18. The Wheel of Time

Created by Rafe Lee Judkins; based on the books by Robert Jordan (Prime Video)

In assembling this list of the year’s best shows I decided not to hold the total number of entries to some arbitrary multiple of five. Any show where I’d say to a loved one “You know what you should watch?” makes the cut. Getting canceled immediately after this season makes The Wheel of Time a tougher series to recommend, which costs it some points through no fault of its own. It’s a shame, because Wheel, aka the High Fantasy That Fucks, had really come into its own. Its ornate, colorful design, high-camp dominatrix villains, increasingly impressive cast (we’re missing out on Shoreh Aghdashloo as a main antagonist!), prog-album-art visuals, and occasional rousing lesbian drinking song about how great the locals’ tits are all made it a show I eagerly anticipated; its pleasures are still worth sampling.

17. A Thousand Blows

Created by Steven Knight (Disney+/Hulu)

My primary memory of watching A Thousand Blows, just one entry in creator Steven Knight’s long list of period crime dramas, is being knocked flat on my back by Erin Doherty. As Mary Carr, leader of the all-women’s gang of thieves the Forty Elephants, she projects a raw need under the viciousness that’s frighteningly intense. (Anthony Boyle wowed similarly in Knight’s House of Guinness.) Stephen Graham and Malachi Kirby are deeply impressive, too, as the bareknuckle boxers whose paths intertwine with Mary’s. You want to see these people win, which is why it’s so compelling to see what they do when they lose.

16. Pluribus

Created by Vince Gilligan (Apple TV)

Particularly on television, where the genre has thrived ever since Lost landed on that island — and its roots can be traced even further back, to The X-Files and Twin Peaks and The Prisoner — the sci-fi mystery combines two genres that invite audience speculation to create a Frankenstein’s monster of theory-mongering. For a critic who prefers to write about what’s on screen now instead of what might end up on screen several episodes or seasons later, these shows are frustrating, particularly when all the speculating requires one to overlook holes in the here and now. But after creator Vince Gilligan shook off the broad comedy that tends to mark his shows’ early going and drilled into just how deranging being one of the Last People On Earth would be, the juice finally seemed worth the squeeze. The show is augmented immeasurably by its million-dollar visual, its bold use of composition and color, and the work of Rhea Seehorn, who can make a deliberately insufferable character easy to spend time with.

15. Last Samurai Standing

Created by Kento Yamaguchi and Michihito Fujii; based on the book by Shogo Imamura; Creative Director: Junichi Okada (Netflix)

Are you a fan of Takashi Miike samurai films like 13 Assassins and Blade of the Immortal? How do you feel about end-of-the-Old-West stories like The Wild Bunch and Red Dead Redemption 2? What about the way Yuen Woo-Ping rewrote the rules of on-screen combat in The Matrix, Kill Bill, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? If any of this sounds intriguing to you, let alone a combination of all three, make a point of seeking out this stellar samurai series. Choreographed by star Junichi Okada, every fight and battle is completely different from its predecessors, and somehow better. As a bonus, it’s the kind of rousing action-adventure story you can sell to the non-sickos in your family over the break.

14. The Pitt

Created by R. Scott Gemill (HBO Max)

More stylistically and narratively straightforward — more downright broadcast-networkian, even — than anything else on this list, The Pitt was a tough sell for me at first. It was only a matter of a few episodes. Once the show gets past the unavoidable surfeit of “Here’s this doctor or nurse and here’s their name and here’s their deal” dialogue and digs deep into the physical and psychological labor involved in keeping both a hospital emergency room and its traumatized staff up and running, its game cast and real-time gimmick make it nigh irresistible viewing.

