The problem with airing a really, really good episode of an otherwise mediocre show is that people will raise their expectations accordingly. This what The Wire would refer to as one of them good problems. Of course you want your audience to respect and enjoy the work you do and eagerly anticipate more of the same, if not better. 

It becomes one of them bad problems when you fail to deliver on that forward momentum. The all-too-aptly titled “Do-Si-Do,” which believe it or not is the penultimate episode of Outer Range’s second season, shows that last episode wasn’t a breather, but a return to the status quo, even if it makes little storytelling sense to head back there to begin with.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Outer Range Season 2 for Decider.

If the fifth episode of Outer Range’s second season fails to deliver the thrills of the fourth, it’s hard to get that upset. That fourth episode, after all, was really freaking thrilling. Its saga of a time-displaced Joy Hawk and her kill-or-be-killed escape from white settlers blended human drama, time-travel genre shenanigans, and riveting action for the show’s best outing yet. Episode five, by contrast, is mostly aftermath. I certainly hoped we’d be off to the races, but it’s not necessarily a bad sign that we’re taking a breather.

I reviewed episode five of Outer Range S2 for Decider.

Hell yeah, brother! It took eleven episodes to get here, but Outer Range has finally, truly, knocked it out of the park. Set entirely in 1886 until its final moments, the cheekily titled “Ode to Joy” is exactly that — a showcase for the time-displaced Sheriff Joy Hawk, and for actor Tamara Podemski. Both the character and the performer take that spotlight and make it a star turn, transforming Joy into one of the show’s best characters and cementing Podemski as, perhaps, the equal and opposite reaction to Josh Brolin’s Royal Abbott. 

I reviewed the outstanding fourth episode of Outer Range S2 for Decider.

Sometimes I feel less like I’m watching Outer Range and more like I’m rooting for it. Somewhere within “Everybody Hurts,” the third episode of the show’s second season, director Deborah Kampmeier and writers Dagny Atencio Looper and Glenise Mullins have the makings of the fun, surprising show Outer Range can be. It’s like tracking a promising team’s progress, hoping this is their year.

I reviewed the third episode of Outer Range S2 for Decider.

God bless James Cromwell, man. The look on his face, the tone of his voice as looks up at Sugar and says he says what he says: “Grace and sensitivity. To the end.” In that look and in that voice there is admiration, resentment, gratitude, skepticism, and awe, all wrapped up. That’s the effect the thoroughly decent can have on the rest of us. We may not suspect that they’re literal aliens, but we still know there’s something very unusual about them. They can make us feel worse about our own shortcomings, but they can also make us want to try harder when we realize they walk among us.

I reviewed the finale of Sugar, a charming show, for Decider.

When a show switches showrunners, the temptation to play armchair analyst about the results is strong. How much of what we’re watching is how the story was always intended to play out? How much is the revision or invention of the new guy in town? 

In the case of Outer Range, I can’t help but give into temptation and say that the seams of the switchover from the Brian Watkins era to Charles Murray era are showing a bit. But that’s okay, I think. Outer Range doesn’t have the benefit of the case-of-the-season structure utilized by the late, great Perry Mason reboot, which switched out showrunners from one season to the next without missing a beat. But when (for example) you make a big dramatic showing of sending Rhett and Maria out of town in the Season One finale, only to have them back in town permanently by the second episode of Season Two, it’s safe to say a beat has been missed. 

I reviewed episode two of Outer Range Season Two for Decider.

A lot of people make their home, home on the Outer Range, where the bison and the time portals play. The biggest problem facing the show, created by Brian Watkins and now helmed by Charles Murray for its second season, is that some of those people are way more interesting than others.

I reviewed the premiere of Outer Range Season 2 for Decider.

So what kind of show is Outer Range, then? A neo-Western befitting Josh Brolin? A science-fiction mystery box in the Westworld mode? A meemaw-and-papaw-friendly melodrama in cowboy boots?

In preparation for the recent second season of Outer Range, I wrote about the challenges it faces for Decider.

Okay, so he’s an alien. By now we’ve had a week to digest that John Sugar is a blue superhuman who can stop bullets with his bare hands — a sort of combination Dr. Manhattan/Ozymandias from Watchmen (the comic; we do not speak of the others here). Sure, I’ve been wondering what will happen next, but it was how it would happen that had me worried. Would Sugar still feel like the same offbeat, upbeat neo-noir suggested by Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge’s smoky theme music and Colin Farrell’s impeccable tailoring?

