I’m calling it right now: If you’re afraid of heights, and I sure am, this episode of Alice in Borderland is the scariest hour of television you’ll see all year. I’d say it’s scarier than the similarly heights-based games in this year’s Squid Game, for the simple reason that none of us have ever seen a colossal game arena in real life. All of us, however, have seen towers and bridges and under-construction skyscrapers that are nothing but a pile of bolted-together metal for hundreds and hundreds of feet in the air. Hell, if you’ve ever looked up at the catwalks in a basketball arena and freaked out a little bit, you know what I mean. 

Anytime I even think of this stuff I get the shivers and shakes. Making me watch this nightmarish episode, in which half of our heroes are forced to climb Tokyo Tower by hand? Let me see what I wrote in my notes: “THIS IS AN ABSOLUTE FUCKING NIGHTMARE FOR ME” — boldface and all caps in the original — followed by “oh i hate it, oh i hate it so much lol.”

The “lol” is the give away. I hated it so much! I loved it!

I reviewed episode four of Alice in Borderland for Decider.

Let’s hear it for Jack Gleeson. The Irish actor cemented his place in television history in his first major role: the smug, sadistic, sociopathic, cowardly, completely insufferable boy king Joffrey Baratheon on Game of Thrones. He returned to his studies after that, acting only sporadically until very recently. 

God, am I glad to see him back. His character here, the archetypal Irish trickster Byron Hedges, makes use of many of the same traits that made Gleeson’s portrayal of Joffrey so menacing — the twinkle of glee in his eye, the tight-lipped smile of someone harboring a secret — but harnesses them for good instead of evil. Well, if not good, then at least Guinness.

I reviewed the fourth episode of House of Guinness for Decider.

I can’t say that House of Guinness is firing on all cylinders. Ellen, for example, feels altogether too broad a caricature of a fiery Fenian redhead, down to chugging a pint o’  Guinness with her flaming tresses curling hither thither and yon. I could do with Rafferty getting a little more seasoning than “sexy swaggering tough-guy company man, too; his scene with Ellen suffers as a result of neither quite feeling like people the way Arthur or Anne or even the type-A Edward do.

I think it’s Arthur’s show, frankly. It’s like the man’s callowness — “What the fuck do I care about the people for? I’m a Conservative!” he says at one point, indignant — is in a constant tug of war with actor Anthony Boyle’s soulfulness, with neither side emerging the victor in full. (Also, you see his penis.) That said, Jack Gleeson stole every scene he was in as Joffrey, and he’s already a blast as Byron, so there are other contenders for the crown. Or the harp.

I reviewed the third episode of House of Guinness for Decider.

This remains such a fun, inventive show. It’s capable of recognizing when it needs to course-correct, following up the complex zombie card game with a very basic round “dodge the flying killer frisbees.” The nerve gas on the Tokyo subway, meanwhile, is a still-provocative image that calls to mind the lethal terrorist attacks by a religious cult years ago. The canaries are a great visual, too. 

And Ryuji emerges now as a compelling antagonist — the kind of explorer in the further regions of experience obsessed with going beyond the limits that drove the narrative of the first two Hellraiser films. This is an archetype I like a lot, and as with so much else in this show, I like it here plenty. 

I reviewed the third episode of Alice in Borderland‘s third season for Decider.

I dreaded watching this episode of Alice in Borderland. Not because I’m squeamish, or sensitive, or artistically or philosophically opposed to random acts of gratuitous violence. It’s just that I like my gratuitous violence to mean something, man. If I’m going to watch characters get senselessly mowed down in agonizing terror for an hour at a stretch, I want to know they did so in order for the filmmakers to make a statement about the wielding of power against the powerless, however personal or political you want to make it. I want to know those characters died for a purpose.

That’s never been Alice’s strong suit. This isn’t Squid Game, with its candy-colored Verhoevenesque anti-capitalism. This is just a bunch of cool violent shit happening to nice people who deserve better and try and help each other. I feel for the characters of course, but their plight seems very arbitrary and narrow. I don’t foresee circumstances in which getting sucked into a warp-zone afterlife where you get shot by lasers reveals much about the human experience, you know?

