So, let’s talk about running times. As has been customary in previous seasons, Ozark Season 3 routinely presents us with episodes that run right up to, and sometimes cross, the full 60-minute mark. In the past I might have called this “Netflix Bloat,” part and parcel of the same mindset that led the Netflix/Marvel collaboration series to run, oh I dunno, four to six episodes too long each season.

In Ozark‘s case, at this point anyway, I don’t think that’s a fair criticism. I never feel bored during an episode, never wonder why we’re spending time watching the cinematic equivalent of paint drying—the way I often did on Jessica Jones or Luke Cage, when characters would be shot just walking to the places where actual scenes were happening, as if the show needed to clear its throat before actually getting down to business.

What Ozark‘s lengthy runtimes do produce is a sense of disconnection between what happens at the start of an episode and what happens at the end of it. For example, Ozark Season 3 Episode 6 (“Su Casa Es Mi Casa”) ends when Ben Davis, off his meds for a previously undisclosed bipolar disorder, and his nephew Jonah Byrde track Ruth Langmore to a cash dropoff that goes south when unknown parties in black SUVs show up and gun down the Kansas City mob grunts tasked with the dropping off before blowing up the truck they were driving.

I was so engrossed by the whole business—by seeing how Ben’s condition was manifesting itself, by Jonah’s use of his drone, by the evident care and tenderness Ben feels towards Ruth, by Ruth’s relationship with the KC assholes, by whether they were going to fuck with her again, by whether Ruth would get out of there in time when the shit hit the fan—that I completely forgot how the episode began.

I reviewed episode six of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

I believe that covers everything? This is an eventful show, with a real gordian knot’s worth of plot threads. It’s to the point where it can be hard even to remember where we were this time last season. (Remember Rachel and the Blue Cat? They haven’t even been so much as mentioned.) One moment you’re digging up dirt on an FBI agent and the next you’re apologizing to a horse breeder for cutting an animal’s nuts off for no good reason. Then again, I suppose this is how life feels for the Byrdes, perhaps the busiest main characters in any prestige drama I can remember. Every time Wendy asks Charlotte to put something on her schedule I cringe a bit inside. How much more can these people take?

I reviewed episode five of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

In the end, Marty gets dropped back off at home after his forcible sojourn to Mexico, and all is right with the world, more or less. But there are ominous signs for the future. (Aren’t there always?) I’ve got no idea how his scheme to corrupt a federal agent is supposed to play out. And Helen’s warning to Charlotte (who knows nearly everything about her family’s dirty deeds) that no one must ever tell her daughter Erin (who’s in the dark) anything lest they face dire consequences is a Chekov’s gun if ever there was one. This is not a show in which people succeed in keeping secrets; indeed, constant revelations are the very engine that powers the entire story. Poor Erin Pierce is gonna find out soon enough what her mother’s real job entails, and I wouldn’t want to be in the blast radius when that particular bomb goes off.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Ozark Season 3 for Decider.

But most promising of all, I think, are the curveballs the episode throws. I like how out-of-nowhere Wendy’s decision to reclaim custody of Ezekiel is; that makes it hard to pin down as just another plot beat and makes it seem more like the product of a personal decision. I also like how Uncle Ben seems like…not such a bad dude! He’s a fine confidant for Wendy, who tearfully tells him about the affair she had that helped blow up her marriage (“It fuckin’ sucked” is her verdict after the fact), and a halfway decent suitor for Ruth, who like I said actually smiles at the dude. (It says a lot about Julia Garner’s talent that she can make her character scowl in like forty different expressive ways, to the point where you might not even notice she’s never happy until, all of a sudden, she is.)

I reviewed episode three of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

As a title, Ozark pegs the show to a unique location. It has a nice oddball ring to it as well. But if this show were looking for another name, A Series of Unforeseen Events would work pretty well. Every time Marty and Wendy Byrde do…well, pretty much anything, some other unexpected thing comes back to bite them in their collective ass.

