More or less a two-hander other than the major cameos by Emily Ratajkowski and Kit Harington — I know, I know, that’s not a two-hander, but you get what I’m saying — this is an episode of fairly modest ambition. It’s a snapshot of a point in time for these two people. Writer-director Lena Dunham is using Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe, two charismatic and attractive actors with believable chemistry, to depict what it’s like to be so into your new significant other that you pull an all nighter to have sex four times. That’s a fun topic to take on, and together they do it well.

I reviewed episode three of Too Much for Decider.

All told, this is a very promising episode. As Kim and Boss, Janciza Bravo and Leo Reich waltz onto the screen as if Too Much is a show about them, not Jessica — the exact right energy for these characters, who are clearly the stars of the shows running perpetually in their own minds. Meanwhile, I love the way writer-director Lena Dunham gradually but unmistakably reveals that Felix, for all his kindness and warmth, is kind of a cad. For all that Jessica’s first two days in London have resembled one of her beloved Brit romances, she’s got a rockier road ahead of her than she realizes. I’m looking forward to watching her (and Megan Stalter, who’s a delight) rant and rave her way down it.

I reviewed the second episode of Too Much for Decider.

Lena Dunham is a fascinating talent. I’ve written that as this review’s first sentence fully expecting a number of readers to hit EJECT and bail right away. Let’s give them a minute.

Okay, they’re gone? Everyone else settled in? We’re good? Great. 

Now that we’re among friends, Lena Dunham is a fascinating talent. Girls, the only dramedy I’ve ever enjoyed, is as perfect a cringe-comedy portrait of Dunham’s age group and demimonde as Curb Your Enthusiasm is of Larry David’s; simply substitute fabulously wealthy middle-aged showbiz types from New York who now live in L.A. with liberal-arts college grads bumbling around Brooklyn trying to find themselves and/or get laid and you’re basically looking at the same show. Seriously, cue up an episode of Girls on HBO Max and mentally replace Michael Penn’s twee indie-guitar score with the familiar Curb stock music. Now do you get what she was doing?

Of course, Girls also frequently got serious, as dramedies do, and here’s where Dunham’s chops as a director come in. A tremendous chronicler of The City and life in it, she has an eye for beautifully lit street scenes and skylines and an ear for the kind of dialogue people regret shouting at each other in those streets once they’ve calmed down or sobered up. After you’ve finished Curb-ifying that episode of Girls, stay on the HBO app and watch the first episode of Industry: A showcase for Dunham’s talents as a director of both actors and images, it’s one of the best pilots ever made. Dunham did that!

So it was with considerable excitement that I cued up Too Much. Loosely based on Dunham’s own life and co-created with her British musician husband Luis Felber, it tells the story of a young American woman with a media job who moves to London and falls in love with a British musician. Hey, write what you know!

I’m covering Too Much, Lena Dunham’s fun new Netflix rom-com, for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.

Even if there isn’t much tension involved in the question of whether the title character, played by the show’s only marketable star, dies in the season one finale, there’s still just, y’know, the pleasures of watching Murderbot. Solid jokes, solid action, impressive gore, a clever spin on robotics and actual artificial intelligence, some cutaways to Murderbot’s stories, a monster or two maybe, and off-kilter romantic/sexual tension between just about everyone in the crew — that’s the Murderbot promise, and I see no reason why the finale won’t deliver.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Murderbot for Decider. It was delayed due to an inexplicable technical glitch, which seems appropriate.

The big problem with all this is pretty much what you’d expect it to be: Riri has never seemed stupid enough to literally shake hands with the Devil. Nor has she ever deluded herself about what N.A.T.A.L.I.E. really is or was, not even when she came around to treating the simulation, if not like her old friend, then at least like a new one. It doesn’t hold water that she’d risk turning into a berserk demonically powered killing machine forced to do the business of an infernal devil-king in order to revive what amounts to a really good version of Siri. Smart people get scammed all the time, I get it. But to get scammed by the guy whose minion just tried to tear your face off with his claws? That’s not the Riri Williams I know. 

