“Grim-Faced Murder Detectives Abroad” is a genre of prestige — or at least prestige-adjacent — television I’ve avoided until now. So too is its auxiliary wing, “American Version of Grim-Faced Murder Detectives Abroad.” Secret City, the new crime drama from Netflix, is a little bit of both. Set in Canberra, Australia, the country where it originally aired in 2016, it’s one of the many many foreign shows branded with the American streaming-media behemoth’s familiar red N. Its star, Fringe‘s Anna Torv, also co-headlines the David Fincher serial-killer series Mindhunter, a hit for the network (as far as anyone knows; Netflix is infamously opaque about such things). Despite predating Mindhunter, this gives Secret City the feel of a side project, a place Torv can use her native accent and look less like Carrie Coon while still dealing with the same basic matters of investigation, intrigue, and murder most foul. If Mindhunter is her Parliament-Funkadelic, Secret City is Bootsy’s Rubber Band.

I reviewed the first episode of Secret City on Netflix for Decider. Based on one episode out of a total of six, it’s a so-so show with a strong lead and at least one interesting supporting character.

The Americans was a thriller. I don’t mean in general. I mean “Once, The Americans was a thriller.” For a while it wasn’t much else. The show’s first season was lauded to the heavens, and—from the ferocity and agency of Keri Russell’s co-antihero Elizabeth Jennings to the bold and clever use of Big ‘80s pop—not without reason. Yet it lacked the quiet, the dread, and the terrible empathy that would come to define the series. Early Americans opted instead for violent high-stakes spy games among its principals, the likes of which The Americans as we know it today would take a full season or more to build up to, if it were to show them at all. Recall that Stan Beeman murdered a man, and that at one point Elizabeth and Claudia—Claudia—have a physical fight as part of a quickly resolved side-plot. Either of these events would now drive a dozen episodes.

The show tightened up significantly during its second season. It was helped by its terrific antagonist, a closeted Navy SEAL whose innate all-American fascism blossomed forth spectacularly when he had a chance to serial-kill his way to the Soviet agents that blackmailed him into becoming an informant. But its main purpose was setting up what was to become the central conflict of the series: Philip and Elizabeth’s decision to follow orders and recruit their teenage daughter Paige into the KGB. The plight of a Soviet defector whom Philip kidnaps and repatriates was a major leap forward for the show too, in terms of taking the suffering of the Jennings’ victims as seriously as the suffering of the Jennings themselves.

This is the terrible empathy that would reach full flower in the form of Martha, the FBI secretary who falls in love with and marries Philip’s alter ego “Clark.” An act of profound cruelty on Philip’s part, it forms a moral abscess the show never really stops probing, as surely as Philip using pliers to rip one of his “real” wife Elizabeth’s teeth out. This is the trademark of The Americans, once it truly became The Americans: taking the time to linger on pain.

All this is to say that “START,” the end of The Americans, suffers from a structural disadvantage, one that sets it at irrevocable odds with the series at its best. Everything that happens in this final hour-plus happens here and only here, because there are no other hours. There’s no place left to linger. And in the absence of the ability to wallow in the guilt and shame and horror of it all, The Americans becomes a thriller once more.

I reviewed the final episode of The Americans for Decider. I wasn’t crazy about it. This was a great show with an adequate finale, one that for all its many strengths (I go into them in detail and was not immune to their power) was both too much and not enough. Having such mixed feelings about the last episode of such a great show was a difficult position to be in, so I took writing them out very seriously, and I hope that shows.

“Is there anything I should know, as an FBI agent, about the Jennings family?”

“Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are not Russian spies.”

“Do you think it doesn’t matter who our leader is?”

“It was all for nothing, Elizabeth. You destroyed it all today.”

“I’ve always known, Mom. Every time, every lie, my whole life. And I know now.”

“Sex? Ha, what was sex? Nobody cared! Including your father!”

“Hi. I was hoping to make it home for dinner, but things are very topsy-turvy at the office.”

If you expected fireworks in the second-to-last episode of The Americans ever, you didn’t get them. Not in the usual sense anyway. Ever since The Sopranos established the structure for the contemporary drama’s short-season model — and certainly since Game of Thrones began using character-defining, character-destroying acts of violence to cement it — penultimate episodes have become the go-to spot for bodies to drop, en masse. (At least on shows where people kill other people for a living.) Yet the only prominent character to die here is Tatiana, the KGB agent based in the Soviet Rezidentura, whose relationship with Oleg Burov ended in career suicide for her when he outed her plan to steal weaponized biological agents to the FBI. Perhaps desperation is what drove her to accept a dangerous mission way out of her wheelhouse to assassinate a reformist negotiator; desperation is certainly what drove the Centre to ask her to do so, since their star agent refused. That star agent—”Jennings, Elizabeth,” as both the episode’s title and Stan Beeman’s computer list her—winds up killing Tatiana herself to stop the assassination. It’s over in seconds, and the eyewitnesses appear more confused than panicked. It’s the quietest public execution you can imagine.

