You know how I spent the last review comparing the relationship between Billy “Jigsaw” Russo and Dr. Krista Dumont to the one between the Joker and Dr. Harleen Quinzel?

Yeah. If you need me, I’ll be over here, awaiting my Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

Episode 7 of this season of The Punisher is titled “One Bad Day.” I know, I know: one bad day? Do any of these characters have any other kind of day? But the title references a key component of the definitive, if not technically canonical, Joker origin story, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke. The thesis there is that all it took is one awful, awful day (albeit one that culminated in an acid bath) to turn a down-on-his-luck family man and wannabe standup comic into the deadliest serial killer on the planet. The Joker, who only vaguely remembered the details of his own life pre-Clown Prince, was determined to test this thesis on Commissioner Gordon, whom he kidnapped, stripped naked, and forced to look at gigantic photos of his daughter Barbara “Batgirl” Gordon, also stripped naked, after the Joker shot her in the spine, paralyzing her from the waist down.(It’s a problematic fave.) So it’s hardly like the show is trying to hide its homage to the Distinguished Competition’s supervillain supercouple.

I reviewed the seventh episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

If you like this sort of thing, here’s the sort of thing you’ll likehas been Netflix’s mantra for a minute now. It’s not just the original programming that works this way, either. When ’80s nostalgists run out of Stranger Things or ’90s nostalgists run out of Maniac or people who love Pablo Escobar run out of, like, five different shows about Pablo Escobar, they can always watch the Big Red Machine’s library of the most popular shows on broadcast network television from the past couple decades, which not coincidentally are also the majority of the most popular shows on Netflix.

I’m not saying this approach never pays off creatively. Narcos is a fun show with a great theme song, a great performance in Wagner Moura, and an occasional Great Episode. The troubling German science-fiction show Dark snuck in on a wave of “It’s kinda like Stranger Things” early press (tonally they’re worlds apart but plotwise, yeah, a bit) and became its own engrossing thing. The Punisher, the best of the Marvel/Netflix shows, is a direct Daredevil spinoff from a line of six interconnected series set in the most popular franchise of all time. Still, if you’re looking for something to kick down the doors the way The Sopranos did…well, here are some cooking shows!

But you’ve gotta hand it to them with Kingdom, this sweeping new original Korean-language series. Plenty of networks and plenty of shows have tried and failed to capture the magic of Game of Thrones, the show on TV that is the sort of thing the most people like out of pretty much all the shows on TV at this point, and bellyflopped. (MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles, anyone?) But for whatever reason, none of them isolated one of the most instantly appealing elements of George R.R. Martin, David Benioff, and Dan Weiss’s baby, a concept so brilliant in its simplicity that it shows up before the opening credits of the pilot even roll and will be the subject of the entire final season. Yes, Game of Thrones is “The Sopranos with swords,” as the early buzz hailed it. But it’s also, and on a much larger and more immediately, nerdily impactful scale, The Lord of the Rings with zombies.

Kingdom has cracked the case.

I reviewed the series premiere of Kingdom for Decider.

(NOTE: These review summaries will be brief while I play link catch-up. Just read the reviews!)

Now this is a weird one. Alternating between some of the series’ most vicious writing and some of its corniest, between passages of silent and dark visual poetry that suck you in and out-of-character moments that knock you right back out again, The Punisher Season 2 Episode 6 (“Nakazat”) is a viewing experience as fractured as Billy Russo’s psyche and Jon Bernthal’s prizefighter nose.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

There should be a term for the “now that’s more like it” episodes every Marvel/Netflix show busts out after the ones that would be better off not existing. Maybe they follow a tonal miscalculation, or a filler episode, or a sudden turn for the implausible even by superhero standards. But they’re usually there somewhere, at least once per season, getting things back on track like a three-year-old realigning Thomas the Tank Engine’s wheels in the grooves of their wooden railroad playset. “One-Eyed Jacks,” the The Punisher Season 2 Episode 5, is exactly that kind of course correction.

I reviewed the fifth episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

Before we get to the specifics, here’s my thinking on this, see if you agree. Superhero stories are a subgenre of multiple genres, depending on the character and the approach; there are elements of science fiction, fantasy, crime, sometimes mystery, sometimes war, usually a soupçon of character-based drama, often some comedy, and the basic template of heroism that you can map everything from Greek mythology to professional wrestling onto. But the key component is action, and great action films and shows employ action to convey emotion. They set up a closed system where conversation is insufficient to vent the turmoil beneath the surface, so it comes out in punching and lasers and so on, the same way that in opera or musical theater it comes out in singing, or in horror it comes out in demonic possession or people getting their faces torn off.