It feels like another place where Ironheart’s short six-episode length can really be felt. With more time, maybe we could have gotten Riri to a place where her desperation to revive the N.A.T.A.L.I.E. AI felt raw and real. Maybe turning to the evil cosmic entity responsible for creating the supervillain who’d just tried to kill her would have felt like the desperate act of a heartbroken friend, instead of the impulsive decision of a genius hero who should know better.

The glass-half-full way of looking at it all, though, is that Ironheart is the story of a Marvel superhero permitted to be kind of a fuck-up. She starts the season by getting expelled from MIT after maiming a professor. She ends the season by selling her soul to the Lord of Lies. In between she joins a gang of bank robbers, leaves a defenseless man to die, jams up a friend with legal trouble so bad he becomes a supervillain to cope, and (admittedly this bit was an accident) creates the least ethical form of MCU AI since Ultron. 

That’s all kind of interesting, right? As clumsy and rushed as it was to get there, the deal with Mephisto was necessary to undercut the sense that Riri had made everything right with everyone she could, done her good deed for the day, and could soar off into the sunset in her bitchin’ new suit. That would have erased all the work done in the paragraph above in creating a character whose intelligence and impulsivity are constantly either working in concert or at odds. Whether or not the ending works for you depends on whether or not you think her impulsivity is really capable of beating her intelligence that decisively. 

I reviewed the season finale of Ironheart for Decider.

Thanks to an almost unnecessarily heartfelt performance by Alden Ehrenreich during their jailhouse meeting, Zeke’s assessment rings loudly as we watch the rest of the episode play out: “You’re just a selfish kid who can’t take any responsibility for herself. You lie, you cheat, you manipulate, you’ll do anything you can to save yourself, even if that means hurting other people in the process.” 

This is unfair, in that it completely erases any kind of context or consideration of motive. But if you were in Zeke’s place — or Parker’s, or the crew’s, or Ronnie’s, or Xavier’s, or N.A.T.A.L.I.E.’s — would you be inclined to be charitable to her? She’s not a bad person, but in much the same way that she scavenged and scrounged for parts to rebuild her armor, Riri essentially took the people around her and assembled them into a second suit, using them to achieve her own ends. Parker’s not the only person with a superhuman garment that’s draining their humanity, then — but Riri’s the one with a fighting chance of getting hers back. 

I reviewed the fourth episode of Ironheart for Decider.

Squid Game didn’t need its second and third seasons, no, but I’m glad they existed anyway. The imagery makes every other TV dystopia look like they’re sleepwalking through the design phase, the supporting cast is unforgettable, and Lee Jung-jae — who spends the bulk of this third season mute, his face his only instrument — delivers an incredible performance in a role without much precedent on the small screen. It’s not hard to see why so many millions of people wanted to swallow this show’s bitter, bitter pill.

But if there’s a central theme to the second and third seasons of Squid Game, maybe the meaninglessness of rules is it. Maybe it’s that Gi-hun doomed himself the moment he agreed to continue playing by their rules — that no matter how good his intentions or how hard his efforts, you simply cannot destroy the system from within. Writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk presents life as an epic struggle between humanism and barbarism, in which barbarism holds all the cards while humanism rolls all the dice. The only way anyone wins is by refusing to play at all.

I reviewed the series finale of Squid Game for Decider.

“All right,” says Player 100. “If there are no objections, let’s go ahead and vote on Player 222’s elimination.” Player 100 presents this as an entirely reasonable statement, and that’s how it’s greeted by his co-conspirators in the final game. In the tradition of the nightly decision whether or not to continue playing, they’ve agreed that a majority vote will settle the matter of whose lives to sacrifice so that the others might live. Player 100 is trying to get things on track, keep things nice and orderly according to agreed-upon precedent and procedure. No more messy arguments that are beneath our dignity as colleagues — It’s time to democratically decide whom to murder.

