Elizabeth Jennings sits in a cafe in Mexico City and learns that the leader of the Soviet Union will be murdered if he agrees to deactivate his country’s top-secret plan for retaliatory nuclear annihilation. She learns this not in a warning, but in a demand for her assistance. Making an end-run around her superiors back home, a man from the Soviet army has come to recruit her to spy on Gorbachev’s team at a disarmament summit. Her job is to make sure that the Strangelovian project — codenamed “Dead Hand,” because why fuck around — is not on the bargaining table. If it is, she is to report back, and history will change forever.

As she learns this information, which will culminate in her receipt of a necklace with a poison pill hidden inside in order to protect the sanctity of Dead Hand should she ever be captured, Peter Gabriel’s “We Do What We’re Told” rises in volume on the soundtrack, higher and higher, until the only reason we can make out her contact’s words is because we can read their subtitled translations. It’s a clever callback to The Americans‘ first episode and its use of “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins — another eerie solo standout from a Genesis alum that was famously used in the soundtrack for Miami Vice some thirty years ago. But it’s also away to focus our attention not on the mission, but the shock of receiving it. The Americans deploys quiet and wordlessness as effectively as any show on TV; so many of its standout performers (Noah Emmerich, Brandon J. Dirden, Costa Ronin) are strikingly soft-spoken, and many of its best moments consist of characters just standing and staring at something they can only just bear to see. This isn’t an option in the middle of receiving your marching orders, so the show does the next best thing: It drowns them out. Elizabeth herself is quiet, but there’s a tumult in her head.

[…]

Watching The Americans in 2018 is a much different experience than watching The Americans in 2013 — not just because it’s much better show than it was during that first season (a reasonably enjoyable thriller and not much more), nor because during the 2012 election liberal pundits treated Mitt Romney describing Russia as our enemy as a gaffe while now many of those same pundits are out to start a new Cold War against the country and its ex-KGB leader. You get a little closer when you start talking about why — Russian meddling in 2016 election and influence peddling with its Electoral College–appointed winner Donald Trump and his minions — but only if you treat that as the starting point rather than the finish.

Should even the worst of the allegations against the Putin and Trump governments turn out to be true, they’re basically just tit for tat if you go back to what happened after Gorbachev, when America helped establish an oligarchy by kicking off a capitalist fire sale in the country, and intervened directly and more or less openly to ensure Putin predecessor Boris Yeltsin presided over it. A slightly, but only slightly, less dramatic looting of the commons by corporations, their wealthy viziers, and their paid representatives in the United States government took place here at home. And there’d be no Trump on whose behalf to meddle if our own grotesque racism, sexism, xenophobia, gutting of the social safety net, and worship of money hadn’t made him possible.

In short, it’s much, much harder than it used to be for all but the most blinkered patriots, liberal or conservative, to look at America and Russia’s recent history and see good guys and bad guys. History is a palimpsest, rewritten as we go. And as with Elizabeth in that cafe, things that used to be sound perfectly clear are getting harder and harder to hear.

I reviewed the final season premiere of The Americans for Decider, where I’ll be covering this very special show until the end.

“And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?” —Country Joe and the Fish, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag”

If there’s one thing that struck me about “The General,” the seventh episode of The Looming Tower, it’s that the answer to Country Joe MacDonald’s musical question is, as it always was, “not much.” Not much of value, anyway. Ostensibly depicting the investigation into the bombing of the USS Cole off the Yemeni coast, the episode is in fact about how interagency and international strife made a halfway decent investigation impossible. Most of the fighting that gets done here is between people who are supposed to be on the same side. Why are they doing it? As Country Joe put it, “Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn.”

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Looming Tower, the first one where I started to think maybe they’re gonna run out of fuel for this story long before they run out of story to fuel, for Decider. The Looming Tower does not have the spark. It does not have the magic.

