2023-2024 Bonus Entries

(Excellent shows that started last year and ended up on a lot of 2023 lists but which didn’t air their final episodes till January 2024)

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Created by Chris Black and Matt Fraction; based on the work of Ishirō Honda and others (Apple TV+)

The best compliment I can pay this spinoff series from the Legendary Godzilla/Kong movie series, which in quality ranges from dumb fun to just plain dumb, is this: I remember the romance better than the monsters. Actors Wyatt Russell, Mari Yamamoto, and Anders Holm capture the spark and the ache of a love triangle as well as I’ve seen it done, pretty much, with Anna Sawai providing an echo as their younger counterpart. The season finale reunion between Russell’s aged character (played as an older man by his father Kurt) and Yamamoto’s time-marooned one, scored by the Ross Brothers, is movie magic plain and simple.

Fargo

Created by Noah Hawley; based on the work of Ethan and Joel Coen (FX/Hulu)

A strong contender for the strongest overall season of Noah Hawley’s still-controversial Coen Brothers homage, this most recent entry shares many of its predecessors’ concern with the rapacious forces on the move in America today, personified by Jon Hamm’s monstrous enforcer of the patriarchy, Sheriff Roy Tillman. Its bold contention, embodied by Juno Temple’s brave battered wife Dot Lyon, is that we don’t have to swallow what they feed us.

The Curse

Created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie (Paramount+)

Like Too Old to Die Young, the first season of Them, and the Adult Swim Infomericials This House Has People in It and Unedited Footage of a Bear, this cringe-horror masterpiece feels less like a television program and more like an acute, crescendoing mental health crisis. I hated, hated, hated the pilot, which I thought was smug and self-congratulatory about the dark side of liberal do-gooding; by the end of the nightmarish and somehow prophetic finale I thought I was watching one of the best shows I’d ever seen. I was right the second time.

The Top 15 Shows of 2024

15. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Created by J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay; based on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien (Prime Video)

Jeff Bezos is an evil man, and he prefers to keep the company of evil men these days, so I wish I could say that this show was as much an embarrassing folly this season as it was during its initial installment. Alas! Like The Wheel of Time and Foundation before it, it got gud, son. The credit is largely due to the emotionally and physically abusive relationship between Charles Edwards’s Da Vinci–like Elf genius Celebrimbor and Charlie Vickers’s gaslighting Dark Lord in sheep’s clothing, Sauron. This season made me understand why these particular guys wanted to make this particular show. I felt the purpose.

14. Presumed Innocent

Created by David E. Kelley; based on the book by Scott Turow (Apple TV+)

Clive Barker once explained that he made his monsters sexually compelling because that’s the only convincing way to write characters stupid enough to open the door that has the reader shouting “Don’t go in there!” Kelley’s adaptation of Turow’s legal thriller rightfully focuses on the explosive sexual connection between Jake Gyllenhaal’s leading man and his other woman, played in flashback by Renate Reinsve. If they make you believe in that, they can make you believe anything else. Bonus points for the insufferable antagonists muttered into life by Peter Sarsgaard and O.T. Fagbenle.

13. Tokyo Vice

Created by J. T. Rogers; based on the book by Jake Adelstein (Max)

How often do you get to say “this stylish, sumptuous crime thriller” and really mean it? But Tokyo Vice‘s second season was all that and more — an almost Dickensian (apologies to David Simon) look at the underbelly of a lost time and place. It delivered on everything the first season only promised.

12. The Old Man

Created by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine; based on the book by Thomas Perry (FX/Hulu)

Another sophomore outing that bettered its already pretty good first season by a substantial margin. This season’s setting in the rugged wilds of Afghanistan gave it mythic last-gunslinger gravitas. It’s a fine showcase for the formidable talents of Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow, but this was really young gun Alia Shawkat’s time to shine.