No, this episode’s weapon of choice wasn’t weapons at all, but words. Over and over again, characters said things they’d never dared say before, or never had to, or never wanted to, or never even thought of. And no matter how soft-spoken the character or actor involved—The Americans is the most soft-spoken show on the air—each such line sliced through the show’s quiet like a knife.

I reviewed the beautiful penultimate episode of The Americans for Decider.

I once said The Americans is a great show for faces. I’ll now go a step further: The Americans is the greatest show for faces. Since the show’s third season at least, when it permanently slowed down the clip of its capers and became one of the most ruminative “thrillers” of all time, it has relied on long stretches of silence, on closeups held on faces as if actor and camera were in a staring contest, during which only a look in the eyes or a twinge in the cheek or a tightening or loosening of the lips can convey what’s really happening and what the people it’s happening to think about it. The only show that surpasses The Americans in this regard is the third season of Twin Peaks, which among its many other attributes studies the tectonics of faces with geological patience. Not coincidentally, Twin Peaks is also the last time I can remember that a show made me feel as nauseous, for as long, as this week’s episode of The Americans did.

Written by Joshua Brand and directed with series-standard restraint by Sylvain White, “The Summit” delivered a constant barrage of shocks to the storyline, belying its peacemaking title. Yet it was concerned less with those detonations than with their impact, spread across the faces of the characters involved.

I reviewed the faces of last night’s episode of The Americans for Decider.

We’ve all seen post-apocalypses that ask what the survivors are willing to kill for in order to keep surviving, but asking what they’re willing to live for is a much more important question.

I reviewed the eight and final episode of The Rain Season One. That’s it in a nutshell. This show was such a pleasant surprise, and so easy to binge with just eight very brief and brisk episodes. I recommend it.

Pretty much all fantastic fiction — sci-fi, fantasy, horror, superheroes, dystopias, you name it — is riddled with what could be considered plot holes, since implausibility is exactly what makes these stories fantastical in the first place. You might notice them, but you only start fixating on and complaining about them if the work that surrounds them fails to present you with anything of compensatory value.

If The Rain had a less talented cast, a less firm grasp on the emotional dynamic between the characters, a saggier running time, a more cynical dog-eat-dog attitude about what it takes to survive and what “surviving” even means, then yeah, maybe it’d be time to start writing whole paragraphs about why the Strangers don’t simply saturate the area with drones or whatever. As it stands? The Rain is a good show, in almost all the ways a show can be good. Pick your nits elsewhere.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Rain Season One for Decider. (Having now seen the finale, I’m kind of impressed with myself for how on-track I was with my predictions.)

It could have been worse. I sure thought it would be.

From a historical perspective, The Americans’ final season feels an awful lot like, well, The Sopranos’ final season. The similarities stem in part from the sensation that Season Five and Season Six are two halves of one larger run, with the sense of anticlimax that pervaded last year’s finale actually serving as a “stay tuned” for the final ten episodes this year. The Sopranos, you’ll recall, divided its final season into two parts, a model adopted by heirs to the throne like Mad Men and Breaking Bad as well. If The Americans disguised this by solidifying the split with different numerical designations, it’s kind of fitting.

But it’s the dreadful feeling, the awful feeling, shared by The Americans and The Sopranos in the end that stands out to me in “Harvest,” this week’s episode, and throughout this final season in general. Maybe it’s the presence of that cancer-stricken artist, who’s now so racked with pain she looks like she has a seizure disorder even as she barks orders at Elizabeth so she can keep making art until the end. Maybe it’s the return via flashback of Dylan Baker’s bioweapons-expert character, dying of a self-inflicted hemorrhagic viral infection as he talks to Stan Beeman about how the Jennings live the American dream. Whatever it is, there’s something sickly, diseased in the atmosphere. It permeates even the most innocuous or cheery scenes. So when Philip and Elizabeth embark on their most difficult mission yet, one in which failure could lead to the dismantling of their entire network, while at the same time their neighbor Stan grows more and more suspicious of his friends each time we see him…I expected a catastrophe. Somehow, not getting one, not yet anyway, feels even worse.

