As a critic, I consider myself to be in the liking-things business. I go into every show I watch with as few expectations as possible, save one: I expect that what I’m watching will be good, until proven otherwise. That’s it! I’m never like “Oh brother, this looks awful, but here we go”; even in cases where I suspect a show might not be for me, I hold out the hope of being pleasantly surprised. Some of the shows I’ve had the most fun writing about—The Leftovers, Halt and Catch Fire, Billions—took the better part of a whole season to get to that point, but when they got there, whoa baby, I sure became a fan. I’m always open to starting to like something, from the moment the premiere begins until the credits roll on the last episode I’ve been assigned to review.

I say all that to say this: The second episode of ZeroZeroZero kicks twelve kinds of ass. Hallelujah!

I had my problems with the pilot of ZeroZeroZero, but the second episode of ZeroZeroZero basically blew me away. Wild. I reviewed it for Decider.

I’m a broken record on this anytime it comes up on a television show, but here goes: Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner once told an interviewer he’d never consider killing one of Don Draper’s children, because any show in which a child dies would need to become about the death of that child, the way people’s real lives reshapes themselves around that tragedy.

Is ZeroZeroZero going to wrestle with this? Is it going to dig down deep into how it feels to know you caused the death of a kid? Or is this just a kind of detail intended to add instant gravitas and then given no more thought? I have my suspicions, yes I do.

At the very least I don’t need television’s umpteenth narco series to show me a little girl whimpering in pain and fear as blood pulses out of a hole in her neck, until eventually she dies, all on camera, which is exactly what ZeroZeroZero does. The main goal of a show like this is, let’s face it, to entertain people who want to watch people get whacked in expensive location shoots, and tossing the brutal on-screen murder of a child into the mix just so the cop character can have a sad about it is an ugly, ugly impulse. “Rules are for men”? Alright, then—that’s my rule. Break it again at your peril.

I had very strong reservations about the pilot of ZeroZeroZero, the Amazon crime show I’m covering for Decider. But stay tuned…

White Lines‘ first season tried to do a lot of things, and that kind of ambition is worth praising. Zoe’s midlife crisis, her romance with Boxer, the Calafat family drama, Marcus’s third-time loser routine, David and his spirituality and drugs, Anna and her sexuality and drugs, raising teenage children, the sideplot about Zoe and Axel’s dad, Ibiza, house music—it’s all in there, and all of it is handled more or less well. But the whole isn’t so much less than the sum of its parts as it is a jumble of them thrown together, all of them prominent but none of them truly emerging as what this show is about. Its hedonistic pleasures are undeniable. But like many of its questing characters, I want more.

I reviewed the season finale of White Lines for Decider.

With one episode in the season remaining, it’s worth taking stock of how far we’ve come. The jumpy timeframe and the rapidity with which these characters form and break bonds makes it easy to forget that Boxer brutally murdered two guys a few days ago, and that Zoe and Marcus are both involved in the cover up. Instead, the show focuses on their personal growth journeys, their sex lives, the question of whether they’re in love and if so who with. I can’t quite square that with the same people who hauled dead bodies out of the water and buried them in a shallow grave, you know? It seems like that would take precedence in their psychological landscape.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of White Lines Season One for Decider.

To paraphrase Lenin, there are episodes of White Lines where whole seasons happen. This is one of those. Boy, is it ever!

I reviewed the eighth episode of White Lines for Decider.

There’s a part of me who’s down with White Lines just for the fun of it. That’s probably something the characters could relate to, no? The beautiful setting, the beautiful people, the rampant hedonism, the sex scenes, monster acid house tracks like A Guy Called Gerald’s “Voodoo Ray” on the soundtrack—it’s kind of hard to resist! Almost enough to forget, you know, the murders!

I reviewed episode seven of White Lines for Decider.

You know, after a long day of looking at photos of my murdered brother picking street fights and pulling his own tooth out of his mouth with a pair of pliers, going scuba diving to retrieve my friend’s lost cocaine, accidentally uncovering a pair of dead bodies, holding them beneath the surface in order to prevent the police from finding them, loading them into a boat and accidentally driving into the middle of a religious procession, watching the metal rods in my friend’s broken legs accidentally tear free, driving the boat into the middle of nowhere until my car stalls out, dragging the boat halfway across a field by hand, calling the murderer with whom I had a one-night stand for help, and burying the bodies and the drugs in a rainstorm, there’s nothing quite like having sex on top of a wet and shallow grave to take the edge off.

I reviewed episode six of White Lines for Netflix.