11. The Regime

Created by Will Tracy (HBO/Max)

In this sharp and subtle satire that actually looks as interesting as its dialogue reads, a mentally ill autocrat and her also mentally ill macho object of obsession plunge their country into a whirlpool of quack medicine, economic ruin, diplomatic isolation, and civil war. I dunno, it all seems funnier when Kate Winslet does it.

10. Fallout

Created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet; based on the games by Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and others (Prime Video)

Though it’s one of the more egregious offenders in this year’s woeful trend of truly over-the-top teal-and-orange color grading, Fallout can be forgiven: The blue-and-yellow jumpsuits were taken right from the game, and there’s only so much you can do when you’re filming a desert wasteland against an azure sky of deepest summer. That aside, this is an unexpectedly nasty and batshit anti-capitalist/anti-American post-apocalyptic sci-fi satire from your friends at Amazon. The lead performances of Walton Goggins as a strangely sexy revenant and Ella Purnell as a pretty straightforwardly sexy fish out of water sell the whole thing.

9. Disclaimer

Created by Alfonso Cuarón; based on the book by Renée Knight (Apple TV+)

Disclaimer features arguably the year’s hottest scene and its most harrowing. It’s a sinister little dance between Cate Blanchett in glamorous Tár mode and Kevin Kline as the kind of English schoolteacher you might hear Roger Waters sing about. It’s directed with a unique eye for light and color by Alfonso Cuarón, whose work filming in the ocean feels like yet another technological feat of filmmaking in a career characterized by them. It’s not perfect, but that’s plenty for me.

8. Them

Created by Little Marvin (Prime Video)

While less brain-breakingly brutal and disturbing than its debut season, which is honestly fine with me, the second installment of Little Marvin’s horror anthology series cements returning star Deborah Ayorinde’s place in the pantheon of great horror actors. There’s a fun scary-movie feel to some of the proceedings, which makes the really bitter parts that much harder to swallow.

7. Shōgun

Created by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks; based on the book by James Clavell (FX/Hulu)

Or: How I Found Out The New York Times Won’t Let You Call An Assisted Suicide Erotic. Featuring at least four of the year’s most memorable performances (Anna Sawai, Cosmo Jarvis, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tadanobu Asano), this tragedy of manners was every bit as epic in feel as its sci-fi and fantasy counterparts. But its emphasis on restraint gave it a ruminative, romantic, melancholy tone all its own.

6. Supersex

Created by Francesca Manieri (Netflix)

A desire for sex so insatiable and profound that it takes over your whole life until there’s not much else left: This is traditionally the stuff of European art films. To my great surprise, and ultimately my benefit, it’s also the stuff of this season-length biopic of the notoriously intense Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi, played by Suburra star Alessandro Borghi. Rocco’s background of poverty and savage bullying, his emotionally incestuous relationships with his mother and brother, his treatment of lust and pleasure as matters of paramount importance no matter the cost — this is livewire stuff, handled with skill, care, and artistry.

5. Sexy Beast

Created by Michael Caleo; based on the screenplay by Louis Mellis and David Scinto (Paramount+)

I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it too: A prequel to the first in director Jonathan Glazer’s run of back-to-back-to-back-to-back movie masterpieces? Best of luck to you! But intrigue got the better of me, and boy am I glad it did. This is — realize I understand the weight of this statement — a worthy companion piece to the original film. As the young thief Gal Dove, James McArdle has incandescent romantic chemistry with Sarah Greene as his true love Deedee, and makes a believable big-brother figure to the strange and belligerent Don Logan (Emun Elliott.) But the romance is messy and complicated and unpleasant, as these things often are. Behind it all lurks Stephen Moyer as up-and-coming gangster Teddy Bass, somehow as terrifying in his way as Ian McShane was in his.

4. Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story

Created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan (Netflix)

Ryan Murphy’s empire is what it is, but you do, under these circumstances, gotta hand it to him: Between The People v. O.J. Simpson, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Dahmer, and Monsters, he’s given us probably all four of the best true-crime miniseries ever made. The story of the Menendez brothers is handled with immense respect for the gravity of the subject matter and backbreakingly frank dialogue as to its horrifying nature. Directed by Michael Uppendahl, the fifth episode, a single shot of two actors, made me sick, as well it should.