13. Task

Created by Brad Ingelsby (HBO)

Everything everyone else saw in Mare of Easttown, Brad Ingelsby’s previous drama/thriller about crime in the downwardly mobile Philadelphia suburbs, I saw here. Tom Pelphrey, perhaps the single most endearing actor working today, plays a small timer who draws big heat by trying to do the right thing after a home invasion goes horribly wrong; Tom Ruffalo, Fabien Frankel, and Alison Oliver are among the messy, endearing cops (sorry) trying to track him down. Directors Jeremiah Zagar and Salli Richardson Whitfield shoot the woods of DelCo as if drawing forth their very life force, creating a mood best labeled fentanyl transcendentalism.

12. The Lowdown

Created by Sterlin Harjo (FX/Hulu)

Unless the Dude himself is involved, sun-baked South/Western neo-noir is generally not my scene. I wear all black all the time, and this is a “guys who wear brown” genre. Oil and water, you know? Imagine my surprise, then, as The Lowdown steadily won me over. As a comedy it’s rock solid, its jokes and sight gags — more often than not at the expense of Ethan Hawk’s Lee Raybon, the good-hearted, down-on-his-luck “truthstorian” investigative reporter at the center of it all — landing with a high hit rate. The supporting cast is killer: Kyle MacLachlan, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Peter Dinklage, Keith David, Tim Blake Nelson, and Paul Sparks, just to name a few. Ethan Hawke plays Lee as what George R.R. Martin might write as hedge knight — a hardscrabble servant of the public good, whether or not he earns either money or appreciation for it (though he’d be happy for either). The Lowdown is a poignant plea to do the right thing in an era that rewards the opposite, even considering the cost.

11. Daredevil: Born Again

Created by Dario Scardapane and Matt Corman & Chris Ord; based on the work of Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Gerry Conway, John Romita Sr., Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, Charles Soule, Christos Gage, Ron Garney, Stefano Landini, and others (Disney+)

Daredevil: Born Again is about a blind vigilante ninja lawyer called Daredevil teaming up with his frenemy, a serial killer called the Punisher, to take down Donald Trump and his army of sociopathic cops. That’s it. That’s what it’s about. It’s as clear as day. It’s the reason Garth Marenghi called writers who use subtext cowards. This show is the best thing Marvel had put out in years, despite its many growing pains during development and production. Arriving early in the year, it was a welcome sign of artistic resistance to fascism via one of the most popular franchises on the planet; in that category, though, it would soon be topped.

10. It: Welcome to Derry

Created by Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs; Showrunners: Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane; based on the work of Stephen King (HBO)

To paraphrase myself talking about the similarly strong start for Nick Antosca’s Channel Zero way back when, the first scene of the first episode of It: Welcome to Derry is grosser, scarier, weirder, more pointedly political, and just plain meaner than everything in director Andy Muschietti’s two It feature films combined. The show almost feels like penance for those movies, in a way — as if Muschietti and his collaborators were determined to get the queasy mix of nostalgia and brutality found in Stephen King’s masterpiece right this time. They succeed in large part thanks to a surprisingly strong lineup of child actors, led by Clara Stack and Matilda Lawler, and, amazingly, an adult cast that can command audience interest just as well as the adorable kids and the killer clown (played once again, and better than ever, by Bill Skarsgård). Jovan Adepo, Taylour Paige, Madeleine Stowe, and especially Chris Chalk as recurring King character Dick Hallorann aren’t acting like they’re in a Halloween haunted house, but rather in a place where their families, sanity, and souls are legitimately at stake. Despite some needlessly Hollywood plotting, it’s a testament to the power of cruelty in art.

9. Monster: The Ed Gein Story

Created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan (Netflix)

Between The People vs. O.J. Simpson, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Dahmer, and Monsters, Ryan Murphy and his collaborators are responsible for the four best true crime dramas I’ve ever seen. Murphy and Ian Brennan’s latest Monster show, about the Wisconsin killer and grave robber Ed Gein, feels less tightly focused than the other four shows, but this is to be expected due to The Ed Gein Story‘s expanded scope. Bluntly gruesome and woven through with surreal flourishes, it really is about the Ed Gein story — not just the killer’s life, his crimes, and the media circus immediately surrounding their discovery, as was the case with O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan and Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers, but the legend that grew up around him. Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and the true-crime industry itself can all be traced, in one way or another, back to Ed’s lonely heart.

