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.

Rushed, slapdash, illogical, and — horror of horrors — even poorly fight-choreographed, “A New Napkin,” the final episode of Daredevil‘s enthusiastically received third season, feels less like a considered episode of television than a mistake someone made along the way to making one. The funny thing is that it has the opposite problem of most shaky-to-downright-bad Marvel/Netflix episodes, which bloat and drag tediously along to the closing credits. This one feels like the writers went to work one day and realized they’d lost track of how many episodes they’d already done, forcing them to wrap things up as quickly, and therefore as clumsily, as possible. It’s a suitcase packed by someone who overslept their alarm and has a flight to catch in 45 minutes, in television form.

[…]

Daredevil is a fun, and usually fine, show, don’t get me wrong. It and The Punisher are the only live-action franchise superhero things I’d recommend to anyone with any enthusiasm at all since the first Tim Burton Batman movie, and this doesn’t change that. Some of those fight-centric episodes and the Karen Page spotlight were killer, and Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Deborah Ann Woll have all been fantastic from the start. But man, what a letdown — and what a bucket of cold water on the very popular idea that this season represents some sort of major breakthrough for the ailing Marvel/Netflix cinematic universe. Daredevil was better than people gave it credit for being before, and it’s not as good as people are giving it credit for being now. No bullseye, in more ways than one.

So there you have it. I reviewed the finale of Daredevil (for now or forever, who knows) for Decider. A good series goes out on a bad note.

“We’ve been manipulated by a sociopath who doesn’t care about the truth, or about who he hurts, or about anyone other than himself,” said the publicly shamed woman about the crooked New York billionaire hotel owner who seems able to flout the law and inflict suffering at will, in an episode where the judicial system is undermined and a sadistic white man murders a brown man and a Holocaust victim in cold blood. Sometimes, a show writes your review for you.

Directed by prestige-TV favorite and Daredevil veteran Phil Abraham, the penultimate episode of Daredevil Season 3 (“One Last Shot”) feels painfully familiar. It’s not so much the specific details that hurt, though despite the disparity between when the show was made and when I watched it, it’s hard for certain similarities between recent events in its world and ours not to hurt. And I tend to be skeptical about any writing premised on the idea of franchised corporate art speaking truth to power; if you thought, say, Black Panther had a message worth hearing, you and the CIA have something in common.

It’s the mood of the episode that makes the metaphorical resonance between Wilson Fisk and Donald Trump so strong. The odyssey of fear, shame, confusion, rage, horror, and despair through which Agent Ray Nadeem travels on his way to court, and then to his death — the sense that anything could happen at any moment, that it will almost certainly be bad, and that nothing that’s supposed to stop it actually can or will — this is the emotional tenor of our age.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Daredevil for Decider.

“Some people are so rich and powerful the system simply can’t handle them,” Matt says by way of explaining why he feels he has to kill Fisk rather than risk him beating additional charges if he’s simply re-arrested. “They actually are above the law.” Foggy, ever the idealist, doesn’t buy it, arguing that this is what the rich and powerful want you to believe in order to drive you to despair and preventing you from using the system to take them down.

I think it’s pretty clear that the opposite is true, and that the rich and powerful promulgate the fiction that the law applies equally to everyone; if this is the case, well, if they break the law and nothing happens, they must not have done anything wrong to begin with, right? The system works!

Daredevil operates with a compelling tension on this point. I have a hard time believing a corporate-owned superhero property will ever really challenge the validity of the entire system; like all the Marvel/Netflix shows, Daredevil has enough heroic cops and feds to demonstrate that several times over. In the case of this conversation, too, it seems we’re meant to see system supporter Foggy as the voice of reason.

But Daredevil relies on the military and law enforcement for its villains, which is also like all the other Marvel/Netflix shows. Dex the crazed soldier turned FBI agent; Frank Castle the berserk black-ops veteran, his commanding officer who became a druglord, and his best friend turned nemesis who started a mercenary company when his tour ended; that guy from Jessica Jones who was a soldier turned cop who got super-strength and roid rage from experimental pills; the prison that used its inmates as guinea pigs in Luke Cage; and on and on and on. In many cases they’re augmented by entire FBI offices, police precincts, or military units that are thoroughly corrupted or downright sadistic. The whole system’s out of order, as the saying goes. Daredevil is like an extended experiment in how far the fantasy of The Last Honest Warrior setting it all to rights can be taken.

I reviewed the antepenultimate episode of Daredevil for Decider. I like the word “antepenultimate.”

Written by Tamara Becher-Wilkinson and directed with both restraint and explosiveness by Alex Garcia Lopez, “Karen” is one of the best episodes in the series’ history. Actually, divided into segments designated “Before” and “Now,” it’s almost two of the best episodes in the series’ history.

[…]

All in all, this is as good an hour of superhero entertainment as you’re likely to see. The raw and nuanced performances of Tergersen and Woll, Garcia Lopez’s proficiency with both New England light and hand-to-hand combat, and a structure in which the realistic and fantastic work together to make each other better than they would be alone — it’s a model the unending onslaught of Marvel and DC movies and shows, up to and including the forthcoming adaptation of Watchmen from the Leftovers team, should seek to emulate. Amen.