Yes and no. Sugar’s unraveling of the conspiracy against him feels like the Sugar we know. But there’s an element of the resolution of the Olivia mystery — which does get resolved, though there’s a whole episode left for aftershocks and final twists — that rings phony, even in a show about alien private investigators with fists of steel, a heart of gold, and eyes of electric blue. 

I reviewed the most recent episode of Sugar for Decider.

Well, that settles that question!

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

I’ll note here that Deborah Ayorinde has delivered one of my favorite performances of the year, amid competition that’s already very stiff. The dynamic range of emotional intensity she can convey with the way she holds her eyes, her nose, her mouth alone is astonishing, all the more so for how simple she makes it look. At the drop of a hat she can be a mother driven to reckless anger, an abuse survivor seeing the true story of her young life play out, a doppelgänger embodying only her worst qualities, a horror-movie character watching as a malevolent creature slowly approaches.

I reviewed the finale of Them: The Scare for Decider.

Whatever else it is, the penultimate installment of Them: The Scare is one of the most visually accomplished episodes of television to air this year. Directing a script by Scott Kosar, creator Little Marvin employs a variety of striking visual techniques to create the sense that for Dawn Reeve and her family, the walls are closing in; Marvin makes this all but literal by adjusting the frame to the comparatively claustrophobic dimensions of an old TV screen. 

But limiting the characters’ room to maneuver is just one of Little Marvin’s tricks. He tints the screen blood red for the characters’ nightmarish visions. He breaks out a split diopter shot straight out of classic Hollywood to heighten the painful melodrama between Athena and Dawn. He uses dissolves, overlays, and slowly spinning images to fade us from one image and scene to another in a hypnagogic rhythm. There’s a Vertigo shot, a camera attached to a car door, static horrors placed at the center of the frame in  monumental horror-image style. Why settle for just being scary when you can be scary and gorgeous, too?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Them: The Scare for Decider.

When the showdown comes, who will be there? Who can you count on to have your back? In episode six of Them: The Scare, our heroes find out the hard way. 

I reviewed the sixth episode of Them: The Scare for Decider.

In the season’s riveting fifth installment (“Luke 8:17”), the riffs come fast and furious. A sequence involving Edmund ringing the doorbell and Dawn answering it deceptively cross-cuts between two separate incidents to make them seem like they’re the same scene when they aren’t, as Jonathan Demme did in The Silence of the Lambs. Edmund’s Raggedy Andy doll talks to him in voice that’s somehow both absurd and incredibly menacing at the same time, the way the neighbor’s dog talks to David Berkowitz in Spike Lee’s overlooked Scorsese-style serial-killer drama Summer of Sam. A supernatural killer who stalks the sleeping, folds children up in their beds, and kills while invisible to everyone but his victims is on the loose, like no less august a slasher than Freddy freaking Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. A murderous asshole beats a man to a pulp in the middle of nowhere as he begs for mercy, then ditches the battered and mutilated body, like something out of Scorsese’s own Casino — a gangster flick, sure, but one that dips deeper into horror than all but a few of the modern master’s movies.

The reason all of this actually works, rather than feeling like someone’s horror Pinterest board, is because creator Little Marvin, director Guillermo Navarro, and writer Tony Saltzman are filtering all this previous work through a sensibility and a story very much of its own. Folding the aesthetics of Demme, Lee, Craven, and Scorsese — the horrors of Buffalo Bill, Son of Sam, Freddy Krueger, and Frank Vincent — into the framework of turn-of-the-‘90s Black Los Angeles culture makes a powerful statement. It’s a way of wresting existing culture into a shape of one’s choosing, which is what the greats do.

I reviewed episode five of Them: The Scare for Decider.

