It comes down to the problem I spotted a few episodes ago: There’s an artlessness to the way this show discusses mental illness, and by extension the human condition. Think of exchanges like this:

Owen: “My mind, it doesn’t work right.”

Annie: “No one’s does.”

Or this:

Owen: “Annie, why are you here?”

Annie: “Because I’m your friend, and that’s what friends do.”

Or think of Owen describing his dilemma: “The same thing happens every time I meet someone, or get close to someone. I mess it up.”

Have all of us thought or said things like this? Yes, and that’s just it: All of us have thought or said things like this. What do we need Maniac for?

If you feel some kind of frisson from hearing actors on a Netflix-prestige show recite vanilla aphorisms about what life is like for people like you, fine, great, cool.

For me? It’s like reading one of those lovely Richard Scarry books for kids, where the little animal people in overalls and jaunty hats drive around a town where everything is labeled: “car,” “street,” “firehouse,” “hat,” “overalls.” It’s a My First Sony version of insight, rounding off all the hard edges of the psychological forces that drive and derange us until they’re so user-friendly that they represent no challenge at all to address or intake.

I reviewed the finale of Maniac for Decider. It wasn’t a good show.

If Maniac isn’t going to take its most serious episode seriously, why should we?

The penultimate episode of Maniac is a mortifying blend of mawkish sentimentality, a lousy Coen Bros pastiche, a shameless Mad Men swipe, and an embarrassing Marvel-style hallway-fight sequence. Thanks, Algorithm! I reviewed it for Decider.

I’ll say this for these past two episodes. First, it’s great, and by Netflix standards positively groundbreaking, that they are two episodes. There’s really no reason for them to be — they’re both set in the same two fantasy worlds created when Annie and Owen ingest the C-pill and tell one continuing story about them from start to finish.

But Maniac is a half-hour dramedy, give or take a few minutes from time to time (mostly take, lately, which is also frankly incredible), and by god they’re sticking to it. Thus what would be a dense hour of TV becomes two breezy sitcom-length installments. It’s amazing how much easier the result goes down. I mean, can you imagine powering through 60 minutes of the fake Lord of the Rings world? Fortunately, you don’t have to!

I’ll say this for these episodes as well: I’m kind of shocked by how much I enjoy Owen’s gangster fantasy, and Jonah Hill’s performance in it. Combine that Soundcloud-rapper look in a mafia environment, which I haven’t seen before, and that weird blend of taciturn and terrified that’s Owen’s default way of interacting with the world, which I also haven’t seen in this context before, and you’ve got something…well, that I haven’t seen before.

That’s the first time Maniac has done anything original. It’s amazing how much easier the show’s magpie tendency to pluck ideas from other films works when there’s something genuinely unusual going on. I mean, the plot mechanics of the gangster fantasy are just remixing The Departed — more so now than ever, with Owen’s lost brother Jed/Grimsson appearing as a deep-cover gangster working with the cops to rescue him at the last minute, and high-ranking guys in the outfit secretly working with the Feds, and all kinds of out-of-nowhere murders and whatnot. But with that oddball take on the rogue-prince gangster archetype at the center, I didn’t mind.

Also, murder on TV is kind of fun sometimes.

And Owen’s date with Olivia, in which they discuss the Gnostic Gospels as a metaphor for how your brain interprets reality and weeds out conflicting data, and in which Olivia reveals she had a paranoid ex-boyfriend who sounds a lot like Owen himself, is a strong scene. Okay, so lines like “For people we’re supposed to love unconditionally, families seem to have a lot of conditions” is some very writerly shit, but oh well. At this point it’s clear I’m never gonna be deeply embedded in this show’s fantasy, so I’ll take whatever blips of enjoyment I can get.

I reviewed the eighth episode of Maniac, aka the one where the epic-fantasy and gangster-movie fantasies end, for Decider. Trying to look on the bright side here.

