In addition to the ominous soundscapes of Dean Hurley and the familiar synth-score of Angelo Badalamenti, even David Lynch’s beloved mid-century pop music gets in on the act. Booker T. & the M.G.’s immortally cool rock instrumental “Green Onions” plays almost in its entirety over an unbroken shot of a worker sweeping up the floor at the Roadhouse; it’s slow cinema at its most entertainingly dull, until Jean-Michel Renault reveals that his family, which has been running the place for nearly 60 years, is still trafficking teenage girls there.

Santo & Johnny’s equally iconic instrumental “Sleep Walk” plays over a scene at the Double R, where Shelly and Heidi serve customers as Norma does the bills. Suddenly the door bursts open, and a man (Riley Lynch) yells “Has anybody seen Billy?” No one has. The frantic man leaves, and the song plays on. Ghostbusters did this as a gag at Tavern on the Green; Stephen King did it as a primary characteristic of the town of Derry and its people in It. As Laura put it, “They’ve never listened to my cries.” We sleepwalk past others’ unhappiness to preserve our own, for however much longer we can.

I reviewed episode 7 of Twin Peaks Season 3 for Pop Heist. (Gift link!) 

I love a good dance scene. I mean I love a good dance scene. I adore watching interesting characters played by beautiful people move their bodies in time with good music playing within their fictional world. I find interpreting their body language, feeling what the music and the movements are meant to communicate, absolutely thrilling. Dance scenes are a rhythmic audiovisual spectacle of sex and glamour. That’s the stuff movies and TV were made for. So of course I’m gonna go gaga for an entire dance episode. 

I reviewed this week’s The Shards for Decider.

This is the hit-and-run episode.

Other things happen in the sixth episode of Twin Peaks’s return — funny things, fascinating things, frightening things, things we’ve waited to see for 25 years. Most of them fade in the glare of white-hot agony generated by that one scene. It is one of the most viscerally upsetting moments in both David Lynch’s oeuvre and, frankly, the history of television drama.

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

The episode ends with Debbie refusing to look up at the beautiful sky. “I’ve seen it already,” she sighs. This cynicism is the embodiment of the world of adulthood and death into which Bret now feels he’s been thrust permanently. His days as a kid are permanently over. This, of course, is what the whole party was a rehearsal for, but now it seems ugly and empty. As a wise woman once said, when they get what they want, they never want it again.

I reviewed episode four of The Shards for Decider.

FX‘s The Shards loves lingering on beautiful things that won’t last. Director Michael Uppdendahl’s lens luxuriates in the sight of a beaming, utterly fearless girl roller-disco dancing on her own in slow motion…on a circle of young, beautiful friends eating lunch, the camera whirling around and around them…on an incredible dancer commanding the camera…on a fast drive down a twisting, secret road…on a fallen model practicing her grand Oscar kiss-off…on a boy smelling his lost boyfriend’s jacket and crying. When this episode finds something nice to look at, it lets you know it, and does not let go, until it has to.

I reviewed episode 3 of The Shards for Decider.

Back in Twin Peaks, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Shelly and Norma (a re-debuting Peggy Lipton) watch concerned as Shelly’s daughter Becky (a radiant Amanda Seyfried) “borrows” money to compensate for the shiftlessness of her husband, Steven Burnett (Caleb Landry Jones). This guy is such a no-account that Mike freaking Nelson (Gary Hershberger, also making his return) boots him from a job interview because he couldn’t even fill out the application properly. Norma and Shelly, who have no shortage of experience with winding up with the wrong guy too young, can only watch and cling to each other.

But even the dumbest young love is still young love. Becky is clearly enamored with Steven’s flattery of her and promises of a brighter future…and with his cocaine, which he hoovers up like a vacuum apparently. He still has enough left over for her to take an absolutely blissed-out, coked-up ride in his convertible, staring up into the sky with luminous eyes while the Paris Sisters’ oldie “I Love How You Love Me” plays on the car radio. 

Honestly, someone probably should show the fun parts of dating a dirtbag and doing a lot of blow. These can be fun activities! They just come with some side effects, usually. But Lynch and Frost convert this moment into a kind of ecstatic tribute to the joy of being young, being beautiful, being in love, being alive, the sun, fast cars, fun drugs, good music, grinning from ear to ear just because you feel good. It’s incredible how many moments like this, in how many different moods and tones and genres, the TP braintrust has created already this season. They can shoot threes from the logo or shatter the backboard with a dunk seemingly at will.