But here’s the thing: The moment you shoot a flaming arrow through some rando redshirt’s neck, all my objections go up in smoke. So to speak.

I reviewed the second episode of Alice in Borderland‘s third season for Decider.

It’s the damnedest thing. I’m sitting here watching the second episode of House of Guinness and thinking “Huh, this seems much stronger to me than the first episode, somehow. Less showy and blunt, more thoughtful, better dialogue, better lighting, an altogether tighter thing.” Great news, right? But then I thought, “Wait, why does this seem familiar?” It’s because the exact same thing happened with writer-creator Steven Knight’s last period piece about 19th-century dirty deeds among people with pretty accents, A Thousand Blows. 

Back then, I wrote that “Series premieres, even of very good shows, often suffer from what I call ‘pilot-itis.’ It’s a tendency to go a bit big and braod in hopes of catching and capturing the audience’s attention.” That’s especially true of the House of Guinness debut, which introduced the players and their personalities and motivations with all the subtlety of a kid plopping her favorite action figures down on the floor before playing with them. 

It’s the playing that seems to interest Knight more than the setting-up. All of a sudden he’s having Aunt Agnes lament to her headstrong niece, who neither wants to play matchmaker for her brothers nor be married herself, “Oh, Anne, you’re a wave crashing against a rock, made up of gold bands and diamond engagement rings.” You’ve got Arthur, who earlier that day was dumped by his boyfriend Michael (Foundation‘s Cassian Bilton) in a botanical garden, cryptically telling his brother and their body man Rafferty “My peace was shattered today, beside a water lily.” 

In the first episode, only Ben the junkie and Rafferty the rake were permitted this kind of lyricism, and coming from them it seemed more like a character defect than anything else. Once everyone gets in on the act, you start achieving some of that Deadwood magic, where characters of low character speak in high poetry.

I reviewed the second episode of House of Guinness for Decider.

Adapted by writer-director Shinsuke Sato from the manga of the same name by Haro Aso, Alice in Borderland is one of the most complex, complicated, convoluted TV shows I’ve ever covered. The obvious point of comparison is Squid Game, but with more players, way more games, and way more uncertainty as to what the hell is even going on. 

This premiere clears a lot of that uncertainty right up. Obviously it’s possible the show is just straight-up lying to us, but it certainly appears as if Arisu’s adventure’s in Borderland took place during a near-death experience that plunged many people into a sort of shared consciousness where the games took place in classic “if you die in the dream, you die in real life” fashion. 

Now, this obviously still leaves a lot of questions unanswered. If this is just some dream world, why do all the games involve guns, booby traps, and other relatively realistic means of killing people? Why are they themed around a deck of playing cards? Is it connected in a direct way to the meterorite, in the sense that its origin is extraterrestrial? How is Banda able to pass to and fro? Has this happened before, and if so where and when and how often?

But still, given the show’s adamant refusal to answer a damn thing for nigh on two seasons, this return felt like finding the answer key to a chemistry exam. What’s more, there’s no new normal to familiarize yourself with that takes more than two seconds to get accustomed to: “Oh wow, Arisu and Usagi are married now? Cool, good for them.” And other than Ryuji, there aren’t any new characters to familiarize yourself with, not yet anyway. This may be the easiest Season 3 premiere I’ve ever had to review, from a “recapping the action” perspective.

To me, however, the standout moment isn’t any of the explanations receive. It’s not even the disgusting electrocution sequence, as fun as that is if you’re a gorehound. It’s Arisu’s long twilit walk from the sanitarium to the game zone through the cobalt-blue streets of empty Tokyo. It’s then that it truly feels we’re on the border of some new and terrible thing. At least, so I hope.

I reviewed the season premiere of Alice in Borderland for Decider. I’m covering this whole season in the next few days as well!

WATER. MALTED BARLEY. HOPS. YEAST. COPPER. OAK. FIRE. FAMILY. MONEY. REBELLION. POWER.

According to the titles that spool out over a music video–style montage showing the making of the legendary brew, these are the ingredients that go into both a pint of Guinness and House of Guinness itself. The approach to getting this information across is stylish, slick, bombastic, and direct. The text is a blend of cold hard facts and poetic embellishment. It’s a bit corny in places, but knowingly so: People who play with themes like “FAMILY. MONEY. REBELLION. POWER” know they’re walking well-trod territory, so they might as well dance their way across it instead.

