It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a television show dig this deeply into the annihilatory power of sex, into its ability to make you forget not just the troubles of the day but troubles at all, its ability to make you feel like you’re everywhere and nowhere all at once. (In fact I may never have seen it tackled this directly by a show; this territory tends to be reserved for feature-length erotic bummers like In the Realm of the Senses or Last Tango in Paris.) The Supersex persona is liberating for Rocco because it’s his way of not being himself anymore, not even being a person anymore. He’s a force, an entity, an energy animating a penis with a vestigial human attached to it. 

I reviewed the second episode of Supersex for Decider.

Sato and Samantha are in bed together, and Sato is taking his ring off. Watching from home, I’m wondering why. Is this item of jewelry significant to him in some way — a mark of his membership in Chihara-kai, maybe? If so, I don’t remember it coming up before. Nor is it a wedding band he couldn’t bear to part with following a death or divorce, not unless there’s a whole lot about Sato we don’t know. I couldn’t quite figure out why writers Annie Julia Wyman & Joshua Kaplan and director Takeshi Fukunaga bothered to include this detail, beyond perhaps adding a little down-to-earth touch to the sex scene…until I noticed the position of Sato’s arm between Sam’s legs. He took off his ring so he could finger her without hurting her. 

I bring this up not out of prurient interest — although I firmly believe that if you’re not operating at least partially out of prurient interest, you’re not watching TV for the right reasons — but out of admiration for how Tokyo Vice handles, well, pretty much anything. For the second episode in a row, the show has served up an admirably graphic sex scene, in which the technical aspects of physical sexuality are made clear, whether that’s Trendy’s legs in the air around his boyfriend or Sato slipping off his ring before putting his fingers inside Sam. Much as I hate to give them any oxygen, there’s a vocal contingent of viewers who prefer not to watch sex scenes at all. Sex is as much a part of life as anything else going on in Tokyo Vice, and as such it belongs on screen. The show has little time for those who think otherwise, and good on the show for it.

I reviewed this week’s Tokyo Vice for Decider.

The acquisition and hoarding of wealth and power should be understood as a mental illness. Period, point blank, deadass. At the very least it’s a cognitive impairment on par with getting spike piledrivered onto your noggin in a wrestling ring for several decades running. This is in no way a joke. Access to the money and authority that prevents you from every hearing the word “no” if you don’t want to turns your brain into soup. Ask Elon Musk. 

The Regime gets this and runs at it more directly than any other satire of its sort, which makes it the satire for me. Kate Winslet as the incredibly sexy and stylish, incredibly self-absorbed and stupid, incredibly gullible and theatrical and vindictive and woo-woo New Age-y, and incredibly impossible to actually be around or get to know unless you’re just as fucked in the head as she is commander-in-chief of a modern nation. That, friends, is a TV show. It’s also life in these United States, but it’s a TV show too, boy howdy.

I reviewed the second episode of The Regime for Decider.

Supersex upset me worse than any other show…ever, really. I had a reaction to “Superpower,” the premiere of this loosely biographical series about Italian porn legend Rocco Siffredi, so intense, so severe, that it knocked me out for the rest of the day. There’s a chance this review runs late because of it and everything. 

Good. Good! I’ll say it again: Good. Art should have that kind of power. Art should be able to change your entire day. That it changed my day for the worse is immaterial. Supersex moved me, and that’s what good television is supposed to do.

I reviewed the premiere of Supersex for Decider.

At the risk of sounding like one of the terrified subjects of Chancellor Elena Vernham: You’ve made a marvelous debut, Chief. There’s nothing to complain about in the first episode of The Regime, and much to delight in. Written by Will Tracy (The Menu) and directed by Stephen Frears (The Grifters), it’s the strongest, sharpest, best-looking, and (very importantly) funniest satire of wealth and power HBO has served up in its whole “satires of wealth and power” era. 

I reviewed the debut of the new Kate Winslet comedy The Regime for Decider.

Tokyo Vice Season 2 is a confident show. It glides from character to character, plot point to plot point, and strength to strength. Its directors know how to frame and wrap light around the characters to make them seem as vivid and memorable as the high-frequency emotional tenor of the material demands. Its sex is graphic and sexy, its violence graphic and brutal, its heroes lovable, its villains compelling. Its story has the comfortable familiarity that genre work provides, with the ability both to shock and to dig surprisingly deep that distinguishes a genre’s standouts. In a year of stiff competition (Fargo, Griselda, Sexy Beast, True Detective), it’s a crime show to remember.