I reviewed the gangbusters fifth episode of Twin Peaks Season 3 for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

Would you like to hear me sing a song by The Vampire Lestat? Then come listen all the way to the end of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour episode on The Vampire Lestat and Interview with the Vampire, because I SING!

Directed by frequent Ryan Murphy collaborator Michael Uppendahl, this episode lacks its predecessor’s copious film references and dreamy vibe. But it’s excellent at capturing the outrageous lives of hedonism, luxury, and unsupervised independence enjoyed by Bret and “the gang.” Drinking red wine in the hot tubs of houses blissfully unoccupied by parents might be a memorable evening for normal kids; for them, it was Tuesday.

The show’s deadpan cheesiness, meanwhile, is a hoot. The central-casting Satanic cult and its evil leader named (dun dun dunnnnnn!) Bruce (Gus Halper). Bret keeping a knife on his manuscript for self-defense. Susan narrating every detail of the Kellner family’s lives (Matt’s dad is played by an uncredited James Wolk) like she’s somehow the prosecuting attorney in his murder trial. Bret’s pretentious pronouncements about the perils of life in the Serial Killer Age…It’s funny! On purpose! 

It’s also sexy and sleazy and now and then creepy and occasionally, as in a striking composition that puts Bret’s face in the extreme foreground as Debbie does her makeup behind him, lovely. As is typically the case with Murphy ensembles, everyone in the cast appears to be having a ball with the material. I know I am.

I reviewed episode two of The Shards for Decider.

“It became clear to me after our second introduction that Robert Mallory was like a virus, a new kind of insidious, invading agent who was here to destroy the very cellular structure of my friends, my school, and me. He was up to something, and it was up to me to find out exactly what it was.” Herein, I believe, lies the secret of exactly how seriously you’re meant to take FX‘s The Shards. Feel how you will about Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis, the provocateurs who adapted the series from Ellis’s novel of the same name — itself a work of autofiction, juxtaposing details from Ellis’s real childhood with pure invention — but they understand how this sounds. 

These are the words of a teenager, Bret Easton Ellis’s fictional avatar in fact, declaring that another teenager is a virus out to destroy everything, And Only I Can Stop Him. It’s superhero dialogue, coming from the mouth of a kid who looks like Peter Parker, but enjoys luxury living like Jordan Belfort…or Patrick Bateman. And why has he decided that this newcomer to his clique is pure evil? Because the guy fibbed about, or just plain forgot, seeing Bret for five seconds at an opening-day screening of The Shining half a year earlier. The monster! 

It’s funny on purpose, is what I’m saying. If you want to appreciate The Shards, you’ll have to get on that level. 

I reviewed the premiere of The Shards for Decider. Fun show!

Airing back to back with “Part 3,” this episode rounds out the Vegas storyline somewhat, showing us exactly who Dougie is and what the hell Cooper is going to do in his shoes. What it really does is establish that apparently nobody is going to much notice that the Dougie Jones they know has been replaced with a doddering simpleton who can only repeat snippets of things people say to him and has forgotten how to do all basic tasks, from getting out of a car to urinating.

Maybe that will change, and more people like Bill Shaker’s wife will come along. Maybe Lynch and Frost are making a point about how for certain guys, things kind of just always align in their favor. Maybe it’s just funnier that way. 

Regardless, it’s one of the most audacious things this show has ever done — as big a departure from the original in its way as purple oceans and cannibalistic entities mutilating nude people. If you don’t want Twin Peaks at its Dougie Jones, you don’t deserve it at its Dale Cooper or its doppelganger. To paraphrase another great TV show, they’re building something here, and all the pieces matter. 

I reviewed episode 4 of Twin Peaks Season 3 for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

Before I start an episode of Apple TV‘s Cape Fear, I crank up the volume on my soundbar. I want that Bernard Herrmann/Elmer Bernstein/Jeff Russo score to hit like the fist of an angry god. I turn off every light, because I want the ruddy flesh tones and blue-green eyes of these sweat-soaked lunatics to pop off the screen. I turn off the air conditioning, partially because I don’t want to the show to compete with the white noise but partially because if it gets hot while I watch it, well, that feels appropriate. To properly enjoy Cape Fear, you have to give yourself over to it completely. 