8. The Chair Company

Created by Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin (HBO)

The original concept behind Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard’s comic book series The Walking Dead — which I liked quite a bit, as opposed to the TV show — was simple: What if a zombie movie never ended? “What if an I Think You Should Leave sketch never ended?” works well as a description of The Chair Company. ITYSL creators Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin trap Robinson’s senior-manager everyman Ron Trosper in a labyrinth of fraud and corruption that he uncovers more or less by being monomaniacally insufferable. I get the impression from the season’s cliffhanger ending that the plan here is to follow the original roadmap for Twin Peaks, whose creators David Lynch and Mark Frost never intended to solve their central mystery, using it instead to draw us deeper and deeper into their weird world. Will Ron ever get to the bottom of why that chair fell out from under him? Does it matter?

7. Foundation

Created by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman; based on the books by Isaac Asimov (Apple TV)

There’s no other…okay, there’s one other science fiction show on television that looks as good as Foundation. (More on that in a bit.) Everything from space travel to psychic powers to genocidal superweapons are rendered as kaleidoscopic and beautiful, while owing very little to the obvious genre antecedents. There’s heroism and sadism, derring-do and body horror. There’s mid-century SF’s usual obsession with scientifically measuring and predicting the broad movements of human society. There’s sex appeal galore. Right at the apex of it all are the strange, engrossing performances of Lee Pace, Terrence Mann, and Laura Birn as the immortals cursed with the burden of Empire, turned into monsters by wielding more power than any being should hold. There’s a lesson here about personalist regimes that’s too loud, and often too blackly funny, to ignore.

6. Murdaugh: Death in the Family

Created by Michael D. Fuller and Erin Lee Carr; based on the podcast by Mandy Matney (Hulu)

I’ve deliberately avoided using the word “mesmerizing” during any of these write-ups so far, despite it being a go-to superlative for someone in my line of work. (Well, for me anyway.) This is because there is one performance out of everything I watched this year that deserves “mesmerizing,” and it’s Jason Clarke as Alex Murdaugh in this true-crime drama from under the Nick Antosca umbrella. With his Christmas-ham face, his good ol’ boy charm, and his mountain of criminal secrets, his dynamic with his kind but enabling wife Maggie (Patricia Arquette, proving the weakness of her work on Severance is just a writing issue) resembles nothing so much as that of Tony and Carmela Soprano. Both stories are about the insatiable maw at the heart of the American dream, and who gets fed into it, and by whom. A sharp, tight, sensational show.

5. Alien: Earth

Created by Noah Hawley; based on the screenplay by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett (FX/Hulu)

An unconscious man with an alien parasite attached to his face, hastily stashed under a child’s bed. A sheep with one bulbous eye, gazing coolly at its surroundings. An android with a shock of white hair, observing the sheep-creature right back. A wide-eyed billionaire manchild, vibrating with sociopathic glee. A child in a woman’s body, cooing at an apex predator from outer space. A glowering working stiff with nothing left to live for, and no morality to govern that life, save the completion of his mission. A xenomorph in full flower, running through the forest canopy, basking in the hot sun like a jungle cat. By stitching together memorable images in an almost ruminative way while never skimping on the all-out monster action, Noah Hawley has added a third entry to the Alien canon, behind only Ridley Scott and James Cameron in the originality and impact of his vision of the creature and the world it invades.

