How high can highlights take you? How much strength does a show require for its strong points to overpower its weak spots? How does the whole become more than the sum of even its most important parts? Jessica Jones, the hotly anticipated second series in Marvel & Netflix’s partnership, tells the story of a private eye, so perhaps it’s appropriate that it’s got me searching for answers myself. Its pilot episode, “AKA Ladies Night,” contains some of the most powerful moments and challenging themes in the entire Marvel oeuvre. I’m just not sure that’s enough to declare the case for its quality closed.

I’m covering Jessica Jones for Decider! I’ll be posting a review a day every day till I get through the whole season. First up: My somewhat skeptical take on the pilot.

And then there’s the sorcerer himself. “Who are you?” Kevin asks Virgil, awestruck. “I’m just someone who once had an adversary of his own,” the man replies by way of self-description. “One that made me do terrible things. And for those things I was shot in the chest, in the belly”—and here’s where it gets unpleasant—“and in that foul machinery below the waist, which transgressed the laws of man.” At this point it’s not hard to guess why John shot him, though the identity of the victim isn’t clear until Kevin brings up the shooting himself. “I hurt him,” Virgil says, referring to John. “I hurt him a long time ago. And then he hurt me back, and he freed me.” Now we have our explanation for John Murphy’s anti-magic vigilantism: If your abuser claimed he was cured of his desire to molest children by an otherworldly encounter with his supernatural adversary on the other side, you’d be pretty fed up with the miracle shit, too. Combining the old man’s mysticism with the all too real horror of pedophilia is dark fantasy at its grimmest, a conception of the genre in which magic isn’t simply a deus ex machina, but a force in human affairs with as powerful an impact and as complex a moral cost as sex and violence.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Leftovers for Decider.

It’s grimly fitting that last night’s episode of The Affair took place on Thanksgiving, because it was all about the consequences of shitting where you eat—not for you, necessarily, but for your fellow diners. After another significant leap forward in time, we rejoin the merry band of Baileys, Lockharts, and Solloways after Noah’s (Dominic West) book Descent has made him the toast of the town, and a pretty penny to boot. But while he’s living large, the people whose marriage he helped break up are paying the price. Cole Lockhart (Joshua Jackson), as you’ll see below, is facing the fallout from the ugly family history Noah dredged up in his novel, with a little help from family nemesis Oscar Hodges. And Alison (Ruth Wilson), whose POV comprises the episode’s first half, is struggling with a new life of luxury in which she has been reduced to a prop, or a PR ploy. Noah’s feast is their famine.

Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed last night’s episode of The Affair for Decider.

It’s been fascinating to watch The Affair tell Helen’s story this season. Both the writing (this time around from playwright and consulting producer David Henry Hwang) and acting (from Tierney, a series MVP) has examined her unique blend of drives, strengths, and foibles with surgical precision, from her rebound relationship with Max to her making-up-for-lost-time use of intoxicants to her struggle to parent both her children and her own mother on her own. Sadder, wiser, and wounded by the series’ main characters in a way it has the guts to show may not properly heal—a chronic condition, like Martin’s Crohn’s disease—she’s a fully realized, incredibly compelling creation.

Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed this week’s The Affair for Decider.

At times it can be difficult to get on the exact emotional wavelength of some of these characters, because they inhabit a world with one major difference from our own: the Sudden Departure, and the indisputably supernatural event it represents. This doesn’t necessarily mean the involvement of God, or any kind of deity or demon or magic or religion whatsoever, mind you—a physical phenomenon beyond the reach of current science serves just as well. Whatever it was, it happened, and it’s been impossible to explain nonetheless. This can make the unyielding skepticism of characters like John, who insists there are no miracles in Miracle, difficult to swallow. (Nora, at least, has a self-evident psychological need to see the Departure as both random and one-time-only; perhaps we’ll eventually get a similarly illuminating backstory for her vigilante neighbor.)

But an episode like this helps illustrate the continuity between skeptics and believers, between those who think they may have played a role in sparing people from it Departure and those who fear they’re to blame for it: Each approach offers its proponents a sense of control amid the chaos. Nora rejects the concept of lensing or the possibility of further Departures to stave off guilt and fear, the only way she can keep going. Perhaps for John, fighting for a world without miracles is a small price to pay for a world without curses as well.

Yet a sense of safety is also why the townsfolk have embraced the eccentrics who slaughter goats or wear bridal gowns every day simply because that’s what they did on the day Jarden was spared, or why people are paying $500 per milliliter for the town’s water: Belief offers them emotional protection against the terror that it could happen again. On the flipside, Erika blames herself for her daughter’s disappearance for basically the same reason the town gives Jerry the goatslayer credit for preventing the disappearances: Knowing the cause makes the effect less frightening, whether that effect is good or bad. You don’t need to have experienced the Sudden Departure to recognize the universal tendency of human beings to look for heroes and villains, and, if no one else fits the bill, to self-destructively settle on themselves.

