In TV terms, the spectacle of middle-aged men indulging their id is abundant and low value, so to speak; this means Mad Dogs’ execution must be unimpeachably tight to distinguish it. Provided the premise alone doesn’t turn you off, so far so good. The cast is solid, yes, and the tropical-paradise eye candy is tasty, though that’s easy enough for TV today too. But what really works is the editing, the rapid-fire kind we olds used to call “MTV style” but which you rarely see in contemporary dramas. It gives the proceedings a sort of adrenaline sheen, but it can be played with to great effect too, whether by dragging things out—a club sequence crash cuts through three different and distinctive songs to suggest that the gang stayed there for a long time—or slowing things down—the quieter scenes drop the staccato rhythm for longer takes that drive the importance home.

I’m covering Amazon Prime’s new show Mad Dogs for Decider this season, starting with my review of its promising pilot.

By switching the question from “whodunit?” to “which of the two whodunit does Noah really care about?”, the show traded the big mystery that sustained its first two seasons for another one with impressive seamlessness. Courtroom theatrics notwithstanding, the transition also moves the show firmly away from its crime-thriller elements, focusing instead on the characters themselves, and on the power and nature of love—how it begins, grows, falters, and ends. This has always been The Affair’s heart and soul, the place where it pushed hardest, dug deepest, and took the biggest risks. The irresistible pull of sexual desire. The fracturing of families young and old, large and small. The idea that people are more complicated than simply characterizing them by the best and worst things they do allows. The notion that pain might be a worthwhile tradeoff for happiness, but it’s no guarantee. The idea that people can make mistakes from which they can never recover and for which they can never atone. (Especially after tonight, when Noah and Alison’s affair, and their slow drift away from it, directly destroys all of their lives, and ends Scotty’s.) Every episode, The Affair says what we rarely even have the guts to say to ourselves. This new twist puts paid to the criticism that the murder storyline diffused the impact of this approach. If anything, the events surrounding the death of Scotty Lockhart are its most powerful payoff to date.

Megan O’Keefe and I reviewed the season finale of The Affair for Decider.

When the season began, Cole (Joshua Jackson) was a man at rock bottom. He was alone, strung out, and living in a trailer parked outside his cheating wife’s house and driving rich assholes around his hometown. Since then, he’s faced family feuds, family curses, and an impromptu hook up with Alison (Ruth Wilson). And now? He’s engaged to a good and loyal woman, rolling in money, and buying the Lobster Roll with Alison. He’s even gotten Scotty to go to rehab. Everything’s coming up Cole Lockhart.

How the hell did that happen?

Megan O’Keefe and I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for Decider.

Given the depth and power both the writing and Ritter brought to the material involving trauma, which remained the series’ strongest point throughout the run, it’s tremendous shame it didn’t extend to other areas of the show. This is especially the case for Tennant and Kilgrave, whose constant, transparent evil lets real abusers, able to hide or temper it, off the hook: “See, we’re not like that!” That the show is dealing with a difficult and horrifically underrepresented subject ought to obligate it to do better than “good enough”; recognition alone is the start of a conversation and the bare minimum of merit, not the be-all and end-all. While nothing here was offensive or insulting, nor was anything inspired or inspiring. Considering the potential, that’s a crime. Case closed.

I reviewed the season finale of Jessica Jones for Decider. This was a very frustrating, disappointing series.

Foremost among those achievements: the fucking acting. By the time he hit that first chorus in “Homeward Bound,” the Simon & Garfunkel song that enabled Kevin Garvey’s escape from his return to the afterlife after getting gutshot by John Murphy, Justin Theroux had already paid off two seasons of work with just a minute of facial expressions and passable Paul Simon. His portrayal of Kevin has long been an inversion of his archetypal tall dark and handsome good looks; unlike Jon Hamm, whose transitions between Don Draper’s strong, suave side and his insecure, guilt-ridden shadow were distinct and dramatic, Theroux always plays Kevin as guy with a godlike body, an incandescent stare, and the loosest of grips on both his emotions and reality itself. Here he really got to crack, not in his usual freak-out mode but as a man so moved by the meaning of the song he’s singing he can barely get the words out without breaking down in tears. It’s somehow both restrained and totally vulnerable, a bravura combination. The scene is for him what “The Suitcase” was for Hamm on Mad Men or what “Crawl Space” was for Bryan Cranston on Breaking Bad. Shot in a series of tight, spotlight-illuminated closeups by Leder, it gives you nothing but a face and a voice, and gets more out of them than you could have imagined.