4. The White Lotus

Created by Mike White (HBO)

From the moment the show’s new and improved theme song began playing, it was clear something different was going on with The White Lotus this season. I’d previously found its broad satire of the leisure class smug and insufferable, but this season it opened up its tonal range to its great benefit. There’s a grand doomed love affair. There are characters who aim to do the right thing as much as there are who take the easy way out. There’s an astonishing monologue about the nature of desire by Sam Rockwell that has a decent claim on being the scene of the year. Lavish shots of the natural world and its animal inhabitants serve as the lifeblood of the thing, flowing between scenes and lending the whole sordid thing an air of mystery and danger.

3. Chief of War

Created by Thomas Pa’a Sibbett and Jason Momoa; showrunner: Doug Jung (Apple TV)

Jason Momoa, man. Jason goddamn Momoa. Star, co-creator, co-writer of every episode, director of its absolutely breathtaking finale, a landmark achievement in screen combat — watch Chief of War and you’ll find his achievements nearly as impressive as those of Ka’iana, the painfully ethical warlord of the show’s title. Torn between two women, at war with two kings on behalf of another — and all these characters are fully fleshed out to the point where you feel they could sustain the show as the lead themselves — Ka’iana is a real-life figure turned legendary. That’s Momoa and Thomas Pa’a Sibbett’s overall approach to the material: a myth for the Hawaiian Islands, an answer to King David or King Arthur. Appropriately, the visuals are mythic in scope, using greens and reds and yellows in painterly fashion; Momoa does things with digitially color-graded orange in the finale I’ve simply never seen on screen before, the way Danny Boyle put new shades of green on camera in 28 Years Later. It’s that kind of story, almost, right down to the presence of a Bone Temple. The finale delivers the climactic battle the show’s been promising all along, too — no false advertising here. An epic like few others.

2. Adolescence

Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (Netflix)

You forget about the stunt aspect. That’s the highest compliment I can pay Adolescence, considering how impressive the stunt aspect is. Director Philip Baratini shoots each of the show’s four episodes as a single continuous take, immersing us in the lives of a Liverpool family being detonated by their young son’s shocking, misogynistic crime. A Thousand Blows stars Stephen Graham (the show’s co-creator and co-writer) and Erin Doherty knocked me out once already; in this they’re almost too luminous with the terrible truth of their characters’ circumstances to look at. Owen Cooper, who plays the boy at the heart of it all with precocious power, is the acting find of the year. This show is a triumph.

1. Andor

Created by Tony Gilroy; based on the work of George Lucas and others (Disney+)

“Andor,” I wrote on Bluesky partway through watching the show’s second season via advance screener copies provided to me by the Mouse, “is a stone cold masterpiece. There’s stuff in Andor Season 2, images, moments, as good as anything on television ever. Not grading on the Mandalorian curve, grading on the Mad Men curve.” I stand by every word, and I’ll go further. Andor isn’t just the best show of the year, it’s one of the ten best television shows ever made.

I believe Andor is the most expensive television series ever made, and every penny is visible on screen. Tony Gilroy and his collaborators have created a fully fleshed out society from the sketched out structure left behind by George Lucas as the bridge between his prequel trilogy and the original films. He crafts a bright, shiny dystopia of propaganda, ecocide, and genocide — one that countless viewers were all too able to recognize as our own — then examines what enforcing that regime, or fighting back against it, would really look like.

The result is a Star Wars show that treats the existence of something called the Death Star as the moral obscenity it really is. It explores the strangely compelling sexual neuroses of fascist apparatchiks, and is unsparing about the kind of sexual violence the servants of the Empire would inflict on civilians. It tells a terrifying story of genocide from start to finish. It shows the sacrifice of personal happiness inherent in a life lived for the cause. When it finally introduces the Force, a subject from which the series stays away for nearly its duration, the concept regains its power as the animus within all living things. “Life will defeat you,” Winston Smith insisted to the Party in 1984; Andor says the same thing, and means it. Vital, elegiac, magnificent.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Telling you that any given episode of Foundation kicks ass in five or six different ways seems to be the Prime Radiant’s prediction of my destiny, and far be it from me to deny the math: This episode of Foundation kicks ass in five or six different ways. Caitlin Parrish and Leigh Dana Jackson’s script is merciless, sullying a babyface character perhaps beyond salvation. It’s also dependent on not one but two characters, Gaal and the Mule, remaining several steps ahead of the audience, which in my case at least they certainly did. I always enjoy it when shows are smarter than I am.