Taken together, Squid Game’s second and third seasons are one long allegory for sham democracies. I mean, you hear how fucked up their logic sounds when it’s presented by Player 100, right? Vote how they will, the majority can never rightfully take away the rights, or the lives, of the minority. Our inalienable human rights are just that — unseverable from our status as human beings. They are not subject to vote or plebiscite, to Supreme Court ruling or executive order. They are ours forever. You can no more vote them away than you can vote away the bones curled hard in our fists or the hearts that beat in our chests.

But that’s the version of “democracy” that the Squid Game’s sadistic creators — the in-world ones, I mean, not the very nice filmmakers — have presented their players. It’s not dissimilar from the version we’ve been largely forced to accept here in the real world. Illegitimately condemning other people to torment and death because there are more of some than there are of others, the players participate in a series of zero-sum ballots where voters can only conceive of themselves as members of opposing teams since the stakes are so high. And no amount of voting can break the cycle of violence and degradation, not as long as the loathsome, mega-rich VIPs (David Sayers, Jane Wong, Bryan Bucco, Jordan Lambertoni, and Kevin Yorn, each of them almost unbearably obnoxious) want it to continue. 

And by this point in the games, it’s all been boiled down to its essence: Can you ethically vote to kill a baby, and are the results of that vote binding?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Squid Game for Decider.

Okay, fine, I’m gonna come right out and ask it: Are they gonna kill the baby? I know this is television and 99 times out of 100 shows that aren’t Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon are not gonna kill the baby. But this is Squid Game. Yanking the audience’s heartstrings as hard as possible until the damn things snap is what Squid Game does. So I’ll ask it again: Is Squid Game gonna kill that goddamn baby?

I reviewed episode four of Squid Game Season 3 for Decider.

My understanding of the multiverse theory is almost entirely science-fictional in nature. It has something to do with probabilities, or maybe divergent timelines, I dunno; mostly I know the multiverse is where you find a few dozen Spider-Men. 

But it isn’t hard to picture a multiverse in which the island game complex from Squid Game, the severed floor from Severance, the Island from Lost, and the Village from The Prisoner each exist by themselves in their own separate universe, one standing in for the other. After all, when you get down to it they all serve the same purpose: trapping people in inescapable, inexplicable torment, the better to crack them open and see what comes spilling out.

As such, they’re kind of the perfect TV shows, aren’t they? By condemning Gi-hun and his fellow contestants to keep on playing and playing; by forcing Mark S. and his coworkers to keep on working and working; by forcing Jack and the rest of the castaways to keep surviving and surviving; by forcing Number Six to keep trying and trying to escape a place he also keeps trying and trying to figure out — by doing these things, Squid Game and Severance and Lost and The Prisoner are really only replicating the circumstances through which television shows in general entertain us.

Was anyone forcing Sam and Diane to stay in that bar, or Laura Palmer’s friends and family to stay in that small town, or Walt and Jesse to stay in that meth lab? Okay, maybe that one’s a bad example. But you get my point, right? The “weird prison of the mind” vibe of The Prisoner and its spiritual successors only renders more literal the purgatorial conditions of basically all television shows. Gi-hun and Mark S. and Jack and Six are all stuck where they’re stuck until we in the viewing audience — or the powers that be in the network suites — set them free.

I reviewed the third episode of Squid Game season 3 for Decider.

Don’t let overfamiliarity cloud your vision: Squid Game is one of the most singular sci-fi visions to reach television since The Prisoner 60 years ago. 

I reviewed the second episode of Squid Game Season 3 for Decider.

However it goes down, I’m impressed by how much mileage Murderbot has gotten out of its simple premise, small cast, and brief runtime. More would-be sci-fi mindbenders could stand to install a Keep It Simple, Stupid module.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Murderbot for Decider.

Put it all together and it’s one of the most entertaining hours of Marvel superhero TV I’ve seen that doesn’t involve a blind ninja lawyer. 