I reviewed the extraordinary season finale of The Leftovers for Decider.

My favorite thing about this week’s episode of The Affair is that there are two more episodes to come after it. The show’s first season was just ten episodes long, but this year it’s gotten the bump to twelve, which I didn’t realize until the coming attractions. To this I say “hell yeah.” When you go Solloway, you gotta go all the way!

My second favorite thing about this week’s episode of The Affair was the half Meghan got to cover. Noah’s solo stint in couples therapy was the most realistic portrayal of a therapy session I’ve ever seen on screen—which makes me think it’s long past time for me to seek out Affair co-creators Sarah Treem and Hagai Levi’s psychologist-centric show In Treatment. It was also the most in-depth and even-handed investigation of Noah’s strengths and weaknesses as a person—or as “a man,” as he might prefer to put it—we’ve gotten yet.

Alison’s half of the episode wasn’t half as meaty, but it was at least twice as juicy. By missing the therapy session, she missed out on a chance to take a long journey inward, but she got to give the plot all its forward motion as a make-good.

My compadre Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for Decider. So jealous she got to cover Noah’s therapy session!

Here, I suppose, is where we’ve got to grapple with the most unsurmountable problem the show faces: the flat performances of its two leads. With only one episode to go, my earlier reservations about the work being done by Krysten Ritter and David Tenant have blossomed into full-blown dislike. There’s almost nothing to Ritter’s acting here beyond dead-eyed, monotone sarcasm, pitched up into anger or down into tears at appropriate moments. Tennant, in turn, is a scenery-chewing gentleman villain, unrelated to and unrecognizable from any comparable figure in real life.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Jessica Jones for Decider. It was bad.

The gravity of the situation is consistently undercut. This begins almost immediately, right there in the restaurant where Hope stabbed herself to death and four others came within a hair’s breadth of hanging themselves. Jessica wants to orchestrate a cover-up in order to avoid entangling the cops in Kilgrave’s web, but her goofball neighbor Robyn, who unleashed the telepath as part of an extremely dumb plan to get to the bottom of her brother Ruben’s death, isn’t having it. “We tell our truth,” she says, “for Ruben.” Then, referring to Hope, whom Jessica has shrouded under a tablecloth, “For tablecloth girl.” Nothing says “We take this seriously” like a cutesy nickname for a distraught woman who just slit her own throat! I get gallows humor, but this is too much too soon, and it jibes with neither Hope’s death nor Robyn’s horrifying close call.

I reviewed the eleventh episode of Jessica Jones for Decider. It was bad.

About the best thing you can say about Jessica Jones’s tenth episode is that Carrie-Anne Moss and Robin Weigert have a horrifying fight scene. With encouragement from Kilgrave and an accidentally lethal last-second rescue by Pam, Jery and Wendy’s vicious divorce turns violent, with the doctor attempting to make emotional “death by a thousand cuts” the lawyer dealt her all too literal. The assault goes on for an uncomfortably long time, with Wendy counting out every slash of the knife against the body of the woman she once loved more than anything. She winds up dead with a glass table embedded in her skull, staring forward with dead unseeing eyes at the woman it turns out she didn’t see clearly in life either. The superhero genre is powered by the use of violence as metaphor, a spectacularly physical way of speaking the unspeakable, and this is as good as the show has ever gotten in that area. Too bad the rest of “AKA 1,000 Cuts” fails just as spectacularly.

I reviewed the tenth episode of Jessica Jones for Decider. It was bad.

The biggest problem with the episode is structural. Since it begins with Kilgrave locked away safely in his soundproof, hermetically sealed, electroshock-equipped prison cell, we know that he’ll have to escape by the time it ends. I mean, there’s five more episodes left in the season, including this one, when he gets locked up, right? If he doesn’t get out, what are they gonna be about, Trish and Simpson getting engaged and picking out items for their wedding registry? And if he has to escape, that requires someone on the other side of the glass to do something to help, either by going inside and falling under his control or letting him have access to the outside and control whoever he wants—in other words, doing something unimaginably stupid.

I reviewed the ninth episode of Jessica Jones for Decider. It was bad.