But at bottom, unless you’re a person who just gets reflexively jazzed the moment men with Noo Yawk accents start talking about loyalty or beautiful people with long hair and grey cloaks take off their hoods and reveal pointy ears, this has nothing to offer. It’s cute, it’s funny, it’s kinda cool sometimes, but why would the key phase of the Mantleray process involve such obvious pop-culture archetypes? There’s one wonderful throwaway bit — heat waves emanate from Olivia, which she explains to Owen by saying her permanently hyperthermic skin maintains a constant temperature of 106 degrees — that points to the creepy fun that can be had with dream logic, but it’s over in an instant. When you’ve got the chance to do anything, anything, why do the same thing you’ve seen before?

I reviewed episode seven of Maniac, aka the one where the epic-fantasy and gangster-movie fantasies start, for Decider. When you’re supposed to be digging deeper into your main characters’ minds than ever before, why would you use massive and obvious pop-culture staples to do it?

The Oedipal scene between the Drs. Mantleray, at least, has the virtue of being kinda funny because it’s so blunt and brutal. But it points to a larger, worrying tendency: the artlessness with which mental illness is discussed on the show.

“For some reason it’s more exciting to tell people I cut than to actually cut,” says one patient, describing an apparent history of self-injury. “You know that movie It’s a Wonderful Life? If that happened to me there would be no difference in the world,” Owen says when asked to describe in his own words what’s “wrong” with him; later he disputes GRTA’s contention that she can cure him by stating flat-out “There’s no cure for schizophrenia.” “She laid in my bed for two months and talked to me about how she wanted to hang herself; I was eight,” James tells Azumi about how his world-famous mother handled his father’s abandonment of the family.

This isn’t writing, as I understand it, in the context of narrative fiction in general or genre fiction in particular. This is just having a character walk up to the camera and describe, in so many words, a thing about a rough part of being alive. For some people this kind of writing seems to hit like a bolt out of the blue, or at least the proliferation of Bojack Horseman screenshots on my Twitter timeline tells me so. The ecstatic reaction to Alex Garland’s Annihilation, which features an exchange in which one character suggests another’s self-injury scars indicate attempts to kill herself and a third says “No, I think the opposite: trying to feel alive” — a truism from the depths of the purplest YA fiction, or an unremarkable real-world therapy session — is another indicator.

I’m bored by it, frankly. When I think of lines from films and television shows about mental illness and suffering that have really moved me, it’s not stuff I’ve heard before cutting a check to my psychiatrist for my co-pay, it’s stuff I’d never thought of before at all, but rang true the moment I heard it. I can still remember exactly how flattened I was when I first heard Boardwalk Empire’s traumatized, murderous World War I veteran Richard Harrow explain why he stopped reading novels after the war: “It occurred to me the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other, but they don’t.” It washed over me like a nightmare, and functioned like a nightmare in that it dredged up fears I hadn’t been courageous enough to face and forced me to stare at them. He didn’t just say “I’m having a hard time enjoying things that once brought me joy” like he’s in a commercial for a new antidepressant. He fucking walloped me. The thrill of recognition is tiny. The thrill of revelation is colossal.

So that’s my problem with Maniac now, even if Justin Theroux is far better playing an unorthodox but effective psychiatrist, as he does in the post-pill interview scenes, than a funny-looking goofball with sex hangups, like he’s forced t everywhere else. There’s no art to it, no faith in the power of genre to use spectacle and the unexpected to articulate truths in a truer way than rote recitation. This despite layer upon layer of fantastical worldbuilding and enough vectors for getting far out — semi-dystopian near future, talking supercomputer, weird clinical environment, psychoactive pills, elaborate fantasy sequences, schizophrenic hallucinations — to sustain several shows, much less just one. Let the pills take hold, man. Let the pills take hold.

I reviewed episode six of Maniac for Decider, and in so doing wrote about the workmanlike way in which shows have begun addressing mental illness. We have therapy and thinkpieces already. Be art!