As outer space spectacle, this remains a magnificent show. From Toran’s wounded ship skipping across space and down to the surface of their planet half destroyed, to the imposing enclosure of Kalgan by Empire’s ships, to the “cobalt spike” that burns the planet, even down to the red and green lighting of Dusk aboard his “black hole gun” weapon as he hears the news from Dawn, to the gravity-defying ways of the tubular planet where the Council meets, there’s virtually always something to feast on. 

I reviewed today’s episode of Foundation for Decider.

The last word I wrote in my note s for this episode is “WOW.” TV should always be this beautiful, savage, and strange.

I reviewed this week’s Foundation for Decider.

Plot-heavy recaps of a plot-heavy show tend to make those shows feel, well, heavy. There’s always a lot going on on Foundation, and since much of the business is very grim, cataloging it feels a bit like reading your New York Times push notifications. Collapse of civilization, fall of empire, rise of a tyrant, destruction of all that is kind and good in this world, flaying shirtless himbos with a potato peeler…It’s a lot to take in.

Not when you’re watching, though. Director Tim Southam drops us into the action with a you-are-there shot of Dawn’s huge landing craft touching down and keeps things spectacular from there. Bravodo Magnifico Giganticus’s performance is a sci-fi psychedelic musical rainbow, staged in one of those futuristic nightclubs that play EDM as heard everywhere from Andor to Dune: Prophecy. From lamplit glow of the library to the red light of the nightclub exterior, the scenery is vividly realized.

The script by Eric Carrasco and Greg Goetz, meanwhile, is full of funny little gems shining out from in between the flayings and the mindwipings. My favorite line goes to Day, who asks Song, “Are you feeling alright, darling? You’ve hardly touched your drugs.” (Second favorite is him insisting to Demerzel that “giraffe” is pronounced with a hard “G.”) Toran referring to the child princess whose archduke father the Mule killed as “your drunken toddler” is a nice bit too, as is her scampering after the Mule and his goons when they leave like she’s about to yell “Wait for meeeeee!” 

And all the Cleons resting their chins on their hands in contemplation simultaneously? It’s a great visual, but it also points to how similar these three men are despite all their self-perceived differences. Like so many aspects of this show, it works on multiple levels, which is why Foundation, like any empire, works so well.

I reviewed the most recent Foundation, which includes one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen (complimentary), for Decider.

“Do you feel it? The air gone stale? The common people holding their breath, watching their neighbors’ door get kicked in?” When Captain Han Pritchard asks this of the wealthy nepo baby Toran Mallow (Cody Fern) and his “wife” — marriage is the latest trend; everything old is new again — Bayta (Synnøve Karlsen), he knows what their answer will be. They’re too rich, too callow, too comfortable to hear the sound of the jackboots. When the Black Tongue, the flagship vessel of the telepathic pirate warlord known as the Mule, hovers over their honeymoon spot, their only concern is that its shadow will prevent them from getting a tan. They don’t want something so insignificant as a coup interfering with their comforts.

Not to sound like a broken record in these reviews, but boy, does that feel familiar!

I reviewed this week’s Foundation for Decider.

“Welcome to my filth!” So says a cheery Brother Day (Lee Pace), the absentee Emperor of the galaxy, to his predecessor/older brother/imperfect clone, Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann). He’s welcoming the aging avatar of Empire to his lovely villa, where he’s “playing poverty” with his beautiful lover (and drug dealer), Song (Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing). But Day — stupid, sexy, Christlike Day, with his bare chest and his oversized drug rug and his “Common People” decision to slum it — speaks for me as well. Foundation is extremely my shit. Welcome to my filth!