But the most entertaining thing about this mightily entertaining episode (if you find dark shit entertaining, which, if you don’t, why are you watching this show) is simply its context in the series. This season, The Leftovers has proven itself to be a carnival ride through humanity’s grimmest emotions. A new family of main characters, a sudden switch to old ones we’d all but forgotten, seamless shifts backward through time to events we thought we’d seen the last of, an entire episode taking place in a hallucinated dreamworld, in-depth grappling with cult deprogramming and reprogramming, one-on-one conversations as intense as any action sequence—each new installment has the potential to do something entirely different than its predecessors. In an era where prestige drama has a tendency to be consistent from episode to episode, perhaps to a fault, The Leftovers mixes it up while remaining true to its core thematic and emotional obsessions each time. It’s impressive, risk-taking work—doubly so given Lindelof’s oft-stated preoccupation with the reactions of his audience. What will happen in the finale next week, then? To paraphrase Megan, I’m guessing it’s gonna be pretty fucking amazing, what they’re gonna do.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Leftovers Season Two for Decider.

Relative to Helen, Alison’s situation is straightforward. She goes into labor. She needs her fiancée. He’s not there for her, due to the combination of a misplaced smartphone, a coked-up sex party, serial philandering, and an unseasonal hurricane. She gives birth to a beautiful daughter without him, with the help of a doctor she mistakes for a nurse due to her youth and, let’s face it, her gender. During labor she seems to commune, on some level, with her ex-husband Cole as he hits rock bottom. And when she emerges, she finds she needs Noah less than she did before. Maybe that’s what she and her romantic rival Helen ultimately have in common. Whatever it is they really need, Noah isn’t it.

Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Affair Season Two for Decider.

There’s a certain irony to “AKA WWJD?”, the title of Jessica Jones’s eighth episode. Asking “What would Jessica do?”, it then does something the series has consistently failed to do throughout the season so far: something (anything!) surprising. Often unpredictable, frequently subtle (at least by superhero standards), it’s the show’s best episode so far, by far.

I reviewed the eighth episode of Jessica Jones, which I thought was good, for Decider.

Still, Ritter fares better than David Tennant, who leaves no scenery unchewed in our longest glimpse of Kilgrave in action to date. His ranting and raving in the squad room where he confronts Jessica is 100% Boar’s Head ham. The false humility, the sudden rages, the skin-crawling professions of love—some of this is the writing’s fault, no question, but every choice he makes in trying to sell it is rote and predictable. Contrast this with Vincent D’Onofrio as Daredevil big bad Wilson Fisk. From his physical comportment to speech patterns, he was a wholly original creation. The performance ran the risk of alienating the audience by doing something superhero stories rarely do: forcing them to watch something they’d never seen before. Tennant feels like a copy of a copy of a copy of a mash-up of a Bond villain and Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter by comparison. Meanwhile he’s supposed to hold down half of this show’s emotional bargain. Like Hogarth’s wife Wendy, you don’t have to take this deal.

I reviewed the seventh episode of Jessica Jones for Decider. Sorry, Whovians.

“You are a hard-drinking, short-fused mess of a woman,” Luke Cage tells Jessica Jones. “But you are not a piece of shit.” Thesis statement! Yes, Luke has reason to reassess the latter part of that description later in the episode. But either way, this line from “AKA You’re a Winner!”, the season’s sixth episode, tidily sums up the show’s vision of its lead character: Sure, she’s an alcoholic asshole fuckup, but she’s got a heart of gold! If this is an interesting archetype for you, great, go with God. If not? You’re in for a slog.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Jessica Jones, aka the one where they throw people into weed, for Decider.

One sentence did more to damage my appreciation of Jessica Jones than any other. It wasn’t anything any of the characters said, or even anything a TV critic wrote. It was something mysignificant other said to me as we watched “AKA The Sandwich Saved Me,” the show’s fifth episode. “Does Kilgrave need to speak to people directly to control them?” she asked. “Seems like it,” I replied. Her response: “Then why don’t they wear earplugs?” I believe that’s what Mortal Kombat calls “FATALITY.”

I reviewed the fifth episode of Jessica Jones for Decider. More like Justokay Jones, amirite?

The title character herself is not getting any more interesting. While the handling of abuse and trauma is as incisive as ever, so too does Jessica remain a glowering hardass stereotype in every other respect. Some of this is down to the writing, which sets her up in cliched scenarios like the ol’ sad shower scene (I don’t know about you, but I’m rarely sad in the shower—my bouts with melancholy usually take place on the couch) and forces her to deliver wooden lines like “Not tonight, Hogarth. Not tonight.” But, and I hate to say this, some of it is Krysten Ritter, who seems more and more miscast as the series continues. As good as she was in Breaking Bad, investing a supporting character with a mainline dose of audience empathy, she’s doing very little with this part beyond glaring, sneering, and occasionally sitting in silence. Sure, they can have her do a Pete Venkman twirl on a street corner or cry a single Frodo Baggins tear when she discovers her junkie neighbor Malcolm has been Kilgrave, but like when she trashes the room she’s been lured to by her anti-gifted client for an assassination attempt, the emotional displays feel forced since her affect is otherwise so stonefaced. If this show is ever gonna soar, something’s gotta break.