I reviewed the Karen Page flashback/church fight episode of Daredevil for Decider. If the series really is over (i.e. Marvel doesn’t restart it when it launches its own streaming service), hopefully some smart casting director gives the brilliant Deborah Ann Woll the showcase she deserves.

NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*
NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*
NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*

Okay, I lied: There isn’t any actual sex in the flashback sequence that dominates the first reel of “Revelations,” the ninth episode of Daredevil Season 3. And I’m sorry, but this isn’t just a dropped ball, this is a Bill Buckner–level debacle. It’s not just that Isabella Pisacane, the actor cast to play the young Sister Maggie as she falls in love with local boxer Battlin’ Jack Murdock, looks like a cross between actual young Joanne Whalley (the modern-day Sister Maggie) and Game of Thrones‘ Maisie Williams, which is to say she’s stunning. (Ol’ Battlin’ Jack is definitely punching above his weight class, if you’ll pardon the pun.) It’s that the tension between Catholic iconography and guilt on the one hand and raw physicality on the other is Daredevil‘s stock in trade. I believe it was Chekov (or perhaps Sasha Grey?) who said that if you have a sexy nun on the mantle in the first act, she’d better get off by the third.

I’m joking, but only a little. Co-written by Sam Ernst and showrunner Erik Oleson and directed by Jennifer Lynch, a name I remain amazed to see in television credits whenever it pops up, “Revelations” is another one of those oddly structured episode that feels more like a botched solution to the problem of Marvel/Netflix’s overlong seasons than a cohesive unit that needs to exist on its own. There’s some good stuff in here, and some stuff that could have been better, and some downright baffling stuff too.

I reviewed the Sister Maggie flashback episode of Daredevil for Decider.

Remember all the complaints I had about the Bullseye origin story? The gaps in plausibility, the slapdash psychology, the less-than-successful cinematography and staging? Well, you can say goodbye to that mess. You can, if you will, vacuum it right up.

“Upstairs/Downstairs,” the eighth episode of Daredevil‘s third season, did more to convince me — in the guts, more than in the mind — of Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter’s madness in this one shot of the man cleaning up his messy apartment in the Daredevil costume he wore to commit mass murder than it did in every other scene involving the character combined. I really can’t say enough good things about writer Dara Resnik and director Alex Zakrzewski, who spent the entire episode showing how Dex’s eggshell mind could be cracked, punctured, sucked dry, and refilled with nothing but trauma and violence, but who neatly (pardon the pun) summed up the whole thing in a single image. Here’s a very sick person clinging desperately to the simple instructions about routine and order that kept him semi-sane for years, while wearing the emblem of that routine and order’s complete and lethal disintegration. It’s a beautiful, horrible thing to behold.

I reviewed episode eight of Daredevil Season Three for Decider.

They call this episode of Daredevil “Aftermath” for a reason. As seemingly mandated by the by-now anachronistic 13-episode model all the main Marvel/Netflix series —the few that remain standing, anyway— follow, the seventh installment of the show’s third season is at least fifty percent conversations between characters about things that happened in the sixth installment of the show’s third season. At least Wilson Fisk gets to watch it on the news all at once instead of spreading it out over the course of 45 minutes of streaming television.

I reviewed the mixed-bag over-the-hump episode of Daredevil S3 for Decider. This series too is no longer standing.

Does Dex’s devolvement into a grinning mass murderer in someone else’s superhero outfit scan, as far as psychological motivation goes? Well, no and, uh, no. A hard “no” in the sense that, as witnessed last episode, his backstory and history of mental illness is kind of sketched-in and scattershot and hard to swallow. You can’t methodically pick apart a character who was never a cohesive whole to begin with, no matter how hard Daredevil showrunner Erik Oleson, writer Dylan Gallagher, director Stephen Surjik, and actors Vincent D’Onofrio and Wilson (!) Bethel work to prove otherwise.

But also a soft “no,” in the sense that no human being in the history of human beings has everdevolved into a grinning mass murderer in someone else’s superhero outfit, because there are no superheroes. There are also no supervillains whose unerring aim and throwing capacity enable him to turn any household object into a lethal weapon, whether they’re dressed up as Daredevil or have their own snazzy black-and-white costume to do their killings in.

The point I’m trying to make here is that this season, Daredevil decided it needed Bullseye, so Daredevil created Bullseye. It could have gone the route of both the comics and the original Ben Affleck/Colin Farrell movie version and had the Kingpin hire an out-of-town hitter with a badass reputation, but it tried to grow one organically from within, tying his origin directly to both the protagonist and the antagonist of the show. Is there any way to do that in a wholly realistic manner? Not when your show is Blind Radar Ninja, Attorney-at-Law there isn’t.

So, y’know, have a little fun with it! Do some creepy voices and camerawork, put some baggy eyes and flopsweat on your handsome new actor, give your main heavy a chance to play master manipulator and guide a new killer to follow in his footsteps a la Hannibal Lecter. Kinda churlish to complain that the end result isn’t in the DSM, no?

I reviewed episode six of Daredevil S3 for Decider.