Now, a really good superhero story can manage the conversation bit too, of course. Or it can express intimacy in other ways, like we’ve talked about in this space before—tending to injuries, physical closeness, etc. But what it cannot afford to do is stop everything for an hour of samey two-person dialogues that a show with a smaller episode order could easily eliminate and lose absolutely nothing of value.

I reviewed the fourth episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

The Punisher is a murder machine. He’s not a gunslinger or a samurai, there to dazzle the audience with brio or technique. To the extent that his lethal maneuvers are impressive at all it’s down to how casual and calculated they are, especially when contrasted with the expression actor Jon Bernthal wears on his face for such scenes. Close-quarters hand-to-hand shit is one thing—that’s where he goes beastmode, growling and bellowing. But when it’s a firefight and his job is to advance on and kill his enemies until none are left, he has the attitude of a person tasked with a difficult but eminently doable task, like mowing the lawn. He puts people down like he’s using a hedge trimmer. Got it, next.

The most interesting thing about “Trouble the Water” (The Punisher Season 2 Episode 3) is how it shows the cost this ruthless efficiency extracts in human suffering.

I reviewed the third episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

In this episode of The Punisher, a lady uses tweezers to take a bullet out of Jon Bernthal’s bare ass.

There. Never let it be said that I’m one to bury the lede.

But if there’s one thing the Marvel/Netflix shows, even the ones I’m not crazy about, have been good at, it’s tying their superhero/vigilante violence to moments of physical intimacy. Sometimes this involves the main characters having sex, and from Jessica Jones and Luke Cage to Luke Cage and Misty Knight to Matt Murdock and Elektra Natchios, those scenes have been hot across the board. That’s certainly true on this show as well, from Agent Madani and Billy Russo to David “Micro” Lieberman and his wife Sarah to “Pete Castiglione” and Beth the bartender just last episode.

At other times the violence itself is intimate. This naturally tends to be the case more for the characters who lack super-strength than for those who do, but it’s true. Watching mortal men like Matt Murdock and Frank Castle be made vulnerable by the infliction of violence on their bodies is a display of intimacy. To quote myself quoting Barbara Kruger regarding another show, “You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” Hallway fights are an intricate ritual indeed.

I reviewed the second episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

Have we—as a nation, a society, a people—done enough for Jon Bernthal? No, that’s not even the right thing to ask. What viewers of The Punisher, and all other media, must do is take a fearless personal inventory on the Jon Bernthal Question: What have I, personally, done to show respect and gratitude to this great man? If nothing else, The Punisher Season 2 will give all of us the opportunity to look inward and see if we’ve done right by the Last Action Hunk. You hear that, America? Fix your hearts or die.

I reviewed the season premiere of The Punisher for Decider. Jon Bernthal is perfect in this role.

(Note: These episode review summaries will be short while I play link catch-up. You’ll just have to read the reviews!)

Weird ‘Flix, but okay: 2018 saw a certain streaming behemoth finally achieve the approximate cultural reach and clout the Big Four broadcast networks still enjoyed as recently as a decade ago. Unfortunately, the level of artistic quality and risk-taking roughly followed suit.

But even the algorithm-assisted return of TV monoculture—you can have any flavor you like, as long as it’s a flavor our data indicates you’ve enjoyed before—couldn’t stamp out the hard-earned gains television has made as an art form since Tony Soprano woke up that morning 20 years ago. Shows predicated on the idea that challenging your audience is a vital part of entertaining that audience, even if it’s an audience you have to will into existence in the process, are still out there.

Television can still make even a jaded viewer sob with sorrow and joy, recoil in suspense and terror, stare in silent (or shouting!) awe at the sheer emotional and aesthetic audacity of it all. Between them, the eight shows below did all that for me and more.

8. On Cinema at the Cinema (Adult Swim)

Now, nobody likes a good laugh more than I do. But comedy is about making people laugh, which turns characters in comedies into joke-delivery mechanisms rather than characters in the fully developed sense from which we derive value in drama. So it takes a lot for a comedy to make my list of the best the medium has to offer.