I reviewed episode four of Jessica Jones for Decider. I’m not crazy about it.

As a reward for all this good behavior, Helen apologizes for the choices she forced Noah to make, for her secret glee that his first book failed, and for her inability to see how important writing really was to him. “I never in a million years thought you would be this, this guy,” she tells him. “And now you’re here, and I’m very proud of you.” She means it. That this is coming from Helen’s perspective indicates she wants and needs to be seen as forgiving, supportive, and honest about her ex-husband’s character. But it also means she thinks he deserves it.

And on Noah’s side of the equation? He’s a drunken dickhead, ranting about how hard it is for white men to get ahead in literature (“It’s impossible to be a man in 2015!” he says, unleashing a laughing fit from his ex), picking fights with student-newspaper book critics, barely resisting the temptation to pick up admiring undergrads, and coming an unzipped fly away from cheating on his pregnant fiancée with his publicist. Yet even here Helen is affirming the better angels of his nature: “You’re not a dick! You’ve made some questionable choices, and you don’t like yourself very much for reasons I don’t understand, but you’re fundamentally a decent human being.” As we’ve been saying for a while, that’s the thesis statement for The Affair’s take on masculine martyrdom: Sure, we men make mistakes, we fuck up, but at heart we’re Good Guys—why can’t everyone see this? In Noah’s case, Helen can. He’s the one whose descent has blinded him.

Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed last night’s episode of The Affair for Decider. The dialogue basically quoted my long-standing read of how Noah wants to be seen verbatim, which was nice!

What does it all mean?

I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean: that we’ve now been given all the tools we need to determine if Kevin’s visions are the product of the supernatural or psychosis. I believe co-creator Damon Lindelof when he insists this show will never deliver The Answers to the Great Departure, and I believe that studied agnosticism extends way on down the line to every seemingly supernatural happening on the show. Maybe Kevin really did mystically travel to the other side, where he underwent a series of trials and defeated his adversary, bringing himself back to life. Or maybe he’s a schizophrenic who drank poison provided by a suicidal pederast, had a hallucinatory paranoiac nightmare while he was out in which he processed his grief and guilt and trauma, and woke up before he suffocated. The results are the same either way. What difference does it make?

I reviewed last night’s extremely divisive episode of The Leftovers for Decider. I thought it was a hoot! Funny, creepy, and very bold. It’s only infuriating if you’re determined to read it in a certain way. Everything you like about the show was still there under the surface.

Actually, the Kilgrave concept itself—in the sense that this story and this story alone is what the season will be about—is working much better as of this episode. Unlike Daredevil, which kept its protagonist and antagonist in the dark about one another for some time and featured many mini-mysteries along the path to their final confrontation, Jessica Jones has been all about the title character and her nemesis tracking each other down from the jump. The decision to focus so monomaniacally on the mano a mano conflict between the detective and the telepath could feel either fitting or forced; around the point where Jessica learns Trish plans to have her fellow victim Hope on her radio show and freaks out, it fell firmly on the former side of the line. “He’ll be listening to her and thinking about me,” Jessica warns her friend, a wholly appropriate reaction. After all, we’re talking about a stalker on one hand and the woman he traumatized on the other—of course they’d think about each other all the time. The narrative simply reflects this sad emotional truth.

Unfortunately, the complexity, nuance, and willingness to take chances with the genre has yet to extend beyond these two areas. Put it this way: Aside from her zesty sex life with Luke and her ongoing attempt to process what Kilgrave has done to her and others, is there anything about Jessica Jones as a character you haven’t seen a million times before? Whether we’re talking about private-detective tales or young-woman-in-the-city stories, this exact combination of sarcasm, alcoholism, broken friendships, and regret is as common as spandex in superhero comics.

Speaking of comics, I’m loath to compare TV shows to their source material all that much, but in Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos’s original Aliascomics, Jessica was much less of a hardboiled stereotype, exchanging the live-action version’s sardonic stoicism for the jittery, high-energy banter common to the writer’s work. The result was a lively, lived-in character who felt more like a real person trying and failing to live up to her extraordinary circumstances than a noir archetype peeled straight from pulp fiction. The point isn’t “The book was better,” it’s that what’s on the screen isn’t working, irrespective of what happened on the page.

I think I figured out what’s not working for me in Jessica Jones. I reviewed the third episode for Decider.