“She came to me,” Harry says, “and she made everything better.” He repeats himself, breaking down, in a way that’s hard to hear if you’ve ever worried about losing someone who’s done that for you. “Everything, so much better.” Dropping his gun, he collapses into Coop’s arms, and the two hold each other in the show’s most arresting portrait of their free and easy friendship yet. These guys love each other, man. How can you not love that? How can you not love them?

I reviewed episode 17 of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

With characters this well drawn and this locked down this early, there’s almost no limit to where you can go. Look at Cheers or The Golden Girls: Those characters were those characters immediately, and thus their pilot episodes contain some of the funniest jokes in the entire run of the series. Kind of reminds you of a show we’re watching right now, right?

I reviewed this week’s Widow’s Bay for Decider.

There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss it joke in the series premiere of Widow’s Bay. It’s one I didn’t even mention in my review, because on this show there’s simply a lot of good stuff to talk about. Mayor Tom Loftis is turning the page of his wall calendar, which features pictures of wolves. The month of July, however, is a picture of a car wreck. On one level, this is just a funny sight gag, one of many sprinkled in to show that things in Widow’s Bay are a little bit…off. On the other hand, dear God why is there a full-page photo of a crashed car  in a wall calendar?

Two episodes deep into Widow’s Bay, I’m starting to understand just how fruitful an approach this whole “is it funny, or, if you stop and think about it, is it actually deeply disturbing?” thing is going to be. 

I reviewed episode 2 of Widow’s Bay for Decider.

“Shut it down. Shut it all down. It’s starting….Close the port. Shutter the businesses. Sound the siren….You refuse to accept our history, to accept the truth, and I’ve lived with that for years, but now it’s gonna get people killed….The island has lain dormant, but she’s waking up, and that’s when bad things happen. You think the fog out there is natural? No, it ain’t natural. It already took Shep and it will take the rest of us tonight. It’s a haunt!”

It may not look like it to read it, but this is some of the funniest dialogue I’ve heard on TV all year. Delivered by the legendary character actor Stephen Root as Wyck, the eccentric old harbormaster of a quaint New England fishing village called Widow’s Bay, it’s a warning about impending death and damnation…and I got no further than the third sentence in the speech, “It’s starting,” before bursting out laughing. A guy who talks only in the voice of bad Stephen King knockoffs from the 1980s? Why, he’s speaking my language!

I’m covering the delightful new comedy Widow’s Bay for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Like most of the episodes in this critically disfavored stretch of the series — be careful which Twin Peaks fans you say the words “pine weasel” around — this feels, well, extremely Twin Peaks to me. It makes room for everything from Andrew Packard gleefully proclaiming “I’m aliiiiiiive” to Josie like he’s his own Dr. Frankenstein, to huge moments in the romances between the Hurley boys and their beloveds, to goddamn Bob and the Man from Another Place reappearing. It all fits. 

The show reminds me of a well-recorded rock song in this way, where if you sit and single out any given instrument, you hear something almost totally new. Want to focus on how Mädchen Amick is the best-looking human being ever to be filmed for the small screen as she sits at the bar in the Roadhouse in a brown leather jacket smoking a cigarette? Want to marvel at Thomas Eckhardt’s garish robe as he breathes his last, ending legendary bad-guy actor David Warner’s brief stint on the show? Want to contemplate the cosmic injustice of a woman forced into moral dissolution by powerful men, punished by demons, and trapped in a wooden limbo forever? Twin Peaks makes all of it possible, even the things you wish weren’t.

I reviewed episode 16 of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. Gift link!

David Lynch is not the only notable name to direct an episode of Twin Peaks. Lesli Linka Glatter, famous for her later work on Mad Men and Homeland, directed four episodes. Duwayne Dunham, whose résumé as an editor includes Return of the Jedi and Blue Velvet, directed three, as did Caleb Deschanel, cinematographer of The Natural and The Right Stuff.

But it’s fair to say that Diane Keaton — yes, that Diane Keaton — is the biggest star to sit in the director’s chair this side of Lynch himself. While she’s most famous as an actor, Keaton brings more than just her Oscar and her star on the Walk of Fame to the proceedings. While clearly working with the stylistic palette established by Lynch himself, Keaton takes the opportunity to flex.

I reviewed episode 15 of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. Gift link!