Braun is so good at portraying (possibly improvising?) Greg’s perpetual state of flummoxedness that his garbled manner of formal speech — “Is there doubt afoot?” — has become the stuff of catchphrases in spite of itself. Macfadyen is just as strong cruelly toying with Greg or barking at the help as he is tormenting himself over whether or not Shiv is cheating on him; he makes it clear that neither side is the “real” Tom, because both stem from the same underlying insecurities and bottomless need to feel validated. And watching Strong sidle into faceoffs with Brian Cox’s Logan or Eric Bogosian’s Gil or especially Natalie Gold’s Rava is straight-up thrilling at this point, like watching a man who’s always half a step behind what the coke and adrenaline in his bloodstream and the butterflies in his stomach are making him say try and catch up in real time. I could watch a bonafide Tom and Greg antibuddy comedy, or an actual prestige drama about Kendall. For the first time since the pilot, I think it’s possible Succession might be able to do both.

I wrote about the penultimate episode of Succession Season One for Decider. Jeremy Strong, Nicholas Braun, and Matthew Macfadyen are the show’s breakout stars no question, but for the first time the series did right by Sarah Snook’s Shiv, too. Overall it was the most I’ve enjoyed the show since the pilot.

There’s something that’s been bothering me about Maniac and I couldn’t put my finger on it until now, but here it is. Creator Patrick Somerville, like co-star Justin Theroux, is a veteran of The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s gorgeous existentialist SFF drama about the survivors of an unexplained mass-casualty event. Once it worked out its first-season kinks, that show blended comedy and tragedy, the supernatural and the quotidian, the real with the surreal as well as any show on the air during its run, and quite possibly ever. It’s a lot like the show Maniac seems to want to be. And for what it’s worth, which is a lot, because looking at beautiful people is one of the great pleasures of both film and television, it starred two very beautiful people, namely Theroux and Carrie Coon.

Then there’s Maniac. Its male lead is Jonah Hill. Its female lead is Emma Stone, who looks like this:

This is not to insult Jonah Hill, who as Owen and his various dream-world doppelgangers is not trying to be some kind of dashing ladykiller — not even now, in an episode set during a 1947 séance at a rich occultist’s mansion. It’s simply to say that stories in which the male lead looks like a normal guy and the female lead looks like a goddamn Tolkien Elf are, more often than not, exercises in self-indulgence by male filmmakers. They feel lopsided, to the point where film criticism has developed terminology to help describe the phenomenon. Casting one of the world’s handsomest men, Theroux, as a weird dork does not help.

I reviewed the ‘40s period-piece episode of Maniac for Decider.

There’s a bit early on in “Furs by Sebastian,” the mildly amusing fourth episode of Maniac on Netflix, that got on my nerves as a lifelong Long Islander, taking me to a level I always forget I have inside me until some offworlder sets it off. With the same ostentatious ATTENTION TO DETAIL it’s displayed in constructing its retro-futuristic “real” world, the show takes us to a Long Island of the mind, in this case the mind of Owen Milgrim. (And quite possibly Annie Landsberg too; more on that in a bit.) After taking the B-pill as part of Neberdine’s clinical trial, Owen has subconsciously recast himself as Bruce, a mullet-sporting jersey-wearing Volvo-driving resident of a stripmall suburb in the ’80s. In this fantasy, Annie is Linda, his no-nonsense hospice-worker wife.

They’re on the trail of an exotic and illegal lemur stolen from one of her dying patients, and utilizing quick instincts and shrewd detective techniques — she wrote down the license plate of the van used by the thieves as she watched them speed away, then went to the DMV and got their address by reading it from a computer screen’s reflection off a DMV clerk’s big-ass glasses — they’ve got their man. (Men, as it turns out, but more on that in a bit too.)

As they pull out of the DMV parking lot, a Long Island Rail Road train traverses an overpass in the background. The problem is that while everything — the hairstyles, the cars, the storefronts, the billboards, the jeans (oh god, the acid-washed jeans), and the music (“Close (To the Edit)” by Art of Noise for pete’s sake) — screams ’80s, the train is an M7 model, which didn’t debut on the line until the 2000s. The red-on-black LED readout of the next stop on the cars’ exteriors is the tell. Real LIRR heads know we shoulda been looking at M1s or M3s, with their distinctive subway-style double doors and gross leather-and-wood interiors. Bruce and Linda, sharp cookies that they are, would have smelled a rat from the start.