In the case of On Cinema, Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s byzantine saga of atrocious human behavior in the guise of a thumbs-up/thumbs-down movie-review show starring two idiots, here is what it took: Tim, the right-wing hedonist host whose endless series of jilted wives, abandoned children, unwatchable action-movie side projects, unlistenable alt-rock and dance-music spinoffs, disastrous alternative-medicine experiments, near-death experiences (including toxic shock from unsterilized acupuncture needles, malnourishment from an all-drug diet, and incineration after falling asleep with a lit cigarette in the storage locker cum VHS-tape library he’d been reduced to living in) culminated in a mistrial for murder after 20 kids died from smoking his tainted vape juice at an EDM festival. The subsequent tenth season of his movie-review show (“On Cinema X”) saw him caught between the diktats of the show’s snake-oil sponsor and the civil judgment won by the family of one of his victims.

Somewhere in there, he and Gregg may or may not have awarded Solo: A Star Wars Story their coveted Five Bags of Popcorn seal of approval; between Tim screaming obscenely about the district attorney (against whom he mounts a quixotic electoral campaign) and Gregg prattling on about how Tim Burton won’t answer his letters, it’s a bit hard to tell. Heidecker and Turkington have played out this shaggy-dog joke for years, anticipating (not kidding at all here) both the rise of Donald Trump and the role that aggrieved nerds would play as his cultural vanguard. The result is maybe the best thing the extended Tim & Eric universe has ever produced. Long may they rant.

I named the eight best television series of the year for Decider. I believe in all eight of these shows very deeply, which is why it’s just a top eight and not a larger, rounder number. I hope you enjoy them too.

The men of The Terror did not, as they say, die as they lived. They lived as interchangeable cogs in the machine of empire—sailors in the Royal Navy of Great Britain, the largest imperial project ever undertaken by humanity between the ride of the Khans and the Pax Americana currently dying all around us. So the show based on their final misadventure dresses them in their blue uniforms, swaddles them in shapeless and face-covering winter gear, allows the cold to redden their faces and lengthen their beards, until distinguishing between them requires an expert’s eye and ear. (Or at least a thoroughgoing knowledge of English and Irish character actors.)

They lived their final years trapped in the frozen waters and barren lands of the Arctic, searching for an open lane of water that would bridge the Atlantic to the Pacific without the need for Her Majesty’s Ships to sail around the tip of South America to get there—the fabled Northwest Passage. (Only one of them would actually live, and not for long, to see the Passage, and only by accident.) So the show shoots them against endless uniform vistas of white and gray, with snowblinding daylight or soulcrushing darkness alternating for periods that lasted months at a stretch.

And in the end, they lived their final weeks, days, hours, minutes, moments dying from the same things: malnutrition, food poisoning, disease, starvation, exposure to the cold, murder at one another’s hands…and, in some cases, mutilation and consumption by ferocious hulking thing on the ice, out for their English blood. (Fee-fi-fo-fum.)

But when they died? When they died, it was different. They were different. Replacing the uniforms and the uniformity were visions as unique and beautiful and terrible and individual as people are themselves, deep down inside.

I wrote an essay on the many deaths of The Terror for Decider. As you’d expect for a piece on character deaths, there are many spoilers. I tried to do this magnificent show justice and I hope you enjoy the result.

“It was that moment when it all fell apart.” The most compelling point made by the season finale of Narcos: Mexico (“Leyenda”) is that just when it looks like the United States is finally getting serious about heeding the warnings, cutting through the corruption, and taking the fight directly to the bad guys…well, they become the bad guys, or just as bad as them, if they weren’t already. The narration that closes this languorous, occasionally horrifying episode doesn’t appear anywhere else in the episode, and its voice finally represented on-screen in the person of a burned-out, gun-smuggling American agent played by Scoot McNairy. Both maneuvers lend extra weight to the narrator’s words, which are accompanied by real-life news footage of heavily armed soldiers and dead bodies. Those words essentially take the emotional logic of how the story of Narcos: Mexico has developed — indeed, the entire moral logic of the War on Drugs itself — and drag it out back to be bashed in the head and dumped in a field.

I reviewed the season finale of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

What gets me most is the raw, brainless brutality and venality of the whole affair, as two governments and an organized-crime outfit with the profit margins of a Fortune 500 company spend millions of dollars and waste untold lives over a drug war that’s unwinnable by definition, and which isn’t even in full swing yet. Do the people zapping Kiki with a cattle prod and piercing the bones of his hand with an electric drill actually think he knows anything that will help them evade prosecution? Did the agents and soldiers who lit Rafa’s $2.5 billion weed farm on fire think it would materially damage the cartel, let alone affect the overall flow of contraband into the United States? How many people have to die so rich and powerful criminals, on both sides of the law, can stay rich and powerful?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Narcos: Mexico for Decider. I think it displays some noble intentions but undercuts them by refusing to go all the way with the cruelty involved.