3. Interview with the Vampire

Created by Rolin Jones; based on the books by Anne Rice (AMC/AMC+)

Like the first season of The Terror did with Dan Simmon’s sprawling, detailed work of historical horror, the first season of Interview with the Vampire took everything good about its source material, jettisoned everything bad, and improved on the results in every conceivable way. For its second season, IWTV improved on its first season in every conceivable way, ending with its absolute best episode to date. That’s a fucking feat, man. This is the most drama-club goth show ever made, with all the beauty and the bloodshed that implies. With the aid of wrenchingly physical performances by all its leads, it uses the supernatural to supercharge the ecstasy of love and the agony of loss.

2. House of the Dragon

Created by George R.R. Martin and Ryan Condal; based on the books by George R.R. Martin (HBO/Max)

I believe in Westeros. Westeros has made my fortune, such as it is. And I write my reviews in the Westerosi fashion. When a show uses size, scale, spectacle, and the supernatural to convey ideas and emotions, to me it’s like a whole new kind of thing, as much an opera as a drama. These nude incestuous psychopaths flying around on their giant war-crime reptiles are, quite simply, playing my song.

1. Industry

Created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay (HBO/Max)

I can’t believe I was late to this show. I can’t believe no one told me about this show. I can’t believe no one grabbed me by the shoulders and said Sean, Sean, Sean, this is a show for you. What if Billions, Mad Men, Mr. Robot, and Girls were all the same TV series, and every episode featured sex scenes as frank and explicit as…well, I can’t think of any points of comparison, really. This show treats sex seriously, even as it depicts its rapacious young (and envious middle-aged) hypercapitalists as beautiful sociopaths, their bodies colliding against one another in the water they make their living boiling. As a bonus, you get to watch episode four, “White Mischief,” in which director Zoé Wittock takes Uncut Gems to After Hours school. It’s the year’s most invigorating hour of television, and it feels like this show slapped it down like a casually spent hundred, pulled from a bottomless pocket.

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE FINALES OF THE CURSE AND FARGO SEASON 5

It’s this collapse of meaning that frightens me the most about The Curse. The idea of falling into the sky is a common enough fear for anyone who’s laid back and looked up at the blue yonder and suddenly found themselves gripping the grass a little tighter. Once it starts happening to Asher, he and Whitney and their employees come up with a series of rational explanations and practical solutions, none of which mean anything in the face of a power capable of flinging a human being clean off the face of the earth and into the frozen space beyond. Everything Asher believed was true ceased to be true, in the most rapid and complete way imaginable. 

Fargo slams the breaks on all that. There’s a version of this season that ends with a happy suburban family systematically executed by a supernatural entity whose only moral code is that debts must be paid, a version in which everything that spousal abuse survivor Dorothy Lyon was able to put together for herself and the new husband and child she loves is dumped into that metaphysical garbage can by a psychopath. In the case of this television program, anyway, that’s not the version we got.

I wrote about the January 2024 finales of Nathan Fielder & Benny Safdie’s The Curse and Noah Hawley’s Fargo Season 5 as two contrasting visions of the future for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World. It’s a subscriber-only piece, so subscribe!

We’re talking all five seasons of Noah Hawley’s Fargo on our latest subscriber-only episode. This is a good one!

The latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Podcast takes a look back at the year in television, as Stefan and I review my picks for the ten best shows of 2023. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

In offering the biscuit to Ole, Dorothy is essentially rewriting the very similar sequence from No Country for Old Men, in which the freakish and seemingly unstoppable hitman Anton Chigurrh (Javier Bardem) pays an identically menacing visit to Carlar Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald), long after his business with her husband Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) seemed to have concluded. Like Dorothy tells Ole, Carla Jean tells Anton that his strange code of honor isn’t some binding thing placed on him from some external authority — it’s a choice he makes, or doesn’t make, to continue hurting people. He could stop if he wanted, stop right then and there.