I reviewed episode two of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

These strongly delineated characters, and the performances behind them, keep the show afloat. As Marty, Bateman is all quiet cynicism and resignation; he always seems to be struggling just to get through the day, and his volume never rises above a four. Linney’s Wendy alternates between chipper, we-can’t-lose plan-making and peals of derision when her saturnine husband tries to shoot her down. And Garner, the real star of the show, portrays Ruth as a woman who always has to keep proving herself, sometimes succeeding, sometimes lapsing into impulsive outbursts of anger when someone accuses her of falling short.

You can string a lot of story between these three opposing poles, that’s for sure. They’re sturdy, they’re easily recognizable, and they play off one another beautifully. (It’s impressive, in its way, for the show’s auteur Bateman to continuously take a back seat to the more dynamic performances of his leading ladies.) The Redneck Riviera setting and the tangle of competing criminal enterprises give the show its own unique flavor, too. Yes, the show has its obvious precedents and its storytelling tics, but I’m still glad the Byrdes are back.

I reviewed episode one of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

I’ve heard Narcos and Narcos: Mexico described as the platonic ideal of a Netflix show: eminently bingeable, instantly forgettable. I don’t know if that’s entirely fair, particularly (as I’ve said before) for the Wagner Moura/Pablo Escobar seasons. But here we are at the end of a season that I enjoyed watching from start to finish, but would be hard pressed to, like, recommend to anyone for any particular reason, aside from maybe all the screentime Scoot McNairy got. He was right: This story does not have a happy ending.

I reviewed the season finale of Narcos: Mexico Season Two for Decider. Good but pointedly not great.

There’s one episode left in this season of Narcos: Mexico, and there’s over thirty years of actual narcos in Mexico remaining before the series gets up to date. So there’s plenty of room for final twists and turns in the season finale, which may or may not see the fates of Félix and his plaza bosses sealed, to say nothing of Walt back in Sacramento. All we know for sure is that, to quote Dune, the spice must flow. The only question remaining for this ruthlessly plot-driven show to answer is who will control that flow, and who will act to shut it off.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Narcos: Mexico Season 2 for Decider.

There’s one more moment that sticks with me from this episode. When the representative from the opposition notices that the government’s tech guy is entering secret passwords for separate sets of results, he gets so angry he starts cursing. The Minister of Defense, who’s in the process of colluding with a druglord to conduct this massive fraud at that very moment, chides him for his language. It reminds me of the bit from Apocalypse Now when Brando says “We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene!” From Saigon to Mexico City, civility is barbarity’s shield.

I reviewed the eighth episode of Narcos: Mexico Season Two for Decider.

I don’t know if it was deliberate or just dumb luck, but my favorite part of Narcos: Mexico Season 2 Episode 7 (“Truth and Reconciliation”) doesn’t come up in conversation between the characters. It’s not a plot point either, or a particularly striking shot. It’s just rain, that’s all—a gentle patter of rain.

The rain falls on the windows of a truck as DEA Agent Walt Breslin is driven back from a meeting with Juárez plaza boss Pablo Acosta by his girlfriend, Mimi. Spurred by her secret pregnancy and by her love for the man himself, Mimi called in a tip to the U.S. Embassy that Acosta might be willing to play ball and help bring Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo down. Walt dutifully hears the man out as they hang out on his roof and share beers—and stories of their brothers, both of them led to their deaths by drugs. Mimi explains to Walt that she hasn’t told Pablo about her pregnancy because his decision to walk away from his life of crime must be made for his own sake. As she and Walt talk, little drops of rain plink down the windshield—droplets of life and hope in an arid landscape. Again, I don’t know if this was an artistic choice, but how much of any work of art comes down to choice, anyway?

I reviewed Narcos: Mexico Season 2 Episode 7 for Decider.

When I saw in the opening credits that this episode (“El Dedazo”) was written by series co-creator Carlo Bernard and directed by its head helmer Andrés Baiz, I figured we were in for something momentous and mournful, the way the best Narcos and Narcos: Mexico episodes tend to play out. That…really wasn’t the case, as it turned out. Instead, it’s the usual formula: incremental movement across a tangle of plot threads, generously seasoned with graphic violence and political cynicism. Not even a side plot in which Félix more or less stalks his Long-Suffering Ex-Wife adds much to the mix.