Is this the most picayune criticism I’ve ever lobbed at a show? Absolutely. But when you’ve got a petard, you’d better prepared to be hoisted by it. Maniac‘s painstaking attempts to recreate the look and feel of the Reagan Era — even during its present-day material, with its blend of smartphones and clunky old computers — often substitute for it having anything particularly interesting or innovative to say about technology, time, or humans’ interface with either. As they say on Law & Order, you opened the door, counselor.

I reviewed the Lawn Guyland episode of Maniac for Decider.

“The ‘A’ experience on its own can be a seductive demon,” says Dr. Robert Muramoto in Maniac Episode 3. “Most people wouldn’t understand why someone wants to revisit a trauma again and again, even take pleasure from it. Most people wouldn’t.”

“But you do,” Annie guesses in response.

“People like that don’t want to move forward,” Muramoto continues.

“I don’t deserve to,” Annie replies.

“Don’t you?”

“I want to move forward,” Annie says. “I wanna know what the second pill does.”

“People who feel they deserve loss might try to move forward. They might taste recovery. But,” Muramoto concludes, “they always end up going back.”

(Author’s note: At this point in the exchange between Annie and Dr. Robert (ahem), I wrote THIS IS PRETTY GOOD in my notes.)

“Why?” asks Annie.

Then Dr. Muramoto makes a weird grunting sound and drops dead at his desk. The most interesting thing Maniac has said yet about how human beings process trauma and guilt, tossed aside for a black-comedy sight gag. You’d be hard pressed to find a better illustration of how this show’s ostentatious hyper-cleverness gets in its own way.

I reviewed episode 3 of Maniac for Decider. It has its ups and downs but this sums it up.

“I hate this character. I hate this character.” The note so nice I wrote it twice! Maniac Episode 2 (“Windmills”) focuses on Emma Stone’s Annie the same way the pilot centered on Jonah Hill’s Owen. Like that fifth-generation photocopy of Zach Braff in Garden State, Annie is, with all apologies to Pirandello, six tics in search of a character. High-functioning addict, self-injury scars, fractured family, needless hostility as behavioral baseline, sarcastic scofflaw, skillful dissembler. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, you know?

I reviewed episode two of Maniac for Decider. Things have not improved, though on the plus side there’s Julia Garner.

Maniac is Stranger Things after half a semester at a liberal arts college. It’s back home during Thanksgiving break, first semester freshman year. It’s hanging out at the bar everyone goes to. It’s got you cornered in that bar. It’s monopolizing your time with a solid 15-minute monologue ranking the music videos of Spike Jonze in ascending order of formativeness as your eyes dart around the room, looking for your FWB from last summer or your weed connect or basically any other human being. It’s holding a copy of House of Leaves under one arm, front-cover-side out. It considers itself spiritual but not religious. It thinks cubicles are a metaphor. It has its doubts about Prozac.

What Stranger Things is to the 1980s horror, science fiction, and fantasy milieu reigned over by Spielberg, Carpenter, and King, Maniac — written by The Leftovers veteran Patrick Somerville and directed in its entirety by future James Bond auteur and True Detective Season One-derkind Cary Joji Fukunaga — is to the films of 1999, give or take a year. Instead of doing what the Duffer Brothers did with The Goonies and Ghostbusters and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Somerville and Fukunaga do it with Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, Office Space, American Beauty, Magnolia, The Matrix. There’s some Coen Brothers in there too (Barton Fink), some Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums), a whole lot of Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), with outliers like Children of Men and Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy thrown in for good measure. If you’re a TV person, and Netflix counts on it that you are, you’ll see shades of Mr. Robot, Legion, and the Adult Swim Infomercials in there too, but that’s not the meat of the thing, nor the point of it. Maniac is as much a product of nostalgia as Stranger Things, only now it’s the stuff you watched when you were 20 rather than 12.

Pretty sure I got Maniac’s number in these two paragraphs, but I’m covering the entire season for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere, just in case.

