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.

Naturally, Kendall’s ability to keep needs other than his own in mind leads his siblings — even the relatively disengaged literal brother from another mother, Connor, who spends most of his time either spouting New Agey bullshit or making out with a girlfriend young enough to be his daughter — to label him weak. To them, and to his father as well, looking out for anything or anyone but Number One is weakness. As my partner put it to me, no wonder Kendall’s the one with the drug problem. He’s the only member of the family who seems to feel any emotional toll from their insane wealth and responsibility.

He also gets a boner when his ex-wife gives him a hug to comfort him. Pobody’s nerfect!

My Succession for Slowpokes series at Decider continues with my review of episode two, focusing on the so-far surprising humanity of theoretical chosen son Kendall.

Succession is a very funny television program. That’s a relief, since it was created by Peep Show and The Thick of It‘s Jesse Armstrong and directed by Anchorman‘s Adam McKay (working in his Big Short vein); it weren’t funny, that would be kind of troubling. But I’d like to start this Succession Episode 1 review of its premiere by discussing a scene that isn’t funny at all.

Which I do, at length, as I start my coverage of Succession for Decider. I know, I know, we’re getting a late start. But so are a lot of viewers, it seems. Climb aboard!

Gather ’round, friends, and I’ll tell you a scary story. It’s a tale of political intrigue, in which right-wing politicians in a Western nation (culturally, if not geographically) conspire with the intelligence apparatus of authoritarians abroad to undermine democratic institutions and maneuver themselves into power. This story has it all: International hackers, compromising video of illicit liaisons between politicians and secret foreign spies, deep-state chicanery, romantic relationships between reporters and intelligence agents, false-flag terrorist attacks, a trans woman risking her life to expose abuses by the military-intelligence apparatus of which she’s a part, honeytraps, rampant xenophobia and racism, indefinite detention, allegations of fake news, attacks on the press, oppression of dissent…

Wait, you say you’ve heard this one before? And you haven’t watched Secret City, the Australian political thriller from Summer 2016 now playing in Summer 2018 in an American Netflix account near you?

In one of the most remarkable cases of art not imitating life but anticipating it, Secret City‘s short, sweet six-episode first season plays like a prophecy about the next two years of life in these United States, issued by a Canberra Cassandra who won’t be heard until it’s too late. And after the events that unfolded between America and Russia this week, it feels more relevant than ever — just swap a few proper nouns and serve hot.

I wrote a few pieces I’m proud of last week. First up, a few words on Secret City, the new-to-Netflix Australian political thriller from 2016…that just so happens to be basically America in 2018.

It’s an enormously tantalizing note to end on. Yet I can’t help but wish it really was the end. I know that political thrillers tend to be endlessly iterative, and detectives and spies are as franchiseable as superheroes. But Secret City already started stumbling over itself here in the end, and now we know it’s done so without the satisfaction of a self-contained story to compensate for it.

No one’s going to complain about seeing more Anna Torv, a natural-born leading actor for this sort of story, that’s for sure. There’s a throwaway moment in this episode, when she has a tension-breaking laugh about her cop pal Bremmer’s target-shooting prowess in which she jokes she’ll safe as long as all their attackers are made of paper, that’s as human and incisive as anything you’re likely to see in a genre work this year. But Torv, and Harry, deserved a conclusion as well-drawn and decisive as Harry herself. I wish they’d gotten it.

I reviewed the season finale of Secret City for Decider. It tripped up in the end, which is a shame.

Filmed in 2016, Secret City is a dystopian vision of a future for Australia that has already come to pass in America. That’s what I can’t get over, watching the fifth and penultimate episode of the show’s first season (“Ghosts in the Machine”). I mean, it’s uncanny. Right-wing influence peddlers collude with authoritarian foreign governments to consolidate power. They use fear of non-white foreign hordes to drum up xenophobic fever. They take advantage of the previously existing, already unaccountable security and surveillance apparatus — left intact by a left-wing government in order to look tough — to consolidate power even further. Like I said in my previous review, all you need to do is change a few nationalities around, and this thing isn’t a drama, it’s a documentary.