But one thing Narcos teaches you is to look for the little things. It’s in the way one of the murderous PRI brothers waxes rhapsodic about women in tennis skirts. It’s the idea of a man whose name means “The Crazy Pig” getting sent to conduct high-stakes negotiations. It’s in that weird glance Ramón Arellano Félix shoots him before his men open fire. It’s in the fact that Cochiloco takes off his sunglasses for maybe the first time since we’ve met him, only to get shot seconds later. It’s in the way Félix finds himself swept up in a rally for the PRI’s rival party, a development that seems to start the wheels turning in his head for a maneuver that could pull his ass out of the fire one more time. Narcos is rarely, if ever, going to blow you away—but that just makes any moment where it scores a direct hit on you that much more impactful.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Narcos: Mexico‘s second season for Decider.

What does it all mean? It means you’re watching Narcos. As I put it in my review of the previous episode, “You can probably expect the usual cat-and-mouse, one-step-forward-two-steps-back kind of stuff to happen.” We’re firmly in two-steps-back mode at the moment: for Walt, whose decision to sow dissension in the cartel instead of just rolling up the tunnel-diggers himself leads to innocent miners losing their lives; for Chapo, whose big innovation has gone up in a cloud of dust and who now has the very angry brothers to worry about; for Félix, whose plan to dictate terms to the Colombians has gone completely backwards, and who barely escapes the episode with his life. You can pretty much expect the next set of twists and turns to reverse everyone’s fortunes again, since that’s how this show rolls nearly every time—until, inevitably, one of the major players falls for good, at which point someone else will step up to fill the vacuum. Is this a recipe for fulfilling television? No, probably not. Does it make for very watchable television? You bet.

I reviewed episode 5 of Narcos Season 2 for Decider.

“You’re not an idea guy, Chapito.” So says Palma, the head of the Sinaloan branch of Mexico’s cocaine cartel, to his doofus underling Chapo.

Famous last words, am I right?

With his Moe Howard haircut and pipsqueak voice, Chapo comes across like an overgrown child, an impression he complains about in Narcos Mexico Season 2 Episode 4…to his mommy. But as even a casual observer of the news knows full well, he will one day become El Chapo, one of the most powerful and dangerous narcotraffickers in history. This episode takes its title, “The Big Dig,” from the innovation that proved he was “an idea guy” after all.

I reviewed episode four of Narcos: Mexico Season 2 for Decider.

Watching Narcos: Mexico means following along with an endless series of deals, double crosses, alliances forged and broken, leverage gained and utilized, cards getting played and dominoes falling down. It’s not high art; neither opening an episode with a dream sequence nor peppering it with De Palma-esque split-screen sequences changes that. But if you’re into this kind of thing, you make like Zuno and go along for the ride.

I reviewed the third episode of Narcos: Mexico Season Two for Decider.

But hey, Narcos is gonna be Narcos from time to time. This is not genre revisionism along the lines of what The Sopranos did for mafia stories, or what Deadwood did for Westerns, or what The Wire did for cop shows, or what Game of Thrones did for fantasy and so on. Narcos: Mexico never really promises to be much more than a jaundiced but well-crafted look at the drug war. Sometimes those drug warriors are gonna sound like clichés rather than people. Like getting kidnapped and tortured, it’s an occupational hazard.

I reviewed the second episode of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

Subtlety has never been Narcos‘ strong suit. In its original incarnation as the story of the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar, its transitional season chronicling his rivals in the Cali Cartel, and now in the spinoff series Narcos: Mexico, the show displays a welcome cynicism about America’s quixotic war on drugs. At times, it also takes on a rueful, almost poetic tone, as the thugs on both sides of the battle are made to confront the consequences of their actions. But as a viewer, you’re never asked to do a whole lot of work to figure out what’s going on. Case in point: As Félix Gallardo, Mexico’s drug kingpin, struggles against a cash flow problem that has him at odds with both his Cali suppliers and his Mexican underbosses, he sits and watches a chained tiger.

Get it?

I’m back on the Narcos: Mexico beat for Decider this season, starting with my review of the season premiere. I really enjoy writing about this show, which is good-but-not-great in a way that’s interesting to talk about.