Andrew Cunanan walks through Miami Beach toward death as “Vienna” by Ultravox plays on the soundtrack. That New Wave masterpiece is both a celebration and rejection of glamour. Sequentially so, in that vocalist Midge Ure sings of “a man in the dark in a picture frame, so mystic and soulful” and “haunting notes, pizzicato strings, the rhythm is calling,” only to follow up by proclaiming “the image is gone…the feeling is gone…this means nothing to me.” Simultaneously so, in that when he sings “this means nothing to me” the song soars as if nothing has ever meant more to him. Inextricably so, in that it wedges “only you and I” between each declaration of faded emotion and emphatic meaninglessness; in that the title comes from the chorus’s climactic phrase “Ah, Vienna,” a cry of joy and a sigh of loss all at once. The first time that chorus hits in the ninth and final episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, Andrew Cunanan assassinates Gianni Versace. The second time, he’s standing in a stranger’s kitchen, rummaging through a fridge in a house he’s burglarized, pulling out a bottle of champagne and fiddling with the foil around the cork. His lonesome toast to himself is not timed to the music. The feeling is gone, only you and I, it means nothing to me, this means nothing to me.

[…]

Andrew Cunanan is dead and gone when The Assassination of Gianni Versace, one of the best dramas of the decade, concludes. Its final scenes focus on the family of the title character, not his killer; even this choice is a deliberate disconnection from what’s come before. Estranged though they are, both his sister Donatella and his partner Antonio struggle to connect what they had with what they have now. Donatella, who has coolly presided over Antonio’s excision from his late partner’s estate, sobs, because her brother annoyed her on the day of his murder to the point where she refused to pick up the phone when he called. Antonio has been rejected not only by Donatella but by the priest at Gianni’s funeral mass — where rich and famous friends from Princess Diana to Elton John to Naomi Campbell to Sting were present, but where Antonio himself did not merit a mention as a part of the family, nor a kiss from the cleric, whose institution spent the decade denying the humanity of homosexuals while systematically destroying the humanity of so many children in its charge. Like Andrew, he attempts suicide; unlike Andrew, he is unsuccessful.

Gianni Versace ends the series as a photo in a shrine where his sister goes to grieve and lament what could have been had she picked up the phone. Donatella is a distorted reflection in glass embellished with the House of Versace’s Medusa head emblem, monstrous in her mourning. Antonio lies cradled in the hands of the help, who save him from his effort to die with the love of his life. Andrew is just a name on a wall in a mausoleum, one of countless others, nothing special. It’s all so unglamorous, so unceremonious, so blunt and short and ugly. The beauty Versace worked all his life to create, that Andrew tried all his life to recreate, has no place here at the end. The image is gone, only you and I, it means nothing to me, this means nothing to me.

I reviewed the season finale of ACS Versace for Decider. This show is an all-timer.

Andrew Cunanan was cool.

Like, really cool.

Sincerely, legitimately awesome.

That’s the tragedy of “Creator/Destroyer,” the penultimate episode of this extraordinary season of television. By the time we see Andrew in his full glory as one of the wildest guys at his high school, we’ve also seen his father Modesto, who debuts in this episode, get his hooks deep into the kid. Andrew has seen his father harangue and assault his mother. He’s borne the weight of all his dad’s dreams, knowing this comes at the expense of his siblings, sensing on some level it’s not right to have this kind of pressure placed on him but, because the pressure is couched as praise, not knowing how to fight back. He’s been…well, the show is cagey on this, but saying he’s been molested by his father would not be out of bounds.

And even now, as an ebullient and confident teenager, he’s begun certain behavior patterns that will get him in trouble in the end: he has a sugar daddy, and he becomes fast friends with Lizzie, his future bestie, because she shows up at a high-school house party pretending to be a kid rather than the married adult she really is. (“I’m an impostor.” “All the best people are.”) He’s picking up little tidbits on how to deceive (including his go-to pseudonym, DeSilva, the name of the people who own the house where the party takes place) and why (because “when you feel special, success will follow” as his father teaches him).

But for a brief time, he’s just a cool, slightly weird, slightly obnoxious, slightly closeted teenager, and if you weren’t at least two of those things during your high school career I don’t wanna know you. He stands up to homophobes in a familiar way, by camping it up even further, going so far as to pose for his class photo with his shirt all the way unbuttoned to show off his (impressive!) torso. He’s prophetically chosen to be “Most Likely to Be Remembered,” and equally prophetically selects “Après moi, le déluge” as his yearbook quote. He rolls into the parking lot like a refugee from Less Than Zero (complete with that movie’s soundtrack staple, the Bangles’ cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter”; the film was his IRL fave) and shows up at the house party in an Eddie Murphy red-leather jumpsuit. (Finally it’s clear why so many of his music cues over the course of the ‘90s portion of the series were anachronistically ’80s: The ’80s were his time.) This Andrew could be loved. This Andrew could be saved.