[…]

In the end, I think the point Secret City is trying to make as it closes in on its final hour is that politics as warped as those being practiced here is pulp. If politics is the art of the possible, as the saying goes, and it’s possible to detain a journalist without a warrant and disappear her into a Kafkaesque nightmare only the lawyers of the country’s top newspaper can get her out of — and only just in time, since legislation has been passed to prevent this — well then, there’s really no limit to what politics can be, right? Compromised cabinet members, clandestine meetings, rampant corruption, flagrant human rights abuses, crackdowns on dissidents: Anything goes. Are a few bodice-ripping hookups and pitched gun battles really that outlandish in a political landscape that seems torn from a fever dream?

I reviewed episode five of Secret City for Decider. There’s some sex stuff in this one, too!

The contrast between actors Dan Wyllie as Mal and Sam Fraser as his son Dylan works well, too. Dylan’s as estranged from his dad as you’d expect the quasi-failson of a wealthy government official who sent him to boarding school hundreds of miles away to be. That this gets reflected in their physicality — Dylan is tall, lean, pale, thin-lipped, with bass in his voice; Mal feels napoleonic in dimensions and demeanor, with a big mouth, convex eyes, and a raspy tenor — is very smart casting indeed. So when they do bridge the gap, as when Dylan quietly insists on coming to work with his dad and Mal acquiesces, or when Mal gently ribs Dylan about his conspiracy-theorist, Walter White wannabe friends, or when Mal employs Dylan for a little surreptitious surveillance of one of the right-wing generals calling the shots in the government now that Mal himself has been marginalized, you feel it in a way you wouldn’t if they looked like two peas in a pod.

[…]

The thing I keep thinking about while watching this show now is this: Secret City would be great for an American remake, with the governments of Russia or Israel or Saudi Arabia or any of the other foreign powers aiming firehoses of dirty money at the current regime standing in for China. But reality has clearly outpaced television. Secret City, a drama when it aired in 2016, feels more like a documentary from a slightly alternate reality in 2018.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Netflix’s Secret City for Decider. This is why I love doing episodic reviews: You can zoom in on details, which is where the stuff of art really is, and then you can cut back to the big picture.

Please click through to see a whole lot of lovely shot compositions that the Decider team captured and gif’d for me, too.

If there’s one thing Secret City has gotten right, it’s showing how hard we can cling to our preferred versions of the people we love. That’s an unusual statement to make regarding a cloak-and-dagger thriller about the menace of China Rising, but it’s true nonetheless. Episode 3 of Secret City finds its emotional center in the mourning for Kim Gordon, the slain spy who was once married to main character Harriet Dunkley, and it provides ample opportunity for writer Belinda Chayko and director Emma Freeman to demonstrate this maxim.

I reviewed the third episode of Secret City — featuring some really beautiful shot compositions, a magnetic performance by Anna Torv, and misgendering as a sign of villainy — for Decider.

I do have one concern, though, and upon thinking about it it’s a pretty major one: What is this for? Don’t get me wrong: Anna Torv and Damon Herriman (a cis male actor cast as a trans woman, he steers clear from the showy pitfalls such performers often leap into, even when the material all but frogmarches him in) are both magnificent in this segment, and if anything it’s a shame they won’t be given a chance to repeat this performance together. Yet I’m sitting here watching these characters in terror and pain because, what, there’s some opaque shenanigans and skullduggery going on in a pissing contest between Australia and China, involving a bunch of unlikable bureaucrats we’re treating like fun antiheroes and flat-affect spies who can best be described as “sinister Asians”?

The stories of spycraft that have really mattered to me — The Americans, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Joseph Conrad’s relatively obscure but beautifully bleak novel Under Western Eyes — wedded their characters’ zealous, often murderous and amoral patriotism to a sense of colossal waste. It’s impossible to walk away from those stories feeling like you’ve watched an edge-of-your-seat thriller and nothing else, not when they’re based on the idea that espionage is a soul-destroying, life-destroying business. Unless and until Secret City gets serious not just about the deaths of people like Kim, but the whole fraudulent and poisonous enterprise for which such people died, it’s not a city I really want to live in.

I reviewed the second episode of Secret City, which is maybe a bit too good for its own good in terms of wedding well-made characters to a potboiler, for Decider.