I reviewed this week’s The Leftovers for Decider.

The Leftovers gives you a lot to chew on with no guarantee you’ll like the taste, and “No Room at the Inn,” last night’s episode, was even more of a mouthful than most. It focused on Rev. Matt Jamison (Christopher Eccleston), who last season was the star of what was, for my money, one of the worst episodes of prestige television ever aired. This new spotlight ep strings together a series of trials and tribulations in which Matt drops his phone in a toilet, learns his brain-dead wife is pregnant with a baby whose conception no one will believe she consented to, gets his head bashed in and his hand stomped on by a mugger who steals his ID bracelet and sabotages his car, pushes a wheelchair for over five miles in the Texas sun, loses a fight with a man in a wedding tuxedo, gets detained, gets thrown out of town, is forced to knock a stranger unconscious with an oar for cash, nearly drowns in a flash flood, loses his wife’s wheelchair, gets smuggled back into town in the trunk of a car, gives up his recovered bracelet to the son of the guy who mugged him after the guy dies in a car wreck the kid somehow survives, and voluntarily has himself locked up full-frontally nude in a pillory—and just in case you didn’t get what’s going on, says his favorite book in the Bible is Job. By rights this shouldn’t be any more successful than the first go-round. Instead it winds up being one of the series’ finest hours to date.

I reviewed this week’s very strong, very demanding The Leftovers for Decider.

“People don’t see me, Cole. They don’t. They just wanna fuck me, or they don’t…see me. They don’t care. Sometimes I worry at night that I’m not a real person, that I’m just a figment of other people’s imaginations.” In this week’s episode of The Affair, Alison (Ruth Wilson) self-diagnosed her core self-esteem issue with a level of insight you’d usually get charged by the hour for. That she offers this analysis not in her own POV segment, but in her estranged husband Cole’s, is largely immaterial. Okay, maybe it’s proof that Cole knows her better than just about anyone, since this entirely accurate appraisal is his memory’s construction of their conversation. But it also demonstrates that Cole sees her as a woman in need of rescue…which is her point exactly. She’s always a character in someone else’s story, while her own gets pushed to the wayside.

Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed the latest episode of The Affair, which (if you ask me anyway) remains excellent, for Decider.

At the end of the episode, Nora handcuffs herself to Kevin. It’s her attempt to provide security for his sleepwalking, and to ensure that she never wakes up to an empty bed again. But given what we’ve learned of their quiet desperation, it reads like the jail sentence it probably is. Thus The Leftovers reduces another moment of human connection to illusion and panic. This kind of thing makes it a hard show to watch, and a harder show to turn away from.

I reviewed the latest episode of The Leftovers for Decider.

If you had to sum up the Tao of The Affair—what it is, what it does, how it does it—in two lines of dialogue, this week’s beautiful car wreck of an episode has you covered with Helen (Maura Tierney) alone. In her half of the episode, which leads the hour, she puts a punctuation mark at the end of her humiliating arrest for DWI and marijuana possession by asking Noah (Dominic West), the man she feels drove her to this point, “Why are you doing this to us?” At the same point in Noah’s side of the story, she instead says “Why do you get to fuck up and I don’t?” Right there you have the yin and yang, the presence and absence, of Helen’s dilemma. Noah’s infidelity and their subsequent divorce have devastated her by forcing her and her children to suffer the consequences of someone else’s actions, yes; that’s the explanation she allows herself to articulate. But they’ve also hurt her by forcing her to confront how much she wishes she could get away with that kind of tomfoolery, too. Showing us every side of the gender-specific resentments and self-perceived virtues of men and women, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives—even the sides the people in question don’t wish to show, or can’t see themselves—is The Affair’s specialty and strength.

Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed this week’s The Affair for Decider. I think this show is excellent, and I’ll level with you: I think the writing we’re doing on it is second to none.

It’s episodes like this that make The Affair the smartest show about relationships on television. Nothing is as explicit or unflinching about the ways grief and memory can remain so present they’re practically a third partner. Nothing is as honest about the power and the limitations of sexual connection. Nothing is as observant about how we identify the comforting, satisfying elements of love, then lie and hide and self-censor to preserve them, all but guaranteeing their eventual loss.

Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed last night’s The Affair for Decider. This is an excellent show.

