of plops him down at the start of the sixth episode out of nine episodes total. We’ve barely gotten a glimpse of him blowing up oil tanks somewhere and receiving a psychic communiqué from Flagg when bam, the next thing you know he’s already in Vegas, getting the lay of the land from Lloyd and receiving the blessing of the Dark Man himself. Why didn’t the show sprinkle Trashcan Man scenes throughout the season, starting no later than episode two or three? I legitimately have no idea. Was it simply to shield us from Ezra Miller’s performance in the role—a high-pitched, gibbering caricature of a neurodivergent person? Again, I got nothing, man. I enjoyed the creepy Willy-Wonka-tunnel evil psychedelic montage he envisions when Flagg psychically contacts him, and I appreciate that he alone out of everyone in Vegas seems to recognize that Flagg is effectively a demigod worthy of worship, but otherwise nearly every decision involving this character is baffling to me right now.

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