I reviewed last week’s episode of ACS Versace for Decider. What a show.

“We must be talked about, or we are nothing.” —Donatella Versace, to the Versace staff

“For me, being told ‘no’ is like being told I don’t exist. It’s like I disappeared or something.” —Andrew Cunanan, to Jeff Trail

“Is this normal? Is this normal enough?” —Gianni Versace to his sister Donatella, on creating a less unique ready-to-wear version of the haute couture dress they designed together for her

“It’s just a name they made up to sound special.” —Andrew Cunanan to his mother Mary Anne, on Häagen-Dazs ice cream

“It needs confidence.” “It gives confidence.” —Donatella and Gianni, on the dress

“So you can hold your own at a dinner table conversation.” “I am the dinner table conversation.” —an escort agency owner and Andrew Cunanan, on Andrew Cunanan

“I want the world to see you in a way that you have never been seen before.” —Gianni to Donatella

“Oh, if they could see me now.” “Who?” “Everyone.” —Andrew Cunanan to Norman Blachford

“This dress is not my legacy. You are.” —Gianni to Donatella

“He’s a good boy. He’s always been a good boy.” —Mary Anne on Andrew Cunanan

“Ascent,” the seventh episode of ACS Versace, is the one where my admiration for what writer Tom Rob Smith has accomplished with his scripts and structure for the series shifted into something approaching awe. Returning to the Versaces’ world of high fashion for the first time since Episode 2 (their appearance in Episode 5 centered on Gianni’s coming out, not their work as designers), it creates a series of parallels between the the artist and the man who would murder him that are all the more striking for how different they are in intention and affect.

I reviewed episode seven of ACS Versace for Decider a couple weeks back. (I apologize for all the catch-up linkblogging tonight.) I remember going through my notes on this one and thinking “Christ, this is a well-written show.”

Fittingly, director Michael Slovis and writer/showrunner Dan Futterman crafted a cinematically memorable version of the Cole bombing. After a long, slow, even placid build-up, the actual attack maintains the same feel and rhythm; if you didn’t know any better, you’d think this really was just a couple of guys and their nephew or something, out for a pleasant cruise, waving to the smiling sailors nearby. This isn’t some Euron Greyjoy–style pirate assault — it’s a sneak attack that no one saw coming even when they literally saw it coming. The cinematography is so fitting that it almost feels complicit.

The show’s done the character work to make the sequence stick in that respect, too. All those scenes of the bombers being friendly and joking around with one another are obviously reminiscent of what the FBI agents we’re also following around do, too. They’ve even got a kid sidekick whom they can playfully surprise and delight with their video camera, a bit of technology he’s never had the chance to experience before; the way they all repeat the word “zoom” and laugh when they use that feature to get a closer look at the Cole is genuinely funny and endearing if you put the context aside. But the show’s not really asking you to do that, since it provides its own context for what they’re doing: the murder of the kid’s family and friends by the United States, in an attack so senseless and unstoppable that the only way he can make sense of it is by magically attributing it to Shaytan himself. (The only hiccup is the Shaytan monologue, which overstays its welcome and drifts too far into otherizing “strange foreigner invokes demons and deities” territory.) Put it all together and you get that these are basically normal people, traumatized by injustice, and driven to kill for their countries and ideals in ways we too could understand.

When you’ve done all that, what does putting the kid on the boat add? We don’t need it for cinematic impact, for pathos, or to illustrate the human cost, since we’ve gotten all that already. It just feels indulgent, and oddly disrespectful of the facts to boot. Dramatic license is fine if you wanna create believable composite characters like Schmidt and Marsh in the CIA or Chesney and Stuart in the FBI, or even the kid himself. If you’re inserting a character in such a way that his presence would materially change the world’s understanding of the event that’s occurring, as the use of a literal child to suicide-bomb the U.S Navy surely would have done, that’s a whole different story. That it was all unnecessary only makes it worse. Have faith in the tragic truth.