The persecution of cults by the government has stealthily become the series’ most disturbing theme: Seen both as dangerous and, just as importantly,repulsive, these fringe movements are treated like free targets for government agents and pissed-off citizens alike. The thing is, though, that they are both dangerous and repulsive. Holy Wayne was a creep and a kook, irrespective of the inexplicable coincidences surrounding him. The Guilty Remnant are unforgivably cruel to the grieving and physically abusive to their own members. Laurie and Tommy are now peddling pure snake oil. The Leftovers doesn’t give them a pass, or act like their crimes are mere doctrinal disputes. It does, however, force us to examine who we consider a part of our tribe, the tribe of American society, and what we consider acceptable losses among those we cast out. That’s gutsy, and I’m grateful, because hey, someone’s gotta do it.

I reviewed last night’s The Leftovers, another strong one, for Decider.

And what about Noah? His return from Manhattan is a far cry from the sweet, slow-dancing with no music Nicholas Sparks routine his POV depicted last week. He’s irritable and exhausted at the end of a long and shitty day, nosing around about the money they stand to make from the sale of her house, furious for incoherent reasons that she took a job with Robert and Yvonne. He storms out onto the deck, then — with the camera lingering on Alison’s face until the end to make his reappearance feel all the more sweeping and sudden — returns, all apologies and animal lust. What follows is a stand-up tabletop sex scene that’s hot even by Affair standards, as Noah tells her “I just want you to be happy” over and over: Seriously, my notes include the words (copying and pasting here) “lorrrrrrrrrrrrd have mercy” and “WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.” I fanned myself like a Southern lady, for real.

Given that this is the kind of sex you gchat your friends about afterwards, something about Noah’s anger and subsequent remorse is clearly clicking with Alison. Is she appreciative of his ability to recognize and admit his mistakes? Is she getting off on keeping Cole’s visit a secret down to the last detail (he rifled through Noah’s manuscript and fixed their toilet, facts she not only hides but actively lies about) even as her boyfriend begs for forgiveness for his comparatively less severe wrongdoing? And how does this fit with the flashforward, in which she discovers she’s the last to know that her husband’s attorney was hired and paid for by his ex-wife?

I don’t have the answers, but I’m not sure I’m supposed to. Maybe it was the weird symmetry between Alison’s POV and Cole’s later in the episode—car rides with older men, seemingly superfluous conversations with a cafe waitress, camerawork in which a character approaches and embraces them suddenly from outside the frame — but the deeper we go into this show, the more I suspect the dueling POVs are more like the opposite sides of a Rorschach blot. The shape is there for all to see, but the meaning’s what we make of it.

Meghan O’Keefe and I tag-team reviewed the latest episode of The Affair, which I think is just tremendous, for Decider.

The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead send the message to a society in the throes of endless war, openly nativist and racist politics, and mass gun psychosis that the only way to ensure the survival of you and your loved ones is to act with maximum brutality at all times. It’s not that I’m saying these shows are turning people into killers; on the contrary, everyone involved knows damn well that this is decadent nonsense since virtually no one watching will ever be in the personal position to do anything like what Travis Manawa and Madison Clark are made to do. But the same is true of the NRA or Donald Trump or Ben Carson, who for political and financial profit fuel the paranoid, masturbatory murder fantasies of a country full of gunfucking shut-ins terrified of the unwashed, undead masses flowing over the border, out of the ghettoes, and into Main Street USA. Ideologically, Rick Grimes and George Zimmerman are just a zombie apart.

It’s important to understand why this violent show, among the countless ones now on offer and racking up gangbusters reviews as well as ratings, stands out. What’s wrong with Fear the Walking Dead and the show that spawned it that isn’t wrong with Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire, The Americans, and on and on and on? To find the source of FTWD/TWD’s ethical failure, you have go look at an artistic failure, a hole in the writing the show falls into time and time again. On those other shows, characters are presented with moral choices between right and wrong options—one side may look more appealing or viable than the other, one may have better or worse repercussions, one may be easier to live with or live through, but their nature is never truly in doubt. Fear the Walking Dead is different. It repeatedly offers characters and viewers alike a false choice, one in which the only options are brutality and survival on the one hand or naïveté and death on the other. In this closed moral circuit, violence is both vital and virtuous; no other correct answer is allowed.

I reviewed the season finale of Fear the Walking Dead for Decider.

The only place Helen finds comfort that isn’t weed-scented is her kids. Wearing a lived-in t-shirt that makes her look physically as well as emotionally at ease, she turns their glum family dinner around with a self-deprecating quip or two; she seems at home, in other words. Strangely, the only other moment she truly comes across as satisfied she’s doing the right thing is when, in the flash-forward, she goes to the jailhouse to pay for Noah’s lawyer. The implication may well be that this reflects her own self-interest, that she knows more about Scotty’s death than we’ve ever suspected. But could it also indicate her self-conception as a woman far more at ease with being selfless than with being selfish? Isn’t this — the different yet equally self-defeating forms of martyr virtue men and women allow themselves to embody — what The Affair is really all about?