In an episode that involves the discovery of a vast network of Nazis inside the LAPD and the birth of a bone-mangling serial killer in the back of a Chuck E. Cheese, I’m not sure how much attention anyone will be paying to needle drops. But under the dreamy direction of horror specialist Axelle Carolyn and the superb music supervision of Christopher T. Mollere, a crate-digging music cue provided the backdrop for my favorite shots of the Them: The Scare Episode 4. The song is “Free” by Deniece Williams, and as its gossamer introduction floats over the soundtrack, the faces of Dawn Reeve and Edmund Gaines as they drive through the lights of the Los Angeles night fade in and out, to and fro. It doesn’t advance the story. It isn’t scary. It’s merely beautiful.

I reviewed episode four of Them: The Scare for Decider.

The way I see it, there are three theories as to who, or what, is killing people in Them: The Scare, and all three get a turn in the spotlight in the season’s third episode.

I reviewed episode three of Them: The Scare for Decider.

On a completely different note, Reeve is a character with some zip to her. There’s a marvelous moment in the first episode where she throws away a birthday card from her ex-husband, the father of her kid, without reading it. She doesn’t seem furious or jilted or anything like that. It’s more that she’s like, well, okay, he remembered my birthday, that’s nice, it’s the thought that counts, I’ve now acknowledged the thought, let’s move on. She’s neither a pushover nor a grudge-holder. She’s just living her life.

I reviewed episode two of Them: The Scare for Decider.

There’s an old maxim about how only the very rich and the very poor can afford to make great art, since they’re the only ones with nothing to lose. Perhaps that’s why Amazon’s Prime Video, the creative fiefdom of the richest man in show business (or any business), is the most adventurous streamer out there when it comes to original programming. In shows like Barry Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad; Ed Brubaker and Nicholas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young; Leonardo Fasoli, Mauricio Kartz, and Stefano Sollima’s ZeroZeroZero; and Alice Birch’s Dead Ringers, Prime has pushed the content envelope farther than I ever thought it would go on television. These shows have more in common with arthouse or extreme cinema than they do with Succession. They are challenging viewing, but for viewers who love a challenge, they’re a godsend.

To this group we can safely (if anything about this show can be said to be safe) add Them. Conceived of as an anthology series by writer-creator Little Marvin, the show debuted in 2021 with a season subtitled Covenant and bristling with some of the most harrowing and horrific violence ever aired on TV. Since almost all of the terror, even the supernatural elements, comes heavily freighted with anti-Black racist animus, Them is doubly upsetting. Watching that first season is like fighting a battle wielding a sword without a hilt: You can emotionally survive it, but not intact.

I reviewed the season premiere of Them: The Scare for Decider.

There’s an energy to Sugar that’s hard to describe. A lot of it is the performances — a stacked cast of tremendous supporting players, headed by a bonafide movie star, with all the looks and charisma such a job entails. Some of it is the frenetic, finger-snapping editing by Fernando Stutz and John Petaja, which feels more be-bop than the old attention-deficit MTV style. Its dreamy vision of Los Angeles is unique for a noir mystery, in that we’re seeing the city through the eyes of a sweet guy who truly loves the place, not a hard-bitten thrice-around-the-block gunsel or a femme fatale’s hapless patsy.

 I think that may be why a lot of people I know, even professional artists, erroneously pegged the opening credits as AI (it’s not): This is not quite a version of L.A. we’ve seen before. This is not quite a version of the private investigator story we’ve seen before. I’m really not sure what it is, and that’s a wonderful place to be with any story, let alone a mystery.

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

John Sugar is a stop and smell the flowers kind of guy. He puts it in so many words to Melanie, the ex-rock star who is his semi-partner in the search for her stepdaughter Olivia. Melanie, shaken by the revelation that Olivia’s half-brother David is a serial rapist, feels differently. “The reason we don’t look,” she suggests, “is it’s all so sad and ugly.”

“Yeah, but not everything,” Sugar counters. Then, with effortless delight, he rattles off several roses to stop and smell, so to speak. “Sea lions…Patti Smith…Cypress trees…The sound of your little sister laughing and having fun…Paris.” Even Melanie, who’s never been there, has to admit Paris seems pretty good.

This exchange from Sugar’s fourth episode (“Starry Eyed”) could not have better encapsulated the mental and emotional battle that consumed my brain for years during a prolonged bout of major depression. The depressed part of me, the Melanie part, fully and truly believed that life is defined by its worst moments, the world by its horrors. The healthy part of me, the not-sick part of me, is John Sugar conceding “Yeah,” then adding “…but not everything.” 

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