I enjoyed writing about this week’s episode of The Looming Tower for Decider, one of those episodes that really helps you understand why what works works and what doesn’t doesn’t. This particular sequence was good to explore in light of the creative success of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, another true-crime series that takes necessary liberties and inferences, yet always feels on-point.

The Looming Tower is a cop show set in a world very much like our own: a world full of scumbags, banding together in little clandestine groups with a self-awarded licensed to kill on behalf of their scummy ideologies. Unlike the real world, however, the world of The Looming Tower has a magic-realist tinge to it. In Towerworld, there exist Cassandra-like oracles capable of seeing the future and its ocean of blood but utterly incapable of doing anything about it. In fact, to the characters, these unheeded, impotent prophets of doom are completely invisible. After all, they’re not characters themselves. They’re the audience.

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Looming Tower for Decider. It was the first one where the lethal folly of this War of the Shitheads really started getting to me.

Despite earning the respect of his bosses for his correct call against making the attacks, and lining up much-needed help cracking the CIA’s vault of secrecy from the Justice Department, John O’Neill’s a fuckin’ mess, man. Belying his on-top-of-the-world swagger, his lavish lifestyle of fine dining and $400 shoes (in 1998 money!) combined with the need to travel between three different romantic partners has buried him in debt. His credit cards get declined. He’s out of town for so long all the time that his wife and children barely tolerate him when he returns. Catholic cardinals fail to give him a reprieve to divorce his religiously devout missus and marry his equally devout (and deceived) girlfriend Liz, no matter how many Cohibas he smokes with them. Just to top it all off, his other other woman is planning a move to New York to be near him. He’s, uh, not thrilled.

And even when he’s right in this installment, he’s right about stuff that makes him seem prurient, rather than prophetic. In place of his many killer one-liners about how bin Laden wants us to go to war, maaaan, he’s pontificating about the “72 virgins” issue with his star agent Ali Soufan, who tells him it’s all bullshit. “Blow yourself up and win the pussy sweepstakes—it’s like consumer fraud,” O’Neill concludes. “And ironically, so fuckin’ American.” He’d know!

This is how Jeff Daniels can work: as a guy who seems to have all the advantages a wealthy white straight cis Christian man who’s got a high-ranking job in a law-enforcement agency in America’s cultural and political capitals can get, yet seems incapable of not pissing those privileges away. People keep trying to cast him as Wyatt Earp or Walter Cronkite, while his potential to portray a reasonably popular governor forced to leave office after getting caught using the state education fund to pay his mistress’s son’s orthodontist bill was right there all along.

Hey gang—I figured out Jeff Daniels’s strengths as a dramatic actor and wrote about them in my review of this week’s episode of The Looming Tower for Decider! What do you think of that, Jeff?

The third episode of The Looming Tower was struck by two coordinated explosions. No, not the al-Qaeda-orchestrated embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, nor the CIA-orchestrated tough-guy retaliatory strikes on an AQ training camp in Afghanistan and its, ahem, “chemical weapons facility” in Sudan. As if invoking the “two-for-two” principle that led American intelligence and defense officials to launch the latter attacks, writer Bash Doran and director John Dahl teamed with their actors to set off a double detonation of their own: the interrogation-room outburst of FBI investigator Robert Chesney, played by Bill Camp; and the furious freakout over being kept out of the loop on the airstrikes, potentially lethally, by his boss John O’Neill, played by Jeff Daniels. The first of these hit its target. The second was a dud. The difference between them says a lot about what these two actors, each likeable in his own way, have to offer.

[…]

I don’t blame Daniels for failing to deliver the dynamite that Camp cooks up in his similar scene, not entirely anyway. But it’s certainly true that Daniels is a far broader performer than Camp, even when the latter is screaming at the top of his lungs. His recent career has seen him repeatedly cast as ostensibly convincing figures of authority, be they good (his blustery Real News anchorman from Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, whose name I can’t remember but whom I now always think of as “Jeff Newsroom” thanks to a vocal anti-Sorkin contingent on Twitter) or evil (his extravagantly bearded one-armed mass murderer in Netflix‘s Western series Godless, which feels like the part of a Broadway show’s run where a new actor takes over for the lead who originated the role, in this case most likely Jeff Bridges).

