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

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

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

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

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

I reviewed this week’s incredible Industry for Decider.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I reviewed the season finale of Fallout for Decider.

There’s a lot of good TV on right now. Even more specifically there’s a lot of good TV on HBO Max right now. In addition to Industry, there’s The Pitt and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and Heated Rivalry. They’re all big buzzy dramas. (For the record, Knight isn’t a comedy or a dramedy, it’s a drama that’s funny, a subtle but crucial distinction.)

But even relative to its strong contemporaries, Industry is in a class by itself. It’s in the conversation with The Sopranos, Mad Men, and The Young Pope/The New Pope. I don’t know what that conversation is, necessarily — something to do with artful, ruthless television about how the cycle of venal but irresistible desire unmoors us from the morality that makes us human beings — but that’s where Industry is. Every time I sit down to write a review of this magnificent smorgasbord of sociopathy, my first thought is “Where do I begin?”

I reviewed this week’s Industry for Decider. What a show.

Keep that in mind as you watch Coop’s subsequent actions throughout the episode. When he’s interviewing the GQ guy, he learns that the man was in love with the woman who blew up, though he knew she didn’t feel the same. When he starts to sob with grief, Cooper actually takes the risk of reaching out and holding the man’s hand. “Thank you for being kind,” the man says with shocking directness. “They’ve kind of been treating us like animals.” Light shines on them from above, transformed from the harsh glare of an interview room to a kind of visual benediction.

The same thing happens with Platt’s character. When Cooper enters the plastic-lined chamber where doctors are working on him, he’s struggling against his restraints, begging them to “talk to me like a real person” over and over. That’s exactly what Cooper does, calming Manny down by discussing their dogs and, again, holding the man’s hand. “You have a kind face,” Manny plaintively tells Cooper at one point, not incorrectly. Things go south after that, but that’s the virus’s fault, not Cooper’s. 

If you’re not a heterosexual cis man and you’re reading this, I need to impress upon you just how not done it is to reach out and hold the hand of basically any man, let alone a stranger. You have to willingly leap a pretty big gap of societal convention, patriarchal conformity, homophobia, and emotional stuntedness to do it — and you have to count on the recipient to be willing and able to do the same. I found these moments strangely beautiful as a result. Even amid all the camp body-horror shenanigans, the show makes time for men to treat each other decently. 

What’s more, Ashley and Manny aren’t simple stereotypes. Ashley, who’s kind of a gym bro, feels looked down upon by the elite fashionistas at Vogue. He knew Manny was cruisy in the men’s room — but he didn’t mind, because letting the guy check out his dick gave him a little confidence boost. “I’d give him a little show. Made me feel superior. Picked me up on down days or something.” Only after rambling like that does he catch himself: “Sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” 

It’s a humanizing comment, a funny and unexpected detail, and an illustration of how even straight gym bros who are madly in love with beautiful women and absolutely love to kiss and tell about it also engage in a little homosociality now and then for various reasons, all in one. It’s excellent writing from co-creators Ryan Murphy and Matt Hodgson, and the entire hospital segment is engagingly acted by Peters, Platt, and Halper.

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

“Don’t think of them as human beings. Think of them as Americans.” 

When the creators of the Fallout games forcibly annexed Canada into their dystopian-future United States, they did so when this was a parody of American imperialism. How could they have known that before too long, American imperialism would be beyond parody? The incorporation of Canada as “the 51st State” is now an explicit, stated policy goal of the American government, to the extent that any of the demented synapse-firings of our pedophile protector president and the psychosexual fixations of his cadre of mutant Nazi viziers can be considered “policy” as we have historically understood the term. We live, and in an increasing number of cases we die, under the exact same kind of rule by demented billionaires Fallout presented as a worst-case scenario. A cheery thought, isn’t it?

I reviewed this week’s crackerjack episode of Fallout for Decider.

It was right around the time that his beautiful wife engineered a threesome with his equally beautiful assistant that I started to feel bad for Henry Muck. I watched this peer of the realm joylessly slam his marble-carved body into Hayley, an eager, gorgeous woman 15 years his junior. I watched his wife Yasmin — who made it happen, then oversaw it all with approval while languidly smoking a cigarette — order Hayley to spread her legs so Yasmin could suck “something that belongs to my husband, and therefore to me” directly out of her body. I watched all that, and I thought this poor bastard.