I reviewed last week’s tense episode of The Americans for Decider.

In The Rain‘s storytelling arsenal, group dynamics are its secret weapon. Netflix’s consistently surprising (is that an oxymoron? oh well) post-apocalyptic drama treats its band of six (previously seven) thrown-together young adults not as a collection of types, but as people, capable of making their own decisions but shaped by the response of the group around them, both individually and collectively. Turns out the best way to show off that skill is to focus an episode on the one person who doesn’t fit.

I reviewed episode six of The Rain for Decider. Sexy and sad.

Some shows don’t know their own strengths. Westworld, for example, is the best example of this phenomenon on the air right now. Its creators took Michael Crichton’s old sci-fi horror concept and ported it to a modern-day prestige-TV landscape where they could play up the sex and violence all they wanted, while still having the breathing room to depict the robotic theme-park attractions’ burgeoning self-awareness so slowly that entire scenes can pass featuring completely realistic conversations between “characters” who have no idea their every thought, word, and deed has been preprogrammed. The pulp thrills are right there for the taking; so is the (as far as I can tell) unprecedented experience of watching a work of fiction in which the heroes start out from a position where their interactions no more “real” than your iPhone connecting to your car via Bluetooth. And what does Westworld do? Bury both the juicy and heady stuff in boring puzzle-box narratives, pointlessly shifting timelines, and long boring conversations about What It Means To Be Human—a perennial thematic non-starter, given that all of us have a pretty good idea of what that means every time we wake up in the morning, thanks. There’s a fine show in there, but the show itself doesn’t know it.

The Rain is the anti-Westworld. As its fifth episode (“Have Faith”) amply demonstrates, it knows where its bread is buttered: in the faces and emotions of its cast of characters as they face a horrific world in which only connecting with each other keeps them afloat, and in racing through a series of post-apocalyptic tropes at a pace brisk enough to keep them feeling fresh while making each deviation from the expected path a genuine surprise rather than a “twist” so painstakingly telegraphed that redditors could figure it out months in advance and call it a day.

I reviewed episode five of The Rain for Decider. This one took a tried-and-true staple of post-apocalyptic narratives — the colony of seemingly well-meaning survivors who maybe aren’t so well-meaning — and made something new out of it.

Tempered expectations can be a real blessing where TV drama is concerned. During the first three episodes of The Rain on Netflix, I’ve come to expect a well-acted, exciting, handsomely shot show about young people making their way through a rather lush post-apocalyptic hellscape, with the subgenre’s tendency for cruelty tempered by an appreciation of the value of sweetness and happiness as both the means and end of survival. That’s a long and labored way to say I think it’s pretty good and I’m having a good time watching it. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be reduced to tears sitting on my couch in the middle of the afternoon by the thing. And yet here we are.

I reviewed the very sad fourth episode of The Rain for Decider.

What a pleasant—and unpleasant—surprise Episode 3 of The Rain turned out to be. Set primarily in the devastated city of Copenhagen, where our band of seven survivors grows closer to one another while realizing just how far gone much of the rest of humanity has gotten, this installment both embraces the tropes of post-apocalyptic life-on-the-road narratives and thoughtfully avoids many of the pitfalls that plague such stories. It proves that the series is capable of facing ugly truths about human nature without functioning as a backdoor endorsement of that ugliness—all with a running time of just 36 minutes and change.

I reviewed episode three of The Rain for Decider. Here’s where the show really started to impress me.

The first episode of The Rain was 46 minutes long. This one is a cool 37. In the words of Tuco Salamanca, tight tight tight! Narrative economy is at a premium in this day and age, whether it’s the end of days or not. And if the show’s second installment lacks the premiere’s breathless pacing, at least it doesn’t overstay its welcome as it slows things down.

The problem facing the series at this stage in its eight-episode opening season is pretty straightforward. Now that it’s established its rain-delivered armageddon, cemented the roles of its protagonists Simone and Rasmus in its creation and possible cure, and (most importantly) abandoned the little underground world of two that made their situation so unique, can it still hold our interest as it retreads the familiar ground of so many post-apocalyptic stories before it?

I reviewed the second episode of The Rain for Decider. It’s the shakiest, insofar as it has to go through all the usual maneuvers described above, but I was impressed by how un–Walking Dead it managed to be nonetheless.