Yet these authority figures never actually convince. Again, the writing is often to blame, but either way it’s impossible to imagine a ham like his Newsroom character saving the moral heart of the journalism industry, or his pretentious, bible-quoting gunman becoming the most feared figure in the West in a show where Michelle Dockery and Merritt Wever both displayed more, ahem, true grit. His O’Neill commands respect insofar as we know he was right and his enemies were wrong, but Daniels is just the guy whose job it is to inhabit that suit of rectitude. He doesn’t wear it particularly well. (His secondary characteristic — an irresistible ladies’ man whose ruddy middle-aged machismo is irresistible to half a dozen different women half his age — is an even worse fit.)

I did a satisfyingly close read of the performances of Jeff Daniels and Bill Camp in my review of The Looming Tower’s third episode for Decider. Camp is the most underrated actor on television.

“We’re at war.”
“Only if we want to be.”

Welp, there you have it. That’s the game right there. That’s the whole megillah. “Losing My Religion”, Episode 2 of The Looming Tower, may have a too-cute-by-half title. (It’s a reference to our lapsed Catholic and observant Muslim FBI heroes dealing with his own sins in the former case and those of his correligionists in the other — relatively minor issues in the scheme of things). But that nine-word exchange between the CIA’s Strangelovean, bearded boffin Martin Schmidt and the FBI’s hard-drinkin’, hard-lovin’, law’n’order straight-shooter John O’Neill encapsulates the great debate that would shape the next 20 years of American history because of who winds up winning.

[…]

I’m a bit perplexed by complaints that the show is a sentimental look back at 9/11 with little to tell us about what happened afterwards. In the pilot, all the sniping and name-calling and backstabbing between agencies made me think it possible, even likely, that by showing us FBI, CIA, and DoD morons staging a pissing contest while people die, The Looming Tower would be more useful to us today than a deep dive into Islamist extremism would be. Now I see that while that element continues, so too does a blunt, bare-essentials critique of the War on Terror. Put it all together, and you’ve got a portrayal of an intelligence community that’s overworked, underinformed, and lacking in basic human empathy, helping to usher in America’s dying-empire phase. Again, look at today’s headlines and tell me this isn’t a valuable perspective.

I reviewed episode two of The Looming Tower for Decider. It’s a very straightforward show, but it certainly isn’t hidebound.

“He’s a house. He’s a home. He’s a yard and a family and picking kids up from school…he’s a future.”

“They say this man…this man has nothing left to give. And a man with nothing to give is a nothing man….This world has wasted me.”

Ominously directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton and featuring absolutely stunning dialogue from series writer Tom Rob Smith, “Descent,” the sixth episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, is the first and only episode so far to steer entirely clear of murder and its aftermath. Yet somewhere between those two statements above — the first is a description of his beloved David Madsen to his friend Lizzie, the second a description of himself to a meth-induced nightmare vision of Gianni Versace — Andrew Cunanan dies. The old Andrew, anyway, the Andrew capable of warmth and charm and moments of honesty amid the lies. It’s not hard to identify the specific spark of vitality that gets snuffed out to make his dark rebirth into the new, lethal Andrew happen, either. When his hope dies, the old Andrew dies with it.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Minneapolis to be born? I reviewed this week’s stunning episode of ACS Versace for Decider.

The Towers really do loom over The Looming Tower. They stand in the distance as John O’Neill, the FBI’s chief counterterrorism agent, complains to a colleague that the Bureau’s director slept through a nationally broadcast interview with Osama bin Laden, a sure sign that “we’re running out of time.” They show up again as he rides the train into Manhattan the night al Qaeda simultaneously blew up the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, as he calls his best Arabic-speaking agent Ali Soufan to tell him “now it begins.” The presence of the Twin Towers is a commonplace in pre-9/11 period pieces, and of course they appear in countless films made before the attacks with little or no fanfare, a simple marker that the characters have woken up in the city that never sleeps — hell, I watched The Money Pit the other night and there they were in the opening credits, a recognizable Manhattan landmark meant to establish contrast with the bucolic, disintegrating suburban mansion Tom Hanks and Shelley Long were about to fall down in a lot. But their presence takes on extra heft in The Looming Tower. Only here do they loom over a man who dedicated his career to thwarting terrorist attacks, quit when bureaucratic infighting made his job impossible, then died mere weeks into his private-sector career as a security consultant when the World Trade Center collapsed on top of him. He was right, and it killed him.