I reviewed last night’s Industry for Decider.

The final surprise? Like his boss, Antonio loves him some yacht rock. In another American Psycho riff, he defends the artistic legacy of Christopher Cross at length, decrying the image-first MTV era for tanking the average-looking singer-songwriter’s career. “The world is cruel to people who aren’t beautiful,” says the murderer-for-hire.

But he only says this after he sings the entire first verse and chorus of Cross’s smash hit single, the definitive yacht rock song, “Sailing.” And I mean the whole thing, every note, for approximately one minute and forty seconds of screentime — all while Jeremy, who’s both a) not a fan of Christopher Cross, and b) convinced this man is going to kill him at any moment, watches in perplexed horror. 

And dude, Anthony Ramos sings that song. He puts his heart and soul into it the way you do when you really want to kill it at karaoke. The funny, pop-culture-referencing hitman is an old archetype now — Pulp Fiction is over thirty years old — but rarely have I seen it done with this kind of cheerful gusto. Between this and his fine work on Marvel’s Ironheart, the guy plays a great villain precisely because he doesn’t really read as villainous.

I reviewed the third episode of The Beauty for Decider.

“I think everything that we do, from the minute we hit puberty to the second we die, is about sex. We go to the gym, we work on our bodies, we cut our hair, we fix our teeth, our tits, torturing ourselves for some promotion — and everything that we do is about our universal, unquenchable thirst to all be considered attractive enough to get laid.” —Agent Cooper Madsen

Put a pin in that speech. We’re gonna come back to it.

I reviewed the second episode of The Beauty for Decider. It’s fun and sharp!

The series premiere of The Beauty, co-created, co-written, and directed by Ryan Murphy, depicts a deranged model played by Bella Hadid going on a killcrazy rampage at a Balenciaga runway show, embarking on a high-speed motorcycle chase on the streets of Paris, resuming her killcrazy rampage with bone shards sticking out of her leg, then exploding like a blood-filled water balloon, while the Prodigy’s “Firestarter” plays.

There. I’ve now told you everything you need to know to determine whether or not you’ll enjoy The Beauty. It’s a Ryan Murphy joint through and through, from the high-profile cameo by a beautiful famous woman to the emphasis on sensation over substance. Of course, sensation can be its own kind of substance, and your mileage on whether Murphy ever makes it so may vary. I find all this work in the true-crime genre to be excellent, for what it’s worth. The crimes going on here, however, are very much not true.

I reviewed part one of the three-part series premiere of The Beauty for Decider.

Telling this story to her husband, Cooper Howard, when he confronts her with what he knows about the plan to drop the bombs does not have the effect Barb intended. When he asks her how she could sentence millions, billions of people just like them and their daughter to death to protect their daughter herself, she asks, wouldn’t he? I don’t think he would, at least not in this pre-Ghoul incarnation.

But plenty of people not only would, they’d jump at the chance. Just the other day I saw a viral post in which father of a newborn boast he’d wipe out whole continents just to see his baby daughter smile. Odds are that this asshole doesn’t even change the kid’s diaper without being asked, but here he is, champing at the bit to commit genocide to show what a good dad he is. 

Remind you of anyone? “Some things just never change,” Hank MacLean tells his daughter Lucy in the present. “People just wanna kill each other, don’t they? I think it’s the only way that people feel safe. It’s ironic, isn’ tit? To feel safe they have to kill each other.” It’s the raison d’être of the fascism we see playing out on American streets in 2026: In order to assuage our baseless fears, we must inflict terror on others.

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

When presented with a banquet, an absolute feast of an episode like this one, the temptation is to try to swallow it all in one go. The challenge is to resist that temptation. An episode like “The Commander and the Grey Lady,” the second in Industry’s fourth season, is a meal you can return to for seconds, thirds, and leftovers. Once again written and directed by series co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, it’s the kind of episode that makes you ask the host for the recipe — or the help, as the case may be. Best to sample a few delicacies at a time rather than try to gobble it all down.

I reviewed this week’s Industry for Decider.

What impresses me most about this episode is the amount of pathos Walton Goggins is able to generate under an inch of prosthetic makeup and with a digitally erased nose. The moment the Ghoul sits down at that bar, it’s like he’s a different person than the one we knew — ruminative, disappointed in himself, just plain sad about it all. Of course we learn later he’s wrestling with handing Lucy over to her insane father, which he reveals was the whole reason he stuck with her all this time: She wasn’t his friend or his ally, she was his bargaining chip. 