That seems to be the approach of writer-creator Steven Knight, previously responsible for the well-regarded British gangster period piece Peaky Blinders, as well as the excellent 19th-century bareknuckle-boxing drama A Thousand Blows earlier this year. This seems an altogether less serious, more scandalous and sudsy effort than ATB, which was anchored in part by powerhouse performances from future Adolescence stars Stephen Graham and Erin Doherty. There’s only so silly you can get when those two are giving their all.

This is not to sell short any of the talents involved in House of Guinness, which is prefaced with the amusingly Wildean description “THIS FICTION IS INSPIRED BY TRUE STORIES.” This is is the historical-fiction TV-show equivalent of David Bowie slapping every copy of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars with the phrase TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME — a sign that above all, we’re here to jam out and have fun.

I reviewed the premiere of House of Guinness for Decider, where I’ll be covering the whole season in the next few days.

The bad guy’s a fun one, too. No one who isn’t named “Leslie Nielsen” has had more fun poking fun at their square-jawed persona than Kyle MacLachlan has over the course of his career (even on Twin Peaks: The Return!). In this episode alone we watch him hump Jeanne Tripplehorn only to collapse crying into her arms upon climax, then insist on a ludicrous hair dye job to “court the youth vote.” When he and Lee nearly come to blows at Dale’s memorial service, he assumes a ludicrous Fighting Irish put up yer dukes boxing stance. He seems to be having as good a time here as he had on Fallout, which bodes well for the future of this shaggy-dog story of a show.

I reviewed the second episode of The Lowdown for Decider.

The Big Lebowski’s influence, intentional or not, can’t be overstated. Lee is basically the Dude if he made a career of leaping off of couches and using that old pencil trick to see what Jackie Treehorn wrote on that note. A wise, mysterious older stranger sits down next to him at a bar. A car of unknown origin follows him around. He is beset by rich white assholes and beautiful, eccentric women. He gets mixed up in a sprawling case with a huge cast of colorful characters and humorously recreates classic crime narratives in pursuit of the truth. You get it.

Most importantly, like the Dude used to be back when he (and six other guys) wrote the Port Huron Statement and occupied ROTC buildings, Lee is, according to both Cyrus and Marty, that saddest of specimens: “a white man who cares.” Even though he dresses like a dirtbag and talks like he’s doing a bit and is perpetually broke, Lee still has tremendous power and privilege as a straight cis white guy. Because he cares, he’s using these powers for good. As a result, he nearly winds up murdered in a car trunk like Billy Batts. 

Caring, in other words, isn’t easy, even if you live life on the easy setting thanks to your background. It’s hard and dangerous. The Lowdown simply suggests that caring also can make you one of the coolest, most interesting people anyone’s ever met — a living legend without really trying to be one — while still solving actual problems. Maybe it’s not really that easy in real life, but if it results in a show as much fun as this one? Let’s hear ’em out.

I reviewed the series premiere of The Lowdown, Sterlin Harjo and Ethan Hawke’s new series, for Decider.

If you know actor Tom Pelphrey at all, it’s likely because of a single scene: a monologue he delivers in the back of an Uber on Ozark, desperately explaining to a person who doesn’t care why he’s almost certainly crossed the wrong person and gotten himself and, possibly, his sister and her family killed. But of course there’s hope around the corner, a light at the end of the tunnel, if he can just…keep…going. Despite the scene’s almost unwatchably painful naturalism, Pelphrey has said he didn’t improvise a word. 

But he’s such a good actor that it feels like he’s making it up as he goes along, even as he sticks to the script’s chapter and verse. His dialogue seems to come from within his body, not his head. So when Robbie repeated himself during this pivotal scene, over and over and over, my first instinct was to give Pelphrey the credit. But if his process remains the same as it once was, writer-creator Brad Ingelsby is responsible for this revealing detail. If you’ve ever wondered why I like Task so much better than Mare of Easttown, this kind of thing is why. 

I reviewed this weekend’s Task for Decider.