In this episode of Narcos: Mexico, dozens of people are killed so the United States government and its Mexican-government allies can burn a five-thousand-ton marijuana field valued at two and a half billion dollars. Then the owners of that field and their Mexican-government allies, who are also America’s allies when it comes to suppressing the left, kidnap one of the U.S. government agents responsible for the raid and prepare to torture him to death for information the U.S. government’s plans for further action. By this point the U.S. government has decided, by the way, not to take any further action, so as not to embarrass its Mexican-government allies.

Folks, I’m starting to wonder if the War on Drugs was a bad idea.

I reviewed episode eight of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

Titled “Jefe de Jefes,” after the Lucky Luciano–style “Boss of All Bosses” sobriquet bestowed upon Félix by his high-flying lieutenant Amado, the show’s seventh episode makes ample use of the parallels between its protagonist and antagonist. That, at least, is par for the course. The series began by setting up Gallardo and Camarena as opposite numbers with the same basic makeup: both of them cops, both of them relocating to Guadalajara, both of them hoping to advance in their respective careers after being stymied back home, both of them often thwarted by the established power structure, both of them exceptionally driven to work around obstacles to achieve their goals.

Now, though, it feels both excessive and unnecessary to maintain that parallel structure. Both men are planning to leave town to go back home. Both run into opposition from their Concerned Wives when they decide not to do so. Both make major power plays to defeat the last governmental obstacles to their end goals. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, to be sure, but when you’re creating historical fiction based on the strange truth, there’s definitely a point at which “stranger than fiction” becomes “too cute by half.”

I reviewed episode seven of Narcos: Mexico for Decider. Stuff like this is why as good as this franchise can be from time to time, it never quite achieves liftoff.

Displaying considerable moxie, the show chooses G.W. Handel’s stately, morose “Sarabande” to accompany much of the action, particularly the climax in which Gallardo narrowly escapes arrest and then returns home to discover his infidelity has been discovered in turn. Real Kubrick headz know that this is the theme music to the great director’s period-piece masterpiece Barry Lyndon — itself the story of a country boy who becomes rich and powerful through a combination of luck and deceit. I kinda wonder if the filmmakers were gonna go with a more appropriately adulterous Kubrick music cue, Shostakovich’s “Waltz No. 2” from Eyes Wide Shut, before thinking better of it and going for a less obvious choice. (Also, its Netflix sister show Altered Carbon got there first.) At least they didn’t use Strauss.

I reviewed episode six of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

Actor Wagner Moura’s Pablo Escobar was one of my favorite television characters of the decade — a singular performance that’s all the more appealing and imposing because of how much he underplayed it. It’s funny hearing all of Gallardo’s friends with a foot in the coke world warn him about Pablo being “temperamental,” an assessment with which Escobar himself agrees, because looking at and listening to him you’d swear the guy was coming down off painkillers after a root canal. (Maybe it’s all that weed he’s smoking.)

Cocaine, schmocaine: Pablo’s chief export was the ambition and anger he grew inside himself. But the genius of version of the character we saw on Narcos was that his reserved temperament when encountered in person forced everyone to lean in closer and hang on his every word. It’s more effective, and frightening, than exploding all the time would have been. To reflect this, Amat Escalante keeps Pablo shrouded in darkness and half-light during an outdoor nighttime soirée. It may simply be a workaround for Moura’s post-Pablo weight loss, but it presents a stark contrast with the brightly lit office of the Calí boys, and it gives the character the vibe of a supervillain without requiring him to do anything outwardly supervillainous at all.

I reviewed episode five of Narcos: Mexico for Decider. God bless Wagner Moura.

And for crying out loud, how great is the sequence where Rafa and his partner-turned-babysitter Don Neto have to figure out a way to kill time in their big empty safehouse? The two get massively coked up, and then have a little two-man dance party to freaking Culture Club. As Boy George croons “Karma Chameleon,” Neto (who winds up nearly getting arrested during his drunken drive home, then makes the cop who stops him his indentured-servant driver) hoots and hollers about his new CD player, simply unable to contain his joy that the music won’t skip no matter how much you jump around. In a music-nerd move so amazing I can hardly contain myself about it, Rafa’s reaction is momentarily muted when he produces a stack of vinyl records in their cardboard sleeves and starts ranting about how the album cover will become a lost art when the canvas shrinks to CD size. It’s like he stepped out of every conversation about music I had with my dad in 1990. Writer Scott Teems deserves some kind of award for this scene alone.

