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!

Enid locks herself within the confines of the lupine cages to prevent her from wolfing out, since a full moon is coming up, and if a young alpha transforms at that stage of the lunar cycle, they’re stuck that way permanently. Inside her cell, Enid tells Wednesday something Professor Capri said to her about her pack being her strength. “You’re my pack, Wednesday,” she insists.

And even though both characters are essentially living cartoon characters — very literally, in Wednesday’s case — that bond between them feels legit. It’s not so much that opposites attract, it’s that each of these people has gotten so used to looking at their opposite number and thinking “I know exactly what she needs” that they now consider each other in this way as a matter of habit. You can’t not make Wednesday care about Enid, not for long, nor vice versa. They’re too determined to stay in each other’s business. That’s a very believable basis for a comedy friendship, and this is one of the best comedy friendships on TV.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Wednesday Season 2 for Decider.

Foundation is a marvelously rich experience, in which a Crayola 64-pack of SFF character types, visuals, and storylines coexist not only easily but symbiotically. The heady stuff enhances the earthy stuff. The kaleidoscopic spectacles provide contrast for the ghastly gore. Scenery chewing baddies like the Mule and Shakesperean tragedies like Lady Demerzel inhabit the same story.

My delayed review of last week’s Foundation is now up at Decider!

The Kingdom of Hawai’i, Ka’ū District. The windswept, ocean-darkened beach sands. Keōua, newly crowned King of a divided Hawai’i, kneels before a fire. His mother (Kekuhi Keali’ikanaka’oleohaililani), a formidable singer and one of his chief advisors, brings him his father’s mahiole, the trademark Hawai’ian helm. It was a symbol of his wise father’s rule, but he has no use for it anymore. “I no longer fight to preserve his kingdom,” Keōua says, tossing his father’s legacy on the flames. “I will live to build my own.”

My notes at this point read simply “THAT’S INCREDIBLY BADASS. THIS IS JUST A BADASS SHOW.”

Due to a technical glitch, my review of last week’s Chief of War for Decider has just gone up now. Go read it!

Did I say the last episode was the best Wednesday episode ever? I lied. Boy, did I ever. A body-swap comedy that sees the mind of Wednesday Addams inhabit the body of Enid Sinclair and vice versa, “Woe Thyself” (Season 2, Episode 6) proves that Wednesday, well, knows itself. From the start, leading actors Jenna Ortega and Emma Myers have played their mismatched roommate characters as if they were John Goodman and Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, no matter how far short the material they were given fell of the talent they were giving it back. What this episode, co-written by co-creators Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, does is simple. It takes the best things about the show and gives them even more to do: act like each other.

I reviewed episode 6 of Wednesday Season 2 for Decider. This was a hoot.

It wasn’t a fluke. Wednesday Season 2’s mid-season finale was the show’s best episode ever — funny, frightening, and genuinely striking to look, all in ways the show had so often struggled to achieve. That struggle seems to be over. The fifth episode of the series’ bifurcated second season is even neater and nastier.

I reviewed the mid-season premiere of Wednesday for Decider.

We live in a time when the most powerful, most wealthy, most seemingly unstoppable people in the world are telling you and me and our children on a daily basis that no one else matters, no one else is real, the only thing that counts is getting what you want, preferably at the expense of others. There are certainly characters on Chief of War who’d fit right in in that world; give King Kahekili a tactical vest and a neck gaiter and he could be out there threatening Democratic politicians at gunpoint even now. What a boon to see a story in which the willingness to be open, to listen, to understand, to be honest, to be friends and family and lovers, to be a community, a people, is seen as the ultimate virtue. Other people aren’t our enemies, they’re our brothers, our sisters, our siblings. When we betray them, we betray ourselves.

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

It’s almost boring to say at this point, but Foundation’s astonishing hot streak continues. For the second season in a row, the show balances a seemingly impossible-to-reconcile number of characters, storylines, tones, and visual palettes in episode after episode. The Demerzel hallucination is an all-timer image for this show, which is saying something, and both the flashbacks and the Foundation’s horrifying massacre by the Mule’s mind-controlled forces recall the most unpleasant moments of Andor’s masterful second season. Writers Jane Espenson and Greg Goetz and director Christopher J. Byrne also prove adept chroniclers of the Mule’s sadism, with Indbur’s bloodless but brutal demise ranking way up there on this series’ history of violence. Again, this is really saying something.

I reviewed last week’s Foundation for Decider.

This is a plot-focused episode compared to its predecessors, relatively light on the sci-fi spectacle that’s Foundation’s hallmark. That’s fine — it’s good to bring things back down to earth a bit in order to advance the story.

But this is not to say it’s devoid of fascinating space-opera visuals. Demerzel pulling the Prime Radiant out of herself from between her robotic cleavage is an image that probably shouldn’t be as disconcertingly strange and sexy as it is. The coldwave psychedelia of their journey into the black hole is a bravura effect, reminiscent of Hari’s strange fractal freakouts while trapped within the Prime Radiant last season. And I love the design of Mycogen, which blends the familiar Blade Runner vibe of a decrepit futuristic city with the art nouveau beauty of a Peter Jackson Elf kingdom for its wealthier districts. I’m perpetually amazed by just how smart the design of this show is.

I keep coming back to poor oblivious Brother Day, though. His is the shock of any rich and powerful person when confronted with how normal people really think about them. Don’t you love me? I love me! I know it’s fake with all the others, but it’s real with me, right? Right? The belief of the mighty in their own irresistibility is a gap in their armor as clear and as vulnerable as the missing scale on the belly of Smaug the Golden. Great and terrible things can be done when it’s exploited.

I reviewed this week’s Foundation for Decider.

Tell the Shōgun and Game of Thrones fans in your life now: Chief of War is the real deal. 

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