Chief of War is an achievement in historical fiction on television, an earthbound spectacle to rival and surpass the faraway fantasy lands and science-fiction galaxies of other epics. It announces the arrival of Momoa as a filmmaker worth watching — worth studying, even. There are compositions in here that call to mind Kurosawa’s Ran, and I don’t say that lightly. This show delivered in every way I’d hoped it would, and in countless ways I never dreamed it could. 

Wow.

I reviewed the season finale of Chief of War, co-written and directed by star and co-creator Jason Momoa, for Decider. It’s gobsmacking.

Though we’re only two episodes in, so far Task is an improvement over Ingelsby’s stylistically and thematically similar Mare of Easttown in almost every conceivable way. Naturally I miss the inimitable presence of Kate Winslet, but such is the power of Tom Pelphrey and his seemingly bottomless fuel tank of pathos that this show has it covered. It’s aided additionally by Jeremiah Zagar’s superb direction, which takes care to match the characters’ piercing emotions with equally striking shot compositions and lingering, well-framed closeups. Gliding over all is the gloriously goes-to-eleven score by Dan Deacon, who like so many others — Danny Elfman, Mark Mothersbaugh, Trent Reznor, Mica Levi, Daniel Lopatin — proves that the art-rock weirdo to superlative film composer pipeline is real and flowing freely. Task is not a happy show, but it’s one I’m happy to recommend.

I reviewed last weekend’s Task for Decider. Sorry I’m just linking to it now!

Folks, I could go on like this all day. It’s that kind of show. Chief of War is one of the biggest and best television surprises of 2025.

I reviewed last week’s Chief of War for Decider. What a program!

This one’s bittersweet. The Mule is down, but seemingly not out. Empire stands, but it’s fallen into Darkness nonetheless. Foundation lives, but it’s a fraction of its former self. Gaal betrayed her mentor. Darkness betrayed his brothers and his most loyal servant. Atrocities have been committed across the galaxy by a black-hole bomb that remains operational and in the hands of a madman.

But Foundation has always been bittersweet, hasn’t it? From the start, this has never been a story about the triumph of good over evil, knowledge over ignorance, civilization over barbarity. All Hari Seldon ever aimed to do was shorten the inevitable reign of evil, ignorance, and barbarity from 30,000 years to a mere millennium. 

This isn’t an easy message to hear, especially right now. Everyone’s looking for the quick fix or magic bullet that will restore the world we once knew, or better yet create a new and healthier one, from the hell it’s been made into by rich and powerful sociopaths — men exactly like the Mule and Brother Darkness, except in ugly suits.

But the message is necessary. The fight is on to preserve the light of freedom, science, and truth as rat-bastard tyrants attempt to stamp them all out. Everyone can play a part to make the future just a bit brighter than it would be without them. The moral arc of the Prime Radiant is long, and only we can bend it towards justice.

I did an explainer of the who what when where how and why of the Foundation Season 3 finale for Decider. As usual, I took the opportunity to get a little philosophical.

The Season 3 finale of Foundation has no chill. None. Not a single particle of chill can be detected. Where this episode goes, you couldn’t see the light from chill with the Hubble telescope. Generations of psychohistorians working hand in glove with a secret team of powerful psychics to steer the course of this episode towards chill across a span of centuries would come up short. You’d need the Mule to brainwash you into feeling any chill in this thing whatsoever.

I reviewed the season finale of Foundation, one of the greatest sci-fi TV shows of all time, for Decider.

Gritty, realistic, down-to-earth: If you read much about Task, the new crime drama from Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby, those are the kinds of adjectives you can expect to see. You won’t see them used about the show’s music, though, that’s for sure. Composed by Baltimore electronic musician Dan Deacon, Task’s score soars, it sizzles, it screeches, it screams. It’s an insanely overheated sonic signature for the show, making anything from fixing a morning coffee to brushing dead leaves off a porch sound like Oppenheimer waiting for the bomb to go off. 

I love that for Task, personally. And I love how much director Jeremiah Zagar echoes that energy in his shot compositions — men framed in colorful doorways, masked monsters pass in slow silence across every axis of the frame. There’s a charge to how this thing looks and sounds that I couldn’t find in Mare outside of Kate Winslet’s lead performance. It feels like a big leap forward.