I reviewed episode four of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

The most remarkable thing about the episode, in which DEA Agent Kiki Camarena uncovers irrefutable proof of Félix Gallardo’s massive marijuana operation while Gallardo cements his role at the top of the organized-crime pyramid (sort of), is its patience.

Take Kiki’s journey into the belly of the beast, when makes an unauthorized undercover trip to work in Gallardo’s marijuana fields. First, he drives out to the point in the desert where he’d previously seen the unidentified convoy of blindfolded workers drive past. He sits there in his car for hours, until nightfall. When the convoy approaches, he waits until just after it passes and then pulls into line behind them. He arrives at the staging ground for the operation’s workers — a popular enough spot despite being in the middle of nowhere that it has food carts and bars operating 24/7 — and blends in, during a lengthy steadicam shot that does nothing in particular, really, just follows him into this world. He has a three- or four-beer, five- or six-cigarette conversation with the guy next to him at the bar, but then comes up short on getting any useful intel out of him.

He waits around again, napping, until the start of the workday just before dawn. He manages to get himself on one of the transports to the field with the help of his barfly buddy (who demands half his daily wages in exchange for this favor) and gets trundled out to the fields. He spends the whole day there, picking buds and fucking up his hands and eating bad food and, eventually, hiding from the DFS agents who show up on business and might recognize him from their shared time in the Guadalajara cop bar. He gets back on to the bus after what can best be described as a low-speed chase in which he struggles to stay out of sight and ahead of step from DFS underboss El Azul, who spotted and vaguely recognized him. By the time he’s shipped back to the staging ground and can use the payphone to report his findings to his boss, he discovers his wife has gone into labor.

All of this is done with minimal cinematographic razzle-dazzle, and more importantly, with barely a note from the show’s score and nary a peep from its omniscient narrator. Director Andrés Baiz, a series mainstay, clearly trusts his audience enough to grant them this silence, to let them take in the events of Kiki’s day and draw their own emotional conclusions about what he’s thinking, feeling, experiencing. The few times something unusual does happen from a filmmaking perspective — that long but unshowy take, the reveal of the gigantic forest of weed, the split-diopter shot that juxtaposes kiki’s terrified face against the DFS agents in the background — it hits harder because of its restrained context.

I reviewed the very good third episode of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

I’ve long thought that the key to Narcos‘ success, such as it is, is just the flow of the thing. I’ve said in the past that whatever the strengths of its stars, from Wagner Moura’s taciturn menace as Pablo Escobar to the mustachioed cool of Boyd Holbrook and Pedro Pascal as his enemies, that slow, sly, sexy, slightly sinister theme song is the production’s true lead.

The show follows suit. With its Scorsese-esque narration, provided once again by an unseen Scoot McNairy, and its use of how-the-sausages-get-made montages, it has the same sit back and sink right into this strange new world appeal as the opening reels of GoodFellas and Casino — only over and over again, hour after hour, one season per year. If you think that dilutes the appeal of those kinds of sequences, that’s fair, and it’s probably even correct.

But there’s something soporifically enjoyable about its rhythms nonetheless. You can always count on some tense conversations, some glamorous coke-fueled excess (Neto and Amado in particular find their first big-city coke soirée to be a real hoot), some cops conducting high-risk raids, a lot of murders and executions, a few that are stopped at the last minute, some sweeping shots of the wildnerness and the city streets, and all the other crime-genre thrills and chills you could ever want.

I reviewed episode two of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

As an artistic enterprise, Narcos is a bit like the business it chronicles — a simple matter of supply and demand. The show was originally created to tell the incredible true story of Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar, who was so rich and ruthless that he essentially conquered the country before losing a bloody civil war and getting hunted and killed like an animal, complete with an American DEA agent posing for a photo with his corpse. With a magnetic lead performance from Wagner Moura as Escobar and rising star Boyd Holbrook as the American who took him down, it became one of Netflix’s bigger and more respected dramas.

Which meant that even after Escobar’s death, the show must go on.

I reviewed the debut of Narcos: Mexico, and presented a people’s history of the Narcos franchise, for Decider.