Things are getting sexy on White Lines.

I reviewed the fifth episode of White Lines for Decider.

This is a plot-dense episode, and some of the show’s storytelling decisions are a bit baffling to me, I must admit. Take the big fight Boxer and Zoe have when he chews her out for being ungrateful for his help. (At this point she’s unaware that his “help” included a double homicide.) We see Boxer blow up at her and kick her out, we see her bump into Kika and Kika’s fuckbuddy Sissy on the way out, we see her dance, we see her bring up the fight—and then we get a flashback to the fight that adds a few sentences and a few household items thrown in anger but is otherwise much the same. In other words, there wasn’t some secret about the fight that was withheld, there’s no big revelation in the flashback to events that happened just minutes prior; the flashback just kind of happens, and that’s that. If you squint at it hard enough you can maybe see the show making a point about selective recollection of events—the whole series does revolve around a murder the details surrounding which no one present can remember—but since the initial view and the revisit show basically the same thing, I’m not sure that explanation washes.

I wrote about episode four of White Lines for Decider. Things are starting to get hinky.

Well, we learned a lot about what kind of show White Lines is in Episode 3. Is it the kind of show that will drop music cues by the Happy Mondays or that screaming cowboy song for atmosphere? Yes, but we knew that. Is it the kind of show that derives a lot of mileage from the extremely photogenic people playing the late DJ Axel Collins and his apparent mother-daughter love interests Conchita and Kika Calafat? Also yes, and we knew that too.

But the incestuous overtones, not just to Axel having sex with two women from the same family but also Conchita’s casual toplessness in front of and intimate embrace of her son Oriol? That’s new. The high-speed chase that begins the episode, in which Boxer and Zoe deal with the problem of having seven kilos of coke in their car by racing away from the cops and dumping it out the windows as they go? Also new.

And you know what else is new? The brutal violence.

I reviewed the third episode of White Lines for Decider.

I very nearly titled this review of White Lines Episode 2 “Seven Kilos and a Funeral.” The seven kilos are obvious enough: They’re the purloined payload of drugs that Zoe Collins steals from her late brother Axel’s DJ friend Marcus in hopes that this will force him to come clean with what he knows about her brother’s disappearance and murder—the absence of which lands Marcus in leg-breaking hot water with his suppliers. The funeral would be the memorial service for Axel thrown by his friend-turned-guru Dave, who serves magic mushroom tea to the mourners-slash-revelers.

But then I remembered: There was a second funeral in this episode. For a dog.

I reviewed episode two of White Lines for Decider.

If there’s one thing I love about the English, it’s their dance music. If there’s two things I love about the English, it’s their dance music and their stylish crime thrillers. If there’s three things I love about the English, it’s their dance music and their stylish crime thrillers and their conviction that the golden age is always receding into memory, to be revisited and yearned for but never quite recaptured.

Is this my way of saying White Lines might be extremely my shit? Yes it is.

I reviewed episode one of Álex Pina’s new Netflix show White Lines for Decider.

Grappling with the big questions?

Try The Young Pope and The New Pope (HBOGo/HBO NOW)

Here’s the deal: Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s outrageously bold pair of series take on the iconography and ideology of the Catholic Church with a sly sense of humor and a knack for surreal visuals. The Young Pope stars Jude Law as Lenny Belardo, an “incredibly handsome” American elected Pope by his brother cardinals, whom he comes to rule with an iron fist. The New Pope, which is simply The Young Pope Season 2 by a new name, introduces John Malkovich as Belardo’s successor, the dandyish Englishman Sir John Brannox. Fully loaded with eye candy, both shows grapple head-on with the power of faith and the mystery of love—or is that the other way around? Your jaw will drop even as your mind expands.

I wrote a guide to 10 off-the-beaten-path shows to binge-watch during quarantine for Decider. This one was a long time in the making—I hope you dig it!

But in the end, isn’t that Hollywood‘s big idea? Imagine a world in which, thanks to a string of lucky breaks, women and queers and black people and Asian people and people who’ve been arrested by vice squads suddenly had it within their power to change the kinds of movies Hollywood makes. Imagine a world in which, thanks to innovative business and PR maneuvers, the first of these movies winds up being a big hit. The resulting story isn’t a matter of “Well, if Rock Hudson had simply come out of the closet we wouldn’t have had all those problems”—it’s speculative fiction, a sort of social-justice steampunk (imagine Dick’s early invention of the wide release as the equivalent of an armored blimp or whatever) in which values of diversity and acceptance battered down the doors years before they did IRL. I get it. I enjoyed it. I had a good time at the movies, so to speak. Action!