I wrote about this week’s episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

Sexy Beast is as good a TV prequel as Andor, House of the Dragon, and Better Call Saul. I hope it runs exactly as long as creator Michael Caleo wants it to. […] It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a crime show this rich. I mean, the obvious antecedent really is Better Caul Saul. I’m very pleased to say, however, that it hasn’t been that long since I’ve seen a prequel or adaptation this good. From Dead Ringers to Fargo Season 5, miraculous extrapolations of preexisting masterpieces are, strangely, thick on the ground. I’m so glad this show exists, so glad for the performances by James McArdle, Emun Elliott, Sarah Greene, Stephen Moyer, et al — so glad that a movie I love as much as I love Sexy Beast spawned a show worthy of the name.

I reviewed the season finale of Sexy Beast for Decider. Incredible show.

“This reminds me of The Sopranos”: Now that’s a thought you love to have. If a show is doing something reminiscent of the show that effectively made all of your subsequent favorite shows possible, then it’s doing something right. Watching a pair of gangster idiots escalate a meaningless offense into a brutal murder and clumsy coverup? That’s that Sopranos magic, baby!

I reviewed this week’s episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

As Nancy Sinatra sings “Bang Bang,” my stomach ties itself in knots. Two episodes remaining in this season of Sexy Beast and I find myself torn. Part of me wants the story to go on for however long the filmmakers want. But another part hopes they wrap everything up, since high quality isn’t the kryptonite of short-sighted cancellation it was just a few short years ago. (Fatal Attraction, we hardly knew ye.) 

More importantly, though? I’m nervous as hell. My body’s reacting to the prospect of pressing play on this episode as though it thinks I’m actually in danger myself. The atmosphere of mounting dread, created by showrunner Michael Caleo and now helped along here by writer Alastair Galbraith and director Stephen “Teddy Bass” Moyer, has me that shook. 

As it needs to. In the original Sexy Beast, you know from moment you see Aitch, Jackie, Deedee, and Gal react to the news that Don Logan called that this man is terrifying; you spend the movie wondering when he’ll make good on his reputation. The TV show’s trick is to set whatever event gave Don that reputation—whatever made people stop thinking of him as weird and annoying and start thinking of him like an alien could burst out of his chest and eat them at any moment—in the indeterminate future. We know we’re getting closer to it, but we don’t know how far we’ve gone.

I reviewed the fantastic penultimate episode of Sexy Beast‘s first (?) season for Decider.

The “To be sure” paragraph in a review, the bit where the critic briefly tempers their overall praise or criticism with the reverse, usually comes pretty deep into things. Not this time, friends.

To be sure, the sixth and final episode of True Detective: Night Country has its high points. The highest is undoubtedly Liz Danvers’s ferocious tirade at Evangeline Navarro when the younger woman claims to have seen and heard Liz’s dead son Holden. “You don’t come here and tell me ‘he said,’ or I will shoot your sick fucking mouth right off your face,” she screams, the threat so blunt it almost sounds silly. “Leave my kid out of it, or I will rip you apart. I am not merciful. You understand? I got no mercy left.” Jodie Foster tears into the words like they’re between her and oxygen. 

It’s not just tremendous acting, it’s tremendous writing. Creator/writer/director Issa López gives Liz a wholly and appropriately furious and disgusted reaction to the fucking bunkum Evangeline is spewing. Dead kids returning to tell their mommies everything’s okay? Ghoulish. A ghoulish thing to claim! People who do so, who take advantage of the grieving whether for profit or ideology or psychological gratification, deserve to be screamed into silence.

Then the show itself goes and does exactly that. 

I reviewed the season finale of True Detective: Night Country for Decider.

Sexy Beast bristles with ideas, images, emotions, and sensations. This episode in particular is like the Hellraiser puzzle box, opening up and shooting chains in every direction, tipped with hooks that sink in and pull. 

[…]

Every single layer that Sexy Beast adds has enhanced rather than obscured the source text. It’s like if Coppola had made a TV series of the Vito Corleone section of The Godfather Part II. It is absolutely the goddamnedest thing. 

I reviewed this week’s amazing Sexy Beast for Decider.

Boy, this was a nice-looking episode of Tokyo Vice. Granted, this is Tokyo Vice, and looking nice is kind of its thing. But even by the show’s own neo-noirish standards, this week’s episode (“Old Law, New Twist”) had me wolf-whistling at the screen again and again. Director Josef Kubota Wladyka and cinematographer Daniel Satinoff understand that making Tokyo look like a nocturnal dreamworld is job one if this story is to succeed; whether indoors or outside, up close or from a bird’s eye view, they make the city and its people feel luminous.