I’m covering The Looming Tower for Decider, beginning with my review of the series premiere. It’s a pretty straightforward show as far as this one hour of it is concerned, but that’s probably the best way to play this. While I’ve read reviews saying the moment for this treatment of this material has passed, since it focuses on the American intelligence community exclusively rather than treating al Qaeda’s leaders and forerunners as co-protagonists the way the book did, I’m curious to see if it can transform itself into something that does speak to the present moment after all. A show about FBI, CIA, and DoD morons having a pissing contest while people die is probably more useful to us at this point than one about Islamist extremism anyway.

Watching Jeff’s final confrontation with Andrew prior to the murder is painful, then, both because of what he gets right and what he gets wrong. “I don’t know what you stand for,” he shouts at Cunanan. “I don’t know who you are. You’re a liar. You have no honor.” Correct on all counts — possibly lethally, so if you figure this contrast in their outlook is a big part of what drove Andrew to kill. But when Andrew rightfully points out that he believed in and supported Jeff while his beloved Navy treated him like shit — “I saved you!” — Jeff bitterly retorts “You destroyed me. I wish I’d never walked into that bar. I wish I’d never met you.” He says he wants his life back, as if Andrew took it from him, instead of Bill Clinton and Uncle Sam. Andrew doestake his life away, eventually, mere hours from that moment in fact. But in a sense, he was just an accessory after the fact. Jeff signed his own death warrant the moment he decided, in the face of society’s hatred, that some principles are worth fighting for anyway.

I reviewed last night’s episode of ACS Versace for Decider. This is a great show.

“You can’t do it, can you?” “I can’t what?” “Stop.”

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is what Matt Zoller Seitz once described, by way of a subtitle to his blog, as “a long, strange journey toward a retrospectively inevitable destination” — the titular murder, seen in the cold open of the very first episode. We’ve already seen where we’re going; what’s left to the show is to depict how we got there. Even those swept along and killed by Andrew Cunanan during the journey seem to sense it. Hence the exchange above. Promising young architect David Madson is the love of Andrew’s life, to hear Andrew tell it. He’s a man to whom the murderer is so fanatically committed that he not only slaughters his rival for David’s affections, his own former love interest Jeff Trail, with a hammer, thus beginning his murder spree, but then manages to convince the shellshocked David that he has some how become an accomplice to the crime and must flee by his side. As time wears on and the shock wears off, David grows less pliable to Andrew’s nonsensical advice and admonishments, but also more honest with himself about where his journey as the Bonnie to Andrew’s would-be Clyde will end. He has no more hope of survival than Andrew has a chance of shutting the fuck up and telling the truth. He can’t do it, can he.

I reviewed last week’s episode of ACS Versace, another tremendous piece of work, for Decider.

I’m glad, in that beautiful terrible way tragedy can make you glad, that Marilyn Miglin gets the last word of the episode, even as Andrew continues shopping and driving and killing on the way to his appointment in Miami. She returns to her gig hawking her signature line of fragrances on the home shopping channel almost immediately — a gutsy move with which the show challenges us to continue to feel empathy for her as she slips into the uncanny valley between sincerity and showmanship, just as the mere presence of any older woman with a glamorous background triggers our societally induced suspicion and revulsion at female failure to remain young. “He believed in me,” she tells her audience, completely honestly. “How many husbands believe in their wive’s dreams? How many treat us as partners? As equals? We were a team for thirty-eight years.” That’s what they were, even if it’s all they were. That’s an achievement. That’s what Andrew destroyed.

Marilyn ends the episode by recounting the advice she got when she first began selling stuff on TV, a technique for connecting with the camera and the people on the other side. “Just hink of the little red light as the man you love.” She stares at the light, at the camera, at us, and as the impenetrable black mascara of her wet eyes closes and the scene cuts to black, her thoughts are ours to imagine.