But her presence in his life is changing him, as surely as she’d never have killed someone before meeting him in turn. It may not seem like much, but being kind to that dog and feeling any kind of way at all about Lucy are huge steps for the subhuman piece of shit we met last season. Especially as the flashbacks draw us closer to…well, whatever happened with him and Barb and House and the bombs, who knows what kind of human being the Ghoul will turn out to be.

I reviewed this week’s Fallout for Decider.

Industry is a freefall into the moral void, as thrilling as it is terrifying. It’s the only show that dares to depict our world today as it is: an elevator shaft without a bottom to hit. I’m so glad this miserable, wonderful show is back.

I reviewed the season premiere of Industry for Decider. Hooray, Industry is here again!

It’s in relatively simple and straightforward episodes like these that we can see just how sturdy a structure Fallout is. It’s obviously full of monsters and moments torn from the video games to please fans of the franchise, but I haven’t so much as hit start on a single one of those things and I’ve had no trouble making sense or feeling the impact of anything on the show. Okay, so I had to look up the name of the big monster with horns, but if I hadn’t, “big monster with horns” gets the point across quite nicely. You don’t need to know a giant radioactive eggshell is an easter egg to appreciate a giant radioactive eggshell.

The insistence on practical sets and effects as often as possible is a huge boon to the show as well. It’s easy to imagine the Ghoul and Lucy’s faceoff with that monster in New Vegas as a Dave Filoni Star Wars show or a late-period MCU movie — two people standing on a volume stage with a bunch of CGI slop surrounding them. Instead, it looks like Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins faced a Balrog that somehow managed to extinguish itself (they can do that underwater, look it up) in a gigantic pile of rubble and abandoned pleasure palaces, which is basically what the set builders constructed. 

Finally, the charms of Purnell and Goggins really can’t be oversold. The latter is so likeable as Coop and so vile, yet weirdly endearing, as the Ghoul. The former makes a drug-fueled rampage feel like the next logical outgrowth of Lucy’s cheery, can-do persona. In an opposite register, the tremulous performances of Aaron Moten and Michael Cristofer during Maximus and Quintus’s corresponding showdown go a long way to making you understand that these two people really do share a deep bond, no matter how loathsome you find Quintus personally. 

I reviewed this week’s Fallout for Decider.

Man, Fallout is a killer show. I don’t know what else to say! When I press play on any given episode, I sit back secure in the knowledge that everything I see will be entertaining. Some of it will be funny in a nice way. Some of it will be funny in an extremely nasty way. There will be violence that makes you go “fuck yeah!” and violence that makes you go “oh fuck.” Practical effects and physical sets will prevail over CGI sludge. A bunch of actors you like — Macaulay Culkin! Jon Gries! Kumail Nanjiani! — will show up and do something rad or weird or awful or hilarious. Corporations and capitalism will be dragged in a way that would shock the non-existent conscience of Amazon overlord and Trump crony Jeff Bezos, our era’s answer to Robert House. (I know people will think Elon, but it’s always the quiet ones.) All on Amazon’s dime! Fallout has the giddy feeling of people getting away with something, and it’s infectious as fuck.

I reviewed this week’s Fallout for Decider.

They’re both right, and that’s true across the board on this show, nowhere more so than with the dueling outlooks of Lucy and the Ghoul. The gunslinger is kind of like a one-man Walking Dead, where he’s both the zombies and the human beings who’ve turned into ruthless, merciless killers to survive. On that show, there was only ever one correct answer when faced with the question of whether to help outsiders: Don’t, because they’re always dangerous, and the most important task for anyone is to protect yourself.

Lucy’s presence upsets all that. While the Ghoul is usually right not to trust outsiders, that doesn’t make Lucy’s belief in people’s fundamental goodness seem like a weakness. When he says “Empathy’s like mud, you lose your boots in that stuff,” we’re not supposed to believe that he — or Elon Musk, or any other real-world anti-empathy crusaders — have the right of it. Lucy’s optimism is presented as a strength even when it gets her into trouble; in Fallout’s view, it’s the world, not Lucy, that is wrong and must be made to change. 

I reviewed this week’s Fallout for Decider.