The Coens’ oeuvre and the Fargo TV show alike are full of characters like this — strange, implacable killers who seem like visitors from another world. (Indeed, they usually are alien to “normal” American culture in some way, in terms of nationality or subculture.) No Country’s Chigurrh, Raising Arizona’s Leonard Smalls, Miller’s Crossing’s the Dane (J.E. Freeman), a character I won’t spoil for you in Barton Fink. On the show, you’ve got Season 1’s Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton), Season 2’s Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClarnon) and the Kitchen Brothers (Brad and Todd Mann), Season 3’s V.M. Varga (David Thewlis) and his henchmen Yuri (Goran Bogdan) and Meemo (Andy Yu), Season 4’s Constant Calamita (Gaetano Bruno), plus the recurring character of Mr. Wrench (Russell Harvard). Whether they live or die, these men all have one thing in common: Ain’t no one serving them biscuits. No one’s telling them they can refuse to swallow the shit the rich and awful make us eat. No one’s telling them they can be forgiven.

I went long on the end of Fargo Season 5 for Decider. (You can skip the servicey bits if that’s not your thing.)

When it comes to men, I have a type. Fortunately for me, this type of man is common across the Prestige TV space: The Hound on Game of Thrones, Richard Harrow on Boardwalk Empire, Wild Bill Hickok on Deadwood, and Hanzee Dent on our very own Fargo. Simply put, I like men who have been absolutely immiserated by how good they are at killing people. 

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything when I say that whether they live or die, these characters rarely have a happy ending waiting for them. Their line of work is both physically dangerous and emotionally poisonous, making emotional survival difficult even if literal survival is achieved. That’s what makes these men such tragic figures: They are capable of seeing all this, but they’ve despaired of changing it. As Wild Bill told Charlie Utter in Deadwood: “Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?”

I reviewed the excellent finale of Fargo Season 5 for Decider.

Fargo loves a good misdirect. Remember the bit in this week’s episode — “The Useless Hand,” the penultimate episode of the show’s stellar fifth season — where Dorothy opens up all the gas valves on Roy Tillman’s stove? You anticipate fireworks that never come. Roy smells the gas, stops one of his dipshit minions from lighting a cigarette, turns off the stove, has the boys open all the doors and windows, boom, problem solved. 

All the gambit manages to do is tip Roy off that Dorothy has been in the house, which he honestly might have eventually guessed anyway. (He’s very quick to figure out she’s hiding someplace she thinks they wouldn’t expect.) And he would have figured that out the moment he went up to his bedroom and found his wife knocked out cold — not that the sight gives him a second’s thought of stopping his hunt to help the woman when he does stumble across her. Not our Roy!

The point is that neither expected outcome, neither the worst nor the best, comes to pass. The gas doesn’t make or break Dorothy’s escape attempt. She doesn’t kill Roy with it, and she doesn’t get killed because of it. (It’s a close call in the end, but again, it would have been a close call regardless.) The show just wants you to think something might happen. Creator Noah Hawley, who wrote this episode, constructed the show’s entire approach to action and suspense around allowing the viewer’s mind to spin as fast as it can for as long as it can before he finally lowers the boom. 

Later in the episode, state trooper Whit Farr warns the task force of feds and state cops he’s assembled to rescue Dorothy not to shoot at her even if she appears armed and dangerous, which she almost certainly will. “This story,” he tells them, “will not end with us crushing the victim with the helping hand.” Puts an idea into your head, doesn’t it? Doesn’t beat you over the head with it, but slides it right in there nonetheless. And there it will stay for one more week. You can rotate it in your mind like a cube if you want. I’m pretty sure Noah Hawley wants you to.

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

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THIS WEEK’S EPISODE OF FARGO AHEAD

Danish falls victim to one of the central schisms of this season, which is the split on the political right wing between the true believers, like Roy Tillman, and the rich people, like Lorraine, who think they’re just using the true believers to keep their taxes low. Danish thinks he knows which side is really in charge, but Roy is the man with the gun, and he thinks otherwise.
You definitely have a sense with Jennifer’s character, Lorraine, that there’s still humanity in her. She cares about her family, and wants to protect them, so it’s at least as far as that. Obviously she’s willing to destroy other people’s lives in service of that goal without any real compunction.