Written by series co-creator Jannik Tai Mosholt and directed by Kenneth Kainz, The Rain’s series premiere is the most breakneck work of sci-fi worldbuilding I’ve seen since the pilot episode of Lost. It’s a smart play. The high-speed opening distinguishes the show not only from the usual Netflix-bloat pacing problems, but also from the traditional way in which post-apocalyptic narratives dole out information about the stakes and the threat a little bit at a time. The show seems to assume that yeah, we’re familiar with how these kinds of stories operate, and we can dispense with the formalities and get right into the good stuff.

I reviewed the first episode of The Rain, Netflix’s surprisingly good new Danish post-apocalyptic drama, for Decider. Much more on this show to come.

Let’s talk about silence. I mean, the Jennings family certainly does this week, and how can we go wrong following their example? Elizabeth discusses it in the context of Rififi, the classic French crime movie by blacklisted American director Jules Dassin. She watches the film in an attempt to ingratiate herself with one Jackson Barber, a handsome young film buff who works for Senator Sam Nunn, a key player in the arms-reduction negotiations she’s spent the season trying to undermine. The movie features a heist sequence that clocks in at something close to half an hour without a single word spoken. You can see how this would appeal to Elizabeth, who knows how these kinds of things work—and to The Americans, which has worked out so well in large part by following in its footsteps.

Elizabeth talks about silence again with her son Henry, in a painful phone conversation the pleasantries of which reveal long-standing estrangement between her and the child she didn’t bother recruiting. Henry complains about having to read Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s treatise on the virtues of quiet contemplation. “It’s important literature, apparently,” he verbally eye-rolls; critics of this show’s slow-burn approach no doubt know how he feels.

Yet Henry picks up on something hidden inside Elizabeth’s strategic silences: pain that she’s struggling, in vain, to cloak in small talk. “She was asking about school and the weather,” he tells his father Philip about the call. “It was weird, because she doesn’t really call me? We barely ever talk, but all of a sudden she’s calling from a business trip and asking me about English class.” He concludes with a casual observation that hits her husband like a Mack truck: “I don’t understand why she’s so unhappy.” She never said a word to that effect, bur her silence spoke volumes.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The Americans (from a couple weeks back) for Decider.

Can people change? The question drives many of the New Golden Age of Television’s greatest shows. Arguably it drives the New Golden Age of Television. To the extent that the medium’s rebirth coincides with the seismic upheavals in American life in the time period that stretches from 9/11 through the election of Barack Obama to the ascension of Donald Trump, the question may resonate because it’s so similar to the one we’ve been asking ourselves as a country for over half a generation.

Can people change? Different shows have come up with different answers. The Sopranos says no. Deadwood says yes, but at a cost. The Wire says the system prevents change, so “n/a.” Mad Men says yes, eventually. Breaking Bad (and its doom-laden prequel Better Call Saul) says yes, for the worse. The Walking Dead says yes, for the worse, and that’s good, which is why the show is bad.  Game of Thrones says we’d better fucking hope so.

Can people change? After watching “The Great Patriotic War” — an appropriate title for one of the most upsetting episodes of this series yet — I think The Americans is saying yes and no, simultaneously. Perhaps this, more than the simple fact of having co-ed co-protagonists, is its real innovation in the antihero genre. It’s telling two stories at once, chronicling two competing theories of the world. It’s its own cold war.

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Americans for Decider. I’m proud of what I was able to do with this review (and, in a different way, that headline).

I’ll close with one of my favorite-ever scenes of allegorically resonant sickness in a series that’s been full of them: Elizabeth in her home-care disguise, taking her patient to a World Series party so she can spy on the woman’s husband and a potential double agent with in the Russian negotiating team, then getting vomited on as the dying artist panics and gushes up food and fluid from her disease-ridden guts. It’s Elizabeth who pushed the woman into attending the party in the first place so she’d have a chance to spy first-hand; it’s Elizabeth who talked her and her husband out of euthanasia to keep the information channel open; it’s the hated Russian negotiator who rushes over to help clean the vomit by Elizabeth’s side.

As best we can tell, Elizabeth’s primary reaction to the incident is dismay that it interrupted the taped conversation between her husband and the Russian. But earlier in the episode, the artist told Elizabeth she wishes she’d spent less time painting and more time with her spouse “The work is the best of me,” she thought, “something to leave behind. But really, who cares? Who cares. All those hours, just…honestly, I wish I’d spent them with Glenn. Just being with him, doing I don’t know what. Just…doesn’t matter.” Something’s eating Elizabeth up from the inside, too: her work. “There’s something rotten about it,” Oleg says to Philip; perhaps that’s why the artist vomits three times, once for each of Elizabeth’s victims earlier in the episode. Will Elizabeth listen to the woman whose suffering she’s aiding and abetting and get out before any more lives are wasted, with bullets or otherwise?