Succession should find a way to set every episode in the most aggressively obnoxious places possible. That’s the lesson I’m drawing from “Prague,” its eighth episode, which does not take place in Prague at all. Rather, it’s set almost entirely in the faux-grimy confines of a subterranean/off-the-grid warehouse-party quasi-orgy for the rich and…well, the rich. At the behest of Stewy, the sleazy private-equity guy who wormed his way into the company on Kendall’s behalf and then kicked his old friend to the curb when it suited him, Roman has selected this environment, known as Rhomboid (“New York’s hottest club is Rhomboid,” I can hear Stefon saying even now), for his simpering future brother-in-law Tom’s bachelor party. “Is it cool, or is it, like, total fucking bullshit?” Roman asks as they enter. “Who knows!” One thing’s for sure: It gives the collection of assembled dickheads invited to the party their best opportunity yet to be shady and shitty in very funny ways.

For Tom, played by the magnificent Matthew Macfadyen, this mostly means enthusing with uncomfortable manic glee over his free pass from his fiancee Shiv to get up to some shenanigans. After abandoning his childhood friends (they’re not on the guest list), he spends the evening alternately shouting over the music to various in-laws about “splooge” and worrying about whether Shiv also has a free pass (if he only knew!). Mercifully, his exploits, if they happened at all, are reported to us rather than shown. Suffice it to say that by the end, the entire family has congratulated him on “swallowing your own load.” Just the kind of impression you want to make on the people you’ll be seeing at Christmas every year!

I reviewed episode eight of Succession for Decider. It’s the best one since the pilot, primarily because Matthew Macfadyen’s character spends most of the episode talking about his own semen.

As for Shiv’s assignation with her ex-boyfriend turned new colleague Nate, everything I said about it last week still stands: Sex between ciphers is definitionally not hot. Note that this is different from saying sex between strangers is definitionally not hot. When you don’t know someone, the element of anonymity and mystery involved in watching them fuck is erotic. We know Shiv and Nate just fine, and that’s the problem, since there’s nothing to know. They’re not idealists, that’s for sure. Nor are they monsters like Logan or scoundrels like Roman or just repulsive like Tom. They’re barely pragmatists, since that would imply goals, and we don’t have any clue what attracted them to politics since they express no actual political viewpoints. Shiv says whatever will get a rise out of the person she’s currently trying to act tough toward and reverses course without compunction when the need passes, hence going to work for a guy she jokingly called Stalin and less jokingly called too radical within about five minutes of meeting him. Nate himself comes right out and says, “I don’t believe in anything.”

Nate and Shiv are dull, the way only people who are handed everything in the world and can’t be bothered to use the spare time to develop even the most rudimentary and idiosyncratic beliefs or personalities can be dull. Under normal circumstances? The lay-it-on-the-line, “I want to fuck you, here’s where and when we can do it” transactional flirting, the all-business hand-down-the-pants initiation of intimacy—whoa nellie. Here it’s like watching the weather report. I’m supposed to get hot for this? Heroes, villains, rogues, by all means have at it, but orgasms for bores I will not abide.

[…]

I’ll tell you what works here, beautifully and unequivocally, or rather I’ll tell you who works: Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy. Watching him handle the prodigal son’s near-instantaneous collapse of sobriety (aided and abetted by his dad planting stories that he was running through the street muttering about a coup; now we know the plot purpose of his otherwise unnecessary dash through the streets) is gripping stuff. Once he makes the decision to leap off the wagon, he’s in it all the way. He’s determined to have a great time, and so he does, whether he’s chatting with the locals, calling his brother with the firmness of purpose of the incredibly high, disrupting the family gathering, goading his father into near violence, or just kicking back in the wilderness enjoying the coke and the view.

Strong handles all of this with restraint and without cliche, from the anger, frustration, and feigned toughness as he takes the plunge to the chemical relaxation and goofy good cheer that follows. The irony is that in the ease of his interaction with the local burnouts, whom everyone else in his family would (and in Roman’s case, does) treat like sentient dogshit, you can see him find even more ways to convey Kendall’s innate, if relative, decency. In fact, when one of the methheads gives Roman shit in turn, Ken sticks up for him, too. It’s like watching a performance from Deadwood show up on Petticoat Junction. On this show there’s Strong and then there’s everyone else.

I reviewed episode seven of Succession, in which I disliked the sex and liked Jeremy Strong, for Decider.