I reviewed episode three of Ironheart for Decider.

Writer-creator Chinaka Hodge and lead actor Dominique Thorne don’t quite surmount the standard “Here’s who I am and here’s who everyone is and here’s how I feel and here’s why I feel that way and here’s what I need” over-explanatory first-episode syndrome, but they do their level best. You can rarely judge a show by its pilot in that regard at any rate, since the structural requirements of a first episode are so much different even than the needs of a second. 

A bigger problem for the script is the sense that it’s out of step with the moment. Riri’s lionization of billionaires and, as they put it in Speed Racer, the unassailable might of money feels real real weird right now. So does the constant invocation of so-called AI as the wave of the future. I get that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, AI means “Paul Bettany” rather than “fascist technology developed by rich men who want to own slaves that steals from writers and artists in an attempt to eliminate freedom of expression and thought,” but at a certain point you have to adjust with the times.

None of this would be so bad if it weren’t for the two most recent Disney+ franchise dramas of note. The last MCU show, Daredevil: Born Again, was an anti-Trump allegory that was as subtle as a crushed skull. Andor, Ironheart’s immediate predecessor, is somehow one of the most politically radical things ever aired on American television, to the point where thousands of people from MSNBC resist libs to honest to god leftists (ask me how I know!) quoted from it unironically while protesting against Trump and his ICE gestapo on No Kings Day. Those are big shoes to fill.

Of course, you can simply sidestep the shoes entirely, and tell a kickass story about a woman of steel who battles a guy in an evil cape. I’d be 100% down with that! Certainly the fight choreography we see in this episode feels promising — it’s not the brutal bonecrunching of the Born Again and its Netflix antecedents, but it’s fluid and physical and fun. Which, when you think about it, is maybe exactly how a superhero story should be.

But Ironheart has something going for it that those other shows don’t: it’s…well, I was gonna say “unapologetically Black,” but it’s the kind of show that recognizes that being unapologetically anything only gets you so far. Every time Riri pipes up with some prepared speech about she’s a special young giant being made to feel small while rousing music swells on the soundrack, someone’s there to undercut the easy catharsis of speechification. I think there’s a very real possibility that by the end of this short six-episode season, Riri may feel very differently about the almighty dollar, too, especially if an obvious evildoer like Parker is speaking up on its behalf. We’ll just have to stay tuned for the next issue — I mean, the next episode — to find out.

In the meantime, though, just seeing Chicago photographed lovingly, while the most powerful man on the planet demonizes and attacks it…just hearing a guy say hello by saying “Hey, Black people,” which feels like a radical statement while books and people are being purged based on their race by the white supremacist government…just seeing Black characters who are straightforwardly portrayed as brilliant without a single concession made to segregationist anti-DEI scaremongering…This is a world people are actively trying to take away from us, even within our imaginations. These things are not nothing. In a way, these things are the only thing.

I reviewed the series premiere of Ironheart for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show for the duration.

From start to finish, this episode’s entire “creature/other creature/monster sex/gross eggs/evil robot/monster’s revenge” sequence is a perfectly executed daisy chain of escalating sci-fi action and gross-out splatstick humor. Rampaging robots, Lovecraftian beasts, huge gooey 1980s horror movie style slime-dripping monster eggs — this thing has it all. It serves as a bombastic bookend to the subdued first scene, which relies not on special effects or spectacular gore but the performance of David Dastmalchian as Gurathin, whose combination of shame, gratitude, and awkwardness about his checkered past and the way Mensah rescued him from it is riveting to watch. 

This is a really fun show, man!

I reviewed this week’s Murderbot for Decider.

Murderbot is a triumph of casual viewing. It’s breezy without feeling flimsy and disposable. It’s intense without demanding that you respond to that intensity with your entire mind, body, and soul. The violence is taken seriously and depicted graphically, but it’s still more in the “Halloween haunted house” vein than the “Jesus Christ this is a real endurance test” mode. 