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Americans for Decider. This is such a rewarding show to write about. It’s got so much to give.

Based on the talent involved, The Looming Tower could and should have been better. But with the task it faced and the approach it took, I’ll be damned if I can figure out how. Some things just weren’t meant to be dramas. So despite a slate of fine actors doing their best — and despite a scorching critique of the CIA, the Clinton and Bush administrations, and the Saudi royal family — The Looming Tower never built up into something more than a well-cast book report. It gets harder and harder to never forget.

I reviewed the final episode of The Looming Tower for Decider. The show never really worked, though it did give us a magnificent Michael Stuhlbarg performance (is there any other kind?) as, of all people, Richard Clarke.

“I am alone without them, here. Alone.” This line — delivered by Soviet hockey player turned double agent turned defector turned likely divorcé Gennadi to the FBI agent he considers his only friend, Stan Beeman — hit me harder than anything else in this week’s episode of The Americans. As a reminder, this week’s episode of The Americans opened with Elizabeth Jennings washing a man’s brains and blood off her face, then yelling at her traumatized daughter Paige for making the unforgivable mistake of running toward the scene to make sure her own mom was still alive. It includes Elizabeth straight-up lying to Paige about the nature of the man’s death, which she calls a suicide without mentioning that “assisted suicide” is closer to the mark but still woefully inadequate. It includes Elizabeth rolling some poor sap who may have been her easiest mark ever, effortlessly getting him to tell her everything he knows about the weak spots at the secure warehouse where he works before grabbing him from behind and choking him to death on his way out the door. It includes Stan apologizing to his old ally Oleg Burov for his inadvertent role in the CIA threatening him and his family should he refuse to turn double agent, and Oleg rejecting the apology. It includes Philip Jennings growing so alarmed about Elizabeth’s contempt for the United States and oblique hints about her participation in some kind of power struggle against Mikhail Gorbachev that he accepts Oleg’s proposal to spy on, and potentially act to stop, his own wife. If you’re in the market to get hit hard, this is an embarrassment of riches.

So why did this line from a minor character in the grand scheme of things affect me so much? “I am alone without them, here. Alone.” When he says this, Gennadi has been unceremoniously yanked from his double life in the middle of the airport, where in the middle of one of his courier missions Stan approaches him saying he understands he’s requested political asylum — an agreed-upon signal that he’s at risk and must end his life in the Soviet Union forever. Stan’s old partner Dennis Aderholt does the same with Gennadi’s wife Sofia, the TASS news agency worker who helped the flip Gennadi in the first place, but who’s now so unhappy in their marriage that she’s leaking secrets to her new beau, some unseen guy named Bogdan. Other agents pick up her son Ilya from elementary school. The protection they’ll need as defectors ensures that they’ll be moved far away; if the divorce goes through, they’ll be moved to separate locations where they’ll be unreachable to one another. So Sofia moves ahead with her plan to divorce him, Gennadi will never see her or Ilya again. What all of this means for Gennadi is that he’s lost his homeland, his home life, both of his jobs, and his family in the space of an afternoon. He is a man without a country.

Is there a better way to describe each individual member of the Jennings family?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Americans for Decider. As an aside, it’s nice that the soundtrack calmed down a bit.

If I had to sum up this hour-long portrait of how Elizabeth’s studied, professionally mandated distance from the emotional needs of other people — except insofar as they can be instrumentalized and weaponized — is slowly destroying her, I’d do it with an exchange she has with Claudia. Elizabeth can’t help but see how Paige has responded to the woman’s grandmotherly presence in her life. “The way Paige has taken to you,” Elizabeth says to Claudia, “if something were to happen to me at any point…” Your mind fills in the blank before Elizabeth can do so herself — surely she wants Claudia to care for her daughter in the event of her own death — until Elizabeth finishes the thought: “I think you could finish with her.” Just as when she uses her children as a ploy to get the general to let down his guard when he pulls out the gun she’ll eventually use to kill him, the mission is the priority, not the well-being of another person, not even that of her own daughter. It’s clear where that leads them both.

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Americans, in which Paige gets a good look at her mother’s monstrousness, for Decider.

Serious question: When the makers of The Looming Tower called this episode “A Very Special Relationship,” did they have Jeff Daniels’s graphic sex scenes in mind?

I wrote a whole bunch more about how the failure of The Looming Tower to make a cohesive character out of FBI anti-terrorism chief John O’Neill undermines a lot of the dramatic parallels the show is trying to make in my review of its eighth episode for Decider, but I also just want you to see these gifs.