I reviewed this week’s Tokyo Vice for Decider.

As anyone who’s watched a few episodes of the original Japanese Iron Chef can tell you, 1990s Tokyo was a deliciously glamorous place — a political, financial, and cultural world capital with a sumptuous nightlife and a seedy underbelly. (Granted, you didn’t see much of the seedy underbelly on Iron Chef unless you count particularly harsh judges.) The streets, the lights, the food, the storefronts and restaurants and bars and clubs and bikes and beautiful men and women and architecture…Tokyo Vice’s great strength is showing you why this place is worth killing and dying for in the first place. 

I’m back on the Tokyo Vice beat for Decider starting with my review of this week’s premiere.

Keep in mind that this comes hot on the heels of Deedee’s gutting storyline, involving a disastrous attempt to reconnect with her family over Sunday dinner. Her shitty father stonewalls her and eventually kicks her out. Her mother smiles and cries but does nothing. And her sister, who’s ostensibly her remaining friend in the family, is revealed to be the person who told Deedee’s father she’d started filming porn. (And kissing girls.) In a harrowing flashback, he bodily drags young Deedee from the house and throws her out. A more effective evocation of social conservatism — a political movement dedicated to giving men a pretext to abuse their spouses and children — I haven’t seen in a long time.

I reviewed this week’s Sexy Beast for Decider.

Don Logan is the Gollum of the Sexy Beast cinematic universe. Sometimes he’s harmless, fawning Sméagol — desperate for his friend buddy Gal’s affection, willing to catch a bullet if it means sparing his only friend in the world. Sometimes he’s Gollum, paranoid and dangerous, prone to flying off the handle at the most minor perceived slight and spurring the sort of altercations that end with cops dead at the hands of their own crooked partners in full view of multiple witnesses. The problem for Gal is you never know which Don you’re gonna get; this is also the problem for Don.

I reviewed this week’s Sexy Beast for Decider.

Sexy Beast the TV show is basically like someone Andor’d Sexy Beast the movie. How’s that for high praise? But that’s what creator Michael Caleo and his co-writers have done on this thing: They took an iconic work of cinema (referring to the whole Star Wars gestalt rather than Rogue One specifically here) and made something rich, challenging, ugly, and darkly humane out of a prequel that fleshes out the original work’s world at length. It’s the damnedest thing.

I reviewed episode three of Sexy Beast for Decider.

Oh. So it’s a real show then. Upping the ante of violence considerably — from shocking and stylish to prolonged, sexual, and horrific — this episode of Sexy Beast is at times a very tough watch. It probably had to be. There’s nothing wrong with a slick ‘90s British crime caper series featuring well-executed younger versions of characters we know and love from a bona fide movie masterpiece. But that movie is absolutely grueling to watch at times, however much its London gangster cool and brilliant soundtrack convince you otherwise. For this show to be more than a good time on the telly…well, it has to be a bad time, too.

I reviewed the second episode of Sexy Beast for Decider.

I don’t know how they do it. I really don’t. How do you take a stylistically unique, psychologically intense, stone-classic thriller from the past 40-odd years of English-language cinema and make a really good show out of it — not just once, but enough times that trend pieces can be written? What alchemy is this?

I reviewed the series premiere of the Sexy Beast prequel series for Decider. It’s really good!

This is what I was worried about. Three episodes in and it’s clear that barring a major, likely audience-infuriating twist at the end — gas leak, chemicals in the water, Navarro is schizophrenic like her mom and sister (I actually think this one’s semi-likely) — that True Detective: Night Country is also Ghost Country. It’s a land of magic and mystery, where the dead speak, the maimed know your name, someone in the darkness plays catch with an orange with you, and an ominous She has been awakened. It’s also a place where basically none of this is actually scary.

I reviewed this week’s True Detective for Decider.

The pleasure of the finale is in watching Vergara say goodbye to this character, whom I expect will be a career-changer for her, or at least ought to be. The fire largely extinguished, the crack pipe put down, she’s first stonily defiant, and then simply emptied out. She’s still Griselda, but you can feel that something vital isn’t there anymore. There’s no big breakdown either — it’s like someone let the air out of her, and she’s flopping along the highway at 15 miles an hour to her inevitable destination. And with that, we’ve reached ours as well, our eyes opened to Vergara’s potential and our drug-drama jones fully satiated. Not a bad outcome at all, for us anyway.

I reviewed the series finale of Griselda for Decider.