Everyone’s performance is lively and engaging. The biggest star in the piece steps back and mutes his wattage — it’s inherent to his character — so that everyone else shines brighter. There’s interesting romantic chemistry going on between a whole bunch of people with interesting faces, people who are handsome and beautiful in a real way rather than a movie-star-with-veneers way. 

Every episode is substantial but short, and you can watch it with your laptop on your lap, your feet kicked up on the sofa, stoned and eating pretzels and hummus quite comfortably. (Ask me how I know!) All told, Murderbot is my favorite way to spend 20 minutes on TV this season. 

I reviewed this week’s Murderbot for Decider.

To paraphrase Ghostbusters: Yes, it’s true. This Murderbot has no dick.

I mean, so we’ve seen, in, uh, non-graphic detail. Whatever organic components went into the construction of our reluctantly, confusedly heroic SecUnit, a penis was not one of them. But that doesn’t stop Leebeebee (Anna Konkle), the delightfully stupidly named sole survivor of the DeltFall habitat massacre, from fantasizing about his imaginary potential penis at length. No pun intended. 

I reviewed the most recent episode of Murderbot for Decider.

There’s one moment in this episode in particular that I think speaks to a much broader problem with The Better Sister as a whole: a phone call in which Chloe reports Agent Olivero’s misconduct to an FBI complaint hotline. The operator’s dialogue is stiff and wooden. The report, if you can call it that, goes into no details whatsoever beyond saying his behavior was inappropriate and hanging up. This takes place while actor Jessica Biel is behind the wheel of a car, with sunglasses on, effectively making it impossible for her to convey emotion. 

And the entire conversation lasts about 20 seconds. It’s so abrupt, so goofy, like on the level of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie, that I actually laughed. The effort feels so minimal! If The Better Sister had put half the energy into making little scenes like this work that it did into ensuring everyone dresses exclusively in shades of blue-green and orange-brown, it might have been something, well, better.

I reviewed the finale of The Better Sister for Decider. What a turkey!

I miss the days when people on television wore colors. Sure, television is still in color, technically, but on far too many shows that color runs the gamut from Point A to Point A. Everything is blue and orange, apricot and teal, denim and wood, aquamarine shirts and orange skin tones. The fourth season of True Detective Season 4 served as a real Magic Eye poster for this critic in this regard — once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it, and now I see it everywhere, up to including otherwise brilliant works of art like the second season of Andor. And I’m not crazy — oh no, not I! Watch this episode of The Better Sister and take a drink every time you see a shot with that exact blue-orange palette or a variation thereof. By the end you’ll be drunker than Nicki after getting roofied by her husband Adam.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Better Sister for Decider.

There is, however, one genuinely strong scene in this episode, the cold open. In a flashback, we see Adam in a confessional at a Catholic church. Rather than confide his own sins in the priest, however, he enumerates Ethan’s. He sees the boy as a fat, slothful stoner-gamer who’s ungrateful for everything Adam’s worked so hard to provide him with, and he sees his mother, Chloe, as an enabler who keeps throwing bad money after good where the boy is concerned. Corey Stoll is quietly but very frightening in this scene; you can feel how his anger would warp Nicky, Chloe, and Ethan around itself one after the other. 

It takes the priest to point out that he hasn’t actually confessed any sins to be forgiven, but he grants Adam absolution anyway. When Adam asks what for, the priest replies, “You can name it, son.” He can tell this is a man who can’t even admit to himself the things he’s done wrong, but he knows they’re there, and he’ll need to face up to it sooner or later. 

Stoll’s performance makes the scene, but it’s beautifully and moodily lit as well, it deepens the character of Adam, and it even retroactively explains his career as a prosecutor and his current work with the FBI — he was a do-gooder because he’d done bad and wanted to atone for it. In other words, the whole thing makes sense, aesthetically, narratively, emotionally, intellectually. It can be done. I just wish this show did it more often.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The Better Sister for Decider.