I’ve never been quite sure if Ozark is about anything. Its criminal parable is so broadly drawn, and the plot is so oddly specific (all those timed ultimatums), that it’s hard to read it as anything but the crudest allegory for the corrupting effect of money and secrets. But it uses its gorgeous watery and woodsy locations as well as any show this side of Game of Thrones, it gives interesting actors a chance to dig deep, and it seems comfortably settled into a slow-and-steady pace. Breaking Bad comparisons are well and good, but I wonder if The Americans isn’t a better point of reference. Like Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, Marty and Wendy Byrde are living the nightmare side of the American dream, trying to pretend to the world, and their children, that there are no monsters under the bed at all when they are those monsters themselves. It’s a show I’ll be thinking about for quite a while.

I reviewed the season finale of Ozark for Decider. Given Netflix’s track record there’s no way of knowing if the show’s current level of quality can be maintained, much less improved, but it really does remind me of where The Americans was at at this stage in its development: not great yet, but carrying the seeds of greatness within.

The episode’s cold open gives us a sense of what the Snells in one another, and how Darlene’s wild side is not some out-of-the-blue thing, as it’s at times seemed. In a flashback set to Glen Campbell’s gorgeous romantic dream of a song, “Witchita Lineman,” we see Jacob as a just-returned Vietnam veteran, clean cut in his uniform. Darlene is a young hellcat — there’s no other word for it — who crashes the date he’s on at the local diner and, promising him a life of excitement that won’t leave him wishing he’d died in ‘Nam after all, whisks him away to skinnydip. She’s half naked by the time she even introduces herself. So, y’know, I get it.

So does Jacob. During a rueful conversation with Marty and Helen, he learns he’s made an error that gives the government claim to nearly all his land just like what happened to his ancestors in 1929. The camera lingers on actor Peter Mullan throughout Marty and Helen’s explanation of just how badly he’s gotten swindled, giving it an effect that’s like the opposite of the similar “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE” speech at the end of There Will Be Blood — here, the point isn’t the glee Jacob’s enemies take in beating him, since they really aren’t taking any, but in his own sense of failure, his realization that Darlene was right and they never should have gone into business with the cartel, his other realization that things wouldn’t have gotten this bad if Darlene could control her anger, and no doubt a sense of stupidity about spending a lifetime trying hold on to what his family built up from nothing, only to lose it all again. (Though millions in cash from the casino would probably salve the pain a little.)

Anyway, at the end of it all, he asks Marty this: “What do you do, Martin, when the bride who took your breath away becomes the wife that makes you hold your breath in terror?” It’s a gorgeous, portentous line, and Mullan savors it; I wish he’d had been given anything that Boardwalk Empire/Deadwood-memorable during his recent stint on Westworld, just for example. He knows he forged a connection with Darlene so deep from the start that severing it will be a disaster. He was just wrong about who’d bear the brunt.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Ozark Season Two for Decider. Love Peter Mullan, love Julia Garner.

Now that’s more like it. After treading water for an episode with a ginned-up kidnapping crisis and Screenwriting 101 religious debate involving a character way past his sell-by date, Ozark returns to its strengths in this antepenultimate installment of Season 2. Titled “The Big Sleep,” it’s a slow-burn affair that spends its time widening the cracks in the Byrde clan, ratcheting up tension between their various partners, and digging into the fundamental questions of family, trust, and honor among thieves that serve as the show’s primary fuel. All without a “you have 24 hours” deadline in sight.

I reviewed the eighth episode of Ozark Season Two for Decider. I want David Lynch to make another movie or show just so he can work with Julia Garner in it.

You have 48 hours to find an episode of Ozark Season 2 in which no one is given 48 hours to do something. Or 24 hours. Or two minutes. Or any artificially imposed time frame, actually, though I mention those numbers specifically because all three are cited in ultimatums issued in this episode alone. A black-marketeer gives Ruth and Cade Langmore 48 hours to steal a fancy thermal imaging system for him in exchange for ten thousand dollars. Marty Byrde gives Darlene Snell two minutes to tell him where she’s hiding his wife Wendy before siccing the cartel on her. Pastor Mason Young gives Marty 24 hours to retrieve his infant son from the foster system or he’ll kill Wendy, whom he’s kidnapped. Ozark Season 2 Episode 7 is called “One Way Out”; it might as well be named that after the strategy employed by the writers’ room.