I reviewed the season/series/not sure finale of Hollywood for Decider. It was a fun show!

Directed once again by Janet Mock, it’s maybe the most Hollywood episode of Hollywood yet. Take the opening sequence, for example. Avis vows to provide security for the cast and crew, who’ve come under threat by the Ku Klux Klan. Ernie, the old pimp benefactor of Jack and Archie, refuses their and Rock and Raymond’s offer to go back to work to make up Meg‘s budget shortfall, instead calling in all his old employees for a week-long binge of sex work in order to raise the money for them (and earns a major role for himself in the process). You gotta love a series that takes that old Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland “hey kids, let’s put on a show” vibe and funds it with prostitution!

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Hollywood for Decider.

The speed with which Hollywood can shuffle between all these storylines and all these modes—the personal, the artistic, the political—isn’t trivializing any of them, I don’t think. If anything, it’s arguing that these factors are all fundamentally inseparable. The big test of the show, I think, will be whether it argues that success in one sphere equates to success in the others. Does making a politically worthy film make the film good, or make the filmmakers good people? Can great art affect political change, or do we settle for it in lieu of political change? I don’t know how Hollywood will answer these questions, especially with just two episodes to go. But my butt will be in the seat until I find out.

I reviewed episode five of Hollywood for Decider.

I agree with the basic thesis advanced by creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan and their co-writer and director for this episode (“(Screen) Tests”) Janet Mock, I really do. Representation matters. Culture sends messages people receive and act on. Hollywood is not nearly so powerless when it comes to what the public will accept and pay for as they make themselves out to be every time they shy away from roles for women and queer people and people of color, both behind and in front of the camera. They’ve got all the power in the world where that’s concerned.

But the idea that they’re more powerful than the goddamn government in terms of their ability to ameliorate oppression and suffering…well, that’s kind of why we’re in the mess we’re in right now, isn’t it? Generations of liberal politicians downplaying expectations, winning the culture war for the most part but ceding vast swathes of the body politic to the sworn enemies of women, of queer people, of people of color. I want Ace Studios to cast Camille, the right woman for the role, same as Roosevelt does. But I also want the government to pound Jim Crow laws into dust, which government and government alone, motivated by mass action, has the power to do.

I reviewed episode four of Hollywood for Decider.

I’ve never quite seen Hollywood‘s blend of earnest social-justice anachronism and dirty-minded played-for-laughs smuttiness before. I certainly never would have guessed it would go down like peanut butter and chocolate. But here we are, three episodes into a seven-episode run, and I’m enjoying every dick joke and every impassioned speech about standing up for who you really are. Sometimes—like when Henry tells Rock he reminds him of what it was like to truly care about someone, declares that he’ll make Rock the biggest movie star in the world, then makes him have a threesome with Roy Calhoun and Tab Hunter—I’m enjoying them within the same scene. That’s Hollywood, baby!

I reviewed episode three of Hollywood for Decider.

“Sometimes I think folks in this town really don’t understand the power they have. Movies don’t just show us how the world is, they show us how the world can be. And if we change the way that movies are made—you take a chance and you make a different kind of story—I think we can change the world.”

As mission statements go, Hollywood could not make it plainer. Through the voice of Raymond Ainsley (Darren Criss), a neophyte director and a half-Filipino man who passes as white, Hollywood co-creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan are making their position clear, or at least it seems that way for now. You chip away at the kind of people who make it to the screen here, you chip away at the kind of people who make those decisions there, and before long the world will remake itself in Hollywood’s new image.

I reviewed the second episode of Hollywood for Decider.

Hollywood is not Ryan Murphy‘s first television series about Hollywood. It’s not his first series about fame, or performance, or the desire to remake oneself. From American Crime Story to Nip/Tuck, from Glee to Feud, these topics have been the prolific writer/director/producer’s bread and butter since his own Hollywood career began. But this new Netflix miniseries gives him a chance to flex his dream-factory muscles at the absolute apex of the Hollywood studio system, its true Golden Age, and still involve both his bawdiest and most high-minded storytelling obsessions: sex, identity, performance, what stories get to be told and who gets to tell them. And judging from this pilot episode (“Hooray for Hollywood”), it’s Ryan Murphy done right.

I reviewed every episode of the new Netflix series Hollywood for Decider, starting with my look at the series premiere. This is both the most cornily earnest and gleefully filthy show I’ve seen in a long time. I enjoyed it!