Boy, does that approach pay dividends here. Titled “The Executioners” after the John D. MacDonald novel that started it all, this season finale plays more like the finale of a fireworks show, with one spectacular scene and set piece after another until the ominously understated conclusion. It’s a sensory experience, a parade of lurid sights and bombastic sounds best represented by a single shot: Max Cady, standing on the roof of the Bowdens’ house in the middle of a hurricane, as the theme song blares. I was grinning from ear to ear. A moment like that is why you make this show — a masterpiece of modern TV horror.

I reviewed the finale of Cape Fear for Decider.

This journey beyond the infinite deserves, frankly, a round of applause. Coop’s journey is not without precedent: Without straying far from mainstream nerd culture, it’s reminiscent of David Bowman’s travels past Jupiter in 2001, the concept of the Source Wall from Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics, or the ritual of Chüd in Stephen King’s novel It. Even so, it looks and feels wholly unique. Mark Frost and David Lynch are combining horror, fantasy, science fiction, surrealism, and experimental filmmaking with gobsmacking results — the kind of episode that leaves you either knocked back on your couch or excitedly pacing around the room, recalling favorite moments and spinning elaborate theories. My notes read “THERE’S SIMPLY NEVER BEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS ON TELEVISION.” 

I reviewed Twin Peaks Season 3 Episode 3 for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

Suddenly I wonder if the tables will be turned in the finale. In previous iterations of the story, Max Cady assaults the Bowden family at Cape Fear. But Tom is in prison, Natalie is with Noa, and Zack is who knows where, possibly in Max’s trunk but most likely not given the timing. That leaves Anna alone with Max, Crystal, Robert, Luke, and mama Hester (Jill Larson). (Granted, she’s busy breastfeeding dolls she believes to be Crystal, but she’s still out there.) Will the finale, which I fully expect to be batshit insane, feature Anna as a one-woman army, an unstoppable force destroying the Cady family before it destroys hers?

I reviewed this week’s Cape Fear for Decider.

Rolin Jones’s Interview with the Vampire was always good, but during Season 2 something extraordinary happened. It just got better and better from episode to episode until the finale, which was the best episode the show had ever aired. And they say lightning doesn’t strike twice! Moving, disturbing, disgusting, hilarious, and harrowing, this final episode of The Vampire Lestat’s first season is the best episode in the whole show’s history.

This is true even though it succumbs to that otherwise woeful trend of shows building and building to an explosively violent climax that never arrives. Shōgun Season 1, House of the Dragon Season 2, and Fallout Season 2 were all good-to-great, yet they all dry-dicked us when it came to bloodshed, if you’ll pardon the Daniel Molloy–level vulgarity. 

This episode overcomes that deficit through its sheer richness. “Silver threads,” Lestat says dreamily as he (apparently) looks directly into Heaven at one point. “Silver threads stretched out over other threads.” That’s how the writing on this show feels. Hannah Moscovitch’s script is a tapestry of different tones, styles, genres, emotions, sensations, all of it so wittily worded, so diamond sharp that Oscar Wilde could use it to file his nails. Director Alan Taylor, the major Sopranos and Game of Thrones director, returns to the chair for the first time since IWTV’s phenomenal series premiere, and lays out a real feast for the eyes as well as the ears.

I reviewed the season finale of The Vampire Lestat for Pop Heist. I just wanna be clear that as a horror person, a glam rock person, a musical theater person, a goth, and a TV critic, this show had a very high bar to clear with me, and it soared over that thing straight into the

I’ll say right here that Kyle MacLachlan is simply magnificent in this role, terrifying and wholly unique in his malevolence. The doppelganger looks as if all the light inside a normal human has been completely emptied out and replaced with tar. He sounds unbearable when he’s pretending to be happy and uncanny when he actually is. He’s pure darkness. I’m a big fan of Jamey Sheridan’s work in Mick Garris’s 1994 adaptation of The Stand, but if you said that MacLachlan’s Nega-Cooper is the best portrayal of Stephen King’s infernal archvillain Randall Flagg, I wouldn’t argue with you. He is the Dark Man, the Walkin Dude, the Hardcase, the Man with No Face.