Honestly, the timed-ultimatum thing is more funny than anything else at this stage, to the point where I wonder if it’s not intended to be some kind of recurring gag. The bigger problem with this episode, which follows one of the series’ strongest, is how much it feels like wasted time.

I reviewed episode seven of Ozark Season Two for Decider. This one is an old-school wheel-spinner digression, though holy shit, Julia Garner puts in work as Ruth Langmore.

This one sneaks up on you. After a big prestige-crime blowout in Episode 5, the second season of Ozark heads into the homestretch in the cryptically titled “Outer Darkness,” its sixth and best episode. The title phrase calls to mind cosmic concepts from Lovecraft and Tolkien, but the episode itself is a stately and intimate thing — a surprisingly thoughtful mood piece about death and the severing of human connection by both mortality and immorality. I dug it.

I reviewed the elegiac episode six of Ozark Season Two, my favorite hour of the show to that point, for Decider.

We’ve reached a Pivotal Episode. It’s Succession Episode 6, “Which Side Are You On?”, and my understanding is that after watching it, a whole lot of viewers were firmly on Succession‘s side. This is a Tony vs. Uncle Junior type situation, in which a quartet of coup plotters — Kendall, Roman, Frank, and Gerri — make their move against Logan in a vote of no confidence brought before his company board. Their hope is to remove him before he embarrasses himself and destroys the company. It does not go well, and unfortunately I mean that in every sense.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Succession, aka The One with the Board Meeting, for Decider. It’s rare for me to be as immediately pleased with a piece of writing as I was with this, so I hope you’ll read check it out. It was a chance for me to hash out pretty much everything I think works (some) and doesn’t (most) in the series. Pros include strong comic performances by Matthew Macfadyen, Kieran Culkin, and Nicholas Braun, and some truly powerful work by Jeremy Strong as the show’s sole real dramatic role. Cons include flummoxing camerawork and plotting, a disconnect where the show’s main erotic energy is located, and a music-cue misfire for the ages.

I’m much less sold on the waterboarding of Ruth Langmore, orchestrated by Helen to determine whether or not she’d ratted Marty out or if his trust in her, despite it all, was valid. I get the need to portray the cartel as the supreme badasses, and to sell Helen as the slay-queen sort who can torture teenagers on behalf of mass murderers but still wish she was at home playing with her kids; since you can’t just pause the action and turn to the camera and recite the URL for these cliches on TVTropes this will have to do.

But I have a harder time swallowing the idea that a billion-dollar drug operation believes this form of interrogation yields any useful information whatsoever when everyone outside the Republican Party knows it just makes people say what they think you want to hear, or that we as viewers need to suffer through the brutalization of a teenage girl to reinforce the bogus notion that Torture Works.

To add insult to injury, the scene was superfluous, because the issue of whether or not Ruth would flip was already tense and emotional as it was. You had the whole weird sexualized intimidation routine with Petty. You had the normally stalwart Ruth hiding, crouched in strip club office, wondering how to make it past the cartel alive. You had Marty learning Ruth had tried to kill him, and Ruth learning that Marty learned it, and Marty talking to Ruth directly about it, and Ruth admitting it. You had Wendy and Cade floating around in the mix too, with their own agendas and reactions to everything. Wasn’t watching these four people figure out what to do about the mess they were in more interesting than a Zero Dark Thirty reenactment?

I will at least give the show credit enough to believe that Ruth’s experience will wind up being the most important aftershock of this sequence, not Cade’s thirst for revenge or Marty’s guilt; Ozark has taken great pains to build Ruth up as its most interesting and well-rounded yet still difficult character, and I don’t see them suddenly non-lethally fridging her to make the menfolk feel things. But I can really only talk about what’s on screen in the here and now (at least until the Netflix UI automatically rolls me over into the next episode), and it was corny and ugly and pernicious. I expected better, and more entertaining to boot.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Ozark Season Two for Decider. I wanted to draw attention to this (uncharacteristically) unsavory and unnecessary sequence in particular.