I reviewed the Season 3 premiere of Foundation for Decider. So glad this one’s back!

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!

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.

GOYER: We’re aware of the fact that we’ve got actors like Lee Pace and Jared Harris, and that we can’t just plunk anyone into one of those smaller roles, or it’s going to break the suspension of disbelief. That is our motto: Every one of these people has to be able to stand toe to toe with Jared Harris.

I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time: I interviewed David S. Goyer about making Foundation Season 2, the year’s most thrilling show and one of the all-time great sophomore surprises, for Decider.

Foundation Season 2 ruled. Why? Let me and Stefan Sasse explain it to you in the Boiled Leather Audio Hour’s latest Patreon exclusive Boiled Leather Audio Conversation podcast. Subscribe and listen!

It’s not until I lay it all out like that that I realize just how steep a hill the tenth and final episode of Foundation’s superb second season had to climb. To deliver on any one of these promising elements of the show would be an achievement, one that many shows, including ones I really like, would settle for. Just by way of a for instance: Silo, a sister “adaptation of a bestselling sci-fi series about the menacing future airing on Apple TV+” show, is all the better for having a narrow focus and relentlessly aiming its laser at it.

But that was not the path chosen for Foundation. Instead, writers Goyer and Liz Phang, director Alex Graves, and the entire stellar cast set about delivering on every single thing. And deliver they did. Overdelivered, actually. In fact, in terms of sheer scale and scope and daring, the last show I can remember serving up season finales this replete with emotional and visual spectacle is, deep breath, Game of Thrones. And no, I’m not tossing that comparison around lightly. In terms of SFF TV, Foundation is currently as good as it gets.

I reviewed the finale of Foundation Season 2 for Decider. What a show!

But that’s where we’re at with “Long Ago, Not Far Away,” the penultimate episode of Foundation’s second season, and the latest in a series of back-to-back-to-back home runs. Written by Jane Espenson and Eric Carrasco and directed, as was its excellent predecessor, by Roxann Dawson, it’s TV genre entertainment at its grandest, sexiest, saddest, most mysterious, most violent, most spectacular, best.

I reviewed this past weekend’s episode of Foundation for Decider.

When a television show gets on a real creative tear, something special often occurs. To me, anyway. Whether it’s a stone classic deep into its run, firing on all cylinders; a killer from jump, blowing you away right away; or — as is the case here, with Foundation — a formerly sputtering spacecraft that has achieved escape velocity and is now hurtling towards the stars, there comes a point when a regular review simply won’t do, and a litany of superlatives is all that can get the job done. 

In other words? There is simply too much shit to like in “The Last Empress.” Directed with total confidence by Roxann Dawson, working off a remarkable script by Liz Phang, Addie Manis, and Bob Oltra, it’s Foundation’s best episode to date. (Seems like we’re saying that a lot lately, no?) 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Foundation, a success on every level, for Decider.

One element worth singling out: The deft, origami-like folding of Constant and Poly, General Bel Riose and his husband Glawen Curr, and Hober Mallow and the Spacer hive into one single elegant construction. In a sort of cascading series of scenes, Hober makes Hari Seldon’s big offer to the Spacers: an unlimited supply of a synthetic version of the compound that keeps them alive, heretofore controlled by Empire, in exchange for their support. The spacer queen, She-Is-Center (Brucella Neman-Persaud), decides the risk isn’t worth it and rats him out to her daughter, She-Bends-Light (Judi Shekoni), who serves with Bel and Glawen. Hober is handed over to their custody, but escapes thanks to his sentient navigator beast Beki and makes a jump right there within Bel’s ship’s hangar, thus proving the existence of Foundation’s advanced faster-than-light travel technology. As a result, Poly and Constant are brought before the Cleons and Demerzel, taunted, tortured, and returned to prison. It’s almost elegant, the way the pieces are put together.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Foundation for Decider.