I reviewed episode three of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, a truly magnificent hour of television, for Decider. Thank you for your patience with this flu-delayed piece.

Yes, I wrote a review of episode 3 (which has not been posted by Decider yet) as well as episode 4 (which has)! But I was badly delayed in handing it in due to the flu. Given how long ago it aired it’s understandably not a huge priority for my editors to get it edited, formatted, and posted, but I’ve been assured that they will eventually. My hope is that it will be up prior to my review of tomorrow night’s installment, episode 5. Once it goes up I’ll link to everything in order the way I usually do, but I’m waiting until then just to keep things straight. Thank you for your patience!

Just two episodes into the series, Darren Criss is cementing the status of his portrayal of Cunanan as one of the all-time great on-screen serial killers, not just calling to mind Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, Tom Noonan as Francis Dolarhyde, Ted Levine as Jame Gumb, or Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, but actually earning the comparisons.

He’s certainly helped in this respect by Smith’s script and the direction of People v. O.J. cinematographer Nelson Cragg. The reference set they assemble for Andrew to inhabit includes a genderbent shower scene by the beach with Andrew’s ersatz friend and escort manager Ronnie (a warm, wounded, marvelously understated Max Greenfield), combining Psycho’s defining visual with the pre-shower/murder rapport between Norman and Marion Crane, not to mention its star Perkins’s closeted sexuality. (A motel also figures prominently, again with roles reversed: Andrew’s the guest on the run from the law, not the person at the front desk, and he must ingratiate himself to her instead of the other way around.)

Elsewhere, a scene of excruciating sadism, in which an underwear-clad Andrew dances to the Big ‘80s strains of Phil Collins and Philip Bailey’s pounding “Easy Lover” while an escort client slowly suffocates beneath the duct-tape mask Cuanan wrapped around his head (“You’re helpless…accept it…accept it…ACCEPT IT…”) drags the male-on-male-gaze subtext of Bret Easton Ellis and Mary Harron’s respective American Psychos squirming into the harsh Florida light. Simultaneously hitting Pulp Fiction‘s gimp sequence, Boogie Nights‘s “Sister Christian”/”Jesse’s Girl”/”99 Luftballoons” coke deal gone bad, and Silence of the Lambs‘ Buffalo Bill/”Goodbye Horses” buttons as well, this is a scene people will remember. (A closing scene in which Cunanan prefaces his usual torrent of bullshit about his life by straight-up saying “I’m a serial killer” to a prospective suitor also tears a page from the AP playbook.)

And in the most chilling allusion of all, Ronnie — a sweet guy who moved to Miami because he’d heard “people like living by the ocean who don’t have much living left,” then got unexpectedly healthy, and now dreams of opening up a small florist shop with the money he and Andrew have amassed from his escort gigs — knocks on the bathroom door and finds Andrew in full Manhunter Great Red Dragon mode on the other side, the top half of his face rendered obscure and inhuman by the duct tape he’d applied to himself. Because the context of each of these scenes is so specific to who Andrew and Ronnie are, none of it feels derivative or plagiaristic, the way the generic King/Carpenter/Spielberg rehash of Stranger Things does, for example. Indeed, it’s no different from the way it alludes to Christ telling Peter he’d deny him three times when Andrew tells Ronnie, who’s desperate for connection even as Cunanan flees, “When someone asks you if we were friends, you’ll say no.” As I’ve argued before, the horror genre exists in conversation with itself, and Versace is simply using the language established by its forebears to tell a story all its own.

I reviewed the extraordinary second episode of ACS Versace for Decider.

However you feel about Ryan Murphy’s other projects, ACS‘s debut season, The People v. O.J. Simpson, is unquestionably his apotheosis. In conjunction with writer-creators Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, Murphy revisited a media-circus murder case nearly everyone thought had been exhausted of any creative or sociopolitical potential, and the result was a kaleidoscopic, knockout-powerful examination of racism, sexism, celebrity culture, journalism, the judicial system, the rise of reality TV, domestic violence, police misconduct, and the whole goddamn human condition. It was one of the best television shows of all time, full stop. Can Murphy, now working with writer Tom Rob Smith and adapting journalist Maureen Orth’s book on the case Vulgar Favors, draw water from that same dark well a second time?