My fellow critic Meghan O’Keefe and I will be tag-team reviewing The Affair, one of my favorite shows, for Decider this season—she’ll handle the men’s points of view and I’ll be examining the women’s. We started with last night’s season premiere.

The big question: Is this overhaul a good idea? I’m sure HBO thinks so. The cheerier credits alone bring it much more in line with the network’s other fare, and a diversified cast makes artistic, ethical, and financial sense. ButThe Leftovers stumbled real fucking hard out of the gate the first time around (that cornball Rev. Matt spotlight episode is one of the worst-written episodes of prestige TV ever), and it took most of the season to firmly reestablish its footing. Once it did, it never looked back—by its final two episodes in particular it was utterly ruthless in its exploration of depression, grief, and loss, gutsy subjects for a TV climate that’s still more attuned to power struggles than internal ones. It was also a real star turn for Coon, whose Nora was the quietly shattered heart of the show.

Now it’s gotten a heart transplant. The Murphy family dynamic has the ingredients to be interesting, at least. And the worldbuilding done so far with Jarden—the hermits and goat-sacrificers, the ID bracelets visitors have to wear, the impression that trespassers are ejected with extreme prejudice, John’s vigilante crew, the earthquakes, the mysterious and perhaps only metaphorical connection to the cavewomen and the baby—is definitely intriguing.

But since Season One got it all so right in the end, does starting over again bode well or ill? The Leftovers got very good indeed, but it took a whole lot of huffing and puffing to get there; tight storytelling that doesn’t overstate its emotional case is not exactly Lindelof’s strong suit. A show this dark can’t be puffy without tipping over into melodrama, and starting over could duplicate the problem. For now, as the song says, I guess we’ll let the mystery be.

I wrote about the curious case of the Season 2 premiere of The Leftovers—the hardest reboot an HBO series has seen since The Wire Season 2—for Decider.

What makes both Fear and The Walking Dead flagship exceptional television, literally, is how they break the usual rule against assuming that depiction equals endorsement in fiction. In both shows, violence is repeatedly depicted as both necessary and, given the post-apocalyptic context, virtuous. Yes, the brutality is made to feel ugly, but it’s invariably less ugly than the alternative. All of the show’s dramatic weight rests upon the idea that if you were in these people’s shoes, you’d want to do the same things to survive. And man, fuck that noise. Like the zombies locked into that stadium in their thousands then inexplicably left unguarded, I want out.

I reviewed the latest installment of TV’s most morally repugnant franchise, Fear the Walking Dead, for Decider. Much, much more on this coming soon.

While great art generally fills some kind of need in the hearts and minds of its audience, art need not be as utilitarian as all that. Fabergé eggs, extended remixes, the Wet Hot American Summer fart track: In these cases and many others, enjoyment is self-justifying. Hell, by some definitions, art is inherently unnecessary, which is precisely what elevates making it from the pursuit of food, shelter, sex, and survival.

But this ain’t dancing when nobody’s watching or writing the great American novel we’re talking about here. This is “Not Fade Away,” the fourth episode in what looks increasingly likely to be the entirely superfluous first season of Fear the Walking Dead. With the largest fanbase in television built right in, this spinoff series could have gone anywhere. Instead it made an infected-style beeline straight for one of the most traveled paths in the history of the zombie genre: When the dead rise, the army runs amok. Whether you’re talking about 28 Days Later and its sinister soldiers, its sequel 28 Weeks Later and its well-intentioned but incompetent and ultimately indiscriminate occupying army, Day of the Dead and its tiny band of undisciplined bullies and martinets, this story has been told over and over, in a much tighter and more engaging way. It’s difficult to watch Fear and think this particular take on the tale is worth telling.

I reviewed this week’s Fear the Walking Dead, which was bad, for Decider. Danny Boyle, contact your attorneys.

“Good people are the first ones to die,” says Fear the Walking Dead, doling out INSANELY badass truths to its audience of bored gamers. Is that an unfair characterization? Of the audience, maybe. Of Fear the Walking Dead? I fear it’s not. With the conclusion of “The Dog,” this week’s episode, we’ve reached the halfway point of this short introductory season, and the series has yet to produce a compelling reason for itself to exist—other than “we can make a lot of money selling grimdark violence to people who will live and die without ever once experiencing such horrors themselves,” that is. Ending with a military takeover of the town is appropriate, because ethically and aesthetically, Fear is basically a gun nut waiting for the UN’s secret Muslim invasion squad’s black helicopters to land, in TV-show form.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead, which I found equal parts distasteful and dull, for Decider.