But then you have Jon’s character, who believes he’s empowered by God, and therefore infallible. And can commit murders, randomly, constantly! He believes that if a man’s intentions are pure, everything he does is right, which is a much more dangerous mindset. It’s a psychopathy: You are incapable of feeling empathy, feeling any guilt or remorse for any of your actions, no matter how heinous, because you know, for a fact, you’re right in everything you do.

It reminded me of this fascinating little moment earlier in the season, where Danish is trying to leave Lorraine’s compound, but one of the security guards he himself hired won’t let him leave until he shows ID. It doesn’t make any sense, but the guard has the gun, so he makes the rules.
The power Danish thinks he has is illusory. All his power stems from Lorraine, he doesn’t have any power that’s vested in him, but he thinks he does. When the guard blocks him, it’s a little taste of what’s coming with Sheriff Roy.

When he sees Roy’s gun, in my mind, Danish is just disbelieving, because usually people are afraid of him. He’s like, “No, people are afraid of me! This isn’t gonna happen! He’s not gonna do this.” Right up until the moments the shots are fired, he still believes he has a fearsome presence.

Danish’s disbelief is so convincing that for a minute I didn’t believe it either. Roy pulls out his gun and I’m just like, Hmmm, what’s he getting at here?
[Laughs.] Then the misdirection worked! Good!

I interviewed Dave freaking Foley about Fargo for Vulture! Holy cow!

I had an absolute blast watching this episode, even when it made me feel like curling up and dying.

I reviewed this week’s fantastic episode of Fargo, our first early candidate for episode of the year, for Decider.

9. The Idol (HBO/Max)

Fuck what you heard. The Idol, 2023’s most hated show, is far and away the TV I’ve thought, and argued, about the most this year. Hype and backlash cycles notwithstanding, Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye created a sleazy, lurid, funny, fucked-up, incredibly straightforward satire of the starlet factory à la Paul Verhoeven. Unlike, say, Succession, which spoofs the ultra-wealthy without simultaneously trying to feel like Dallas or Empire, The Idol sends up the sex-and-drugs world of pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp in the year’s most underappreciated performance) and her grifter svengali Tedros Tedros (Tesfaye in the year’s second most underappreciated performance) while also embodying it. 

The two leads act out their intense and at times humiliating material without a net, but they’re buoyed by a Greek chorus of comedic performances by the likes of Hank Azaria, Rachel Sennott, Eli Roth, Jane Adams, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who turns on a dime to deliver genuinely affecting material whenever called for). All of these terrific actors perform in front of a backdrop of lush retro synths and strings courtesy of Tesfaye, Levinson, and composer and super-producer Mike Dean, appearing as himself. In a sane world this would have just been Pop Starship Troopers — gnarly, nasty, sexy, fun, appreciated by those who get it and basically ignored by everyone else. It couldn’t sustain the discourse around it, and shouldn’t have had to, when its meaning was so plain to see, and enjoy

I wrote about the ten best television shows of 2023 for Decider. I’m enormously proud of this list. The variety I’ve seen across TV critics’ best-of lists this year can be nothing but good for both TV and criticism, and I’m glad to have contributed in my own way. Anyway, I believe in all these shows and think they’re worth your time.

Social justice separatism is having a moment. On Yellowjackets, purple-clad adherents to the self-help group founded by plane crash survivor Lottie help the addicted and outcast find peace on their compound. On Mrs. Davis, a convent of fun-loving nuns holes up in an abandoned motel in the Nevada desert. On Foundation, a commune of psychically powered “mentallics” live a life free from persecution by the galaxy’s normies in their home on a distant planet. On The Changeling, a group of women forced to kill the demonic creatures that took the place of their children take refuge on an island off Manhattan accessible only via magic. And now, on Fargo, a community of abuse survivors perform cathartic puppet shows and take on the name of their founder: Roy Tillman’s first wife, and Nadine Tillman/Dorothy Lyon’s groomer, Linda.