Finally, there’s Twin Peaks’ answer to The Omen, Little Nicky. Andy informs Lucy of his and Dick’s theory that their young mentee is a murderer who offed his own parents. “We think he was six at the time of the crime,” Andy says gravely. Royally peeved, Lucy recruits Doc Hayward to tell these two dopes the real story, and boy, is it a tearjerker. 

The Doc himself delivered Nicky, whose mother, a poor immigrant chambermaid at the Great Northern who was the victim of sexual assault but carried Nicky to term anyway, died in childbirth. “We buried her in potter’s field and sent the infant to the orphanage,” Doc says, like he’s an Edwardian vicar. Nicky’s tragic life took a turn for the even worse when the loving parents who adopted him died in a car accident. By the time Doc says “Six-year-old Nicky managed to pull his parents from the blazing car,” Dick and Andy are sobbing and I was howling with laughter. Between this storyline and that Jacoby line, this episode features some of the show’s funniest dialogue ever. But right at the end of this deliberately over-the-top moment of sensitivity, Lucy swats a mosquito, and the thing is full of blood. It’s such an odd, unnecessary, uncomfortable, funny, weirdly shocking thing to do. In other words, it’s Twin Peaks.

I reviewed episode 14 of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. Gift link! I continue to find the allegedly terrible Season 2 storylines good.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen or heard from Twin Peaks’ show within the show. Invitation to Love, the cheesy soap opera many of the townsfolk followed during Season 1, has been completely absent from Season 2, and with it one of the filmmakers’ chief methods of having a little fun at their own expense. They’re fully aware that the only thing that really separates the melodramatic potboiling of the fake show from the real one is execution, so they hung a lampshade on it. It’s all in good fun.

In audio form, anyway, the show makes its triumphant return this episode. We hear it playing in Shelley Johnson’s still half-finished house as Bobby Briggs jilts her in favor of his big opportunity with Ben Horne. (And, presumably, his equally hot prospects with Ben’s daughter Audrey.) The soap has always been an escape for Shelley; now it plays as her prospects narrow and the walls close in.

Sure enough, the inevitable finally occurs, and the monstrous Leo Johnson emerges from his coma. He’s got a party hat on his head, cake smeared all over his face, and  if his sinister smile is any indication – murder on his mind. Shelley can only scream like a girl in a horror movie, which is more or less what she is.

Shelley’s survival notwithstanding, Invitation to Love feels like an appropriate accompaniment to this episode, one of the horniest and most violent in the show’s brief history. Couple after couple, including some surprising ones, get it on, while heroes and villains alike employ brute force either to save the day or darken it.

I reviewed episode 13 of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

It took a few episodes, but it’s safe to say it now: As of the twelfth episode of Twin Peaks Season 2, Twin Peaks Season 2 has officially begun. 

Depending on how new to the show you are, you may or may not know that its second season has a historically poor reputation. By now the whole Twin Peaks saga — the original run, the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Season 3, aka Twin Peaks: The Return — is so beloved, as is its co-creator and primary director David Lynch, that you may hear Season 2 badmouthed less often than it used to be.

Speaking personally, I think people lump together the entire Laura Palmer saga in their heads as “Season 1,” then lump everything after that (plus the “Mr. Tojamura” thing, perhaps) together as “Season 2.” Even then, a lot of the things people love about Twin Peaks happen after Laura’s murder is resolved. You’re never going to hear anyone complain about post-Laura Season 2 because it introduced Denise Bryson or the concept of the Black Lodge, that’s for sure. 

Other than that, though? When people use “Season 2” pejoratively, this episode is rooted almost entirely in the storylines they’re talking about. James’s film-noir road trip. Nadine’s high school wrestling career. Andy, Lucy, Dick Tremayne, and the devilish Little Nicky (Joshua Harris). The widow Milford and her siren-like power over every man who lives in a town already inhabited by, well, the female cast of Twin Peaks. Ben Horne becoming a Confederate sympathizer during a psychotic break. 

Well, everyone knows these Twin Peaks Season 2 storylines suck. What this review presupposes is…maybe they don’t. Written and directed by one of the series’ A-teams — Harley Peyton, Robert Engels, and Caleb Deschanel — it makes a strong opening case for some of the show’s most maligned material.

I reviewed episode 12 of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

Wherever you go, there you are. Buckaroo Banzai’s maxim feels broadly applicable to the people of Twin Peaks. Transplants bring their pasts with them, and expats remain trapped in a perpetual Twin Peaks of the mind.