Anyway, there’s some perfunctory “and the moral of the story is…” stuff about masks—Ozymandias says they “make men cruel,” Hooded Justice says “you can’t heal with a mask” because “wounds need air”—the sum total meaning of which you can grasp in about the time it took you to read this sentence. It seems to me that in an episode that featured, again, Angela Abar breaking someone’s fingers one by one for information, you should probably have shown how vigilantism and unaccountable law enforcement are bad rather than just told us. It would have made it easier to believe the show meant what it was saying.

As it stands, I’m not really sure what the show means. Not that meaning is the be-all and end-all of visual narrative—like I said a few episodes ago, this is a drama, not a thinkpiece. If you were to treat all of this as an essay rather than serialized television, you’d miss how much dizzying fun Damon Lindelof’s brand of blow-to-the-head surrealism can be, or how good Regina King and Jeremy Irons and Jean Smart and Tim Blake Nelson and Louis Gossett Jr. and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Tom Mison and Sara Vickers and Don Johnson and Hong Chau were in their roles. (Seriously, that is a murderers’ row of individually vivid performances, whatever you think about the show they were in.)

But seriously, what do we have here that we didn’t have before? Watchmen the original article had a lot to say about America, the Cold War, vigilantism, the right, the superhero genre, and the comics art form. Other than opening with the Tulsa Race Massacre—a big point in its favor—did Watchmen the TV show comment on politics in general or its own medium in particular with anything approaching Moore & Gibbons’s innovation, vision, and purpose? The puzzle pieces all fit, but what kind of picture are we looking at? I’ll give you a little time to think it over. Tick tock, tick tock.

I reviewed the finale of Watchmen for Decider. I feel like in the end it was a bunch of beautiful humbug.

It’s only when the episode reaches its conclusion that it starts to trip over itself. First, it indulges in a cheap and easy Terminator-style temporal paradox: Angela tells Dr. Manhattan that her grandfather murdered Judd Crawford for being a closet Klansman and member of the Cyclops conspiracy, facts of which he goes on to inform her grandfather years earlier, causing him to commit that very murder in the first place.

Alan Moore wisely avoided these chicken-and-egg brainteasers when he wrote the character. Instead, he emphasized the way Dr. Manhattan’s quantum-physics experience of life would affect him emotionally. Passing messages backwards and forwards in time until reality becomes a loop is a lot less interesting than the idea of a man constantly adrift in an endless sea of memory, experience, and anticipation. One is a parlor game; the other is a story. It doesn’t surprise me to see the co-writer of this episode is Jeff Jensen, the former TV critic best known for his elaborate and always incorrect theories about what was really going on on Lindelof’s Lost. (Apparently Lindelof appreciated those pieces a lot more than I did.)

I reviewed this week’s episode of Watchmen, about which I had mixed feelings, for Decider.

Do you see where I’m going with this? The art of this show doesn’t lie in Damon Lindelof’s nervous-breakdown interviews or contractually-obligated making-of mini-documentaries, or in the Peteypedia supplementary materials on HBO.com, or in finding just the right place to stop the chicken-and-egg cycle of racism and racism-induced trauma that led to the state of vigilantism and policing today. It’s in the pacing and the imagery, in that staccato strangeness that Lindelof has developed and unleashed in his Gibbons-endorsed, Moore-ignored homage to the original.

If that’s not to your taste, that is fine—even The Leftovers was Not For Everyone TV. But at least respond to it as a work of visual narrative, not a thinkpiece. At least reflect on and wrestle with where the art of the thing really is, not where you feel you need it to be.

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

Most interesting is the chicken and the egg question all this raises. Is a black man to blame for the pseudofascist superheroes who followed in his footsteps and gave Dick Nixon decades in the White House, then went on to spawn the 7th Kavalry? Or is it the original masked vigilantes, the KKK, who should get the blame for driving Reeves to become Hooded Justice in the first place? And most importantly, does Watchmen have a sure enough grasp on this material to answer the question at all?

I reviewed this week’s episode of Watchmen for Decider. It has a complicated relationship with the source material, to say the least.