Only…not really. Camp Utopia and its gang of Lindas are a figment of Dot’s exhausted, traumatized imagination. Their welcoming community in the woods, full of friendly, grinning women; their therapeutic punch-and-judy shows, in which newcomers tell their horrible stories using puppets they themselves design and build; and most importantly, Linda herself (Kari Matchett), the woman who “fed” Dorothy to Roy in order to escape herself, the woman who atoned for the sin of abandoning Dorothy and the then-salvageable Gator to Roy by helping untold numbers of other women, the woman who offers an apology (though not an explanation) that Dorothy finds she can accept…none of these things, none of these people, actually exist.

I’m fine with that. As an abuse survivor I bristle at the notion that surviving abuse confers upon you some kind of innate decency or dignity, as if abuse were a sacrament as well as a crime. As such, the Hollywood concept of the commune where the wounded gather together to grow stronger in the broken places or whatever has never held any appeal for me. I think it’s begun to exhaust its appeal in Hollywood as well, judging from how many of the above examples either subvert the trope or treat it as a literal fairy tale or dream.

I reviewed this week’s Fargo for Decider.

Let’s talk about Jennifer Jason Leigh. Underneath the Locust Valley Lockjaw accent and the power suits she’s delivering a tremendous performance, lively and mischievous. She plays Lorraine Lyon as a character who relishes each opportunity to show off, to stunt, to exert power. You can all but see a little flicker of delight in her eyes when one arises. 

But in this episode I noticed a few more things. First, and I apologize that it took me this long to notice, she is insanely sexy in this role, holy moses. Lorraine’s self-confidence alone almost erotic in and of itself, as is the feeling that this is the last person on earth whose room-service breakfast order you’d ever want to take. Like, yes, exactly. I kind of think that her impenetrable exoskeleton of casual cruelty is the armor she needed to generate to make men leave her the fuck alone when she’s this magnetic a person.

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

There’s one more conversation I want to highlight. When Danish exits the house, he’s stopped by a security guard, who demands to see his ID. Never mind the fact that Danish is leaving rather than arriving, that he’s the most instantly recognizable human being in Minnesota, or that he hired the guy: Orders are orders, and the man carrying the gun has been given orders, so Danish must show ID.

Now, Danish manages a “Don’t fucking do that to me again” afterwards that I think will actually take — he is the boss at the end of the day — but it’s a fascinating exchange nonetheless because it shows how power actually works. It’s as simple as Lord Varys’s old parable from Game of Thrones, about the soldier surrounded by a king, a priest, and a rich man, each of whom orders him to kill the others. Who has the power in that situation? Whomever the man with the sword believes has the power. 

Danish is rich. Danish has political clout, both via Lorraine and likely some of his own. But in that moment, the man with the gun does not believe Danish has the power, and thus he does not. Will Roy and Lorraine come to learn similar lessons?

I reviewed this week’s Fargo for Decider.

Roy’s terrifying speech to Lenore is an episode high for me, one of the two points in my notes where I simply wrote “ooooooh-wheeee.” The other is very different. It comes when Dot/Nadine visits Wayne in his hospital room (dodging Lorraine, Danish, Olmstead, and Farr in the process) after he awakens from his electrocution during the home invasion. While he’s barely coherent or aware of himself and his surroundings, she attempts to coach him into believing a sanitized version of what occurred, to no apparent success or failure. But it’s the way he smiles when he repeats the phrase “my wife,” as if he’s seeing her for the first time and can hardly believe his luck, that gets to him. “Move over, you,” she says finally, tears welling in her eyes, as she scoots him over to lie next to him and cuddle. Tears welled in my eyes too, let me tell you. Not a bad range of emotional experiences for one episode at all, no sir.

I reviewed this week’s terrific episode of Fargo for Decider.