I reviewed the 11th episode of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist (gift link). It’s the one that introduces Agent Denise Bryson of “fix your hearts or die” fame.

Rumors of Twin Peaks’ demise have been greatly exaggerated. 

We’re up to the tenth episode of the show’s second season, which tends to be described in monolithic terms as wholly unsatisfactory, a betrayal of Season 1’s potential. But everything from that cliffhanger season finale through Leland Palmer’s capture and death has been every bit as good as Season 1, and in several cases significantly better; the episode in which Leland is revealed as Laura’s killer is the most powerful episode of the show to date.

In a way, Season 2 hasn’t even really started until now. Given the truncated length of Season 1, it makes more sense from the perspective of today’s viewer to view everything from the pilot until Leland’s death at the hands of his demonic inhabitant Bob as the first chapter of the story. The remaining 13 episodes of Season 2, starting here, are effectively Chapter Two.

And what a start Chapter Two gets off to. The first episode of the show to be both written and directed by women, Tricia Brock and Tina Rathborne respectively, it’s a thoughtful farewell to the side of Leland that prevailed in the end, a heartwarming series of bon voyages between a departing Agent Cooper and the good people of Twin Peaks, and an introduction to several new storylines that, for now at least, feel both urgent and intriguing.

I reviewed episode 10 of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

“In pursuit of Laura’s killer, I have employed Bureau guidelines, deductive technique, Tibetan method, instinct, and luck. But now I find myself in need of something new, which, for lack of a better word, we shall call magic.”

It’s magic, alright.

I reviewed the episode of Twin Peaks in which Laura’s killer is caught for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

If the monsters are Monarch’s muscle and its chance to show off its imaginative mind, the characters’ relationships are the show’s big soft heart. It’s beating loud and clear here. Takehiro Hira is a quiet MVP as Hiroshi Randa, a man forced to justify to his children why they come from two separate families he kept secret from one another — one where his wife was a coworker and confidante and one where he could leave that world behind. Meanwhile, he’s able to reunite with his mother, who’s barely aged since he last saw her when he was a boy. His life is…complicated.

Equally complicated are the feelings of young Lee Shaw when he hears Kei describe her relationship with his best friend, Billy. She says he’s a far better husband to her even than her son Hiroshi’s father, the sainted doctor who died treating victims of the atomic bomb. Lee knows he shouldn’t begrudge his friends that kind of love, but one look at his face is all it takes to know it hurts him badly all the same.

It makes you appreciate the effort that went into ensuring that the human elements of the show could hold your interest between monster attacks. If both remain exactly as good all season long as they are this episode, then the Great God of the Sea has truly blessed us with a bountiful catch.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.

The Beauty has been one of the season’s most pleasantly unpleasant surprises — nasty, horny, catty, bloody, and beautifully disgusting. The production and costume design is first rate, referential of past horror/dystopian classics without feeling derivative. Ditto the body horror, which like that in The Substance is reminiscent of Cronenberg and Carpenter but blazes vile new snail trails of its own. 

The show’s approach to its titular concept has been multifaceted and frequently fascinating. Fully acknowledging that beauty standards are draconian and arbitrary and designed to be profited from, the show also uses a variety of characters — a lonely shut-in, a depressed teenage girl, a trans woman, a sick child — to make the point that it’s not always shallow to want to look and feel like an idealized version of yourself. The question of “Whose ideal would that be, anyway?” is never far below the surface. 

Plus it’s fun as all hell. Beautiful people running around bare-assed. Assassins and mutants and loose-cannon FBI agents (oh my!). Sci-fi lab facilities and pastel commercial parodies. Impeccable stunt casting. Mac Quayle’s creepy synth score. Frank sex talk. My favorite Ashton Kutcher performance ever. If the season had lasted just five seconds longer and shown us the new old Cooper instead of leaving us with a shrug of the shoulder I don’t think I’d have any substantive complaints at all. If they make a booster dose available in the form a second season, I’ll be first in line for a poke. 

I reviewed the season finale of The Beauty for Decider. Fun show!

But more unsettling than anything else is the speed with which this almost entirely untested product, which is so festooned with gruesome side effects that they need to knock their rich patients out to hide it from them, takes over society. It blows past the usual testing and government approval. In fact, it has the full backing of the unnamed, unseen, but Beautified president (you know who it is: he threatens to run for five terms as a result), whose entire cabinet takes the shot by way of endorsement. 

