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.

Ozark is getting weird in its old age. Why not, right? When you’ve got ten full Netflix-length hours of television to fill — the kind of runtime that makes a show feel old not even halfway into its second season — with nothing more than blue-gray early-autumn atmosphere punctuated by the occasional out-of-nowhere escalation of the threat level that Ozark employs as plot movement, you can afford to do some strange, melancholy shit. And “Stag” (Season 2 Episode 4) does it in spades.

I reviewed episode four of Ozark Season Two for Decider. It’s nice to see a show flow out into little stylistic filigrees every now and then. It shows confidence.

So you can add another ticking time bomb to the pile as the FBI gets back into the action, along with Wilkes, the Snells, the cartel, the mob, the Langmores, and no doubt other players to be named later. We’ll bet you an investment opportunity in a promising local business that at least one of these storylines will involve someone getting shot in a cold open. If it ain’t broke, right?

I reviewed episode three of Ozark Season Two for Decider. This show sure loves timed ultimatums and shooting people during the opening sequence.

If it wasn’t already apparent, women have the meatiest and most engaging material throughout the hour. Aside from Wendy’s power-playing and will-she-or-won’t-she angle and Darlene’s out-of-the-blue baby fever, there’s Ruth Langmore to consider. The young gun has been netting bigger and better assignments from her boss Marty for a while now, including a $25K per year raise, various management responsibilities, and the task of securing the purchase of a Proud Mary–style riverboat to serve as the cartel casino, which she manages by tipping over the seller’s wheelchair and kneeing his sniveling underling in the balls.

But Ruth is still very much under the thumb of her father Cade. She spends most of the episode regaling him with a vision of a picket-fence future paid for by Marty’s money, and winds up watching him stick up a convenience store just for fun, before he bashes her head into the dashboard of their car and insists she figure out a way to fuck the Byrdes out of their money, or else. That there’s an incestuous edge to all of this goes without saying.

And far, far away, Rachel (Jordana Spiro) resurfaces. You remember Rachel: She was the original owner of the Blue Cat Lodge, a sad-ass lakeside motel that Marty turned into his main front business. Once she got wind of what he was really up to, she stole a hundred grand and hit the road, and has apparently been living from flophouse to flophouse ever since.

When she gets brought in for DUI, who should resurface but Agent Petty (Jason Butler Harner), whose lover Russ Langmore got electrocuted by Ruth over all the Byrde-related craziness. He’s now out for vengeance — though why he needs any witnesses cooperation when the feds are clearly all over the Byrdes’ operation is beyond me — and, in a tedious tough-guy speech, he forces Rachel to help him take his quarry down. I may not be 100% sold on, well, any of this, but the entertainment value is as tough to dispute as a three-strikes-and-you’re-out felony verdict.

I reviewed episode two of Ozark Season Two for Decider. It’s one of the most “if you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you’ll like” shows in recent memory. (I kinda like it.)

Whether you’re in the middle of a heat wave or feeling the first cool warmth of early autumn blow in, the ass-end of summer is the perfect time to return to Ozark. The blue water and gray skies, green trees and leafy ground, the misty morning docks and streets — there’s an end-of-season vibe to pretty much everything you see in the Ozark Season Two premiere. That’s the storyline, after all: Cartel accountant Marty Byrde and his wheeler-dealer wife Wendy have successfully bargained for their lives by spending the summer laundering millions of dollars in drug money by turning a sleepy lakeside tourist town into a cradle of enterprise for less-than-legal businesses. Unfortunately for them — and this is a paraphrase of the tagline for the second season itself — heroin has no off season.

Directed by star Jason Bateman, who’s turned the show into something of an auteur project, the premiere (“Reparations”) revisits many of the strengths displayed in the series’ first go-round last year. First and foremost, it delivers the kind of stoic savagery by chilly killers that people pretend not to enjoy about the show’s most direct antecedents (and likely inspirations, if Netflix’s algorithm-dictated creative model is anything to go by), Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

[…]

I don’t think this amounts to much in terms of a moral message that applies to anyone’s daily lives in anything but the most broad-strokes allegorical way, but hey, not every prestige-format show has to actually have prestige. Sometimes atmosphere, a handful of enjoyable performances, and some murders are enough.

I’m back on the Ozark beat for Decider, starting with my review of the Season 2 premiere.

It’s Thanksgiving Day on Succession, and you know what that means: Logan Roy knocking a child to the ground by hitting him across the face with a metal can.

Wait—what?

Generally I find complaints along the lines of “who wants to watch a show about assholes” either misguided, in the sense that assholes generate conflict and conflict is the stuff of drama, or childish, in the sense that large segments of the modern audience want problematic characters depicted Goofus & Gallant–style with unmistakable indicators that good behavior is good and bad behavior is bad, or not depicted at all, which is the stuff of shows made for literal toddlers. I presume that you, dear reader, are neither so squeamish nor so juvenile in your tastes. And neither am I!

Yet “I Went to Market,” the fifth episode of Succession‘s first season, sorely tests even the patience of a guy who lists The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as one of his favorite films. Another episode of everyone in the Roy family and its orbit (with the slight exceptions of ostensible heir Kendall, his estranged wife Rava, and corporate consigliereFrank) acting like complete monsters, culminating in actual physical child abuse of the sort punishable by law, with no end in sight?

I reviewed episode five of Succession, a show I’m having a harder and harder time getting anything out of, for Decider.

This week (technically several weeks ago, but you get the point) on Succession…well, a lot of stuff happened that I’m gonna race through because four episodes into this series and the joke is getting a bit old, isn’t it? All of the Roys and all of their employees, with the possible exception of Kendall, are pieces of shit who’d trip over their dicks on the way to the soda machine, let alone attempting to run a major international corporation and all its attendant charity balls and political campaigns and what have yous.

I’m up to episode four of my Succession for Latecomers review series at Decider, and I’m kind of over it. There’s an interesting bit with Kendall, though, that I go over in some detail. See what you think.

This reveals the limits of the sitcom as a form as far as investigating human nature is concerned. (And that’s what really concerns me as a critic, I’m sad to say.) Simply put, characters in sitcoms are not characters as we understand them to exist in dramas. They are joke delivery mechanisms, and their prime directive is to be funny. If that comes at the expense of recognizable human behavior, it’s all in the game, man. (To be clear, being funny is itself a recognizable human behavior, but not when it requires all other concerns to bend to that goal.)

The problem arises when people, many critics among them, ignore this basic structural tenet of the genre and start looking to comedy for life lessons and moral instruction.

My Succession Reviews for Latecomers series for Decider continues with a look at episode three, in which I realize you people have tricked me into watching a sitcom.