Beyond that, though, Roy’s nipple rings, weed habit, and kinky penchant for having his wife roleplay as women he wants to punish during sex could be seen as the show scoring some cheap points about right-wing hypocrisy. (Not that such shots don’t hit the mark.) But it could just as easily be seen as a depiction of how to men like Roy, this isn’t hypocrisy. Roy is free to do what he wants, and the people of Stark County are also free to do what he wants — the completely consistent conservative definition of freedom in a nutshell.

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

But the episode we get is a very good one. Once again, writer-director Hawley displays his facility for building tension and dread; the long take that includes the stabbing murder of Gator’s partner by Ole Munch feels endless, drawing out the sense that something terrible is going to happen before delivering on it. Jeff Russo’s score goes full horror movie in this scene as well, which helps immensely. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up my favorite homage in the episode: Jon Hamm getting out of the bath bare assed, à la Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Season 3. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so gander all you want.

I reviewed the second episode of Fargo Season 5 for Decider.

Two > > Three > One >> Four. There, that’s the extent to which we need to relitigate Noah Hawley’s Fargo. This love letter not just to the Coen Brothers’ 1996 black-comedy crime classic but to their entire oeuvre is getting to that M*A*S*H point where it’s funny to point out how it’s outlasted its inspiration, but along the way it has aired one truly great season of television, two merely terrific ones, and one that would have gone over a lot better had poor Chris Rock not been miscast as a crime boss. That’s an excellent track record from where I’m sitting, even before you factor in Hawley’s acuity with action sequences, tension and suspense, weird eruptions of uncanny horror, getting gangbusters work out of a slew of fantastic actors both with and without prior Coens experience, you name it. So what if Hawley, on whom I run hot and cold as a rule, is not Joel and Ethan fused into one new guy? Voguish or not, if Fargo is on, I’m watching. 

I reviewed the season premiere of Fargo for Decider. This season’s real good!

Gretchen Felker-Martin and I reunite for a second two-hour deep dive into television’s storied recent past! This time, the Original Bad Boy and the Filthcore Queen tackle shows they didn’t touch on before or only touched on briefly. Beginning with a trinity of canonical dramas—The Wire, Deadwood, and Mad Men—they then make the jump to anthology TV—Channel Zero, American Crime Story, and Fargo—with plenty of surprises along the way. It’s better than your most recent Netflix binge—available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

But it’s Mike Milligan/Satchel Roy who must bear the weight of all this. It’s he who’s cursed to remember, he in whom the bloody history of this war is imprinted. And for the purposes of this episode, it renders him speechless. Who fits in and who is rejected? For whom is the power of violence sufficient to gain entry into the promised land? How many people must watch their loved ones die in front of them to feed the maw of the money machine? Mike has no history report to offer us. He stares out at the great American nowhere and fiddles with a gun and does nothing—and if that isn’t the “Storia Americana” that gives the episode its title, I don’t know what is.

I reviewed the season finale of Fargo for Decider. The final scene made the whole season for me.

In thinking about this episode, it’s the details that jump out at me, despite all the major goings-on. The black comedy of the cops explaining their presence in Oraetta’s apartment by simply saying “He woke up.” Oraetta’s taunting of Ethelrida: “What does it feel like to be so sure you’re right and nobody cares?” Josto and Gaetano literally bragging about the size of their dicks. (“Big like a pickle?” Gaetano asks his brother, quoting “The Humpty Dance” of all things.) The lovely slo-mo shots of strutting gangsters and lethal shootouts in the episode’s opening gang-war montage. Josto trying to lift his brother up affectionately and failing miserably. Josto’s baffled “What the fuck?” when Gaetano dies. Odis’s smile. Gaetano’s flapping skull. Loy’s forgery of a painting he grew fond of when he saw it in a magazine, and Ethelrida’s ability to identify it.

If this season of Fargo is to be considered a success, it’s in these little things, these images, these exchanges of dialogue—moments that accumulate and tell a story of their own, even if the big picture has yet to come together.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Fargo Season Four for Decider.