Yes.

I reviewed the premiere of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, the brilliant new season of American Crime Story, for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show till the end.

Call it the Lilyhammer of the Gods.

In February 2012, Netflix established its creative model right out of the gate. Its first original show, Lilyhammer, starred “Little” Steven Van Zant, fresh from playing a mobster on The Sopranos…as a mobster, albeit one who’s relocated to Norway for witness-protection purposes.

The road from Lilyhammer‘s quirky Sopranos rehash to Stranger Things‘ unabashed theft from ’80s pop-culture staples is not a particularly long one. All that changed was the company’s self-identification as a creator of original content rather than an online video store, and its subsequent accumulation of user data and development of a predictive algorithm to deliver the goods.

Many of the network’s original series —”original” being a relative term— speak to this desire to please the crowd with things that have already pleased them. Why have only one off-beat comedy about the mildly crazy lives of young people set in New York (Master of None), for example, when you can also have one in Chicago (Easy) and Los Angeles (Love) as well? It’s too bad Donald Glover titled his show Atlanta and took it to FX, or else I’m sure Netflix would have something on the docket for that youth-culture mecca as well. In a more traditional move, reboots are common, from the campy (Fuller House) to the acclaimed (One Day at a Time). And that little row of Netflix Original rectangles contains enough grim-visaged cops, crooks, and killers to look like a photo array you’d use to identify suspects in the world’s most focus-grouped crime.

Which is what makes shows like Dark, The Punisher, and Suburra: Blood on Rome stand out. From the outside, these 2017 debuts seem like status-quo programming. But each veered of the course they could have cruised down effortlessly, taking creative risks that yielded entertaining and provocative results.

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action: Over at Decider I wrote about the possibility that Dark, The Punisher, and Suburra represent a creative turning point for Netflix, in which the sheer volume of material the network puts out is now enabling some shows to complicate and interrogate their genre elements rather than serving them up straight.

SPOILER ALERT

The best part was the axe murder.

When Dark Army fixer Irving drives the blade into corrupt FBI Agent Santiago’s chest, and eventually many other parts of his body, a lot of things happen at once. Bobby Cannavale is finally given a chance to cut loose after a season of playing Irving as a model of chatty, casual restraint; now he can go full Gyp Rosetti, and it’s a thing of beauty. Moreover, Mr. Robot has had horror in its DNA, from Tod Campbell’s often eerie cinematography to the roots of fsociety’s iconography in a slasher film; an axe murder seen in that light seems almost overdue. Finally, an explosion of intimate, savage, gory violence after a season full of tension and sadness, in which even a gigantic series of terrorist bombings is witnessed only at a remove, takes all of the show’s unspoken resentments and hatreds and buries them in a warm, wet body, over and over again. “These are for me,” says Irving as he sends his traumatized and cowed new slave at the FBI, Dom DiPierro, away. They’re for everyone on the show, really.

I wish the rest of Mr. Robot’s Season 3 finale (“eps3.9_shutdown-r”) cut half so deep. Instead, it’s a claimant for the most disappointing episode in the history of the show — a profound narrative miscalculation that sees the show retrench rather than create new possibilities, yet also denies the basic sense of completion and catharsis you’d think such a retrenchment would require. Axe murders aside, it just sort of sits there, waiting for something else to happen.

[…]

All told, it doesn’t surprise me that the finale, and the season itself, is being held up by other critics as a return to form. It was — to a fault. Audacious episodes like the Tyrell Wellick spotlight and the long-take high-rise thriller, the highlights of the season for me, now feel like respites in a long act of creative backpedaling, to get the show back to where it was when it was a zeitgeisty phenomenon during Season 1. “Like 5/9 never happened”? More like if Season 2, a phenomenally bold season of sweepingly despairing and vicious television that risked alienating the audience the show had built, never happened. We’re headed back to the start, and that’s not a ride I’m sure I want to take.

I reviewed the season finale of Mr. Robot, which made one baffling and disappointing narrative choice after another for an hour, for Decider. A truly dispiriting letdown.