I reviewed the series premiere of Task for Decider.

Obscenity is a form of violation. That’s the idea behind it, anyway. When you say a movie or a painting or a book is obscene — okay, not you, dear reader, but the kind of people who do say movies and paintings and books are obscene — you mean they violate the dignity of the reader or viewer. If performers are involved, you might say it violates their dignity too, or that of their whole gender. You could say the same about the use of the word to refer to, say, income — “So-and-so makes an obscene amount of money,” violating the social compact that no one person should command that kind of wealth when others do not — but of course it’s the purportedly degrading sexual and scatalogical stuff that gets people really riled up. The human body is sacred, and this is how you treat it? Shame on you, and may the full force of capital and the state be wielded against you.

There’s a line about obscenity I return to over and over, from the film Apocalypse Now. Ranting and raving as per usual, Marlon Brando’s mad Colonel Kurtz speaks of the hypocrisy of the United States military, from which he has defected to create a society more honest about its brutality:

“We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t allow them to write FUCK on their airplanes, because it’s obscene!”

Kurtz knew that the most vile imaginings of the most uptight general or admiral in the armed forces could not imagine a more unspeakable violation of the human body associated with the word FUCK than the actual, physical, cataclysmically violent violation of the human body associated with napalm. There’s no question what’s more obscene, no question where our ire should be aimed, no question what we should be trying to stop at all costs. Instead, we’re banning cusswords while we rain death upon all of Indochina. Translated into modern terms, it’s expelling student protestors of genocide in Gaza rather than lifting a finger to do anything to stop that genocide.

Brother Dusk commits genocide in this episode of Foundation, three times over. Appearing as a Wizard of Oz–sized hologram before the galactic council as they prepare to hand the Mule not only Trantor but him, too, the last Cleon standing decides to make a counteroffer. With sadistic mirth in his voice and that unmistakable Dusk twinkle in his eyes, he uses the Novacula, his black-hole bomb, to wipe out the homeworld of the Council, the sacred planet of the Luminists, and the entire cluster of worlds called Cloud Dominion. He does it in seconds, with the push of a button. A blast, a brief detonation, and then poof — billions of lives reduced to floating ash as instantly as a dandelion blown apart by a child. And it’s all done with about that level of consideration.

Foundation is no stranger to planet-destroying weaponry. But it’s the anticlimactic nature of these planetary blasts that turns your stomach. There’s no suitably huge explosion of flame, like the mushroom cloud after a nuclear detonation, or planets and Death Stars bursting apart in Star Wars. It’s like I said: a blast, a rumble, a conflagration that lasts about two seconds, and then nothing. If the body is sacred, then the sacred was just profaned in the most grievous way imaginable, billions upon billions of times over. They weren’t even afforded the dubious dignity of going out in a way that suited the immensity of the loss. Their funeral pyre was denied them.

“Don’t fuck with Empire,” Dusk says before signing off.

It’s one of the most shocking, disgusting, horrifying acts in the history of this show, and that’s saying something. 

I reviewed this week’s Foundation for Decider.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is more than just the title of a movie. It is, depending upon your perspective, either a threat or, to paraphrase Roger Ebert, a promise. From the moment you decide to watch the movie till the moment, fairly deep in, when the titular atrocity begins, you know you’re living on borrowed time. You have decided to watch a movie which you know, for a fact, includes a chain saw massacre. One of the smartest things I ever read in film school was that half the work of Tobe Hooper’s grisly, greasy torture-porn masterpiece was done by the title alone.

This episode of Chief of War is titled “The Day of Spilled Brains.”

I reviewed this week’s Chief of War for Decider.

Overall, Wednesday is finally the creepy kooky mysterious spooky and altogether ooky fun I’d been promised during Season 1, only to wind up disappointed. By leaning even harder on the gifts of its two irrepressible leads, then adding a third cut from the same living-cartoon-character cloth in the form of Agnes (she refers to them as “the Three Musketeers”; Wednesday and Enid disagree), the show located and leaned on its greatest strengths — not the plot, but the performances. Wednesday is a showcase more than it’s a show, and accepting that its superpower.

I reviewed the season finale of Wednesday for Decider. The whole back half-plus of the season was a lot of fun!