This is, in effect, the world we currently live in. Hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into AI, a technology known, for a fact, to induce psychosis in its users, to reduce the cognitive abilities of children, to produce child sexual abuse materials and spread Nazi propaganda at scale. This is being done with the White House’s approval and encouragement. Major governmental departments are fusing with AI as fast as they can. There are no guardrails when the people in charge are too insane and corrupt and evil to want them in place. 

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Beauty‘s first season for Decider.

We know who that killer is now, and that makes Twin Peaks a fundamentally different show than it was an episode ago. With the show’s central mystery solved from the viewer’s perspective, you can already feel the force of storytelling gravity tugging the case towards its resolution. There’s only so long you can leave the killer on the loose without making Agent Cooper and company look incompetent, which cuts against the core appeal of the character.

I wrote about Twin Peaks Season 2’s eighth episode for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

Fortunately, the lead actors — particularly Sawai, Yamamoto, and the Russells — are uniformly skilled at wielding the show’s secret weapon, a sense of profound yearning thank links one person to another, whether their connection is familiar or romantic in nature. The dynamic in the past between Mari, Bill, and Lee, three people who love each other but who can never properly resolve that love since a romantic pairing is only possible between two of them at a time, is sophisticated, heartbreaking, and acted with both tenderness and humor.At times, this group is asked to take on material that isn’t at their level: big gobs of “I’m going back, it’s what he would have done for us” genre-movie motivation, say, or an underwritten scene in which Cate and Hiroshi finally address his bigamy that should have been emotionally riveting. When that happens, you feel the disconnect between their abilities and the script.

I suppose having a cast strong enough to expose the occasional weakness is one of them good problems, however. Certainly you see the advantages of a cast this stacked come through in the character work: Young Lee’s petulant sneer when Kei cracks a dirty joke about Bill, Kei’s mesmeric connections with both men, Cate wrestling with how her Monarch experiences have completely uprooted her from the world. Sawaii makes it feel like Cate’s quest to rescue Lee is less a matter of hero-of-the-story bravado and more a desperate woman clinging to a man who’s been her literal lifeline. 

And the monsters! Man, this show has not disappointed there. In addition to Kong and the trilobites and (presumably) Biollante, there’s a giant bat thing that barfs electricity, a huge rat monster Kentaro kills with a forklift, and one of those cool giant ram/boar/rhino things whose hides are protected by a layer of trees and plants and giant thorns. Monarch’s thought process for creating and deploying new monsters and Titans appears to be “Hey, you know what would be cool?”, and so far their answers have been correct. The result isn’t a perfect show, but it’s certainly a fun one.

I’m covering Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider again this season, starting with my review of today’s premiere. Woo!

We have this episode’s pleasures to enjoy, and they are many. Foremost among them is Graynor as the Mother, a supervillain just as sexy and insane as Byron, but with the demeanor of a woman who has business to attend to, not a guy who’s got parties to plan. 

Mac Quayle’s score, meanwhile, really sizzles in this one; the closing music was so good I let the credits play just to listen to it all the way through. It’s a visually splendid show, too, with director Crystle Roberson Dorsey serving up a series of little treats and terrors for the eye. Even shots that don’t need to be anything fancy, like Cooper and Bennett traveling up the stairs back to their room together, can become an Escher-esque trompe l’oeil. If sometimes that means watching a man’s ribs pop open like that turkey in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, well, beauty always comes at a cost.

I reviewed episode nine of The Beauty for Decider.

The eighth dose of The Beauty we’ve received is the most refined formula yet. In just over half an hour of screentime, this episode encapsulates everything that makes this show what the Tom Tom Club once referred to as “fun, nasty fun!”

I reviewed episode 8 of The Beauty for Decider.

Health, wellness, beauty: unobjectionably positive things, right? The last time I watched broadcast television, every commercial that wasn’t for AI or online sports betting was for products pertaining to one of the three. There’s a section in your supermarket named after them and everything. 

But whose health? Whose wellness? Whose beauty? That is to say, who’s defining what it means to be healthy, to be well, to be beautiful? What do they stand to gain from those definitions? Most importantly, who stands to lose from them?

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Beauty for Decider.