I reviewed episode 2 of Twin Peaks Season 3 for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

I can picture it now. A mausoleum somewhere in Savannah, holding four corpses. HERE LIE THE BOWDENS, reads the legend above the entrance to their crypt, below which is printed a single explanatory sentence for their collective demise: “IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME.” Over and over, Anna, Tom, and Natalie — Zack is in a mental institution recovering from his brainwashing — do what feels right in the moment, only for it to come back to haunt them in the most horrifying way possible.

I reviewed this week’s Cape Fear for Decider.

But more importantly, we learn exactly how Claudia feels about “Daddy Lou”: She hates his goddamn guts. Sometimes inhabiting Merrick, sometimes appearing directly before them, Claudia says she hates Louis more than anyone she’s ever known. 

She mocks his self-pity, saying she only chose him over Lestat because he’s a natural-born “slave” who’d be easier to manipulate and then discard. Even worse, she reveals she’s had no rest in the afterlife, searching the void for her beloved Madeleine, who is nowhere to be found. “STOP SAYING MY NAME!” she screams, and departs. At last, Claudia has been given a voice of her own, and actor Delainey Hayles uses it for all it’s worth.

Or is it Claudia’s voice? Again, everything we’re hearing and seeing this season is being mediated through Lestat, just as Interview with the Vampire was through Louis. It’s possible that the needier, more damaged Louis, the creepier Armand, the more vindictive Daniel, and the Claudia who hates Louis more than her maker and kinda sorta murderer Lestat are closer to reality than the ones we saw through Louis’s eyes. It’s possible we got Spirit Claudia as-is, with no editorializing by Lestat. It’s just as possible that we didn’t.

I reviewed this week’s fantastic The Vampire Lestat for Pop Heist.

The differences are established right away. The opening title sequence, with its familiar sight of a chirping bird and whirring saws, is gone. After woozy shots of the black-and-white floor and the red curtains, there’s a cold-open flashback set in the Black Lodge, with Laura Palmer telling Dale Cooper she’d see him again in 25 years. We fade to mist over the pines, then to the walls of Twin Peak High School, where the screaming girl runs through the courtyard as she did in the pilot, in slow motion. The camera pushes in to the trophy case, zeroing in on Laura’s homecoming photo. When the title of the show appears and Angelo Badalamenti’s theme finally hits, it’s over Laura’s face.

This opening alone establishes three things. First, the Black Lodge is no longer a side dish, it’s the main attraction, with the Red Room’s zig-zag flooring and billowing crimson drapery the first things you see. Second, we will be diving deep into memory here, into what happened 25 years ago and what happened in between. Third, Laura Palmer is at the center of it all.

I reviewed Part 1 of Twin Peaks Season 3 for Pop Heist. Boy, am I excited for this. (Gift link!)

A couple years ago I wrote an essay about a TV style or subgenre I called “the New Lurid”: Dead Ringers, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Idol, Copenhagen Cowboy, and other hyper-lush depictions of the incestuous degeneracy of the ultra-rich — Saltburn-core, basically. Since then, recent seasons of shows such as The White Lotus, Industry, Euphoria, and Interview with the Vampire as retitled The Vampire Lestat have carried the New Lurid torch. Cape Fear, a raw psychosexual thriller about a one-percenter family in which everyone is related, as they fight and fuck under trees whose branches appear ready to snap from the weight of their greenness, does so too.

“Like a televisual vanitas,” I wrote, these shows are “sensual but death-haunted, lush to the point of rottenness, like a once-magnificent family finally, terminally, gone to seed.” If that doesn’t describe Cape Fear, I don’t know what does.

I reviewed this week’s Cape Fear for Decider.

The Vampire Lestat is now at the point that Interview with the Vampire reached in its second season. It is escalating in quality at a rate that is frankly psychotic. Each episode is better than the last; in IWTV’s case, this culminated in the Season 2 finale, which was the best episode in the history of the show. There are two episodes left in this season. Pump them directly into my veins.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Vampire Lestat for Pop Heist.